Awesome / Penny Arcade

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• Gabe trying to cure Tycho's hiccups by cutting off his hand.
  • It would be more awesome if it worked.
    • Well, he'll presumably stop hiccuping when he runs out of blood. So that's kind of like working.
    • In the volume it's in, Tycho says Gabe thinks people hiccup to spite him. So wanting to harm them works.
    • We heard on one of the podcasts that Gabe has the power to stop his hiccups through sheer willpower, and presumably he doesn't understand that this is not the case for other people.
• Three Words: Cardboard Tube Samurai.
  • Nine More Words: Cardboard Tube Samurai skin for Yoshimitsu in Tekken 6.
• Guess Tycho needs to learn how to Shut His Filthy Mouth
• Tycho gets his when he delivers an epic To the Pain speech that wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy novel in response to Gabe saying that Warhammer ripped off World of Warcraft.
  • Not just any fantasy, it would be perfectly in place in a Warhammer novel.
  "Don't say another Goddamn word. Up until now, I've been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one. When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth."
• The Dixie Twist in Gabe's line dancing finals is certainly his Moment of Awesome.
• Tycho and Oksana's final moments in "Paint the Line 2"..
• Tycho gets a Crowning Moment of Awesome and Funny. Nah, it's cool.
• Annarchy had two in "Armadeaddon": this one where she's whaling on zombies with a bat'leth, and this one where she breaks up with her boyfriend while still whaling on zombies.
• Tycho gets one here: DaytoooonaaaaaAAAAAAAAGH!
• Hell, even the Fruit Fucker gets one.
  • The entire Armadeaddon storyline counts. Hell, Jim, a completely anciliary character who was introduced as a dessicated skeleton, turns out to be the leader of the zombie horde; and one of the zombies was Gabe and Tycho's former undead roommate.
  • Don't forget how Tycho beats Jim: with an absolutely legendary callback joke. Specifically, the "I roll twenties", from the sandwich comic.
    • Roll for initiative.
• Gabe's first session as Dungeon Master. It helps if you read the lead-up.
• Counter Stomp!
• When Jack Thompson reneged on his offer to donate $10,000 to charity if someone made the ultimate violent video game in which players could urinate on people's brains and murder kids who worked in video game stores, Mike and Jerry made the donation themselves.
  Tycho: We've just made the donation you never would, and never meant to. Ten thousand dollars' worth. And we made it in your name.
• Carl the Exterminator's taming of a truly ancient Deepcrow.
• Gabe's facial expressions in this strip
  • And also in this one.
  • Tycho offers some delightfully wicked smiles in this strip and this strip.
• Tycho's response to Roger Ebert is not only a CMOA for the comic, but for art criticism in general. The Rant for the strip is even better.
• From the guest Lookouts comic, the troop kills the basilisk together.
• Just about any time Tycho cranks up his literary motor and rolls out the Purple Prose. For instance, the mission of Carrot Cake Soup, and his experience of Venice.
• DivX gets one here.
• Mere words cannot do this justice.
• Tycho's feelings on stereotyping.
• Steve Jobs gets one.
• It is a very odd sort of patriot who would destroy the first amendment to protect the second. The follow up is just the icing on the cake of Gabe's sobering and thoughtful viewpoint in regards to the recent school shooting in Connecticut.
• The entire Ocean Marketing situation. Mobilizing the internet and making memes in less than 24 hours.
  • What set it off: an email thread
  • The last word on bullies? "I will personally burn everything I've made to the fucking ground if I think I can catch them in the flames. -Gabe Out"
  • The same guy later continued to harass Mike and Penny Arcade via Twitter. He claimed to be visiting PAX in disguise even though he was banned. However, he forgot that his iPhone also tweets his location. It doesn't even stop there; read it for yourself.
• One for Mike (Gabe), after going to his son's school and hearing that one of the girls loves Slenderman, he's planning to do something about the problem of kids playing violent games meant for teens or adults in a mature and reasonable manner by explaining to parents about the ESRB rating and what really happens online.
• Robert Khoo is a walking CMOA. In 2002, he met Mike (Gabe) and Jerry (Tycho) and showed them a business plan he came up with for Penny Arcade and offered to do two months of work for free to try and make their webcomic a successful business, since he felt that they should be millionaires. Eleven years later, Penny Arcade is one of the most successful webcomics ever made and he manages to run it and has a huge hand in Child's Play and all of the PAX conventions. The conventions, by the way, are the only single conventions in the country, if not the world, themed on a single solitary web comic!!
• Penny Arcade Presents The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. This wasn't just a dream project for both of them; the Penny Arcade: The Series episode has Jeff predict from personal experience that it will be a nightmare making it happen because Nintendo is so legendarily hard to satisfy ... and it's the exact opposite. Nintendo was so happy with it that they didn't change so much as a word — and rightly so.
• Another Real Life awesome: after Microsoft lent Mike (Gabe) a Surface Pro 3, he posted his impressions, including a few issues he had with using it as an art tablet. Microsoft's reaction was basically an awesome moment for them both: they not only invited Mike out to demo the thing, they came to Penny Arcade to show off their fixes.
  It's one thing to invite me out to give them my feedback. They very easily could have done that and then not done anything with it. Honestly I wouldn't have blamed them. I mean the device is done and shipping in like a week. To see them come back to me with fixes for my problems was really amazing. They are putting time and effort into making sure the Surface Pro 3 does what artists want it to do. You hear a lot about MS being this massive company that doesn't listen but that's really not fair in this case. The Surface team seems incredibly passionate and open to hearing feedback about their baby. After I was done drawing I went out to lunch with some of the people from the team. I said to them "listen, I am an edge case. I don't use this machine the way most of your users will use it. I understand this thing isn't going to do everything for everyone." Their answer was basically "why not?"
• "Brush them again."
• The first ever PAX had approximately 3,300 people attend, but the real CMOA comes from the number of pre-registrations:
  Jerry: Pre-registraton ended with 1337 attendees in total, and though I ordinarily shun leet-speak that number clearly implies the blessing of gaming deities.
• Short, to the point, and brutally precise, Tycho's rant at EA for closing down Visceral Games and their reasons for it is nothing short of all kinds of satisfying.
• Gabe somehow managing to guess Little Big Planet codes. Twice!

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