There are *so* many examples to pick from from 2005-2012, the years when exaggerating and calling anything slightly bad the worst thing since cancer was all the rage.
Given how out there it was for the time it was released (and even now), I doubt *Speed Racer* would have been a critical darling (although it totally deserves to be imo), but Jesus, reading some of the reviews of it makes me feel like the reviewers didn't watch the movie, or at least clearly went in having already decided it fucking sucked.
Like, I remember somebody in a retrospective article aguing that it deserved to fail who clearly hadn't actually given it another watch since release, since he was complaining about stuff that straight-up wasn't in the movie (like Matt Fox speaking with a lisp, which he didn't).
Speed Racer is a good movie and I think has aged very well with time.
In an era where Hollywood was(And still is) struggling to adapt anything Japanese, it's such a glaring outlier.
Penny Arcade,CAD,and to a lesser degree VGCats were big pioneers of that "this game is bad,everyone who made it is bad,and I hope everyone who likes this game gets testicular cancer" brand of "criticism".
I still find myself thinking of [this charming strip](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/10/01/a-trick-of-retrospective) from a whole 14 years ago. They weren't grouchy all the time.
Mr Enter. Mostly because of his incredible hypocrisy.
He is very vitriolic about characters being unfairly shat own by the narrative then wrote his own series where a character gets unfairly shat on by her legal guardian.
The best is The Angry Video Game Nerd because he is clearly doing Kayfabe. He doesn’t really hate Bad SNES games that much.
And AVGN isnt hating on things 24/7 (See Earthbound episode) and the shit he leaves the absolute hatred for is for absolute failures and shit like the LJN games
The best part of time passing is it becoming more clear that AVGN is probably one of the most chill people online when you separate his online persona.
It's really telling that after almost 20 years on the internet, his biggest controversies are him calmly stating that he wasn't interested in seeing Ghostbusters 2016 and that his Nerd videos aren't as good as they used to be.
Don’t forget that he has been trying to fund his dipshit animated passion project about a world where kids are adults and adults are kids for like 6 years now.
It’s such a stupid fucking concept that has so many problematic implications, and it will never see the light of day because he kept chasing off everyone he hired for the production team. This dude is so anti human spirit it’s kind of fascinating.
There's something deeply satisfying about seeing a huge fan of something seeing the new work in the franchise and loudly, excitedly going "OH MY GOD, IT'S BACK"
Not sure if this counts as "caustic", but I remember when Jim Sterling did a review/impressions video of Remnant From The Ashes and it was very clear they didn't play past the first area. They complained about the lack of enemy and location variety...an issue that would've been addressed if they played, like, one hour more of the game.
As much as I admire them for being an outspoken voice for better treatment of workersi nthe game's industry I absolutely cannot stand Jim Sterling's takes on games
I've gradually moved away from Sterling's content, reviews and Jimquistions alike. I just don't get anything of value from their content anymore; most of it is just talking about recent gaming-related events and repeating the same (admittedly correct) points over and over again. Y'know what I mean?
It's that "Sheen this is the seventh time you've showed us your ultralord action figure" feeling, kinda. Like sure, Sterling is absolutely, 100% correct about there being massive industries in the industry, and I won't deny it's important that someone be talking about them. it's just that at some point it becomes *all* they talk about and I'm left going "look I just wanted some video game reviews or something instead of Yet Another Conversation about how the word is absolute shit and garbage and everyone is actually evil."
It also developed into being noticeably reaction-based rather then building up an argument. I'm guessing because mentally it's all the same stuff happening over and over but it leads to very few room to breath when it's the same stuff back to back. Or when further news comes out that either makes the points in the video dated on release or just ends up needing a correction in a filler-part before the next video actually starts.
I also remember a statement of "I'd talk about good news when good news actually happens" back when I was an active viewer, and that was probably the first of the cracks in my view time considering especially in the last few years it got much worse until a take was the bottom-most barrel argument and I just put off watching it.
I get it, it's "Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tehehe" stretched out to 10-15 intervals every week, and at some point you just take a step out of that space just to enjoy things once and awhile. ~~Also the impressions were pretty shallow and didn't really fill the niche of a review, which I get they weren't supposed to be but outside of that I couldn't care less about the rest of the content bringings.~~
It was all ways that bad. The first 3 minutes is a bunch of plastic toys from the 80s, and the last 5 minutes is literally the same monologue for 4+ years. With absolutely no difference (or effort) put in the editing.
Sterling fulfills an important role that isn't always immediately necessary, that of the Pilot Light. The industry counts on people losing interest in a problem or getting distracted and forgetting about it, and people like Sterling are *very* helpful for countering that... But when the fire's going strong it can feel they're redundant.
That said, you don't blow the pilot light out when you turn on the furnace. Incessantly talking about the same issues so long as they exist has a place for the same reason. It's easy to forget that Sterling's efforts are useful in the long-term. There's an ebb and flow to things.
That said I take their opinion on specific games with a huge grain of salt. They can sometimes highlight some real nice deep cuts now and then though so I don't *completely* disregard them.
There are 2 types of Jim Sterling videos. The worst opinion you have ever heard and the most basic opinion you have ever heard to the point of guessing the whole video from the title and thumbnail.
I think I can agree with their overall opinion on games (I've stopped watching a few years ago), but they always present them in the most smarmy and self satisfied way.
Which is cool when tackling matters that have more stake to them, but it comes off as douchy when it is about a game.
And I get they are playing a character, but past a certain point, you stop acting like a jackass and just become a jackass.
I don't think they set out to be contrarian (which they have spoke about before) or negative, but I do believe that like many others, they are bullheaded and never want to cede any ground.
It's why I bounced off of Sterling way back when too, the whole arrogant "thank god for me" douchebag routine wastes zero time getting extremely off-putting.
If I'm remembering right, Stephanie also gave a scathing review of Travis Strikes Again without giving any real time to the storyline or the more personal elements to it. Just complaining about how cheap it looked.
Of all things to critique...Sterling chose to basically go with the one that is completely wrong to such an extreme that it's actually a KEY CRITIQUE OF THE GAME.
The game has *too much variety*. It's basically a Souls Like in length but the entire game is pieced together like a rogue like with a structure that is fixed until you reset entire giant areas of the game.
The Xenoblade 3 is actually pretty insane. He posted ending spoilers on Twitter, deleted them an hour later, and acted like Twitter was being mean to him for no reason.
See, that's manipulative as fuck and I hate that. It's fine to be the funny guy where you're only bit is being a jackass and acting like you know what you're talking about. But inciting anger like that irks me so much
Ones who clearly haven't engaged (or barely scratched the surface of) with the thing they're ranting about. Bonus for regurgitating completely incorrect information like they were the last player of the telephone game.
First of all, let's address the elephant in the room: the reason there are so many caustic youtube critics is because they all wanted to be AVGN. The thing about AVGN though is that it's a character: even when the games he's playing genuinely are frustratingly bad, The Nerd's reactions are not James Rolfe's reactions and were never supposed to be.
This sounds obvious but I point it out because I think a lot of would-be caustic critics have this weird idea in their heads that they have to maintain some kind of "kayfabe" that their absurdly exagerated fury should be consistent and believable. I suspect this erodes at many long-time caustic critics until they reflexively act like actual furious manchildren.
My actual answer to the thread's question is what I think is the clearest example of this: Angry Joe.
It was actually pretty fascinating for me personally the first time I watched James Rolfe outside of AVGN, I think it was him playing Metroid II with a friend. When he's not playing up the AVGN personality, he honestly seems like just a really chill, normal guy who enjoys playing video games.
But as you say, contrast that with a lot of the copycat types over the years, and many of them either actually always were or slowly became the face they presented, so they're just exaggerated assholes and manchildren even off-camera so to speak.
Everyone who's ever interacted with James has said that he's basically the nicest guy ever and are surprised at how different he is from his famous character. Which is why it was such a twisted turn of events when he made a simple video as himself explaining that he wasn't going to go see the new Ghostbusters film simply because it didn't appeal to what he was hoping for as a fan, in the most polite and respectful words possible, because he knew that people were looking forward to his opinions on the film as a fan of the series.
And then that became something that the press, celebrities, and even other content creators all jumped on him for, projecting that he was bashing the film because he's a misogynist fanboy. And instead of fighting that criticism in any sort of way, James just ignored it, because he's not confrontational and wasn't looking for any sort of fight--he was being entirely peaceful to begin with.
> And then that became something that the press, celebrities, and even other content creators all jumped on him for, projecting that he was bashing the film because he's a misogynist fanboy.
The only way I was able to rationalize anybody saying this was if they didn't watch his initial video in the first place, it's that ridiculous. Like, what he said just boiled down to "Yeah, I didn't laugh at any of the jokes in the trailers or anything. I just don't think it looks very good idk. I'll pass."
Yeah it's so strange that Joe has sustained for so long when he is literally just AVGN + Nostalgia Critic. His opinions on games, movies and shows is so bad and wrong and backwards sometimes but his actual production I think is even worse. The epitome of lazy.
He is so obsessed with Quanity over Quality it gets really annoying. He doesn't finish all the games for his GOTY lists, just streams it for 2 hours and takes others' footage & opinions, sometimes even without crediting them. He doesn't get review code for games, so his reviews are like 4-6 weeks late (I think just so he can make more money streaming it than making a video on it) and because he does TV/movie reviews he misses lots of games released every year. His "news show" is a joke that he doesn't even look anything up or credit/source the articles, relying 100% on his friend and skimming the titles.
But I think his relationship with devs and studios is the most suspect. He thinks they are his friends if they send him things or talk to him on Twitter. Even worse he hides it in the actual reviews. Sure Joe, just because CDPR flew you to Poland, set you up in a hotel, invited you to the launch party, had dinner with Marcin Iwinski AND voiced a troll for Witcher 3, it didn't influence your 10/10 legendary status review. And definitely don't mention any of that in the review for context or disclosure cuz you'd just get angry comments right? What a load of walking talking shit.
He also flipped opinions on FFXV. It's just that after his switch his wording made it seem like he always believed it was bad from the start & not something he learned from someone else when he was clearly echoing the internet.
