James Rolfe / James D. Rolfe / Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) / Rex Viper and Cinemassacre / Screenwave - Now with not much grieving about a 41-year old man still making videos on YouTube. We're the balls on the dick.

Which videos do you like the most from Cinemassacre?

  • Angry Video Game Nerd

    Votes: 1,812 63.5%

  • You Know Whats Bullshit

    Votes: 143 5.0%

  • James and Mike Mondays

    Votes: 96 3.4%

  • Board James

    Votes: 443 15.5%

  • Monster Madness

    Votes: 270 9.5%

  • James' movie reviews

    Votes: 90 3.2%
  • Total voters
    2,854
Even though Majora's Mask was considered to be James' last great AVGN video, looking back I felt it was mainly due to the skits and presentation but the review content itself is just lackluster. For me, the Earthbound one still stands as the last great one.

Someone actually went ahead and detail a lot of shit about what went wrong with the Majora's Mask review as if AVGN is Irate Gamer lmao:

old.reddit.com

AVGN Majora's Mask video is the worst review of any game I've ever seen

I didn't really post here until today, and was recommended going here from one of you guys on Youtube. I know it's been almost 2 years,...
old.reddit.com old.reddit.com

I didn't really post here until today, and was recommended going here from one of you guys on Youtube.



I know it's been almost 2 years, but this video is so awful it lives in my head rent free, and I've been wanting ever since this came out to to spell out in detail as to why this video sucks hard, and I figure this place is the only site where anyone might remotely care. To get it out of the way I'll admit I'm a huge fan of the actual game, and played through it a dozen times and so I know the entire game inside and out, so obviously I'm biased. While I honestly wasn't expecting James to like it, what with NO TIME and all, plus the fact he doesn't really seem to like 3D games in general, what had me in utter shock the entire time was how absolutely awful he was at the game, and how every single criticism (I am barely being hyperbolic here) was just him being an absolute moron at the game, grossly misunderstanding mechanics or having a total lack of intuition. And I don't mean he didn't use super optimized speedrunner strategies or whatever, I mean his gameplay skill is so bad that I guarantee anyone here who has never even played the game could pick up the controller and run circles around him, skill-wise.



Also, for the record, this is one of the few recent-ish videos that James actually played himself. This wasn't a case of Slobwave playing it for him/stealing footage and then writing a script. I'd also like to point out that I don't think MM is some flawless game, it certainly has problems. I just find this video bizarre since almost none of the issues presented are actual problems and are instead just James being bad at the game, while a lot of the game's actual problems go strangely unmentioned.



I'll present this in list format:



James doesn't know you can lock onto enemies: the most stunningly moronic issue with the video and James' ability to play, and something I didn't really see anyone comment on despite how ludicrous it was, was the fact that James apparently went through the entirety of the 15-20 hour long game without realizing you could lock onto enemies. As in, you know how almost every 3D action game since Ocarina of Time uses basically the same lock on functionality for combat? James somehow didn't realize you could do that (despite the game explicitly teaching you to do this at the start), and so all the footage of him in combat encounters has him awkwardly facing the enemy with the camera head-on and charging at them or doing stupid shit like trying to manually target the enemies with the bow or other projectile weapons while the enemy is charging at him, instead of just locking on. This is such an incredibly stupid thing to do that I still can't wrap my mind around it.

James goes through the entire game without realizing you could skip dialogue: This one is a bit of a mystery, since it's not totally clear what James means when he says “the dialogue scrolls way too slowly”. Technically, this is true, however Majora's Mask lets you skip dialogue by pressing the A button, and lets you skip through an entire NPC conversation by pressing the B button. In fact the game probably has some of the most fastest-scrolling textboxes in videogames with these controls in mind. Now, MM does feature some dialogue that can't be skipped or fast-forwarded, but this comprises probably only half a percent of the total dialogue in the actual game, basically just the text that occurs at the very beginning of the game. Does this mean James is being incredibly petty with his criticism, or does this mean he is actually so fucking stupid that he never once thought to press the A or B buttons while text was on screen?

