Not content to create a documentary about the chiptune phenom, Vaguely Qualified Productions has started a a Nerd of the Week podcast that highlights some of the nerds the duo ran into while putting together Nerdcore Rising.

Episode One is all about the vast sea of self-proclaimed nerds that attend the Penny Arcade Expo. Brian Crecente

Nerdcore Rising [Thanks Tomo]

We mentioned a month or so ago that this Nerdcore Rising documentary was in the works. Now that I've had my first glimpse of it, I think I'm starting to want to go see it. It follows MC Frontalot on his first national tour and uses the footage to trace the roots of Nerdcore Hip Hop.

I chatted with MCF abit at Penny Arcade Expo last year. He seemed like a pretty nice guy and he was hanging with his mom, which just so rocks. She seemed as bewildered as anyone about her son's tremendous success in this niche music genre. Brian Crecente

In case you missed one of the 40-something posts I wrote about Penny Arcade's expo here's the list. I still have one more story to put up, my chat with Gabe and Tycho. I just need to get around to transcribing it. Brian Crecente

Fighter was Inspiration for Table Tennis
Live Anywhere Mobile Pics
Star Fox Command: Not Bad, Not Bad at All
Omegathon Winner Interview
Fruit Fucker Case Mod Interview
Warhammer Online Gameplay Video
Major Nelson's PAX Podcast
Clips: More Splinter Cell Double Agent Gameplay Vids
PAX: So Long and Thanks for All the Bean Bags
Dark Messiah Impressions
Clips: Dark Messiah Gameplay
PAX06 Has Ended
J-Candy Invades PAX
Liveblogging the Panel I'm On
The Juicy Fruit Fucker Case Mod
Clips: The Minibosses Vs. MC Frontalot on GH2
PAX Giant Strips
The Microsoft Blogger Crew at PAX
Kick Ass Table Tennis 360 Case Mod
Clips: Jerry Holkins Takes on Robert Khoo on Guitar Hero II
PAX: The Minibosses
PAX: MC Frontalot
Omegathon Round 4: The Guitar Hero II Round
Clips: Behold the Mighty PAX Hot Dog Fairy
The Official PAX Strip
Liveblogging the Pax Comic Panel
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Demo
Pax06: Splinter Cell Double Agent Multiplayer
PAX Exhibit Hall Gallery
The Lone PSP
Bawls Rockin PAX
Clips: PAX Gamers Play with their Balls
Ken <3s Ryu
Piratical Oddities at PAX
Liveblogging the Gabe/Tycho Talk
Penny Arcade $10K Scholarship
Penny Arcade Game Art Revealed
Liveblogging the PAX Keynote
And the PAX, It Did Open
Penny Arcade Video Game Announced
PAX Here I Come

I spent a bit of timing hanging out with Rockstar's San Diego studio folks at PAX. They are they team responsible for Table Tennis and were hosting the Table Tennis tournament at the show.

It was interesting to listen to them analyze the gameplay. One of the guys said he fingered the winner of the tournament on the first day of play by his style.

He was standing just the right distance from the table, he said. Also he could play with any of the characters and adapted to new styles of play quickly.

Another guy was telling me that when they were creating the game they didn't really have any other games to look at, so they decided to use fighting titles as the model. I knew it. I knew there was something familiar about the back and forth, the subtle tactics of the game.

I, once more, asked the team to introduce fatalities to the game. I'm not sure if I should take their belly laughs as a yes or a no.

I shot some pictures of the modded Xbox 360 in action (One of the guys told me that the mod cost $3,500. Holy crap!). The ping-pong ball lights up during play, which is a cool little touch.

The winner also took home a copy of the game with some of the team's signatures on it. The runner-up won a framed poster for the game with all of the development team's signatures on it. Brian Crecente

All of the panelists were hanging out in the Green Room before the blogging panel at PAX, when we started comparing sexy phones.

Well, I was mostly bitching about how often my Treo 700W locks-up on me. At least I don't get the blue screen of death.

So Major Nelson whips out his phone and says, "I bet your phone doesn't have this." and proceeds to jog through a bunch of Live Anywhere windows on his svelte phone.

Nice. I tried to take two pictures of it, but, well, I suck at taking pictures. MN couldn't say when Msoft would be bringing the Live Anywhere to the people. Brian Crecente

It's true that the multiplayer mode could use more maps and that the single player mode is a touch too short. And yes it would be nice if some of the strategy elements of the single player mode were available on the multiplayer mode. But even with those issues, Star Fox can be a lot of fun to play.

Since no one had the game at PAX (or at least very few people did), I would go into the game and select recruit from the menu. This let me host up to five other players on my single card.

Often the games ended up with three or four other players, but occasionally we would max out and it was a lot of fun.

While lag was almost non-existent, the initial loading time was absolutely horrific. The other issue was that if anyone left the match it would close down the entire game, which totally sucked. Also, they really should have made the on-going games joinable between matches.

So yeah, besides all of that stuff Starfox is a blast.