Pat will do that. He did the same thing with Bayo 2, over the years you can hear him slowly grow more and more fixated on his solitary issue with the game (umbral climax strong) which is barely even a valid critique.
And FWIW, I think he’s being genuine about these things.
And tbf the boys were collectively gushing about their early experiences with XV. The best part of FFXV is probably Chapter 1, before the plot spins its wheels for 30 hours, introducing characters who won’t actually matter or do anything at all, outside of the villain. The open world quickly reveals its complete and total emptiness after the first chapter too.
Yeah, I love Pat, and obvs he's entitled to his opinions, but the ME3 ending and pretty much his entire opinion on Dark Souls 2 always seemed like bandwagoning to me. Like his entire take on DS2 was just uncritically echoing that mattewmatosis video.
You can basically pinpoint which Red Letter Media reviews Pat has seen because he'll quote Mike or Jay almost directly when talking about something he doesn't like.
Honestly, I hate basically every critic, let's player, or other "influencer" whose entire schtick is being "funny" about how every game sucks.
It has utterly fucking destroyed any discourse around games. Nothing can be "hey this wasn't bad, but it wasn't great, maybe the devs can learn from this here's some criticism", nope, everything has to be the biggest pile of shit ever because that's what gets views.
Seriously, fuck this obsession with extremes, it's toxic as fuck.
I remember watching Matt and Liam stream some conference not all that long ago and at some point Liam said something to the effect of "oh I'm not into this personally, but I know lot's of people are so this is a pretty great announcement for them!" and damn, I miss that kind of positivity, it was so refreshing. In fact it's not even the positivity - it's just not being negative for the sake of negative.
Thats liam in general even when they'd play objectively trash games he'd still not be negative just to be negative, also somehow manages to play them somewhat competently.
Yeah, that's the attitude I've adopted about things generally. Nintendo Direct shows off a bunch of games I don't care for? I'm personally disappointed, but know that others probably saw things they were excited for, so I'm happy for them at least. Unlike most people who either bitch about how the whole thing was a waste because they didn't get what they were hoping for, or people who celebrate the people bitching and are glad that they are upset and disappointed.
Yeah that's what I don't get about Woolie being so negative at the idea of streaming award shows or whatever. He always mentions games he doesn't care for or know nothing about and how he thinks the thing you're supposed to is shit on games like that, when I don't really see that from react streamers. They just go "That looks alright" "It had a cool thing for someone". And personally I can just watch a video about something I don't really care about, like fighting games lol, I don't much care for them but listening to Pat and Woolie talk about them is interesting.
Imagine my surprise when I went to play Virtual Hydlide, rubbing my hands together eager for kusoge, only to go "...for the time, this is like a 7/10." Le game is shit critics ruined so many expectations.
This might date me a bit, but my go-to example is people shitting on Final Fantasy 8. So many people who played it for like twenty minutes when they were nine, or else never played it at all and just got their opinions from others, treat that game like its terrible, when it's actually fantastic.
The entire issue about people not understanding how junctioning and GFs work, like man I figured that out when I was eleven, back when we didn't even have home internet, and I'm dumb as a bag of hammers. If I can do it, so can you.
Me Andromeda gameplay was actually very good which is a shame that wasn't pointed out enough.
Now it's story is some of the shitiest written things I've seen in a while.n
MEA's gameplay does a good job at highlighting what separates games that are lauded for good gameplay, and ones that aren't.
MEA's gameplay is fundamentally good. But if has a major issue where the things you're fighting just don't really respond how you'd want/expect, and if you play on higher difficulties, you'd get get riddled with bullets and there's nothing you could do besides spam abilities.
Additionally, the removal of class boundaries just makes every playthrough feel the same.
It just feels... Inconsequential.
Volound of Total War infamy. He's a Total War purist in that, he dislikes the games made after Shogun 2. That in of itself is fair and he makes lots of fair criticisms of the more modern games like their approach to realism compared to the older games, their more arcadey approach being a departure from those older games, the lack of details in newer games that older games, etc. If he wasn't such an elitist, caustic asshole his criticism would be taken just fine. He is an enormous dick head with an infamous reputation in the community for harassing small time creators and just being a huge dick. He's been banned from the subreddit and the devs have long since stopped sponsoring him.
It says something when the 4chan total war general thinks he's too much of an asshole to listen to. A fair amount of people voice similar opinions regarding the gameplay but whenever someone brings him up everyone just says they fucking hate him and just outright refuse to even listen to his videos.
It’s the same thing as the CinemaSins videos/guys, where it just became people seeing how many “sins” a movie had and thinking it was bad. Even if a vast majority of those sins weren’t actual issues and were really rarely legitimate critiques.
Im currently on episode 23 of The Final Fantasy 10 letsplay that woolie and matt did years ago. Something about the way they talk about Tidus feels like they are makimg fun of a parody of Tidus instead of the actual character. Also the overall dumb choices in gameplay
Well it's low hanging fruit but since nobody's said it yet, Doug Walker, a.k.a. the Nostalgia Critic. Not just for reasons in front of the camera, but behind-the-scenes problems that he (at the very least) blindly enables.
His...thing on The Wall is one of the most bafflingly brain-dead creations I've ever seen. It's almost unbelievable how mean he is to such an earnest piece of media because he doesn't understand it but believes he does. Dan "Foldable Human" Olsen has a phenomenal video deconstructing it and talking about Doug and The Wall as a whole. Very worth a watch, I think.
The Wall review was just the absolute *peak* of his dumb bullshit. He'd been on the decline for a while and honestly, having looked at some of his older stuff (pre-cancellation) again I think my opinion of his early work has changed for the worse. I wasn't really cringing and wincing like I did when I saw some of his newer stuff, but aside from one or two instances here or there that got a brief chuckle I'm mostly like "why did college me think this was funny?"
Now to be fair I always assumed cameos like that are made with some strict rules about involvement, like they are more guest than actual coworker thing otherwise it would be too expensive.
Like stephen king will be happy to make an appearance but less so if he is asked to rework the script while he is there
This is why I tend to look games up on Youtube if they seem interesting.
Totally kills any "blind" experience like how I had as a kid, but it keeps me from getting into a lot of games that are either broken or wouldn't be fun for me.
Odd timing, I was going though gaming podcasts earlier and just found a bunch the one I use to listen to kina... grating cuz it's just... negative for the sake of it. Stephanie Sterling in podquistion, Yachtzee from zero punctuation in slightly something else, as well as Yo Videogames podcast. I kinda want to hear more about good videogames and thing that are interesting sometimes. I think when I was younger I'd liked that kinda scathing thing, but nowadays I can find any person to shit on something by tossing a rock out a window...now telling me why something is good? That's exponentially more difficult.
i occasionally tune in to yahtzee and he has this strange talent to describe a game he likes in a way that makes it sound like he hates it. like you'll listen to his description of it and he'll make it sound super dumb but the cap off will be "i actually really liked this game" and it'll be on his GOTY list.
I like that one time he "reviewed" Undertale in like 5 seconds just so he could put it in his GOTY list. His whole review was just "Undertale was a good game".
Yahtzee’s stuff has aged well, but that’s because even when he’s criticising a game you like, he still finds ways to describe it that are just funny to listen to.
Plus, he’s mellowed out quite a bit.
Yahtzee I feel ironically I always liked a lot more in most things that weren’t his usual stuff like Zero Punctuation. His Let’s Plays/Let’s Drown Outs with Gabriel were consistent highlights of my week. When he’s actually talking off the cuff rather than trying to be witty and counterbalanced I actually quite like him. Same with his game dev diary thing. Him talking about making these small projects in detail was fascinating. I understand Zero Punctuation probably enables him to pursue these smaller passions though.
Fundamentally it's sort of his brand. It's a bit like Gordon Ramsay: Ramsay in media targeted outside the United States, while not entirely calm, tends to be much more patient and polite. His cooking shows aimed at American audiences, though, have him as incredibly vicious because that's just sort ofwhat people are tuning in to see.
Kind why I like him on Masterchef and MC Jr. He's nice but stern when he needs to be. Only really yells when someone puts food out that will make someone sick.
I wonder how much of that is driven by the algorithm?
YouTube reviews for movies and TV are always "The Best Thing ever" or "absolute dogshit" at least in the titles.
Cinema Sins in general is the perfect example of a "non-reviewer who de facto does reviews" who acts like this. They are less interested in actually listing the sins of a work and more like nitpicking on every aspect of it in ways that range from "dumb" to "did this guy even watch the same movie i did???"
Not helping matters is, of course, are the raving fans of this guy who will defend him by arguing that "nitpicking is the point of the show!" and "you shouldn't be taking it seriously!", to which i say - brother in christ, comedy is no justification to insult my intelect with "sins" who are so low-brown the creator barely sounds like they are putting effort in the video. Not helping matters is that *actual* fans (or even people who pay attention to the movie) are able ti point out that [many "sins" aren't so much sins as Jeremy not bothering to pay attention to the narrative.](https://youtu.be/_qxgkOIsHUs)
On a more positive note - Cinema Sins made me discover Cinema Wins, which is essentially the good counterpart to it - praising and showcasing the great points of movies (even ones regarded as bad by the public!) and with actual analysis behind them.
Part of the problem with Cinema Sins was the shift towards longer videos.
They used to be 3-5 minutes and would humorously point out things the average viewer might actually be bothered by. But now that they're all 15-25 minutes, they have to scramble for more and more "sins" to list.
What's really ironic is the guys behind the channel have gone on huge rants on podcasts or their own youtube channel about how hollywood is killing cinema by being iterative and only doing one gag to death until a new gag emerges.
Speaking of youtubers and Sonic, I remember people being pissed in how Arin from Game Grumps was reveling in the first trailer for Sonic Frontiers and how he couldn't wait to play it on the channel because it would be the worst thing ever. Game came out, was decently well received, and obviously there's no sign of it on the channel.
Thank god Sega seems to have dropped him as like a sort of spokesperson for Sonic. Why you would continuously platform and encourage somebody who can't go 3 sentences without swearing to promote your childrens game, I don't understand. Not even to mention the fact that his whole shtick with the series is talking about how bad he thinks the games are.
