The Exorcism Of James Rolfe (The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures And Me: The Final Chapter)

In the end, it all comes back to the numbers.

This, much like my Metroid Other M post from a few months ago, is nothing more than elaborate exorcism. Both Other M and this are games that, though I completed and tossed aside years ago, I can still find myself ranting and raving about at a moment's notice. This is a volcanic eruption of necessity, I'm afraid. If I don't get this out there in one gigantic burst of third-rate alchemical waffling, I'm going to drive everyone I care about batty by never shutting up about this game. Much like the Other M rant, this is happening because I discovered a point about the game that I want to make. Unlike Other M, however, this game isn't wildly criticized and it has a different history beyond "it was a really bad entry in a franchise I loved". So, before we make our points and since I have never really properly touched on the history between me and this here game before, let's slip into a TARDIS and check out the Web Of Time.

The story so far...

In the fall of 2006, a very good friend and I discovered the Angry Video Game Nerd. We were amused by him and continued to watch his updates for several years. In 2013 it was announced that Screwattack Games and Freakzone Games were working together to create a retro-themed jump and shoot game based on the Nerd. Hey, I was on board! I can't find the exact trailer now, but the image that stuck with me was a simple one. The Nerd, in a futuristic level, encountering the famous Mega Man blocks which appear and vanish at timed intervals. His text box popped up and said something along the lines of "OH NO, NOT THIS SHIT AGAIN!". I was okay with this! A retro-themed game which looks back on the tropes of hard games, pokes a little fun at them, and has a good challenge? I was ready. The game came out, and that friend of mine bought me a copy. I loaded it up, ready to give it a shot, and... I hated it. I beat it once on Easy mode, and then again on Normal. I still hated it. So, in order to vent my disappointment, I wrote about the game over on that cool website, Socks Make People Sexy. Here is what I wrote. I checked the word count just now, and my original screed is just under 2900 words. A fair chunk of text, but no more than two days' work at NaNoWriMo. Here, then, were my main two objections.

1) The humor.

I set myself up for disappointment here, by assuming the game would play with the tropes of 8 and 16-bit platformers from the 80's and 90's. Instead, the game seemed more preoccupied with making in-jokes based on things from AVGN videos. Which, I really took to task because that's a major pet peeve of mine. It stems out to other places as well, like the Channel Awesome "movies" which are naught more than an excuse to string all of the in-jokes, characters, and running gags of that website's critics into a narrative about having pretend fights with people to save the world. I took this to task hard, for being far too insular and alienating to anyone who had a casual interest in retro-themed games. You know, rather than "this is only for AVGN fans and nobody else is allowed to get the humor!". In hindsight, I took the wrong approach here and let my own personal biases in. Which, well, it's my review and my opinion so my personal biases are allowed, but it didn't help. What I should have done, and the position I take now, is a far more simpler and objective statement. References aren't jokes. I am an AVGN fan. I'm ostensibly part of the target audience. Reminding me that the rock weapon from Friday The 13th was bad isn't a joke. Am I supposed to be impressed at remembering a thing from another thing? Because I really wasn't. Video reviewer ProJared said it best, and succinctly: "[the game] doesn't offer any humor of its own; it's all references which are fleeting, which will have you acknowledging that you get the reference, but no laughs will leave your lungs." Couldn't have said it better myself. That's a minor point though, and one I'd concede to taste. The second objection, however, is far more severe.

2) The difficulty.

AVGN Adventures is not a game based on the hard games of old. I say this, being a bit of a hard game fanatic. AVGN Adventures is a masocore game, more akin to I Wanna Be The Guy or Eryl's Action than anything like Mega Man or Castlevania. It doesn't work. It didn't work for me, but it worked for many. The many called it a "rewarding" hard game experience, and that just begs the question of what in the everloving fuck "rewarding" means in hard game lingo. Does it mean that you feel like you outsmarted the game and were clever and inventive enough to surpass a challenge? If so, I applaud the many for feeling that good feeling. I, however, would classify its difficulty as "relieving." As in, relief that I'm finally done with that particular godforsaken section and can move on. No, there's only one way to beat AVGN Adventures, and it's the way where you memorize where every cheeky gotcha trap is and beat a boss who flies in a figure 8 pattern and gets faster the more you hit it. That's how all the levels go, and on Normal or higher, you have lives to deal with. On even higher difficulties, continues. You don't make a limited life masocore game. You just... don't. It goes totally against the flow of the thing! On that note, every time you die in the game (which is often) you get a procedurally-generated Nerd quote about how he'd rather stick his head up a blah blah blah. These are unskippable. They ruin the flow of the thing and interrupt the masocore experience to make more references to things you like. I hated it.

