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Gamer Rants #1: Greatest Shits

Posted by MCM Zevin on January 13, 2013
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , . 5 comments

So, when I was writing my Fanboy May Cry article, I forwarded the link to the video the article was built around to a friend for a laugh who responded within seconds with “That AlphaOmegaSin guy makes really bad videos.” Realizing that I could very well have stumbled upon a material goldmine, I quickly began digging through his back catalogue to see where I could take this. Sure enough one video in particular caught my eye…

Oh man, where do I start!? Most people don’t realize this because they have a life, but a lot of videogame collectors do not like having Greatest Hits/Players Choice/Platinum Hits copies of games in their collection, largely because the “black label” copies tend to be harder to obtain and therefore more valuable/desirable from a collector’s standpoint. All that is fine, buy what you want, I collect video games too, so I get it, at least this far I do. However AlphaOmegaSin takes it all a step further declaring that IT SHOULDN’T EXIST BECAUSE IT LOOKS DIFFERENT ON MY SHELF AND MY OCD DOESN’T HAVE TO TAKE THIS FUCKIN’ BULLSHIT! I’M A SERIOUS COLLECTOR DAMMIT! YOU CAN SUCK MY DICK!

I’ll get to the big reasons why pretty much everything he’s saying is total dog shit in a bit but first I need to point out that this is not an isolated occurrence, it’s a pretty common sentiment amongst my fellow collectors that because they don’t want a greatest hits copy of a game, that the line shouldn’t exist at all. Hell, AlphaOmegaSin isn’t even the only person who posted a video about it; he’s just the most competent one. Don’t believe me?

“I’m a perfectionist” he says as he uploads a video where he spends the entire 2:25 running time not looking at the camera instead of just taking the time out of his life to rerecord it. Also the comments reveals this gem!

HAHA, what a laugh riot! The biological functions of women are a mystery to me!

LOL, what a laugh riot! The biological functions of women are a mystery to me!

I love this guy’s dramatic reenactment of the meeting in which the greatest hits packaging is conceived. Apparently the console wars are just a conspiracy perpetuated by greedy men of ambiguous ethnicity. Mass Effect and Resistance were developed by the same people! In all fairness though, the rest of this guy’s videos aren’t that bad.

GREATEST HITS! THE TERROR OF ALL! BTW CHECK OUT MY SKYRIM COLLECTORS EDITION!

Why does this matter this much? Gamers are the most entitled bunch of whiny brats ever and this instance is no exception. If it is not made for them, the TRUE HARD CORE GAMERZ, then why fucking bother making it!? A common complaint being leveled at the packaging is that it “looks different” that it “sicks out like a sore thumb” or that “you can see it from a mile away.”

NO SHIT SHERLOCK!

The whole point of the packaging is to stick out and give visual cues to less dedicated gamers that the game they’re looking at is:
1.) Popular enough to have sold X number of copies
2.) Generally cheaper than the rest of the games on the shelf.

It’s an entry level line of games people; they’re not made for you. The lines exist for new and casual gamers to find good games at cheap prices without having to put a whole lot of research into it. Back when I finally went Sony, I cut my teeth on a ton of PS1 games like Xenogears and Metal Gear Solid, which were readily available thanks to the greatest hits line and will likely always be easy to get for future generations of entry level retro gamers because people like you treat them as some sort of abomination.

Furthermore, the existence of a Greatest Hits copy of the game does not somehow deny you a standard release copy of the same game. Sure, you can say it makes the standard release copies harder to find, but guess what…

WELCOME TO THE THRILLING WORLD OF A COLLECTOR’S HOBBY!

There is no reason to collect things if you only ever have to put zero effort into it. Part of the thrill of the hobby being able to have things most people won’t have. A standard release copy of whatever is still out there and just because your local Game Stop or Walmart doesn’t have them anymore doesn’t mean you can’t hit up a few pawn shops and flea markets and find them with a little patience. Sure you might have to pay a little more but if that bothers you I’ll direct you to bold, underlined text above (which I’m sure bothered you because it’s not uniform with the rest of the article) and also add that if you insist on partaking in a hobby that you can’t actually afford, you probably have bigger self-control problems going on in your life than a fucking green label on a PS1 game could ever hope to match.

Like I said earlier, it’s okay if you want the black label copies but stop acting like the industry has to bend over backwards to accommodate people like your niche when most people don’t give two shits either way about the packaging and will just buy the game either way it comes to them.

