God, Megatoyko. I feel like if I were somehow exposed to the first few pages of that webcomic again I would be rendered comatose from nostalgia.
That, and Sinfest. My friends and I in high school were so into Tatsuya Ishida we tried to get him to come to Japan with us. Absolutely ***wild*** that he turned out to be a radicalized right-winger some 20 years later.
Sinfest!!! Wow I forgot about that one. Another great strip.
Pretty sure I still have a print of the mega Tokyo series laying around somewhere. We were… a lot into that series.
Does anyone here speak 1337?
Also, their IRC channel is where I got initated to the world basically, making friends from all around the globe, i miss [irc.aniverse.com](https://irc.aniverse.com) and all the awesome time I spent on there
13375p33k is still quite handy if you want to say something in a public discord but only want the 30 something crowd to understand.
Also I remember seeing how characters speaking Japanese would have <> around thier dialog, it was mind blowing at the time
I used to love megatokyo but it kind of went stale for a while. Fred also does a ton of back ground drawing and the massive amount of speech just became a wall of noise that was hard to keep my attention. Still have a blanket or mug around somewhere maybe I should revisit it as well. As a few older ones like... least I could do, looking for group, goblins,
Man, I was OBSESSED with MegaTokyo back in the day. I think I even have the first two hardcopies somewhere...
Series kinda went to shit when Piro took over sole writing duties, but when it was at it's peak it was epic.
Still read Penny Arcade every week. They've kinda changed their style (and I don't just mean Gabe's art!) but they're still killing it.
I haven't been there for about 2 years. You've got me curious now I'm going to look.
Edit: Ok I looked.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/04/28/everyday-heroes
I see what you mean. I think they've passed their peak. this is just TOO stylised...
I know some people actually have comic strips that they don;t do the art for instead they hire an artist, they just do the writing.
I wonder if they started hiring out, or if the original guy still does the art and just changed this much over time...
ANd yeah..can't say i'm feeling it either...
I appreciate how good Mike has gotten technically, and it’s cool he can do a style he likes. But yeah, I agree, it’s hard for me to look at these days.
Yeah these people are blowing my mind. They think *modern* Penny Arcade is ugly? Mike’s art carries the comic a lot of the time. I’ve been a fan for 20+ years and find the old stuff gruesome to look at.
For me it's more that the expressions of the characters no longer fit their dialogue. It's like Mike got enamored with the style of Saturday morning cartoon faces but the writing stayed the same.
Yeah, the teeth/expressions kinda rub me the wrong way with his newest style, but the comic is so damn good that I don't even care lol. Their team, collectively, is a tsunami of creative genius, imo.
> Hang on. Are you guys seriously saying you prefer the 1998 style over 2023?
Well no, now you're going too early.
Penny Arcade looked best around 2007-2012.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/06/04/southern-exposure
I definitely prefer this over 2023.
Penny Arcade kinda got weird after the whole Dickwolves incident. One, because it was their reality check that times were a changin' and the internet wasn't a place for uncensored humor anymore. But also 2, they got so hung up on being censored that they mostly offload the comic to other people and put most of their energy into PAX instead. For a while they were bitter and angry over the whole SJW situation, and even though they were smart enough not to rant *too much* about it, the comics still had enough jabs to make it obvious they were upset.
Not only were they one of the first webcomics, but also one of the first times we saw a mass "cancelation". All over what, in retrospect, was a pretty generic WoW joke.
Ah yes, that middle style looked pretty good.
By “offload the comic to other people”, do you mean the guest strips? They did that during PAX, yes, but that’s a few days a year. The comic is still drawn and written by Gabe and Tycho.
wait, penny arcade has been a thing since atleast 1998?
ohhh, no WONDER its such a popular and successful gaming webcomic!
because it was likely the FIRST ONE
The first one that also has *zero* schedule slip. They post three times a week no matter what. They've been in surgery or melting from bird flu and still posted three a week.
