So Bad It's Horrible/Let's Play
After Something Awful started making Let's Plays much more common, it was inevitable that people would start to make bad ones. Of course, there will occasionally be horrible ones filled with annoying voices, bad skills, and occasionally cheating.
Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not sufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy, no matter how small a niche it is. It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.
Second Important Note: A Let's Play isn't horrible just because Retsupurae riffed it. There needs to be independent evidence to list it. (Though once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review(s) or, in special cases, the sole link.)
Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order by name):
- EvaXephon was one of the most infamous LPers. His Livestream of playing games are generally terrible (he died so many times that it wasn't funny), and his tales are often worth a few laughs...
- He kept getting banned from every stream site because he pirated and streamed Red Dead Redemption before its release. Everyone who hated him, and the people he banned who kept trying to tell him to stop streaming it, reported him to Rockstar.
- When he streamed Just Cause 2 before the release date, he died on every single attempt to kill one of the bosses.
- He later retired the name in Old Shame and fell back into obscurity... until Yandere Simulator, a game he developed as YandereDev, became popular on YouTube.
- Imperial Terra is another hated Livestreamer, when he wants someone to watch his stream. He spams his thread with images that are generally not work safe, rather then just letting it run its course. Although on average, video game streams on 4chan are normally frowned upon due to the amount of spam that the topic creator makes to garner attention.
- JayZilla2830, uggh. His LP's are terrible, filled with him either randomly spouting off about whatever he pleases or talking about what he's doing in the game. He tried to make a Christmas special based on Home Alone the game that was just terrible and advertised it on the AVGN. He's hardly any better on Crazy Commentaries, where he just fills the videos with blatant references, even going so far as to quote Tatsudoshi's intro word-for-word. And he screams very high-pitched in some of his videos, to the point where you question if that's even human. He's very-deservedly-unknown and very annoying.
- iJustine's Let's Play of Portal 2. She gets stuck on the easiest puzzle of the game for eight minutes! The worst part is that this is after the puzzle that demonstrates the way portals work to you. Watch an at least tolerable version of the video here.
- Not to mention that she manages to ignore most of the plot while playing it. There may as well have been none. She ignored the "Lemons rant" even. To paraphrase a quote of hers: "Who's Caroline? I thought I was Caroline."
- At no point does she refer to any of the characters by name, calling Wheatley "Mr. Eyeball" and GLaDOS "the potato". This is extra insulting since she has the subtitles on-screen telling you the character names!
- It only gets worse. Whenever she does refer to something by its proper name, she "corrects" herself and says the made-up name. I also don't know what's sadder, that she basically has a party in the middle of one video and they all end up talking over the aforementioned lemon rant, or that, given her lack of reaction to the rest of the dialogue, it probably made no difference.
- MasterknightDH's LPs are severely flawed. His speech is difficult to interpret since he suffers from extreme Elmuh Fudd Syndwome (think PsychedelicEyeball slurring), and his commentary tends to be either banal or whiny about his perceived 'game balance' issues. That alone is terrible, but he also has a colossal ego; he can't take even the slightest criticism or insult, and usually ends up shutting off comments or ratings. He's also infamous for his rant videos, where he demonizes anyone who disagrees with him, at one point even saying that the girls who live in his area deserve to be RAPED HORRIBLY because they mock him and dislike him and goes on to say that it would serve them right.
- MaxiMaxi10 has 1,551 videos, half of which are him just doing random crap around the house. His Let's Play videos are where we get into the majority of this entry. He does camcorder LPs where his camcorder's at a bad angle and you see the right third of the screen. His commentary's boring, and you often find yourself watching the action figures on top of his shelf to see if they'll be more interesting. Even worse, whenever he's criticized, he says that he can't help it because he suffers from autism.
- The early LPs of Quadraxis14, notably his camcorder LP of Contra III and his infamous Kaizo Mario LP (SNES9x anyone?) Retsupurae begrudgingly admit in his God Hand LP that he's gotten better.
- Queenie Z. Whether it's her severe Girl-on-the-Internet syndrome, her unfunny commentary, her constant use of outdated memes, or her shrill voice (with retainer sucking to boot), you'll share the RPer's pain.
- Retsupurae has covered the first two parts of her Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem LP. If you check the videos out, you'll notice that Part 2 has over 20,000 fewer views than Part 1. For added irony, the video description of the former says "You're watching Part 2? Didn't Part 1 scare you off?"
- She's gotten somewhat better over the years; while it's unlikely she'll ever live down the aforementioned LP, she has apologized for it and considers it something of an Old Shame.
- Rijno has been cited by some as the worst Let's Player on YouTube. Between recording his TV at bad angles, his annoying nasally voice, and constant pointing out of things we've just seen (OKAY!), who can blame them? Retsupurae has seen Rijno's work, such as a review of Brave Fencer Musashi.
- SuperCrazyHealthBar is a famously awful LPer. Despite his excellent picture quality, many of his videos suffer from severe audio clipping and his commentary is abysmal, consisting mostly of him rambling aimlessly about things that don't have anything to do with the game, occasionally dipping into a weird demonic growl and shouting at the screen. He's so terrible that Retsupurae believes him to be a troll, although it's never been very clear.
- teddybearmassacure...ugh. His video quality and skill are subjectively decent, but everything else is abysmal. Many of his videos have loud noises in the background and obnoxious co-commentators that sound like ten-year-olds. His commentary, meanwhile, is irritatingly banal, with "jokes" consisting of Seltzer and Friedberg-style pop-culture references. He'd probably be small-time if Retsupurae hadn't dredged out one of his older videos. He has gotten better over the years, but not by much.
- The individual known as The King of Hate (or DSPGaming, short for Darksydephil) breaks every single rule about how to make a Let's Play. He deliberately ignores any on-screen instruction and then blames the game for any failure he commits because he doesn't get its mechanics. He never attempts to immerse himself in the game (constantly sporting a tough guy persona) which gets grating when he attempts horror games or JRPGs. He gets stuck in very easy puzzles and even by things that aren't supposed to be puzzles. He is very prone to spew crude jokes and a barrage of sexist and racist remarks that usually have nothing to do with the game, making Seth MacFarlane sound like a nuanced gentleman by comparison. His playtroughs are less "finished" and more "ragequitted". And the worst thing about him? He never learns from his mistakes. A Hatedom has spawned from his awful playthroughs, with a massive compilation series highlighting how not to play video games. The guy has failed so often and so consistently that The Other Tropes Wiki used to have a full sub-page devoted to his Let's Play antics.
- The infamous preview gameplay of Cuphead by Dean Takahashi, is what happens when a game-related media forces a journalist specialized in industry insight to play a game in a genre they aren't remotely familiarized with, and then insist on upload the video just to have a gameplay preview before other sites despite the atrocious skill displayed on it. The thing was edited into the "Hatoful Takahashi" clip — a split-screen video comparison of said game journalist going through the tutorial and… a pigeon intelligence test. With the pigeon solving much the same problem faster. There's failing, and there's embarrassing one's species, or at least creating a notion that "bird-brained" is inapplicable to one's profession, as this would be an insult to the pigeons.
 |
Youtube user comment: Now this is an unfair comparison. |
 |