Let’s go back to the exciting world of hues. I hope that red makes an appearance this time. We had a lot of blue, yellow, and green last time. No love for red? It’s one of the three primary colours along with green and blue, who were covered extensively in the first ten minutes of the video.
9:45 – “So you’re controlling a cute little robot…”
Good stuff, Erin. When you were writing the script, did you consider having a thesaurus next to you? You don’t have to say “cute” every time.
- adorable
- beautiful
- charming
- delightful
- pleasant
- pretty
Wow, that’s terrible. That was from Thesaurus dot com. Aside from “adorable” none of those are even accurate. Are you telling me there’s only one synonym for “cute”?
Merriam Webster’s website has a much longer list but…I’m not seeing any that are accurate. “Dollish” is okay, I guess.
“Junoesque”? “(Of a woman) imposingly tall and shapely. ‘a handsome Junoesque woman.'” That doesn’t seem accurate.
“Pulchritudinous”? Oh, this has got to be good. “A person of breathtaking, heartbreaking beauty.” Umm…would you use that term to describe a cute robot in a video game? Presumably no but nobody knows what “pulchritudinous” means so you could probably get away with it.
“Sublime”, I think would work. “You’re controlling a sublime little robot.”
“Resplendent” as well. I mean, I suppose a lot of these work given the fact that Erin puts the word “little” after the adjective. So even if you’re saying that something is “beautiful”, which is what most of these synonyms seem to be about, you have the diminutive right after it, which takes the edge off.
10:30 – So after that 30 second “review” where she barely played the game, we get King Neptune’s Adventure. “I remember stumbling upon this game years ago at a game store.”
More “stumbling.” Earlier, she talked about “stumbling” across some other game. Let’s check the thesaurus again since she obviously wasn’t using one when writing this script.
Well, these are all about literal stumbling, as in falling. Let me try “find”. Yeah. Any of these would work. “Discover”, “Hit upon”, “Hunt out”, et cetera. It’s just lazy script writing. If this was all off the cuff, that would be one thing, but she’s writing all of this shit out. Apparently. Multiple revisions. Six months of work. This is the best she can do? Everything is “cute”. Everything is “stumble”?
11:30 – “I couldn’t take any more of the music or the nauseating colour pallette.”
She’s talking about, I think, level one again. She never gets far in these games, let’s just say that. But another shout out to colours.
And then she just moves on. I thought that she was going to have more to say. No. That was the end of that “review.”
11:45 – “Master Chu & The Drunkard Hu has always baffled me by its existence.”
Oh sure. It’s keeping her up at night. She’s a big Master Chu & The Drunkard Hu fan. Played it once, for seconds, on stream, for money.
She doesn’t understand that plot, which features a drunken kung fu master, and chalks this up to the 1980s being “weird”. She’s clearly unaware of the long history of drunken kung fu masters in fiction.
Let’s look this up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_Master
Well, there’s a 1978 kung fu comedy movie from Hong Kong. But does it go back further than that?
Oh. Indeed. By about 800 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Song
A fictional character who was a practitioner of the Drunken Eight Immortals style of boxing. He claims that his “fighting ability is at its peak when he is drunk.” You can read his exploits in the Chinese classical novel Water Margin.
It’s not uncommon to find drunken kung fu depicted in video games. One of Erin’s favourite games for the “The PC Engine” as Erin calls the Turbo Grafx 16, bizarrely using the Japanese term, is China Warrior. Or as she calls it, again preferring the Japanese title, The Kung Fu. The final boss practices drunken style kung fu, taking swigs from his bottle of hooch to regain energy. I guess that she never got that far in the game. She never even got past the first level, which is her typical experience with video games.
12:00 – She describes some caterpillar enemies as “cute”. Great stuff, Erin. This script should be nominated for an Oscar.
12:45 – Metal Fighter. Barely played it. Had nothing to say about it.
14:15 – Operation Secret Storm. “Where do I start with this one?”
How about the colours?
She had nothing to say about it.
But it’s a game about the Gulf War, which presumably was released around the time of the Gulf War. That’s notable, surely. Let me look this up.
It was released in 1991. The Gulf War was 1990 to 1991. Yeah. How many games have there been even subsequent to this about the Gulf War? Not many, surely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Gulf_War_video_games
Yeah, only a few. So this has some historical significance. But all that Zombie Gums could talk about was a camel who spits fireballs.
15:30 – The Pradikus Conflict.
“It starts you out in the menu of things you can purchase despite starting you out with no money. I hate when games do that.”
I can’t think of a single game where this issues arises. But Erin, being the mega gamer that she is, has apparently encountered so many games where this happens that it really bums her out.
16:00 – “There’s nothing much to say about this game besides it exists.”
Great review, Erin. The same description can basically be applied to Erin.
16:15 – After a brief (and boring) story about seeing some corporate mascot statue in sunny California, she starts her “review” of Pesterminator.
16:45 – Erin suggests, in jest, that this game was marketing for the pest control company whose mascot is the protagonist. And she gives the example of a parent calling this company when they have a “spider infestation.”
Really? Spider infestation? That’s what she thinks pest control companies do?
