Following the recent announcement that Penny Arcade’s first game is coming to XBLA, I thought ya’ll might enjoy this neat glimpse into the history and personalities behind the comic.

Researchers are now using MMOGs to study the spread of epidemics; the “Corrupted Blood” bug in World of Warcraft (which stemmed from a boss battle gone awry) provides a great first test case.

Chris Avellone has been putting up stick-figure sketches for several months now. This one is comedy gold. :-)

Ubisoft is making some of their older titles available for free, in ad-supported form. Makes sense; they aren’t capturing much value from these games anymore, so why not try ads? Best case, they make some extra cash, *and* convert a few non-fans of POP (and other titles) to likely buyers of future versions.

Soren Johnson talks about tutorials (something that XBLA devs should be especially concerned about, given that a long, unwieldy tutorial could guarantee poor sales of a game in our try/buy model.)

An interesting glimpse into the Halo 3 test lab.