davextreme: pennyarcade

Showing posts with label pennyarcade. Show all posts

11 March 2008

Penny Arcade! - Perfectly Reasonable

Bookmarking for later: Penny Arcade's real estate strip.

09 December 2007

Child's Play 2007

We just made our picks for our annual Child’s Play contributions. Established up by the guys of Penny Arcade in 2003, Child’s Play works with children’s hospitals around the world by setting up Amazon wishlists to give sick kids cool toys and games to play with when they’re stuck in the hospital. All you do is go to their site, find a participating hospital near you, and pick out some toys.

28 December 2006

New York Times piece on Child's Play Charity

New York Times piece on Child’s Play Charity

05 November 2006

Child's Play 2006

Child’s Play 2006

Donate a toy, game, or movie to a children’s hospital for kids to play while they’re stuck in recovery.

24 March 2006

Penny Arcade is Six Times Funnier Than I Thought

I’ve been vocal when asked about my opinion of Penny Arcade. PvP boiled it down pretty well a few years ago. I certainly don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with knowing your audience and skipping the background introduction, but really, it’s like a leader paragraph would kill them somtimes. Regardless, I had the theory that I thought they were brilliant occasionally, and either unfunny or inaccessible the rest of the time, so I decided to put it to the test. I read every single comic they’ve published, and picked out the ones I thought there were funny. Anything rating above a three on the chuckle-meter made the cut. Here you go:

I think my initial goal in the project was the prove they only had like five funny comic strips, and their vast popularity was all a fluke born out of getting into the game when the world needed a webcomic about video games, but thirty strips is a lot, even if they’ve beeing doing it for years. Much like my slow progress through The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, it’s neat to see how their art and writing changed over the years.

My gripe about webcomics in general is that they exist on the web, but they don’t take much advantage of it. You can’t search for old comics easily. They’re not usually arranged by category. Finding an old strip, unless you get lucky and a blogger wrote a post about it, is just as hard as flipping through old newspapers is — you go day-by-day until you find the right one or get sick of the project. They could solve this pretty easily by using a content management system (Movable Type could easily be rigged to do webcomics) and putting the text of the strip in a field that you hide with CSS so that search engines could still have an idea of what a given strip is about.

Edit: a few others that did not quite make the cut: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Edit: okay, I’ve grown to like this one: Liar’s Day.

18 October 2005

Penny Arcade

I think Penny Arcade’s over-rated. They’re funny, but not consistently so, and they seem to take pride in omitting context from half of what they say. Still, they hit it out of the park sometimes, and I commend them for that.

This whole Jack Thompson thing is a good example of that. He’s the lawyer who’s suing the makers of Grand Theft Auto for inciting some nut to murder two police officers. He also made an offer that if someone made a game in which someone kills video game execs as revenge for the industry’s violence that he’d donate $10,000 to charity. Naturally, someone made said game, and he backed down on his offer, saying it was satire.

So Penny Arcade donated the $10,000 for him, in his name.

Pretty damn awesome, I’d say.