James thinks leaving the game running overnight is a better idea than saving: this baffled me. In part of the video, he complains about the game's save system. Basically there are two save systems: going back in time which permanently saves your file, and using Owl Statues to save, which you can do whenever, however the game returns to the main menu, and loading from one of these “owl saves” wipes that owl save file (if you loaded an owl save and then shut off the game, and then loaded that file again, it'd take you back to the last time you did a “permanent” time reset save). While confusing, this is intentional since I am pretty sure this was done to prevent savescumming (if you can save and reload freely, there'd never be a need for actual time travel, and the game would be very easily broken). Despite James seeming to understand this, for some reason he chose to leave the game console running overnight and “pray there'd be no power outage”, rather than use these owl saves. Just bizarre.

James not understanding time as a mechanic: This is a common argument against the game I see outside of the video, but I always find is strange people (including James) think that stripping the time mechanic out of the game would improve it somehow. If you removed that from the game, it'd basically just be 4 dungeons, the transformation masks and there'd be none of the same sort of NPC sidequests and cool time loop shenanigans that make the game unique. It'd basically just be a small Ocarina of Time expansion pack.

Complaints about the bank: at one point he criticizes the game's bank system and the fact that scrolling through menus is tedious and that there should be a deposit all/withdraw all button. This isn't necessarily a bad criticism in of itself, however in conjunction with his apparently lack of understanding that you can skip dialogue, it's clear he was just being a dunce again. You can very quickly skip all the initial banker dialogue with B, and then input the amount you need to withdraw/deposit, and it doesn't take much time at all. There's also some strangeness with his actual footage, where at one point he receives some interest from the amount of deposits he's made, and so receives a small amount of bonus money, to which James groans and then goes through the banker's menu again to deposit that, despite it being such a meager amount that any logical person wouldn't have bothered trying to deposit it. Does this mean James was thinking things out so poorly and being so obsessive, that he would run to the bank every single time he found any amount of money, instead of only depositing cash his wallet is full?

James idiotically spends money on things instead of finding them for free: at one point he makes a big deal about the fact that buying items at a shop is tedious since you can't select the amount to buy like in most RPG's. This is itself a reasonable criticism, however it's another case of James not using his head at all. I honestly forgot this game even had shops, since you can find any replenishable item (hearts, bombs, arrows, etc) by cutting grass outside in the main field area for 10 seconds. It's not like this is some secret thing, it's incredibly obvious, and one of the very first things you can even do in the game when you start playing is cutting grass and getting items. It's also not something that takes any time at all, since there's grass patches all over the hub area of the game that is accessible to every other area, and again, cutting the grass to get items takes a few seconds. Just another case of James having a total absence of critical thinking or any sense of efficiency.

James depicts an extreme edge case as a severe issue: in the snow dungeon, there's a sequence where you need to transform into a Goron, use the roll ability, and roll over a ramp to pass a gap in a bridge. In James' video, he somehow fucks up by jumping over the gap, then bouncing off a crate and landing back where he started. I have no idea how this happened: as far as I know, hitting a crate while rolling should just stop your roll and destroy the crate. In all my years of replaying the game, I have literally never seen this happen. As far as I am concerned James just discovered some ultra-rare bug for speedrunners to use.

The stupid shit with the barrel bomb: In the mountainous part of the game, you need to carry a barrel bomb from point A to point B while the fuse is lit, in order to blow up a boulder blocking an important area. Naturally, James makes this bit of gameplay look like it requires a Herculean effort. There isn't really much to say here, other than that this part of the game is easy and James is either trying to intentionally make the game look frustrating to make the video entertaining, or he's genuinely that bad at videogames. For comparison, imagine watching someone play Mario 64, get to the first Bowser stage, and then spend 5 minutes talking about how insanely hard it is. That's the level of difficulty this is comparable to.

James depicts an extreme edge case as a severe issue (again): Eventually James makes it up the slope with the barrel bomb and plants it near the boulder. However time is slipping away and the game is about to transition from night to day. When this happens, the barrel bomb despawns, and James declares the game worse than Simon's Quest. Ignoring the fact that you can manually detonate the bomb by attacking it, this is a annoying instance of a reviewer using an extreme edge case as an example of bad game design. I have no other way to explain this other than by comparison, but basically imagine playing Doom, getting the All Ghosts bug, and then claiming the game is broken and buggy because of that.