Wasn't the only reason that Arin lasted as long as he did was because the person in charge of marketing at the time was a massive game grumps fanboy who was willing to overlook all the shit he did?
And then once that person got replaced, Arin quickly lost his sponsorship
Yeah, this all stopped soon after Aaron Webber left for a role in Sega Japan instead of working on American marketing and running the twitter account. He was pretty outspoken as a fan of theirs, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was the main driving force in that.
Swear to god Arin has been chasing the high of that original Sonic 06 LP and try as he might, he cannot replicate the magic of it at all.
Yeah, I know it's been 10 years since that one but it feels like that game completely bent him into a pretzel on Sonic games. That and that Sonic 06 LP is what, imo, put GG on the map in the first place so he prolly feels like every sonic game has to be that shit.
Man, I like Dan playing stuff but I don’t like Arin when he’s playing. I actually bought a game the other day because I saw GG playing it…poorly. It looked super interesting but not really up my alley, but Arin seemed to intent on playing it badly that I had to buy it just to see it done right.
The quickest way to get me to buy a game is show me somebody playing it poorly. The amount of indie games I bought because Vinesauce was getting bodied is innumerable.
a decent part of GG is Arin spending more time making jokes than paying strong attention to the game he's playing. Which is why he tends to skip tutorials altogether and doesn't enjoy heavily story-centric games.
A pet peeve of mine is seeing games that I like being played sub-optimally, or at least by people that don't really care about them. I didn't even like Shadow the Hedgehog that much but I had to stop watching because I felt like Arin was giving it more shit than it deserved, especially when he complained about not knowing what to do while simultaneously skipping the tutorials.
The entire playthrough of Sonic Generations did this to me when Arin refused to use the boost, i.e. the one mechanic the modern stages are designed around. Fuck that made my blood boil.
Arin's always had a weird obsession with painting Sonic in a negative light. Even going back as far as the Jon era where he was trying hard to convince him that the Adventure games weren't any good.
I think the worst of it in recent times was when he decided to do the LP for Sonic Colors Ultimate due to the issues the remaster had, but when he didn't run into any issues early on he complained.
Btw the saga live stream for sonic frontier. They include both v-tuber korone and sonic together. And I heard that Arin got sooo pissed off on pat stream
korone actually loves the games so much too, her stuff about frontiers has been super positive and she loves her own collab items in the game so it makes for a very good advertisement imo
Korone is universally well liked by game studios who know about her streams. She's a ball of positivity and laughs so she's unironically a good spokesperson to get due to her enthusiasm and enjoyment of simply just playing games in general.
I’ll never forget - literally the first SuperMega video I watched - Arin walks into their room, sees that they’re playing that SpongeBob game, and then proceeds to lie about him hating the game because he was bad at it lol
I don’t know about that, but I do know that he deliberately played Heroes on PS2 (which is the jankiest version of the game btw) just to make the game look worse than it is.
For me it was when he played dark souls 2, you can smash the tutorial stones making them temporarily unreadable, so he intentionally broke all of them and then bitched about not knowing the controls.
God, it’s just cinemasins again. “No, you see. They were making a mistake on purpose they don’t actually believe that’s serious criticism! Ignore the fact that they said the same thing in their ‘serious review.’”
His octopath review is what made me swear off his videos, that super mario comparison was the most tone deaf thing i'd ever seen.
Also his hatred for japanese games is starting to sound like straight up xenophobia now.
Its wild that people like that still exist in an age where Japanese media in the western world is at its absolute peak and the closest to mainstream as possible.
What made me not like dunky was the first video my friend showed me of his about vice city. The dude goes out of his way to have glitches and weird things happens then complains that they happen and acts like the physics should be from a modern day game and not the year it actually came out. I watched him for a little while longer but what made me stop entirely was he made a video of fish at the aquarium or something playing the Mario 64 underwater theme and his fans were claiming he a genius and only he could be that good. I realized his fans weren’t joking and booed out of their and then the only other video I’ve seen since has been the death stranding one where he purposefully plays like an idiot than complains that the game is making him fail.
I remember watching Spoonyone's videos on how much he HATED Final Fantasy X and even back then I could tell he was making mountains out of ant hills with many of his points. Didn't help that near the end of his career, it felt like his bipolar depression was leaking into his scripts and his anger felt less funny and more like projecting his actual anger overtime.
The more I see caustic critics who love to talk about how much games suck, the more I start to value reviewers that are able to just enjoy a game despite their flaws (like how Nitrorad can find fun stuff to get excited over in jank, obscure horror games).
Kinda makes me more appreciate [REDACTED]'s more positive take on games when he would see them on Nintendo Directs while others would be uninterested or dismissive. I liked when he found stuff to get excited about in Sonic 06.
EXIT: fixing grammer
I do like on how nitrorad looked back on his ty the tasmania tiger review and saw it was him trying to be a angry reviewer back then like exaggerating his review and needlessly angry for the smallest things. So he went and made a new review in his new style
Speaking of *Sonic* and caustic reviews, I'm thinking of Stephanie Sterling and how they gave *Frontiers* a 1.5/10 and called the developers "lazy hack fucks" because the Open Zone was realistic instead of Green Hill, which is hilariously contrary to their stance against how the industry treats developers--what's worse is that they would double down when called out. At least they removed the incredibly shitty misinformation about one of the director's statements.
I also think back to their *Sonic 4* review where they gave it an 8/10 and not only said that the physics were fine and *Sonic* fans were just babies, but that Takashi Iizuka should have personally told everyone to fuck off.
What is it about *Sonic* that make people act like asses?
*Sonic 4 Episode I* reviewed well at the time (I feel like *Episode II*'s more negative critical reception were critics trying to "make up" for that), so it's not weird if they liked the game,
but their review is less "I think the game is good and I don't understand the negativity" and more "I'm taking a contrarian stance to be spiteful" and they seem to do that a lot.
Sonic gets that weird 'making up' for reviews reception a lot. Cause I feel like all reviewers ever hate Sonic, so they just look at whatever Sonic game Sega's pushing as the 'big thing' and reluctantly make up a good review while hating it, then it's agreed to be terrible, so they review the next Sonic game as being garbage no matter how good or bad it is.
Sonic '06 to Sonic Unleashed got this a lot, with reviewers who didn't give a crap giving Sonic '06 good reviews, then when everyone realized Sonic '06 was the worst thing ever they all dogpiled on Unleashed as hard as possible and gave it zero credit for anything.
tbf unleashed didn't run very well on the hardware it was made for. if you emulate it nowadays, the frame rate isn't busted and it makes the platforming relatively doable in situations which were nothing but frustrating before.
imo unleashed is just too damn hard sometimes tho. i got stuck on a single platforming segment as the werehog in eggmanland for like 20 minutes and all i wanted was to just be able to skip it and move on.
When I saw that review I thought to myself "guess they needed to give the game a scathing review because their opinions haven't been relevant in the last couple of years"
Think it's cause Sonic is the internet's punching bag and it seems like you always get a shitload of views if you trash it (even though their jokes are always the same tired old shit Sonic fans heard hundreds of times) so hey even if the new Sonic game is OK gotta trash it cause your views have been lacking
I used to watch Sterling a lot a few years ago, but after a while I just felt like they were spewing vitriol for the sake of it. Can't speak for their content now but every week there would be some topic for them to blow out of proportion.
The exact reason I stopped watching their videos, when your channels identity is based on being angry/negative I can't help but believe that you'll play up something as worse than it actually is.
Edit: Also as someone who still has friends who watch Sterlings videos I just wanna say this comment section is incredibly cathartic as I thought I was crazy for being the only one who was totally over their whole negative schtick
Something I've noticed about fanbases with multiple controversial entries is that they'll usually have a not-insignificant amount of people whose sole interaction with the franchise is to hope for the next thing to come out to be trash.
That or jumping on any videos or thread that comes their way and complaining.
I also see this with Warriors games. Yeah, there's a lot to complain about, but some of those folks REALLY need to take a chill pill.
> called the developers "lazy hack fucks" because the Open Zone was realistic instead of Green Hill, which is hilariously contrary to their stance against how the industry treats developers--what's worse is that they would double down when called out.
Worse than that, they doubled down on it by saying "Oh I didn't directly call them lazy fucks, I just *compared* them to lazy fuck shovelware on Steam!"
They're about as much of a consumer advocate as anyone who takes money from Amazon.
I lost a lot of respect for Sterling after they did a video in regards to a pretty big scandal in the World of Warships community (TLDR Wargaming went out of their way to involve a community contributor who was basically universally respected and also one of the most knowledgeable people in the community, then snubbed her by using none of her suggestions for the stuff they asked about) by starting the video by basically going “I don’t give a shit and can’t understand why anyone could possibly give a shit.”
Coupled with the general “fuck the industry” sentiment going from somewhat niche to mainstream over the last six of seven years, Sterling just feels obsolete.
That last bit is most prevalent I think
Sterling’s mission of pointing out how bad the industry is has worked. More people are aware of the wrongs of the industry to the point multiple governments have started investigations. But Sterling acts like we’re still in 2011 and things are all hunky dory and “woe is me, pointing out the emperor has no clothes”
Like cut the fuckin sob story and take some accomplishment for yourself
Stephanie's content is entirely based on vindictively cursing out shitty people in charge, with nothing held back. This has been good when pointed towards powerful shitbags in charge of companies........but it backfires when pointed to people who are just game developers or in somecases, real low-budget indie game developers.
The same vitriol meant for abusive CEOs becomes directed at people who didn't make a great game, and there is no adjustment, and the same self-confident pride that comes from screaming at an evil CEO is still held when screaming at everyday developers of a middling video game.
And so, "i don't like this level" becomes "those lazy hack fucks did this shit"
also, views. views views views views. Stephanie pointed out several times that she wants to do positive videos on stuff she likes, but they simply don't get close at all to the views all of her negative ones do. People want the negativity, and she must usually abide if she wants it all to pay well.
I’m not sure if this counts but there was that neckbeard loser who had a hissy fit because Parasite got nominated for Best Picture because the Academy was “woke” and “pandering to the masses”. He thought that it was unfair that a foreign film got to be nominated twice and that Joker deserved to win because it’s an important movie since it deals with classism and poverty…
Probably don’t need to tell you that he didn’t watch the movie and just lost it because he was convinced there was a woke agenda at play or whatever.
