It's sad, when you think about it: at one time, JS was genuinely on his way to becoming a respected pundit, despite his antics and ridiculous persona. All he had to do was manage his career intelligently. He had the tools for it, too; his content was never brilliant, but some of the pieces from his Destructoid days strongly suggest he had at least SOME potential. . . . Now he is just a fat man wearing a ridiculous outfit and screaming stupid shit into the void. Sure enough, he's always been a fat man in a ridiculous outfit, but at least before people had genuine reasons to at least suspect there was more to him than that.
He might get some credit for being more interesting than most of the lot from around that time frame, but the warning signs that we'd end up where we are now were there all along. Earlier in this thread someone brought up an old video from Metokur where he was pointing out issues in games journalism. One example involved Sterling. Jim had done a review of Halo Wars (
archive) while working at Destructoid that he put out despite only playing a small part of the game. Some of the other people who worked with him there checked Sterling's game stats and found that he'd only spent a few hours on the game and hadn't even tried the multiplayer (
archive). There was enough community outcry that Destructoid had to address it and the review (
link) now comes with the following update. Note that the score for the game didn't between the original review and the update after he played game for more then a few hours.
Editor’s note: The original Halo Wars
review was written before I had completed the campaign. This is common in our industry, where reviewers have to make a judgment call as to whether or not they have played enough for review. A number of our readers disagreed with the judgment call made, The Incredible Edible Egg in particular, and as the debate has continued, we have decided to address the issue with a very simple fix.
The campaign was completed, multiplayer was given a run, and now we’re republishing the review. Very little has changed, because completion really didn’t add anything to the opinion, but I elaborated on multiplayer so this is a more comprehensive article for you.
Going forward, we’ll be aiming to bring a game to near-if-not-full completion, and will let you know if that is not the case. We’ve always preferred completed games, obviously, but sometimes it’s not practical. Please don’t expect us to play bad 70-hour RPGs 
I think that some of his presentation style and the topics he focused on were to cover up the fact that he hadn't played as much of the game as he probably ought to have. People like to say that as of late Sterling has grown tired of something he used to be passionate about, but I question how much passion he really had to begin with. Perhaps he just got away with it for so long that he got sloppy or just stopped caring about trying to not let it be so obvious. If you go back and read the page on Destructoid about Sterling (
link) it doesn't seem like Games Journalism was something he really wanted to do, but something he fell into where he could at least make some money. Here's a paragraph from that page where Sterling himself spells it out for us.
Basically, I’d spent many years wasting my life, wandering without any sense of purpose or direction. I tried a career as a live comedian, both sketches and stand up, but results were mixed. I was always a writer at heart though, even though I never truly accepted it. I spent most of my time writing at my personal baby,
Morphine Nation, which was/is social commentary and very angry, curse-laden rantings. I had a small amount of cult success with that, but never anything spectacular. At the same time, I used to drop game reviews for a friend’s website,
Project Wonderboy and occassionally
Earth-2. I’d always been heavily complimented on my game reviews, and told I should go professional, but for some reason I never took the idea seriously.
I don't doubt that a lot of the newer games journalists never really wanted to be there, but couldn't get anything better and had to settle. It's not surprising that they resent the games industry and gamers the way that they do. If someone wants to they could go back and read some of Jim's old reviews. Earth-2 is still around and has some of his reviews posted under Morphine Jim. Project Wonderboy appears to have died a long time ago, but the Wayback Machine has some captures of it. Unfortunately, it looks like Morphine Nation was scrubbed from the internet. There is a dead YouTube channel (
link) that has some random short videos and two episodes of an AVGN knockoff (no Sterling appearances), a Twitter Account (
link) that just tweets links to articles on that site, without any clear indication of any that Jim may have written. Though there are a few that seem like something Sterling certainly could have written. Alas it appears lost to history.
(
link)(
archive)
Sterling always just wanted to write his rants on social commentary, but no one really cared to read them. To some degree the success he had with his YouTube channel did arise due to mixing social commentary into his coverage of gaming, but only to the extent that it was applicable. Maybe Sterling thought he'd found a way to bridge the gap and drag the channel towards the social commentary that he always wanted to give, but people seem to be there for the gaming content. Frankly I think he always seemed to at least enjoy what he was doing when he was talking about weird games or indie titles as opposed to major studio games and he probably could have focused the channel on that niche. Trooning out probably would have driven some people away, but I think a lot of why people are leaving is due to Jim's bitterness at his own audience leaking through.
