A while back on Act Casual, we featured a little title called Grow Cube, by developer “On” at EyeMaze. The game was simple to play: Click the ten boxes in an order of your choosing, and observe the results and how your selections interplay with your previous selections. Rather simple, but fun in its own way. It’s a pretty straightforwardly casual title.

Now we bring you a new game, also by On: Grow Valley. In many ways, it’s the same game: Click the seven buttons in the order of your choosing. Watch as the results unfold. Try again with a new order. The mechanics aren’t very complicated, but the interplay between each of the seven options is interesting and the feedback can be fun to observe. You could sit down with a notepad and some free time to figure out the optimal order if you’d like, I suppose.

And at this point, given that description, you might be wondering why I’d feature this at all. It’s not just that this is a nice refinement on the Grow series, mere quantum leap though it may be. So here it is: On has added a more intelligible theme to the possible actions in this and the most recent predecessor, Grow Island. Namely, the new idea isn’t just wacky actions interacting, but now themed actions based on a university curriculum in science and engineering. Previous ones were fun, but a bit too “wacky” for me, in a way that conjured feelings of cat-hair mustaches. And Grow Valley’s refinement of that theme actually makes you think about the possibilities in specialized departments working together, rather than making you think about whether the pot and the bricks will somehow work together to make your Grow Tower even taller.

If you do come up with the optimal solution or another interesting combination (There's at least one Easter egg.), let us know! We could discuss whether it seems a worthwhile model of a curriculum, and whether the dynamic between options makes sense to you.

Why you should play this: The Grow series is growing up, becoming more than a fun time waster and now encouraging players to think about how groups can work together. Sure, this isn’t a new theme—especially not in the context of Japanese media—but it’s a respectable theme and a nice step forward for the series.

IndieCade Side note: Be sure to check out the recently released list of the 32 IndieCade 2010 Finalists. You may notice a few familiar titles!

I don’t really, fully understand what I am supposed to do this weekend at PAX. I have a vague notion that there will be both cool stuff and people there, and that sitting in on a panel or two is a recommended idea, but for the most part I am going out there unprepared, and as a result more than a little skittish about the whole thing.

I’m usually pretty comfortable in a convention setting. I’ve walked into a handful of E3s, a clear agenda clutched in my tight, gamer grip; eyes ready to absorb the glamour and glitz with the kind of unrestrained, total abandon that is the hallmark of the objective games journalist. I have stoutly walked into Los Angeles time and again like I owned the place, a bearded force of nature in an E3 that had forgotten to equip its nature resist gear before the encounter.

PAX feels different. Squishier for lack of a better word. A convention built less on orchestrated media hype and more on the bonds of community. To be honest, this community thing is exactly where I’ve long had the most difficulty finding my comfort zone. Normally I am a level 80 shmoozer, at least in business settings where everyone pretty much agrees to put an entirely false personal on, so it feels really unusual to be nervous about PAX, but there it is. An unknown quantity.

This week Shawn, Elysium, Cory and Lara talk about expectations and how they impact our play experience.

Penny Arcade Expo is on its way. If you're joining us and the 60,000 or so of your odder fellows in downtown Seattle over Labor Day weekend, you've got a great time in store.

We've done our homework, and we've got info to help you make the most of your trip.

GWJ is going to be on hand in full force.

• Check the schedule for our luminaries showing up as panel guests. Julian Murdoch will be at Rookie Years: Stories from First Projects on Sunday from 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM at the Serpent Theatre. Several of the podcast crew will be running around, too, so keep an eye out.
• The Official GWJ Slap and Tickle will be held on Saturday, September 4th at the Rock Bottom Brewery. See this thread for details, and I hope to see you all there.
• There are unofficial gatherings, too—peruse the forums and come hang out!
• You fellow forum-goers are going to be all over, and to make it easier to find each other, we have chosen a symbol to identify ourselves—Stan! Here’s a link to Stan in all his radiant, 300dpi glory for your printing pleasure. If you forget or can’t print it or whatever, I will also be printing out 100 blank ones to bring with me and I have real badge clips this year so we don’t have to punt. Find Momgamer or Amoebic for one and sport your Stan in style!

Metroid: Other M for the Wii is an easy pick for game of the week, though the critical response to the latest Samus adventure may be a bit more diverse than the grand and unrelenting praise we are accustomed to seeing. Team Ninja has apparently taken some license that traditionalists may take some issue with, particularly in the characterization of the lead character. It may be worth a look through a few reviews before making a snap buying decision.