(Alternative title for this article: “Black Label Society”)

Fanboy May Cry

Posted by MCM Zevin on December 31, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments
Apparently this is SRS FUKIN BZNZ

Apparently this is SRS FUKIN BZNZ

Not too long ago the demo for DmC, the newest entry in Capcom’s Devil May Cry series, was released. DmC has been on my radar for some time as developer Ninja Theory gave us what I consider to be one of my favorite action games of the current console generation, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. However, I quickly learned that excitement for a game based on its developers impressive previous work was going to make me the laughingstock of all the Gamestops in the land. See, what matters most in game design and life is how much the protagonist of your game resembles a character design from 11 years ago. In the time since its reveal, DmC has spawned one of the most idiotic shitstorms in the history of gamerdom’s petulant whining, stemming almost entirely from a series of complaints concerning the reinvention of series protagonist Dante. Myself, I’m not partial to either character design, though I enjoyed the original games and look forward to this one, but scant few things rub me the wrong way more than a bunch of fanboys propping up their disapproval of something like it’s some kind of video game vigilante justice.

So I was originally going to just run down a list of generic complaints leveled at the game and address them one by one but I wanted to put a video in the article to illustrate how whiny this shit was, then I found this video and holy fucking shit, how could I not scrap 1,000+ words and start over?

First I want you to realize something; the men in this video are grown adults. These aren’t teenagers using some AV equipment they checked out from their high school, these guys are grown ass men doing this shit. The first three minutes and some change are occupied by a hilariously ill-conceived music video for metal song about how awful the NuDante is. It’s true “must see to believe” caliber shit if I ever saw it. I love how half the time this jackoff moves around you see a faint, green glow around him. BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE GREEN FLAME! TREMBLE IN FEAR CRAPCOM AND NINJA THEORY, YOUR CRIMES AGAINST DANTE WILL NOT GO UNPUNISHED! Seriously though, if you can’t be bothered to do your green screen right, why bother? Why not just record this in your garage or in front of you video game shelf to assert your gamer cred, God knows you’ll need to whatever cred you can get after uploading this video.

What’s even better is that you can download the song on New Grounds!

This touches me deeply, DanJohansen-sama!

Once the three minute mark rolls around the video shifts to a rant from a guy who calls himself AlphaOmegaSin. AlphaOmegaSin’s channel describes his content as “Nerd Rage at Its F*ckin Finest” which is what I call “d*mning with faint praise”, but whatever.

I may hate his video, but his collection is pretty nice...

I may hate his video, but his collection is pretty sweet…

In the first few seconds of his portion of the video he claims that there is “a lot of fucking shit” he could say that “hasn’t already been said already” a bold claim considering that this video came out before the demo so there is a significantly smaller pool of topics he could talk about. Okay, hit us!

Just kidding! He’s full of shit! Most of the video is just him calling NuDante an emo faggot. He makes some jokes about NuDante slitting his wrists because, hey, that was clever back in 2004 and that was a great year for video games, so it must be a great year for jokes too! He also complains that the creative director at Ninja Theory doesn’t like the same things as him so fuck that guy and then goes on to call Ninja Theory a “cluster fuck of faggots” who “need to be destroyed” and claims that he doesn’t “give a fuck if you have to drop a fucking bomb on them” because he’s a fucking dipshit who lacks perspective. Finally he claims Ninja Theory has only made “half-assed fucking efforts” because, you know, the reviews for Enslaved weren’t overwhelmingly positive or anything, but I guess that game didn’t have the requisite amount of skull fucking or some shit. (I imagine he or his viewers would tell me that fucking video game reviews are all written by fucking faggots and are bought and fucking paid for just because they’re so fucking edgy and fuck the fucking system man, but I would in turn ask him why Namco didn’t bother funneling money into the reviews of their other big release that year, Splatter House, which fared much worse critically.)

However, if you dig through all the homophobia, bitching about emo scene bullshit that hasn’t been relevant in at least 5 years/isn’t present in the game despite what this dumb ass wants you to think, and calling for the death of the developer via airstrike there is a single thread that runs through his entire rant. Around the six minute mark he gives the game away when he says “Quite fucking frankly, I cannot stand the fact that they’re ruining shit like this, that I’ve grown up with, that I’ve loved over the years.” There is it kids, it’s not that NuDante is bad, it’s that NuDante isn’t the old Dante that he “grew up” (debatable) with. I FUCKING HATE IT WHEN THINGS ARE NEW AND DIFFERENT!

