The Irate Gamer

I've been binge watching some old AVGN and Irate Gamer videos from back in the day and it's made me realize even more how much I miss the internet from 18+ years ago. 

You see, grooming scandals only happened once in a blue moon, influencers weren't that big back then and most of them were pretty chill people, unlike today where it seems every other influencer has became one just to try to have sex with minors. 

Anyway, don't get me wrong, I was not a fan of Chris Bores (the shit out of us), in fact I considered myself one of his haters and not because of some twisted devotion to AVGN, I can appreciate alternatives to all forms of entertainment, but Chris just sucked. Some of his videos were so bad they were good like the Monster Party video but in general they were bad. 

And they weren't bad in terms of production values, they were bad in terms of writing, a simple way to describe them would be if people from Hollywood decided to make movies on a shoestring budget. I mean his first video was him ripping off AVGN's Back to the Future review, even using the same catchphrases AVGN did. 

He would abuse all the tropes of the angry game reviewer fad back then with things like having guests on every review, toilet humor and profanity, but to top them all off he would add his unfunny humor, inability to play games and overuse of crappy special effects. It might sound crazy but the worst part of his videos were the actual reviews themselves, mainly because he simply sucked at playing them.

Like most angry reviewers back then he was just chasing after a fad, unlike most of them however it was so obvious he wasn't a gamer, he probably played a few videogames in his childhood but holy hell he couldn't even play games like Aladdin on the SNES, Zombies ate my Neighbors, Mario 2 on NES and fucking Tetris so he would blame his complete inability as a gamer on the games themselves, it was painfully obvious when he used game genie to get past areas of a game. 

He couldn't even be bothered to make research on the games he reviewed, for instance he thought the Sega Genesis was made to compete with the SNES as opposed to the other way around. He also seemed to think that the Back to the Future game on NES was released alongside the movie. And for whatever reason he thought Mario 2 was the predecessor to the original Super Mario bros just to name a few examples. 

At some point, I thought we were all getting trolled, there's no way there's someone this stupid I used to think, he must be doing this on purpose to get views, after all YouTube chose him as a partner over AVGN because he used less profanity than AVGN (the irony). But even more baffling to me was that he had fans that would even defend him, although none would his "honor" more than his own mother, that's right, his mother would get into flame wars and insults with random internet strangers. I remember seeing that a YouTuber called Archfiend had proof that LadyBuggin777 (his mom) was just a sockpuppet account, but how was that supposed to make him look good in any way? Maybe it was just trollbait or maybe he really elicited the help of his mom. 

After all, the guy was really delusional, fully embracing the AVGN ripoff gimmick he decided to copy his ykwbs series by ranting about the shapes of lucky charms cereal... I mean, I thought the whole point of the series was to rant about first world problems that mildly inconvenience all of us, you know, relatable problems, who the fuck was supposed to relate to HIS problem with the shapes of a kids' cereal?

Of course, this is far from all the drama surrounding him, he's done some scummy stuff like promoting contests that no one would win or "spoofing" AVGN when he asked for donations for his movie and looking yet again like a moron in the process. And a shitty iOS game that was a reskin and asset flip of another game (the irony) that was lost media for a about 8 years because almost no one bought it. 

I know I've been very negative about him so let's mention a few positive things about him, first of all his irate the 80s series was actually pretty good, he should consider making more of those. He now does unboxing of toys and action figures disguised as a puppet Steve (from Minecraft) and even though it's not my cup of tea, there's nothing particularly wrong with it, if I had a son I wouldn't have a problem with him watching it. Also, he's amended his relationship with AVGN which was a welcome surprise, in fact there was a crossover between the two, although it wasn't much of a crossover since AVGN is barely in it and to top it all off he even puts "inspired by AVGN" in his more recent Irate Gamer videos, which I wholesome for some reason. 

Either way, I'll take this guy over the likes of Onision, Shane Dawson, Dr disrespect, etc. Because at the end of the day, this guy is pretty harmless, in fact a part of me thinks a lot of the hate received was very undeserved. 

So yeah, I miss the days when an AVGN rip-off was the biggest internet villain. A testament to how much worse society has become.