Pointedly, I was in the minority here. The only people I am aware of who didn't like it are ProJared and Something Awful Let's Player, Psychedelic Eyeball. He did a big two hour stream of the game and was baffled at all the non-sequiturs, to which his cohosts would tell him that whatever he was looking at was something from a Nerd video. So. The rest of the world loved it. I'm going to use numbers here, and that will become important later for my own opinions, but here I'll use them to the benefit of the fans of this game. It has a 77 Metacritic score.  The word "rewarding" is bandied around like a buzzword, but we'll ignore that for now! People loved it! People loved it a lot and I didn't. So, here I was, fall of 2013, with a 2900 word review that took down the game for not being all that good. It's here where our story gets good, as I happened to notice that GameFAQs had no user reviews of the game. So, I took the words I had written, cleaned up some of the swears and other things, and submitted it on a whim. They accepted. Well, people were none too pleased about it. Not long after, a thread popped up on the forum for the game. "Already a user review on this game?!", it asks. What followed was two days of nothing short of total amusement for me as people tore into me for my opinion; but not in the way you'd think. Not quite. Rather than really raise any of my points, or get into some sort of debate about expectations of hard games or how masocore games mixed with humor should work, or anything like that... I got ad hominem attacks. Total fallacies intended to dismiss my opinion in what felt like a strange attempt to protect the dignity of their game they loved so much. I critiqued it for AVGN references, so therefore I must hate the AVGN! I must even be an Irate Gamer fanboy attempting to ding the number scores! I wrote a 32,000 word wall of text about how it was bad, and therefore my opinion is invalid because it's too long! He thought the difficulty was unfair? He's probably just terrible at video games! Oh, and that number score. That fucking number score. I gave it a 3 out of 10 because the description for a 3/10 on there was "bad". Which is what I thought of it. Unfortunately I forgot that people really give a shit about number scores, and half the objection was that I unfairly gave it a 3. I'll let you in on a secret. When it comes to number scores in games, I don't give a shit. I let the words speak for themselves. Too bad I threw my words into a space where numbers do matter. Oops. To be fair, a couple of the user comments I got on the review were a little more well-worded in their disagreement.

Those most recent two really make me giggle. Now, I'm not saying my review is good or anything. I know what I'm about. The level of hate I got for it simply baffles me. Everyone else liked it. I didn't. The game got good reviews, it has a sequel coming in December, and everyone else who played it appears to have had a good time and were amused at the jokes and thought it was fun. To you out there: You won. You won by the simple virtue of getting to have more fun than me. There was, and is, absolutely no need to dogpile on me with ad hominem attacks about how I probably am a troll who is terrible at retro games (which is particularly hilarious if you know about my "Hard Game Beater" exploits) in order to... what? Protect the integrity of this game? Win an argument online? As I just said, you won when you had fun and I didn't. I am not trying to antagonize anyone, not really. Notably, both camps on this game have their gonzo loudmouths. I looked at the comments on that ProJared video. I saw a whole bunch of shit about how "Oh, these defenders are just dumb AVGN fanboys, they'd buy a bag of shit with his name on it for 15 bucks!" I'm not going to do that. I respect you enough not to do that, and I only ask you respect me enough not to as well. I'm just an idiot with an opinion. There have been good critiques of this game and my viewpoints on it. I made a video on it in March, for reasons. A lot of what I've been typing out here, I said there. I still felt the need to explode about it. I got a very good comment from one "Shot97", which I'm going to put here because it's the kind of debate I was looking for. Respectfully bringing up their own opinion in regards to mine.

Very interesting thoughts on the game. I can't see how anyone could find fault in your arguments against the game. Anyone that can't respect the way you put forth your opinion is only showing what little respect they deserve. The best review for the game put head on against yours would only show a difference of opinion. You would certainly win against the less articulate good reviews, given that the majority do seem to enjoy the game. 

