Cinemassacre/AVGN/James Rolfe Thread

James Rolfe is an independant film-maker, a big fan of old horror movies who has made it big in the late 2000s when he created an online video series called The Angry Video Game Nerd (or just AVGN for short).

The AVGN is a comedy review series about a stereotypical glasses-and-pocket-protector-wearing nerd who reviews old console games in an exaggerated comedic manner.
It was a success; he heavily inspired the "angry reviewer/critic" trend that is still very common nowadays on the Internet.
Some were maybe a bit too "inspired": Chris Bores, The Irate Gamer, was accused of being a complete ripoff - some of his creations were clearly way too similar to Rolfe's - and remains infamous for being a copycat.
He was compared to Doug Walker, The Nostalgia Critic, and they did several crossovers, where they would portray themselves as angry rivals.

James Rolfe has also made two noteworthy online video series: You Know What's Bullshit? where he rants on common life nuisances (way before rage comics) and Board James where he reviews board games, although in a more level-head manner.

Along with many movie reviews, his content is mostly located on his Cinemassacre website.

James Rolfe has usually managed to stay away from drama. He rarely talks about his personal life, keeps a cool and reserved attitude as himself, and doesn't passively-agressively reply to criticism.

Except:
- Promoting the Cheetahmen II game re-release on cartridge. The affair was lately denounced as a "scam" and Rolfe as being unethical for being involved with this.
He distanced himself from that when there was too much negative feedback.

- His feature film Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, that he was working on for years. He did a successful Kickstarter, but when the movie came out, reception was more than mixed.
Longtime fans were often disappointed by the film's quality, others accused Rolfe of embezzlement or whatnot. Fanboys who loved it would use the usual predictable fallacies to "rebutt" arguments.

- Making a video where he announced he would not review the 2016 remake of Ghostbusters (he is a huge fan of the original film, is very attached to the franchise and was hoping for a genuine Ghostbusters III to come out since ever).
Received more harsh insults and negative publicity than ever in his career from SJWS, feminists and whatnot, and was denounced as a misogynist geek manbaby.
Thankfully got a lot of support and his career was not tarnished in the least. Remains a prime moment in the "Ghostbusters 2016 Salt".

But anyway, what do you guys think of his content?

 

I like the review of Paperboy.

"EXTRA! EXTRA! Paperboy goes mad!"

The Desert Bus one is pretty good too.

 

I know some have accused him of dragging the AVGN character for too long rather than letting it die. But like I said in the Channel Awesome thread, I think it's pretty reasonable to bring it back only when he's found some new worthy material (read, crappy old-school games that he's found or have been suggested to him) rather than exploiting it's popularity to review things that completely escape the scope of what the character was originally intended for, like for example Doug himself, who's come to the point of reviewing movies that came literally last thursday and have no nostalgic value whatsoever as the Nostalgia Critic. He even mentioned on the Independence Day and Big Rig reviews that these games were kinda exceptional on how recent they were compared to the rest of his repertory.

Yeah, he's discussed recent games on his other shows, like the one with Mike, but if he was reviewing, like, every dissapointing Call of Duty game, Sonic Boom title and what not, then I's say he's run out of fuel and just exploiting the character for cash grabs.

Spoiler

Besides I'm still waiting for him to review Raid 2020 in the year 2020.

 

I remember watching AVGN all the time when I was young (he was how I learned about a bunch of old consoles). I don't really watch his videos now, but it's nice to know he's actually managed his channel very well over the years.

 

I've always found him pretty entertaining. What was the cheetaman 2 drama?

 

Being a fan of AVGN, I too was disappointed by the movie. Boring story line and horrid jokes that made only sense to the writers but not the audience. Whitney Moore's cameo was completely unfunny and pointless and again, made zero sense.

 

In an AVGN episode, James reviews the "Action 52" cartridge, that is a compilation of 52 mini-games that are very, very bad because they were all developed in a rush by a greedy clueless producer.

The guys that made "Action 52" also put a lot of focus on the final game of the compilation: "Cheetahmen", a game about anthropomorphic cheetah-men with martial art skills who fight an evil mad scientist. It was an obvious attempt to cash-in on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and like Battle Toads, trying to start it on video game format.

The producers were very ambitious: they wanted to have a Saturday Morning Cartoon series based on the Cheetahmen and an action figure line. You know, just like TMNT.

