Broken Pixels

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Broken Pixels (sometimes spelled Brok3n Pix3ls) was an MST-style video game mockery show on 1up.com that ran from 2006 to 2009. Its longest-lasting and most popular hosts were Seanbaby, Shane Bettenhousen and Crispen Boyer. Many of the games played were ones that had previously been featured on "Worst Games" lists in Electronic Gaming Monthly or Seanbaby's Web site, and thus the hosts tended to have professional history with some of the games, usually because they had been forced to review them before.

The games ran from So Bad It's Good (like Night Trap) to So Bad Its Horrible (Superman 64), along with some games that many consider classics (Altered Beast).

The show died off around the same time as EGM did, as 1up.com was bought by UGO Entertainment. It had a brief Spiritual Successor called Shame Night.

Tropes used, called out, or referenced in Broken Pixels include:
  • Actually Pretty Funny: The guys get really into some of the games and enjoy themselves.
  • Author Tract: Cripsin believes the author of the Congo instruction manual made all the animal enemies female as a Take That against an unfaithful ex-wife:

"It may sound cute, but she's a fucking whore like my ex-wife!"
"The spider will fucking nag you to death and then sleep with the guy who cleans the pool."

"I'm going to choke myself with this cord and masturbate..."

  • Black Comedy Rape: One of the most common jokes in Wirehead, where they assume that the bad guys rape Wirehead after each failure.
  • Corpsing: The camera crew can often be heard laughing in the background.
  • Four Point Scale:

Shane: EGM gave this a 2 back when we used to give everything an 8.

Shane: This game was developed in Japan...they needed to hire a white guy to be in the game...and they found one.