The 2020 Frogesay Really Heckin’ Arbitrary Game Awards!
There comes a time in every young Froge’s life where he spreads his wings and leaves the hive of mediocrity, crawling out from his den of eggs and swimming into the savannah to become a hideous avian-insect-mammal-amphiban hybrid that should have been executed as one of God’s most hideous creations, alongside the platypus, Boris Johnson, and whatever the hell a chihuahua is supposed to be. For clarification, the platypus is not named Boris Johnson, although that would cause the poor creature to be bullied to the point of suicide or perhaps elected as the leader of a rapidly-declining nation which considers fascism an appropriate response to the existence of minorities. I can’t explain the chihuahua though. Those things are fucked up.
What better way to celebrate our survival than continuing on my Solstice series of bitching about things that nobody cares about but me? Since this year has been less of a pisser and more of a piss and shitter, I’ve upgraded from last year’s 2019 Frogesay Still Arbitrary Game Awards, deciding to make this year heckin’ arbitrary to boot. I’d give you a grand speech and an introduction from my throne made of gold and whores, but the gold was appropriated by the Chinese government in accordance with the communist lifestyle, and the whores are dead. Yes, COVID-19 caused some budget cuts this year, in addition to the mild concern of seventy million people suffering long-term disability due to an incurable disease created by some anonymous villager who will soon be seated in Hell’s hottest quarters, next to the guy who fucked the monkey which gave us AIDS, and Boris Johnson. I’m sure Boris Johnson is reading this in parliament and concocting some way to revert Canada’s independence from the comfort of his parliamentary beanbag, but then God-King Trudeau has his laser eyes pointed directly at the House of Commons in case of any resurrection from the motherlands. Trudeau Blackface. The previous two words are there to remind you of Trudeau Blackface.
I spent the entire year in a perpetual state of nonessential existence without any purpose beyond living for the sake of living itself, failing to actuate the meaning I ascribe to myself to prevent rebelling against the absurdity that is my life and the nihilistic hell I feel every single day, and I still didn’t finish JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Let’s check the statistics:
5 movies finished.
16 comics finished.
10 animations finished, 5 dropped.
13 games finished, 8 dropped.
48 albums finished, 5 dropped.
92 media finished, 18 dropped.
Let’s assume I sleep nine hours a day, spend five hours a day on chores, business, working out, masturbating, and everything I need to do to maintain myself, then spend the last ten hours per day doing whatever the hell I want. This number would be absurdly high in any other year, but it’s accurate in 2020 because taking two steps outside will give you the coof, and I am also a loser. With 2020 being a special snowflake just like yours truly, it has 366 days in the year instead of the usual 365, which gives us the nice number of 3660 hours of your life to while away as you wait for either cure or death. Assuming you’re willing to spend all of that time going full otaku wizard couch potato mode, like some people actually do, that gives you enough time to consoom any of the following: 161 52-episode 24-minute anime series, 703 13-episode 24-minute anime series, 191 52-episode 22-minute cartoons, 1,830 two-hour movies, 366 ten-hour video games, 610 eight-hour books, and 2,400 ninety-minute albums.
As I have not read 610 books in my entire life, I suggest two possibilities for the discrepancy in my available time and the little time I chose to spend on media. One, I’m spending my time on wholesome activities that enhance my personal development. This is obviously bullshit. Two, instead of spending my time on discrete, measurable chunks of media I can easily write down and catalogue, I am instead spending it on intangible consumption such as YouTube, disparate Web articles, songs from albums I don’t bother to listen to in full, random shows I drop in ten minutes and don’t write down, or other such usages of media that aren’t easily measurable. I could also be using my ten hours of free time doing other things, such as writing this excellent article your eyeballs are grasping, or masturbating. I find it funny though, how even if I only spent one hour a day on watching media, I still would have watched far more series than I actually did. Keep in mind, I already carved out five hours per day for getting up to take a piss. Not exclusively pissing, of course. Except for that one guy in Georgia.
DigiBronyMLP elucidated this idea in their always-relevant video “YOU DO NOT HAVE TIME”, which is all about the TIME you DO NOT HAVE in the ever-decreasing amount of hours you get to spend on Earth, and how you should spend that time watching good anime instead of watching bad anime. Given this is an individual named “DigiBronyMLP”, the suggestion to watch cartoons that aren’t anime, such as My Little Pony and the Digital Brony birth thereof, is shoved to the side. They suggest that given a 65-year lifespan, starting from 14 years of age, all the free time you’ll ever have is 125,404 hours to do whatever you want in life that isn’t related to work, sleep, or chores. And yet, despite knowing the absolute limit of the amount of time I will ever have to watch anime and masturbate, I still decide to waste it on worthless pursuits like creating 28,000 word articles and attempting to write novel drafts inbetween reading nonfiction and maintaining my delicious twink body. I could have been watching classics of world cinema like The Emoji Movie and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. I could have finished JoJo’s!
Oh, well. Tomorrow’s a new day to waste, and I will waste it through continuing to write about topics intimate to me, and then communicate them to you in the hope we gain a mutual empathy and understanding for our respective UNDERTALE BLOWS DICK.
Things what I liked
Thanks a lot, me. I appreciate the introduction. I’m broadcasting this article from the remnants of human civilisation on top of a pile of disease-infested corpses mere hours away from being set to flame by the government plague doctors who seek to purge the world of sin through the fire and the flames, which in Gamer parlance is called a “bad ending”. At least the Wi-Fi is good up here. You know what else is good? This year’s awards ceremony, which most definitely exists, inside my head. Also there are no awards this year, because of the aforementioned communist-gold-and-dead-whores snafu. If you’re currently reading this article from the comfort of your own retrofitted parliamentary beanbag, in those few remaining bastions of human existence surrounded by protesters who are moments away from kicking the doors down and setting flame to all the exits, then you can write down some smiley faces on sticky notes and give yourself some good boy points before your head is held to the wall and shot in the temple as your last thoughts are “so much for the tolerant Left”.
Starting off this article, we got the — oh, shit! We got ourselves the Most Gamer’s Gamer Game of the Gamer’s Game of the Year Award Award Award Reawarded 2020 Spicy Deluxe Tournament DX Alpha Strike 3S Arcade Super Ultra Omega XRD Revelator 2 EXE:Late[est][cl-r] It’s Better Than Undertale 2 And Skyrim Remastered 3 Plus All The Dark Souls Games And Demon Souls And Dark Souls But Set In Japan Fuck Dark Souls Garbage Franchise Dedicated To Todd “Levine” Druckmann And All The Great Writers Of Video Games And For The Patricians At 4chan Gamers Aren’t Dead Baby Game Of The Year Award Again He Can’t Keep Getting Away With This LOVE MAX SIX STARS XTEND!!!!! And Knuckles Gamers Game of the Game Awards 2020, Last Of Us Part 2 Winner Winner Chicken Dinner Best Game Ever Created Cyberpunk 2077 Praise Geraldo Nobody’s Going To Remember This Shit in Ten Years Lmao Presented By The Woman From Captain Marvel For Some Reason Don Cheadle Sex 2 Trans Rights Don’t Choose Penis 2 Option Worst Decision Of My Life People Actually Paid For This Shit Ah Fuck It I Haven’t Even Played Any Game Less Than Five Years Old, Award!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!1!!1!1!1!!1112
And the winner of the award… oh, shit, it’s Super Mario Odyssey, it’s Super Mario baybee! It’s the — it’s the Super Mario. It’s Mr. Bing Bing Wahoo. Super fucking. Animal Crossing. Super Mario Crossing. Mario Run. Anyone remember Super Mario Run? Anyone? Minecraft?
Minecraft?
Hey, you know what’s worse than Super Mario Odyssey? The systemic genocide of LGBT individuals at the hands of state senators and the federal government in the failed country that is the United States. But that’s not funny, so let’s talk about Skyrim for the Nintendo Switch.
Steven Universe
Stars: ★★★★ 4/4. One-word review: Soulful
Alright, cunts. I watched the first two seasons of this cartoon. My dick was blown off. It was fucking castrated. There has not been a show that has ever captured the perfect idyllicy of childhood joy like this one. This is one of the most mature, respectable, and yet simultaneously joyful cartoons to ever be created. That this show was produced under the American animation system is no less than a miracle. Being trapped in an eleven-minute-episode format as a children’s cartoon, it’s not particularly deep in its themes or messaging, but what messages do exist are told in an insightful manner that does not patronise its adult audience whatsoever. Every character in this show has a fantastic design, a well-rounded personality, and a soul to them that makes you feel for them in ways which so many other character dramas try and fail to do. The dignity it gives its queer representation is further bolstered by its respect and reverence for love and affection, glorifying the virtue of healthy romantic relationships, and the ideas it expresses are so much more important and interesting than the dumb-fun comedies which so many other cartoons are. It’s funny, it’s interesting, it’s captivating, it’s just plain engrossing to watch. This is an astonishingly good cartoon. I am so happy it exists.
Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion
Stars: ★★★★ 4/4. One-word review: Lollercoaster
This is a stupid, stupid show. It’s a bastard mix between a mecha anime, a high-school drama, a political thriller, a commentary on the banality of totalitarianism, and an edgelord’s pipe dream smoked out of a crack binge. The great thing about Code Geass is how it simultaneously fails to take itself seriously while not taking itself seriously enough, leading to this deadpan middle ground where actions on screen occur without any awareness of appropriateness, almost like a parody of the genres it seeks to be. What stops the show from being a total trainwreck is a mostly-comprehensible storyline, an endless array of “holy shit moments”, awesome tactical fight scenes, characters that are interesting and well-developed, and just being damn entertaining to watch. Plot developments are introduced straight out of left field, with the second season giving up and doing whatever the fuck it wants, and the constant on-screen action and drama means the show is never boring. This results in it being a “lollercoaster” of an anime, pulling out twists and turns whenever it feels the story is getting dull, and failing that just throwing in a big dumb mecha fight scene. It’s a truly amazing, truly stupid show, and I’m a richer man for having seen it.
I think DigiBronyMLP says it best: “WHAT? WHAT?”
Bigtyme Recordz, Volume II – All Screwed Up
Stars: ★★★★ 4/4. One-word review: Screwy
A legendary album from legendary Houston producer DJ Screw, who used this one-take mixtape to remix tracks from U.G.K., Point Blank, 20-2-Life, and PSK-13 to create one of the dirtiest and most grimy rap records ever put to tape. In the process, he codified and invented his own genre of hip-hop, titled “chopped and screwed”, becoming the only hip-hop artist to have a genre named after its creator. Describing the sonic landscape of this record is a fool’s errand because it defies easy categorisation, but it’s essentially a downtempo scratch-heavy blast of plunderphonics with depraved lyrics sequenced to resemble the effects of purple drank — or gangster rap meets vapourwave, if you prefer. If you get past the initial mask of seemingly-impenetrable production and ultraviolent themes, you’ll find the most inspired record hip-hop ever produced, with the later genre of cloud rap being a pale imitation of its original brilliance. It was always doomed to be a niche genre, where even the album’s most accessible track, “After I Die”, is as stylistically dense and depressing as the rest of the record. Even so, it escapes the trap of being incomprehensible nonsense like so many other niche genres are, and Bigtyme Recordz, Volume II – All Screwed Up offers an expression of tragedy that isn’t replicated anywhere else in hip-hop. Yes, that’s its full name, for some reason.
Texhnolyze
Stars: ★★★★ 4/4. One-word review: Morbid
There’s a reason you see this series shilled on 4chan’s anime recommendation 3x3s. Weeaboos respect it because it’s cool and edgy, contrarians respect it because it’s one of the classic pleb filters, media critics respect it because it’s extremely intellectual, and people who are only in it for the aesthetic respect it because of how omnipresently bleak it is. In a similar respect to blackpilled doomers being fans of Serial Experiments Lain despite it being such an obscure show to the normie anime audience, this series goes even blacker and doomier by crafting a 22-episode narrative about the absurdity of existence, the meaninglessness of self-improvement not crafted by your own hand, the inhumanity of a life lead for no greater sake than living, and the evil one will enact for the sake of a doomed philosophy. It’s possibly one of the deepest anime ever made, inasmuch as it’s possible to be within the confines of TV anime, and its exploration of nihilism demonstrates a view of humanity where mass extinction is the happiest ending out of all possible paths. Those of you who are already blackpilled will find this in agreement with your philosophy, and though it’s presented in an arthouse manner, the core story is easy to follow. Look beyond the surface, and if you’re not prepared for what you’ll find, it will crush you.
The Many Faces of Oliver Hart
Stars: ★★★★ 4/4. One-word review: Empathetic
This album brought me to tears in so many ways. Oliver Hart is the one-time pseudonym of indie rap darling Eyedea, who died from opiates in 2010. It’s a rap album whose sonic landscape doesn’t quite match into any subgenre such as jazz, rock, pop, or various other hip-hop fusions, despite being very much a fusion record absent of the boom-bap bling rap typical of its 2002 release date. It is extremely lyrically dense, each song being a brilliant mixture of wordplay, raw technical abilities, and occasionally storytelling in the same vein as Eminem or Aesop Rock, but with a softer, poetic edge detailing the artist’s personal struggles with neuroticism, absentmindedness, and ennui with the state of life as presented to him, where he can’t believe in anything outside his own head. “Bottle Dreams” remains one of the most beautiful and haunting hip-hop songs ever created, and the record is full of these intensely emotionally-resonant songs that don’t suffer from any of the pretentiousness or arrogance that so many other “woe is me” indie albums do. It’s one of the greatest albums I’ve heard in my life, and I’m so grateful to be able to experience it.
