DarksydePhil

""I didn't mean to do that! The controls are fucking lagging!" "Did you see that? There was nothing I could do man, come on!""

Phil Burnell, more commonly known as Darksyde Phil or "The King of Hate", is a YouTube Let's Player, formerly partnered with Machinima. He has gathered a sizable Hatedom for his unpleasant and angry Let's Plays.


 * Aborted Arc: Project 7 was introduced fairly early in Phil's YouTube career, but vanished after several videos.
 * It was brought back in spectacular fashion in January of 2012.
 * AcCENT Upon the Wrong SylLABle: He has done this a few times, putting a weird emphasis on a particular syllable when he says certain words, such as "adverTISEment" or "ink RIBBons".
 * Accentuate the Negative: Even when praising games, he seems to be having a bad time playing them, due to his bad gameplay and tactics.
 * April Fools' Day: Every April Fools' Day, Phil will play "The Greatest (Insert Genre) Game Of All Time." They're not great.
 * Archive Panic: His DSPGaming channel has been around now since April 2010, and has nearly 60,000 videos on it!!
 * Berserk Button:
 * For some reason, so much as mentioning a user named Almighty Tevin, whom Phil is extremely bitter towards for what is most likely a petty reason at best, is enough to send him into a blind rage.
 * Expect a lean in manual ban if you suggest Phil gets a part time job to supplement his income.
 * Replaying minutes worth of gameplay (especially in cases of Checkpoint Starvation) will piss Phil off to no end.
 * Asking about his finances will set him off (he claims it's nobody else's business, but considering he constantly begs for money for his viewers...)
 * Blatant Lies: The best example of him lying is an in-game action that causes him to die/fail, when he claims he didn't anything wrong. Also claims there is no evidence that he encouraged his fans (years ago, mind you) to click ads that appeared on his videos, even though the video in which he did just that does exist on YouTube and can be easily found if you search for it.
 * Catch Phrase: Oh boy, does Phil have a lot of these! So many in fact, that just listing them would turn this page into a checklist.
 * The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Invoked often, accurately or otherwise.
 * Crippling Overspecialization: If there's one thing Phil struggles with, it is adaptability; any time he plays a game that's vastly different from the last one he played, he often resorts to using the same/similar tactics to try and breeze through, only to be shocked that it didn't work the same way. If he kept dying to an enemy, or even a Wake Up Call Boss, he will continuously attempt to power past them without ever coming up with a different strategy.
 * Phil will often complain about randomness in games, but that's just his preference for fixed AI patterns talking. In Crash Bandicoot for example, he complained about not being able to defeat enemies by jumping on them despite doing so beforehand, but he continued to jump on them without thinking to use the spin attack which is the preferred method of attack in that game. His attitude towards unpredictable AI applies to platforming as well.
 * The same also applies to old school games like Metal Gear Solid, or (again) Crash Bandicoot, simply because he is so used to how modern games work.
 * Cluster F-Bomb: Often invoked when Phil is really pissed off, but sometimes does this in an attempt at humour.
 * Determinator: To Phil's credit, he has managed to beat most of the game he played, even when he was getting really wound up.
 * Dirty Coward: Some of his gaming tactics can be summed up as this, like hanging back and letting summoned allies do the work for him in Dark Souls.
 * As of September 2017, he has all comments disabled on his YouTube channel. Many suspect this was to avoid negative criticism, others believe it to be somewhat of a counter to This Is How You DON'T Play videos, which were often interlaced with comments from Phil's own videos. Obviously, this tactic didn't work.
 * The Ditz: Let's just say that Phil isn't the smartest guy alive. He has a tendency to forget certain game mechanics right after being told about them. Even when his stream chat gives him advice on how to play a game, he still forgets just moments later. Half the time though, this is because he doesn't pay attention.
 * Entitled Bastard: Phil thinks he is entitled to profit off of video games, and will do everything he can to ensure he can still do so. Given how much he complains about his finances during his streams, it's clear that he is unwilling to make sacrifices in his life because he believes his current lifestyle is something he is owed, and he expects his viewers to do everything for him. Same thing when it comes to stream attendance; the biggest example of this is when he called his viewers lazy for not turning out for Pokémon Moon as if he is entitled to an audience.
 * Failed a Spot Check: One of Phil's biggest sins when making videos is his lack of situational awareness; his Catherine playthrough best exemplifies this, since he often forgets the more advanced techniques only minutes after they're introduced, and often misses the simplest and most straight forward solutions to the puzzle, even if one can see said solution right there, leaving him to crawl around like a headless chicken for minutes at a time as a result.
 * Fan Hater: Phil can be incredibly nasty when he's angry, and he tends to take out his frustrations on his own fans.
 * Gasshole: Phil has a habit of snorting or belching loudly into his microphone with no attempt to cover it up.
 * Hair-Trigger Temper: Particularly if Phil is having a miserable time with a certain segment of a game. Even the slightest jab at him, no matter how harmless can cause him to flip a bitch! Hell, if you offer him a suggestion to improve his content, he'll react as if you insulted his mother regardless of your intentions.