I'm more in the middle on this one. I can see exactly where you're coming from on designing a game intentionally to be difficult... and delving a little into the psychology of it, given that you (and I would put myself in this category as well) have found enjoyment in beating games that many others find terribly difficult, you're more frustrated than your average person would be with this game. Given your opinions on games like Castlevania, Battletoads, Ghosts and Goblins, and Mega Man, which are all games that others find difficult; They are all still games that can be beaten if you're persistent enough. If you're smart enough to recognize the patterns and if you're patient enough to go through all the deaths necessary to get good, you will come to a point where that game will cease to be difficult for you. Say what you will about many of those old school hard games, once you figured it out, you're golden. There is a great satisfaction that is unmatched in modern gaming for when you master an old school hard game. Contrast that with this game, which is designed to piss you off and I completely understand why a person of your skill would hate this game. No matter how much time you invest in this one, you're still going to find far too many cheap deaths and areas that you will never truly master. If you're looking for that old school satisfaction of mastering a hard game, you will get none of that with this game.

But I can also understand the side that says it's a good game. The controls are there, the settings are nice for 8-bit inspiration, there's humor in abundance, and regardless of the difficulty you should be able to see a nice chunk of the game. Not being able to master a game will not be an issue to people who have never really mastered hard games.

Where you have issues with the AVGN references, for a game that's called AVGN Adventures you're making your target audience very clear. It could be easily said that a game (or movie for that matter) that tries to appeal to a general audience, when it made all of its money to that point on fans, will end up being extremely disappointing. Are there ways you can go about getting both the casual person and the hardcore fan into it? I guess... But you will never really make both camps happy. If you make the general people happy, you could have seriously fucked up everything you've ever done. That could be career ending if you throw away the fans for money.

I kind of feel the X-Files did this with the 2nd movie, trying to appeal to casual thriller fans and coming dangerously close to kicking their fans in the teeth. There were supposed to be many more films after that one... Nothing... It is because they went for the general audience and forgot about the fans. They did the best they could with the first movie to make it accessible but it leaned more toward the fan that knew what they were getting into. And that's the best you can ever do. Most people that went to see The Adams Family knew what they were getting into, but they were also strange enough characters to get people that hadn't seen it to fall in love with them too. It's hard to balance it, but the ones that are successful usually lean more toward the fan than the general audience. If you're going to do one or the other, i'd rather it be an experience completely for the fan. The X-Files game would be an example where the casual adventure game fan will find no substance there, but any X-Files fan will fall in love with it based simply on the references. I love that game because of it, regardless of how easy it is in terms of adventure games. But I do recognize it's not really good on its own... But what's the use of having the license if you're going to make it stand on its own? In that case make up new characters and take away the expense of the license and make some more money. 

An adequate game with enough references to make me smile makes it a good game. You could do better certainly, but it's not hard to do good. Which makes it much more of a shame considering how badly licensed game have been over the years. It should be so easy to make a "good" game out of it, because it only has to be okay to make the fan think it's good. 

Getting back to AVGN, I think it accomplished exactly what he wanted it to. He told them what he wanted and they delivered. It's playable, it's hard like he wanted, and his fans should enjoy it. That's a lot more than can be said for that now discontinued IG game. Could it have been better? Yeah... But it's not bad. The Irate Gamer game is bad... This is not bad. Reminds me of ET and some of the more famous "bad" games. Is ET bad? If you look at it from a certain perspective yes, but it's very easy to change perspective and look at it in a positive light. I think that's where this game lies. I've seen all of his stuff, I like the AVGN. I can find enjoyment in this game because of the references. I wouldn't recommend it to a non fan, but who are we kidding? Nobody else is going to buy that game... and thus... he probably made the right decision. I think it pisses me off just like it does you, but I can let it be. I can say fuck it and put in a different game yet appreciate what the AVGN game does offer. 

Anyway... So I'm sure you've heard the stupid fanboy defenses of the game, and I'm sure you've seen some eloquent defenses saying it was great, but hopefully this "it is what it is" down the middle review is something you've yet to see.

