"Zero Punctuation" and "Dev Diary" by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw - The only thing worth watching on The Escapist

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The shit with Second Wind's declining viewership has me wondering if these giant collab channels a la Channel Awesome actually work in modern YouTube or if SW is just comically mismanaged. Like:

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The only things getting viewership here are Yahtzee and Design Delve. They're apparently struggling to stay profitable despite making roughly half a million a year with what should be very little overhead, so just cut shit like Bytesized and Unpacked that nobody is watching. Cut whatever "The Backdrop" is. You are poisoning your algorithm performance by flooding your subscribers' inboxes with stuff they obviously aren't interested in. Why are there two or three near-identical video game reviewers on your video game reviewer channel? Cut.

Yahtzee is the dumbest motherfucker alive. Could be swimming in ~500k a year before tax all by himself, bestowing generational wealth upon his family, and instead he decided to hand the reigns to some retard who insists on complicating what should just be the Fully Ramblomatic channel.
 
The Noise said:
The shit with Second Wind's declining viewership has me wondering if these giant collab channels a la Channel Awesome actually work in modern YouTube or if SW is just comically mismanaged. Like:
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Channel Awesome doesn't really exist anymore (their website closed) and by the time it functionally broke up in 2018 most of the creators had a big enough following that they were able to survive on their own. Looking at the CA YouTube channel, Doug still gets 200k views but another creator, Walter Culture, gets 25k. I'm not sure when he joined, he's not one of the old guard. (I'm not sure if Larry is associated anymore, he famously stood by them just to be a contrarian). In Second Wind, Yahtzee doesn't break 200k views and the hangers-on do even worse than Walter Culture. (I've never even heard of Walter Culture but he routinely pulls in better numbers than anything on SW besides Fully Ramblomatic).

What made CA a little different in its heyday is that they all tended to have different specialties and did crossovers, it wasn't just the illusion of Doug and a bunch of less-successful hangers-on, there was a whole expanded universe.
 
The tired cat said:
Basically, in Mogworld a lot of his jokes and analogies is material he used in his old reviews. Stuff like the "Cockup Pinnacle" and so forth.
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That tracks. I never read his books but I did play his "Chzo Mythos" games (5 Days a Stranger and all that) and while I liked them at the time (being free made me less critical), in retrospect he kinda wrote Trilby as a blatant self-insert.

Xarpho's Return said:
What made CA a little different in its heyday is that they all tended to have different specialties and did crossovers, it wasn't just the illusion of Doug and a bunch of less-successful hangers-on, there was a whole expanded universe.
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I mean, that's kinda true, but you did have a lot of overlap. Like fundamentally, Bad Movie Beatdown was just Nostalgia Critic but less funny and more likely to say something retarded, and I feel like they had like five guys whose thing was video games.

Really outside of Doug, Spoony, and I would say Linkara, nobody else at Channel Awesome was at all notable. Oh yeah, and that person who was basically a girl version of Doug ;).
 
skykiii said:
Really outside of Doug, Spoony, and I would say Linkara, nobody else at Channel Awesome was at all notable. Oh yeah, and that person who was basically a girl version of Doug ;).
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Eh, I'd say Angry Joe and Bennet the Sage tried to stand out.
 
The tired cat said:
Eh, I'd say Angry Joe and Bennet the Sage tried to stand out.
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The main memory I have of Bennett was him basically showing that his intelligence was so limited he could not follow even most basic storylines and would get confused by nuances even a normie would pick up on. Probably the best example is the crossover he did with Film Brain where they reviewed Batman Returns. It kinda just made both of them look retarded.

I never watched Angry Joe so I can't comment on him, I know he succeeded at "standing out" in the worst possible way thanks to the Metokur video.
 
skykiii said:
The main memory I have of Bennett was him basically showing that his intelligence was so limited he could not follow even most basic storylines and would get confused by nuances even a normie would pick up on. Probably the best example is the crossover he did with Film Brain where they reviewed Batman Returns.
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Wait, Bennett did a crossover with FilmBrain? That's new to me, I know the guy did various anime reviews and those were def fun to watch (except when he tried to make an "apology/breadtuber" review after shitting on EVA, which frankly it deserves to be shat on), but I don't recall him and the Limey ever working together.
 
Xarpho's Return said:
What made CA a little different in its heyday is that they all tended to have different specialties and did crossovers, it wasn't just the illusion of Doug and a bunch of less-successful hangers-on, there was a whole expanded universe.
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I think you're forgetting just how many damned people they actually had on that site over the years. The "main" group who showed up in the anniversary videos was only a fraction of them.

You just don't need 20 different people reviewing movies, even if it's different genres or types of movies at some point they're going to end up redundant. Same with having a half dozen people reviewing anime, or a dozen people discussing video games. Even if you exclude the people listed there like the normal boots guys who are only on it because they did some crossover bullshit, that's still easily well over 100 people between 2008 and 2014.
 
The tired cat said:
Wait, Bennett did a crossover with FilmBrain?
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This might still be up on Youtube but I saved myself some time and just looked on an external hard drive.

