The Angry Video Game Nerd/Headscratchers

"User: What’s with the disappearing and appearing beard on James? Do you always shave it for AVGN filming and let it grow otherwise or what?
 * Why did the Nerd wait so long to make a significant jab at LJN? Before, all we got was a passing reference in the Nightmare On Elm Street review to "Laughing Joking Numbnuts". Heck, he even discussed Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree before LJN.
 * Actually he made more jabs at LJN before that. One of them is in his Nintendo accesories review. But to answer your question, he said himself he just realized that most of the bad games he played were from LJN.
 * The Elm Street review came first. Besides, it was one of his early reviews.
 * Wasn't the Nerd supposed to review the R.O.B. at some point?
 * Irate Gamer beat him to it.
 * And that matters...why? Like James would steal jokes from Irate; he's too good for that.
 * Regardless, ever Irate Gamer fan would call him out for even reviewing the material after he did, which would proceed to more flame wars.
 * No, he never planned to review R.O.B. At the end of "NES Accessories", he said "I think you know what's coming next", puts on an Indy hat, and R.O.B. pops up in the background. Some people thought that meant R.O.B. was next; in fact, it was Indiana Jones, and R.O.B. was just a joke.
 * He also said that he can't cover everything in one go, and what he missed (R.O.B.) will have to wait until later.
 * Actually, according to his list of games he owns on Cinemassacre, he's missing a working copy of one of R.O.B's games. Since he's only compatible with two, there's no point in doing a review without both.
 * HE JUST REVIEWED R.O.B! http://www.gametrailers.com/video/angry-video-screwattack/711094
 * Is the Nerd recording things directly from his videogame console? It sometimes becomes very noticeable when he's splicing multiple videos together at once, like in the Ghostbusters review. Wouldn't it be easier if he used emulators?
 * On his FAQ page, he says he just connects the console directly to a DVD recorder. Seems easier than using an emulator to me.
 * No, it's not. Not when 99% of the games he endures are tolerable only with the Save State function of emulators!
 * Don't quite a few emulators these days have an AVI record function?
 * You can often see the flaws composite cabling leaves on video in his videos, and he has mentioned several times that he has the consoles wired up through a DVD player. For the ones with built in screen, like the Vectrix or Virtual Boy, he films on the screen with a camera. He probably uses a Super Gameboy for Gameboy games, and the later similar tools for later versions of the Gameboy.
 * He's never really addressed it, but James only reviews games he owns a physical copy of. Odds are he doesn't want the effort of actually acquiring the game to go to waste by doing the review with an emulated game.
 * Then there are the legal issues; ROM's are hypothetically legal to play in the U.S. if you own a legitimate copy of the game, and definitely illegal if you don't. Publishers can't do much about casual home use of ROM's, but they could do something about a guy who made money by playing pirated software. ROM's also don't have cases to show to the camera, nor a manual from which to learn the controls (though he rarely seems to read the damn thing anyway).
 * He mentioned it on his Sega CD review on why he left out a review for Snatcher.
 * His 'Making an AVGN episode' episode explains everything the original question asks for.
 * Did the Nerd switch to Yuengling? What the fuck?
 * Huh? What the hell is that? If it's about his website fucking up from time to time, the Nerd made a video explaining that the sheer traffic forced him to get creative with his server and on occasion the site splits between two different servers.
 * He's talking about The Nerd's beer of choice. His penchant for Rolling Rock is iconic amongst his fans, so a switch is a bit jarring.
 * The Nerd explained on his site that it was cheaper than Rolling Rock at the time, so he went with a local beer.
 * And this matters...how? Is he actually drinking real beer on camera? I thought that it was supposed to be a sight gag and nothing more; that he needs a Quick Nip every now and then. Fill Rolling Rock bottles with water and who'd know the difference?
 * Of course he's drinking real beer on camera. Why wouldn't he? It's not like he's gonna get smashed off one beer. I mean, yeah, its a sight gag, but still.