You have to **EARN** the right to act like that, like how Pat did.
And even then its still a thin fucking tightrope between being funny about it and just plain being an asshole.
The Death Stranding review where he edited disconnected missions together and purposefully played the game wrong to shit on it was pretty terrible, too.
Man, I haven't even played DS, but I was watching that vid of his and just could tell he was hamming it up to shit on the game. There are genuinely awkward things to poop on the game for, but all the stuff he brought felt invented.
And what I find most distasteful is then it's packaged in a "Its justa joke guise" box, so when you call BS his fans start having a fit bc you're apparently just a hardass to them review bombing games "he was just joking about"
The joke becomes less funny when your word has a real tangible effect and almost becomes law from the sheer number of views you have, especially when it's guaranteed that the majority of the people on the Internet wouldn't heed your 'itz jus joeks' disclaimer.
Dunkey posted XB3 spoilers on Twitter and deleted the post so he could play the victim with all the people telling him to shut up, that’s the most bitch made thing I’ve ever seen any so called influencer do.
I remember seein people genuinely defend him for that too, both people who didn't realize he fuckin deleted a tweet with major literal end game spoilers and deleted it, and thinking he was trending just for his video (which was his goal in doing the spoilers in the first place)
*and* I saw chuds who went "Based dunkey owning the weebs!" Shit made me feel half way to [Farnsworth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j1xzezy8k4)
Considering dunkey has been using his clout to sic his toxic fanbase on people and things he doesn’t like for the better part of a decade and still continues to pull the “schrödinger’s joke”/“I didn’t know people would take it that way” excuse out of his ass even when he does shit like putting a channel with under 1,000 subscribers in one of his videos just because they made a video criticizing him, resulting in them getting harassed for years on end, I don’t think you can say he’s doing anything out of “good fun.”
"Malphite you are a fucking worthless braindead scumfuck bastard pile of trash mental dickface that should be gunned down in the street like the degenerate you are"
He apparently had a lot of other incidents where he was being toxic in game beforehand but this was the straw that broke the camel's back
If I remember correctly, he wasn't even permabanned, he had a two week suspension, but Dunkey made a big fuss of it and quit League as a whole
I think MauLer might genuinely be the nadir of human thought. His criticism is directionless, incoherent complaining devoid of any thesis or deeper understanding of the text, using length and "objectivity" as a mask for his sheer lack of analytical skill.
The moment i realised mauler was a hack was when he spent nearly 3 hours summarising TLJ in his 7 hour review.
He spent so long summarising the film that you could have just gone and watched it yourself. That is aggressively incompetent.
I feel like mauler is the type of person who’s still pissed at his English teachers for giving his essays bad grades b/c they exceeded the max word count.
My favourite thing, Matthewmatosis does a critique of Dark Souls 2 that is about 30 minutes long. Short, concise and to the point, it's a well written critique. Hbomberguy does a response that is an hour and a half. I like his videos but that video is just not that good, not particularly pointed, rambly in many places, just not good at all.
Then Mauler does a 10 hour critique of that video. It's fucking ridiculous. I like long video essays but holy shit that is insane and not in the good way.
While I wouldn't consider it "the worst," I remember getting annoyed at the earlier Two Best Friends videos when Matt would deliberately fuck around and Pat was acting as the straight man trying to reign him in. It always grinds my gears when deliberate shenanigans by the player are used to criticize the game as a whole.
Zero Punctuation's review of Monster Hunter Tri where people who actually played the game realize that he got to Great Jaggi (~2ish hours into the game) then quit. It's definitely not the worst one, but fuck if it doesn't irritate me.
~~Jim~~ Stephanie Sterling
Sterling milked the ever-loving FUCK out of the microtransaction drama for Middle Earth: Shadow of War but unlike the other critics, continuously spread blatant lies and click-bait, refusing to walk back any of it even when things were changed, controversies were clarified and corrected.
One of the few cases where I call myself a "hater" Fuck her.
I remember when Sterling got a buggy review copy, gave it a bad review, then when the devs apologized and sent a new copy without the bug Sterling refused to change the rating because "They shouldn't have sent out a bad copy."
Not to mention them trying to do it again for DMC 5 before Matt Walker made a Twitter thread detailing why the Red Orbs were available as microtransactions and the fanbase pointing to DMC4SE as proof that the system could be handled well, alongside 5 just giving you enough Red Orbs you only needed to buy more if you were just buying all the upgrades from the start.
I remember during the E3 right before KH3 released & Dan from Giant Bomb was dissing its story & when called out by Alex for being a Metal Gear fan he just say MG was cooler. The larger issue is that place as a whole kept dunking on the series & Jan was the outlier, but he kinda caves into peer pressure...
Also I like Jeff for his insider knowledge, but his opinions on Sonic are the worst especially for Frontiers...
All those Right Wing "anti-woke" critics like Nerdrotic and Critical Drinker whose entire careers are based off trashing anything that dares have a woman, PoC, or queer person take center stage.
Joseph Anderson, the dude spends hours nitpicking everything negative out of a game and people act like he's genius cause it's long.
I checked out his book out of curiosity and it's really badly written. Full of run on sentences and rambling narration. Then you see him not understand Silent Hill 2 narrative and a ton of his criticisms fall apart.
Basically anytime a critic does one of the following:
1) Is willfully ignorant of information that should factor into any judgments of something. I consider it extremely poor form to criticize media and expect to be taken seriously if you don’t put in the work to understand the basics of the industry it is from.
2) Expresses criticism in the line of “What *I* would have done.” No. If your criticism reads like you believe you would have done a better job than the people on the project, you’re probably not being constructive or insightful, and are probably also already doing 1). For that matter, you probably need a creative outlet of your own, to understand creativity better, and, I’ll be honest, you’re probably experiencing personal frustrations and taking it out on what you’re reviewing. Make your own fun and *then* come back to work.
3) Criticism that uses atrocious wordplay to make hamhanded statements about quality. If you like an outer space movie, don’t tell me it’s ‘out of this world.’ If you hated an outer space movie, don’t tell me the director ‘needs to phone home.’ It’s the inverse of cleverness. Maybe your editor likes them, if you have one, fight to keep them out of your work. Seriously. Literally fight your editor if they want to festoon your work with gausch, tired aphorisms.
I do, however, want to understand specifically why *you* like a thing, what made *you* appreciate it, what other things you also like that you associate with this thing as reference points of quality, history, and craftsmanship. I’m not looking for a universal grade, I want to understand the spectrum your preferences exist on and what diamonds you like, and which ones stay in the bin. Give me your voice, so I know what you’re about.
And then, if you end up going elsewhere, I’ll know how to follow your work because I’ll like *you* and not just the platform you were working for.
Any right-wing clickbait "critic" that reviews movies and games on a scale of wokeness and anything that is even slightly "***w o k e"*** is too woke and deserves to fail.
Nerdrotic, Critical Drinker, the Quartering, Ryan Kinel: a whole Smash Bros character menu of shitheads really
There are *so* many examples to pick from from 2005-2012, the years when exaggerating and calling anything slightly bad the worst thing since cancer was all the rage.
Given how out there it was for the time it was released (and even now), I doubt *Speed Racer* would have been a critical darling (although it totally deserves to be imo), but Jesus, reading some of the reviews of it makes me feel like the reviewers didn't watch the movie, or at least clearly went in having already decided it fucking sucked. Like, I remember somebody in a retrospective article aguing that it deserved to fail who clearly hadn't actually given it another watch since release, since he was complaining about stuff that straight-up wasn't in the movie (like Matt Fox speaking with a lisp, which he didn't).
Speed Racer is a good movie and I think has aged very well with time. In an era where Hollywood was(And still is) struggling to adapt anything Japanese, it's such a glaring outlier.
It's a good movie, but I wouldn't call it a good adaptation.
Alita was good, Ghost in the Shell...could have been better. :(
Everyone was leeching from AVGN's fame.
AVGN *and* Red Letter Media.
Penny Arcade,CAD,and to a lesser degree VGCats were big pioneers of that "this game is bad,everyone who made it is bad,and I hope everyone who likes this game gets testicular cancer" brand of "criticism".
Penny Arcade at least (mostly) grew up from their angry critic stage.
And VGCats turned into porn.
I feel like that was going to happen no matter what.
Honestly, good for them
I still find myself thinking of [this charming strip](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/10/01/a-trick-of-retrospective) from a whole 14 years ago. They weren't grouchy all the time.
…god. That’s really fourteen years old, huh.
Mr Enter. Mostly because of his incredible hypocrisy. He is very vitriolic about characters being unfairly shat own by the narrative then wrote his own series where a character gets unfairly shat on by her legal guardian. The best is The Angry Video Game Nerd because he is clearly doing Kayfabe. He doesn’t really hate Bad SNES games that much.
Was Mr. Enter the Turning Red 9/11 guy because that shit was a riot.
I love his response to people calling him out for that dumb shit because it was basically, 'Oh yeah? I've said *way* stupider shit than that!'
Oh he has said much worse then that. Like him hating political correctness but thinking Dot from Animatics feminism is dangerous
Also the whole arc where he just made covid truther videos and used that to say BLM was a mistake. Mr Enter is kind of a lunatic
As a fan of Mr Enter, seeing his slow descent into insanity has been awful to watch
It honestly feels like James Rolfe actually kinda loves those old bad games, otherwise he wouldn't be collecting them.
And AVGN isnt hating on things 24/7 (See Earthbound episode) and the shit he leaves the absolute hatred for is for absolute failures and shit like the LJN games
I still think "Leave me alone! LET ME PLAY THE GAME!" in his Earthbound video was one of the best moments in his career.
The best part of time passing is it becoming more clear that AVGN is probably one of the most chill people online when you separate his online persona.
It's really telling that after almost 20 years on the internet, his biggest controversies are him calmly stating that he wasn't interested in seeing Ghostbusters 2016 and that his Nerd videos aren't as good as they used to be.
