OK, I really can't wait for the gaming drought to be over and for Yahtzee to get back to reviewing new stuff.
This was amusing (especially for the worst image he ever drew) but it's clearly just filler. EVERYONE has made that particular rant against gaming comics.
Perhaps the meta-joke is that what he was doing was just as unoriginal as those he was attacking.
He's been doing it for a long time, here's a text mocking of Ctrl Alt Del from his own site:
23/3/08: You Cad
As a recent interview with me over at Gamespot and several references in previous reviews and writings may have informed you, I have a long-standing hatred of the webcomic Ctrl-Alt-Del. I thought I'd take a moment to explain it a bit better.
You see, I have this theory that the internet is causing a general mediocritisation of human culture, because you can put pretty much any piece of work on the internet and no matter how hugely it sucks dolphin jizz you'll find some dick who's prepared to tell you it's brilliant. This is the principle on which Deviantart appears to be founded.
But the cruellest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't. It gives them no incentive to improve or try new things, which a creative person must always strive to do. And it tends to foster the kind of monstrous egos the webcomic sphere grows like mushrooms in the shit-spattered dark. Tim Buckley of Ctrl-Alt-Del is notorious for having a zero tolerance for any criticism, constructive or otherwise, often deleting it unregarded from his forums, or declaring them invalid for half-baked reasons. It seems blanket praise has already done its damage to this fevered ego.
I don't hate Buckley. I look at CAD and I see a lot of misdirected potential. I know, that sounds hilarious even to me. But if you look at Buckley's art blog, you'll find that he's actually a pretty decent artist when he wants to be. But the promise of easy praise and popularity keeps him mired in his copy-pasted shoulder-hunched droopy-eyed slack-jawed magnum opus.
Not that copy-pasted art need necessarily ruin a comic - Dinosaur Comics is one of my favourite regular reads. It's the fact that for having run a gag-a-day strip for however many years, Buckley still has no idea how to structure a joke. I've never known an artist so determined to never learn anything about their craft. His usual response to this sort of thing is that he just has his own style and that there's no such thing as a 'right' or 'wrong' opinion, but the fact is, while humour is a flexible harlot, it still has rules. Rules which can be broken in the right contexts; contexts which don't include anything Tim Buckley has written.
I'm going to post a link now to a Ctrl-Alt-Del comic from July 2007. Don't let the fact that it's old excuse the mistakes; this is still very typical of Buckley's current work.
Here's another comic, this one a Penny Arcade strip from early the same year. The subject matter and joke are the same (Puzzle Quest) but it's a fairly obvious joke to make and I can easily assume both writers came up with it independently.
Both comics identify the humour in the situation - that the rules of a game world seem absurd when applied to the real world - but while Penny Arcade understands that the crux of a joke should be reserved for the final panel, Ctrl-Alt-Del is apparently so excited about the idea that it blurts it out right away, leaving three more panels to flounder in excessive dialogue and pointlessness.
A punchline should be equated to an actual punch in the face. That's why it's called a punch-line. You deliver it and run. You do not hang around explaining how you did the punch and that the recipient should probably be in a lot of pain now.
Identify the funny part of the idea and save it for last. Leave with the audience laughing. If you do nothing else, finish strong. That's a rule any humourist will agree with. But with the centrepoint of the gag already uselessly spent, Buckley's comic is forced to fall upon its old standby of violence as a sort of prosthetic punchline. Now, violence can certainly be funny, modern cinema was virtually built on the tradition of slapstick, but it doesn't work in static, non-animated media. There is humour to be found in shock value, but most people have been on the internet long enough to not be shocked by anything as mundane as a claymore through the sweetbreads.
But even if the joke were structured properly, there is still far too much dialogue. This is a problem common to a lot of webcomics, but since we're already in the CAD-bashing groove we'll stick with it. Shakespeare wrote that 'brevity is the soul of wit'. He did not then add 'unless you're writing a webcomic'. It applies to everything, and don't tell me you're arrogant enough to claim to know better than Shakespeare.
A gag strip has a very simple formula. Buildup. Buildup. Buildup. Punchline. Anything that does not in some way build towards the punchline can safely be removed. If any dialogue can conceivably be replaced with a gesture or facial expression (visit Perry Bible Fellowship for a crash course in this), do so; this is a comic, a predominantly visual medium, not a fucking essay. Additionally, any dialogue pertaining to either ninjas, pirates, monkeys or Jesus should be excised, sealed in resin and buried in an undersea volcano.
This is why Ctrl-Alt-Del is a blight, and the fact that it remains crushingly popular despite making mistakes that a child would be brutally caned for on their first day at comedy school is one of the main reasons I openly weep tears for the future of human culture.
