Year End List: Top 8 Worst IG Moments of 2013

Another year has come to a close, and that means it’s list time!
This wasn’t easy as this year was a whole lot of nothing. Chris’ inactivity was so bad that I couldn’t even make a Top 10. Either that or the videos were so boring and generic that there wasn’t much to say.

Despite this, 2013 really was his worst year. Let’s go over it.

You’re probably expecting the tally aren’t you… that’s not going to happen this year. Honestly, I lost count after a while since everything just started running together and I partly stopped caring. I’ll try again next year, hopefully things won’t be so… samey. I did count the major videos though so that’s something.

8, All the side series are essentially dead.

It’s no secret that Bores has trouble focusing on one or two projects at a time. He’s created so many side-series that it takes months for a major review to come out. … Well, that was last year at least.
2013 saw only a single I Rate the 80’s video back in March, and not a single History of Video Games episode (the revised episode doesn’t count, there is no reason for that to exist). IG Shorts is long dead, and only a single movie review (Man of Steel).
I would say he’s finally taking his time to focus on his reviews… but the rest of the list says otherwise.

7. Sonic Lost Hurl

IG Neo was about as active as it usually is, with six episode this year. Most of them were just boring or inoffensive though, so it was tough to pick the worst one for this list. It was between Diablo III and Sonic Lost World, but I went with Sonic for a simple reason. I don’t think he played the game.
Calling his Sonic Lost World video a “review” is being generous, the entire video was an off-the-cuff vlog with footage playing where Chris only complains about one thing, the game gave him motion sickness. That’s it. Nothing on controls, nothing on gameplay, nothing on sound, just the fact it made him sick.
So why do I think he didn’t play the game? When he held it up on camera, one can see it’s still in the shrink wrap. So either he didn’t play the game, or he played the digital copy for some weird reason. Either way, it sounds more like he watched videos of it online and couldn’t stand it.
It also had one of his dumbest research mistakes, his claim that Sony and Microsoft “didn’t want the game on their console”, even though it’s part of a 3-game deal between Nintendo and Sega. He even reported the deal on his site back when it began!

Chris has had a history of claiming that games have been giving him motion sickness. He mentioned he barely played Doom because of that, he often mentions getting “Vertigo” when playing certain games (specifically, Contra III and Cool Spot), he often brings up that he doesn’t like shooters because they make him dizzy, and that the flying in Lego Batman 2 made him sick. I really have to wonder why Bores chose to take this career path if most games out there make him sick. If we consider he was never a gamer before 2007, why didn’t he stop when he realized that most games were making him sick? It just raises too many questions.

6. Baka Sentai Ge-Mas (later adapted into Power Rangers Gaming Dumbasses)

2013 was surprisingly active for his retro reviews, four in total. The first three were less reviews and more like condensed walkthroughs/Let’s Plays that still got things wrong, with the usual terrible jokes and cutaways. All three also felt rushed to get out in time for a Hollywood blockbuster release, and all three lacked any of the stupid storyline he’s been doing for over three years now. They also felt like a “return to form”, which isn’t saying much.
That is why this moment goes to the fourth review, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for the SNES.
The “review” is spent bashing what’s really a pretty decent game, all for petty reasons that were clearly reaching. Often complaining about aspects that are similar to the show (and yes he also did complain about how it differed from the show). A complete mess of a review littered with his pointless characters.
The story part though… wow. The villains unleash their giant HAL-bot into “the city” (no I don’t know what city, probably Cleveland since Bores lives in Ohio) and… good lord these effects. Toei should take that footage and show it to their set designers and effects workers on how NOT to do a Super Sentai giant scene.

And the worst part is? There’s still one storyline video left! How the hell did this take over three years? How many story arcs did Linkara complete in that span of time? Watch, the ending is going to be complete bullshit, just like it usually is with Chris.

5. IG turns his homepage into a blog, with pointless results.

IG’s website was just… there. It occasionally updated with “I’m working on something” and “This video is going to be epic”, but most of the time the site was just empty air (though it provide us with April 31st). That all changed in July of this year.
IG’s site changed from an MS word layout to a Wordpress blog funded by GotGame (who I imagine are regretting this immensely). Now Bores can tell us all sorts of gaming news like… this Mario video he found, and this Zelda video he found, and this Street Fighter video he found, and this Zelda picture he found, and this stuff related to Breaking Ba- that’s not even a game!
So yeah, the new site was less Kotaku and more “Chris Bores finds random shit and posts it for a couple people to see”. Not that it stopped him from stealing from Kotaku.
I tried covering it every week, but after a while I noticed how tedious it was. How every article was essentially the same again and again and again. Even his constant spelling and grammar mistakes couldn’t motivate me to keep going.
It does warm my heart that Bores almost never gets comments on his posts. Time to rethink this strategy? … Pffffft.