James doesn't understand how freezing water works and also praises the single dumbest change from the 3DS remake: while the freezing mechanic in the game is a bit janky (blocks of ice won't form if you shoot at water too close to some existing geometry), what really irks me about this is after being frustrated by the ice arrow mechanic, he then goes on a tangent where he praises the shitty 3DS “remaster” which makes it so water can only be frozen by shooting designated spots of glowing water. There's nothing more to it, he's literally just praising the remaster for dumbing down the game's mechanics to make it so even people with lead-poisoning can figure the game out.

James thinks going back in time means you have to redo an entire dungeon: at one point in the video, he runs out of time while near the end of the water dungeon, and needs to go back in time (presumably he spent 90% of the game's three day cycle awkwardly flailing at enemies instead of just using the fucking lock-on like someone with above-room temperature IQ would do). While the dungeon does indeed reset, for some reason James is under the impression you only retain your dungeon map and compass. This isn't true, you also retain your magic dungeon arrow (which James did have), which means you could easily bypass most of the dungeon's puzzles super quickly and beat it in a fraction of the time. To elaborate, every dungeon gives you a arrow type: the first dungeon gives you the bow itself, second gives you fire arrows, third gives you ice, etc. The water dungeon has lots of puzzles involving changing the flow direction of water via activating pipes and freezing water streams. You normally don't get the ice arrow until near the 2/3 of the way through the dungeon, however since he had to restart the dungeon, but still retained the ice arrow, this means he could immediately enter the dungeon and begin freezing key pipes to change the waterflow to get to the endgame areas of the dungeon very quickly, easily cutting the total dungeon time down to a fraction. Yet another case of James not using his head at all and just robotically going through the motions.

James somehow fails at the easiest minigame in the world: In Majora's Mask, there's a sidequest involving protecting some ranchers from aliens and bandits, which involves a few different little events over the course of the game's three days. While the initial ranch defense against the aliens offers some challenge, the second part of the sidequest is a cakewalk. Basically you have to rendezvous with the older of the rancher sisters at the farm on the night of the second day, where you sit in the back of her caravan and shoot at bandit raiders with a bow while protecting her milk supply as you both ride into town. This sounds like it could provide some challenge, but it's pathetically easy. The bow can fire about as fast as a semi-automatic rifle, has perfect accuracy, and you have infinite ammo. You can literally just endlessly tap the fire button while vaguely aiming in the direction of the bandits and you'll never lose. The fact that James failed at this is absolutely absurd, and also it occurred to me while watching it that I had actually never seen the failure dialogue for this sidequest in all my dozen or so times replaying the game.

James forgets to look up: this is a minor point, but at one point of the video he apparently forgets you can look up, and continually gets ambushed by enemies dropping from the ceiling and knocked off the platform. I just think it's funny he never thought to just snipe them from afar with an arrow.

James forgets how to swim: This is easily the dumbest single moment in the entire video, possibly dumber than anything Arin or DSP has ever done. At one point in the water dungeon, James makes a rant about the “whirlpool room” area of the dungeon. In essence the room is a large cylinder with a big pool of water and a turbine at the top that spins the water in one direction. The room is a sort of puzzle, as the underwater part of the cylinder contains multiple pathways to other parts of the dungeon, but they are angled so that they can only be accessed if the water is spinning in one direction or the other, otherwise the player will be swept away, and the challenge involves re-orienting the whirlpool direction to access different parts of the dungeon. That brings us to James, who – and I know this sounds absurd – outright doesn't think to just swim with the flow of the water. He just gets frustrated, and then comes to the conclusion that the only way to navigate the whirlpool is to stand still and awkwardly let the current slowly carry him to the right doorway. What's especially odd is moments before there is footage of him swimming normally, but for some reason that I can't even fathom, he doesn't think to just fast-swim with the current. I cannot wrap my head around this part of the video, it just so fucking stupid I can't comprehend a human failing to understand such an obvious solution to a problem.

James struggles to navigate a 1 meter-wide pipe: this is another case of James having extreme difficulty with a part of the game that is totally banal. In the water dungeon there's a part where you need to walk over a large pipe that extends out of the water and onto a large platform. The pipe also has a single enemy on it that can knock you off. For some reason, James finds it impossible to simply walk straight forward without falling off, declaring this pipe to be “a tightrope”, despite it having about the same walkable width as Link does. Also he continues to just run into the enemy guarding the pipe instead of just sniping it with a bow from afar like someone who doesn't have lead poisoning would do.