He closes out by saying that if you like this game you’re not a TRUE FAN which is about as low a bar as you can set for games commentary. It’s a petty attempt to denigrate people’s enjoyment of something and will only matter to complete jack offs who care about the most trivial nerd culture bullshit anyway. Who gives a fuck if I’m a TRUE FAN or not? I never really considered myself a Devil May Cry fan to begin with despite me enjoying two of them. I certainly don’t see myself writing “TRUE Devil May Cry FAN” on a job application and then not getting the job when the interviewer asks me if I liked DmC, so go ahead dumb ass, take my TRUE FAN card, I don’t want it anyway. Seriously, grow up.

Listen, I’m not saying that you have to like NuDante, I’m just saying this shit doesn’t matter. If DmC has moved the series in a direction you don’t like, okay, move on. Shit likes that happens all the time. There is life after Devil May Cry guys. You don’t have to cling to it like a child. You got a few good games that you enjoyed out of it, be happy you got that much, new franchises will come along and fill the void.

The Allen and Craig Show

Posted by MCM Zevin on August 18, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

Well, I promised we’d start talking about shit outside of That Guy with the Glasses and showcasing good stuff too, so here goes. As I said before, we’re not going to stop talking about TGWTG, I mean, we’ll certainly have plenty to talk about once To Boldly Flee hits, but it’s time we expanded our horizons lest we convince someone that TGWTG is actually relevant. With that said, today’s subject is The Allen and Craig Show.

The Allen and Craig Show is a mockumentary web series of sorts chronicling the misadventures of best friends Allen Murphy and Craig Deering as Allen attempts to get famous on YouTube and Craig gets dragged along for the ride. It ran for 25 episodes from Jan 28, 2008 to Oct 1, 2010. The closest thing I could equate the series too is The Office, mostly for it’s mockumentary style complete with cuts back and forth between following the characters around in their misadventures and short, one on one talking head interviews where the characters discuss the main action of the story, but where The Office set its sights on the banality of working a 9 to 5, The Allen and Craig Show looks squarely at the strange and ephemeral nature of becoming famous on YouTube.

Craig Deering and Allen Murphy respectively.

Much of the humor of the series stems from the fact that in Allen’s many attempts to get famous, he only seems capable of copying other successful work as opposed to thinking up something truly original; the first episode follows Allen’s failed attempts at creating his own Mentos + Diet Coke video with many future episodes using a similar setup to frame their narrative. The show’s constant lampooning of Internet fame and the lengths (or lack of lengths) some people go to achieve it is part of the reason why I’ve always wanted to write about this series in the context of this site; whenever I discover some new hack content producer on the Internet, I can almost always find something they do that was made a joke of in The Allen and Craig Show.

However, the real heart of the show is the character dynamic on display between Allen and Craig, played by real life friends Allen Murphy and Craig Deering respectively. The characters play very well off one another, which is pretty impressive considering how little of the show was actually scripted. Furthermore, the characters remain consistent in their personalities across the show’s 2 ½ year run, culminating in an ending that brings about a hilarious and well executed role reversal that only serves to highlight the original character dynamic the series was built on while also making good on the show’s original mandate. It’s good fun.

One final thing before I close, I look at various sketch comedy style videos on the Internet and I realize how just how low budget this series really was. So many likeminded videos have made heavy use of After Effects style special effects, while, with the exception of two instances I can remember, almost all of The Allen and Craig Show’s effects were practical effects. Even then, the times they did use digital effects they were intentionally poor as part of a joke. This recent rewatch of the series made me really appreciate what an entertaining series these guys were able to create with such limited resources and also realize that most people shouldn’t be dabbling in digital effects. Seriously guys, that shit looks usually looks fucking awful.

A space ship from To Boldly Flee, Channel Awesome’s 4th anniversary special. It illustrates the thing which I just said. I bet you thought I’d use that shot of the fucking car exploding at the end of Suburban Knights, but we are nothing if not a timely bunch here at Man-Child Messiah!

It’s not without fault, some jokes would drag on a bit too long and one or two episodes were just too weak to be carried by the characters alone, but overall I’ve always felt that The Allen and Craig Show is one of the best series of it’s kind. If you want to watch the series, a playlist can be found here. Their YouTube Channel, Evil Iguana Productions, features other videos ranging from parodies of recent film trailers to other bits of sketch comedy and while I’m not a fan of all their work, some of it is also worth checking out as you please.

I’ve Got 99 Problems…

Posted by MCM Zevin on April 29, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , . 3 comments

Listen guys, can we please stop cluttering up my Facebook feed with links to the fucking “Hot Problems” video?

Look, I get it, this song is awful and it’s pretty hilarious. But stop acting like this is the death of music. For as eager as we all are to throw around the word troll, I’m surprised I’ve not seen it used more in reference to this video, because I called troll less than 45 seconds into the video.

They see my blonde hair, blue eyes, and class, but what they don’t know, I‘ve got a really big heart.