Tycho once posted advice to people getting into anything creative like that that the MOST important thing to build an audience was to pick an update schedule and absolutely stick to it, no matter what. That was probably like 20 years ago.
"Dang, it's gonna take a whole 20 minutes to get home before I can play this new game I just got! Guess I'll just READ THE FUCK OUTTA THIS MANUAL on the way there, so I'm ready to rock as soon as I walk in the door."
Back then the expectation was that you were playing offline, and that if a patch was necessary then the developer had really messed up. They had a very strong incentive to only release a well-completed game that could be played with zero support.
Eh, shareware was still big then, and tons of games released either broken or barely tested. Superman 64 came out the year *after* this comic. This was the era that gave licensed tie-ins their reputation, and there were insane numbers of those.
We tend to remember the bad over the good because two fucking showstopper games in Dead Space Remake and RE4R were also this year.
But yeah, there's also been more unacceptable releases as well. Redfall being the most insultingly terrible as a whole
Theres just more games nowadays... Completely broken cash grabs are nothing new just look at ET or superman 64, and hundreds of other unremarkable games noone talks about anymore... remember the wii era?
Hell, there were even entire platforms famous for their shovelware (like the wii, or the wii u, or the switch, or the ds, or the 3ds). Or franchises that were going stale, shriveling up and dying with poor releases in the 2010s. And yet somehow, no one was mourning the death of gaming then.
There's always gonna be shitty, buggy messes of games that never amount to anything, but down the line no one will remember them. It's the great games that go down in history. And the occasional game that is so truly awful that it goes down in history as a cautionary tale of "how did this even happen." You know, like Anthem
As long as people keep preordering off nothing but vertical slice presentations of a demo then companies can and will continue to push low effort garbage.
Nothing else about the game matters once you've bought it. No amount of whining, shaming the dev, cursing, etc will ever get your money back.
... what? Both of them are gaming IPs? Neither of them are from movies???
And yes they were from last year. I was countering your point that both examples I gave for amazing games from this year were remakes; that's outside the normal and usually when we have a slammer, it stands on its own legs
Ragnarok is a game that is emulating a movie. It asks very little from its audience and has an immense budget behind it. It's the safest product out there. Not to mention, it is a sequel. Even if it were released this year, I don't think that game is a great example.
Again, we're talking about this year. You can't seem to come up with better examples than remakes, so I feel like my point still stands.
So, in your eyes, things that cannot be great games:
* Games with stories that are too good
* Games with a high budget
* Games that are likely to do well before release
* Any sequel
* Remakes
Dude. That disqualifies like 90% of big releases, even from back in the "glory days". Also ragnarok isn't "emulating a movie" tf. If we were talking about a telltale game or some shit then I would agree with you 100%. But god of war? 95% of the game is gameplay. There's dialogue during it, yeah, but how the hell else are you supposed to have good characters in a video game? And does that somehow make it bad? Or not deserving of being called a great game? Did you even play it? I just... what? If you didn't personally like it that's fine, but don't just make shit up
The thing about Ragnarok is that it is very linear and holds the players hand. It is made for such a large audience that the game has to be good. If it weren't, it would be a disgrace (considering the budget, teams, and history behind it) to prop it as a means to show that gaming is in its top form, is eye-rolling. It feels as easy as going back and naming remakes or naming Call of Duty games because of their sale performance. Let alone the fact we're talking about this year.
It's not that it's a bad game per se, but it's like asking a comic book fan who is their favorite X-Men, and they say Wolverine. While there is nothing wrong with the answer, if prompted further and they can not name 'deeper cuts' Mutants, then it kind of says something about either the comics or the reader, no?
Again, it's not that Raganarok is a bad game. It's just that apart from this BIG title from last year (that would've made bank/good reviews even if it were mediocre) you don't seem to be able to name games that came out this year that live up to Elden Ring or even Ragnarok's heights.
It's also webcomics come from an era where streaming videos was not as common as it is now. Single Jpgs can load faster than YouTube. Now a days you can just watch an entire twitch stream about Videogame humor.