James does something stupid and then goes on to repeat outright misinformation: near the end of the video, James defeats the boss of the final dungeon, then moronically walks into the teleporter that removes him from the dungeon before grabbing the boss's Heart Container. While this is a stupid thing to do, since this is the penultimate boss of the game and he should have learned by now that the teleporter exits the dungeon, he then falsely claims via some website walkthrough that “you need to redo the dungeon and re-fight the boss to get the container if you missed it”. This is absolutely false, and if anything, MM is better about this than any other Zelda games. For one, once a boss is defeated, entering its dungeon again will create a teleporter at the entrance of the dungeon that warps you right to the boss room, if you ever want to fight it again. Secondly, James had killed the boss in that time cycle, which means it'd still be dead until he reset time again; he could have just walked back into the dungeon, stepped on the warp pad, and been teleported to the boss room and grabbed the heart container without having to fight the boss again, all in 30 seconds flat. In fact it probably took longer for James to look up a guide online that claims this disinfo, than it would have for James to just use his head and just step back into the dungeon and go through the warp.

So, that's basically it, save for a few other nitpicks that I may have forgotten about.

I kind of want to make a compilation video showing off all the dumb shit that happens in the video and comparing it to how to correctly play the game (almost like those Good Idea/Bad Idea meme videos people would make to make fun of DSP), but the video is so utterly rife with James' moronic decision making and general stupidity that a compilation/comparison video would probably be longer than the actual video itself.

Sorry for this giant autism essay but honestly this shit has been bothering me since the video came out, since not only do I rarely see people call this stupid shit out despite being worse than anything guys like Arin or Dunkey have ever done, but I often see people refer to this video as “one of the good ones”, when in reality it's basically a 40 minute long DarkSydePhil incompetence simulator. It also just kind of kills me inside since while MM is hardly obscure, it isn't the most-played game, and it's kind of sickening seeing comments like “I always heard this game was good, but after watching the AVGN video now I know it sucks!”

Just heinous.
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Probably preaching to the choir here, but put me in the "I like James and most of his older videos but I hate the new shit" camp.

I was first drawn to AVGN because his appreciation for retro gaming seemed so similar to mine. He's mostly into 2nd-4th gen shit, had something of a "messy" looking flea market / thrift store curated collection, and a general down-to-earth disposition regarding the hobby. He's not deep into obsessive "set" collecting, or pedantic "game historian" bullshit, or tech nerd spergy nonsense, which is hugely refreshing.

His best videos are the ones with the chill casual vibe. Castlevania and whatnot. I love his classic editing, where he made it feel like he was playing the game in real-time and the viewer was appropriately a real-time observer. His worst classic vids were the ones with guest stars and skits and whatnot; I don't think this type of shit enhances anyone's productions, however.

Most of his new videos are awful and, like, random? Like the Game Gear VHS tape bullshit. "lol look how stupid and kitschy this ~*radical*~ 90s media was!" gets old quickly. He has no passion for most of what he's "playing" now; delivering a dry monologue over someone else's footage. It's a shame because he had the perfect niche -- NES (and similar) games are virtually limitless and often "authentically" bad or strange in a way that's easy and fun to riff on. The jokes almost write themselves.

And yeah, the slobs are trash. Absolutely zero charisma or charm. As weird as Mike is at least he's "funny" in his own way.
 
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BrunoMattei said:
I really like that one too. Him going over trying to get that power up or bonus thing or whatever it was at the start of the first level is gold.

His last really good video I'd say is the Majora's Mask review despite the opening sketch being AIDS.
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I really thought the opening of his Majora's Mask review was great because it paid homage to a classic Twilight Zone episode and had neat looking props. Maybe I'm just a sucker for that stuff.
Quantum Diabetes said:
I take back my prediction of Avgn Junior and now think Slobwave will introduce a "cousin" of Avgn like how they replaced Steve in Blues Clues, probably some lardhole, too.
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I pray to God that you're wrong, both for the sake of the dwindling respectability of Cinemassacre's brand and our ability to handle cringe. To quote AVGN in his prime, I would rather listen to my only infant child puking to death than deal with that.
Seven Costanza said:
Probably preaching to the choir here, but put me in the "I like James and most of his older videos but I hate the new shit" camp.