Spinning
Stars: ★★★★ 4/4. One-word review: Gratifying
This is an autobiographical comic by Tillie Walden about the unusually-engrossing and unusually-harrowing life of a young lesbian figure skater. You might call it a “graphic novel” if you’re still afraid of your parents, but comics artists tend to call them what they are: comics. This novel covers so many disheartening emotional bases that even the somewhat generic message of “be your own person and be honest with how you want to live your life” is gratifying by virtue of how much mediocrity Tillie has to endure. Combine that with the occasional bout of trauma and having to stay in the closet during her teenage years, the backdrop of mid-level teenage figure skating competitions feels nothing like a sports comic and more like a snapshot of a young woman’s life that’s as interesting as it is relatable to anybody who was dishonest with themselves when they were a teenager. I might be biased towards this comic because I give much love to my queer brethren, but I genuinely think it’s as heartfelt and emotional as I make it out to be, and I would be honoured to view more stories like this one.
Walker
Stars: ☆☆☆☆ 0/4. One-word review: Poverty
This has to be one of the single worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life. Despite not knowing anything about the movie, or knowing anyone who has seen the movie, or having done any reading on it, or seeing the movie, or even complaining about the movie on the Internet despite not seeing the movie, I have to say this is, as I eloquently expressed prior, one of the single worst movies — no, THE single worst movie, I have ever, I have ever seen, this is just absolutely awful, abysmal, poverty of imagination. First of all, they smoke cigarettes, even though cigarettes hadn’t been invented until 2001. What’s up with that? Second of all, his name is William Walker. Guess what he does in the movie? Walks. Yeah, real fucking clever symbolism there, Judas. And there were no titties, there were no Kung Fu scenes, and for a comedy movie, it wasn’t very funny. And why didn’t this movie condemn the presidency of Donald Trump? This obviously means the director supports colonialism, and is therefore Racist. I am appalled at this movie, this is worse than The Room and Freddy Got Fingered… combined!!! This movie is… A DUMB POOPY!!!
Enough highbrow satire. Roger Ebert gave this movie zero stars, and I gave it four stars, which I suspect is because I watched the movie. As I explained in the review — which, you know, you’re supposed to read — it’s a satire on American exceptionalism in general and in particular the failed campaigns of Central American filibusters which are still praised by the inseparably racist United States culture which views even a monumental failure in terrorising foreign nations as a preferable alternative to allowing them to live their supposedly primitive lives. This movie was released in 1987, which meant it was fucking doomed. As Americans remain the most arrogant and primitive of all races, it was panned by critics on release due to displaying that old woke bullshit, including true patriots like Ebert and Siskel who were cognitively unable to come to terms with the movie shitting all over their toilet-seat country, and so rebelled by writing means words about it. Thirty years later, it has been recognised by the Criterion Collection as one of the most clever and damning commentaries on Statesian patriotism, and I recognise it in turn.
Super Metroid
Stars: ★★★★ 4/4. One-word review: Professional
In Metroid you play as Metroid as a bounty hunter who shoots a dinosaur in outer space with his missile 9.5 WHAT THE FUCK —
The joy of Super Metroid is in power and imagination. Games in general offer you a power fantasy as an escape from the uninteractive nature of other mediums, whether that power comes from competitive skills acquired over hundreds of hours of play, or as a result of a design document which drip-feeds you constant toys to play with to defeat enemies which are designed to become less challenging as the game progresses, thus making you feel good about yourself. As surgical as this analysis is, what Super Metroid did back in its release was do all this against the backdrop of an environment which combined pragmatic industrial design with the boundaries of science-fiction imagination to make the power fantasy feel relevant in a world which is less designed to support you destroying it than it is merely the remnants of a story you arrived late to and are only able to comprehend through what little background storytelling exists. The fundamental gameplay of acquiring new powers to acquire new powers is one of gaming’s oldest genres, but few games did it with such astonishing competency that it influenced several generations of designers who studied Super Metroid and appropriated its concepts for their own uses, thus becoming an example of a game which both perfected a genre which existed and invented a new one all to its own. This is one of the most well-built, well-crafted, and well-executed games ever created, and its adoption in gaming’s canon as one of the greats reflects an unusual expression of maturity and taste from the otherwise infantile games community.
Space Battleship Yamato 2199
Stars: ★★★★ 4/4. One-word review: Fantastical
A remaster of the prior television anime “宇宙戦艦ヤマト [Uchuu Senkan Yamato] English: ‘Star Blazers: The Quest for Iscandar’ lit. ‘Space Battleship Yamato’ OR ‘Space Cruiser Yamato’ (Fall 1974, 26 EPs) (theme song performance by Isao Sasaki)”, Space Battleship Yamato 2199 is a big dumb space opera. The Earth has been destroyed by enemy forces, and a small group of highly-skilled space soldiers go forth into the stars to seek protection for humanity as received by a benevolent race which is exactly one planet adjacent to the evil race. Despite science fiction being a genre based on analysing human mediocrity, this series of OVAs contains little of it and seeks instead to entertain through grand space battles and character drama from within the walls of humanity’s last battleship. The designs are awesome, the fight scenes are awesome, the animation is awesome, the characters are awesome, anime is awesome, everything is awesome, and it’s a good show to awesomely contradict any of you baka gaijins who think Star Wars is the height of science fiction storytelling. Since it’s a 2012 retelling of the previous show from 1974, take your pick as to whether you embrace tradition or reject modernity. Or watch this one, then watch “Space Pirate Captain Harlock” for something old. There’s a lot of ancient Japanese anime. It’s kind of their thing.
Some of you might be stuck on what the hell an “OVA” is. It stands for “Original Video Animation”, which are sold directly to Japanese consumers on home video, allowing production companies to spend more time on higher-quality animation and storylines outside the structure of television anime production. This stands in contrast to the equivalent term in the Western world, “direct-to-video”, which is mostly negative due to American production companies shovelling movies that aren’t fit for theatres onto DVDs for a quick buck. This negative reputation developed among cartoon fans primarily due to Disney’s tendency to release poor-quality sequels of popular theatrical releases onto VHS, in addition to shady, unknown animation companies releasing ripoff “mockbusters” of popular animated films. Japan further endears itself as Earth’s maddest country by taking a format considered shovelware by the rest of the world and making it the home of some of anime’s most respected titles, such as “FLCL” and “Legend of the Galactic Heroes”. OVAs are for weeaboos who are too weeaboo for regular weebs, although they all get dumped on Netflix these days under the even more estranged “Original Net Animation” label.
Homework
Stars: ★★★★ 4/4. One-word review: Banging
UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS UNN-TSS
That’s basically house music. But there wasn’t a house group to ignite the public consciousness quite like Daft Punk, who kickstarted the trend of aloof electronic music producers with masked identities and increasingly-terrible renditions of once-funky beats. House is tricky to make interesting because it’s built on the endless repetition of samples which were already produced in previous decades, and the genre itself is essentially a gimmick. Being derived from the prior, significantly more complex genres of disco, funk, and jazz, the vast majority of house records are mindless, groove-until-you-lose dance records designed to be blasted at full force with the speakers in the trunk and the bass on crunk, which describes every popular dance track since 2010. If you get past this surface-level stereotype, house music is a beautiful, brilliant blend of dancehall sensibilities combined with decades of history remixed and remastered by vinyl junkies who reinterpret this heritage through the universal language of four-on-the-floor 128-beats-per-minute 12-inch-vinyl-style tunes.
Once disco well and truly died, house languished as an obscure subculture for nostalgic weirdos, with only the occasional bout of success in the charts as a template for crossover hits to apply vocals to its UNN-TSS backing, which was always less about heritage and more about being a vehicle for less-popular genres like soul and jazz to get some traction, including the ever-cheesy techno house subgenre. “House”-house music, like garage house, acid house, and the endless variety of regional twists such as Chicago house and UK house, remained the privilege of music nerds in-the-know… until Daft Punk came along with Homework, a French house album, who immediately defined the genre and to this day are the only relevant French house producers — except for Justice, who are to house what Bruno Mars is to funk.
Homework preserved the heritage of house music with obscure, classy samples, innovative manipulation of time-tested synthesizers and drum machines, a willingness to branch out from typical house sounds and into more high-concept tracks which still fit within the four-four formula, and the time-tested house tradition of straight-up gimmicks. It’s no surprise their most popular tracks from the record were “Around the World”, which says the words “around the world” 144 times, or making “Da Funk”’s music video star a dog, which got people to talk about how it stars a dog. Getting past this cheese, the rest of the album is filled with experiments with how far house music can become before it becomes a different genre. This desire for experimentation ended up created the later record “Discovery”, which was praised so highly for its house experiments it overshadowed the foundational elements which made Homework so influential to begin with, eventually leading them to abandon their sound with the album “Random Access Memories”. Even if their other work was praised more highly, it was Homework which set the stage for them to become known at all, and to this day it’s their most consistently-entertaining and surprising work of art.
Things What I Liked Slightly Less
If you’re confused as to what exactly the star system represents, read “What Doth Stars Mean? 2?”, which I should have linked at the start of the article but then it would be less arbitrary and holds up spork LLAMA MONKEY WAFFLES! In essence it casts away the notion of objective ratings in favour of wholly subjective ratings based on my personal enjoyment of a work rather than the ultimately-frustrating and not terribly-useful metric of finding merit within a work, which is what I should have been doing in the first place instead of following an ultimately-useless scale. But then we all grow as people and realise how silly we were once upon a time, which is why I have never written anything stupid since that article peanut butter dishwasher I’m a dinosawr!! Yes, I am double-dipping on the 2007-tier “lawl randumbz” humour gag. Did you honestly expect me to I AM A BANANA!!! ALL HAIL TEH GREAT AND SEXEH PENGUIN OVERLORDS HAMPSTERDANCE PARTY BA DA BEE DA BEE DA BO BO BEE DA BEDEH BOOO!!
Given how I have over thirty things listed as having three stars and not nearly enough interesting things to say about all of them, here’s a list of albums that I really enjoyed, yet not to the point of me having further substantial comment on them: People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by A Tribe Called Quest, Discovery by Daft Punk, Elephunk and Monkey Business by the Black Eyed Peas, There Is Love in You by Four Tet, The Heist and This Unruly Mess I Made by Macklemore, To Whom It May Concern by The Freestyle Fellowship, The Beatnigs by The Beatnigs, Masters of the 1 & 2 — History’s Greatest DJs, and Original Pirate Material by The Streets. Some good comics I read include Bad Friends by Ancco, I Moved to Los Angeles to work in Animation by Natalie Nourigat, Pyongyang by Guy Delisle, and The Death-Ray by Daniel Clowes. Also, the following celebrities are gay:
Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Batshit
In 1989, Divine Styler was your typical mediocre golden-age rapper, doomed to be forgotten under the weight of stylistic contemporaries like Rakim and Big Daddy Kane. That was until he converted to Islam, released Spiral Walls in 1992, and became the first recorded emcee to lose his fucking mind on the microphone. That’s not exaggerating. Take one listen to this record, and you’ll understand he actually went insane. This shit is Death Grips twenty years young, and even they aren’t as sicko mode as their grandpappy Styler was. It’s this mind-warping mix of avant-garde poetry, thrash-metal, jazz-rap, trance music, and the occasional bout of bitchin’ hip-hop wordplay. If you can stomach the intensely unnerving album art, take a listen to “Grey Matter” and tell me who the hell was making rap like this back in 1992. And that’s by far the most accessible song on the record. Every track after this descends straight into the abyss of experimental madness, and it’s less a rap record than it is a hidden gem buried under the uncaring dirt of a society which demands easy categorisation above artistic brilliancy. It is a fascinating album, and more importantly, it’s entertaining to listen to. What a bizarre creation to find so casually available.
Donkey Kong Country
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Flowful
There’s been much speculation as to Donkey Kong Country’s appeal. Typical criticism of games devolves into saying games are fun because fun things are fun, and failing that, talk about how the graphics are good through vague, generalised expressions of what humans find aesthetically-pleasing without delving into how the aesthetics of the game contribute to its existence as a product meant to be played. Or failing that, say the soundtrack is good — also outside its context attached to a video game. These are the most common compliments given to Dankey Bong Bluntry, which appears to be one of the most enjoyed titles by the normie gaming audience, and it’s possible I’m overthinking this criticism because the soundtrack and graphics and gameplay are all well and good. Even if they’re all more interesting to study separately, they remain a part of a cohesive product, and I believe it’s the competency and imagination which went into all of these aspects which made it stick out in the minds of the nostalgic Nintendo proletariat as one of the greatest games ever made.
Ignoring the typical Nintendo fanboy exaggeration and Metacritic’s list of Greatest Games of All Time featuring twelve versions of Grand Theft Auto and four versions of Madden NFL, Dong Kong Super Long is still a decent title held together by its excellent level-by-level design. It’s a series of thrilling platforming events with a minimum of unfairness and frankly pitiful boss fights. It’s not terribly difficult, but it’s a bit of engaging fun with a good flow the whole of its experience, and to praise this as one of the greatest games in the medium outside its discrete parts is an insult to all the interesting and insightful games which have come out in the decades since its release and advanced the medium far beyond its original intentions of being nothing more than dumb fun to spend the hours of our lives engaging with rather than doing literally anything else.
Shout-outs to the King K. Rool Mugen character, which replicates the final boss fight as far as a fighting game engine will allow. Also shout-outs to videogamedunkey, who thought King K. Rool was actually a hard boss equivalent to a hell-fuck with a fucking Hitler bitch. Look, Dunkey. I know you guys over there aren’t really keen on the hard games, which is why you’re over here praising Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Maker, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Maker 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Super Mario Brothers 3… I’m beginning to think this guy isn’t Black.
