When I asked Ashley Monif to tell me about Fieldrunners, the first thing he did was start rattling off awards the game had won. Small wonder, because the game spent six months in the top twenty on the iTunes App Store, made Time Magazine’s top ten game of 2008, and won best game in the IGF Mobile competition. That’s not bad for a tower defense game that started out with four towers and no sound effects. Check out the full text of the interview to read about the game in depth, accessibility in the RTS genre, and how Subatomic Studios ended up developing for the App store in the first place.

Cooperative FPS games are the darlings of the genre right now, but they’re popping up so fast that it’s getting hard to tell them apart. However, in a subgenre mostly defined by players reviving each other after tactical mishaps, Left 4 Dead is still the only game where you’ll drop your comrade mid-revival so you can shoot through him. You know, because of all the zombies.

Valve’s upcoming sequel to that game was present on the PAX show floor, and Ricardo Ariza was kindly fielding questions instead of just hitting zombies with guitars. He’s one of the two character sculptors working on the sequel’s 35 man team and was just chock full of information.

Tyler Glaiel is programmer and game designer for Closure, but he looks more like a PAX attendee than an exhibitor. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he made the PAX 10 though. At nineteen years of age, he’s already spent eight years developing Flash games, and five years working with Closure‘s artist, John Schubbe. Check out the full text of the interview for what’s new in Closure, a look at Tyler’s design process, and even a little bit about why platformers have been so cool lately.

Most people come home from the Penny Arcade Expo with a bag of swag, but we thought we’d bring you a vicarious piece of the expo hall instead. Over the next five weeks, we’ll be posting previews, PAX 10 interviews, and maybe even a nod or two to some of the cooler marketing that popped up at the show. We’ll be sticking with our late MWF post schedule, with previews on Mondays, and interviews on Wednesdays and Fridays. Check the full post for a detailed posting schedule.

We caught up with Bruce Chia at the CarneyVale: Showtime booth. He’s one of the four programmers who worked on Showtime as undergraduates at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. If you missed the game’s preshow summary, you can find it here. Read on for a peek at the inspirations, problems, and future for CarneyVale: Showtime.

The E3 God of War III demo was available on the PAX floor, and it looks like it covers about 75% of the game’s first level (and five times your RDA of brutal gore). For those just tuning in, current God of War and deific whipping-boy Kratos has allied himself with Titans to storm Olympus for revenge. The demo picks up in the thick of battle where Kratos must avoid the Titans’ indiscriminate destruction and the Gods’ more precisely focused resistance. Along the way, the conflict showcases God of War III‘s features, old and new.

Man, does nobody update this site when I’ve caught a PAX flu and spread it to my staff? Sigh, and now all this PAX news has become olds. Well, actually the PAX 10 interviews are still pretty awesome, and none of the demos have actually matured into games yet. Ok, new plan: regular updates resume Monday. Maybe I’ll make a PAX nav page and fill in the links as articles go up.

Thanks all for your patience.

Between the plane trips and the thousands of people at PAX, Pixelsocks managed to pick up something nasty. Once he’s feeling better, we’ll have information on what he learned while he was there. We’ve got interviews with all the PAX 10 as well as information on other games released at the conference.

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 conclusion of our PAX 10 introductions.

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 continuation of our PAX 10 introductions.