Jim Sterling / James "Stephanie" Sterling / James Stanton/Sexton & in memoriam TotalBiscuit (John Bain) - One Gaming Lolcow Thread

[Arthur Morgan]

I also remember LKD shrieking like a banshee about Joker, the movie that will turn white men into mass shooters (except it didn't). I don't recall if it was that episode or Gavin quitting or whichever came first, but shortly after this period I stopped listening.

Just looked it up. Gavin's final episode was September 27 2019, and Joker came out a week later. So either she was screeching during the lead up or she did it after.

Gavin had actually been stepping away for longer periods over the two years before he finally did, but on the episodes he was on he seemed to be guarded and walking on egg shells, unless Laura was absent from the episode and he seemed way more relaxed and talkative. Unfortunately, Dale was very rarely absent.

 

[Elagabalus]

I suppose it would be worth dedicating a section in the hypothetical new OP to Jim's podcasts, since he's had at least 5 by my count (Podtoid, Dismal Jesters, Boston's Favourite Son, whatever he calls that shit with LKD...was Fist Shark Marketing a podcast or just Conrad's business?)

Fistshark marketing was indeed a podcast of improv comedy that I found quite hard to listen to even when I was a fan of Jim and his old skits on podtoid/dismal jesters. They still have a youtube page of their episodes and there seemed to be 145 episodes before getting canned in 2018.

https://archive.org/details/podcast_fistshark-marketing_901220263?tab=collection

A bit more obscure, but he also hosted a relatively short lived 40 episode podcast called "The Podcastle" in 2007-2009 as the 'official Destuctiod.com Brit-Pop Podcast", which has all been archived at:

https://archive.org/details/Podcastle

I think I did listen to some of it, but that was a long time ago so can't remember if any particularly interesting details about Jim are revealed there.

I was also strangely saddened to find that the Podtoid wiki seems to have finally died (barring some spotty archives on the wayback machine). That was a true repository of madness and had some decent records of titbits about Jim's life he'd talked about over the years of Podtoid/Dismal Jesters.

 

[Beautiful Border]

@Oliver Onions nice write-off. Fun fact about his ex-wife - she was almost a spitting image of him. And she was a fat dangerhair tumblerite

The fact that Jim is slowly morphing into his ex-wife is something that doesn't get mentioned enough

 

[Product Placement]

@Oliver Onions
May want to add a little about Jim not beating the games he reviews

What Exactly Is Jim Sterling Reviewing? Not Much Apparently

As many of you may have seen, Destructoid's Jim Sterling wrote a less than stellar review for Final Fantasy XIII (4/10). One of his tweets read:

www.dualshockers.com

https://archive.ph/wip/t8hK7

the backlash to his ff13 review

Review: Final Fantasy XIII

If you’re a hardcore Final Fantasy XIII fan, prone to emotional outburts and so defensive of Square Enix’s latest effort...

www.destructoid.com

and how he handled it

100% Objective Review: Final Fantasy XIII

A few people have claimed recently that they want completely objective and unbiased reviews lacking personal opinion. I have been...

www.destructoid.com

 

[Bastet]

Jim gonna talk about Unity oppressing the poor indie devs tomorrow I guess.

 

[Harm]

Yep, it writes itself and it's virtually impossible to have a problematic take on it. Lends itself to his "capitalism = bad" talking points.

He'll probably make a really witty remark about how despite being named Unity... they have only unified everyone against them. Mic drop.

 

[Solomon Bundy]

He'll probably make a really witty remark about how despite being named Unity... they have only unified everyone against them. Mic drop.

Now having seen this, he's gong to edit that out, and pretend he isn't so predictable and basic.

 

[Aaron Costello]

Yep, it writes itself and it's virtually impossible to have a problematic take on it. Lends itself to his "capitalism = bad" talking points.

He'll probably make a really witty remark about how despite being named Unity... they have only unified everyone against them. Mic drop.

will also be 50% irrelevant stuff like wrestling, fetish, and trans stuff.

 

[Mr Processor]

What even were the main issues people had with TB? I wasn't following e-drama then...

Well, it probably depends on the person, but for me it was his friendship with this person back then:

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/laura-kate-dale-laura-k-buzz-joshua-dale-laurawesome-joshany12.27621/

This post goes into some of the drama he got into over his friendship with Dale, the typical loony troon game journalist who writes for places like Kotaku: https://kiwifarms.st/threads/laura-...rawesome-joshany12.27621/page-69#post-3394377

 

[TheGuntinator]

The only troonery-related issue I can think of was the overblown story of an emotionally fragile employee of the company that made the game having a public freakout over trying to change their username on the internal IT system and causing headaches for HR in the process. It's too pathetic for me to bother looking up but go back a few pages if you really want to know momore.

For a second I thought you were describing a quest in game.

Objective: Change Lilliths pronouns using the Deimos executive computer
(Optional) use the wrong pronouns for her for a bonus from Chad

 

[p1138]

@Oliver Onions
May want to add a little about Jim not beating the games he reviews

What Exactly Is Jim Sterling Reviewing? Not Much Apparently

As many of you may have seen, Destructoid's Jim Sterling wrote a less than stellar review for Final Fantasy XIII (4/10). One of his tweets read:

www.dualshockers.com

https://archive.ph/wip/t8hK7

the backlash to his ff13 review

Review: Final Fantasy XIII

If you’re a hardcore Final Fantasy XIII fan, prone to emotional outburts and so defensive of Square Enix’s latest effort...

www.destructoid.com

and how he handled it

100% Objective Review: Final Fantasy XIII

A few people have claimed recently that they want completely objective and unbiased reviews lacking personal opinion. I have been...

www.destructoid.com

But he wasn't actually wrong about anything in his FF13 review. The game fucking sucked. The "plot" was a mess of word salad that relied on an in-game wiki page thing. The boss fights were all indeed trial and error as they revolved around using 1-2 ideal strategies or hit an enrage timer and die. There was next to no player choice in practically anything. No exploration till you hit the ONE outdoor area in the whole game that's basically just a zone from Monster Hunter otherwise it's a big winding hallway. You can't even pick your damn party members till at least halfway through the game(not that it would matter since it'd just be more of a chance to fail boss fights anyway), the stagger system just prolonged boss fights since it became the only time to deal meaningful damage to the boss, you get these sappy emotional FMV sequences that look good... but other than the one black guy just wanting to be with his kid... there's no context for most of it. Actually beating the game might have tanked his review score even worse, since he would have gotten to see just how little choice there really is throughout the whole thing, or that one grass area you can ride around in that isn't just a hallway.