Undergrads
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Collegiate
Are you a college-aged individual with an admiration for Western animation who wants to see more mature cartoons beyond the typical kiddie fare? Go fuck yourself, because there are none. Go slurp from Rick and Morty’s troth of Funko Pops and Reddit tourists jumping on the counter at McDonald’s freaking out over szechuan sauce, then throwing themselves to the floor and screaming “REEE, REEE, I’M PICKLE REEEE”. That was a thing which occurred within my lifetime.
But in all seriousness folks, there do exist some decent adult cartoons out there that isn’t just Normal Words, But A Horse Guy. One of them is MTV’s Undergrads, which is about some jabronies who just got into college and have to navigate the stupid shit their friends get up to while dealing with their own ephemeral and effervescent personal problems over the course of a brief, blistering 13-episode season. There are also a ton of Phantom Menace references, because MTV willed them into existence. It’s consistently funny, occasionally dramatic, incredibly dumb, and is the type of show The Simpsons should have inspired a generation of animators to create, instead of Peter Griffin donning a fursuit and shitting on one of the very few adult cartoons to have actual artistic merit. You can watch RebelTaxi’s video on it, which is far more entertaining than anything on my website despite being made by a guy who talked about accidentally impregnating his girlfriend and the subsequent abortion while playing Neopets. Also, read my 2016 Bojack Horseman reviews! THEY ARE FUCKING GARBAGE AND I WILL NEVER, EVER READ THEM AGAIN — oh my God, there’s a mini-golf game!
Yamada-Kun and the Seven Witches
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Fluffy
I’m only in it for the bisexual fanservice. Contrary to the rumours, my people unfortunately do exist, and thus have to suffer the fate of being too gay for the hets and too straight for the fags. It’s unfortunate because bisexuality is fucking awesome — or at least 28% more favoured than heterosexuality in a Tom Scott poll — and those who deny themselves the pleasure of fucking a pussy while sucking a dude’s balls are all a bunch of FUCKING COWARDS, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, I EXIST YOU FUCKING CUNTS!!!!!!
Let’s talk about anime. Like most high school romance anime, the premise is dumb. Yamada-kun is a delinquent character who accidentally kisses a model student named Shiraishi, who has the magical power to swap bodies with whoever she kisses. This leads to dozens of excuses to kiss cute boys and-or girls in a variety of silly scenarios, topped off with a story that’s actually decent and thus I must recommend it instead of keeping it to myself as evidence of the existence of a sexuality I happen to be. It’s all very sweet and short, absent of the typical annoying romance tropes in favour of being a mystery-comedy which seeks to derive the secret of her magic powers and thus have everyone be at peace with a gay and-or heterosexual old time. Since this is Japan, there’s not much legitimate queer representation beyond being played for laughs and-or fujo pants-creaming, so you gay bitches better not get too big for your britches. Just like all those Touhou characters, and as per canon sources, no-one in Gensokyo is gay. Also, “most men look stupid in fluffy hats anyway”. Damn.
Hey Arnold!
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Kuudere
Coming in from across the pond is a cartoon featuring many a young man’s first contact with the rare “Western tsundere” archetype. I watched the first season of this series on the suggestion of my perennial inspiration and occasional autistic lolcow “The Mysterious Mr. Enter”, through his excellent Nick-O-Rama series of reviews, which he produced shortly before COVID-19 hit and thereafter losing his fucking mind. I could have watched Avatar: The Last Airbender instead, but the only American anime I’ll ever watch is The Boondocks and all those titty animations on Newgrounds. You have Arnold, the straight-man noble spirit snarker with a heart of gold with surprising hidden powers. You have Helga, the conflicted strong-armed sassy-but-sweet female character with a traumatic childhood and a crush on the main character to the disdain of her other classmates. Arnold’s best friend is Gerald, the smooth-talking sexually-nonthreatening classroom guy who gets the MC out of many a pickle, and Helga’s best friend is Phoebe, the smart-yet-meek nerdy girl with glasses who hangs around the other characters out of pity.
When viewed through this lens you realise Hey Arnold! is a slice-of-life school comedy with a series-long romantic subplot with a rotating cast of archetypes who use their unique abilities to overcome a new challenge every episode, and everything comes back to being anime after all. You tricked me, Mr. Enter. I will never forgive you for this transgression — oh, you shat on the anime film Your Name. I forgive everything you have ever done, including spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories and being intensely paranoid of other human beings in general. You want to get real crazy? Try listening to four hours of DigiBronyMLP talk about Pickle Rick culturally appropriating Chinese culture through reintroducing schezuan sauce into the public consciousness without making it resemble the authentic Chinese cuisine the original sauce was supposedly based on and why am I talking about Rick and Morty again why do I only ever reference two people in my articles why is everyone I look up to so fucking pathetic what I am doing with my FUCKING LIFE.
The Karate Kid
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Pragmatic
When I was in training for Them’s Fightin’ Herds in EVO 2020 to represent Jokermort Oleander under the banner of getting TFH out of the /mlp/ ghetto and into the annals of /vg/ where it belongs (to find out what any of these words mean shill read my article shill “4chan: A Song of Shill and Shill” shill), I watched The Karate Kid for inspiration. That’s the original movie, not the remake starring “Cringing With” Jaden Smith. It would later turn out the CEO of EVO raped underaged boys, thus cancelling EVO 2020, proving the anti-pedophile SJW cartel has taken cancel culture too far. When I rewatched Jokermort’s origin in Rainbow Dash Presents: My Little Dashie as part of the Friendship is Magic tenth anniversary stream, after a coordinated attempt to get the RDP Chads to upend the Poochiefags and Glimshits and add the videos to the queue, I found out something about myself. One, being a 2010 brony has ruined my life. Two, the video featuring a run-down suburb featuring monkeys voiced by White people was way more racist than I remember. Three, Lil Uzi Vert sampled the Tubby Wubby Pony Waifu beat. Pegasisters, grab your mason jars.
The Karate Kid is the touching story of a teenager who gets bullied by a group of stereotypical 80s high school comedy bullies, who abuse their martial arts training to do mean things to him. He seeks tutorship from a wise man with unexpected combat prowess with a haunting backstory, training for a karate tournament to free himself from the menace of arbitrary human cruelty. This culminates in a final scene where he wins the tournament, because the narrative would be unsatisfying if he didn’t. It’s a decent movie which follows a typical sports formula, where the underdog learns lessons about himself and his coach as they train under a limited time and budget, as opposed to the real-world scenario where the competitor with years more funding and experience defeats his enemy without issue. I would prefer a movie focusing on the struggles of adhering to a mundane and repetitive lifestyle for the sake of slow self-betterment as opposed to the feel-good, albeit vague message of “hard work pays off” without diving into the psychology of how to sustain yourself through apparently-meaningless work, but the movie I ended up with is alright, too. Violence only begets violence, and the lesson is clear: violence solves everything.
The Adventure Pals
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: CalArts
You mans better click on the Steam page. The Adventure Pals. At first glance it looks like an Adventure Time reject with so much soy shoved in it’ll turn your flat chest into a D-rack, so giddy and twee is its art and concept that anyone over the age of 10 would have to be a fucking idiot to play this game. I am that fucking idiot, because I got it through a Humble Bundle and was one of the 4,000 games I bought from that store I actually decided to play. And it was good. Damn it, it was good! Published by Armor Games Studios and developed by a studio nobody cares about, the game stars a young lad with his best friends “Mr. Rock” and “Sparkles the Giraffe” on a quest to save his granddad from being turned into a hot dog by the evil-moustache-twirling “Mr. B”. This is indeed real life, and since I got through more than ten minutes of it without wanting to shit rainbows and throw up sugar, you can assure this title has Froge’s seal of quality. I expect the rainbow shits to be a prominent part of its marketing from now on, because I am an influencer. I influence.
The Pervert
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Tragic
Remy Boydell’s “The Pervert” is (ironically) about a transgender woman who does sex work to survive, who is also an anthropomorphic dog. It was “directed” by Michelle Perez, who according to Goodreads also directed “The Fatloss Men: How To Lose Fat For Men Today”. Goodreads recommends readers of The Pervert will also enjoy a furry comic about a lesbian poodle saving her Catholic girlfriend from Hell, a series of short strips about a cat who is a boy titled “Catboy” who is honestly gender-nonconforming, and the sequel to a manga titled “My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness”, which I will tell you nothing about except it is a sequel to a manga titled “My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness”. By the way, don’t let my piss-take fool you. All of these are really good comics, and if you can get past their initial normie-abrasive concepts, you’ll find them as compelling as they are cute. But you can’t get past it. You’ll never get past it. Because you’re a coward. And you’ll always be a coward so long as you succumb to normalcy.
All of this context will tell you The Pervert some wacky indie comix bullshit inked up by some naïve artist who thinks they can produce work for the purposes of self-expression rather than as a cynical means to extract profit from the bored and despondent. While the story itself isn’t fully coherent within the mould of an all-encompassing narrative due to its alleged autobiographical elements, when taken as a series of vignettes or short scenes which occur linearly towards an indefinite conclusion, it manages quite the emotional punch with various mundane tragedies and acts of aggression displayed as part of the always-paranoid life of a transgender woman, as she has the right to be due to the tireless efforts of absolute scum who campaign to make the world the worst it can be. You also have your furry sex scenes, if you’re into that, which you should not be due to their inclusion as part of a serious prostitution drama. But I mention it because, hey. Furry sex. Also because furry comics are in the lowest tier of artistic relevancy in the comics scene, and we are so very desperate for work as good as this. Let us be grateful for that.
Clone High
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Dumb
I describe a lot of things as “dumb” this article. This is one of the dumbest. It’s a cartoon where you’re in high school and all the students are genetic clones of historical figures, because potatoes. Released in 2002, it’s a parody of stereotypical late-90s teen dramas as was typically aired on MTV. Since Clone High was also aired on MTV, it was fucking dooooooooooomed. It lasted thirteen episodes while Beavis and Butthead got thirteen billion, but damn. Those were some good episodes. It requires no knowledge of history to enjoy and uses the premise as an excuse to make all the figures parodied to act out-of-character and make “hilarious-in-hindsight” type of jokes, such as John F. Kennedy being a closet homosexual, or a talking cartoon squirrel squirting liquid ass in everyone’s faces, which is a satire on the Trump administration. If you can get past its lowbrow humour, it has some surprising character moments strung along a shoestring series-long teen drama plot, and topped off with a burst of early-2000s nostalgia, it’s become a cult classic over the years that’s remembered fondly for its combination of irreverent comedy and endearing characters. Also because the theme song is a SLAPPER.
What’s astonishing is how this series is easily-available online for free on YouTube, which wouldn’t be notable except this stream is actually legal. It comes to you courtesy of the “Retro Rerun” channel, which also hosts the classic Canadian shows “6Teen”, “Stickin’ Around”, and “Donkey Kong Country”, which is like a mod for Jimmy Neutron, or something. For more information — on Clone High, not the Jimmy Neutron mod — you can look at RebelTaxi’s review on it, who is most notable for courting a woman and assuming she had a crush on him and watched his videos on the basis of her wearing a Ruby Gloom tee-shirt, telling the story of how he got cucked by several men while playing Toy Story on the Super Nintendo and segueing into his crying-and-masturbating story about cumming three times a day. Also, he used cheat codes to play the game. What a man.
Stories: The Path of Destinies
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Anthropomorphic
One of the more competent crops harvested from Steam’s Anthro Furry curation group, this game stars a charming twink fox and his quest to bail out his best rabbit friend and get some of that sweet feral pussy, as possessed by a literal cat. Less facetiously, the game is a hacking-and-slashing thing through a series of linear levels which change based on the choices you make throughout the predefined plot paths, with 24 different endings and choices which go beyond the AAA open-world staples of “accept quest” and “accept quest sarcastically”. Apparently the studio is based in Montreal, and when we consider that Fur Science study funded by the Ontario government, it seems the east coast is receiving a slow-and-steady influx of furry immigrants, who will no doubt be responsible for the unchecked destruction of our country and erosion of our cultural values, as has occurred in every single country which has ever allowed immigrants. Mr. Trudeau, take your laser eyes off those filthy britbongs. We got ourselves some furry boys to cull.
A Goofy Movie
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Goofy
I watched this movie at the advice of a friend, of which I have none these days, who was astounded at how I always took their joke movie suggestions seriously while never watching anything they would admit to liking. I remember two things about this movie. One, the dog girl is fucking hot. Two, the word “fundage” as a synonym for payment, which I am disappointed is not in popular use. Okay, I remember more than that, such as the road trip plot and Pete being a dick and the frankly unnecessarily fluid animation which gave my eyes a mighty feast courtesy of Disney’s dime. The movie was funny and soulful and exactly as long as it could be before becoming repetitive, even though the ending was kind of crap and it’s not a terribly intelligent movie. I’m willing to admit its legacy as an animation sleeper hit is due to it having slightly more emotional depth than the typical Disney film, with a core theme of attempting to grow up too fast and losing track of a family who legitimately cares for you while you pursue ultimately ephemeral adolescent desires such as social acceptance and romantic interests. I’m also willing to admit Max is hot. I am ashamed to admit I find anything in the Goof species mildly attractive, but at least I’m not that guy who draws homoerotic Mickey Mouse porn, but only the specific depiction of Mickey in the Kingdom Hearts series. I would be that guy. I would very much like to be that guy.