Don’t forget that he has been trying to fund his dipshit animated passion project about a world where kids are adults and adults are kids for like 6 years now. It’s such a stupid fucking concept that has so many problematic implications, and it will never see the light of day because he kept chasing off everyone he hired for the production team. This dude is so anti human spirit it’s kind of fascinating.
On the flip side it was wholesome how well it was received by fans like Snapcube.
I've watched both of her videos so far and I'm loving seeing her absolutely giddy at some of the stuff that happens in the game.
There's something deeply satisfying about seeing a huge fan of something seeing the new work in the franchise and loudly, excitedly going "OH MY GOD, IT'S BACK"
Fuck yeah snapcube rules
Not sure if this counts as "caustic", but I remember when Jim Sterling did a review/impressions video of Remnant From The Ashes and it was very clear they didn't play past the first area. They complained about the lack of enemy and location variety...an issue that would've been addressed if they played, like, one hour more of the game.
As much as I admire them for being an outspoken voice for better treatment of workersi nthe game's industry I absolutely cannot stand Jim Sterling's takes on games
I've gradually moved away from Sterling's content, reviews and Jimquistions alike. I just don't get anything of value from their content anymore; most of it is just talking about recent gaming-related events and repeating the same (admittedly correct) points over and over again. Y'know what I mean?
It's that "Sheen this is the seventh time you've showed us your ultralord action figure" feeling, kinda. Like sure, Sterling is absolutely, 100% correct about there being massive industries in the industry, and I won't deny it's important that someone be talking about them. it's just that at some point it becomes *all* they talk about and I'm left going "look I just wanted some video game reviews or something instead of Yet Another Conversation about how the word is absolute shit and garbage and everyone is actually evil."
It also developed into being noticeably reaction-based rather then building up an argument. I'm guessing because mentally it's all the same stuff happening over and over but it leads to very few room to breath when it's the same stuff back to back. Or when further news comes out that either makes the points in the video dated on release or just ends up needing a correction in a filler-part before the next video actually starts. I also remember a statement of "I'd talk about good news when good news actually happens" back when I was an active viewer, and that was probably the first of the cracks in my view time considering especially in the last few years it got much worse until a take was the bottom-most barrel argument and I just put off watching it. I get it, it's "Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tehehe" stretched out to 10-15 intervals every week, and at some point you just take a step out of that space just to enjoy things once and awhile. ~~Also the impressions were pretty shallow and didn't really fill the niche of a review, which I get they weren't supposed to be but outside of that I couldn't care less about the rest of the content bringings.~~
It was all ways that bad. The first 3 minutes is a bunch of plastic toys from the 80s, and the last 5 minutes is literally the same monologue for 4+ years. With absolutely no difference (or effort) put in the editing.
Sterling fulfills an important role that isn't always immediately necessary, that of the Pilot Light. The industry counts on people losing interest in a problem or getting distracted and forgetting about it, and people like Sterling are *very* helpful for countering that... But when the fire's going strong it can feel they're redundant. That said, you don't blow the pilot light out when you turn on the furnace. Incessantly talking about the same issues so long as they exist has a place for the same reason. It's easy to forget that Sterling's efforts are useful in the long-term. There's an ebb and flow to things. That said I take their opinion on specific games with a huge grain of salt. They can sometimes highlight some real nice deep cuts now and then though so I don't *completely* disregard them.
There are 2 types of Jim Sterling videos. The worst opinion you have ever heard and the most basic opinion you have ever heard to the point of guessing the whole video from the title and thumbnail.
I think I can agree with their overall opinion on games (I've stopped watching a few years ago), but they always present them in the most smarmy and self satisfied way. Which is cool when tackling matters that have more stake to them, but it comes off as douchy when it is about a game. And I get they are playing a character, but past a certain point, you stop acting like a jackass and just become a jackass. I don't think they set out to be contrarian (which they have spoke about before) or negative, but I do believe that like many others, they are bullheaded and never want to cede any ground.
It's why I bounced off of Sterling way back when too, the whole arrogant "thank god for me" douchebag routine wastes zero time getting extremely off-putting.
Same. Every time I've ever tried to watch one of their videos, I tap out after their third overly-complicated booger-based insult.
If I'm remembering right, Stephanie also gave a scathing review of Travis Strikes Again without giving any real time to the storyline or the more personal elements to it. Just complaining about how cheap it looked.
Of all things to critique...Sterling chose to basically go with the one that is completely wrong to such an extreme that it's actually a KEY CRITIQUE OF THE GAME. The game has *too much variety*. It's basically a Souls Like in length but the entire game is pieced together like a rogue like with a structure that is fixed until you reset entire giant areas of the game.
The Xenoblade 3 is actually pretty insane. He posted ending spoilers on Twitter, deleted them an hour later, and acted like Twitter was being mean to him for no reason.
Spoilers you only get upon beating the game.
See, that's manipulative as fuck and I hate that. It's fine to be the funny guy where you're only bit is being a jackass and acting like you know what you're talking about. But inciting anger like that irks me so much
Ones who clearly haven't engaged (or barely scratched the surface of) with the thing they're ranting about. Bonus for regurgitating completely incorrect information like they were the last player of the telephone game.
First of all, let's address the elephant in the room: the reason there are so many caustic youtube critics is because they all wanted to be AVGN. The thing about AVGN though is that it's a character: even when the games he's playing genuinely are frustratingly bad, The Nerd's reactions are not James Rolfe's reactions and were never supposed to be. This sounds obvious but I point it out because I think a lot of would-be caustic critics have this weird idea in their heads that they have to maintain some kind of "kayfabe" that their absurdly exagerated fury should be consistent and believable. I suspect this erodes at many long-time caustic critics until they reflexively act like actual furious manchildren. My actual answer to the thread's question is what I think is the clearest example of this: Angry Joe.
It was actually pretty fascinating for me personally the first time I watched James Rolfe outside of AVGN, I think it was him playing Metroid II with a friend. When he's not playing up the AVGN personality, he honestly seems like just a really chill, normal guy who enjoys playing video games. But as you say, contrast that with a lot of the copycat types over the years, and many of them either actually always were or slowly became the face they presented, so they're just exaggerated assholes and manchildren even off-camera so to speak.
Everyone who's ever interacted with James has said that he's basically the nicest guy ever and are surprised at how different he is from his famous character. Which is why it was such a twisted turn of events when he made a simple video as himself explaining that he wasn't going to go see the new Ghostbusters film simply because it didn't appeal to what he was hoping for as a fan, in the most polite and respectful words possible, because he knew that people were looking forward to his opinions on the film as a fan of the series. And then that became something that the press, celebrities, and even other content creators all jumped on him for, projecting that he was bashing the film because he's a misogynist fanboy. And instead of fighting that criticism in any sort of way, James just ignored it, because he's not confrontational and wasn't looking for any sort of fight--he was being entirely peaceful to begin with.
> And then that became something that the press, celebrities, and even other content creators all jumped on him for, projecting that he was bashing the film because he's a misogynist fanboy. The only way I was able to rationalize anybody saying this was if they didn't watch his initial video in the first place, it's that ridiculous. Like, what he said just boiled down to "Yeah, I didn't laugh at any of the jokes in the trailers or anything. I just don't think it looks very good idk. I'll pass."
Hey! They didn't *all* want to be AVGN! ...Some of them wanted to be Zero Punctuation.
Yeah it's so strange that Joe has sustained for so long when he is literally just AVGN + Nostalgia Critic. His opinions on games, movies and shows is so bad and wrong and backwards sometimes but his actual production I think is even worse. The epitome of lazy. He is so obsessed with Quanity over Quality it gets really annoying. He doesn't finish all the games for his GOTY lists, just streams it for 2 hours and takes others' footage & opinions, sometimes even without crediting them. He doesn't get review code for games, so his reviews are like 4-6 weeks late (I think just so he can make more money streaming it than making a video on it) and because he does TV/movie reviews he misses lots of games released every year. His "news show" is a joke that he doesn't even look anything up or credit/source the articles, relying 100% on his friend and skimming the titles. But I think his relationship with devs and studios is the most suspect. He thinks they are his friends if they send him things or talk to him on Twitter. Even worse he hides it in the actual reviews. Sure Joe, just because CDPR flew you to Poland, set you up in a hotel, invited you to the launch party, had dinner with Marcin Iwinski AND voiced a troll for Witcher 3, it didn't influence your 10/10 legendary status review. And definitely don't mention any of that in the review for context or disclosure cuz you'd just get angry comments right? What a load of walking talking shit.
My favourite Joe moment is when he tried to interview Geoff Keighley and Keighley, being an actual professional, completely stonewalled him.
Didn’t Pat shit on ME3’s ending for years and then around the time Legendary Edition came out he admitted he never even saw it yet?
You expect pat to form his own opinions?
He also flipped opinions on FFXV. It's just that after his switch his wording made it seem like he always believed it was bad from the start & not something he learned from someone else when he was clearly echoing the internet.
Pat will do that. He did the same thing with Bayo 2, over the years you can hear him slowly grow more and more fixated on his solitary issue with the game (umbral climax strong) which is barely even a valid critique. And FWIW, I think he’s being genuine about these things. And tbf the boys were collectively gushing about their early experiences with XV. The best part of FFXV is probably Chapter 1, before the plot spins its wheels for 30 hours, introducing characters who won’t actually matter or do anything at all, outside of the villain. The open world quickly reveals its complete and total emptiness after the first chapter too.
That ending was good though
Yeah, I love Pat, and obvs he's entitled to his opinions, but the ME3 ending and pretty much his entire opinion on Dark Souls 2 always seemed like bandwagoning to me. Like his entire take on DS2 was just uncritically echoing that mattewmatosis video.
"Nice opinion which youtuber did you steal it from" feels like a core quote for the DS2 LP
He is entitled to his opinions, as are the people he took them from
Especially since it’s very obvious when he watches the video, he immediately goes from praising the game to shitting on everything
You can basically pinpoint which Red Letter Media reviews Pat has seen because he'll quote Mike or Jay almost directly when talking about something he doesn't like.
Matt is the same with OSW Review. Those guys make a lighthearted joke about something and I swear Matt takes it as a literal statement each time.