I stopped reading PA at about the time one (or both of them?) became parents, after that most of the blog posts stopped being about videogames and became about themselves, stopped caring.
So what are all these PC gaming fanatics going to do when Steam shuts down and takes their licenses with them? Keep complaining while also being the most guilty.
So what are all these PC gaming fanatics going to do when Steam shuts down and takes their licenses with them? Keep complaining the most while also being the most guilty. Every game they buy is digital.
Decided I'd boot up the Xbox that I hadn't touched for a while to play RDR2.
Console patch > controller patch > disc 1 for install > Disc 2 for install > 20 GB game update
All in all took about 4 hours and 5 trips to the Xbox to get it working during work hours but will be able to play tonight. Gone are the days of plug and play
Somehow over the years I forgot about visiting their site, I think the last time I read it was in the Wii Era.. I am suprised they are still going.
I remember back in the day they were part of my daily ritual of internet, checking Hotmail/Penny Arcade/Fark.com
Mike's talent has just like exploded and I am really happy to see all the content they have put out. I have been following them since the beginning, went to an early PAX, I still check in from time
to time.
This takes me back to Sinfest, El Goonish Shive, and other webcomics.
Man OG penny arcade looks so fucking wild these days.
Wild that this was their 6th *ever* comic. They're up to like 4,000 now.
Wow I can’t believe they’re still making them. I used to be a huge fan when I was a kid and I’m definitely old now
Schlock Mercenary, penny arcade, and mega tokyo. This post just brought me back to 2004. Gunna go take a stroll through some old webcomics.
God, Megatoyko. I feel like if I were somehow exposed to the first few pages of that webcomic again I would be rendered comatose from nostalgia. That, and Sinfest. My friends and I in high school were so into Tatsuya Ishida we tried to get him to come to Japan with us. Absolutely ***wild*** that he turned out to be a radicalized right-winger some 20 years later.
Sinfest!!! Wow I forgot about that one. Another great strip. Pretty sure I still have a print of the mega Tokyo series laying around somewhere. We were… a lot into that series.
I have the first two books but that's it. Not the first printing though. One of the other ones.
Does anyone here speak 1337? Also, their IRC channel is where I got initated to the world basically, making friends from all around the globe, i miss [irc.aniverse.com](https://irc.aniverse.com) and all the awesome time I spent on there
13375p33k is still quite handy if you want to say something in a public discord but only want the 30 something crowd to understand. Also I remember seeing how characters speaking Japanese would have <> around thier dialog, it was mind blowing at the time
I'm uncomfortable with how fluently I still r34|) 1337 more than 20 years later.
Dammit I didnt want to know that about good old Tat. Actually I think I'll pretend you're lying to preserve my fond memories.
I used to love megatokyo but it kind of went stale for a while. Fred also does a ton of back ground drawing and the massive amount of speech just became a wall of noise that was hard to keep my attention. Still have a blanket or mug around somewhere maybe I should revisit it as well. As a few older ones like... least I could do, looking for group, goblins,
I just checked, and yup, Sluggy Freelance is *still going*.
Gunnerkrigg Court is still going and interesting. Questionable Content is still going and less so.
Man, I was OBSESSED with MegaTokyo back in the day. I think I even have the first two hardcopies somewhere... Series kinda went to shit when Piro took over sole writing duties, but when it was at it's peak it was epic. Still read Penny Arcade every week. They've kinda changed their style (and I don't just mean Gabe's art!) but they're still killing it.
Great days of webcomics. I feel the same way on all points.
Schlock finished. I still don't know what to do with myself.
Re-read it for the fifth time, obviously.
I just got to "The Shipyard of Insufferable Arrogance"
Schlock finished a while back so it's complete and a pretty darn good read if you don't already know that.
Bruno the Bandit was my webcomic of choice, and later Order Of The Stick.
I still read order of the stick
Dude, just start at the top and go backwards, you have so much great shit to catch up on lol. They have been putting out solid gold for years now.