Bio Inc: Redemption
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosic
Jeremy now has Genital Warts. This is a resource collecting and allocation game where you play the role of a doctor diagnosing and curing diseases to save the life of a rapidly-worsening patient, or the role of a virus rapidly-evolving in order to kill the patient before the doctor can find a cure. You can evolve lifestyles to make the patient either a fat fuck or a skinny bitch, use emergency measures to counteract an opponent’s play, and give the patient a Hitler mask then make him blow his brains out through major depression. The simple premise betrays the simultaneous deception and interplay which comes between the two opponents, even if all my playtime was against the computer who keeps correctly guessing my lupus disease and is a big fat cheater because of it. It manages this balance between being physically and cognitively demanding while having discrete built-in disease paths you’ll discover during each game, with each route offering specific advantages you’ll want to consider for the particular scenario and playstyle your opponent adopts. In this way, the player controlling the virus is the proactive opponent who sidesteps the doctor’s attempts at diagnoses, whereas the player controlling the doctor is the reactive detective who wants to prevent the spread of the virus while spending their limited resources deducing which cures to apply, which offers numerous playstyles for numerous players. And you get to kill Hitler, which is nice.
Negro Necro Nekros
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Aggressive
The hip-hop equivalent of the meme where Binky from Arthur listens to post-industrial progressive classical and asks “when do they stop tuning their instruments?”. Another entry in the “losing your fucking mind on the microphone” genre, this is an industrial hip-hop album from Dälek, which is pronounced “die-a-leck”, which is absolutely intuitive and not at all indicative of a contrarian mentality. You may remember them from many a /mu/ chart for “From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots”, which continues the alternative hip-hop tradition of atrocious album art. Yeah, the lyrics are meaningless and the album has the vibe of a rejected Death Grips sample collection, but it is, as the kids say, a banger — inasmuch as one can be when it features “Praise Be The Man”, a crossbreed between harsh noise, camel music, and whatever the hell MC Dälek is spitting. If you think that track is too harsh for your taste, be grateful it’s not toilet sounds.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Magical!
The most important cartoon of the 2010s. The success of 4chan’s /co/ and /b/ boards in converting massive swaths of lonely, disgruntled nerds into the The Herd reflects either the most positive or most negative aspects of the absurdity of human existence, depending on how attractive you find the horses. The brony menace started from nothing in 2010 and by 2011 was the single biggest cancer to infest the Internet; if it wasn’t for the attempts of 4chan’s moderation to quell its internal popularity, perhaps the community would have been a mere apparition of what it would become, merely a cult community rather than an omnipresent EXPLICITLY NOT-FURRY fandom attracting everyone from Andrew W.K. to Gabe Newell. There was a period of time from 2011-2015 where you couldn’t go anywhere on the Internet without encountering a My Little Pony avatar delivering spicy takes and spreading the praise of Celestia and her benevolent lessons on friendship. It was, in the words of “I Want To Cum Inside” Rainbow Dash, totally awesome.
There’s a certain infantile, yet giddy appeal to this series equivalent to what moe fans feel when they watch those “cute girls doing cute things” anime, which the esteemed DigiBronyMLP has categorised — as well as inventing the MLP analysis community with one of his first videos being a Twilight Sparkle hypnosis video. As with all 2011 bronies, of which I was a 2010 brony and am therefore better than you, once you’re in the herd, you’re in it for life, spending your days waiting for the opportunity to recount stories of the fandom and reminisce over the good old days. DigiBronyMLP did that with the Friendship is Magic Finale (which was FUCKING SHIT), accurately describing the fandom as “a big autistic circlejerk”, and still remembering their Ye Olden Days as the fandom’s prime autist. Also Mr. Enter, who is literally autistic, with these two people making up the yin-and-yang of my obsessive and estranged analytical inspirations. And RebelTaxi did a few videos on the show, including “SAVE DERPY/ DERPY GATE Rant (MLP Friendship is Magic Review 2)” and a video titled “Why Was My Little Pony is so popular”, which features Apple Bloom’s macro crush fetish combined with Fluttershy’s feral necrophiliac vore fetish. He made this as an unemployed college student. I applaud him for prioritising what truly matters.
I know a little bit about why was My Little Pony is was popular, as I revisited the first season of this series to retread my cultural heritage, with the second episode being as important to bronies as Stonewall was to fags. The series is incredibly sapphic and has big gay energy, and the horse pussy is hot hot hot. Seriously though, the series is maliciously twee and it makes no reservations about taking place in a saccharine world, with the occasional bit of mortal danger being as kid-friendly as you expect. On an intellectual level, the mature viewer needs to find value in its simple retelling of moral stories and the moment-by-moment slice-of-life character interactions which underpin the best episodes of the series, as there is no overarching narrative and what lore we get is drip-fed over the course of nine seasons and even then is frustratingly inexact. As its demographic of young girls prevents it from being too violent or having too serious drama, fans of the series find the appeal primarily in the senses, where it’s a treat to look at and listen to, with attractive Flash animation, sound design which inspires joy, an aesthetic which has embedded itself in the popular consciousness, and ponies that are as cute as they are sexually appealing. That last one seems like a joke, but there is a lot of plot in this series. Plot means pony ass. Which I watch it for.
In summary, PUT YOUR ASS IN THE AIR, PUT YOUR ASS UP IN THE AIR.
No Pressure
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Definite
If I become a rapper, I’mma be named Speculation. Pac.
Speaking as someone who’s Whiter than Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers in a fistfight smoking cocaine out a crack pipe and spitting tripe into a shotgun mic, I’ve managed to avoid hip-hop’s favourite biracial White boy over the years, with my only experience with his music coming through the debate of whether he looks Black enough to say the N-word. His name is Logic, and he’s quitting the game, which further cements his reputation as a hipster rapper who appeals to people too afraid to admit they like any music released in the past decade. That person is me, and although this is Logic’s FINAL MUSIC EVAR, I can only interpret it through the viewpoint of someone who dipped out of any rap released since 2012 in favour of fawning over pirated rips of Outkast records. Who he blatantly rips off on this album. Twice.
The existence of this record is a simultaneous celebration of all the successes he’s had in the rap game over his short career and his failure to find joy in the material success that came as a result of it, combined with a warning message to young rappers about the facts-of-life regarding the industry despite his message to write raps for the passion instead of chasing status. Despite a mild dash of the pretentiousness which has dogged Logic over the years, fundamentally this album is a callback to the golden age of melodic rap and the boom-bap lyricism which has given him as many fans as he has haters, combining influences from the past twenty-five years to make a modern-day album that appeals to the oldhead sensbilities. And the pen game on this thing is fucking astonishing! Bloody hell, I didn’t know rappers still knew English these days. You hear a thousand trap beats set to to a thousand mumble raps and grow despondent at the idiocy of the humans who willingly listen to this garbage and make them popular over rappers with actual skill. But that’s how rap always it, isn’t it? The ratio of popular rappers to decent rappers was always unfair, manufactured out of the whims of record executives who have always been more interested in manufacturing trends and setting up one-hit-wonder artists to capitalise on artificial culture over reliable performers whose bankability comes as a result of their talents, and no lyrical miracle will shock the proletariat out of their fickle conspicuous consumption of bullshit.
Sonic the Hedgehog
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Slow
To quote DigiBronyMLP… bloody hell, this cunt has their hands in every cookie jar, don’t they? Anyway, “Ranting about Sonic the Hedgehog” revealed something interesting about the game design and cultural impact of the Sonic series. While the series prioritises speed, the only meaningful challenge to preventing speed is to put obstacles in the player’s path which stops them dead, meaning the core conceit of the series is already damaged because you don’t get enough meaningful time playing Sonic at full blast to make its main gimmick meaningful. Due to the limits of human reaction time, it’s effectively impossible to design a game in this fashion where you simultaneously want to player to travel at breakneck speed while still offering enough challenge to the point where the game doesn’t merely devolve into holding a directional button, which is what the later 2D Sonic games are guilty of. DigiBronyMLP speculates the popularity of the series comes primarily from kids who only have a limited number of games to play, of which Sonic games are some of the most interesting to go back to because memorising the stage layouts is your only opportunity to play the game with the speed it theoretically allows. Combine that with a variety of characters who have cool designs and the bare minimum amount of personality, you can see them as real characters while not being deep enough where you can’t project yourself onto them, and thus the fanbase was ripe for autism and porn.
So as a result of these factors, going back to the original Sonic: Ow, The Edgehog is a quaint experience because of how it resembles a traditional platformer with only the occasional bit of maddening speed which more often than not sends you into some spiky boys and steals all your FUCKING RINGS I WAS AT 94 OF THEM YOU FUCKING BITCH. There are numerous levels which are just straight-up enclosed spaces where you never have the opportunity to run at all, and it’s interesting to see this balance between attempting to live up to the game’s unique selling point while understanding a game consisting solely of linear setpieces would make the game too infantile and predictable, effectively a theme park ride as DigiBronyMLP expresses it. But game design is boring, so the rest of this review will be devoted to the Top Ten Hottest Female Sonic Character’s. Number 10: Amy Rose. First of all, fuck you to Guptill89 for putting her at number ten. She’s the original gangster of furry video game waifus, and while she is indeed cuter than she is hot, she’s got that right mixture of sass and confidence where she is so clearly the type of woman who knows what she wants and will stop at nothing to get it, yet still with a doting side that makes her as much of a cuddleslut as she is a dick-humping hoe. It doesn’t matter if she’s a thirsty cuckquean and Sonic is an asexual dork, she is still the hottest Sonic girl as far as my eyes can see, and if you’re saying these THOTS out here like Rogue the Bat’s Tats and Sally A. Whore have even half the charm as Amy does, you’re as trite and as gay as a daisy in May and for that matter is a cliché coming true. Even videogamedunkey knows Guptill89 fucked up in the rankings, and his wife was there making sure he stayed loyal the whole time. Fuck all ya’ll hoes. Yuuko is Best Nichijou.
The Vagabond Valise
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Touching
Inbetween all the memes I have to give a shout-out to this comic, this massive 350-page full-colour Québécois comic, about the autobiographical struggles of the child of an alcoholic who finds himself wound through the Québec foster home system, as made by the pseudonym Siris and told through the character of Chick-O, who is a chick. The animal, not the gender. It paints this picture of an all-encompassing failure of the social systems designed to protect those who are most vulnerable to the unfairness of society and human beings in general, most often placing these children in the hands of homes that are just as bad as the ones they just fled, including those within the foster system itself. When you have no other recourse but to put your faith in a program which is supposed to help you and yet fails to fulfill this task due to a lack of resources or lack of volunteers which forms its basis, what can you do but suffer? The comic paints a bleak picture of the unfairness and carelessness which new lives are born into, where giving life just to abuse the child for the whole of its youth and leave it with trauma for the rest of its life is fundamentally evil. The best part of the story comes near the end of the novel where we get Chick-O’s first moments of freedom and happiness with his newfound friends and hobbies, which is cut off too short as the prior life ends and a new one begins. It’s touching, and though it isn’t too deep in thematics in favour of telling a straightforward story, what is presented has still left me with gratitude for how my own life has turned out thus far.
Alright, enough with this piece of garbage. Let’s talk about the GOOD shit.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
Stars: ★★★☆ 3/4. One-word review: Flabbergasting
The series with more memes than a Vinesauce Sunday stream, Jeremy’s Mildly Concerning Quest is a shounen for people who hate shounen, with little ambition beyond showing crazy shit happen in two-episode chunks and with every season’s plot resolved with an asspull of such magnitude it makes Bad Dragon look like a Little Bitch. The series is so infested with the stank of its fanbase that watching the anime is like subjecting yourself to one of those ancient meme compilation videos — such as The GAG Quartet — le Internet Medley (OVER 40 MEMES IN ONE SONG) — and physically pointing at the screen whenever you recognise the source of a meme. The series is properly divided into “parts” instead of seasons, and I watched every part outside of Part 5, which is the most recent part to get an anime adaptation and was apparently so awful the original manga creator gave up writing Part 6 and threw out the whole canon with Part 7. Araki forgot? No, Araki wishes he could forget…
I’mma keep it real wit’ you anime subreddits: I ain’t ever reading the original manga. Since each JoJo’s part is a separate self-contained story with very little continuity between each of them, I’ll go over each of them individually and rank them based on my personal preferences and intrinsic biases with supporting evidence and relevant reasons for my opinions structured in an easy-to-follow format which encourages criticism and refutations on the basis of subjective ideas backed up with objective evidence and citations from the source material, like some sort of faggot.
Part 1: Phantom Blood. Everyone’s favourite forgettable filler part, Phantom Blood has no notability beyond starting the damn series. The story concerns DIO being a dick, then Jonathon kills him, then DIO comes back as a vampire, then Jonathon kills him again, and there’s a part where a magic sword has “LUCK” engraved on it and was renamed “LUCK AND PLUCK”, and Jack the Ripper makes an appearance… it’s weirder than the part involving super-soldier mecha Nazis and a dude who transforms into a bird furry, which is the next part, ooooh! It introduces the series-wide concept of “Hamon”, which is abandoned in Part 3 and therefore doesn’t matter. Despite its nine-episode length it’s still as puzzling and full of plot holes as the rest of the anime’s decadent run, without even the power of memes to carry it along. It’s not as notably dumb as the rest of the series and not as smart as any other anime, so you can skip this part if you so desire.
Part 2: Battle Tendency. I don’t know why this one is called “Battle Tendency”, although there are battles, and Joseph is tenacious. This one is my favourite; it strikes the right balance between being corny and trying to tell a coherent story, with less of an emphasis on the mystery plots of Part 3 and Part 4 and more on fighting through a series of tribulations to defeat the Pillar Men with the assistance of those wacky Nazis, who are the good guys, because Japan. Yeah, bet you didn’t think JoJo’s was a Nazi manga, did you? Anyway, much praise has been given to the Pillar Men and their associated meme song due to being particularly menacing in a series full of over-the-top villains, and the lower power level of the main characters compared to the later Stand system means the battles emphasise creative use of the environment rather than the abilities of later protagonists. The story has a strange nobility to it that’s absent in JoJo’s’ other parts, although most of the elements introduced in it are forgotten in Part 3, which means you can skip this part as well.