4. Too. Much. Skylanders.

Chris’ obsession with the toyetic franchise reached a boiling point this year. Every other article on the above site is Skylanders related, most of his videos were talking about Skylanders, and his longest E3 video was an “epic” interview with Activision reps about Swap Force (22 minutes compared to every other game getting like four). Not to mention Vicarious Visions flew him to New York to give him a Skylanders tour. You could almost forget that the Irate Gamer once talked about other games.
As you can imagine, his fans were not happy. The comments were always people bringing up how tired they are of Skylanders and to do something else, or to make a separate channel for the franchise since he clearly loves it so much. At one point, Chris even acknowledged that he was aware of overabundance of Skylanders. Did that stop him? Oh I wish.
Instead, he posted a 6 minute stop-motion video that can be called “uninspired and boring”. They’re statues! They’re a terrible figure to use for stop-motion animation!

I’m just waiting for the day when the public gets tired of Skylanders, it happens with every Activision franchise. It happened with Tony Hawk, it happened with Guitar Hero, and it’s starting to happen with Call of Duty (Ghosts sold a lot less than BLOPS 2)

3. Pursuit of the Bankruptcy

Chris surprised us last year when he announced the return of Haunted Investigators, a series thought long dead (even by Chris himself if his 200th video was anything to go by). But like a 12 year old troll during summer vacation, it came back with a vengeance.
Instead of a TV show, it would be a movie, and it would now be called “Pursuit of the Paranormal”. After showing a trailer around Halloween 2012, Chris went silent on it. Until September of this year.
That’s when the bullshit started. Chris revealed that he dumped his entire bank account into this movie, going to TV conventions and talking to various networks trying to get it on air. He listed Discovery, TruTV, History Channel, and SyFy, and all turned him down. SyFy even told him that “nobody is watching ghost hunting shows anymore” (Chris should have invested in making a schlock-y B-movie with a stupid title, it always works for the Asylum). You would think Chris would take that as a sign to shelve the project, but apparently he cares for this far more than video games. Hell, he would constantly claim this would change the “paranormal world” forever, and that he got a “90 minute conversation with the dead”.
Instead, Chris rented out an old theater in Toledo Ohio for one night to show the movie, as well as have a “genuine ghost hunt” in said theater. He was so proud of this that he even went on local news and radio to promote it (which you can see on his YouTube channel).
So what happened? The obvious, very few people actually came. Reportedly around 20-30 in total, likely a lot less for the ghost hunt. I think Chris knew this wouldn’t be a good turnout as he advertised it on his YouTube channel as “Meet the Irate Gamer”. Even though it had nothing to do with video games and he probably wouldn’t have fielded questions about IG.
The other big mistake is that he scheduled the premiere on October 12th, the same day as the release of the highly anticipated Pokemon X & Y. Considering he advertised it on his YouTube channel, one mostly watched by gamers, this was definitely a bone-headed move.

Of course if you couldn’t make it to the premiere, worry not, there’s a DVD available. And Shawn from TotalActionAdventure has reviewed it: http://www.totalactionadventure.com/content/are-they-worth-it-dvds-internet-15-pursuit-paranormal
Turns out that the movie’s claim of a 90 minute conversation was a lie as the movie is only 54 minutes long. About the same time as an hour-long TV show with limited commercial interruption. Well, he did say he wanted to get it on TV…
And unsurprisingly, Chris found nothing, and was just talking out of his ass when he claimed it would change everything forever. Unless it makes more sense to people actually interested in this crap.

Like Skylanders, maybe Chris should make a separate channel for all this ghost hunting stuff. … Oh wait, he did! Y2B2006, long before he created the Irate Gamer. I wonder what happened there? Hmmmmmmmmmm.