Also of note this week, Valkyria Chronicles 2 comes to the PSP from faraway shores. You know, I make fun of the PSP from time to time, but looking at the broad history of the platform, there are a lot of hardcore-gamer titles on this system that you really can't get easily almost anywhere else.

Find the full release list for the week below.

Pyro went and hopped on a plane at the last minute this morning, waving happily and saying something about "suckers." In a panic, I found e7.

Now, I'm not mad at Allen "PyromanFO" Cook for ditching us. In fact, it gave me a chance to play a game that is delightfully like jumping on a water bed full of Jell-O, or one of those cartoon naked women from Monty Python cartoons. (No, I'm not going to link them here.) See, as a child, I didn't really get to hang around much with the types of people who had water beds, and e7 gives me a chance to combine my lifelong fantasy of jumping on a water bed with my other fantasy of hurling myself through the air at robots to make them explode.

You push arrow keys to either side to slide along and hold down to stretch the squishy ground until you release and sail haphazardly through the air. There's with some sort of narrative to it about seeking out and destroying a bomb pointed at Earth. (Sure, that makes it sound more like a rocket than a bomb, and sure, you'd think that we earthlings could come up with something better than an unarmed hockey puck to save our planet) But I wasn't there to save anything. I was there to bounce.

And it was delightful.

Up until section 14G, that is. There's a massive difficulty spike there, and rather than keep battling the robot phallus you see in the screengrab, I figured I'd let you all try it out, at least to get a shot at the fun mechanics before the work day ends.

Why You Should Check This Out: I know there's a story and stuff, and the art's neat and there's some atmosphere, but it's also a fun little mechanic that could as easily be repackaged as Hockey Puck's Adventures In Spongy Trampoline Land. That would be a much less frustrating game, I bet, too.

Anyway, you Goodjers are probably all better at platform and jumping mechanics than I am, so maybe you can play it and tell me how great the story is when you easily beat it. Doesn't that sound fun?

When the long history of video game console cycles is written, this generation should be counted among the most important to the industry. I realize there is great affection for days of old and memories of the NES, SNES, PS2 and even that long-toothed great-grandfather, now long laid to rest, the 2600. But this generation, the one that began with the Xbox 360 and which is already six years gone with no end in sight, has been a stealthy cavalcade of advancement, most of which took place in ways I had never expected.

I remember what seems like not so long ago being amazed that an arcade game like Super Mario Bros. could be recreated in a home experience. Imagine the quarters I would save! As a child that grew up on games where combat(!) between a red square and a blue square was at the apex of electronic action, the watchword for three decades was graphics. Advancement was easy to measure in wo to the power of x bit processing.

Frankly it got to the point where it felt like the only upgrade to be seriously considered in any generational advance was strictly from the perspective of raw power. As I look back over the last half decade, one in which graphical advancement has if not stagnated, at least become secondary, I see now that there is and has long been so much that can be made better, and it doesn’t necessarily require new hardware to accomplish.

Just a great generation of highly adaptable machines.

I don't remember whether this was the 8th or 9th time that I attended the event that until 2008 was called simply “the Games Convention”. Either way, even with almost a decade of gaming-expo expertise, I never cease to be amazed by how even the cheapest and ugliest of branded keychains or other promotional items elicit such fights to the death among what scientists technically refer to as “The Unwashed Masses”. Unless we're talking about the Portal 2 shirt. That probably was worth breaking a neck or two. Swagstravaganza.

But yeah, let's talk about some actual hardware and software, shall we?

This week Shawn, Julian, Cory and Jonathan talk about surviving conventions. Cory also gripes about his needs. He is met with stony silence.

Ever since E3 switched back to its old format, gamescom has been suffering somewhat. Most of the publishers tend to bring their old builds to Europe, since it would be rather uneconomical to produce a new demo for a show that is this close. Sony, Disney Interactive and Capcom decided to completely skip gamescom 2010 even. Nevertheless, the show attracted over 254,000 visitors this year.

Sony—a company that always cared more about the European shows than Nintendo or Microsoft—finally got around to announcing Resistance 3. What a relief! The genre of grey/brown-ish, irony-free sci-fi shooters in which you get to fight an alien invasion or something along those lines had been starving for so long now after all. Obviously, it wasn't the only action title that made it to Cologne this year.