Part 3: Stardust Crusaders. The big, stupid, rock-’em cock-’em thousand-fist punch that set the Western anime fanbase on fire, giving birth to dozens of dank maymays and out-of-context screencaps which lead to holy shit, is that a motherfucking JoJo’s references the world over. With the release of this season, JoJo’s became the Homestuck of anime, weirdly present in everything yet bizarrely impenetrable to those outside its culture of communicating through screencap edits and spur-of-the-moment JoJokes so insular you could use them to pad an igloo. By far the most brainless section of the series, Stardust Crusaders is famous for dumb, manly fights involving Stands messing with each other in a monster-of-the-week series where Jotaro and Friends try to outsmart the oppressive Stands each villain is introduced with. While there’s never any tension because we know the main characters are always going to win, the intrigue is in seeing the battle of wits play out and the weakness of each individual Stand being exploited. It’s not complicated, but it’s a lot of fun. Since you’ve already seen the best fights in the series through the power of memes, you can skip this part and move on to Part 4.
Part 4: Diamond is Not Crash. Josuke is the most likeable JoJo out of all the JoJos in JoJo’s, but even so, Part 4 is contentious for its particularly meandering narrative and lack of intrigue beyond its final hour. The final battle is a hard-to-follow series of asspulls, with Jotaro from Part 3 coming in and delivering the final blow with his magic time stop powers, which itself was an asspull from Stardust Crusader’s final battle. Still, Part 4 receives high ratings from many fans on the basis of its deliberately-goofy atmosphere and more lighthearted take on the series compared to other parts, with a dramatic shift in art style being the codifier for JoJo’s notoriously flamboyant heterosexuality. Like most of the series, the overarching narrative isn’t too compelling or complete, and the entertainment value comes from the episode-to-episode challenges the characters must contend with, following in the footsteps of the previous part. Even though this part has the right balance between dumb fun and over-the-top action which will make it more interesting for a slightly more mature audience, it’s still fundamentally a silly shounen, and so I recommend skipping this part as well.
Part 5: It Just Works. I’ve never seen this part, but since Part 6 hasn’t gotten an anime adaptation yet, you can skip this one too and wait for the new season to come out. Which is never.
In summary, I still haven’t finished JoJo’s and I’m a worse human being for having any understanding of the memes it spawned. I give JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure a 4 out of 5, just a solid RPG.
Things What I Liked Slightly Less Than Slightly Less
Beyond this point is a vast wasteland separate by a canyon of mediocrity. Where four stars is great and three stars is good, two stars is that uninteresting, unengaging middle ground of being just okay. There’s little of excellence here and what enjoyment I get from these works come from an appreciation of their good parts and an attempt to ignore their bad parts. Enjoy what you will from here, and understand if you like something more than I, that this is just my opinion, and there are no authorities in criticism. Even if I’m right. Which I always am.
I understand 90% of everything is crap, but even attempting to view only media I believe I’ll enjoy, there’s still a lot more works I found just okay rather than was legitimately thrilled to experience. Similar to the last group of reviews, here’s some albums I listened to, got mild enjoyment out of, and have little desire to talk about: Behind the Front and Bridging the Gap by The Black Eyed Peas, Boy In Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal, 1983 by Flying Lotus, 6 Feet Deep by Gravediggaz, Kids See Ghosts by Kid Cudi and Jay-Z’s Bottom Bitch, Oracular Spectacular and Congratulations by MGMT (feat. BRIAN EEENOOO), Scumbag by Bones, Short Dog’s in the House by Short Dog, Paul’s Boutique by Beastie Boys, Sex Packets by Digital Underground, Ridin’ Dirty by UGK, Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives by Prefuse 73, The Powers that B by Death Grips, and The Hands that Thieve by Streetlight Manifesto. Comics include Hex Vet: Witches in Training, Monsters (And Other Stories), My Brother’s Husband, On The Fly, Slow Storm, The Silence of our Friends, and Watersnakes. Games include Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Kart 7, Super Mario Meet N’ Fuck 69 (Super fucking Mario!!!!!), 1 Screen Platformer, Adventure Boy Cheapskate DX, and whatever the hell Molleindustria is making these days. It’s like if Banksy stopped living in a society and reverted to code monke instead.
Gex
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Bexst
God, I want to fuck Gex’s cute little tail hole while he watches trashy scalie pornography and nut in his cloacal cavity as he jizzes all over his black-velvet tiger sheets and cuddles my pale twink body in a sweaty mess of body pillows and musky underwear while he kisses my cheeks and makes Jane Fonda references.
Let’s talk about video games. Hey, it’s Gex! He’s the best! When kids in the 90s think of this charming little lizard, they think of the 3D games and an incredible array of vaguely-horny references to his tail and the time-telling thereof. In fact, Gex was originally a 3DO mascot, even though he debuted in a 2D game, so good console name fellas. He then transitioned exclusively into PlayStation and N64, and thereafter retired to a life of scarfing down nachos and watching trashy scalie pornography — without me. The original Gex was a solid series of linear platforming challenges with vague action elements held together by the theme of each world being based around a stereotypical film genre, including a Chinatown level, which is racist. It was short, but it’s a good game, and despite the unpopularity of the original Gex in favour of the later titles, it’s still a hidden gem with a lot of heart. The main problem is the FUCKING BULLSHIT lives system and still using a password system on a console which had a FUCKING MEMORY CARD. What were they thinking?
The popularity of Gex extended to a videogamegexey video, titled “Gex”, but since he doesn’t make good videos anymore it doesn’t matter. There’s also a charity marathon titled “Gextra Life”, which gives you 25 straight hours of all the tail time you’ll ever need. There’s also that series of artworks where Gex is trans and his husband is Bubsy from 3D, having a Gextuplet of twins all named after Gex games while listening to 100 Gex and having Gex with his Gexy furry BF, which is like penis hour at George Clooney’s house.
Play
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Corporate
Moby is most notable for being stomped by Obie and being a 36-year-old baldheaded fag who blew me. I regret to inform Mr. Nem and his especially strange rap beef with a vegan producer that I do listen to techno, and although his album Play is so far removed from his prior works and manifests as a collection of soul samples put on loop, his post-release strategy of getting every song on the album in every car commercial and every Hollywood movie has diluted every one of its songs to the point where it’s a 2000s nostalgia compilation without the nostalgia. It’s recognizing each sound from a disparate collection of advertisements and mediocre soundtracks without the catharsis of reliving the good old days, and even beyond that the album’s gimmick of setting these samples to backing tracks isn’t interesting enough to sustain a whole album, or even some of the songs themselves due to their repetition and lack of interesting progression.
Even if a few songs, like “Porcelain”, are beautiful and mystifying, so many of the songs feel like an attempt to piece together a landscape of sounds without consideration for the rhythm and pacing of the album format, leaving it a collection of ambient B-side experiments rather than the coherent sum of canonical dancehall classics the album presents itself as. With the hindsight of new innovations in music production since then, Moby’s Play feels quaint and antiquated even compared to the ambient producers before him (such as Orbital, in Orbital 2, with their classic 90’s techno sound), and I just can’t find the heart to like this record even when I want to.
Rocko’s Modern Life
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Uncomfortable
What a bizarre cartoon this is. I watched seven episodes of this series, or 14 episodes if you count each eleven-minute segment as its own episode, and I got it. I also got my nut to the charming wallaby, whose voice is sweeter than any gay blowjob. If Nickelodeon thought this show was for kids, they were smoking some of that sweet CIA cocaine, especially for a cartoon about a newly-adult wallaby and his dumbass friends trying to make their way through the simultaneous mundanity and soul-sucking abrasion of living out on your own when you’ve got no cash, which in the United States is inbetween “convicted serial killer” and “being Black” on the list of crimes which revoke your right to live. You can’t even get a cartoon with an adult premise in 2020, so for a cartoon in 1993 to make it happen, the cocaine must have been whiter than Bill Clinton. What the show does to supplement this mature premise is to throw in a lot of gross-out humour and over-the-top toony body horror, which is to its detriment since the show is funny and surreal enough on its own to stand up without this childish pandering. And what’s with all the eyeball gore? And why was the second episode about Rocko’s neighbours dealing with infidelity and the fat frog chick trying to turn Rocko into an unwitting bull to cuck her husband? I ask all my fellow toonheads: where is the hardcore Rocko cuckold pornography?
For a funnier overview of the series that also features cuckoldry, you can look at RebelTaxi’s review of the show, who also did an unscripted review of the movie UglyDolls in which his girlfriend reveals her pregnancy during a drunken livestream and forgot to take birth control pills while complaining how soft his dick is then started crying while naming the baby after cartoon characters as RebelTaxi talked about the movie Seven Pounds and telling her to shut up and vomit in the bathroom then using the Patreon money to get an abortion while playing the shovelware game Mad Dash Racing, featuring Gex, which is like vagina hour at Will Smith’s house.
RollerCoaster Tycoon
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Unchallenging
A limitless pool of nostalgia for many kids in the 90s, the first impact for a candy-coated obsession with theme parks was RollerCoaster Tycoon being shipped with cereal boxes. Back in the 90s, there existed this media format called a “CD”, with which you could install PC games, and having these games sold inside breakfast cereal boxes is one of those obscure pieces of 90s nostalgia which zoomers wouldn’t believe even if you showed them photographic evidence. While it’s no doubt a sandbox experience which lets you create and theme a park to your sick desires, pragmatically anything you create in the game will look decent due to the pixel art being unmatched in any game, and the built-in scenarios already give you a set number of rides and aesthetics which best fit the theme of the scenario. These scenarios are typically trivial due to the stupidity of your park guests and the ease they’ll spend money, to the point where you can have a park consisting nothing of the same ride and still meet the scenario’s goals in a quarter of the alloted deadline. Amazing things have been created with this game, but outside its expressive potential, there’s little to offer someone looking for a challenge.
Taxi Driver
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Obtuse
Alright, I don’t get it. This is the second time I’ve watched this movie, and I don’t understand what makes it so enjoyed among kino fans. Its innovations in depicting violence and insecure masculinity in 1976 seem to have given it a reputation for peak kinography that stuck with it for 44 years, where its violence is pointless and unimpactful and its exploration of its main character is meandering without offering anything specifically intriguing about him. There’s no continuous plot, instead being a series of vignettes set in New York City, so the city itself is perhaps the protagonist. Even then, it doesn’t offer any commentary on it beyond depicting the seedier, shadier parts of the city and the politicians who are ineffective at dealing with crime — which we already have experience with due to our real-life politics. It’s always on the verge of being too boring to bother with, promising a continuous series of intriguing events without ever delivering on the promise. It’s a movie devoid of meaning and it isn’t even fun to watch. Just watch Scarface. Watch anything else.
The E.N.D.
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Dated
In the late 90s, the Black Eyed Peas was an alternative hip-hop group who gained a small, yet loyal following who appreciated their unique blend of funk and R&B stylings, with honest lyrics which showed a great respect for the rap history they invoked. Songs like “Duet” and “Rap Song” are as early-2000s as they come, and even their later commercial efforts with the massive “Elephunk” and “Monkey Business” albums still remain inventive as far as hip-hop goes. This blend of marketability and soul took a nosedive straight into capitalist hell with “The E.N.D.”, short for “The Energy Never Dies”, which their career did a few years after this astonishingly popular album took over the entire world from 2009-2012. Any trappings of the Peas’ previous hip-hop sound was drowned under a deluge of trashy bangers and basslines so synthetic and brickwalled it set the tone for the decade of mind-numbing electronic dance music to follow. Tracks like “I Gotta Feeling” and “Meet Me Halfway” are forever buried in the memories of those who were once Millenial teenagers, and I feel bad for the new generation of teenagers who will feel a nostalgia even worse than ours… because looking at the pop-rap we have now, those trashy bangers back in the day were actually pretty decent. Even if they suck. Which they do.
Timon and Pumbaa’s Jungle Games
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Unexpected
We’re throwing up all our nostalgic bowels tonight, aren’t we? The 1990s was a bold new frontier for personal computing, where the flexibility of the seemingly-infinite storage capacity of the “CD-ROM” combined with the power of the new-and-exciting computing environment “Windows 3.1” led to big-name entertainment companies like Disney, LEGO, and the guys who made the obscure Strand-type game “Super Mario Bros.” to release a series of software discs which nowadays would be released as a mobile app with ten billion advertisements — or if you really want to get fancy, a browser game. This trend of Disney Activity Centers and LEGO’s bizarre all-in investment on early-2000s PC games is the development equivalent of a Zerg rush, sending out endless variations of the same concepts on the same engines and selling them on the basis of brand power. The death of physical media has taken this practice off store shelves and into the walled gardens of shovelware storefronts like Google Play, where developers face even less scrutiny for their destruction of childhood youths. I remember being pissed in 2015 when The Phantom Pain shipped with a disc that only contained a Steam installer. Now you’re lucky to get a disc at all. You’re paying $80 for a piece of cardboard with an installation code on it, and it doesn’t even fetch basic lands.
