"James has no acting skills whatsoever"
I think that's a bit harsh. Sure, he can be a ridiculously bad actor that has trouble 'becoming the reaction', as we can see from the "a bull just shát through my window!"-scene in one of the older episodes. That's a really not a credible way to react at all.
People don't verbalize what they see happening, unless they can't believe it and are asking someone else, whether they are seeing the same thing, or whether that just happened. Like, if someone is suddenly banging on my door, I won't go "OMG, someone is banging on my door!", especially, when there's no one there..
I'd rather wonder: "What the heck?", go to the door and investigate.
So yeah, it's safe to say that although he has a lot of talent in a lot of areas, and is a very clear and pleasant speaker, when it comes to explanations and game reviews, and has even some sort of nerdy charisma to him at times, he doesn't seem to have a lot of acting skills.
But to say that he has none, is a bit harsh - I think he has been able to feign anger believably in the past, and some of his acting scenes were good, like the 'nerd-clones' scene, for example. So he has -some- acting skills, just not enough to carry a full-length movie (which is probably why he didn't - there wasn't much James onscreen in the movie, in comparison to all the other crap that was going on).
I like him best, when he's explaining a history of something, he usually remembers to mention important details, like that the Miracle piano system was available for the Commodore Amiga computers as well as the Nintendou (actually, this IS the more correct way to spell it, phonetically speaking - it's just too bad that the japanese don't understand the concept of phonetics, and the americans have a twisted concept of it - because of the messed-up english pronunciation, they'd pronounce 'Nintendo' correctly anyway. But this doesn't apply to all languages. So if you want to write the name correctly in katakana/hiragana/kanji, you'd use either the "ou", or "o-", or "ō", "oo", "ô" or some other way to indicate a longer or double-wovel), or when he's talking about a whole system, like the Atari 5200.
I think the Atari 5200 episode is still his best - if only he could have actually -played- some games, it'd be perfect. It was like a long tease without a reward.. but in that episode, even the skits actually served the review, and were funny. It wasn't James in a costume, punching his friend in a costume - it was the AVGN trying to get the system working and properly plugged-in.
I never cared for the cursing, cussing or the 'angry' part, that doesn't add anything to it in my opinion - it's sometimes slightly funny to see him express a gamer's frustration, but it's the review bit that makes it all so entertaining. And of course the game (system) does half the work, and brings half the magic.
I always wished he could also review good games, and he did some specials, like that, when he talked about Castlevania or Zelda, and some of those odd episodes, like the reminiscing the Mortal Kombat craze and all that. But perhaps he could just be a 'Geek in the basement', simply focusing on games, reviewing good games and bad - or if he insists reviewing only bad games, at least he could always use a 'counter-game' to compare the bad game to, how things could have done right.
Like how he mentions Contra / Gryzor every second episode (it doesn't have to be Contra / Gryzor, there are lots of other games that have done the directional shooting properly, like the Amiga's glorious Turrican series (I+II mostly, the third one sucks)).
Btw, I don't think he was fair in the Winter Games review; the NES-version may very well suck, but those exact controls work perfectly with the joystick and the C64-version, and make it an actually great game - the C64-version, that is. And you have to press down, when you land in the figure skating bit, or you will fall. Even a child knew that during the eighties, and our gameplay expert couldn't figure it out? 'Twas frustrating to watch.
As another sidenote; I am a bit surprised to see so many people having a similar viewpoint to the movie to what I have expressed already. Someone even wrote a pretty interesting outline for an AVGN-movie that would have been much better than what we saw (though it had some small unnecessary oddities, like an 'injected romance' part - there's absolutely NO NEED to involve romance or women with AVGN character - just make it about GAMES, CONSOLES, COMPUTERS (and even game corporations, if necessary - LJN visit would be a great core point of any AVGN plot) and it'll be all good).
Maybe the fans and other people are finally waking up from the illusions and the AVGN-trance; perhaps they are seeing that the emperor is, if not completely naked, at least wearing very skimpy clothes instead of royal ones, and is walking towards the wrong direction (no pun intended).
I think AVGN-character can still be saved, and let's face it, if James really discards all the extra crap, and really focuses on making good AVGN episodes, there's probably not an oldskool game enthusiast in the world that wouldn't come back to watch those episodes and praise James for making them.
If he focuses on 'interesting games' instead of 'bad games', that could bring new life to the character - sometimes those games will be good, sometimes bad, sometimes neither, but they would always make entertaining videos to watch.
And that's what it's all about, isn't it?
reply
share