The topic's title is misleading, sorry. But so is their website's so-called "Channel Awesome". It's not awesome at all.
Meet Doug Walker, AKA That Guy With the Glasses, AKA the Nostalgia Critic.You may have seen his 5-Second Movies or Nostalgia Critic videos on Youtube a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The reason I say "may have seen" is because his videos were pulled from Youtube for copyright reasons, posting very long sequences from movies and basically making cliff note videos of movies rather than actual reviews. After getting banned from Youtube, Doug and a friend of his started up thatguywiththeglasses.com to post his videos without Youtube's strict content enforcement and to invite other people to come along and join the party. Over time, more people joined the show, now called Channel Awesome, most notably TheSpoonyOne, Angry Joe, and Linkara.
In the beginning, Walker seemed to actually have pretty good content. The Nostalgia Critic videos were usually well researched and despite Doug Walker's ability to make the most annoying noises on the planet, were incredibly funny to watch for people born between the years 1980-1990, otherwise known as one of the demographic that watches the most movies, television, and plays the most video games. The other major contributors, Spoony, Joe, and Linkara, reviewed shitty old games and movies, shitty current games, and shitty comics respectively. Do you notice a trend here?
Doug Walker managed to very quickly jump the shark and posted a video ranting about the Angry Video Game Nerd, saying he was basically a copy of him, doing reviews of shitty old games (of course, AVGN had been working for a few years by this point). The Nostalgia Critic fans started spamming and flaming AVGN's websites eventually causing the AVGN fans to troll Doug Walker's site. And hence, his plan was complete: he attracted visitors to his site. In reality, this was all planned because James Rolfe, the AVGN, found Walker's 5-Second Movies pretty funny and wanted to see them continue. Walker had to push this further though, and ended up doing a series of videos with Rolfe pretending that they were going to have an epic battle of Nerd vs Critic. Of course, this whole thing was just to promote Walker's website which was still rather new.
With the mission complete, Walker and his friends were allowed to make all the content they wanted, shitty or not, and keep people watching for basically the same reasons people listen to Howard Stern, "they can't wait to see what they do next." Walker's content started going downhill around July 2009 when he started reviewing movies that nobody had seen, even his target audience. Just to add to this nonsense, he stopped making 5-Second Movies, probably his best content, way back in 2008. Ever since mid-2009, his Nostagia movies have been approaching content that is increasingly more and more obscure, resorting to reviewing movies that are less than 10 years old and movies that he admits that he didn't know existed until recently.
That's just getting started on the bullshit, however. TheSpoonyOne, a Final Fantasy fan, but only of numbers IV, VI, VII, and XII (wouldn't that just make him a JRPG fan, not a Final Fantasy fan?), decided to review Final Fantasy VIII, well-known upon its release for being a game that divided the fanbase, although these days the general opinion is that FF8 is well-regarded and people were too quick to jump on it mainly for not being FF7. His FF8 review (a series of eleven videos, because he wanted his audience to see "exactly" how horrible it was) started in September 2008 and finally came to a conclusion almost a full year later in July 2009 (hmm, about the same time Walker posted his Steel review). In the video, Spoony ends up dressed as Squall in a fairly accurate costume and even has a fucking gunblade. If he hated FF8 that much, why does he own... well, any of that?
Spoony only continued to prove his idiocy a year later when he started a video series talking about how horrible Final Fantasy X is, a game that has close to zero negative reviews. He originally only made one video, stating at the end that the game was too horrible to continue. A few months later, he made 2 more videos, allegedly due to "fan demand," but it became obvious why it took so long in the final video: he had to get a Tidus costume of course! If you hate a game that much, why dress up like the character you hate the most? Why can't you make a friend go get the costume and dress up instead?
Spoony's worst problem however, is his utter inability to take any constructive criticism. After a series of incredibly stupid videos, people started leaving thoughtful criticisms asking Spoony to review better material or better yet, stop making as many videos to up the quality of his videos. Of course, Mr. Noah Antwiler wouldn't take any of this and just started banhammering anyone on his site's forums who disagreed with anything he said.
Angry Joe is a guy who has taken AVGN's act and changes 2 things for his personal style: he's Mexican and he reviews current games (and sometimes movies!) rather than ancient ones. First off, I need to say that I am of Mexican descent myself; my parents were both born in Mexico. This guy's English is just downright insulting to children of immigrants. He was clearly born in the US, but talks like a cholo from the 'hood. Of course, no cholo from the ghetto could possibly afford all the games he's played, so it's either all an act, or he really does just sound like a fucking asshole.
Angry Joe has been the source of internet backlash on multiple occasions, resulting in him being the one primarily blamed for Channel Awesome's increasingly worse content. In a review of Red Dead Redemption, he stated that it was refreshing to see such a good game in a market littered with sequels... except Red Dead Redemption is a sequel. In his review of The Last Airbender, he started criticizing things about the plot that were actually ripped straight from the TV show, which he later admitted to not watching. Being that the TV show is incredibly popular, response to his review was not kind even though the movie was terrible.
Joe recently interviewed Geoff Keighley at the VGAs, asking him some fan-submitted questions. For those who don't know, Keighley is a well-respected figure in the gaming industry, on par with the likes of Adam Sessler, and one of the main creators of the Spike VGAs. During the interview, Keighley dismissed Joe's incredibly dumb and inflammatory questions and at one point even told him he had 2 minutes left. Joe began to blow up and came close to openly insulting Keighley before he just walked away from the "interview." Needless to say, Joe is viewed very lowly in the eyes of respectable people in the gaming industry.
OK fine, I'll list 11 reasons to stay the fuck away from that website. Why 11? Because Channel Awesome just sucks that much.
- The Nostalgia Critic just doesn't try anymore.
- Spoony has no idea what he's talking about in any of his reviews.
- Spoony thinks he's far more famous than he really is; it doesn't help that the FF Wiki has an entire page dedicated to him.
- Angry Joe is a bad stereotype of Mexicans.
- Joe has no fucking clue what constitutes a good or bad game and just repeats things he hears on that them there internets.
- Linkara is too quick to defend his compatriots.
- The Amazing Atheist, now known as the Distressed Watcher, is a goddamn employee of Channel Awesome now, what the fuck?
- Everyone who reviews manga or anime pretty much either has no idea what they're talking about or are proof that manga and anime are getting increasingly worse every year.
- The Nostalgia Chick can't find a style or even a name to call her own and has resorted to basically becoming a male Linkara who reviews movies the Nostalgia Critic won't review.
- They have a fucking store where their loyal fans buy their stupid overpriced shit.
- They want you to pay them $17.99 for a DVD copy of Kickassia, their shitty 2-year anniversary movie, despite the fact you can watch the entire movie for free on their own website.
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