Timon and Pumbaa? More like Timon and Pumbass. The joke is that Pumbaa has a big butt, and his butt smells, and he likes to kiss his own butt. Timon also likes it up the butt, as many pornographic images has informed me. The Disney Wiki says “the object of the game is to have fun”, which is never a good sign. Their namesake Jungle Games consist of five minigames, being variants of arcade classics like pinball, Frogger, and Puyo Puyo. They actually have Puyo Puyo in this game, which you might remember as being the shitty game in Puyo Puyo Tetris, albeit with better waifus. All of the games are full of charm with excellent animation and work reasonably well, though their repetitive nature makes this game good for little more than a novelty, and the SNES version doesn’t even come with Puyo Puyo. People paid real money for four minigames back in 1995, although people paid for Undertale in 2015, so we’re all sons of goat bitches.
By the way UNDERTALE GETS 0 STARS BECAUSE IT SUCKS AND BLOWS PENIS OMEGALUL. No, I’m not reviewing it.
Space Brothers
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Glurge
A-1 Pictures is known in the anime community as being the most degenerate pieces of shit garbage anime trashbag fuckboi studio to shitdick the double Hitler bitch weeaboo bullshit otaku anime industry. They are most famous for such excellent productions as “Sword Art Online”, which DigiBronyMLP gave a 6, the Asterix War, which DigiBronyMLP gave a four-hour rant series about, and Shinsekai Yori, which DigiBronyMLP called one of the worst anime they have ever seen. So less than six, then.
A-1 Pictures is the Square Enix of anime — except Square Enix already produces anime, so let’s say they’re the Ubisoft of anime. Their ability to release series that are all at once inane to watch, mind-boggling to attempt to understand, and yet are absurdly popular has made them the top SKUB magnet of the anime fandom, and any discussion of their products instantly becomes made of rage and fail. Their success comes as a result of high-concept stories which fall apart the moment you seriously consider them combined with characters designed to appeal to the basic instincts of people who don’t have the knowledge or cultural experience with anime to understand why their productions are in a far, far lower tier artistically than A-1’s contemporaries. In order words, they make their money off teenagers and idiots.
So I watched Space Brothers, because I like to feel hurt. It was… okay. “It was… okay” is one of RebelTaxi’s catchphrases, who is most famous as a result of inviting esteemed anime scholar DigiBronyMLP onto his podcast and THE STREAMS ARE CROSSING. ABORT. ABORT. Anyway, the show is boring and I dropped it after ten episodes, but it’s not bad enough to warrant any strenuous thought or analysis. The plot is basic and involves an astronaut and his brother who wants to go to space. He applies for JAXA’s astronaut tests and succeeds at every step of the way, with no struggle preventing him from reaching his ambitions. As conflict is the core of all storytelling I believe this is a bad story by virtue there being little. It’s a half-assed plot designed to make you feel good, which it doesn’t because none of the characters are interesting enough for you to feel good about them. Its directing is dull and its art style is uninspiring. There is nothing to care about here and I wish I never watched it. Damn you, /r/anime Recommendation Chart 6.0. Damn you to Hell!
Random Access Memories
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Regressive
Daft Punk comes back to shed off the chains of poverty house music and go straight into the debtor’s prison of disco, releasing an anemic blend of funk and EDM which is somehow more tedious than their prior albums. It’s hard to get more repetitive than saying “around the world” 144 times, but outside the glitz and glamour of the live-band instrumentation and Pharrell Williams being as reliably bankable as ever, you have an album which is both bloated and self-indulgent without any of the interesting synth sounds which made their prior albums so great. Whereas the robot-duo gimmick was charming and innovative on Discovery, it’s worn out its welcome on this album, being used in an attempt to spice up otherwise dull and soulless dance tracks which are a far cry away from the truly awesome disco tracks of olde. Compare the operatic “Do You Wanna Boogie, Hunh?”, or the all-time classic “I Feel Love” to the bored musings of Pharrell on “Get Lucky”, and you realise Daft Punk has constructed a pale imitation of the excellent golden-age staples they obviously took inspiration from.
The lore of Daft Punk is in seeing two robots attempting to recreate human music and to discover themselves through the lens of brief fleeting moments of emotion, which was a story already excellently-told through Discovery, which most Daft Punk fans consider their best work. Instead of using this as a basis to go wild and use the potential of analogue instruments to further this theme, they instead appear to have approached it remaining as robots trying to grasp what makes dance music interesting, using many different sonic elements within each track that don’t add up to anything memorable as a whole. Even the shortest track on Discovery, “Nightvision”, has more humanity in it than any track on Random Access Memories. And to be frank, Daft Punk isn’t fun anymore. The best track the album offers is “Motherboard”, an ambient exploration of synthetic and organic melodies combining into a low-BS six-minute song that actually achieves the album’s goals of exploring emotion through technological means. That’s fun. Not Giorgio Moroder musing about his life to a Discovery B-side. Not monotonous singing by big-name features. Discovery and Homework are fun — not this record. Not Random Access Memories.
Also, Panda Bear went from composing one of the most beautiful and chilling indie pop tracks, “Bros.”, to singing the chorus for “Doin’ It Right”, which is four minutes of filler on an album seventy-four minutes long. At least Panda Bear released two more albums. Daft Punk fans get dick.
Sidescrollers
Stars: ★★☆☆ 2/4. One-word review: Gaming
Bro, what if, like, your life was like a video game? Some publisher somewhere saw those webcomics involving two dudes on a couch Just Gamin’ and decided to pick up a comic written by someone cashing in harder than busting open your favourite lootboxes and getting your Factory New Butterfly Knife to steal the dub and win that epic chicken dinner!
Sorry, writing that sentence made me suicidal. I’m sorry to announce the “teenage slackers hit the EPIC gaming” genre of webcomics, in which two douchebags terrorise each other while cracking wise about such classic titles like The Guy Game and 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand, is fucking dead. It was dead in 2007 when “Powerup Comics” predicted post-ironic Internet humour a decade early, it was dead in 2008 when Zero Punctuation took a diarrhea dump on the half-baked creations of Penny Arcade clout-chasers and made a loss.jpg joke a decade before the Loss (Comic) Wikipedia article, and it was dead in 2009 when “Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff” featured a comic in which Sweet Bro bangs Hella Jeff’s mom while Gaming, spawning the greatest webcomic of all time and becoming the only good thing to come out of Homestuck that isn’t a shipping-obsessed catgirl.
So Sidescrollers. It’s a comic about three teenage layabouts who are Gaming, perhaps Epically. It was banned by a Connecticut school district, which proves Americans still live in a society. There are Gaming references throughout and it’s a rather stupid comic. As it was published in 2008, many of the topics will come as quaint and unexpectedly earnest compared to our post-post-nu-ironic-dank-stanky-maymay Internet humour environment, where hitting the floss comes as naturally as beating your wife for interrupting your Fortnite dub. When searching for “download sidescrollers comic” on DuckDuckGo, I got results for “Games | Jasonafex”, “Top NSFW games tagged Furry — itch.io”, and “Top Platformer NSFW games — itch.io — Download the latest …”. Download the latest what? DOWNLOAD THE LATEST WHAT???
In summary, this comic is fucking cursed, and will be sent into the sun like a Shinku Hadouken sends Gamer energy into a Twitch streamer’s monitor. Just broke a $1,500 computer monitor because I couldn’t control my Gamer Moment, talk about an /r/LivestreamFail! Okay Gamers, let’s get this bread. Free V-bucks Generator — Free Fortnite V-Bucks 2020 Powerful Features Our Fortnite Generator Can Give each Player up to 13,500 V-Bucks just by Single click. No Human Verification Needed. 100% Working! How to Get Free V Bucks in Fortnite I will give you 100% Woking Fortnite free v bucks generator 2020. The last one standing wins. Available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One & Mac.
Things What I Liked Much More Slightly Less Than Slightly Less Than Slightly Less
There are no honourable mentions for this category because video games are SHIT, anime is SHIT, and everything you like is SHIT. I’m over here shilling my recommendations for you to sift through in this sorting hat called life, and I’m still forced to play all these shitty games that suck ass for the sake of giving you that KNOWLEDGE. And I didn’t even get my Free Fortnite V-Bucks 2020 Powerful Features. This reminds me of that bisexual bird furry who shills his Fortnite creator code underneath his bisexual bird furry porn, and this isn’t harassment because some random furry blog pointed it out before me. First of all, purchasing a Brazilian computer that can run Fortnite costs more Reals than the net worth of a soybean farmer with twelve acres of land. Second of all, if I knew I was getting my nut to Fortnite, I would have gone back to 2013 and zerked it to those Minecraft creeper girls and Source Filmmaker pony videos which are just erotic enough to avoid getting taken down from YouTube yet still fetishistic enough so I can get my adolescent wank on. Third, I’m also reminded of that Rebeltaxi video where he plays Fortnite on a Mexican server and enacts a race war against his own nationality despite not knowing Spanish, which on the Rebeltaxi cringe scale is inbetween destroying his bedroom while screaming that Quagmire is the best character in Family Guy and interviewing a 35-year-old diaper fetish Sonic furry and personally drawing his diaper fetish Sonic furry OC. In a diaper.
Now that I’ve talked about masturbating to Fortnite, Minecraft, and incidental diaper fetish, I will give my honest and unbiased review of Fortnite through the lens of someone who has ignored it through the past three years of its existence, and who has only played it for five minutes on some dude’s Nintendo Switch at a Magic: The Gathering draft party in a frat house with a full-tower gaming PC in the kitchen and various rolling papers littered around the living room, where it was after midnight and bicycling home in the midst of drunk drivers and teenagers wrecking bus stops gave me visions of untimely death, but at least I money-drafted a 50¢ basic Swamp.
Fortnite
It sucks.
Cyberpunk 2077
Stars: ★☆☆☆ 1/4. One-word review: Good
All I want to say is I pirated this game, it ran at 30fps at 720p on my $2,000 computer, and crashed my desktop within an hour.
Thank you, Cyberpunk 2077, for my free demo. I will eagerly wait until it receives a deep discount and optimisation patches, after which I will gladly spend the money to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
Also, the best review I read of this game came from The Register, titled “There’s a great game within screaming to get out, but sadly it was released 57 years too early”. Here’s the rub. The Register isn’t a gaming publication; it’s an information security publication. The game has an 86 on Metacritic and 68 positive reviews to one single negative review for a video game that is objectively broken. Why is a security website doing a better job at reviewing video games than the fucking video games media? This hobby is retarded.
Hollow Knight
Stars: ★☆☆☆ 1/4. One-word review: Manipulative
I wasn’t going to review this because I played two hours of Hollow Knight ten months ago, decided it wasn’t for me, and moved on with my life like the sane and rational human being I am — stop laughing. However, there’s one reason why I decided to pull down my trousers and shit on this game. I was looking at the negative reviews on Steam to see if anyone else had the same initial impressions, and found this review by “Sissy Femboy”, with 131 hours on record (46.3 hours at review time):
“Higher beings, these words are for you alone.
“Stop looking at negative reviews and buy the game already.”
Fuck you, random Steam user. I didn’t go trawling through the opinions of the proletariat to get my dick jerked in a circle over some random dipshit indie game whose newly-minted millionaire developers don’t give a shit about you or anything you have to say about their game. I went through the negative reviews because I wanted negative fucking reviews, not a false consensus single-handedly expressed by some dipshit teenager with an ahegao avatar who played 84 more hours of a single video game in the year since their review. This cancer of weird nerds refusing criticism of video games made by people they don’t know, they don’t care about, and have no formal relationship with damages our public discourse by creating sacred cows out of flawed products and chilling all discussion of art which does not fall in line with the censorial demands of the tastemakers who get fucking nothing, absolute fucking dick out of defending them from strangers on the Internet. If you’re so obsessed with one hobby that you can’t handle random people having a below-average opinion on a game you enjoy, and if you’re so obsessed with a single game to the point where you need to shit up Steam’s handful of negative reviews when it already has 125,000 positive reviews, then there’s something wrong with you psychologically and you need to consider a different hobby before it takes over your life more than it already has.
Here’s why I dropped Hollow Knight. The combat was stale and consisted of weaving back and forth between bugs while attacking them lamely with your sword’s single attack. The environment is mind-numbing and the animation and art design did not appeal to me whatsoever, consisting of that vaguely-soulless digital animation which always looks bad as new animation technologies come to fruition, unlike the timeless pixel-art and engaging science fiction setting of Super Metroid. Since Hollow Knight steals the McDonald’s ketchup packets off Super Metroid’s table, I would expect it to understand that grinding for currency is one of the worst aspects of any Metroidvania, let alone for having to unlock something as basic as a fucking map. Even then, it’s not like the setting is interesting enough to make me want to explore it. Oh, no, a fictional animated bug is trapped inside a virtual cage and is making crying noises made by some nameless voice actor four years ago. Why don’t you just dome a puppy in the head and get the pissbaby emotional manipulation over with? Man, just play Dust: An Elysian Tale. And make some more Fidget art. I don’t care if she has 700 images on e621; that whore fox Krystal has 8,000, and there’s only room for one formative furry waifu in this here town.
The Beginning
Stars: ★☆☆☆ 1/4. One-word review: Mindless
So the Black Eyed Peas took their victory lap with The E.N.D. and continued on their trend of releasing trashy dance bangers for Millenials who want to get shitfaced on Four Lokos and have unprotected sex in the club’s bathrooms, deciding to put out The Beginning, which has a similar name to The E.N.D., aren’t we clever? It’s garbage. The beats are generic, none of the lyrics matter, the vocal performances are phoned-in autotuned monotony, and nothing in this album has contributed anything meaningful to hip-hop, EDM, or any other genre in the decade since its release. They then took the next six years to run away with their tails between their legs before ruining one of their good tracks with a similarly awful remix of “Where Is The Love?”, titled “#WHEREISTHELOVE”, which Thee Anthony Fantano called “100% throw-up cringe, I want to die”, before naming it the sixth worst song of 2016.