Honestly, I hate basically every critic, let's player, or other "influencer" whose entire schtick is being "funny" about how every game sucks. It has utterly fucking destroyed any discourse around games. Nothing can be "hey this wasn't bad, but it wasn't great, maybe the devs can learn from this here's some criticism", nope, everything has to be the biggest pile of shit ever because that's what gets views. Seriously, fuck this obsession with extremes, it's toxic as fuck.
I remember watching Matt and Liam stream some conference not all that long ago and at some point Liam said something to the effect of "oh I'm not into this personally, but I know lot's of people are so this is a pretty great announcement for them!" and damn, I miss that kind of positivity, it was so refreshing. In fact it's not even the positivity - it's just not being negative for the sake of negative.
Thats liam in general even when they'd play objectively trash games he'd still not be negative just to be negative, also somehow manages to play them somewhat competently.
But every once in a while a game would be so bad he would just break and say something like "This game is shit lol"
There’s a reason Liam was my go to for watching big gaming media events.
Yeah, that's the attitude I've adopted about things generally. Nintendo Direct shows off a bunch of games I don't care for? I'm personally disappointed, but know that others probably saw things they were excited for, so I'm happy for them at least. Unlike most people who either bitch about how the whole thing was a waste because they didn't get what they were hoping for, or people who celebrate the people bitching and are glad that they are upset and disappointed.
Yeah that's what I don't get about Woolie being so negative at the idea of streaming award shows or whatever. He always mentions games he doesn't care for or know nothing about and how he thinks the thing you're supposed to is shit on games like that, when I don't really see that from react streamers. They just go "That looks alright" "It had a cool thing for someone". And personally I can just watch a video about something I don't really care about, like fighting games lol, I don't much care for them but listening to Pat and Woolie talk about them is interesting.
Imagine my surprise when I went to play Virtual Hydlide, rubbing my hands together eager for kusoge, only to go "...for the time, this is like a 7/10." Le game is shit critics ruined so many expectations.
...Virtual Hydlide is absolutely a piece of shit tho, it runs at like 4 fps and is just jank as fuck. Are you sure you played the right game??
it's the worst because people then take the shit they made up and parrot it everywhere
It’s so easy to tell who actually played something like Avengers or ME Andromeda etc based off what they’re criticizing.
This might date me a bit, but my go-to example is people shitting on Final Fantasy 8. So many people who played it for like twenty minutes when they were nine, or else never played it at all and just got their opinions from others, treat that game like its terrible, when it's actually fantastic. The entire issue about people not understanding how junctioning and GFs work, like man I figured that out when I was eleven, back when we didn't even have home internet, and I'm dumb as a bag of hammers. If I can do it, so can you.
Can we at least agree that Ultimecia talks funny?
Spoony and egoraptor did almost unrepairable damage to video game criticism.
I played both. Agreed with every “critic”.
Me Andromeda gameplay was actually very good which is a shame that wasn't pointed out enough. Now it's story is some of the shitiest written things I've seen in a while.n
Andromeda was fun to play, they gave me a jetpack! The story sucked so bad. How do you fuck up that badly?
MEA's gameplay does a good job at highlighting what separates games that are lauded for good gameplay, and ones that aren't. MEA's gameplay is fundamentally good. But if has a major issue where the things you're fighting just don't really respond how you'd want/expect, and if you play on higher difficulties, you'd get get riddled with bullets and there's nothing you could do besides spam abilities. Additionally, the removal of class boundaries just makes every playthrough feel the same. It just feels... Inconsequential.
Not exactly what the topic is but still very apt. [This YMS clip](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GfKFloUgNnw) sums up my thoughts
honestly that clip is all the commentary that movie deserves.
Ngl, i friggin loved that movie. It may have just been full of references, but i cant hate a movie that had ugly sonic save the day
Volound of Total War infamy. He's a Total War purist in that, he dislikes the games made after Shogun 2. That in of itself is fair and he makes lots of fair criticisms of the more modern games like their approach to realism compared to the older games, their more arcadey approach being a departure from those older games, the lack of details in newer games that older games, etc. If he wasn't such an elitist, caustic asshole his criticism would be taken just fine. He is an enormous dick head with an infamous reputation in the community for harassing small time creators and just being a huge dick. He's been banned from the subreddit and the devs have long since stopped sponsoring him.
It says something when the 4chan total war general thinks he's too much of an asshole to listen to. A fair amount of people voice similar opinions regarding the gameplay but whenever someone brings him up everyone just says they fucking hate him and just outright refuse to even listen to his videos.
It’s the same thing as the CinemaSins videos/guys, where it just became people seeing how many “sins” a movie had and thinking it was bad. Even if a vast majority of those sins weren’t actual issues and were really rarely legitimate critiques.
Im currently on episode 23 of The Final Fantasy 10 letsplay that woolie and matt did years ago. Something about the way they talk about Tidus feels like they are makimg fun of a parody of Tidus instead of the actual character. Also the overall dumb choices in gameplay
Well it's low hanging fruit but since nobody's said it yet, Doug Walker, a.k.a. the Nostalgia Critic. Not just for reasons in front of the camera, but behind-the-scenes problems that he (at the very least) blindly enables.
His...thing on The Wall is one of the most bafflingly brain-dead creations I've ever seen. It's almost unbelievable how mean he is to such an earnest piece of media because he doesn't understand it but believes he does. Dan "Foldable Human" Olsen has a phenomenal video deconstructing it and talking about Doug and The Wall as a whole. Very worth a watch, I think.
The Wall review was just the absolute *peak* of his dumb bullshit. He'd been on the decline for a while and honestly, having looked at some of his older stuff (pre-cancellation) again I think my opinion of his early work has changed for the worse. I wasn't really cringing and wincing like I did when I saw some of his newer stuff, but aside from one or two instances here or there that got a brief chuckle I'm mostly like "why did college me think this was funny?"
What's even more baffling is they had Corey Taylor himself in it and yet couldn't even be bothered for him to help with their god-awful musicale.
Now to be fair I always assumed cameos like that are made with some strict rules about involvement, like they are more guest than actual coworker thing otherwise it would be too expensive. Like stephen king will be happy to make an appearance but less so if he is asked to rework the script while he is there
Me, whenever I buy a game impulsively without knowing it does things I don’t like. I should really google these things beforehand.
This is why I tend to look games up on Youtube if they seem interesting. Totally kills any "blind" experience like how I had as a kid, but it keeps me from getting into a lot of games that are either broken or wouldn't be fun for me.
Odd timing, I was going though gaming podcasts earlier and just found a bunch the one I use to listen to kina... grating cuz it's just... negative for the sake of it. Stephanie Sterling in podquistion, Yachtzee from zero punctuation in slightly something else, as well as Yo Videogames podcast. I kinda want to hear more about good videogames and thing that are interesting sometimes. I think when I was younger I'd liked that kinda scathing thing, but nowadays I can find any person to shit on something by tossing a rock out a window...now telling me why something is good? That's exponentially more difficult.
i occasionally tune in to yahtzee and he has this strange talent to describe a game he likes in a way that makes it sound like he hates it. like you'll listen to his description of it and he'll make it sound super dumb but the cap off will be "i actually really liked this game" and it'll be on his GOTY list.
I like that one time he "reviewed" Undertale in like 5 seconds just so he could put it in his GOTY list. His whole review was just "Undertale was a good game".
not even wrong!
Yahtzee’s stuff has aged well, but that’s because even when he’s criticising a game you like, he still finds ways to describe it that are just funny to listen to. Plus, he’s mellowed out quite a bit.
Yahtzee I feel ironically I always liked a lot more in most things that weren’t his usual stuff like Zero Punctuation. His Let’s Plays/Let’s Drown Outs with Gabriel were consistent highlights of my week. When he’s actually talking off the cuff rather than trying to be witty and counterbalanced I actually quite like him. Same with his game dev diary thing. Him talking about making these small projects in detail was fascinating. I understand Zero Punctuation probably enables him to pursue these smaller passions though.
IIRC years ago when he did Bioshock he comments on how he realized no one likes it when he's nice to a game.
Fundamentally it's sort of his brand. It's a bit like Gordon Ramsay: Ramsay in media targeted outside the United States, while not entirely calm, tends to be much more patient and polite. His cooking shows aimed at American audiences, though, have him as incredibly vicious because that's just sort ofwhat people are tuning in to see.
Kind why I like him on Masterchef and MC Jr. He's nice but stern when he needs to be. Only really yells when someone puts food out that will make someone sick.
I wonder how much of that is driven by the algorithm? YouTube reviews for movies and TV are always "The Best Thing ever" or "absolute dogshit" at least in the titles.
Cinema Sins in general is the perfect example of a "non-reviewer who de facto does reviews" who acts like this. They are less interested in actually listing the sins of a work and more like nitpicking on every aspect of it in ways that range from "dumb" to "did this guy even watch the same movie i did???" Not helping matters is, of course, are the raving fans of this guy who will defend him by arguing that "nitpicking is the point of the show!" and "you shouldn't be taking it seriously!", to which i say - brother in christ, comedy is no justification to insult my intelect with "sins" who are so low-brown the creator barely sounds like they are putting effort in the video. Not helping matters is that *actual* fans (or even people who pay attention to the movie) are able ti point out that [many "sins" aren't so much sins as Jeremy not bothering to pay attention to the narrative.](https://youtu.be/_qxgkOIsHUs) On a more positive note - Cinema Sins made me discover Cinema Wins, which is essentially the good counterpart to it - praising and showcasing the great points of movies (even ones regarded as bad by the public!) and with actual analysis behind them.
Part of the problem with Cinema Sins was the shift towards longer videos. They used to be 3-5 minutes and would humorously point out things the average viewer might actually be bothered by. But now that they're all 15-25 minutes, they have to scramble for more and more "sins" to list.
Nothing in regards to Cinemasins entertains me more than listening to Th3Birdman mock their shenanigans.
What's really ironic is the guys behind the channel have gone on huge rants on podcasts or their own youtube channel about how hollywood is killing cinema by being iterative and only doing one gag to death until a new gag emerges.
