PAX East grows ever nearer, it's super near right now, and our dutiful JavaScript clock is returning a value that seems almost impossible. Maybe it is impossible. Maybe each of my fingers is an undulating shrimp! It's a world of possibilities. It's also a world of challenges unique to my psychological profile.
Might be a good time to get The Conventionist on your phone, so that you can in engage in a kind of guided meditation. Gird your fantasies of the event with a few convincing, factual contours.
5th Cell is local, and they invited us out to play Hybrid on two separate occasions, but the incredible "world of possibilities" I referenced earlier did not contain an instance where we were able to actually make it out there. I had heard, like every other person, that Hybrid was a "shooter," which (coming from the house of Drawn To Life, Scribblenauts, and Lock's Quest) seemed like pretty safe travels. I probably should have assumed that when they said "shooter," they meant some kind of multiplayer platforming action RTS. Hybrid seems like one of those cases where the codename stuck; as a load-bearing piece of terminology, it's well-suited.
What are these crazy 5th Cell bastards even doing here? Robots on the ceiling? Good Christ. Obviously it's not done, needs banged on for a bit, but lordy. Assuming I survive the show, I need to set up a date with these guys that I can actually keep.
I can tell you, however, that Trenched is fucking badical. This is something I actually know. I don't know how things progressed to the point where you can have Double Fine create a whole universe for you every couple Goddamned months, but it's a world I will consent to live in.
New Penny Arcade Television is available, with a new episode of The Series called "The Expansion" which deals with lots of regular company stuff. If you're curious about some of the more "sausage production" elements of a site like this, dig in.
(CW)TB out.