Mice, rats, cockroaches. To a lesser extent, hornets, bees, and ants. These are the sorts of things that pest control companies tend to deal with. Spiders? No.
I don’t think that landlords even have an obligation to deal with spiders. They don’t spread disease and is a spider infestation even a thing? They’re solitary.
I had slugs in one place I lived in. God, you talk about disgusting. Just seeing a three inch long slug creeping along the floor. It turned out that there was some leak under the kitchen cabinets so there was a bunch of water there. The pest control people cleaned up the water, they put slug pellets down, and the leak was fixed. It solved the problem.
17:15 – Then, from out of nowhere, Erin starts talking about the DARE program, which was an anti-drug program in US schools if you’re unaware.
“The 80s and 90s were all about telling kids how bad drugs were while at the same time introducing them to us.”
I thought that this was going to be some commentary about Ritalin or the rise in prescription drug use or the CIA controlling the crack trade or something. No. None of that. She then just shows that commercial comparing your brain to an egg.
HOW THE FUCK IS THAT INTRODUCING DRUGS? It’s REQUIRED to talk about drugs if you’re trying to discourage people from using drugs. What’s her solution?
I might have told this story before but it’s my greatest academic achievement. In the 12th grade, I had this weird, lazy as fuck teacher. “Eccentric” some might say. Some old woman who always had a bunch of pens in her hair. This was…biology class? Something. Some science. And I never took any complicated science class like chemistry or something so it had to be something basic like that.
Every week, we had to write like a ten page report on a different drug. It was bullshit. Writing ten pages every single week? Everybody knew that it was way too much work. She knew that it was way too much work. It was too much work for her. She didn’t even read these reports. She just looked at how many pages you wrote and gave you a grade based on that.
Armed with this information, I wrote a report on cocaine which was largely copied from my Encarta encyclopedia CD. I didn’t go all Newt Wallen on this, I had more sense than him, I changed words around, put things in my own words, shit like this. But it was basically a copy of the Encarta entry. This was before the internet, by the way.
So I got, I think a “B” on it. What wasn’t it an “A”? No idea. It was the ten pages and she didn’t even read it. But she just did whatever she wanted.
Fine. A “B” is good enough. So for the next week’s assignment, I decided to write about PCP. All I did was take that exact same paper that I wrote about cocaine, and did a “search/replace” replacing all instances of “cocaine” with “PCP”. I turned it in and got another “B”. She didn’t even read it. All of the information was clearly wrong. It was in relation to cocaine, not PCP.
I got so discouraged from that woman’s bizarre approach to education that I didn’t even bother doing the big science fair project at the end of the year. Actually, even with the best of teachers, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I was totally checked out by then.
So she said she was going to give me an “F” in the class. But she offered a solution. Buy $5 worth of candy from her. She would sell candy. It was in some kind of box. It would have only cost $5 to avoid failing the class. But I declined. Repeatedly. She’d ask me every few days. But it’s bullshit. Open bribery. Take that candy and shove it up your ass.
She ended up not failing me anyway. I got a D or D-.
17:30 – Erin suggests that she went to public school. It does somewhat explain things, I guess.
Public schooling in the US varies widely. It’s paid for by local taxes so if you’re in a wealthy area, it’s good, if you’re in a poor area, it’s horrendous. I don’t know what kind of school Erin went to but…listen to her for two seconds and tell me that that’s an educated person. She also went to college and has a degree in English but…we see the result.
I went to a Catholic school until the 10th grade and then a public school in a poor area. What a difference. Teachers openly not giving a fuck. Refusing to teach. It was rampant. I’d say half of them didn’t do anything. How can you live with yourself?
And I’m not saying that they were bad teacher or incompetent or couldn’t control the class. They would come into class, take attendance, and then sit there at their desk and do NOTHING. So we would just talk amongst ourselves or do whatever.
Some of the better lazy teachers would show an educational video or something. But there were some who would literally do nothing. Everybody knew. They didn’t get fired. Nothing happened.
In the 12th grade, there were students who couldn’t do long division. They couldn’t read. Some couldn’t even speak English.
Teachers refusing to teach absolutely didn’t happen in the private schools I went to. I couldn’t imagine it happening there.
18:00 – Raid 2020. “It’s nothing but some bottles of pills and a gun. This doesn’t look enticing at all.”
Speak for yourself, you square.
But I don’t think it’s SUPPOSED to look enticing. The game is anti-drugs, as she’s been suggesting this whole time by talking about DARE. They’re not promoting drug use.
19:15 – RoboDemons.
20:15 – “Level 2 is called the Level of Bone. I’ll let you make your own jokes with that one.”
First of all, I’m astonished that she apparently made it to level two. Secondly, GIVE US YOUR JOKE, ERIN. You had six months to come up with a joke. Do you have ANYTHING?
21:15 – “For now, that completes my journey with RoboDemons but knowing me, I’ll probably revisit it at some point.”
Oh, sure. You’re a real “gamer”, Erin. She’s chomping at the bit to play that game again. On stream, for money.
Less than ten minutes left of this god awful video. I was surprised that there weren’t any colour references in this middle section. Unless I mentioned one. No interesting colours in this batch of games, I guess.