Jimquisition



A Web Original show hosted on The Escapist by Jim Sterling, a Destructoid reviewer infamous for his tendency to provoke outrage and with a sizable Hatedom. Assumes the persona of a caricature of himself to make broader points about video games and the video game industry. Episodes can be found here.

Tropes featured include:
"WORSHIP ME, is what I'm saying! Worship me! And Thank God for Me! Which I know doesn't make sense because I said earlier about Gods not being able to be interacted with, but if you worship me, then you-- I can be the God, and you can say "Thank Jim for Jim", thank God-- God...(points to self) God... I am God..."
 * A God Am I: Taken to it's absolute extreme at the end of the Ubisoft review:

"You know, some weeks I finish a video, and I think "That was righteous! That was glorious! That was the truth! You sir, Jim Sterling, are Hitler!" But a good one, obviously. I'm a good Hitler. The good Hitler of videogames."
 * Accentuate the Negative: Although he's willing to expound on it if he feels it's truly negative.
 * Author Filibuster: The entire series is just one Author Filibuster after another, though it's tongue-in-cheek.
 * Berserk Button: The "you didn't play the game correctly" argument as a response to not liking a game. Also see Cluster F-Bomb and Everyone Has Standards.
 * Canon Welding: Virgillio Armarndio is a carryover from his Destructoid show "The Videogame Show What I've Done."
 * Catch Phrase: "And thank God for me!"
 * "Wrong!" (Said in a manner of increasingly silly ways)
 * Country Matters: Comes with being a Mean Brit.
 * Cluster F-Bomb: Jim hardly backs down from obscenities, but it was Dead Space 2's crappy multiplayer and online pass system that drove him to previously unseen levels of profanity.
 * Commander Contrarian: Jim will occasionally take up controversial point of views specifically for the point of antagonizing people into rethinking their positions... or at least getting pissed off about it.
 * Cool and Unusual Punishment: According to Jim, Square Enix needs to stop announcing games all the time or Yoishi Ada needs to get kicked in the ass with steel toed boots.
 * Dissimile: In the "digital games" episode:

"Instead it should be more ironic... I don't know, just pulling this at random, some fat blogger with a whiny English accent, dressed up in a trenchcoat with glasses like he's some sort of rock star, with a background that makes it look like he's in a bad production of V for Vendetta. You know, something so blindingly, obviously ironic that only a fucking idiot would take it as a genuine persona."
 * Everyone Has Standards: Despite saying sexist terms, he doesn't seem to mean it in a misogynistic way. And any game that treats rape and misogyny lightly will get heaps of scorn (why he listed Duke Nukem Forever as the worse game of its year). After "Mass Effect 3: A Gay Erotic Love Story," he did a 'normal' video tackling the subject for everyone who found the previous one too subtle, during which he goes increasingly berserk as he addresses each point brought up in the arguments people make against Mass Effect 3's Gay Option.
 * Large Ham: As a persona.
 * He went Visual Pun by depicting Reggie Fils-Aime with an actual large ham in "Nintendo of America."
 * Mean Brit: Jim's persona has strong elements of this. Especially when talking about something that upsets him.
 * Mean Character, Nice Actor: Despite everything, Jim Sterling seems to be a relatively nice and reasonable guy (at least, compared to his Jimquisition persona).
 * No Export for You: The source of rage against Nintendo of America and its refusal to export a number of cult hits from Japan.
 * One of Us: May seem redundant for a video game reviewer, but his nerddom extends beyond the realm of video games. Some examples include:
 * He'll show off various pieces of swag publishers send him, purely for kicks. Items include a Imperial Guard chainsword, The Penetrator, and a Kirby beanie. Speaking of...
 * He wrapped up an episode on Kirby by doing the Kirby dance.
 * He has admitted to frequently reading TV Tropes on Podtoid, and is even aware of this very page. On the episode discussing the positives of the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, he starts the episode in medias res while looking up this very page on a smartphone.
 * Poe's Law: Apparently, some people didn't get that Jim Sterling's persona on the show is intentionally as abrasive and narcissistic as possible. So he decided to point it out as blatantly as possible without breaking character.