Very well said, and it even gave more insight into why I personally might not like the game; because of my own hard game experience! It does control well, if nothing else. Looking back on it now, there's one phrase that jumps out: "Regardless of the difficulty, you should be able to see a nice chunk of the game.". I'm going to compare AVGNA to Shovel Knight now. That doesn't sound very fair, I know, but for once I'm not trying to harp on AVGNA. I very well could, because Shovel Knight feels like it was made with the opposite approach in mind. It is inspired by retro video games, but then it goes and does its own thing with them, feeling like a natural evolution of the design philosophy that actually was present back in the day. No, I'm going to compare them in a different way, and a way that will eventually use numbers. Let's talk about lives. AVGNA, as stated, uses lives... but only on Normal difficulty or higher. Its Easy setting gives you twice the hit points and infinite lives and continues. I could make this a point about how Freakzone Games' difficulty selection is basically just tweaking the X and Y values of lives/hit points/continues to your detriment but we won't go there. Yet. Shovel Knight, pointedly, does away with the lives system, instead opting for a Dark Souls-esque approach in which death is penalized by the loss of some currency, but making it back to the spot you died at without suffering another death will allow you to regain it. Lives... are an archaic thing. They're hard to make work in 2015. They existed because of factors we used to discuss on the Nintendo Project. The Arcade Mentality, the Dread Beast GREED. The idea that the game needed to kill you to get more quarters out of you. Games have evolved from that, and games like Shovel Knight acknowledge that evolution and go for something different. AVGNA on Easy mode, I'll concede, goes for the same sort of approach. It will kill you over and over and over, but with infinite lives you can power through and possibly enjoy the game. The content isn't shuttered to you for being terrible at the masocore experience. Okay, AVGNA. That's good. I think, then, this is the major difference I had with this game's fans... and the reason I know that is numbers.

Finally, after god knows how many words in, we get to the part that inspired this writeup. Well, part of it; the other half was just wanting to exorcise, in print, once and for all my frustrations and feelings and amusement at this game and the fiasco it's caused me these past two years. Everyone, I give you... the global achievement stats for AVGN Adventures. At first glance it doesn't seem like much, but on closer analysis I noticed some... really odd things. Things that might actually explain a lot about the shared experience of the game and how it was better than mine. Frankly, this is just me adapting to the rules of the game. If people get to claim that a 77 Metacritic score means it's good, or ProJared's 5/10 is not justified because he said "above average" and should have given it a 6 or 7, or that my 3 is totally unfair because of this and that... well, I get to weaponize the achievement stats to back up my points, too. See, I have a theory. I'll do my best not to ad hominem the players of this game as I do so, and I also note that this data is only for the PC version; the game also came out on 3DS and Wii U, but those came out much much later. Still, perhaps the fanbase gravitated to those versions over the Steam release so this may not be entirely accurate. Well, enough waffling. Let's get into my theory.

I theorize that the majority of the AVGNA players have only played the game once or twice, and only on the Easy difficulty setting.

I want to make it very clear that this is not an attempt at hard game shaming. Yes, I did beat it on Normal as well as Easy. Yes, I beat a lot of hard games. This is more of me trying to understand the opinions of those who liked the game a lot, and playing it exclusively on Easy without the worry of running out of lives/continues and having to start the level/game all over again would definitely help. It didn't help me, granted, but I can understand the perspective. So. What can we use to back this up? Let's start with the death achievements. 51.4% of people have the "ASS!" achievement for dying 100 times. Not a hard thing to accomplish in a masocore game, believe me. I have this achievement as well. If it doesn't happen in your first playthrough, it for sure will happen if you bump up to Normal difficulty and start playing with three hit points instead of six. Not that health matters overly because aside from the bosses most of the obstacles are instant death, a la Battletoads, but anyway. Just under half the player base didn't die 100 times during their play of this game. Only 4.9% have the "ASSSS!!" achievement for dying 1000 times. I do not have this one. I'm not sure if that second one is a good metric to judge, because by a playthrough or two you'll have memorized all the death traps and likely be good enough to avoid most of them. I speak from experience; I did two playthroughs, and in the March video I managed to clear a stage in the game without dying. It's entirely possible that a lot of the people who have this achievement did so by deliberately dying 1000 times in order to get it. Hey, achievement culture. Still, only 51% have died more than 100 times. So, either they stopped playing for some reason, or only did one playthrough. Or were skilled enough to avoid a lot of the death traps. There are many possibilities, but this is only the beginning. Two achievements exist for scenes from certain levels; one for riding the fire shark in the hell level (which I'll admit is a brief but enjoyable moment of over the top awesomeness), and one for riding Santa Claus's corpse down a snowy incline while jumping spikes. (One of the few moments where the game pulls its own crude humor rather than an in-joke.) These are not optional parts of the stages; they are required to complete each of those levels. As beating the game requires you to complete every level, it stands to reason that anyone who beat the game at least once would have them. The numbers? Just over 40% for each. Of course, many players could very well have beaten one or both of those levels and then stopped playing... but even so. You would have them if you've beaten the game, so they should by rights be much higher than that.