The part at around 8:57 is one of the moments that cements Bennett as an idiot for me--he's confused about the shredded papers even though the dialogue in the movie clearly explains them. Bennett--at least back then (I've heard he's improved)--was the reviewer equivalent of that one guy everyone knows who keeps saying "this movie doesn't make sense, will you explain it?" and you just wanna say "maybe if you would shut up and pay attention you would understand it!"
 
skykiii said:
The part at around 8:57 is one of the moments that cements Bennett as an idiot for me--he's confused about the shredded papers even though the dialogue in the movie clearly explains them. Bennett--at least back then (I've heard he's improved)--was the reviewer equivalent of that one guy everyone knows who keeps saying "this movie doesn't make sense, will you explain it?" and you just wanna say "maybe if you would shut up and pay attention you would understand it!"
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You don't even need a specific explanation of what they are from the movie. The penguin lives in the sewer where garbage ends up, clearly it's shredded documents(this is why you use a crosscut shredder these days) to blackmail the guy with information that was presumably... shredded and thrown out. Now I don't know if Bennett or Filmbrain wrote that line, but it comes off completely retarded.
 
p1138 said:
Now I don't know if Bennett or Filmbrain wrote that line, but it comes off completely retarded.
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Speaking of Film Brain, this is gonna sound completely autistic (but then again, when do I ever not?) but the moment that forever made me not trust his opinion...

... was his review of Die Another Day, which he called "The Worst James Bond Movie."

In the review, he has a Quantum of Solace poster on his wall.

Personally I never understood hating on Die Another Day, but I guess I could see it if you live in a world where its the final James Bond film, or Casino Royale just came out... but in a post-Quantum of Solace world? No fucking way. I legit had more fun watching Moonraker than I did Quantum of Solace.
 
skykiii said:
Speaking of Film Brain, this is gonna sound completely autistic (but then again, when do I ever not?) but the moment that forever made me not trust his opinion...
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Well being realistic, you've at least improved after the name change if I remember right. Anyway.
skykiii said:
.. was his review of Die Another Day, which he called "The Worst James Bond Movie."

In the review, he has a Quantum of Solace poster on his wall.

Personally I never understood hating on Die Another Day, but I guess I could see it if you live in a world where its the final James Bond film, or Casino Royale just came out... but in a post-Quantum of Solace world? No fucking way. I legit had more fun watching Moonraker than I did Quantum of Solace.
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And shit like that is why I'm not sure which of them wrote the line as Bennett was as retarded at the time(I haven't seen anything of his in years, and looking at his channel and the past couple years of videos it's still mainstream shit, and what looks like obviously weak takes such as complaining about chainsaw man 2 years ago, asking if inu yasha is "overhated" and other nonsense) as Filmbrain still is. Most of the CA people were fucking idiots who focused more on trying to get some "cool" lines into their review, than actually properly attempting to discuss the topic of their videos. While some of them actually "reviewed" shit and could give mostly surface level takes because it was about shit no one was ever going to watch(like most of the crap Brad Jones posted videos about), for every one of him you had 2-3 equivalents of Filmbrain, Bennett, and Obscurus Lupa posting "reviews" of fairly mainstream shit without doing a deep dive into the material or actually finding anything interesting to talk about regarding the background of the material like the people involved or production that they couldn't just pull from a wiki article today(and even back in 2010).

For Bennett specifically, he's just a halfassed version of Kenny Lauderdale.

Looping this back around to being on topic regarding Yahtzee, even his latest "reviews" it's just a bunch of surface level discussion and a couple of attempts at one-liner zingers that equate to a video that comes off like someone not actually know wtf he's talking about. Much like most of the Channel Awesome dregs.
 
The Noise said:
The only things getting viewership here are Yahtzee and Design Delve. They're apparently struggling to stay profitable despite making roughly half a million a year with what should be very little overhead, so just cut shit like Bytesized and Unpacked that nobody is watching. Cut whatever "The Backdrop" is. You are poisoning your algorithm performance by flooding your subscribers' inboxes with stuff they obviously aren't interested in. Why are there two or three near-identical video game reviewers on your video game reviewer channel? Cut.

Yahtzee is the dumbest motherfucker alive. Could be swimming in ~500k a year before tax all by himself, bestowing generational wealth upon his family, and instead he decided to hand the reigns to some retard who insists on complicating what should just be the Fully Ramblomatic channel.
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This has been said about 100 times in this thread.
 
skykiii said:
Speaking of Film Brain, this is gonna sound completely autistic (but then again, when do I ever not?) but the moment that forever made me not trust his opinion...

... was his review of Die Another Day, which he called "The Worst James Bond Movie."

In the review, he has a Quantum of Solace poster on his wall.

Personally I never understood hating on Die Another Day, but I guess I could see it if you live in a world where its the final James Bond film, or Casino Royale just came out... but in a post-Quantum of Solace world? No fucking way. I legit had more fun watching Moonraker than I did Quantum of Solace.
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Not to get off-topic, but I don't mind Quantum, but I also don't mind DAD either, they're like 5/10 movies. Moonraker's a 6. They're nowhere near the worst Bond films, I've always felt Octopussy deserves the title of worst Bond because it is when the franchise became the tired Moore show
 
The Noise said:
Yahtzee is the dumbest motherfucker alive. Could be swimming in ~500k a year before tax all by himself, bestowing generational wealth upon his family, and instead he decided to hand the reigns to some retard who insists on complicating what should just be the Fully Ramblomatic channel
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Look pal, Nick is his bestest buddy so Yahthzee has to run his own career into the ground in order to help Nick keep his grifting operation upfloat a little longer! That's what friendship is all about!

I watched some older ZP videos lately, and boy you can tell that he really started to sand his old edge off the moment Trump became president in 2016. Hell, there is quite a few jokes he made in the old days that would get him cancelled today, so me thinks he should not throw stones in that glass mcmansion he lives in, or rather his wife is allowing him to live in since he's a useless golddigger. I doubt he is the one bringing food on the table, especially now.
The tired cat said:
Eh, I'd say Angry Joe and Bennet the Sage tried to stand out.
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People forget that Ross Scott aka Accursed Farms was also there for a while, altho I don't think he really did anything for the site, he just moved there temporarily due to Machinima's bullshit.
 
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