Black Eyed Peas went on to release their first album in eight years, titled “Masters of the Sun, Vol 1.”, of which there is no Vol. 2 because who gives a heck. I didn’t even bother finishing it. All I remember from my experience is the totally inessential Slick Rick feature, where he repeats his famous “to the tick-tock, you don’t stop” line sampled from “La Di Da Di”, which has more charisma in five minutes than the Peas have managed in ten years. I guess the B.E.P. was too B.R.O.K.E. to afford a verse from an out-of-fashion hip-hop legend. Really, Fantano sums up the Peas’ existence more passionately than I can manage:
“This new Black Eyed Peas record pretty much embodies the power of low expectations, because not only has the band disappeared from the studio album scene for like eight years, for the decade before that — the aughts — they just released nothing but trash. So you release garbage for like ten years, then for eight years, you do nothing, and then you come back with like a C-minus record. A C-minus! A barely-okay album of somewhat conscious, somewhat thoughtful, kinda jazzy rap songs that are cool and laid back — pretty corny lyrics though. A C-minus record, and people are like, ‘Whoa, man, whoa! Have you heard this, it’s-it’s amazing! Oh my God! Oh my God!’. All the Black Eyed Peas accomplished here is… they came out with a record that wasn’t complete garbage. Which they could have been doing for a long time now, but they just decided not to, because — in the year of our lord 2018 — that is when the Black Eyed Peas need to start coming out with ‘political music’, and, uh… jazz rap. Please.”
Terror in Resonance
Stars: ★☆☆☆ 1/4. One-word review: Dull
The English title for the anime “Zankyou no Terror”, the most notable thing about this series is “Zankyou” sounding a bit like “thank you”. Thank you to the /r/anime recommendation chart 6.0 for suggesting me this garbage, even though it also recommends Kino’s Journey, which dare I say is b-b-b-based??? If you want a series where one-note characters melodramatically emote at each other with little intrinsic motivation and the occasional dumbass explosion, here you go cunts. This is a show where the main characters are teenage terrorists from a concentration camp who blow up government buildings while fucking with the police like the Zodiac killer, and they still made it boring. There’s also a girl, whose personality is “domestic abuse victim”, and the two characters use her to their ends despite being a massive liability. Don’t worry, this potentially interesting turn of events never happens, because she doesn’t matter. In fact, nothing in this series matters. It’s eleven episodes long and there’s not enough story for three. You could instead watch Monster, which is a 26-episode series which also doesn’t go anywhere and yet bloats its runtime to 74 episodes. You know what, just watch JoJo’s. The dudes are hotter and the girls show more skin. Who cares if an anime is intelligent? Just make it bloody interesting!
Speaking of JoJo’s, I remember this meme comparing the age of 17-year-old Jotaro Kujo with 17-year-old Konata Izumi, who looks significantly younger and has 300 less pounds of muscle. This confusion of canonical age extends even to Western toonheads, such as RebelTaxi, who said 14-year-old Sailor Moon wasn’t hot then had legendary pervert ZONE-tan explain Japan’s age of consent, where he then coincidentally planned an immediate vacation to Japan while the police arrived at his doorstep as he said he didn’t do anything wrong, then shilled his “Pan Pizza, Trouble in Tokyo” movie, rated PG. He then thanked ZONE-tan for appearing on the show after sexually harassing her with a picture of cartoon ass then getting a response four months later and saying they’ve in love but she doesn’t know it yet and then thanked her on Twitter by sending a heart emoji and saying “a pleasure to jerk with you”. On the plus side, anime pussy.
World of Warcraft Classic
Stars: ★☆☆☆ 1/4. One-word review: Devoid
I’m sucking your left nut if you think I paid to play this shit. Inbetween banning professional players to protect Chinese communists, shitting the bed with Starcraft 2’s permanent irrelevance, and making Overwatch 2 — of all the games that needed a sequel, Overwatch Fucking 2, the game that proved players would still buy lootboxes in a $40 video game — Blizzard Entertainment decided to regurgitate an old version of the world’s most popular Skinner box then sell it back to the same Gamers who’ve had a monthly subscription since 2004, to which they’re now suggesting adding in the first expansion pack thus continuing the cycle of making the same damn product twice. Blizzard is quite possibly the games company with the highest ratio of mind-numbing bullshit to number of obsessive fans, who will literally throw away the source code to Starcraft in exchange for Razer headphones and a Diablo 3 bottle opener.
They are simultaneously infuriating to watch conduct business and soul-crushing to see the hordes of idiots who are so addicted to their products that it overtakes their personalities and the corporation becomes a part of their waking lives, and for this they are my favourite gaming company, because no other developer exposes the nihilistic hell that is our existence quite like they do. In exchange for constructing addiction platforms which manipulate the basic neurological tenets of the human consciousness and shallow multiplayer games designed to sucker in casual Gamers with nothing else to spend their time with, the Activision Blizzard company has earned a net worth of twenty billion dollars and have become the single largest games company in North America and Europe. Nothing Blizzard creates has any cultural impact outside its cult of cattle except for inspiring hordes of Overwatch rip-offs looking to form their own addiction platforms and get their own twenty-billion-dollar bag. No other company is so astonishingly popular and yet so utterly inessential to the culture of the industry they exist in. Except for Ubisoft. And Bethesda. And Rockstar and EA and Konami and Square Enix and those guys who made Among Us and Fall Guys and — look, I just… Assassin’s Creed is a good franchise. I just can’t stop playing it. I can’t stop Gaming on the Ubisoft® Connect® digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications service BUY SKYRIM FOR SWITCH.
Soyrld of Soycraft Soylassic is a SOYRPG where you play as the character Warcraft as you explore a World. You stand in one place and click the spell button with your mouse. You then level up your character, which gives you a sense of accomplishment because acquiring skills in the real world gives you panic attacks. You then get a sidequest which tells you to go to a spot and collect twelve bat scrotums from the magic skeletons, which will then reward you with five spider legs and twelve Munny, which converts into three-and-a-half Gil at the rate of sixteen Pokédollars per Nuka-Cola Simoleon. You get another sidequest which tells you to stand in another spot and kill more spiders. I am a necromancer controlling demons from Hell standing in an empty field picking flowers and manually casting Shadow Bolt three hundred times so my numbers increase so I can do more numbers to other numbers. I am using a private server with three times the normal experience gain. I am currently considering suicide.
Ay yo, fuck World of Warcraft. Fuck Blizzard. Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck Gamers. Trans rights, Black lives matter, Bernie would have won, fuck all ya’ll hoes, fuck all ya’ll bitches, support your sex workers, listen to my mixtape, buy my blog, murder your kids, do hard drugs, stay in school, and floss your motherfucking teeth. Bitch.
Among Us
Stars: ★☆☆☆ 1/4. One-word review: Drama
I’m done with Among Us Tuesdays. I’m sorry to all the Among Us Tuesday fans out there but I’m just not feeling it anymore. When I first got into Among Us I thought it was such a great and fun game to play with my friends, and it was for a time. You’re deceiving people, you’re trying to outsmart and trick your friends… it’s a very social game, and it can be a lot of fun. But lately it’s just gotten so stale and played-out. Really, what is this game? You walk around a spaceship doing chores, and that’s exactly what they are: chores. The stupid card-reading part doesn’t even work. Uh, look at this, it doesn’t even work. And you do chores until somebody dies and then everybody gets into a big argument and starts yelling over each other. There used to be a time where I looked at Among Us with joy. But now I look at the logo, and the little minions, and I feel nothing but sadness and despair.
Just last Sunday, we were streaming on my Twitch channel, and, uh, we were playing with Jack Black and Will Smith and they actually got legitimately mad at each other because Will Smith was hopping in and out of the vents, and he kept doing it and he was having a blast, and then Jack Black saw that and voted him out. So Will started crying and swearing, and then he went “you are not my father!”, and he left the room, and we said “Will, Will, what-what’s going on? Are you okay, man? What’s going on?”. And he sounded really angry, he was like “no, I’m good, I’m just gonna go play a different game, man. And, uh, I don’t wanna do this”. And I said, “well, Will, what game are you gonna go play?”. And he said, “Fortnite”. Among Us Sunday really ended up being Drama Sunday, and then Drama Monday comes and I put my Logan Paul video out, and then all these people that I’m starting a drama with start sending me DMs on Twitter going, “hey are we cool bro?”, and they’re all confused, and I have to be like “look dude, it’s just for a Drama Monday. What happens on Drama Monday stays on Drama Monday”.
So, it just, it feels like so long ago now that I decided to stop making good videos, but now every time I boot up Among Us and see the characters, it sickens me. It sickens me to ever think I have to play this horrible video game ever again. I miss playing games like Mario, you know, Donkey Kong. Battle Garegga, that good stuff, man. Metal Gear Solid. Tekken. DOOM. Smash Bros. Those are the video games that inspire me. Not Among Us. This game is ruining my life. But even more than that, the reality of the situation is that, really, I just want to focus more on Among Us Thursdays. That’s where I do all my best content.
League of Legends
Stars: ★☆☆☆ 1/4. One-word review: Cheesy
I’m done with videogamedunkey. How was I supposed to know he was going to give The Last of Us Part 2 a positive review despite liking The Last of Us and calling it the tenth best game of 2013, liking every game in the Uncharted games series made by the same developers, liking the Jak and Daxter series by the same developers, liking the Crash Bandicoot series by the same developers, making a video parodying the leaked spoilers for the game, making a video saying he was excited for the game two years ago with Dunkey’s E3 2018, and making a video where he spends eighteen minutes arguing with… YouTube comments… about how much he enjoyed The Last of Us Part 2. This turn of events completely blindsided me, I had no way to predict he was going to give The Last of Us Part 2 a positive review, which is a game that’s like three Hitlers stapled together, and despite never playing The Last of Us Part 2, or playing The Last of Us, or playing any Naughty Dog game made in the past twenty years, or owning a PlayStation 4, or reading any reviews of the game, or talking about the game, or knowing anybody who talked about the game, or caring about the game’s existence whatsoever, I am so mad. This is the most upset I have ever been by a nitpicking and biased video games journalist, and for that reason, I am no longer watching videogamedunkey’s video game videos.
Anyway, I found these League of Legends videos from this obscure YouTuber called “videogamedunkey”, and although he only has 6.5 million subscribers and 2.8 billion views, given how much work he’s put into his “League Vids” series, I just had to give a shout-out to a fellow YouTuber who’s as big of a fan of League of Legends as I am. League of Legends is honestly one of the most fun and entertaining games ever created — I mean Riot Games really knocks it out of the park with all of their products, I honestly think they’d be one of the best companies to work for, and League of Legends is probably one of the deepest and most strategically-expansive video games ever created, there is no other video game with as much intellectual gameplay as League of Legends, the skill ceiling just seems infinite, the engine is extremely solid, and you know I’m just in awe at League’s intuitive design, it’s extremely accessible to new players, the announcers are just on point, every character is viable, and League of Legends is quite possibly the greatest video game of all time. Even more so than, uh. World of Warcraft. Which is the second-greatest.
Because I am a fucking idiot, I downloaded League of Legends during the brief period of time before Riot implements their literal rootkit and makes it impossible for Linux users to use Wine to run the game, and started practising my Miss Fortune onetrick (not the lesbian furry from a good game) to increase my MMR from 1,300 to 1,500 and smite those filthy Li Li players like a true Hero of Newerth®. Man, I played like twelve games of League before turning that shit off. I clocked in 2,000 hours of DOTA 2 by the time I was 18, and that was enough of a time waste for one lifetime. Every step of the way I noticed how every mechanic League has already exists in DOTA 2 in a more complex and interesting fashion, with matches that feel less like a battle of wits and more like waiting for some moron to pick a fight they can’t win and then getting fat off that one throw. The matches are too short, the builds are too linear, the jungling system makes no goddamn sense, you get free invisibility by standing in a fucking bush, it’s too easy to burst down random dudes, and despite being a total noob I still got sixteen kills in my third online game. I didn’t even play as Porn Cat because she wasn’t unlocked that week. By the way you have to pay for champions in League, OMEGALUL.
However, there is one aspect of League that is undeniably based, and that is the pornography. The character designs of this game may not be strictly better than DOTA 2’s champions, especially from an industrial design perspective, but Riot’s ability to create so many fuckable characters of so many different species — including the underappreciated female shortstack demographic — is heads and tails above anything VALVe® has made in any of their games. Combine this with League having a player base approximately the size of the known universe, and you have hordes of normies coming in to make a never-ending stream of cartoon pornography for sick perverts like me to sneak a cheeky nut to. You got the anthro furries, the feral furries, the shortstack furries, the fish furries, the abomination of whatever the hell Neeko is supposed to be furries, and you even have 130 characters who aren’t furries. Meanwhile, all DOTA 2 has got over here is Slark with his Linken’s Sphere shoved up his ass. True, Slark is such a perfect little twink grump that he’s worth ten Porn Cats, but man cannot subsist off fish alone. And by fish, I mean fish ass. And by subsist off, I mean eat.
I think we can settle this empirically. Number of e621 entries for “league_of_legends”: 12,118. Number of e621 entries for “dota”: 1,548. This means League of Legends is 7.8 times better than DOTA 2. Sorry anime subreddits, looks like the facts override your feelings. Should have voted for the Yang Gang, baybee…
The Conclusion
In creating this whirlwind series of reviews, not-reviews, and blatant plagiarism, I learned something today. One, the numbers of series which bring me true happiness is far less than the number of series which bring me much less happiness, and viewing art is always an attempt to filter through endless streams of media which don’t appeal to you in order to find those very few artworks which embed themselves into your bloodstream like Bob Ross’s crack cocaine. Two, this deliberate curation of art leads to much frustration when you go through a seemingly-endless troth of never-ending media only to find those few, fleeting hidden gems which you might not even grow as attached to as a really obvious recommendation from a devoted fanbase who have been shilling it for years. This is the main reason why my reviewing stint on Kratzen burned me out; it was exhausting to go through dozens of indie games just to find those few I could intelligently argue in favour or against. Third, UNDERTALE SUCKS.
