Did the Impossible Happen?

Not much to 2020 yet. No GeekTime for starters (now watch as soon as this post goes up, a new episode appears)
That promised video about ghost hunting shows? Delayed or cancelled because, according to him, he got another opportunity to pitch a ghost hunting show of his own. Yeah, this proves that a lot of his anger and bitterness came from jealousy of not having a show.
At this point, I'm convinced that Puppet Steve is nothing more than a tactic to fund his ghost garbage. Even though a real show would have a producer...

Speaking of Puppet Steve
On January 13th, he uploaded a video about mini Street Fighter cabinets. During it he had a dumb segment involving Ryu and Ken action figures. However, the voice of Ken sounds a little familiar. A certain Philly accent.
One quick look at the description, and you realize... it's James Rolfe. Yeah, the Angry Video Game Nerd has appeared in a video produced by Chris Bores. What the hell?

Clearly, we don't have the full story.
I don't think this will lead to a full-blown crossover. Screenwave likely sees Chris as a total nobody now and won't bother to bring him in for a video.
My guess? Chris contacted James using his Puppet Steve name, and asked to record some lines as Ken from Street Fighter for a "popular kids channel". James, being a nice guy, recorded it without knowing it was Chris. He's too busy to look it up.
But until we get answers, all we can do is speculate.
What's weird is that Chris also credits "the Irate Gamer" in the description of the video. Even though Steve and IG are the same person. We're not dumb Chris.
Also, he doesn't credit him as James Rolfe, but as "AVGN". Really?

A shame the ghost rants got delayed. I had popcorn and everything to see him lose his shit over a couple dumb shows, and not in a funny way like Mike Stoklasa talking about Ghost Adventures.

The Worst Moments of the Decade

It’s a brand-new era. An all new “Roarin’ 20’s”. Let’s hope it doesn’t end the same way as the last 20’s.

For Chris Bores, it was an on & off decade of videos, and a lot of downtime. All while making a total ass of himself. Amazing that he never learns.

And like many others, the start of a new decade is a time to reflect. So, let us dive back and look over the worst Irate Gamer/Chris Bores moments from 2010 to 2019. From his I Rate the 80s about *checks note* Kool-Aid Flavors to the charisma vacuum GeekTime. These will be in order of chronology (to the best of my ability), so don’t scroll down and expect a “#1”.

The 3-in-1 Review

In order to make up for a lack of videos, Chris decided to review three different modern (at the time) games in one video. Brutal Legend, Tekken 6, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Reshelled. To call this video a dumpster fire would be too kind.

He barely played Brutal Legend, admitting he only played it for an hour (real professional). He barely played TMNT, implying he only got to the second level and his comparisons to the original weren’t of the Arcade version, but the SNES version. Revealing that he still thinks Turtles in Time was a Super Nintendo exclusive.

But by far the worst one was his look at Tekken 6. Rather, the game’s Scenario mode. Not realizing Tekken was a fighting game, he jumped right into the story mode where the gameplay is different and not representative of the Tekken experience. Compiled with calling out reviews on the back of the box for praising it, as well as complaining about the Japanese voice acting (had he played longer, he would know that characters in Tekken speak their native tongue, and come across characters speaking English). It was so bad that when he released the video to YouTube after some time on GotGame, he added a new segment where he looks at the fighting game portion of the fighting game. Only to say it sucks because “I prefer Mortal Kombat”. A flimsy excuse and a poor attempt at covering his ass.

People hated this video as it really exposed what a poser and moron he really is. As well as how insanely lazy he could really get. Chris didn’t learn from this, making a lazy review of God of War III months later that amounted “Cool action and there’s sex scenes”, and years later he tried it again with “Review Roundup” where he looked at FOUR games in one video. But the original is by far the worst, and among Chris’ dumbest moments.

“The Rise of Red” storyline.