There is no achievement for completing the game on Easy mode. That's unfortunate, as it forces me to make assumptions. Knowing what percentage of people cleared the thing on any mode would really have helped. We know it can't be any more than 40.2% because of the Santa achievement... but luckily for us, the other difficulties have achievements. The numbers are grim. Just 5.1% for "You call that normal?!". Let that sink in. Only 5% of people beat the thing on the Normal difficulty, and the numbers shrink from there. 1.6% for "Old School" mode. 0.6% for "Hard As Balls" mode. 0.4% each for "Impossible" and "YOLO" modes. Past Old School mode, of course, you reach challenge levels that are positively ludicrous. YOLO mode in particular gives you one single life to beat the game with, and mad props to anyone who's done that legit. Still, the latter modes are probably meant more as jokes than anything; making the game next to impossible, just like the Nintendo era was supposed to be. It's the myth of what Battletoads, Ghosts n Goblins, or Silver Surfer are; mythical impossible games that no human being could ever beat. (Hi! Hello! How are you?) No, for now let's zero in on that Normal mode achievement. 5% is low. 5% is really low. Again, many factors could be in play beyond "It was too difficult for most players.". It sure feels that way, though, doesn't it? I again don't mean that as a "heh heh get good at hard games" sort of mentality. I've had that mud hurled at me. I'm not about to become a hypocrite and hurl it right back. No, the line of thinking I can envision in regards to this is "Gee, this game is a lot better with infinite lives. I'd much rather play it like that!". Which, paired with Shovel Knight and its rejection of the lives system, says an awful lot about the tastes of people playing retro-style games in the 2010s. No matter what factors were involved in each individual decision, it all boils down to one simple fact; 95% of the players of this game were not inclined to beat it on the Normal difficulty mode.

As for multiple playthroughs? A half-hearted bit of evidence, but telling in its own ways. The game is full of hidden secrets, here and there. Three playable characters exist to be found in certain levels. There are cameos from other famous Internet personalities in each stage, like Pat The NES Punk or Egoraptor or Jim Sterling (What most of these have to do with the AVGN, or indeed anything beyond "I recognize that person!" is beyond me but shhhhh). Each level also has a hidden Shit Pickle in it (another reference, shhhhh) to be found. Well, far be it from me to judge anyone's satisfaction with a game, but I know that on a replay I'd like to try and find all that hidden shit. I did manage to get all the playable characters, but I only found a couple of hidden cameos and Shit Pickles and I didn't care to replay to find more. Once you beat a level, that's it. You can't go back to it. That may be a factor in the low achievement scores for the secrets. 15.8% have found all the playable characters, myself included. Two of the cameos have their own separate achievements; 7.1% have found Matthew Lentz (who won a pre-order contest to have himself put into the game), and 6.5% have found Craig from Screwattack. Only 2.3% have found every cameo, and just 2.1% found every hidden Shit Pickle. Rather low numbers. Again, for whatever reason, not many people seemed to really care about finding everything in the game. That doesn't exactly say much about the objective number of replays, but it sure does say that the majority didn't bother to scour the tricky levels for everything. Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins, the original release, fell into this same trap. You can't have sprawling levels that beg for thorough exploration to find secrets and powerups, but then also have those levels be merciless exercises in precision. You just can't do both of those and make it work.

So. Let's recap our numbers. Of the Steam players of AVGN Adventures:

51% of players died 100 times during their play time of the game.
At most, 40% have beaten the game at least once on any difficulty.
5.1% have beaten it on at the Normal difficulty.
2% have found every hidden cameo or Shit Pickle in the game.

I mean, when I was preparing this I knew that only 5% had beaten it on Normal, but the Fire Shark/Santa achievement really surprised me. Even assuming that everyone who got the Santa achievement then went on to beat the game, that still means that the majority of people who booted it up never even went on to beat the thing. I put myself in the minority when I said I hated the thing, but the people who beat it and loved it are technically in the minority as well! I mean, holy shit! Even if we assume that everyone who got the Santa achievement then went on to beat the game and was on Normal mode (and that friend who got me the game falls into this category; his one and only playthrough was on Normal mode), that's still only 45% and we're counting everyone in that, not just the people who got halfway in and quit for whatever reason. So the number's definitely lower than 45%, we just don't know for sure how low. I mean, Jesus! How can it be difficult yet rewarding when the majority tapped out before being rewarded? Where in the hell are the reviews and blog posts from the 55% or so of people who quit it? In short, how did 45% become the minority for which the game was heaped praise? I don't understand it. I really don't. What I do understand, though, is this. Of the people who did complete this game, the majority of them were perfectly happy to do it on Easy mode with infinite lives. I took the game to task for being too difficult in all the wrong ways, and my basis was mostly on Normal mode. That would have been the mode most fresh in my mind in September 2013 when I wrote about the game. I was criticizing a level of difficulty and frustration that, mathematically, only very few people had also experienced. Maybe that explains why people thought I was gonzo. The game was fine on Easy, what's this idiot talking about? Hell, the thing appears to have fallen into obscurity now. No forum posts. No user reviews on GameFAQs for the 3DS and Wii U ports. The game had a Halloween achievement, both last year and this year. Beat the game on Normal or higher over Halloween weekend, and you earn it. 1.1% completion rate. Mother of God.

