Unhappy Hipster wouldn’t know a hipster if it bit them on the ass.
Edit: bonus Hark, a Vagrant:
That was drawn on a napkin from the lunch room, in study hall.
Fantastic.
Remember when Penny Arcade was funny? Maybe 1 strip in 6 I actually know what they are talking about lately, and half of those aren’t funny so much as commentary (on top of each strip). Here are the last 6 strips with my comments. Also, every time I don’t get what they are talking about, if I go into the news text for the day, they have a habit I’ve noticed of barely explaining anything, so I’m left out of the loop.
(this is todays). I have no idea what the point of this is. Bullying? Mario Party? Bonzai trees? WTF is going on here?
Zero idea what the fuck this is all about. Here is the text from that day in reference to the strip:
There is a lot about the Horizon Festival that probably seems very good at the time, but will eventually lead the kind of televised documentary with a lot of scary music that often flashes between full color and black and white very quickly .
This seems to reference a mobile phone game I had no interest in learning more about.
Something about Fortnite, which of course I know about a little, but I have no idea what this is referencing, nor what the “punch line” is all about? I suspect I don’t want to know. Funny? Here is the text that references it for the news that day.
These fuckin’ pets, man. I’m not even a regular player and I want to get a piece of this hound.
Destiny 2? This is the only one that made sense in terms of humor to me, out of this last six. It wasn’t that it was very funny, just one I finally knew where they were going.
I guess I get this one too, but it’s again not really funny to me - the joke is they want more clicks. Welcome to 2005, I guess?
It’s certainly been a long time since they really cracked me up, but honestly I don’t think they’ve changed from their decades-long formula at all.
I actually bought the first five Penny Arcade books. Why would I buy a dead-tree version of something that is 100% available for free on-line and is arguably in a harder-to-read form? I have no idea. I honestly don’t have a memory of buying them.
BUT based on a perusal of those books, I think that if you picked six consecutive strips from whatever period you considered to be their heyday, you’d find a very similar ratio: a couple strips about Gabe & Tycho’s weird relationship and personal peccadilloes, a strip about some games industry weirdness that most people haven’t heard of, a couple strips about the inner-workings of whatever game they are currently playing (and which may be very obscure), and one strip having to do with grammar.
Really, the only new addition in the last five or ten years is the “strip about their media empire” thing, where they comment about something that happened at PAX or something that they’re doing as a podcast or twitch stream or whatever. I too find those to be inscrutable since I don’t really want to see/listen/attend any of their subsidiary stuff.
Yeah, the strips only work if you understand what they are referencing, and that is probably what makes it good. I really liked the Dragalia Lost strip because I have played that game, and I too was confused by the fact that combining some items in that game is called “un-binding” and the free to play level up treadmills are quite odd.
But yeah, it has always been like that, I think. It could be that you are playing less of the games that they are now, so the references are lost.
This is most likely the case. Looking back, it’s been ages since they played something I cared about (they mostly focus on the multiplayer stuff, or mobile games, which I suppose is mainstream enough it hits more of their audience).
I cannot comprehend how you’re getting from A to B on this one.
To be fair you have to have a pretty high IQ to understand this reply
Is that you, Holkins?
I think they just had a bad run for awhile there. While I don’t think they’re anywhere near as good as they used to be (is any artist that has been pumping out consistent content for years?), I laughed at the latest one:
EDIT: Is it just me or does the first panel make no sense? The enemy is “two levels above you”, and then Gabe says “one level above you”. Two, one, ‘above’? Since all Tycho has to do is fill in the bubbles with words, you’d think he’d check this stuff.
I think he was trying to emphasize that fighting someone even one level above, let alone two, is very difficult. Could have been worded better. It was already kind of wordy, though, I suppose.
Yeah that’s a fine reading, fair enough. Why is it ‘above you’ though, shouldn’t it be below?
Like a level 8 fighting a level 10.
Oh.
It doesn’t help the reader that Gabe is two literal levels above the enemy. I thought the point of the whole strip was how difficult it is to execute aerial assassinations.
I’m just glad I wasn’t the only one.
Me too. I did not know the AC games were RPGs with levels, so I would not have guessed what they meant.
I’m usually the one not getting the joke. It’s nice being on the other side for once.
That Forza Horizon 4 comic was really funny too. My favorite line is “There have even been reports of time reversing witch-cars, whipped into deviltry by chronomagi”. Heehee. I love that take on the Horizon festival coming to town.
They only started that way last game? Somewhere around then.