Throughout the Summer of 2010, Chris would announce that he purchased HD cameras and use them to take his show into “bold new directions”. By which he means “include a storyline in my reviews”. Inspired by the rise of serialized television and (possibly) other content creators implementing similar ideas (e.g. Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug), Chris decided to produce a “big epic Irate Gamer story arc”. It went about as well as you think.

Spanning three and a half years from October 2010 to April 2014, thanks in part to Chris taking MONTHS to do a single video, this “storyline” consisted of cliché villains, trite story beats, and a finale that … uses Power Rangers footage. Not even attempting to emulate his own, just directly stealing Mighty Morphin Power Rangers footage. There was even a point where the storyline didn’t progress at all, making people believe it was just cancelled. Chris never even met the main villain (the incredibly unoriginal “Shadow Overlord”), not to mention the Irate Gamer felt more like a villain than the actual villains. The whole thing was a giant mess and felt like a big ego project for Bores.

Several formers fans hated how long it took for him to finish this arc, with many of them just throwing their hands up and declaring they’re done with him. I can’t blame them.

Chris even had the gall to release it on DVD. Including all the copyrighted Power Rangers footage. He’s lucky he’s such a nobody or else Saban would have ended him.

The storyline established that Chris is a terrible writer in reviews, characters, and storytelling. Imagine if The Dark Chapters ever got off the ground? Hoo boy.

Rigged Contests

Throughout the early 2010s, Chris would put out several small videos giving away free items as “contests”. It was so simple, just write “Pick Me” in the comments and be subscribed. But also make sure to KISS HIS FEET! People were quick to find out that Chris only picked the most defensive of fans, including 12-year-old Johnny Awesome, who ended up winning twice! Shortly after this came out, Chris would stop doing giveaways and never really give stuff to his fans again. This is what you get for not being impartial.

The Skylanders Obsession

Remember Toys to Life games? Where you purchase a real toy and be able to place it inside the video game to play with them? That was a neat idea. Too bad Activision was Activision, and everything else was too expensive.

Chris unwittingly struck gold when he uploaded a video about Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, gathering many views for his couple hours of work. He further struck gold when he uploaded a checklist video going over the announced Skylanders: Giants figures and gained a massive number of views. It was then that Chris found a new calling. Soon a deluge of Skylanders content hit the channel, gaining him a new following, but alienating a lot of older fans. His Skylanders videos even overtook his regular Irate Gamer work, to which Chris told people asking for that “Too bad, my Skylanders videos are popular, deal with it”. He did attempt to compromise by opening “TheSkylanderC”, a side-channel dedicated solely to his Skylanders content. For whatever reason, Chris gave up on it and just continued pumping out crap onto his main channel. He even did a stop-motion video in celebration of the third game, Swap Force.

Things would eventually slow down, and then come to halt. Partly for a reason we’ll get to later, but mostly for Activision pulling the plug on the series and going for more traditional revivals like Crash The N Sane Trilogy and Spyro The Reignited Trilogy. Greed overtook Skylanders much like it overtook Guitar Hero, while Disney Infinity suffered from kids preferring games their older siblings would play and Lego Dimensions was just too damn expensive.

Either way, his Skylander obsession left a massive scar on his channel that likely prevented any further growth.

A Stolen Sonic Generations Review

As noted above, Irate Gamer Neo was a lazy lazy series. With Chris barely playing the game before “reviewing it”. In the case of this episode, he didn’t even play the game. In his video on Sonic Generations, Chris gushed about the game, yet made some weird complaints. Like how you can’t skip cutscenes, even though you can. Then eagle-eyed viewers played the video in HD and noticed something odd. A watermark in the corner for Cyberman65, a YouTuber that does silent playthrough videos. Everyone soon realized that Chris stole all the footage from Cyberman65 and passed off a review without playing the game. In a professional place, Chris would have been fired and blacklisted like Filip Miucin. But GotGame was basically a shack in the middle of the woods that nobody noticed, so all they did was credit Cyberman while Chris’ “mother” went around saying that Cyberman65 gave permission. That was likely a lie as Chris never posted the video to YouTube, and now it only exists through DailyMotion thanks to Igarchiver (since Blip shut down).

