Book Report: Blips!

Last week I said I’d look at my other video game joke book. Well here it is. Blips! may have Pac-Man on the cover (yes, that is Pac-Man) but this one is more about what we would today call “gaming culture”, and outside of the fact that arcades existed and people aren’t swearing at each other over the internet there’s not really that much difference. Except that adults seem to be defining gaming culture instead of kids. I mean “adult” like “college age”. I wonder if they take themselves too seriously to find this book amusing. Well, I like it anyway.

Blips!

PUBLISHER: Scholastic Books (1983)

WRITER: Bob Stine

ARTIST: Bryan Hendrix

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Book Report: Pac-Man Riddle & Joke Book

I wasn’t sure what to do for this week’s report and although posting late the distractions of the week may have kept me from having a report at all. Then I saw this reading of a very lame Pac-Man joke book. For those of you who didn’t click on the link, the Pac-Mania joke book is mostly the same image of Pac-Man with some minor changes to it to match whatever horrible pun he just wrote. It’s kind of like an art class practice session or one of those puzzle pages where they ask you to finish the image. You can see the host die a little bit with each page he looks at. Still, it inspired me to drag this out late last night.

The Pac-Man Riddle And Joke Book, written and drawn my Mike Thaler and published by Pocket Book subsidiary Archway, had to be something I picked up at a school book fair. There’s another video game joke book I’ll review next week but this is the one I was reminded of after watching the video. Instead of the same stale image with some minor tweaking every image is new and while a few of the same jokes actually popped up there are a lot of things that make this a lot funnier.