This is the stuff of parody and to hear these girls, “Double Take” as their calling themselves, talk about writing this song in two hours, it’s hard for me to believe they did this with anything but hopes of provoking another Rebecca Black level pop culture shit storm. When you talk about this song and call it the worst thing ever the joke is almost certainly on you. Also, part of me can’t help but feel like I’d hear this on the radio about 18 times a day if it had spent a little more time in the oven and was performed by Ke$ha. Food for thought.

Don’t worry though, if you really are hard up for the most awfulest thing since Rebecca Black, “3 Second Rule” by Lisa Gail Alldred has you covered. This is most certainly the real deal, as Alldred had the original video pulled from YouTube after the negative reactions came in. Thankfully the Internet never forgets and will reupload any stupid bullshit they notice has gone missing. Now you too can learn the secret to keeping your man in line.

Truly this is some Alldred family secret passed down from one generation to the next, now being shared to a world of women who need this sage advice, lest their men fornicate with all the women.

Everything about this is bad. Everything. There is not a fucking second of this video that is not 100% awful. It really does speak for itself and nothing I can say does it justice, if you can’t see why this is bad you probably don’t possess the mental faculties to read anything I’ve written thus far, so I’m just going to stop.

My Daughter Used to Be a Normal Teen, but then She Took a Bullet in the Laptop.

Posted by MCM Zevin on February 13, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , , . 2 comments

Bad parenting is a thing that gets a lot of press these days, which is really kind of baffling considering the man-bites-dog nature of journalism. Bad parenting is about as dog-bites-man as you can get, but I digress, for some reason we’re all fascinated with horrible parents.  I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Tiger Mom having 19 kids and counting or something to that effect. I really don’t know because I don’t care about that garbage.

This video has been making its rounds on the Internet as of late, leaving a lot of this horrible parenting nonsense in its wake. If you watched it, you’ll see that it’s just some guy sitting in a lawn chair in an open field complaining to the Internet about what a bratty child he has raised because she posted mean, disrespectful things about him on Facebook. This goes on for a few minutes and just when you’re probably wondering how the heck this boring crap has netted 22,000,000+ views he pulls out his gun and unloads it into his kid’s laptop.

So this guy has become an icon to terrible parents across the country who are convinced that their problems are all the fault of their children as opposed to the result of rigid adherence to terrible methods of parenting. I’m not so much saying anything about the father in the video, I don’t know anything about him personally. I’m talking about the people who have flocked to this video as a big epic battle cry against those damn entitled kids of theirs. Millions of terrible parents across the country rejoiced as they lived vicariously through this man and wish they too had the balls to destroy the technogizmos they blame for all their familial problems instead of just owning up to the fact that they don’t know how to engage their kids anymore and have given up trying until it’s suddenly the 1950s again. It’s neo-Luddite garbage being used to try and validate their failed parenting.

If you don’t believe me just go read the comments on the video. See how many people are encouraging the dad to go after her cell phone next. See how many are complaining that kids today have too much because all they had in their day was whirly gigs and Pick-Up Sticks. The times aren’t going to adapt to your parenting people, so you may as well adapt your parenting to times. Change isn’t always about compromising the values you feel are important, sometimes it’s about presenting those values in a way that’s functional and accessible in the modern world. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find that Facebook and iPhones are gone, so stop living like it might happen.

Okay, so let me level with you; I was raised by tough, stern parents.  They were never afraid of technology and they never blamed it when their parenting came up short, which was rare if ever. My parents have embraced technology even if they have never fully understood it to the extent that my siblings or I have. They never used it as a baby sitter; technology was a reward. As long as my grades were good, they didn’t care if I spent 12 hours a day on the weekend playing my Game Cube back in 7th grade because I had busted my ass feeding livestock to buy the damn thing and was still working to buy the games to play on it.

If your kids are entitled brats who don’t want to work for what they want and spend all day on their iPhone being belligerent, I don’t feel sorry for you, I wonder how they got the damn iPhone.

Author’s Note: I was originally going to focus on the dad and how much of an asshole he is and I was going to say “fuck” a lot and call him “Dickhead Dad”, but the comments and reaction to the video were far more compelling for me to write about. I don’t know if it necessarily jibes with the overall direction of the site nearly as much as the original idea for the article does, but I don’t think I could have written that article in good faith after seeing the stupid bullshit the video spawned. Don’t worry though, next time I’ll be writing about some idiot talking about movies. I’ll even try to get that out extra fast to boot.

