Here’s the bad news:  Immortal Machines was sadly underrepresented this year at PAX East.  Last year, we were there in full force, doing interviews, making videos, covering everything we could get our grubby little hands on;  this year, though, things just didn’t work out that way, and nothing from the show floor was forthcoming.  I know I’m personally bummed out to have missed a bunch of really cool stuff.

The good news:  Steve did go, and he’s here to make us all feel jealous!  So this episode opens with his PAX East report, including his favorites, his disappointments, and his surprises of the show.  If you didn’t make it to PAX East yourself this year – or even if you did – we hope you’ll find it informative and entertaining.

After that, it’s on to your e-mails!  We had two good submissions this time around – thank you, Jeff and Dennis, for providing excellent discussion-prompting material – so we dive into that for the latter half and talk a little bit about Steam’s impact on the PC games market in terms of pricing, and then a bit about PC gaming communities, specifically as they relate to user-generated content.  It’s good stuff;  keep it coming, guys.  We love hearing from you.

A few relevant links from the discussion:  (1) A first look at Portal 2‘s single player gameplay from the PAX show floor.  (2) GameInformer reports on Valve bringing the hammer down on a user trying to sell his Steam account.  Yeah, that hammer.  (3) The Carmegeddon mod for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto 4.  Because it’s hilarious.

That’s it!  Hope you enjoy as much as we did.  Away we go!

Hosted and summarized by Eric [Ravenlock]
Participants are James [Vigil80] and Steve [Dukefrukem]
Produced by Clayton [Voodoo]

(Have you followed our Twitter feed?  That’s a thing you could do.  And if you want to join the discussion, come visit the forum thread over at Colony of Gamers.)

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Starfarer is coming, and it is beginning to generate a buzz. The mind behind this cosmic strategy RPG, Alexander Mosolov of Fractal Softworks, gives us a little of his time to talk about the project and answer questions submitted by Colony of Gamers posters.

It has been too long since the likes of Star Control and Masters of Orion took us to the final frontier. With inspiration from those classic franchises as well as freewheeling, open world romps like Mount & Blade, Fractal Softworks hopes to take us there again. Starfarer promises a troubled galaxy to forge a path across, whether you choose to outfit a fleet of ships for the greater good, or play out life as a lone wolf space pirate.

Find out more at Starfarer’s official site, including details on preorder access to the alpha. And keep an eye on Immortal Machines for your chance to win a Starfarer registration key, which Alexander generously provided.

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It’s no secret that I love throwback action games.  I write about them all the time in the Free and Worth Every Penny column on Colony of Gamers, and an absurd percentage of the purchases I’ve made from XBox Live Arcade or the Indie channel on Steam have been games that could have come from the late 80’s or early 90’s, except for a nice new coat of polish.

So it should be no surprise that when a sidescrolling shooter in the vein of Abuse and the SNES Mega Man games showed up on my radar, I was excited to try it out.  A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda takes its cues from a lot of different sources, and the result is a tight little game that feels nostalgic in some ways, and modern in others.  It’s got a very nice look, addictive upgrade and high-score mechanics, tight controls, and HUGE bosses to take down that’ll remind you of some of the best 2D action classics.  It’s also $10 on Steam, which seems pretty reasonable.

So that’s what Robert, James and I are talking about this time around.  If you’d like to hear more, come on in.  The water’s fine.

Want to join the discussion?  Come visit the forum thread over at Colony of Gamers.

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