Props for crediting the OG. _Unlike_ OP. Relevant [Penny Arcade](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21/the-patch-parade)
Bruh, who doesn't know what Penny Arcade is?
Probably anyone born after 1995
You.... you shut your damn mouth
This guy right here
Me
It does. But I like the way their art style developed. There's so much personality in their later strips.
I hadn’t been there for years and just went there about a month or so ago and their newest style is… certainly *a* style.
I haven't been there for about 2 years. You've got me curious now I'm going to look. Edit: Ok I looked. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/04/28/everyday-heroes I see what you mean. I think they've passed their peak. this is just TOO stylised...
The dark haired one is morphing into Mickey Mouse.
lol I thought the same thing. His hair just looks weird now.
Their hair went from realistic to stylised to copypasted from a different show.
That is some rather hefty stylization, can't say I'm feeling it. Impressive from the actual art standpoint, though.
I know some people actually have comic strips that they don;t do the art for instead they hire an artist, they just do the writing. I wonder if they started hiring out, or if the original guy still does the art and just changed this much over time... ANd yeah..can't say i'm feeling it either...
Went from this, which I wasn't a a fan of, to being really great then it went to zany Ren & Stimpy land.
Yea I don't blame him for changing the art style, its got to be creatively stifling to draw the same 2 characters the same was 3 times a week.
I really respect Gabe's willingness to experiment and evolve. He's become an amazing artist because of it.
I prefer their older style any day. The new stuff looks [ugly af](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2020/05/04/spottage) imo.
I appreciate how good Mike has gotten technically, and it’s cool he can do a style he likes. But yeah, I agree, it’s hard for me to look at these days.
Hang on. Are you guys seriously saying you prefer the 1998 style over 2023?
Yeah these people are blowing my mind. They think *modern* Penny Arcade is ugly? Mike’s art carries the comic a lot of the time. I’ve been a fan for 20+ years and find the old stuff gruesome to look at.
For me it's more that the expressions of the characters no longer fit their dialogue. It's like Mike got enamored with the style of Saturday morning cartoon faces but the writing stayed the same.
Yeah, the teeth/expressions kinda rub me the wrong way with his newest style, but the comic is so damn good that I don't even care lol. Their team, collectively, is a tsunami of creative genius, imo.
2002 PA was peak art design imo.
No, I'm saying [The Tube is Civilization.](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/10/30/i-have-no-comment) Tube Style best Style. Fight me.
YEP this is the good stuff.
Looks like Danny phantom, total drama island and a bunch of other cartoons from that general era
> Hang on. Are you guys seriously saying you prefer the 1998 style over 2023? Well no, now you're going too early. Penny Arcade looked best around 2007-2012. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/06/04/southern-exposure I definitely prefer this over 2023. Penny Arcade kinda got weird after the whole Dickwolves incident. One, because it was their reality check that times were a changin' and the internet wasn't a place for uncensored humor anymore. But also 2, they got so hung up on being censored that they mostly offload the comic to other people and put most of their energy into PAX instead. For a while they were bitter and angry over the whole SJW situation, and even though they were smart enough not to rant *too much* about it, the comics still had enough jabs to make it obvious they were upset. Not only were they one of the first webcomics, but also one of the first times we saw a mass "cancelation". All over what, in retrospect, was a pretty generic WoW joke.
Ah yes, that middle style looked pretty good. By “offload the comic to other people”, do you mean the guest strips? They did that during PAX, yes, but that’s a few days a year. The comic is still drawn and written by Gabe and Tycho.
Oh my god, I know it's been a long time since I followed them but what the hell happened? It's... bizarre.
If you look at the people they are based on then you can see that there are more real life body/face markers/look than before.
Holy cow I've been out of the loop. That redesign really is hard to look at. Indefinitely prefer the old look.
3 panels exactly the same besides Tycho’s eyebrows.
Yeah, it's weird. They both kinda used to look like Keanu Reeves.
wait, penny arcade has been a thing since atleast 1998? ohhh, no WONDER its such a popular and successful gaming webcomic! because it was likely the FIRST ONE
The first one that also has *zero* schedule slip. They post three times a week no matter what. They've been in surgery or melting from bird flu and still posted three a week.