The game wasn't an FF game, so much as it was an FF coaching game where most of the time you're just picking classes and letting it auto battle as that's the ideal way to handle almost everything in the game except on occasion when you have to change classes mid fight, or manually rez someone.

 

[Product Placement]

@p1138 doesn't matter if the review ended up being right. The dude didn't beat the game part of his job nor disclosed how far he got in the game.

We know he did it for FF13 and a few other games, how do we know he didn't do the same to many good games?

 

[Moja Zemlja]

Even with something slightly relevent Jim sticking to his monday upload schedule has hurt him again because Unity has said that they're walking back the runtime fee.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Even with something slightly relevent Jim sticking to his monday upload schedule has hurt him again because Unity has said that they're walking back the runtime fee.

Holy shit that make up is horrifyingly bad

 

[p1138]

@p1138 doesn't matter if the review ended up being right. The dude didn't beat the game part of his job nor disclosed how far he got in the game.

We know he did it for FF13 and a few other games, how do we know he didn't do the same to many good games?

With some games it's just not reasonable to expect someone to put 50+ hours into a game for a review. I don't believe games need beaten to be reviewed. Regarding other games he's reviewed without completing, the more pressing matter is that his takes are just generally shit with FF13 being an example of a broken clock being right twice a day. The reality regarding the FF13 complaints is that it was from a bunch of dumbass FF fanboys who themselves hadn't played through the game yet(or were just high on copium) and realized how totally shit the thing was(and never got better).

If anything, looking back at the metacritic page for ff13 it's a prime example of the entire game journalism industry failing at it's job giving the game undeservedly high scores proclaiming how "streamlined" it is, or that it removes the meticulousness of previous FF games. The reality is the game was shit and I don't believe for a second that the other review sites and magazines at the time beat it either, otherwise they should have gotten just as bored as anyone else assuming they weren't writing just for the sake of sucking off square/enix and appeasing fanboys.

 

[Product Placement]

With some games it's just not reasonable to expect someone to put 50+ hours into a game for a review. I don't believe games need beaten to be reviewed. Regarding other games he's reviewed without completing, the more pressing matter is that his takes are just generally shit with FF13 being an example of a broken clock being right twice a day. The reality regarding the FF13 complaints is that it was from a bunch of dumbass FF fanboys who themselves hadn't played through the game yet(or were just high on copium) and realized how totally shit the thing was(and never got better).

If anything, looking back at the metacritic page for ff13 it's a prime example of the entire game journalism industry failing at it's job giving the game undeservedly high scores proclaiming how "streamlined" it is, or that it removes the meticulousness of previous FF games. The reality is the game was shit and I don't believe for a second that the other review sites and magazines at the time beat it either, otherwise they should have gotten just as bored as anyone else assuming they weren't writing just for the sake of sucking off square/enix and appeasing fanboys.

Then he should have disclosed how far he made it into the game in any review where he didn't beat the game.

It really isn't hard and for a long ass game sure most people would understand, but he also did that shit with shorter games like Army of Two 2, a 7-hour game on the high end.

 

[Dumpster dived waifu]

Holy shit that make up is horrifyingly bad
View attachment 5346380

I know Jim will handwave any makeup criticism as "my faggot polycule hole did it, not me", but Jesus fucking Christ. Unironically, it would look better if he just laid everything in the table, and just rolled his face back and forth.

 

[Moja Zemlja]

Holy shit that make up is horrifyingly bad
View attachment 5346380

The screencap is somehow better than the thrist baiting selfie he posted with it.

 

[p1138]

Then he should have disclosed how far he made it into the game in any review where he didn't beat the game.

It really isn't hard and for a long ass game sure most people would understand, but he also did that shit with shorter games like Army of Two 2, a 7-hour game on the high end.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that most reviewers have been beating games this entire time. You know that's not the case, right? And you're doing it over a couple of old ass games, one of which Jim managed to miraculously write one of the few proper reviews for since the rest never seem to have played it for more than 2-3 hours at the most.

 

[Product Placement]

You seem to be operating under the assumption that most reviewers have been beating games this entire time. You know that's not the case, right? And you're doing it over a couple of old ass games, one of which Jim managed to miraculously write one of the few proper reviews for since the rest never seem to have played it for more than 2-3 hours at the most.

No, like I said, if they don't finish the game they should let people know in the review. My comments applies to every reviewer including Jim. No doubt this is an industry issue but that doesn't make Jim any better, just means the other reviewers suck at their job just as much as he does. Just Jim unlike most other reviews was dumb enough to let it slip in the first place.

FF13 is a shit game, but so is Jim's review of it. Just because you hate the game, doesn't give Jim a free pass in not doing his job. And again he has done this to other games, FF13 is just one of the games we know of.

Also, Jim after FF13 made all his accounts private so people couldn't see if he beat a game or not, which is why I'm talking about an old ass game. It's a sign he still does it if he has to hide that shit.