Finally, before we close this massive exorcism and I open myself up to critique (and good critique, I hope!) from all of you... that sequel game is coming. From the trailer it looks to be taking influence from Mega Man X. It also has a Mr. Bucket boss called "Mr. Fuckit", itself a reference to the James Rolfe spinoff series Board James. So, nothing much has changed on the "Look, remember that?" front. Not that I expected it to! 77 Metacritic Score. Rewarding, rewarding, rewarding. Why would Freakzone Games change a thing when they did so well the last time they did it? I'm in the minority in hating almost every conceptual aspect of what that game was. Granted, as we've proven, the people who liked and beat it are also in the minority, but well oh well. I don't have high hopes on that front, but what about the difficulty? Surely they'll tone that down a bit, make it a little more fair, a little less reliant on the same instant death block sprite over and over again? Well... I'm sorry to say it, but Freakzone Games hasn't learned a thing in regards to getting past the "myth" of what hard Nintendo games were. Case in point; Manos The Hands Of Fate. They made a little retro jump and shoot based on that terrible movie, before the AVGN game. I got it for a dollar from a Humble Bundle, and... I really enjoyed it! Here, look at me enjoying it! It was, granted, a bit of a reference fiesta in regards to cheesy B-movies of the type that Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed on... but it somehow worked for me. The difficulty was more in line with a typical jump and shoot, and in the one segment with instant death hazards, there were 1-Ups that respawned every time you died! Essential infinite tries! Granted, "retro style jump-and-shoot that references something from pop culture" appears to be the one note Freakzone can play so far, but this was fine! Then came the news that they were remastering the game for a Steam release. Well, out it came, and... oh dear. You had more cutscenes based on the bad movie the game was an homage to, difficulty selection that again amounted to "if Normal gives you X health, Hard gives you 1/2X health" rather than changing up enemy patterns or platforming sections or anything like that, and Torgo as a playable character. There was even an all-new level that riffed on Plan 9 From Outer Space. Then the slow, sudden realization of what they had done crept in as I watched a live stream of the new game. See, one of my most hated levels of the AVGN game was "Boo! Haunted House.". In that one, the game went into this low visibility gimmick where you could only see so far in front of you, and instant death skull blocks would appear suddenly and kill you if you didn't know they were there. Even with infinite lives, that shit's just plain annoying. This low visibility hazard was added to the remastered Manos. Specifically, to the entire back half of the game. Granted, I haven't played the remastered Manos, but conceptually this sounds like the worst most unneeded horseshit. It adds arbitrary challenge to a game that was just fine the way it is, for seemingly no reason. Other than possibly "the game needs to be hard. How can we make it harder?". At this point, Freakzone Games have become the George Lucas of hard games. They tinkered with something that was just fine, only to break it in the name of "making it difficult". They also got rather belligerent with someone on Twitter over their dislike of the game... and were actively tweetsearching themselves on the matter. Not cool. Not cool. Particularly for a developer who said this. Practice what you preach, mate.

I won't be buying AVGN Adventures 2 for myself. I suspect, however, that someone might hurl it at me. If that happens, I will play it, and I will write about it. Either Freakzone pulls off a miracle and the game's new elements really appeal to me and I write some praise about it... or it's the same old, same old, and I write critique about it and likely upset a bunch of people and get them to say I'm terrible at games in an effort to win the argument. Either way, I win. Just like the minority won with the first game, somehow. I think I got out everything I needed to say, other than dispelling the "myth" about hard Nintendo games that Freakzone and others seem to take as gospel. Then again, we can probably save that for another day. Maybe when AVGNA2 comes out, if it falls into the same traps. For now... I think I have exorcised enough of my thoughts. Another 32,000 wall of text from some angry Irate Gamer fanboy who is terrible at video games has been completed. What's next? Hell if I know. But what I do know is this.

I'd rather eat raw moose meat coated in hot shit sauce than play this fucking game again.