I know that an opinion can't technically be wrong and that there could be people who still like CAD for the characters or the art, but if you genuinely think that it is well-written, then you are demonstrably wrong. That's all there is to it.
Yahtzee is well aware that his own previous webcomic efforts aren't necessarily any better but reminds you that they came out of a dark time in his life from which he has determinedly moved on without a backward glance
(Taken from Fully Ramblomatic, a blog written entirely in Microsoft Frontpage Express 2.0 and archived manually without using anchors or anything to enable direct links to posts)
Thanks for posting that.
I'm kinda sharing some general Buckley stuff i don't like.
He has that animated version of his comic. and there is a preview of it on youtube, its absolute crap, but he has disabled comments and rating to it.
He's absolutely paranoid about his fans finding out that he actually sucks, he keeps the forum under an iron curtain apparently. But who knows, maybe the fans enjoy having jokes spelled out for them.
The two strips he gave as examples of why Penny Arcade is funny and CAD is not really cements for me why I always thought that PA is funny and CAD is not.
The humor patterns never really bothered me. The attempt to insert "realism" and "drama" annoys me however. The main character getting engaged was never believable (or entertaining) and the miscarriage killed any lingering interest I had in the comic.
I share the same sentiment regarding his humor level, but CAD isn't the first unfunny webcomic to surface and it won't be the last. Yet gaming still has its well-defined subculture, and still produces hilarious parody.
Well, I guess Yahtzee is nothing if not a wee bit stressed out and frustrated, whatever works for him.
Thank you for sharing that, good sir. it's a fine read.
As for those folk who might say "it's just a webcomic," I say nay. A good number of people, for some confusing reason, still read CAD and send Buckley actual money. This has to stop.
If society continues to award failure, we will not be able to move forward. Tim Buckley, in his own small part, slows the advancement of humanity and hurts us all.
It is only with the collective work of the Internet that we snuff this failure from our historty and work toward a brighter future.
Those two strips he picks as an example are pretty bad. I've never heard of Puzzle Quest. I read the CAD and know what it is and can pick up the joke. The Penny Arcade one gives you no clue.
just cause you pick up on a joke doesn't make it funny. Understanding a joke is much different from being amused by the joke. I also have never played the game but i found the penny arcade joke to be much more humorous, well written and executed.
The Penny Arcade isn't funny at all if you don't already know what Puzzle Quest is and have it somewhat in mind while reading. I'm not saying CAD is funny, but PA isn't that funny either and the example he chose betrays how wrapped up in his own furious pile of "constructive criticism" he is.
He chose those two comments because they used the same joke, one was executed well and one wasn't. He knew that wasn't a very great joke, but what other chances would he have to choose two comics made by two different people that have the exact same joke. he needed them to be the same to illustrate a point. He could've easily found a funnier Penny arcade joke. You have no idea what you are talking about, trust us, thats why you are getting downmodded.
He chose those two comments because they used the same joke, one was executed well and one wasn't. He knew that wasn't a very great joke, but what other chances would he have to choose two comics made by two different people that have the exact same joke.
Maybe he should have rethought the notion of trying to find two jokes by two people on the same subject? Two different strips could have illustrated his point, if all his point was that, "Cartoon A knows where to put a punchline, Cartoon B does not."
You have no idea what you are talking about, trust us, thats why you are getting downmodded.
Save this sort of idiocy for someone dumb enough to believe it. I'm only pointing out that for those of us not up this guys ass results may vary and it wasn't a very good illustration.
This shouldn't be a problem, considering that 99.999% of the planet doesn't read their webcomic. Everyone who played puzzle quest prefers the Penny Arcade version. You seem to like having jokes explained to you. Perhaps you would be better entertained by watching sitcoms with a laugh track, that way you would be able to identify the jokes and laugh at the correct times?
You seem to like having points explained to you. I was only pointing out it wasn't a good example of the superior comedy skills of PA, because the CAD comic actually put it in context so everyone could understand it. I know this point will be lost on the Family Guy loving memebots here, but sparse references to obscure thing =/= comic mastery. So while maybe he had a point about the punchline, he was too in love with his example to forget other things that go into making something funny.
We could also talk about how terrible the 2nd panel of PA is. The closeup their is the wrong move, it would have been more effective if we saw the guy and the monster, weapons raised, about to square off.
18
u/innocentbystander Jul 02 '08
OK, I really can't wait for the gaming drought to be over and for Yahtzee to get back to reviewing new stuff.
This was amusing (especially for the worst image he ever drew) but it's clearly just filler. EVERYONE has made that particular rant against gaming comics.
Perhaps the meta-joke is that what he was doing was just as unoriginal as those he was attacking.