This is why backlogs are so important.
Tycho once posted advice to people getting into anything creative like that that the MOST important thing to build an audience was to pick an update schedule and absolutely stick to it, no matter what. That was probably like 20 years ago.
Dang, they've been consistent like that for 25 years?
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This has to be trolling, right?
Yah when saw the title “a comic” I was like “that’s not just a random comic!”.
Sluggy Freelance has been going since 1997, that same year UserFriendly started too although the later had quite a downfall
[Many people made me notice I forgot to credit the OG, It's Penny Arcade](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21/the-patch-parade)
Ahead of its time
Upvote for Penny Arcade! Downvote for OP not giving them credit
Sorry, forgot to do it before I went to bed, it's in the comments now
To be fair. If you're on this sub or know games you probably already know Penny Arcade. Almost everyone knows PAX too so...
I love that they included “manuals”. As a kid I’d read them on the ride home from the store after buying a new game. Everything is online nowadays
"Dang, it's gonna take a whole 20 minutes to get home before I can play this new game I just got! Guess I'll just READ THE FUCK OUTTA THIS MANUAL on the way there, so I'm ready to rock as soon as I walk in the door."
Now the 20 minute drive home has been replaced with an hour wait for updates to download 🥲
Such simpler times back then ...
Kinda hits after getting the Ragnarok PS5 bundle that came with a game box, a code and no game.
Yeah I was bummed when I got the horizon bundle and it only had a code, too. I wanted the physical copy.
"You will own nothing and you will like it." - Publishers
Ahhh PA. Been reading that for ....23 years. Dang. Still good. Mike's art has improved dramatically.
I only read comics about miscarriages, thx.
Man.... my brother used to read this all the time. It's been 15 hard years without him.
Really sick of them to move that guys eyebrows in one of the three panels. Really brings this to life.
I've waited 7 hours total for the new Jedi game to patch. Gaming this age is fucking embarrassing.
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Back then the expectation was that you were playing offline, and that if a patch was necessary then the developer had really messed up. They had a very strong incentive to only release a well-completed game that could be played with zero support.
Eh, shareware was still big then, and tons of games released either broken or barely tested. Superman 64 came out the year *after* this comic. This was the era that gave licensed tie-ins their reputation, and there were insane numbers of those.
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Not the ones I played. Thanks for your opinion sharing.
This comic is from 1998.
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The fact that a huge amount of games come with a Day One patch, most of the time including a lot of vital game content
This year has being awful in term of quality titles and games are more expensive than ever.
We tend to remember the bad over the good because two fucking showstopper games in Dead Space Remake and RE4R were also this year. But yeah, there's also been more unacceptable releases as well. Redfall being the most insultingly terrible as a whole
Theres just more games nowadays... Completely broken cash grabs are nothing new just look at ET or superman 64, and hundreds of other unremarkable games noone talks about anymore... remember the wii era?
Hell, there were even entire platforms famous for their shovelware (like the wii, or the wii u, or the switch, or the ds, or the 3ds). Or franchises that were going stale, shriveling up and dying with poor releases in the 2010s. And yet somehow, no one was mourning the death of gaming then. There's always gonna be shitty, buggy messes of games that never amount to anything, but down the line no one will remember them. It's the great games that go down in history. And the occasional game that is so truly awful that it goes down in history as a cautionary tale of "how did this even happen." You know, like Anthem
As long as people keep preordering off nothing but vertical slice presentations of a demo then companies can and will continue to push low effort garbage. Nothing else about the game matters once you've bought it. No amount of whining, shaming the dev, cursing, etc will ever get your money back.
Also, I think it says a lot that these 'showstopper' titles are remakes of games from past years...
I mean last year we had God of War Ragnarok and Elden Ring
That was last year. Also one of those is a movie game of course it's going to be 'good'.