2. The Irate Gamer Game has arriv- and it’s gone.

Long-delayed projects seem to be a running theme with Chris Bores, such as the “Irate Gamer Game”.
Announced back in 2010 or so, the game was the butt of many jokes, mostly on how it will never come out and that the studio, Mad Media Labs, was clearly scamming Chris. It never even left the concept art stage! But like Pursuit of the Blah, it re-emerged. Around the same time a certain other reviewer was having a game about them being released.
So without a peep, the Irate Gamer Game was released on the iTunes App Store in August, with Chris taking A MONTH to announce it on his channel. For $4 dollars (eventually slashed to $1), you could get 52 levels of platforming hell. Oh, I don’t mean good platforming hell like Super Meat Boy or Cloudberry Kingdom. I mean poorly programmed TOUCH SCREEN hell where you can’t even jump and shoot at the same time.
And that’s just the start of the game’s issues. The animations are terrible, there’s no enemy variety (three HAL-bots and ROB), despite the controls looking like a D-Pad you can only go left or right, there’s ladders for absolutely no reason, you can’t tell what’s background and what’s a wall, IG has a hang glider for some reason, there’s a pointless blood effect every time he gets hit, health power-ups are too plentiful, there’s no checkpoints, the list just goes on and on. Hell, the only positive most people can think of is the artwork in the comic-book style cut scenes is pretty good, too bad it’s attached to a lame-ass story that makes more pointless references than Duke Nukem.

Two months after release, another major problem with the game arose, it’s unoriginal! Specifically, it’s a reskin of another iOS game called Commander Cool. The developers do sell the assets to willing game-makers, but with the intention that they make something original. Mad Media Labs brought the assets and slapped on various Irate  Gamer related characters. Some of the above flaws were carry-overs from the source game (such as the hang-glider and the blood). Considering how poorly-coded the game is, one wonders if this was done in a weekend.

By far the weirdest aspect is Chris constantly claiming that the game is “like Angry Birds”. Has he ever actually played Angry Birds? The two are nothing alike. He could have said it was like Mario or Contra, but instead he chose something that was far from similar. Maybe he just heard it was popular and hoped the comparison would get people to buy it? Didn’t exactly work out there…

Three months after release, the game vanished from the App Store. It was almost too good to be true, but it’s really gone. Three years in “development”, three months of life. Most likely scenario is that Apple did a quality sweep and the game was removed for being crap, and I really can’t blame them. As of this posting, it’s still not there. Good.
Man, I bet the fans were disappointed that it’s gone. Surprisingly, no. Most people commented on IG’s video that it looks like a really bad flash game, the people that did play said it sucked hard, and some were upset that it wasn’t available on Android (you weren’t missing out).

I do wonder if Chris learned something from this experience. Like the importance of not rushing a game out, or doing a background check on the studio you commissioned to make a game, or wonder why the fuck it took three years to make a shitty platformer?!

1. “I don’t feel like doing anything for weeks at a time, I’ll still make money right?”

IG’s worst moment of 2013 wasn’t for something he did, rather it was for doing nothing.
Last year he claimed 2013 would be “his year”. That did not happen. In fact, this year was by far his laziest, with weeks where nothing new would be posted. To Chris, there’s no such thing as a schedule.
His Neo reviews were filled with the usual laziness (outside of Disney Infinity), none of his side series were posted (as mentioned above), and his idea of a Christmas special was posting a two year old video with added bloopers. Okay that Skylanders stop-motion video was also a Christmas special, but it had nothing to do with Irate Gamer. He could have at least done a review.

The question is, why the laziness? Isn’t this his job? He can’t be making money by posting such little content and barely getting views from it. Until he says something about another job outside of YouTube, I’m going to assume this is how he makes a living. If so, he’s going to crash in 2014. With YouTube’s screwed up “content ID” changes, Chris’ complete lack of understanding of the gaming world and YouTube community, and his refusal to change course and direction, I can’t see Chris surviving 2014.

If Chris was smart, he would have started doing Let’s Plays a looooong time ago. Before you bring up that he’s not good at games, that hasn’t stopped other people from making careers of doing poor playthroughs *cough*DSP*cough*
If full playthroughs are too tough, then he could always do what Two Best Friends Play or Cinemassacre do, only show the best moments.
The point is, if Bores wants to keep making money, he needs to stop being a lazy-ass and put out more content. He’s had so many excuses, and none of them hold water (my favorite is his claim that he’s a perfectionist… yeah right!) Then again, doing it solely for the money is the easiest way to not enjoy it. The best course of action is to give up, sever ties with the Irate Gamer channel, and start a new one for something he actually enjoys. Or get a job outside of YouTube, either way I don't see that happening.

*sighs* And that was IG’s 2013. It didn’t feel like much did it?
What do you think next year will bring?  Hopefully the end of that god damn story arc, you just know he’s been making this shit up as he went along. Maybe the return of the Wise Sage?
I do expect Neo reviews of Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze (*insert Cranky Kong meme here*) and South Park: The Stick of Truth. Because Bores is just that predictable.

Happy new year everyone, see you all in 2014.