I was a big spoony fan too but to call him "insanely talented" and "brilliant" because he made good video game reviews is a bit of a stretch. He was talented for sure and easily one of the best in his genre but brilliant? Eh. There still plenty of obnoxious and tedious aspects of his old reviews. The Ultima review which is considered is Magnus Opus has large portions that were so annoying people edited them out of reuploads.
Kids will never know the pain of watching Spoony with Russian subtitles with the skits. They don't know how good they have it.
Like AVGN he did his thing back when the concept was barely heard of. Saying that Spoony was nothing special compared to today is like saying Ohm's Law is nothing special. If it's not, why has nobody before Ohm figured it out already? There were thousands of AVGN clones out there but Spoony was a league above them.
It just hurts, he may have been a conceited, retarded sperg, but he was OUR sperg who was entertaining and had (wasted) talent.
I agree, the hero worship for Spoony has always struck me as kind of odd, but maybe that's because I was never a fan and that comedic style of performative outrage has never resonated with me.
You can admire Spoony's work for what it was at the time, but while Ohm's Law remains as valid and applicable today as it was 200 years ago Spoony's videos are more like a sitcom from the 70s: they have a nostalgic charm and can still entertain, but they very much feel their age.
You mean "to use it WELL (and not be lazy)".
Its a guy talking over video game footage is that not literally what every other reviewer does.or did miss some big renaissance? There's not much to it
I guess, if you want to be as reductive as possible. Similarly all songs are just musical notes arranged in a different order and yet some are remembered for centuries while others sit on a cassette in a pensioner's attic until autists of the Internet finally identify them.
JAG and Roseanne are the same thing because they're both television shows.
Here's a few reasons in no particular order: 1. Good production value for the time(had a camera and audio that wasn't dog shit and even sort of had his own theme song from an actual band). 2. EDGE, not afraid to shit on things that were popular or contemporary, unlike a lot of other angry reviewers who only tackled the likes of 8-bit console jank. We Spoony fans found it cathartic that a a guy making videos shared our frustrations with the game industry of the time, putting him way ahead of the anti-woke grifters of today. Fuck Lord Troon, BETRAYL! BETRAYL! 3. A big one, entertaining serialized content. Hours of videos riffing on FMV games and Swat 4 that blew other let's plays out of the water.
Another thing I'd add to this since I decided to go check his oldest videos is even in 2008 he was properly recording gameplay footage. I don't know if he was emulating or actually bought a capture card but in the early days of LPs 90% of the time you were either getting the Bandicam/Unregistered Hypercam 2 watermark or you were getting out-of-focus footage from a camcorder pointed at a TV. (Famously, Retsupurae would build an entire YouTube channel out of specifically making fun of these kind of Let's Players.)
I enjoy it both ways (no homo), but I think there's still a market for shorter videos too. When I'm in the mood, I love to sit down and watch a 90-minute retrospective on all the RPGs released for the 3DO, but sometimes I just want the QRD on why Thief 2014 failed without the full franchise history and a walkthrough of every game.
His anger seemed genuine, same with Rolfe. It only came out later that Spoony was not acting whenether he was flying into homeless schizo barking at the moon-rage, which is either sad or hilarious and I'm on a quest to figure out which.
Majuular and Spoony are not comparable IMO, one does long and serious research paper-esque retrospectives covering most of the background from today's perspective, other did quick tongue-in-cheek presentations delivering the impression of how it was to play when it came out. Keep in mind Spoony didn't had the likes of Digital Antiquarian to borrow (according to rpgcodex biased or even plain inaccurate) research from back in early 2010s.
Both of their anger was genuine, but Rolfe turned out to be a turbo retard and Spoony was a BPD sadbrain on a bad day and gatekeeping faggot on a good one. Strange how people with strong opinions on video games turn out to be ill equipped to face reality. Whether it’s been sad or hilarious is up for debate; in Spoony’s case it’s been extremely boring, the man appears on the internet once a year to give a milquetoast opinion on the state of the world or video game from 5 years ago
He had a level of charisma and an ability to speak and make it sound interesting and funny in a way that appealed to a lot of people, to the point where many of his videos did better than even Doug's. While you can find plenty of people like that these days, he stood out at the time. I've never played any table top RPG but I liked his Counter Monkey videos because he's a good storyteller, even if some of what he said was so obviously fake. Like him saying he blew up that Vampire larp in revenge for ruining his character. I reckon he wanted to, but probably never did.
Seriously though, how is he getting by with like 2000 dollars a year? I'm surprised his family tolerates it. I'm very curious about his living situation.