They were even able to afford a decently animated ad for TV!


Even though "Action 52" was a huge bomb (the cartridge was sold at at almost 200$!!), the producers were still very clueless and tried to develop a sequel: Cheetahmen II.
The game was never even released, only prototype cartridges remain. Some were found, and the ROM dumped on the Internet. The game was proven to be completely buggy and broken.

James Rolfe also reviewed the Cheetahmen games on their own, including the unreleased sequel. Of course, he thought it was really bad.

However, a man called Greg Pabich bought the rights to the Cheetahmen license and created a Kickstarter so that Cheetahmen II could be finally released on an official cartridge, in a genuine box and other "feelies". The game's ROM would have been "fixed" so that it would at least be playable.
James Rolfe, because he contributed to give the game some exposure, participated into Pabich's Kickstarter video:


However, many were unhappy at the project: according to them, the game's ROM was already "fixed" for a long time on the Internet and freely available - the game was shitty to begin with and it was not worth it - and the whole thing felt like a cynical and dishonest attempt at cash-grabbing gullible AVGN and retro game fans.

James decided to distance himself from the project because of the backlash.

 

I used to watch this guys' videos, he's one of the few video-game oriented Youtubers who I think can be genuinely funny, but he overdoes the toilet humor especially in later videos, probably just to increase his appeal to his 13-year old boy audience.

 

Eh, sure the Rom was probably out there, but it was technically illegal unless the company released it into the public domain, so I don't see it as a "scam" anymore than Best Buy selling a game at a store which someone had already pirated and uploaded for free to a torrent site.

Most likely the intended target audience for this sale were just hardcore retro game collectors anyway, rather than people who wanted to actually play the game and thought it was actually "good".

 

I don't see how it's that different than other fanmade ROMS put onto cartridges.

 

Well I don't know all the backstory - if he was asking for donations to "fix the glitches" but that had already been done by people in their spare time and was basically just pocketing the money or asking for ridiculously high amounts, that's one thing.

Sure anyone who was buying it because they actually wanted to play that monstrosity would be pretty dumb not to just download a free ROM of a horrible unreleased 90s game which is basically abandonware and which there's pretty much no possibility, of being sued over. Though since pretty much every NES or retro game is available as a free ROM on the internet today, you could say the same thing about collecting "retro game cartridges" in general; only reason to do it is if you're just into collecting.

I suppose if the intended buyers were hardcore collectors, they might just be against buying anything which is "unofficial" just for the sake of their collection being "genuine" or whatever. I personally think collecting stuff, whether it's games, comic books, or stamps just for the sake of collecting is a pretty stupid hobby myself, but that's just me.

 

I never watched the movie, what was it that made people think he'd scammed the fans?

 

Well, it's not so much that he "scammed", that's just a small vocal minority.

It's more like many fans were disappointed with the end result. And the other fanboys who liked it are very defensive about it.


See the dislike ratios! Do you see? Do you see?

 

Problem is, the movie goes on its own random over-the-place narrative and lacks the elements of what made the original web series charming and interesting.
The toilet humor was just one of the details - well, in my opinion. It usually came out as a forced "gotta do it cuz it's my edgy trademark" to me.

 

The main reason I never checked it out was just because I didn't see a way to give a review of a single game enough of a story to pad out a long runtime like that.

 

Correct me if I remember this wrong but one of the ways James sort of bungled the indiegogo money is because he wanted to do a multi location (roadtrip) movie in $$$ California instead of shooting in cheaper locations or modifying the narrative to be in less locations in order to stretch the fan contributions more.

 

Took me a while to get into AVGN, but they were fun to watch and to play in the background while I draw. Even though I'm a casual gamer at best, I liked how he did go out of his way to show many of the old-school consoles and ports playing these old games, one of my favorite moments of this being the Virtual Boy since he showed nearly all of the games for it. Probably honestly hard to pick a favorite episode, but for now, my pick has to be either episode 92, "Game Glitches", episode 77 when he looked at Godzilla games, or when he reviewed the Ghostbusters games in those three parts.

Been meaning to get around to checking out what else he's been doing like playthroughs and stuff like that, but I do like the Cinemassacre's Monster Madness series and his reviews on anything Ninja Turtles-related. I dunno, I guess seeing him be a nerd in other things besides video games really helps him genuinely live up to his "angry nerd" title, even though he was hardly angry during those (maybe subtle, if anything).