 * His Spider Man video references this, where he offers the despondent Spidey a beer, specifically Rolling Rock. Spidey pours the drink onto the floor, not wanting "this corporate bullshit", instead "stick(ing) to the local brew" in his words,c omplete with showing off a bottle of Yuengling. That said, James still has a sip of the old RR from time to time (Especially the NES accesories vid. ROLLING ROCK ON THE ROLL N ROCKER)
 * Is it just me, or did the Nerd seem a hell of a lot less vitrolic towards Castlevania II Simons Quest in his Castlevania marathon? It was like he only did an Accentuate the Negative towards the game just to stay in character and even that wasn't that much more accented than his comments on Castlevania III. Heck, he even said that it had a lot of nostalgic value and retained the classic Castlevania atmosphere, and while he practically declared Fanon Discontinuity on it in the first video, he gave the game equal footage with the rest of the classic games in subsequent videos and even the ending montage.
 * The AVGN persona is just that; a persona. When he does tribute pieces like this, he tends to act more like his real self, and James has said numerous times that Castlevania II is one of his favorite games. The original video he did with Simon's Quest was actually just a joke he did for some friends, where he pretended to be a raging fanboy tearing a game apart by nitpicking tiny flaws.
 * He still pointed out its flaws, such as the unskippable "WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE/THE MORNING SUN HAS VANQUISHED THE HORRIBLE NIGHT" text boxes, the useless hints given by the townspeople (Then again, the manual does say they're just plain liars), the pathetic ease of which Death and Dracula can be beaten (Death can be beaten by WALKING THROUGH THE ALREADY OPEN DOOR) and other such problems.
 * When he's talking about it in the tribute video, he's a lot less in-character.
 * This one is really petty. It Just Bugs Me that the "Rolling Rock on the Rolling Rocker!" gag was stretched out to the extent that it was. Yes, I know that some extended gags cycle from hilarious to awful and back again, but this particular gag ended up squarely at the awful end of the spectrum.
 * That would easily put the "Rolling Rock on the Roll N Rocker" gag in the Don't Explain the Joke category.
 * I thought it was a great example of an Overly Long Gag done right.
 * I thought Shit Pickle was the Pokémon Speak, Nerdy Turd only went "PPBBBBBTTTTT!"
 * How come, during his CD-i three-parter with his reviews of Hotel Mario and The Legend of Zelda CDi Games, he did not once mention their use in Youtube Poop? Does he hate YouTube Poop, or was he just trying to resist referencing it?
 * It's not his style? He's not trying to be some hip internet figure (he doesn't need to), he's just making some videos? The jokes had got so lame (apart from maybe the Little No from Hotel Mario) by 2008 anyway.
 * Remember that the Nerd rarely mentions something recent. Back when the CD-i games came out, YouTube wasn't invented yet.
 * The cutscenes of Hotel Mario and the Zelda games are really what make them So Bad Its Good. The Nerd wanted to portray the games as So Bad Its Horrible, so he only focused on the gameplay, which is probably a lot more flawed than the hideous-yet-hilarious cutscenes.
 * Why did they show such little actual gameplay in the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde review? Really, about 90% of that review was just him mumbling about how God-awful the game ones. He hardly said anything about gameplay, mechanics, etc. It was really more of a drunken rant than his typical style.
 * His typical style didn't exist when he wrote it. He didn't even intend to make a series at that time.
 * His revisitation of it fit the now-established formula a lot better and had one Crowning Moment of Funny after another.
 * Super Mecha Death Christ. This troper isn't exactly a super religious fellow, but come on! A character clearly based on Jesus saying nothing but "FUCKERS!" is clearly nothing good. What further bothers me is how SMDC started as an Enemy and then became a good guy with absolutely no changes to its behavior. The icing on the cake? When James first announced he was doing a history of SMDC, I was expecting he'd finally explain why he started it, and that its only a parody that shouldn't be taken seriously. After going through the first ten seconds of that video, this troper turned it off in disgust that it was a fictional history...
 * Refuge in Audacity, the nerd loves using this trope. Although I can agree that it can be taken so far, it just feels more groan-inducing than funny.
 * This Christian Troper loves the Nerd's videos, for the most part, but that was one joke I actually sort of cringed at and just thought "...No."