 * Serious Business: For Jim, all of video games counts, but rental games and the problems surrounding them seem to be his biggest pet peeve.
 * Show Within a Show: "Virgillio Armarndio's Art Hole," which is also another case of Stylistic Suck.
 * Slash Fic: Jim wrote, and did a dramatic reading of, a story about a gamer turning gay because of Mass Effect 3 to make fun of the controversy (and often latent homophobia) surrounding the game's Gay Option.
 * Small Name, Big Ego: The entire point of the Jimquisition character.
 * Stock Footage: Jim tends to use a lot of clips from the games he's talking about, voicing over the footage to fill up time.
 * Stylistic Suck: All original artwork for the show is done by Jim himself in MS Paint. He admitted on Desert Bus for Hope that the MS Paint artstyle amuses him, and that he'd never hire an actually good artist to do intentionally bad artwork.
 * Strawman Political: Jim doesn't exactly go out of his way to use fair representations of the people he's arguing against.
 * Take That: His videos about Nintendo of America, Duke Nukem Forever("Too Cool to Be Cool"), and the pointlessness of trying to be mature when arguing with immature people ("Fight in the Name of Childishness"), to name a few.
 * Take That Me: Whenever he wants to highlight the absurdity of his persona, he engages in a little self-deprecating humor.
 * Technology Porn: Combined with a bit of Hypocritical Humor; in "The Irony of PC Gaming," Jim spends a great deal of time talking about all the good games you can play without needing a $2000 state-of-the-art computer. However, he notes that he still has a pimped-out rig to play the latest games because "I'm a video game reviewer and we need that shit."
 * Tempting Fate: At the conclusion of "Hate Out Of Ten", he nervously asks "At least we're not criticizing 9's, at least now. Right? Yeah?" Cue a blog criticizing Games Radar for giving The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword a 9.
 * Troll: Jim loves to provoke people into overreaction, especially so he can mock them later for it.

Tropes discussed in his reviews include:
"You can hack doors, turrets, guns... but if you fail, the doors can hack you back. It's a game where you can get too scared to shoot... there's 32 player co-op, which is broken as fuck, but have it, just fucking have it!"
 * Did Not Do the Research: The news media, when discussing video games, such as during the infamous Hot Coffee and Mass Effect controversies.
 * The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Jim loves E.Y.E for this reason.


 * Digital Piracy Is Evil: He maintains that pirates need to stop dressing up their activity as anything other than stealing, however, in 2012, he put up a video saying his views had changed a bit. He still thinks it's a crime, but the more he examines copyright laws, the more he realizes (in his words) it's less about protecting the rights of artists and more about protecting the executives who bought the rights from the artists and are making money off them. So getting upset at pirates is like getting upset at a thief stealing something that was stolen in the first place. (He puts in a caveat that this does not apply to self-published creators, in which case he still gets on people's cases to actually buy the product and give them the money they deserve).
 * He also tends to play middle-man too, also saying that there are no real good guys or bad guys in the piracy issue after 4.5 million copies of The Witcher 2 and a 90% piracy rate for World of Goo.
 * Don't Like Don't Read: He says that if people were really going to hate the Water Temple changes in the The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time remake, or if they somehow knew a game that wasn't even out yet would suck, to just not buy it.
 * Double Standard: Jim points out a pretty arrant Double Standard surrounding a lot of retro games and Dynasty Warriors. Dynasty Warriors is constantly criticised (Especially by IGN) as being too "button mashery" and "simplistic", whereas people talk about games like Golden Axe and Final Fight and hold them in high regard...when Dynasty Warriors is more or less a spiritual successor. He also points out another Double Standard when Hardcore Gamers criticise games as being too simplistic, when of course, games that are often still held in high regards were no more complex than the games they hate on.
 * 8.8: One of the topics in "Metacritic Isn't the Problem."
 * And the entire topic in "Hate out of Ten."
 * Fan Dumb: In Universe. Jim frequently mocks the overreactions of angry fanboys, but especially takes them on in the "BOYCOTT!" episode.
 * Unpleasable Fanbase: He has called the Zelda fanbase the "Spoiled brats" of video game fandom, since they had Nintendo putting out new ones every couple years that were always well-done.
 * Game of the Year Edition: Blames them, multiple store-exclusive Preorder Bonus, the Limited Special Collectors Ultimate Edition, and constantly discounting games soon after they come out for the reasons publishers have trouble selling games new. The die-hard fans feel cheated for buying the game when it came out rather than wait until the "complete" games comes out, and other consumers don't know which version to buy or just wait until the price drops.
 * It's Popular, Now It Sucks: He calls it "Call of Duty Syndrome".
 * Reality Is Unrealistic: He points out that real-life violence is downright disturbing due to how quick it's over.
 * The Scrappy/Rescued From the Scrappy Heap: Jim discusses how Duke Nukem would probably be far more likable as a character if they stopped trying to play him so straight.
 * Strawman News Media: His not inaccurate depiction of the news media as completely uninformed about video games, who react hysterically to any violence or sexuality in a game. Usually, they operate under the assumption that video games are for kids, and therefore anyone who puts violence or sex in a game is trying to market sex and violence to kids.
 * The way to fight back? Be as childish and relentless as they are.
 * They Just Didn't Care: In the episode simply titled "Konami", Jim talks about the rather abysmal job Konami is doing as a publisher. Failures include releasing Metal Gear Solid HD Collection in one of the busiest holiday release seasons in history (and on the same day as gaming juggernaut Modern Warfare 3 to boot), not promoting Blades of Time at all and even getting the release date wrong, releasing three Silent Hill games in a month, and the atrocious handling of Silent Hill HD Collection.
 * Widget Series: Jim's "Nintendo of America" episode is about how the titular company refuses to import niche Japanese games, despite the fact that said games usually sell more units in America than in Japan.