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A look at Penny Arcade's ESRB ad campaign
Last week, the rascally duo from Penny Arcade announced their new ESRB ad campaign featuring Gabe-drawn characters and Tycho-penned backstories. The idea: to make gamers more aware of the ratings system in a hope that this knowledge will somehow be transferred -- through some kind of filial osmosis -- unto their guileless parents. ESRB president Patricia Vance gushes, "In order for the campaign to resonate with the gamer audience, we sought to have a little 'edge' to the creative and let's face it, Penny Arcade comics give a whole new meaning to the term 'comic mischief!'" Indeed. That's why we're hopeful a certain fruit-processing character assumes his rightful throne educating the masses on the finer points of M-rated behavior. In the meantime, we have Sarah here and the Andersons after the break representin' the letter E, with no mention of the additional characters in their press release (PDF).(Update: added new, higher-res screens that are -- get this -- actually legible. Thanks go to Gabe at PA for uploading them. I'll let him say it: "I was disappointed at the resolution of the images they released. Like I said everyone here is extremely proud of these ads and so I'll go ahead and post some better versions. These are designed to be read in a magazine. The idea is that kids will actually be turning the page around in order to read the text. It doesn't quite work as well with a monitor but you get the idea.")
Sony's fony graffiti sparks lashback
Sony's guerilla graffiti campaign promoting the PSP in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco has pissed some folks off. The best way to fight corporate graffiti? With graffiti, of course. Pictured here: one vandal's response to the PSP ad campaign. Sony's not the only company that has co-opted modes of underground expression. Rockstar plasters NYC with stickers, Microsoft did the same to promote MSN, and so on. A bit of the ire directed at Sony probably has to do with the whole rootkit fiasco. [Via Digg]
