TGWTG The Spoony One / Spoony / Noah Antwiler and Rachel Baker / @RaeAngel07 - The touching romance between a washed-up videogame reviewer throwing a decade-long pity party and his delusional Canuck stalker. #weaknotsick #donttellmehowtosulk

What will never cease to amaze me is just how bad Noah actually is at video games. Since I never watched too many of his streams - are there any titles he played where he displayed any level of proficiency?
Can't say I'm aware of any. He doesn't spend a whole lot of time on most games. He did play Frostpunk for quite a bit and without failing horribly early on? But when you look at his list of live streams over the past few years, he only played a couple hours of Divinity Original Sin 2, a pile of telltale games, some FMV stuff that might as well just be modern visual novels, a couple streams of baldurs gate 3, a couple hours of death stranding. He's really random and all over the place so I don't think there's any way to tell if he could be good at a game when he only plays it for a couple hours and never touches it again.

I don't think this is intentional, but in a weird way he can't look incompetent if he never plays much past the tutorial of a game. He's definitely not a Dean Takahashi type but at the same time some of his most infamous livestreaming tantrums have been his audience backseating while he does dumb shit on occasion.
 
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What will never cease to amaze me is just how bad Noah actually is at video games.
He used to always brag about how great he was at old computer games and I just took him at his word since he seemed to have all this knowledge and longevity with it all. Then sometime later on he started to stream on justin.tv and was playing the original X-COM, a series he "loved" so much he'd scream BETRAYAL at a gaming convention over, and he just had absolutely no idea what he was doing. It was pretty shocking to me, "oh this guy has just been full of shit the whole time."

And then there was the infamous Fallout stream much later on, where he couldn't even get out of the starting area.
 
I’m curious now how he actually is at the Ultima series, considering how much in high regard he holds them. Wondering if that little heartfelt soliloquy he had on the series was just a bunch of bullshit too, and he’s never actually touched any of them.

He’s not DSP bad, but he’s pretty terrible from all I’ve seen.
 
Regarding Ultima, I believe he watched his older brother play them and had an attachment to them through that, but I don't have any reason to believe he actually fully played through them. Almost everything in his retrospective could be easily learned second hand online and none of the shown gameplay was his.
 
Regarding Ultima, I believe he watched his older brother play them and had an attachment to them through that, but I don't have any reason to believe he actually fully played through them. Almost everything in his retrospective could be easily learned second hand online and none of the shown gameplay was his.
Did he do that for all of the ultima stuff? I know he did for some of the later ultima and final fantasy. Fuck, that's even more pathetic if he used someone else's footage for the earlier games, because he could have just edited a save, read a fucking walkthrough, used a trainer, and so on, since it's not like he had the sense to realize he could livestream games he was getting footage for and double-dip on the content.

edit: ffs, I just checked the end of his ultima 2 review and sure enough, he got at least part of the footage from 2 other people. For ultima 1 it's 3 people. Akalabeth 2 people. For ultima 3 it was 7(maybe 8, I lost count).

So he doesn't even have the excuse of needing to play through the fucking games? Posting a video essay about a movie and showing clips for context is one thing, no one is going to assume you filmed the fucking movie. But for a video essay, "review", whatever for a video game I expect the fucking guy to have played it. Fine sure, he got hooked watching his brother play the shit, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have done it himself for his damned videos.
 
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He explicitly stated that he used Elzair's footage for Ultima retrospective, the same Elzair from rpgcodex. It's not like Ultimas have complex gameplay or mechanics, they're pretty much walking SCA simulator games with light rpg elements so I'm sure he could play them well.

Did he stream original XCOM? There's only streams for the remake, which I did not play, and TFTD, which is infamously a bullshit romhack so it's hard to say if he sucks at it. Fallout 2 one was him picking a diplomancer build then proceeding to fight everything that moves, it's like the last time he played it was 20 years ago and he forgot how to.
 
He explicitly stated that he used Elzair's footage for Ultima retrospective, the same Elzair from rpgcodex. It's not like Ultimas have complex gameplay or mechanics, they're pretty much walking SCA simulator games with light rpg elements so I'm sure he could play them well.

Did he stream original XCOM? There's only streams for the remake, which I did not play, and TFTD, which is infamously a bullshit romhack so it's hard to say if he sucks at it. Fallout 2 one was him picking a diplomancer build then proceeding to fight everything that moves, it's like the last time he played it was 20 years ago and he forgot how to.
The problem is that it means he didn't actually play the shit, he already didn't play ffx or ff13 himself either.

He streamed the modern xcom 2 for a total of under 4 hours, that's not really enough to have a run go particular sideways unless you're a total idiot. He also streamed the original x-com for a little over an hour with "no commentary because I'm sad" so it's not like he got very far in it either.
 
If you believe him, he did play Ultima games in the 90s when they were new. Not replaying them and "borrowing" gameplay footage in 2010s is not that big of a problem since those games have almost no gameplay anyway.

I'm asking about XCOM 'cause you can actually gauge how good at it he actually is. To play Ultimas all you need is a pulse and maybe a text file telling you where to go and what to ask NPCs of.
 