 * Wha?
 * Uh...I didn't think anyone could see it as anything but parody. It's a robotic Jesus firing rockets and laser beams against Satan.
 * A lot of the Did Not Do the Research entries seems more whiny and nitpicky than actual errors on the Nerd's part. While there are some really big mistakes (like with Batman, Ghostbusters, Terminator and Aria of Sorrow), putting those side-by-side the tiny ones reduces their impact.
 * While there are only a few that I would consider nitpicky, I do think that the number has gotten too big for one article (they take up more than one screen's height on my laptop). I call for the creation of a separate DNDTR page.
 * Actually, when you think about it, AVGN's research failures are at least more forgivable compared to the number of research failures by The Irate Gamer, as the AVGN usually does more research on his games while The Irate Gamer claims to have played them for a number of years without and doesn't have proof that he did, so there's actually no need to create a separate DNDTR page for the AVGN.
 * I thank you for leading me to discover that IG does have a separate page for research failures, as I didn't even think of that when I made my previous comment. However, my suggestion had nothing to do with comparing AVGN to other online reviewers; I simply think the number of examples is too many to be kept within the main article.
 * Why did the Nerd, a big Transformers fan, have no idea who Trypticon was?
 * Maybe he know about Trypticon but calls him Mecha-Godzilla as a joke and hey, he does look like Mecha-Godzilla when I first saw him.
 * It was entirely a joke - if he didn't know who Trypticon was, he would have mentioned it when he was saying that the bosses were recycled (because really, decepticon logo? Three times?). And to be exact, everyone would expect either Galvatron or Unicron as the last stage boss, so Trypticon there is just weird (not that he isn't powerful), and most people would think of it as of Mecha-Godzilla.
 * The E3 2010 videos by Game Trailers have James acting in-character as The Nerd. However, it mainly seems to manifest as him just interjecting curses into his speech instead of actually directing it at things that might warrant an angry response.
 * Possibly justified in that the Nerd is a fictional character and the dialogue in the AVGN reviews is scripted; at E3 there very likely wasn't time to prepare scripts for every game on show so James essentially had to ad lib his dialogue.
 * How does he record his Game Boy reviews? Does he use Super Game Boy / Game Boy Player and put a layer that looks like his GB on top of it?
 * Only in his Spiderman review did he just put the Super Game Boy screen on his Game Boy in post. Later reviews had him record the footage from the Super Game Boy itself.
 * Why exactly is Jame's "Console Wars" video only accessible on Myspace? It doesn't bug me, but I find it odd. It's not on Screw Attack, Cinemassacre, or Youtube. Just..Myspace.
 * It's on all those sites, but its title was changed to "Wii Salute".
 * After seeing his "Back to The Future and Other Games Revisited" review and hearing his soliloquy on LJN's logo, don't you think James would have learned by now that LJN didn't actually make the games they put their name on? They were just a publishing company; it was Rare, Acclaim, Beam Software, Software Creations and Pack-in Video that were actually making those travesties. The only thing LJN can really be blamed for is failing to test the games out and make the developers do it over.
 * If your name is on it, you can be blamed for it.
 * How is that a Family Unfriendly Aesop, anyway? Companies should and MUST care for the quality of the products they plaster their names on.
 * I still think the Back to the Future part should've been one video, with the Other Games Revisited part as a second. More updates, more revenue, more views. Why did he combine them again?
 * Rare has a lot of Defensive Fans who wouldn't believe him, btw.
 * Even though most of the complaints on the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the NES are justified, I can't shake the feeling that in a few years, younger generations are going to see this video and, since the game costs $6 on the Wii, will wonder why they have to pay an extra buck for a shitty game. I know the Nerd has stressed exactly how big Turtles were back then, but I don't think he stressed how important that game was for the NES (one of the best-selling third party games, which is likely why they went out of their way to include it on Virtual Console).
