The Penny Arcade Expo is right around the corner, and if history is any guide that means it’s time for this site to start giving shout outs to the PAX 10. So for the next week, your regular posting schedule will be filled with some of the most innovative gaming of 2008 and 2009. We present to you the PAX 10.

American legislators try to regulate video games so often that it’s barely news any more. However, when the United Nations gets in on the action, it’s time to sit up and take notice. On August 7, Japan submitted a report to the U. N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and the committee [...]

The rumor mill has been running overtime this week, with patents, trademarks, and offhand developer mutterings flying everywhere. You’d think that with BlizzCon only just passed and PAX coming in hard on its heels there’d be other things to talk about. However, I suspect that the gaming press has a deep-seated need to manufacture news. [...]

This weekend, all flight paths lead to Anaheim, where Blizzard held its fourth quasi-annual convention, Blizzcon, The two-day celebration of all things Blizzard sported not only stations loaded up with upcoming titles Diablo III and Starcraft II, but also tournaments, a live raid, panel discussions, and tons of goodies to win or buy. Oh, and they officially announced World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the third expansion to Blizzard’s current money-printer, World of Warcraft. Pixelsocks.com’s own Katiegreen was on the ground, and provided this report.

I normally shy away from plugging blogs lest the site collapse into gaming cultural ephemera, but 1up writer and editor Jeremy Parish has posted a killer Zelda retrospective at gamespite.net. It’s not particularly notable as a look at the game itself, but rather as an insight into how The Legend of Zelda bridged the gap [...]

I’d like to issue a warm welcome to anyone who has come to this site from my recent Escapist article, Cease Fire: A Look at Virtual Jihadi. I’ve really enjoyed reading your thoughtful comments, and would like to talk about some of the points you’ve addressed.

I know this girl, let’s call her Sara, with a gaming problem. You see, her boyfriend is a hardcore World of Warcraft raider, which is a 20-30 hour commitment every week. There are certainly raiders out there who spend much more time with the game, but it’s still the kind of time that could really chew into your relationship. However, this isn’t another one of those Widows of Warcraft problems, because the boyfriend has lucked out: Sara wants to play the game with him, and they’ve used the recruit-a-friend program to whirlwind Sara from level 1 to level 61 in no time flat. They’ve had a grand old time tromping around Azeroth, killing X of Y and running the odd fetch quest, but now the boyfriend’s raiding responsibilities have grown, and Sara is twisting in the wind.

If you’ve missed out on the seminal Half Life FPS series (or you just happen to be a dirty pirate), Valve has discounted the whole lot to fire sale prices. This weekend, you’ll be able to download Half-Life, Half-life 2, both episodes, and Half-Life: Deathmatch from Steam for 66% off regular price. For Steam neophytes, that means about $1-6 for each of the games. If you’d like to just up and download the lot of them, it comes out to about $17 (which is probably cheaper than Episode 3 will be whenever it arrives).

The Half-Life series is famous for popularizing scripted events as a way to integrate narrative into gameplay without using cut scenes. Subsequent games made great strides in physics-driven gameplay and facial animations that made characters warmer and more believable. So even if you aren’t a huge FPS fan, you can still have a piece of gaming history for less than the price of a budget game.

Valve’s entire collection is also 10% off, which adds Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead (among other notables) to the deal for a grand total of $90. Whether you’re in for a penny or pound, there’s a lot of gaming for just a little money over at Steam this weekend.

There’s one more casualty of the recession today. Grin, developer of retro games like Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and more modern fare like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, has closed its doors. “It is with a heavy heart we announce today that GRIN has been forced to close its doors. This as too many publishers have [...]

The problem with games like Fable II is not that they fail to deliver on their promises, but rather that it is impossible to do so. Despite that, there’s still a fun action RPG hiding under the marketing rhetoric. It deserves to be recognized for the gameplay it delivered alongside the gameplay it didn’t.