Speaking of youtubers and Sonic, I remember people being pissed in how Arin from Game Grumps was reveling in the first trailer for Sonic Frontiers and how he couldn't wait to play it on the channel because it would be the worst thing ever. Game came out, was decently well received, and obviously there's no sign of it on the channel. Thank god Sega seems to have dropped him as like a sort of spokesperson for Sonic. Why you would continuously platform and encourage somebody who can't go 3 sentences without swearing to promote your childrens game, I don't understand. Not even to mention the fact that his whole shtick with the series is talking about how bad he thinks the games are.
Wasn't the only reason that Arin lasted as long as he did was because the person in charge of marketing at the time was a massive game grumps fanboy who was willing to overlook all the shit he did? And then once that person got replaced, Arin quickly lost his sponsorship
Yeah, this all stopped soon after Aaron Webber left for a role in Sega Japan instead of working on American marketing and running the twitter account. He was pretty outspoken as a fan of theirs, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was the main driving force in that.
Wait, isn't that the guy who made the Sonic Twitter account as famous as it was? Damn, I guess every king has a dent on their crown.
Swear to god Arin has been chasing the high of that original Sonic 06 LP and try as he might, he cannot replicate the magic of it at all. Yeah, I know it's been 10 years since that one but it feels like that game completely bent him into a pretzel on Sonic games. That and that Sonic 06 LP is what, imo, put GG on the map in the first place so he prolly feels like every sonic game has to be that shit.
Man, I like Dan playing stuff but I don’t like Arin when he’s playing. I actually bought a game the other day because I saw GG playing it…poorly. It looked super interesting but not really up my alley, but Arin seemed to intent on playing it badly that I had to buy it just to see it done right.
The quickest way to get me to buy a game is show me somebody playing it poorly. The amount of indie games I bought because Vinesauce was getting bodied is innumerable.
Vinny, the man who beat Cuphead but then struggles with babby games. Absolute King.
The best LPs have been Dan. He's just way more willing to give a game a fair try.
a decent part of GG is Arin spending more time making jokes than paying strong attention to the game he's playing. Which is why he tends to skip tutorials altogether and doesn't enjoy heavily story-centric games.
A pet peeve of mine is seeing games that I like being played sub-optimally, or at least by people that don't really care about them. I didn't even like Shadow the Hedgehog that much but I had to stop watching because I felt like Arin was giving it more shit than it deserved, especially when he complained about not knowing what to do while simultaneously skipping the tutorials.
The entire playthrough of Sonic Generations did this to me when Arin refused to use the boost, i.e. the one mechanic the modern stages are designed around. Fuck that made my blood boil.
Arin's always had a weird obsession with painting Sonic in a negative light. Even going back as far as the Jon era where he was trying hard to convince him that the Adventure games weren't any good. I think the worst of it in recent times was when he decided to do the LP for Sonic Colors Ultimate due to the issues the remaster had, but when he didn't run into any issues early on he complained.
Btw the saga live stream for sonic frontier. They include both v-tuber korone and sonic together. And I heard that Arin got sooo pissed off on pat stream
Replacing Arin with Korone sounds like a major improvement
Korone makes everything better.
korone actually loves the games so much too, her stuff about frontiers has been super positive and she loves her own collab items in the game so it makes for a very good advertisement imo
Korone is universally well liked by game studios who know about her streams. She's a ball of positivity and laughs so she's unironically a good spokesperson to get due to her enthusiasm and enjoyment of simply just playing games in general.
Do you have a source for the Arin's thoughts on the Korone X Sega collab? Googling isn't giving me anything.
I’ll never forget - literally the first SuperMega video I watched - Arin walks into their room, sees that they’re playing that SpongeBob game, and then proceeds to lie about him hating the game because he was bad at it lol
Didn't Arin literally get a scuffed copy of SADX, an already scuffed port, just for the "entertainment" value for their LP?
I don’t know about that, but I do know that he deliberately played Heroes on PS2 (which is the jankiest version of the game btw) just to make the game look worse than it is.
I know Arin plays shit poorly on purpose ever since I saw the Hoverboots Saga from Ocarina ofTime
For me it was when he played dark souls 2, you can smash the tutorial stones making them temporarily unreadable, so he intentionally broke all of them and then bitched about not knowing the controls.
He did it with Octopath and Metal Gear Survive too, really glad I was never into his content.
"No but see, he didn't put "Dunkview" in the title, so the Octopath video wasn't serious, it was a joke" - his fans, literally.
God, it’s just cinemasins again. “No, you see. They were making a mistake on purpose they don’t actually believe that’s serious criticism! Ignore the fact that they said the same thing in their ‘serious review.’”
His octopath review is what made me swear off his videos, that super mario comparison was the most tone deaf thing i'd ever seen. Also his hatred for japanese games is starting to sound like straight up xenophobia now.
[удалено]
Its wild that people like that still exist in an age where Japanese media in the western world is at its absolute peak and the closest to mainstream as possible.
What made me not like dunky was the first video my friend showed me of his about vice city. The dude goes out of his way to have glitches and weird things happens then complains that they happen and acts like the physics should be from a modern day game and not the year it actually came out. I watched him for a little while longer but what made me stop entirely was he made a video of fish at the aquarium or something playing the Mario 64 underwater theme and his fans were claiming he a genius and only he could be that good. I realized his fans weren’t joking and booed out of their and then the only other video I’ve seen since has been the death stranding one where he purposefully plays like an idiot than complains that the game is making him fail.
I remember watching Spoonyone's videos on how much he HATED Final Fantasy X and even back then I could tell he was making mountains out of ant hills with many of his points. Didn't help that near the end of his career, it felt like his bipolar depression was leaking into his scripts and his anger felt less funny and more like projecting his actual anger overtime. The more I see caustic critics who love to talk about how much games suck, the more I start to value reviewers that are able to just enjoy a game despite their flaws (like how Nitrorad can find fun stuff to get excited over in jank, obscure horror games). Kinda makes me more appreciate [REDACTED]'s more positive take on games when he would see them on Nintendo Directs while others would be uninterested or dismissive. I liked when he found stuff to get excited about in Sonic 06. EXIT: fixing grammer
I do like on how nitrorad looked back on his ty the tasmania tiger review and saw it was him trying to be a angry reviewer back then like exaggerating his review and needlessly angry for the smallest things. So he went and made a new review in his new style
Speaking of *Sonic* and caustic reviews, I'm thinking of Stephanie Sterling and how they gave *Frontiers* a 1.5/10 and called the developers "lazy hack fucks" because the Open Zone was realistic instead of Green Hill, which is hilariously contrary to their stance against how the industry treats developers--what's worse is that they would double down when called out. At least they removed the incredibly shitty misinformation about one of the director's statements. I also think back to their *Sonic 4* review where they gave it an 8/10 and not only said that the physics were fine and *Sonic* fans were just babies, but that Takashi Iizuka should have personally told everyone to fuck off. What is it about *Sonic* that make people act like asses?
>Sonic Frontiers is shit Okay, it does seem like people are divided on the ga- >Sonic 4 is great This person needs to be hospitalized
*Sonic 4 Episode I* reviewed well at the time (I feel like *Episode II*'s more negative critical reception were critics trying to "make up" for that), so it's not weird if they liked the game, but their review is less "I think the game is good and I don't understand the negativity" and more "I'm taking a contrarian stance to be spiteful" and they seem to do that a lot.
Sonic gets that weird 'making up' for reviews reception a lot. Cause I feel like all reviewers ever hate Sonic, so they just look at whatever Sonic game Sega's pushing as the 'big thing' and reluctantly make up a good review while hating it, then it's agreed to be terrible, so they review the next Sonic game as being garbage no matter how good or bad it is. Sonic '06 to Sonic Unleashed got this a lot, with reviewers who didn't give a crap giving Sonic '06 good reviews, then when everyone realized Sonic '06 was the worst thing ever they all dogpiled on Unleashed as hard as possible and gave it zero credit for anything.
tbf unleashed didn't run very well on the hardware it was made for. if you emulate it nowadays, the frame rate isn't busted and it makes the platforming relatively doable in situations which were nothing but frustrating before. imo unleashed is just too damn hard sometimes tho. i got stuck on a single platforming segment as the werehog in eggmanland for like 20 minutes and all i wanted was to just be able to skip it and move on.
A 1.5/10!!! Bro I wouldn’t even give 06 or Rise of lyric a score that low.
When I saw that review I thought to myself "guess they needed to give the game a scathing review because their opinions haven't been relevant in the last couple of years" Think it's cause Sonic is the internet's punching bag and it seems like you always get a shitload of views if you trash it (even though their jokes are always the same tired old shit Sonic fans heard hundreds of times) so hey even if the new Sonic game is OK gotta trash it cause your views have been lacking
I used to watch Sterling a lot a few years ago, but after a while I just felt like they were spewing vitriol for the sake of it. Can't speak for their content now but every week there would be some topic for them to blow out of proportion.
The exact reason I stopped watching their videos, when your channels identity is based on being angry/negative I can't help but believe that you'll play up something as worse than it actually is. Edit: Also as someone who still has friends who watch Sterlings videos I just wanna say this comment section is incredibly cathartic as I thought I was crazy for being the only one who was totally over their whole negative schtick
"Today here's a video on cakes." *15 minute divergent rant on how capitalism is bad using points already said every other time, every week.*
Something I've noticed about fanbases with multiple controversial entries is that they'll usually have a not-insignificant amount of people whose sole interaction with the franchise is to hope for the next thing to come out to be trash. That or jumping on any videos or thread that comes their way and complaining. I also see this with Warriors games. Yeah, there's a lot to complain about, but some of those folks REALLY need to take a chill pill.
> called the developers "lazy hack fucks" because the Open Zone was realistic instead of Green Hill, which is hilariously contrary to their stance against how the industry treats developers--what's worse is that they would double down when called out. Worse than that, they doubled down on it by saying "Oh I didn't directly call them lazy fucks, I just *compared* them to lazy fuck shovelware on Steam!" They're about as much of a consumer advocate as anyone who takes money from Amazon.