 * The point there is, criticizing games is what he is supposed to do, and since his complaints on this game can be summed up as "it's too difficult and some things are counter-intuitive", people who would listen to his arguments without thinking on their own whether the new games are good or bad are the kind of people who don't like difficult or counter-intuitive games, and thus wouldn't enjoy them. Most of "old-school gamers" don't mind the difficulty slider being a little higher and the game requiring us to spend some time knowing how to play it, but most players from the "younger generations" want their games to be easy to learn and easy to play, only being challenging when they choose the game to be. And heck, personally I always cursed at the underwater level and never got past the third stage (the one after the dam), but I think it was a pretty good game, even with its flaws, and if I had a Wii, I would buy it because of that.
 * His Sega CD review. It's all a matter of opinion, but the add-on had quite a few good games (especially in Japan). Let's just hope he doesn't do a Sega Saturn review.
 * He admits that a) he has to have the game before reviewing them, they have to work, and b) it was deliberate Accentuate the Negative. He didn't touch Lunar at all, and said it was better than the 32X.
 * Does AVGN have a "life"? He's a persona of James, but it seems the character is just a grouchy guy who plays bad games all day.
 * Nope. The Nerd pretty much spends all of his time reviewing shitty games. Its all part of the "You/I Suck" routine and is lampshaded in several episodes. Of course its all just a friendly gag and is meant to be funny rather than insulting.
 * He makes other stuff, too.
 * Apparently, we are going to see more of his life outside his basement in the movie.
 * The people who take him seriously. No, I'm not talking about his massive Hatedom. People who actually treat him as an authority on whether a game was good or bad. Without playing the games. This Troper had discussions with people who acted like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game wasn't anything but horrible based entirely off of the review. They didn't even bother to refute my points with anything other than "See the video". I even scanned an old magazine from the time period where they gave it a positive review, but nope, a comedy figure is more trusting than print media.
 * People do that with any reviewer, from Nostalgia Critic to Zero Punctuation. And serious reviewers. I personally never listen to reviews when deciding whether or not to play/buy something and do some actual research instead.
 * We have a trope for this: It's Reviews Are the Gospel, also overlapping with Misaimed Fandom. You'll notice if he's reviewing a system or game that isn't universally seen as bad, he has more positive things to say. He even had a lot of positive stuff to say about the Atari Jaguar - you'd think he'd have hated it.
 * Why do his longer episodes on Gametrailers get a glitchy band of colors in the middle of the screen near the end? See some examples. What is causing this problem? This ruined the "Back To The Future Trilogy" and "Star Wars" episode for me, and while "Action 52" at first was working fine, it got this problem too as I went to watch it again recently. Why does this happen?
 * Site glitch? It might be the Game Trailers site doing it to the videos.
 * In my experience, it's almost certainly a problem with Game Trailers. I've never had the same problem watching the videos on Cinemassacre.
 * How come in his Independence Day review, it looks like James blue-screened the footage from the game onto the TV?
 * Probably because the camera recording looked really bad and he thought he might as well take some footage from the DVD recording instead.
 * Has James gotten worse at acting? His Nintendo World Championship video is really... Yea, the acting is So Bad Its Good, maybe So Bad Its Horrible. His older material seemed better though.
 * I didn't mind it, myself. To be fair to James, I like to think his attention is elsewhere, like his other projects - and the AVGN movie. I didn't expect to see ANY more AVGN videos until the movie came out so I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
 * I guess YMMV, I thought the acting was okey and the episode was very funny, considering the cartridge didn't give a lot to review about (since it was just three levels of other games). It was fun to see the Nerd interact with other gamer for a change.
 * While we're on the subject of World Championships; he takes a sledgehammer to a pair of the games (a gray cartridge and a gold cartridge, not the blue reproduction copy). Yet at the end of the credits, he and Pat are seen holding extra copies of the games. So does that mean they actually had two copies of both cartridges, or were the destroyed cartridges fake, or is it something else entirely?
 * They disguised the cartridges. The gold one was most likely The Legend of Zelda, since if you look closely it has a battery in it, which NCW doesn't need.
 * Confirmed, and the gray cartridge was Top Gun.
 * What I'm curious about is who owns which one. I know Pat was known for owning a grey version of the cartridge, where did the gold one came from? Is it Pat's too?