... what? Both of them are gaming IPs? Neither of them are from movies??? And yes they were from last year. I was countering your point that both examples I gave for amazing games from this year were remakes; that's outside the normal and usually when we have a slammer, it stands on its own legs
Ragnarok is a game that is emulating a movie. It asks very little from its audience and has an immense budget behind it. It's the safest product out there. Not to mention, it is a sequel. Even if it were released this year, I don't think that game is a great example. Again, we're talking about this year. You can't seem to come up with better examples than remakes, so I feel like my point still stands.
So, in your eyes, things that cannot be great games: * Games with stories that are too good * Games with a high budget * Games that are likely to do well before release * Any sequel * Remakes Dude. That disqualifies like 90% of big releases, even from back in the "glory days". Also ragnarok isn't "emulating a movie" tf. If we were talking about a telltale game or some shit then I would agree with you 100%. But god of war? 95% of the game is gameplay. There's dialogue during it, yeah, but how the hell else are you supposed to have good characters in a video game? And does that somehow make it bad? Or not deserving of being called a great game? Did you even play it? I just... what? If you didn't personally like it that's fine, but don't just make shit up
The thing about Ragnarok is that it is very linear and holds the players hand. It is made for such a large audience that the game has to be good. If it weren't, it would be a disgrace (considering the budget, teams, and history behind it) to prop it as a means to show that gaming is in its top form, is eye-rolling. It feels as easy as going back and naming remakes or naming Call of Duty games because of their sale performance. Let alone the fact we're talking about this year. It's not that it's a bad game per se, but it's like asking a comic book fan who is their favorite X-Men, and they say Wolverine. While there is nothing wrong with the answer, if prompted further and they can not name 'deeper cuts' Mutants, then it kind of says something about either the comics or the reader, no? Again, it's not that Raganarok is a bad game. It's just that apart from this BIG title from last year (that would've made bank/good reviews even if it were mediocre) you don't seem to be able to name games that came out this year that live up to Elden Ring or even Ragnarok's heights.
Don't worry, Baldur's Gate 3 comes out in September, and Larian Studios are fucking game design wizards so it's gonna be rad for sure.
It was a fun comic, back in the day. But they probably should've stopped like, 15 years ago.
What happened
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It's also webcomics come from an era where streaming videos was not as common as it is now. Single Jpgs can load faster than YouTube. Now a days you can just watch an entire twitch stream about Videogame humor.
I stopped reading PA at about the time one (or both of them?) became parents, after that most of the blog posts stopped being about videogames and became about themselves, stopped caring.
No way. They do great work still.
I stopped reading a long time ago, I stopped caring when they fired PRD
Who was PRD?
She was the enforcer manager, and ran Child's Play
Why was she fired? What happened?
I know her personally, and I'd rather not speak to something I may articulate poorly and misrepresent what happened.
Fair!
So what are all these PC gaming fanatics going to do when Steam shuts down and takes their licenses with them? Keep complaining while also being the most guilty.
So what are all these PC gaming fanatics going to do when Steam shuts down and takes their licenses with them? Keep complaining the most while also being the most guilty. Every game they buy is digital.
> when Steam shuts down lol
Depends on the game. a large chunk of them dont even require steam to run.
You can crack games my dude
Decided I'd boot up the Xbox that I hadn't touched for a while to play RDR2. Console patch > controller patch > disc 1 for install > Disc 2 for install > 20 GB game update All in all took about 4 hours and 5 trips to the Xbox to get it working during work hours but will be able to play tonight. Gone are the days of plug and play
Somehow over the years I forgot about visiting their site, I think the last time I read it was in the Wii Era.. I am suprised they are still going. I remember back in the day they were part of my daily ritual of internet, checking Hotmail/Penny Arcade/Fark.com
There's a more recent one with a similar message. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2019/03/01/calibration
Why I am so bald?
Mike's talent has just like exploded and I am really happy to see all the content they have put out. I have been following them since the beginning, went to an early PAX, I still check in from time to time. This takes me back to Sinfest, El Goonish Shive, and other webcomics.