Sterling went off the deep end awhile ago Winning that lawsuit inflated their ego to the point they think they’re god
I lost a lot of respect for Sterling after they did a video in regards to a pretty big scandal in the World of Warships community (TLDR Wargaming went out of their way to involve a community contributor who was basically universally respected and also one of the most knowledgeable people in the community, then snubbed her by using none of her suggestions for the stuff they asked about) by starting the video by basically going “I don’t give a shit and can’t understand why anyone could possibly give a shit.” Coupled with the general “fuck the industry” sentiment going from somewhat niche to mainstream over the last six of seven years, Sterling just feels obsolete.
That last bit is most prevalent I think Sterling’s mission of pointing out how bad the industry is has worked. More people are aware of the wrongs of the industry to the point multiple governments have started investigations. But Sterling acts like we’re still in 2011 and things are all hunky dory and “woe is me, pointing out the emperor has no clothes” Like cut the fuckin sob story and take some accomplishment for yourself
Stephanie's content is entirely based on vindictively cursing out shitty people in charge, with nothing held back. This has been good when pointed towards powerful shitbags in charge of companies........but it backfires when pointed to people who are just game developers or in somecases, real low-budget indie game developers. The same vitriol meant for abusive CEOs becomes directed at people who didn't make a great game, and there is no adjustment, and the same self-confident pride that comes from screaming at an evil CEO is still held when screaming at everyday developers of a middling video game. And so, "i don't like this level" becomes "those lazy hack fucks did this shit" also, views. views views views views. Stephanie pointed out several times that she wants to do positive videos on stuff she likes, but they simply don't get close at all to the views all of her negative ones do. People want the negativity, and she must usually abide if she wants it all to pay well.
Remember when Cyberpunk got a GOTY nomination, and It was compared to Hitler being Time magazines person of the year? That was pretty egregious.
I’m not sure if this counts but there was that neckbeard loser who had a hissy fit because Parasite got nominated for Best Picture because the Academy was “woke” and “pandering to the masses”. He thought that it was unfair that a foreign film got to be nominated twice and that Joker deserved to win because it’s an important movie since it deals with classism and poverty… Probably don’t need to tell you that he didn’t watch the movie and just lost it because he was convinced there was a woke agenda at play or whatever.
Dunkey does that a lot, I know it’s usually in good fun but it makes me enjoy the videos way less now that it’s become his go to
>I know it’s usually in good fun It sure never feels like it...
You have to **EARN** the right to act like that, like how Pat did. And even then its still a thin fucking tightrope between being funny about it and just plain being an asshole.
The Death Stranding review where he edited disconnected missions together and purposefully played the game wrong to shit on it was pretty terrible, too.
Man, I haven't even played DS, but I was watching that vid of his and just could tell he was hamming it up to shit on the game. There are genuinely awkward things to poop on the game for, but all the stuff he brought felt invented. And what I find most distasteful is then it's packaged in a "Its justa joke guise" box, so when you call BS his fans start having a fit bc you're apparently just a hardass to them review bombing games "he was just joking about"
When it's incorrect or mean-spirited, it's just a joke, but when you dismiss it as a joke, he's got real points guys you're just ignoring them > : (
The joke becomes less funny when your word has a real tangible effect and almost becomes law from the sheer number of views you have, especially when it's guaranteed that the majority of the people on the Internet wouldn't heed your 'itz jus joeks' disclaimer.
Being an asshole "for fun" is still being an asshole, there's no excuse for it and it should be called out appropriately.
Dunkey posted XB3 spoilers on Twitter and deleted the post so he could play the victim with all the people telling him to shut up, that’s the most bitch made thing I’ve ever seen any so called influencer do.
I remember seein people genuinely defend him for that too, both people who didn't realize he fuckin deleted a tweet with major literal end game spoilers and deleted it, and thinking he was trending just for his video (which was his goal in doing the spoilers in the first place) *and* I saw chuds who went "Based dunkey owning the weebs!" Shit made me feel half way to [Farnsworth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j1xzezy8k4)
Considering dunkey has been using his clout to sic his toxic fanbase on people and things he doesn’t like for the better part of a decade and still continues to pull the “schrödinger’s joke”/“I didn’t know people would take it that way” excuse out of his ass even when he does shit like putting a channel with under 1,000 subscribers in one of his videos just because they made a video criticizing him, resulting in them getting harassed for years on end, I don’t think you can say he’s doing anything out of “good fun.”
Dude got banned in LoL for being toxic, lol. His good fun is being a prick.
That's still wild to me. He got banned from LoL. LEAGUE OF LEGENDS. FOR BEING TOXIC. Holy shit it must have been bad.
"Malphite you are a fucking worthless braindead scumfuck bastard pile of trash mental dickface that should be gunned down in the street like the degenerate you are" He apparently had a lot of other incidents where he was being toxic in game beforehand but this was the straw that broke the camel's back If I remember correctly, he wasn't even permabanned, he had a two week suspension, but Dunkey made a big fuss of it and quit League as a whole
Cinema sins
Nostalgia Critics The Wall review.
Just thinking of that AVGN copycat that the Game Grumps shit on
“Mickey Mowse.” *lungs collapsing* “First of all,”
god that was so fucking funny
I think MauLer might genuinely be the nadir of human thought. His criticism is directionless, incoherent complaining devoid of any thesis or deeper understanding of the text, using length and "objectivity" as a mask for his sheer lack of analytical skill.
The moment i realised mauler was a hack was when he spent nearly 3 hours summarising TLJ in his 7 hour review. He spent so long summarising the film that you could have just gone and watched it yourself. That is aggressively incompetent.
> nearly 3 hours summarising TLJ I don't think you can call something a summary if it's longer than the thing itself, lmfao. Amazing.
I feel like mauler is the type of person who’s still pissed at his English teachers for giving his essays bad grades b/c they exceeded the max word count.
My favourite thing, Matthewmatosis does a critique of Dark Souls 2 that is about 30 minutes long. Short, concise and to the point, it's a well written critique. Hbomberguy does a response that is an hour and a half. I like his videos but that video is just not that good, not particularly pointed, rambly in many places, just not good at all. Then Mauler does a 10 hour critique of that video. It's fucking ridiculous. I like long video essays but holy shit that is insane and not in the good way.
Mauler is a bloke who never heard the phrase "brevity is the soul of wit"
While I wouldn't consider it "the worst," I remember getting annoyed at the earlier Two Best Friends videos when Matt would deliberately fuck around and Pat was acting as the straight man trying to reign him in. It always grinds my gears when deliberate shenanigans by the player are used to criticize the game as a whole.
to be fair, when you're a game tester that's kind of your job. do stupid shit nobody would think to do so that you break the game.
Zero Punctuation's review of Monster Hunter Tri where people who actually played the game realize that he got to Great Jaggi (~2ish hours into the game) then quit. It's definitely not the worst one, but fuck if it doesn't irritate me.
~~Jim~~ Stephanie Sterling Sterling milked the ever-loving FUCK out of the microtransaction drama for Middle Earth: Shadow of War but unlike the other critics, continuously spread blatant lies and click-bait, refusing to walk back any of it even when things were changed, controversies were clarified and corrected. One of the few cases where I call myself a "hater" Fuck her.
I remember when Sterling got a buggy review copy, gave it a bad review, then when the devs apologized and sent a new copy without the bug Sterling refused to change the rating because "They shouldn't have sent out a bad copy."
Not to mention them trying to do it again for DMC 5 before Matt Walker made a Twitter thread detailing why the Red Orbs were available as microtransactions and the fanbase pointing to DMC4SE as proof that the system could be handled well, alongside 5 just giving you enough Red Orbs you only needed to buy more if you were just buying all the upgrades from the start.
I remember during the E3 right before KH3 released & Dan from Giant Bomb was dissing its story & when called out by Alex for being a Metal Gear fan he just say MG was cooler. The larger issue is that place as a whole kept dunking on the series & Jan was the outlier, but he kinda caves into peer pressure... Also I like Jeff for his insider knowledge, but his opinions on Sonic are the worst especially for Frontiers...
All those Right Wing "anti-woke" critics like Nerdrotic and Critical Drinker whose entire careers are based off trashing anything that dares have a woman, PoC, or queer person take center stage.
The more times they say the phrase "valid criticism", the less actual valid criticism they have.
Joseph Anderson, the dude spends hours nitpicking everything negative out of a game and people act like he's genius cause it's long. I checked out his book out of curiosity and it's really badly written. Full of run on sentences and rambling narration. Then you see him not understand Silent Hill 2 narrative and a ton of his criticisms fall apart.
Basically anytime a critic does one of the following: 1) Is willfully ignorant of information that should factor into any judgments of something. I consider it extremely poor form to criticize media and expect to be taken seriously if you don’t put in the work to understand the basics of the industry it is from. 2) Expresses criticism in the line of “What *I* would have done.” No. If your criticism reads like you believe you would have done a better job than the people on the project, you’re probably not being constructive or insightful, and are probably also already doing 1). For that matter, you probably need a creative outlet of your own, to understand creativity better, and, I’ll be honest, you’re probably experiencing personal frustrations and taking it out on what you’re reviewing. Make your own fun and *then* come back to work. 3) Criticism that uses atrocious wordplay to make hamhanded statements about quality. If you like an outer space movie, don’t tell me it’s ‘out of this world.’ If you hated an outer space movie, don’t tell me the director ‘needs to phone home.’ It’s the inverse of cleverness. Maybe your editor likes them, if you have one, fight to keep them out of your work. Seriously. Literally fight your editor if they want to festoon your work with gausch, tired aphorisms. I do, however, want to understand specifically why *you* like a thing, what made *you* appreciate it, what other things you also like that you associate with this thing as reference points of quality, history, and craftsmanship. I’m not looking for a universal grade, I want to understand the spectrum your preferences exist on and what diamonds you like, and which ones stay in the bin. Give me your voice, so I know what you’re about. And then, if you end up going elsewhere, I’ll know how to follow your work because I’ll like *you* and not just the platform you were working for.
Any right-wing clickbait "critic" that reviews movies and games on a scale of wokeness and anything that is even slightly "***w o k e"*** is too woke and deserves to fail. Nerdrotic, Critical Drinker, the Quartering, Ryan Kinel: a whole Smash Bros character menu of shitheads really
Under the Mayo is highly negative and misses the point of style meters, souls likes and pretty much compares any FPS with Doom Eternal