Kingsly Chronicles #1: GIRLS WHO WANNA BE FLAWLESS

Posted by MCM Zevin on February 11, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , . 2 comments

So I’m not going to lie, I had no fucking idea who or what I was going to write about when I promised the first post would be up by the end of the week, but like manna from heaven we’ve got someone! Someone who I had never heard of and has over 1,000,000 YouTube subscribers no less, which could mean almost anyone on the top subscribed list these days, right?

This guy, “ItsKingsleyBitch”, or simply Kingsley as we’ll call him, is the 65th most subscribed YouTuber of all time, which back in my day would mean this guy is a subpar amalgamation of various people from the top 50. Like I said, I don’t know a lot about who is in the top 100 anymore but Jesus Christ, have you ever watched something and thought to yourself “This guy is ripping off SOMETHING” even if you’ve never seen it?

I’m going to start by letting this guy introduce himself using the bio on his channel page.

“I’m Kingsley. I’m 21 years old. I’m gay. I’m cool. IDGAF.”

I didn’t really know what “IDGAF” means because I’m an old fart of 23 and anyone who is as young as this whippersnapper can bite my balls but after seeing the consistent lack of quality across the handful of his videos I’ve watched, I can assume it means “I don’t give a fuck.”

Before we get down to today’s video, I want to point out something that I’ve noticed across his videos that he only just recently dropped as of 2012: his stupid hat.

This reminds me of a joke from one of my all-time favorite web series “The Allen and Craig Show“ that I think is rather poignant here. See, every episode of the series, Allen wears a plastic toy army helmet at all times and gets really mad if anyone bothers it. In the first episode, “Probably Going to Be Called the Allen Show“, Allen explains his reasoning to the cameraman.

“I didn’t want to have to explain why I wear this plastic army helmet… the thing is, when you watch somebody online, on YouTube, the really famous people are those ones you can recognize, and so I wear the helmet because I’m not very creative.”

You see this shit a lot these days, these Internet D-listers who would be otherwise indistinguishable from the rest of community always adopt some cheap quirk of dress that makes them memorable because no one else would fucking dress like this. Linkara has his hat and coat and so forth. It’s the fast track to being memorable when you’re deficient of anything useful or interesting to say.

But anyway, moving on to today’s video “GIRLS WHO WANNA BE FLAWLESS”

This is the same bull shit trumpeted by all the other male Vlogers on YouTube when they want to uplift the young girls of today, “You are beautiful! Natural beauty rabble rabble!” It’s not really a message that withstands any level of scrutiny though. It’s still encouraging girls to buy into the looks obsessed culture they live in, just not to try so hard at it. Kingsly isn’t telling girls that their worth is defined internally on their own terms, he’s telling them “Don’t worry about the makeup, guys will fuck you either way, so don’t hog the bathroom so damn much before you drive me to Costco.” It’s superficiality being paraded around as depth.

But moving on, let’s focus on some of the highlights here;

0:09 – 0:37: Dude wastes precious seconds of my life with shit that I don’t care about. This is shit that should probably be on his twitter or in the video description. No one cares about your damn braces or what you have or haven’t been eating, content creators who are far greater than you with far more interesting lives have taken far longer breaks and not bothered us with this sort of shit when they come back. Shut the fuck up.

2:16-2:22: Hannah Montana reference? It’s 2012 asshole, it’s not funny or clever for a grown ass man to reference Hannah Montana anymore. It was never funny to begin with.

3:01- 3:08:Ok, I know I’ve only alluded to the other shit, but I’ll go ahead and include this one as a quote, because I feel like most of you aren’t going to watch the video and this is some fucking stupid shit that you need to see to believe;

“Ok, so being a fan of basketball, video games, and a couple of other things you would never expect, I have quite a few straight guy friends…”

The fuck? It’s 2012! No one thinks like this anymore, at least not anyone who isn’t a complete troglodyte. Do you think that your average viewer believes gay people live in some little fucking colony off to themselves in San Francisco? That gay men don’t usually have straight male friends? That gay people inherently don’t like sports? Or video games? Really? There’s a whole website dedicated to gay gamers!

If I, as a straight male started off a sentence by saying “Ok, so being a fan of fashion, Lady Gaga, and a couple of other things you would never expect, I have quite a few gay guy friends…” I’d get my fucking ass kicked in the comments for playing into stereotypes, but here Kingsley has done just that. He’s not just stereotyped straight men as being jock tea-bagging frat boys afraid of catching the gay, he’s stereotyped gay men as being a distinct “other” outside of their sexuality when compared to straight men. At the very least, he’s insulted your intelligence for implying that you would believe those things.

Fuck this guy. More to come.

240 people see through this transparently positive bullshit.