 * Yes it is pat's
 * Wasnt the nerd supposed to finally review ET licenced game AFTER the spilberg games review? like more than 3 months as passed since
 * That was a red herring to tease the fans, he'll be saving that game for the movie.
 * At the end of the video it said "to be continued in the AVGN movie". We won't see that review until the movie is out. So, it would take some time.
 * The Movie is about the ET game? why? when i thought back then that he was going to review it i was guessing that he will say its a piece of shit for the WRONG reasons like: 1)the expectations of having ET in a video game could not live up, 2)THIS is the second game that ATARI releases in a Christmas (the one was the arcade port of Pac Man the year before) and the fact they make more cartridges than consoles means that they dint learn its lesson, 3)The fact that those games marked the Video game crash makes a post crash hate as the worst games ever existed when in reality (for the ET at least) it wasnt any diferent as the other atari games (Indiana jones for ATARI anyone?)
 * Well, he probably decided to use the ET game for the movie because is the game that everybody is asking for, he's just exploiting the fact that there's a lot of anticipation for it. In many ocassions he has commented that it's the game that most people ask him to review. And remember the movie is not a 2-hours long review or a documentary. I guess all the points you mentioned are probably going to be adressed in the movie as part of the plot. In one interview James commented that he picked it for the movie because of all the history that's behind the game, and in another interview he said the movie could be clasified as a Road Movie. I'm starting to think it has something to do with the Nerd traveling to that infamous landfill in which supposedly the unsold ET cartridges were buried, but your guess is as good as mine.
 * There haven't been any new title cards since the ROB episode, not even for Board James... I wonder if Mike is just too busy.
 * Exactly how in-character is James Rolfe while he's doing the AVGN episodes? I understand that some of the little sketches, like when he fights Bugs Bunny, are all AVGN, but some of his discussions of the video games themselves seem fairly normal. I don't really have a reference point, so... how much of the videos are James Rolfe and how much are the AVGN?
 * It's just something that happens. The Nerd may be a character, but James Rolfe gives him a lot of his real life opinions and interests, so you can expect this "Out of Character moments" to occur. You can think about it as: the character getting better defined(It turns out that the Nerd can act like a normal person too!); James trying something different for the day(You can only go so far with "fuck" and "diahrrea" jokes, after all); or he just didn't care. It's up to your opinion, really.
 * Why is it that James has a beard but The Nerd always has to be clean-shaven?
 * Why does the Nerd always wear white pressed shirts, a pocket protector and pens in his pocket? Because it's his trademark outfit. The clean-shaved image of the Nerd is part of the character now. People identify those traits with the character, they expect to see them. It works, despite the fact that James has aged some since the start of the series, the Nerd is still easily recognizable. James hasn't always had a beard, he's a real person, he can change his look if he feels like it. But when you see him clean-shaved and wearing his white shirt, you know he's the Nerd. Or that's the way I see it.
 * I thought the question was how James can have a beard at the same time as the AVGN being clean shaven. This is only assuming that segments as himself and segments as the Nerd are filmed around the same time, though...
 * Well, if that was the question then, James answered this in a comment in a video :)

James: You pretty much got it right. Lately, I’ve only been shaving the beard for AVGN and Board James. Been too busy to care much. And the videos are barely ever released in the same order that they’re shot, so you might see it going back and forth a lot. It’s like my evil bearded twin, like in the Star Trek episode. What’s the episode title, Mike?

Mother Fucker Mike : Season 2 Episode 33 – “Mirror, Mirror”"


 * In his review of Milons Secret Castle, the Nerd begins the review by saying he fucking hates this game. So why does he react with genuine surprise much later when he finds out you have no continues without a button combination? Wouldn't he already be aware of this if he states at the top that he hates the game?
 * Do the companies that made that bad games (espessially LJN) care about how much the nerd hates the games?
 * The Nerd only reviews old games, so it's likely that many of the games he's bashing have been forgotten about or the companies have gone out of business. I don't think LJN's still around.
 * It's not around anymore. Its last game was published in 2000 for dreamcast, the Other Wiki says.