Most of his new videos are awful and, like, random? Like the Game Gear VHS tape bullshit. "lol look how stupid and kitschy this ~*radical*~ 90s media was!" gets old quickly. He has no passion for most of what he's "playing" now; delivering a dry monologue over someone else's footage. It's a shame because he had the perfect niche -- NES (and similar) games are virtually limitless and often "authentically" bad or strange in a way that's easy and fun to riff on. The jokes almost write themselves.

And yeah, the slobs are trash. Absolutely zero charisma or charm. As weird as Mike is at least he's "funny" in his own way.
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If you can get the right kind of bad game in his hands, he can work with it. It doesn't matter the era, just look at Big Rigs. The problem is that he usually doesn't have prime material anymore and the slobs can't craft a great script these days. Pac Man 2 isn't even that bad according to those hacks. So why even bother? For other motives. The only reason that episode was released was to promote that podcast of theirs, I'm damn certain of it.
 
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Quantum Diabetes said:
I take back my prediction of Avgn Junior and now think Slobwave will introduce a "cousin" of Avgn like how they replaced Steve in Blues Clues, probably some lardhole, too.
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I hope the Screenwave Slobs aren't stupid enough to think that would work. AVGN works because of James. If Mike Matei was AVGN, it wouldn't of worked because just look at the Mineycrafta and Elmo in Grouchland videos. It also didn't work for =3 when Ray William Johnson quit the show and they had other people host it instead.
 
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Tronathon242 said:
If you can get the right kind of bad game in his hands, he can work with it. It doesn't matter the era, just look at Big Rigs. The problem is that he usually doesn't have prime material anymore and the slobs can't craft a great script these days. Pac Man 2 isn't even that bad according to those hacks. So why even bother? For other motives. The only reason that episode was released was to promote that podcast of theirs, I'm damn certain of it.
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I think Pac-man 2: the New Adventures is appropriate. It's not technically bad but it is certainly a weird game.
 
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BrunoMattei said:
I think Pac-man 2: the New Adventures is appropriate. It's not technically bad but it is certainly a weird game.
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Classic AVGN didn't need a bad game to make it work, he needed "weird" games and games with frustrating mechanics (i.e. Battletoads). That's why the NES was always perfect for him because the entire library is full of shit like bizarre video game versions of movies (i.e. LJN's output), lots of games that are hard because of shitty mechanics, and just plain weird shit like Christian video games.
Quantum Diabetes said:
I take back my prediction of Avgn Junior and now think Slobwave will introduce a "cousin" of Avgn like how they replaced Steve in Blues Clues, probably some lardhole, too.
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Even Screenwave isn't that dumb, because they know no one wants to watch fake AVGN and that will kill the channel revenue. If they ever got a new AVGN they'd just give him his own Cinemassacre show that no one would watch besides bots and people wanting to make fun of how bad it is.
 
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José Mourinho said:
Eh, Jon already did it, we don't need the slobs to go Irate Gamer on AVGN for this especially for the 200th episode.
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Jon did such a good job on that video that AVGN would be best to avoid it because no one could top that. I can't see them trying nearly as hard and going to all the trouble that Jon did, and it would definitely turn out like shit.

Hey, for all we know, they actually did want to review the game but then realized it would take way more work than what they'd be willing to do.
 
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Jozef said:
Jon did such a good job on that video that AVGN would be best to avoid it because no one could top that. I can't see them trying nearly as hard and going to all the trouble that Jon did, and it would definitely turn out like shit.

Hey, for all we know, they actually did want to review the game but then realized it would take way more work than what they'd be willing to do.
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Honestly seeing this about Jon really cements that Jon is pretty much just a modern day equivalent to the Nerd and is doing a much better job.

It's a shame James let the slobs be on top of him as they really ruin his content and I feel with Monster Madness, I wouldn't be surprised if they forced it on him and picked movies for him to see that he probably doesn't give a shit about.


Quantum Diabetes said:
I take back my prediction of Avgn Junior and now think Slobwave will introduce a "cousin" of Avgn like how they replaced Steve in Blues Clues, probably some lardhole, too.
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I honestly hope they do this so people could see how much of a shit for brains the slobs are, while James is probably doing something better with his time.
 
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