It might not be quite a Mario Kart DS, but it's far more pick-up-and-playable than Metroid Prime Hunters

How many of you plan on getting Starfox Command? Any of you play a game with me at the PAX Lounge? Brian Crecente

He told me he plans on keeping the fully-loaded car he won and selling his 1996 Chevy Cavalier.

Last year Garroutte took home a sweet Alienware PC from PX05 for landing as runner-up in the competition. He also garnered a free entry into this year's Omegathon.

The Omegathon, for you non-Paxheads out there, is the annual gaming competition held at Penny Arcade Expo. Each year Penny Arcade randomly selects 20 attendees to participate in a multi-game, multi-day competition.

The final game is always a secret until it is unveiled on-stage moments before the final showdown.

This year the game was old-school favorite, Tetris.

Garroutte decimated the competition, winning by default without clearing the required 30 lines, because the other guy bricked out in both games.

Garroutte, a 20-year-old from Greeley, Colorado, said he was relieved when he heard the game was Tetris because it was the game he was hoping they would wrap-up with.

But to get to those final rounds he had to make it through Dice Land, Geometry Wars, Quake 2, Guitar Hero 2 and Mario Kart DS.

Garroutte, who works in Centennial Village, a village that shows life on the high plains from the 1860s to 1920s, says that as soon as the list of games was announced he started training.

Every day he would come home and spend a couple of hours playing through the games, all but Dice Land, which he says is based entirely on luck.

Turns out the only one that gave him any real trouble was Quake 2.

"I was behind for a bit on that, and worried," he said. "But I went into this whole competition with a fatalistic attitude.
"If I didn't die, I mean literally die, in a round I thought I was doing pretty good."

Brian Crecente

I spent a few minutes talking to Adam Allessandrini at the Penny Arcade Expo last week.

Allessandrini is the guy who created the Fruit Fucker case mode for the show. He's also the one who did the Anarchy case mod last year.

"Last year I came and made the Anarchy case mod because I thought it would be simple and easy to do," he said. "I had to out do myself this year, so I though the best possible thing to do would be the Fruit Fucker."

The mod took his team about three months to put together and it wasn't easy, but it was, of course, well worth it. The case itself cost about $500 in parts.

Initially the plan was to install an actual juicer inside the FF casemod and have it spew out the pulpy remains of the fuckified fruit into a glass, but that turned out to be a bit unachievable.

Besides, as Allessandrini points out, the Fruit Fucker is a juicer, it doesn't have one inside it.

So instead they installed a vat that can hold the juice. Allessandrini said they used water-cooling equipment to circulate the juice from vat to cup in a warm, frothy stream.

Allessandrini said the Hot Head Studios guys were talking about buying the case, which is about 5-feet tall, from them, but that he might end up giving it to Penny Arcade instead. He hinted that he was hoping for them to perhaps include him in a strip in exchange for the mod.

He ended up handing over the powercord to the FF computer to the guys during their second comic panel.

My money is on the guys auctioning it off during their annual Child's Play dinner. That could raise some serious cash for kids.

I did forget to ask Allessandrini what it was like when he first got the thing working. In my imaginings it was like something out of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but with way more oranges. Brian Crecente

I didn't get a chance to play Warhammer Online, but it looked an awful lot like a lot of other MMOs out there. I doubt spending ten minutes with it would have let me figure out the differences. MMOs nowadays all seem to be about backstory and play nuance. This video shows a bit of play, but not much nuance. Brian Crecente

For those of you interested in the nitty-gritty on what the panelists had to say should check out the Major's podcast. Brian Crecente

The PAX Panel One [Major Nelson]

The Omegathon finals were a pretty anti-climatic affair. I talked to Will "LeRoy" Garroutte afterward (he's a Colorado native) and he said he didn't even realize he had won at first.

He said it took a second for it to sink in.

He was last year's runner-up, which meant he won an Alienware system and got automatic entry into this year's competition. I told him I suspected he threw last year's competition because he knew the prize was going to get better this year and he wanted a free computer AND a free car. He just laughed nervously.

I just threw up some video showing the unveiling of the final game for the competition (Tetris) and Leroy's domination in the first round of the... final round. That's domination with a capital D. Brian Crecente

As requested here are two more short videos showing one of the Frag Dolls playing some Splinter Cell Double Agent. This was right before they presented the game at a panel. Brian Crecente

After a short flight aboard a dilapidated United airlines plane (the friggin tray was even broken), I'm back in Colorado, snuggly ensconced in my tower of mud.

I'm feeling a little down. I miss those PAXers. Sure it was hot, smelly and packed wall-to-wall with lines, but there was an overwhelming sense of family, of friendship, of belonging.

I was with my own kind and it felt good.

This was my first Penny Arcade Expo, but I hope to make it an annual pilgrimage, not because I'm a fan of the Penny Arcade web comic (though I am), but because I just like hanging out with other gamers, talking to friends and playing games on giant bean bags.

People who've never been to PAX ask if it will replace E3. Once you go you realize it can't. It's just not that show.

It's got more of the Game Developers Conference feel to it, but not quite as heady. I once said I expected GDC to be packed to the gills with professors in smoking jackets chewing on the ends of pipes as they talked about the uncanny valley and persistent worlds.