My years-long joke of Undertale being terrible comes from my time being exposed to the game through Tumblr, and any refugees from that period will know it was less an expression of fandom and more like a warzone. The Undertaleers took over the website through weaponised cuteness, biochemical pornography, and Jokes of Mass Destruction. Unlike the bronies only developing a small, tight-knit outpost on Tumblr and remaining confined in their own pastel wonderland, the Undertale fanbase had much more influence on the website and was similar in popularity to the then-waning Homestuck fanbase. The official Undertale Tumblr became one of the website’s most popular Tumblogs, and its fans benefited from being born in a post-Dashcon world. Where the other Tumblr fandoms like Homestuck and SuperWhoLock had been made quite the ponce in the public arena, the site embraced this inoffensive little indie game and all the memes within as a palate cleanser to get away from the newly-ironic personality the website had grown as a coping mechanism. Of course, the honeymoon period would soon end, and Undertale would turn into the cancer it was a brief respite from, going the way of Steven Universe and Five Nights at Freddy’s in overstaying their welcome and devolving into incestuous shitposting and occasional attempted murder.
After surviving Ground Zero of the Undertale fandom and weathering the resultant fallout for several months, I felt the build-up of bad puns and mediocre skeleton pornography wither my skin like radiation, turning me as cynical and jaded as a PTSD victim unable to feel human emotion due to Charlie stealing his hypothalamus. I cracked under the pressure, put on my designer Rainbow Dash drip, and became an explorer from the Brony Motherland to find out for myself the greatness of Undertale from the perspective of one cancer fandom to another. I played through the game, and I was absolutely enchanted by what I saw. I laughed, I cried, I cringed, and I have to say, without irony, that Undertale is perhaps the single greatest video game I have ever played. There is no other game that combines its sense of humour with its cartoon art style and its relatable characters, just a good story, and the gameplay is incredible, it really makes you feel like your choices matter. You know, you got the funniest jokes, you got the tightly-knit story with no scruples, you got uh, so many relevant side characters. Everyone matters, the plot makes perfect sense. It’s just, it’s such a good game. The gameplay is so tight. Like you’re mom.
But after having my dick, balls, and socks blown off by the masterpiece that is Undertale, being so obsessed with the game’s absolutely astonishing quality to the point of singing its praises at any opportunity and going into a whole off-topic rant on the history of Undertale and its effects on me as a human being and all the fandom stories ever since its inception in 2010 and the nine seasons therein, just a solid RPG, I would soon come across an even more daunting video game. A video game of such magnanimous joy, of such doubleplusgoodliness, that it’s like if Skryim and Super Mario Odyssey had a baby with The Last Of Us Part 2, it’s that good, and it’s even better than you’re mom, and that game, of that Gamer’s game… is…
Undertale 2.
Froge Reviews: Undertale 2
The prospect of Undertale 2 was once upon a time a mere Tumblr-tier joke in the vein of Minecraft 2 and Fortnite 3, where the intrinsic weirdness of something as self-contained and yet contradictorily all-expansive as Undertale would mean any sequel to it would have to live up to the expectations of being possibly the single most beloved indie game of all time. It would be like creating a a sequel to Homestuck, which in itself was a never-ending story of never-ending proportions, and any attempt to continue it would mean the fanbase would be in a quantum state of perpetual dissatisfaction from not following the source material and perpetual fangasmic bliss from all the stupid fandom bullshit being included in such an effort, because the mere existence of Homestuck 2 would be a bigger effort in fanwank than an impromptu orgy at a furry convention with free HIV testing. Of course Homestuck 2 exists, Davekat is now Canon, and Undertale 2 was released under the name “Deltarune”, which is an anagram of the letters in “Undertale”. Because Homestuck was made by Andrew Hussie, and Undertale was made by his bastard child Toby Fox, who is even more autistic.
I originally reviewed Undertale in 2017 on the 10kB gallery, underneath fanart of the trans robot, whose original source page has since dove into the Bermuda Triangle. The review remains functional despite being written four years ago when I had the writing talent of a small worm, a little wormy boy, wiggle wiggle woo. “Fans of Froghand will know that taking the piss out of Undertale is a running gag, for two reasons: (1) it’s an easier target than the broadside of a barn, and (2) for about six months after it came out it filled me with a combination of dread and envy, and then I realised what it was like to be a basement dweller so I just tempered off of that”. Nothing has changed since then. Undertale remains well pissed-on, I remain dreadenvyful, and it still gets enough porn to warrant shooting at the broadside of Toriel’s stonking goat tits — and also stonking goat arse. What I find funny about her character is how she’s canonically slim and with reasonably-sized badonkadonks, but in the war between canon and coom, the coomers find a way to wank another day.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
And with the waifu wars come, the uh, the game they are supposedly — oh, bloody hell, I only get two phone calls a week. I guess today’s combination of bomb threat and Chinese embassy scam comes to us courtesy of… Floge. Oh boy, haven’t heard from him in a while, especially since he moved out of my living room and made The Dwarf even more estranged and delusional. I normally don’t mention my family’s futile attempts to contact me from beyond the veil of tendies and Gamer musk, but so long as we’re being arbitrary, we might as well let this unexpected event spring forth from the well of… oh, fuck it. Hello?
> Don’t review the Deltarune game.
> Dude, you’ve had the same phone for eight years. You know who this is.
Oh, right, caller ID and all the benefits resultant from those fine exercises in technological goodliness. So uh, what’s up?
> It’s underwhelming. You know it’s not bad enough to be funny.
Who ARE you!?!?!?!?!?
> Just okay waifus, too.
Yeah, I guess the designs were repeating themselves since Undertale.
> Also, Susie is hotter than Undyne.
Alright, but Noelle is cuter than both of them, right?
> Of course.
Yes! You see, I told you guys I wasn’t a pedophile.
> Hello?
Uh-yeah, I’m here. Look, can you get to the point? Talking to myself for too long reminds me of that fucked-up exercise in selfcest I posted.
> The anticipation of reviewing a game after making fun of its series for years will be even more disappointing and as ultimately unsatisfactory as the game itself. The joke of Undertale only works if you never bother to explain why it sucks, and your misstep in the 10kB review was making a review at all, no matter how fair it is. You should go back to reviewing other bad games instead of reviewing a game whose only notability in your life comes from porn, because no matter how well you articulate your points as to why you dislike Toby Fox’s body of work, the end result will always be less interesting than off-handedly throwing insults and never explaining your opinions.
That may be true for a less-skilled writer, but you’ve consistently underestimated my body of work and have failed to properly understand the motivations for writing in the particular style that I do, which is strange considering how articulate you are even compared to me. I don’t put jokes in my rhetoric for the sake of novelty, I do it because they augment the points I make by associating a positive feeling with my argument, in the same way all good presenters do through their own personal usages of charisma and emotional effect. Reviewing Deltarune isn’t just about being the climax to a joke which I originally started because I genuinely thought Undertale was overrated; it’s about actually expressing my opinions on something I’ve mentioned in passing forever and yet rarely showcase in my work. It’s not an obligation, nor is it a termination. It’s an opportune time to express my ideas on the series as a whole half a decade after they’ve been praised by every single other writer who isn’t me, and in that sense, it is perfectly fair for me to express my opinions on Deltarune for this first and only time.
> Okay. Being polite doesn’t work with a whimpering far-gone garbage bag of human jizz such as the sibling I’ve been cursed to share an Earth with, so I’m giving you a choice here. You got full Matrix going on, some Hannibal Buress Morpheus shit, the red pill and the blue pill. You know about the redpill? Because I’m about to redpill you.
Will it be Black crime statistics or trans suicide statistics this time around?
> Silence, bottom. You got two choices here, pick a hand and pick a path. You take the blue pill. You review Deltarune, or Undertale 2, or whatever it is you zoom-zoomies do in your Froge subreddit cult. You give it an honest shake, like shaking your little dick after you piss in the potty after jacking it to other people’s furry imaginary friends, and you tell your fans all about how you thought the game is mediocre. Because you’re supposed to do that, you’re supposed to find it wanting, and that’s what you do, brother. You kill off the joke of pissing off the little baby Undertale fans and you go back to your lifestyle of watching cartoons and whining about them to your audience of twelve people and The Dwarf. You take your oldest tradition and you dump all over it for some misguided sense of closure. You fall asleep. You’re complacent, brother. You’re bluepilled.
> Or, you take my other hand, you take the soft hand, and you swallow that red pill nice and deep. You cut off the Deltarune review, you never give your opinions on it, and the joke stays alive. It remains attached to your persona, an inoperable vestigial part you hang around your blog like I hang around you in hopes of desperate incestuous sex. You stop your own closure of a running gag you’ve held onto since the beginning of your hobby, and instead gag yourself like a well-trained sub. But that ain’t self-censorship. Oh, no, buddy. That’s the real redpill. Because in killing the review, you keep the meme alive. You’ll never review Deltarune, just like all the other popular memes you’ve refused to acknowledge, like that visual novel with the suicidal chicks, or that cartoon with the faggy spider. You’ll get to keep pissing and shitting and cumming all over Mr. Fox’s beloved video games all you want, because you can’t make anything other than piss and shit and cum, and all you’re good for is bitching about irrelevant garbage inbetween fleeting moments of superiority and pretentious whining about shit only you care about. You’re a useless autistic faggot, and that’s the real redpill. You’ll always be useless and autistic and a faggot, but at least you’ll be slightly funnier while you’re at it.
> What’s it going to be, brother? You either find yourself in the infinite dream of the perfect blue, or find yourself eyes-wide-shut with the never-satisfied intrigue of furious red.
Should I go back to reviewing LISA?
> You could also suck it up and finally read Homestuck.
No, I think I’ll kill myself instead. Listen, I’m going to go back to entertaining the proletariat now. Love you!
> …
Sorry — force of habit! Bye!
Beep.
It wasn’t a force of habit.
Guys. Guyn’ts. What are you expecting from me? It’s Undertale 2. It’s a half-baked emotionally-manipulative trainwreck with one-dimensional characters, brainless gameplay, and a fake façade of intelligence underneath a very simple story incomprehensibly-told that Toby hasn’t even bothered to finish before release. Soyboys will like it because they’re not emotionally-mature enough to understand good storytelling, and the coomers will like it because it throws in ten thousand characters for you to make porn of. Toby Fox is the A-1 Pictures of gaming: all concept, atrocious execution, and yet continues to make money off of the charlatans who support his slop. It’s not worth condemning because it’s not even bad enough to be remarkable; it’s mediocre through-and-through, mind-bogglingly inane, and giving it any respect denigrates what little self-respect I have for myself.
So I’m going to do what any sane, rational human being is going to do, and I’m going to walk away. I’m stepping away from the Undertale series, I’m going to be grateful it’s irrelevant to my life, and I’m going to do what my fictional half-baked brother would want me to do: take the redpill, and keep the meme alive by taking pot-shots at Mr. Fox’s work without giving it the time of day. He is being enabled by legions of fans with undeveloped taste and a poor sense of what good art involves, and until he proves himself to be capable of producing work that is genuinely excellent and not simply decreed such by the consensus of teenagers and morons, I am going to ignore this little monkey banging on the cages of the games industry, and play some games that actually fucking matter.
And to give some advice to you young folks out there? Make what you want, but don’t expect fame. Make what you want, but don’t expect to be liked. Make what you want, but do it for the sake of making what you want. Don’t do it because you want it to be good. Don’t do it because you’re inspired by someone else. Don’t even do it because I told you to. Because there’s too much art out there for you to be special, and once you get past your ego’s desires to be special, you’ll find yourself with far greater emotional peace, and far greater emotional balance, than you’ll ever have through chasing desires that are out of your control.
Life itself is merely a lesson in humility. Stay humble, folks.
Except for DELTARUNE 69 BAYBEEEEEE, the WINNER of this year’s Most Gamer’s Gamer Game of the Gamer’s Game of the Year Award Award Award Reawarded 2020 Spicy Deluxe Tournament DX Alpha Strike 3S Arcade Super Ultra Omega XRD Revelator 2 EXE:Late[est][cl-r] It’s Better Than Undertale 2 And Skyrim Remastered 3 Plus All The Dark Souls Games And Demon Souls And Dark Souls But Set In Japan Fuck Dark Souls Garbage Franchise Dedicated To Todd “Levine” Druckmann And All The Great Writers Of Video Games And For The Patricians At 4chan Gamers Aren’t Dead Baby Game Of The Year Award Again He Can’t Keep Getting Away With This LOVE MAX SIX STARS XTEND!!!!! And Knuckles Gamers Game of the Game Awards 2020, Last Of Us Part 2 Winner Winner Chicken Dinner Best Game Ever Created Cyberpunk 2077 Praise Geraldo Nobody’s Going To Remember This Shit in Ten Years Lmao Presented By The Woman From Captain Marvel For Some Reason Don Cheadle Sex 2 Trans Rights Don’t Choose Penis 2 Option Worst Decision Of My Life People Actually Paid For This Shit Ah Fuck It I Haven’t Even Played Any Game Less Than Five Years Old, Award!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!1!!1!1!1!!1112, TWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Undertale sucks.