With the opening of the Penny-Arcade Expo only hours away, the Penny-Arcade guys are releasing interesting news. Penny-Arcade, the creators of the game-focused online comic and founders of PAX and the Child\'s Play charity, have partnered with Hothead games to produce video games based on the characters in their comic strip.
The video games will be designed to run across platform and will be released episodically, with several downloadable updates per year. Cross platform means almost everything: Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, with plans to release on home consoles somewhere down the road.
With an episodic nature and such a wide compatibility base, we guess what you can expect will be similar to flash games that are currently on the Internet, only Penny-Arcade themed. We wouldn\'t be surprised to see Xbox Live Arcade downloads, but everything beyond the games existence is speculation on our part. Pricing hasn\'t been announced. In this writer\'s opinion, Penny-Arcade would make a great adventure game, complete with old-school inside puns when your character looks at the toaster, but that\'s just me. Of course, the genre, style, and design of the game could be anything. We have no direct information on that yet.
Here\'s to hoping that one of the best online comics manages to serve as a good mold for making good games.
Hothead Games, for their part, lays claim to an experienced development team that\'s worked on games like The Simpsons Hit & Run and The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, though the development team itself has never produced a published game, that we are familiar with.
A release date for the first Penny-Arcade game, called Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, hasn\'t been announced.