PAX is sorta like that but instead of smoking jackets, professors and the uncanny valley it's t-shirts, drunken members of the NESkimoes and pirates or ninjas. (Pirates FTW, btw.)

Gamers of all ages roamed the expo, they brought their wives, their husbands. Jerry and Mike brought their kids. MC Frontalot brought his mom.

People helped each other out when they needed it. They shared, they joked, they gamed. No one stole, despite the expensive hardware just lying around.

It's sorta like a mini-Woodstock for gamers, but instead of barbiturates the drug of choice is Bawls.

For those of you who don't get Penny Arcade or don't like it, you still need to go at least once to bust your PAX cherry. Brian Crecente

I am seriously jonesing for some Dark Messiah right now. Ubisoft's upcoming first-person spin-off from the world of Might and Magic, feels a lot like a finely honed upgrade to Hexen.

The game is split into two sides, the humans and the undead. Both have the same character classes, each with unique abilities that seem to offset each other.

I got a chance to play some multiplayer in the PAX exhibit hall as a warrior, archer and assassin.

They controls were fairly intuitive. As a warrior you could either click to slash at an enemy or hold in the mouse button to charge up for a more powerful attack.

Up close the warrior can't really be beaten. If he runs into another warrior their attacks can actually parry each other, so it becomes more of a game of cat-and-mouse.

The assassin's basic moves involves a charged backstab and a stealth move that makes him nearly invisible for a set time limit or until he attacks.

The archer is great at distance attacks, but it felt like it takes a lot of sniper-like finesse to make the character work. I couldn't quite get the distance down for shots.

One of the really cool things about the game is that your characters gain experience during the lengthy rounds. This experience can be used to upgrade attacks, unlock new spells or weapons.

For instance, an upgrade for the archer could mean a double shot arrow, which is essentially like a shotgun blast, or an arrow that binds and slows an enemy down with vines. One of the upgrades for the assassin was a poisoned knife. It's a pretty cool system. Though it sorta sucks that you loose it at the end of the game.

The mode we were playing required one team to capture and hold four points on the map. I'm not sure what other modes will be included in multiplay when it launches.

I think I would be fairly OK with just the typical multiplayer modes, but it would be nice if they came up with some unique modes for the game.

The only other problem I see with the game is that it could get a little tedious not being about to select your weapons like you can in a shooter. It would have been nice if they offered each class the ability to choose from a variety of weapons or spells when they start and then make the upgrades unique to their choices.

Even without that though, I can see me spending a lot of time on this game. Brian Crecente

I recorded two videos showing some Dark Messiah multiplay at PAX this weekend.

The first shows some play using the archer and magician and the second shows warrior play. I love watching the warrior get blasted across a courtyard by a magician's point-blank fireball. Brian Crecente

They're rolling up the banners, piling up the bean bags and airing out the place as I write this.

It was three days of bouncing blue balls, moms, concerts and game play. Three days of gamers getting a chance to connect and play.

That's what makes PAX so unique, I think. It's not just for gamers, it's about them. They're the show, Tycho and Gabe are just along for the ride.

If I had 17,000 friends and the money, patience and wherewithal to throw a party, I'd like to think it would be a little bit like this.

I still have a lot of other things to post, including an interview with the creator of the Fruit Fucker mod, video and impressions from Dark Messiah and the mighty duo themselves: Gabe and Tycho. Check back Monday for the goods. Also you can check out our PAX06 coverage here.

Pocky: Breakfast of champions. I don't know why these guys didn't just set up their booth next to that insanely busy Bawls booth. They you could have lined up for a full meal.

That's right I'm sitting up here on a panel about blogging, and blogging it. It's an addiction, I can't stop.

We're talking about the different relationships bloggers and main stream media have with PR firms. Which is quite striking in my opinion.

Chris Grant over at Joystiq (He's sitting next to me) points out that bloggers tend to have more of an adversarial relationship with PR companies.

We're talking about how to generate revenue with blogs. It's not pretty, basically you need to get hired by a big blogging comany (like Kotaku or Joystiq) or depend on weak sauce Google Ads which doesn't pay me a damn penny on Red Assed Baboon.

Law and blogging: It should be a class. The problem with taking information down from a blog is that you could set a legal precedent of you take something down and down the line you might be legally forced to.

The great blogging revolution, its democratizing the Internet and reinvigorating all media. It also juices.

For the record, a journalism degree isn't a total waste of time, but it's best when temprered with a working knowledge of what you cover... like games.

And it's done... and no one stoned me to death. Wiiiiii!

Behold the Fruit Fucker case mod in all of its glory. And yes, it dispenses pulpy orange goodness from its frontal orifice. I hear Jerry and Mike plan to imbibe in front of an audience later on today.

Last night during the Penny Arcade concert, Jerry called guitarists from The Minibosses and MC Frontalot to the stage to face off on a little Guitar Hero 2 in front of the screaming fans.

The Minibosses ending up winning. MC Frontalot said, in their defense, it was their bassist.