 * Hypocrite: So many examples to list, but to keep it brief, everything Phil condemns other people doing, he is guilty of doing the same thing. It never helps Phil's cases though when he tries to make excuses to justify him doing any of the stuff he criticises others for. A separate page might be needed to catalogue his hypocrisy.
 * One notable example is when he played Rise of the Tomb Raider. He spent most of the playthrough complaining about the game too easy (which it is to an certain extent), which is funny considering how much he hates challenge.
 * Insistent Terminology: Phil has a tendency to use certain words and phrases with a particular inflection for each one. He will often use words like "positive" almost as a buzzword to assure his fans that things are good, though almost everyone else isn't fooled.
 * It Got Worse: The original channel, darksydephil, was taken down by YouTube for (bogus) copyright claims. DSP created new channels, and got Google Ad-Sense activated on his The King of Hate HD channel, allowing him to make money off of his videos. Phil lost his job during that time. His Ad-Sense privileges were revoked due to claims of fraudulent actions designed to exploit the Ad-Sense system. In 2011, DSP moved to Blip.tv and gains a partnership, but the account was later closed by Blip themselves due to some poorly thought out humor about Those Wacky Nazis. 2013 marked the birth of This Is How You DON'T Play videos, which soared in popularity, surpassing his own videos in views, thus turning old and potential new viewers away in the process. In 2017, he lost his partnership with Machinima after he mouthed off at them for not caring about his money troubles, his then-girlfriend Pandalee left him in May the same year, and lost his second partnership with Curse Network in 2018. In early 2019, Phil was briefly suspended from Twitch twice; once for doing "fundraising" streams (for himself), and again for making fun of someone's avatar. In April 2021, Phil had his Twitch partnership terminated out of the blue for hateful slurs (allegedly), and left the platform as a result.
 * Jerkass Has a Point: For all of Phil's misguided complaints about video games, he has on the odd occasion had valid complaints about certain games:
 * His complaint about Rise of the Tomb Raider being too easy? Yes, he could've upped the difficulty, but he isn't wrong there.
 * Calling THPS5 a dialled in cash grab? To be fair, it is.
 * Large Ham: Project 7 thrives on this. In fact, one could even say his angry moments qualify as this, even though he may try to deny it.
 * Lazy Bum: He has always been this from Day 1, but now he barely even tries. Instead of putting extra effort into making his videos more enjoyable, he instead expects his viewers to simply give him more money for less effort on his part. Plus, instead of figuring out how beat a game/overcome a tough spot, he expects his stream chat to just tell him how to beat it.
 * Left It In: All of Phil's commentary is live and unedited. This often leads to the viewers watching Phil struggle for minutes on end to get past a section of whatever game he is playing. His pre-streams have become this since he made the move to Twitch.tv, sometimes clocking in at nearly 2 hours!
 * Let's Play: The consistent basis for his content, more or less.
 * Motor Mouth: Phil talks a lot in his videos. Most of this is evident in his lengthy pre-streams, but sometimes the meat of his LP's is just him talking almost non-stop! It's even worse in his non-gaming related videos.
 * Never My Fault: Around 97% of Phil's content can be summed up in four little words: "I didn't do that!". Or some variation on that.
 * Only in it For the Money: probably the only reason why Phil does what he does, and will do everything he can to squeeze as much money as he can from his fans. Best proven by his old upload schedule, which involved him spamming as many 5-10 minute videos per day as he could onto the YouTube search algorithm. Of course, he will try to deny this.
 * Rage Quit: Quite a few games, actually. His reasons for doing so include boredom, low attendance/contributions, frustration, his own incompetence, or a weird combination of the above. One unique case was Scarface: The World Is Yours, in which he initially dropped it to avoid giving a TIHYDP maker, Fred Fuchs, more footage to work with. Despite his undying denial that he ever rage quit any games at all, there is a 7 hour long compilation showcasing 103 DSP rage quits.
 * Smug Snake: Phil has shown that he has no empathy for anyone other than himself countless times. Among the many examples of this behaviour, he acts like he is better than everyone else by constantly reminding everyone how long he's been a content creator as if it is supposed to be a massive achievement. If another creator commits some form of career suicide, he is always there to gloat about "outlasting" them.
 * Sore Loser: It's no secret that Phil cannot take a loss in a video game, whether he's playing with AI or other players.
 * Ungrateful Bastard: Phil almost never shows any form of gratitude when fans give him hints on how to progress through a game, or when they give in money. If he doesn't reach his tips goal, or his streams have low attendance, he will berate them for "not stepping up" and making them feel guilty for not tipping enough.
 * Viewers are Morons: A lot of the time, Phil's commentary is just live calling what just happened onscreen, as if the viewers are blind.
 * When All You Have Is a Hammer: In MGS3, Phil went to fight The End in a sniper battle, the weapon (SVG) that he had used on every enemy up until this fight. However, what's the first thing out of Phil's mouth when the battle starts? "Where's my shotgun?"
 * In Dark Souls, Phil tends to rely heavily on using magic spells to attack from a distance.