Admittedly I don't think I could do more than one playthrough of most of the ultima games except for the Black gate...maybe.
 
Not like there's much to play. Ultima III and V are the only ones I remember having fun playing, first being a Wizardry clone for 80s casuals and second having actually challenging fights and dungeons you have to turn your brain on to beat (underworld, Doom).

VI and VII are one big goose chase all over the map, exploring which is a pain in the ass thanks to switching to a continuous, and weirdly claustrophobic, continuous overworld map. Baking bread and smithing gold might have been impressive in 1991, but not now. Black Gate's full-mouse interface was fucking unbearable.

I and II are more teenager's shitpost proof of concept, IV is more an adventure game masquerading as an rpg which leads credence to the gossip about Roe III Adams being the one who designed it - he also designed Wizardry IV at the time which has the same oddity of being more like a bullshit Infocom production than a game you're supposed to have fun playing.
That award would go to Chris Avellone and his stream of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, where it became painfully obvious the man doesn't play CRPGs at all.
Or that time when John Carmack tried to play Doom.
 
Despite SWAT4 being played for laughs, it's pretty obvious he doesn't learn how to play the game as he goes through it. A simple GameFAQs walkthrough or weapon analysis will tell you what setup to use and how to get around the buggy AI. He keeps doing the exact same thing for each level and is punished accordingly.
 
He used to always brag about how great he was at old computer games and I just took him at his word since he seemed to have all this knowledge and longevity with it all. Then sometime later on he started to stream on justin.tv and was playing the original X-COM, a series he "loved" so much he'd scream BETRAYAL at a gaming convention over, and he just had absolutely no idea what he was doing. It was pretty shocking to me, "oh this guy has just been full of shit the whole time."

And then there was the infamous Fallout stream much later on, where he couldn't even get out of the starting area.
I remember this one. He's similar to Ross Scott (Accursed Farms) in that regard, in that he will box himself into a mode of thinking about how a game should be played and then will proceed to refuse to engage with any mechanics that are to the contrary, instead blaming the game itself on his own failures and mishaps.
 
Regarding Ultima, I believe he watched his older brother play them and had an attachment to them through that, but I don't have any reason to believe he actually fully played through them. Almost everything in his retrospective could be easily learned second hand online and none of the shown gameplay was his.
Always was suspicious that for a long time his review footage was provided by Sean Fausz or some random videos he found on youtube, instead of recording it himself as he was going through the game.
 
The problem is that it means he didn't actually play the shit, he already didn't play ffx or ff13 himself either.

He streamed the modern xcom 2 for a total of under 4 hours, that's not really enough to have a run go particular sideways unless you're a total idiot. He also streamed the original x-com for a little over an hour with "no commentary because I'm sad" so it's not like he got very far in it either.
Considering how shit he is, I'm not surprised. Getting other people to give him footage meant he did less dumb shit, unfortunately it also meant he missed some prime shit to criticize, like the fucking Sphere Grid in FFX.

I remember him streaming modern X-Com and all these soldiers he named after CA people getting killed constantly.
 
Considering how shit he is, I'm not surprised. Getting other people to give him footage meant he did less dumb shit, unfortunately it also meant he missed some prime shit to criticize, like the fucking Sphere Grid in FFX.

I remember him streaming modern X-Com and all these soldiers he named after CA people getting killed constantly.
Sure, and I don't recall if he mentioned the stupid button mashing for summons in ff8 either. Yes, a lot of the ultima games are effectively a walking simulator in a way but at the same time you kind of expect someone talking about a videogame and showing gameplay to have you know... played the game?

The movie review equivalent would be posting a half hour video talking about something ridiculous like the star wars holiday special, without having watched it yourself and simply basing your thoughts entirely on what other people have said about it. That would be really strange.

It also brings up another issue. Not every game review of his even has "credits" at the end(especially in multipart videos it makes sense to put them in the last part of course, but even then some of them just don't have any), so did he even play the games for those other videos? And on top of that, it means he was actually doing even less "work" for the videos he was making because he wasn't even having to sit through the games playing them(so he's even lazier). Something to consider about not actually playing the games himself(other than potentially missing notable things to bring up) is that if something becomes a 10 hour slog of bullshit fetch quests halfway through, that is likely to have an impact on your opinion of a game rather than just making a glorified highlight reel of other people's footage.

Let's go further. Would you trust someone's review of a car because they took notes as they watched video of someone else driving it around? Fuck no. Would you bother with a review of a restaurant like Cooking with Jack and his Jack on the Go series where he pretends he doesn't even eat the food at the restaurants because he's pretending to be on a "carnivore diet"? Absolutely not.
 
Like I said, it's not like he really played long enough to have a run go incredibly wrong or something in just 75 minutes.
Jesus F. Christ out of 170+ comments there are two (2!) that are about the fucking game, rest are nothing but mentally ill parasites rambling about how Spoony videos cured their insomnia or diarrhea or whogivesafuck. I'd hole myself in a basement like a hermit and shamelessly take their money giving nothing in return if those were the kind of losers trying to be friends with me.

TIL pistols in XCOM have the best reaction time.
 
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