Chris didn’t learn his lesson, as many years later he would repeat this move on a certain other channel when talking about Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. Stealing footage from MKIceAndFire and passing it off as his own. It’s amazing how shameless he is.

Kickstarters are Stupid! Until they’re not…

Around 2011, James Rolfe would open an IndieGoGo campaign to help produce the Angry Video Game Nerd feature film. Though highly successful, going 433% over his target goal, it attracted some criticism from people that have no idea how movies are funded. This only got worse when James helped promote a separate Kickstarter for a “fixed” version of the infamous NES title Cheetahmen II. People came out of the woodwork to call James a scam artist and a fraud. Including Chris Bores!

Yes, seeing a moment of weakness in the man he stole from, he took the opportunity to pounce and put out a poorly made video mocking the Cheetahmen campaign video while calling Kickstarters “scams”. This got a bunch of people to start praising him, including some of his harshest critics. Though most people saw how slimy and petty Chris was acting.

And like most slimeballs, his views didn’t stay consistent. Over the years he would promote and praise various other crowdfunding campaigns without a single hint of irony. I bet if you showed the two viewpoints side by side, he would scream “CONSPIRACY AND FAKE NEWS”. Yeah, he’s that type of person.

Irate Gamer Tries to Blog

The Irate Gamer site was never anything important. Updates about the show were rare, you got a bunch of terrible fan art, but there was never really anything to keep people coming back. Until 2013, when Chris tried his hand at blogging. It blew.

Old video game news was frequent, often weeks after it broke. But that was nothing compared to “Chris finds random nerdy thing and talks about it”. Like Star Wars soap. Who doesn’t want to hear about Star Wars soap? The answer is nobody.

He tried guest writers, but that didn’t last long. Anyone that wrote for him able to tell me if he paid you? I want to know if he was willing to do that or if he was one of those “for exposure” assholes.

And much like his reviews and footage from others, he plagiarized others. Though that wasn’t until the end when he basically gave up. Now there’s no more Irate Gamer website. But hey, you could buy it for nearly $1400. Cool?

The Return of Ghosts (including Ghost Hunting 2.0)

Before becoming the Irate Gamer, Chris started on YouTube as a ghost hunter for his TV show “Haunted Investigators”. A boring slog of a show featuring Buddhist priest Alan Cicco (apparently pronounced Sisko like the Star Trek DS9 captain) and his former girlfriend Jennifer Schippel. Only six episodes were produced but he wanted it to be a big deal as he made DVDs and I imagine shopped it around to TV studios. Clearly that didn’t pan out, even mentioning in his (now deleted) 200^th video that ghosts just weren’t doing it.

Until he decided to go back into it. Out of nowhere, he revived his interest in ghosts and with it inflated his ego by calling himself a “Ghost Behaviorist”. Filming a pilot for a new show called Pursuit of the Paranormal and emptying his bank account to try and sell it to a TV studio. Nobody bought it. Instead he screened it in a small theater in Ohio and put out a DVD. Nobody cared.

You would think that would be the end of it but nope! Chris is persistent in his stupid “findings”. So, the next major step was to write a book. Calling it Ghost Hunting 2.0 (after Grant Wilson’s Ghost Hunting because he’s totally the next step you guys) and self-publishing it on Amazon. It was an abysmal book by all accounts. It was poorly written, badly structured, and only served as a way for Chris to suck his own balls. Even downright saying he created a new branch of psychology (spoiler alert: he didn’t)

He did everything to get noticed. He bought fake reviews, he spammed people on Twitter when his book was free on Kindle Unlimited, he even said his book was “the most controversial ghost hunting book ever made”. Citation needed on that.

Chris claimed he had enough to write a second book, but several years later nothing has come of that. I doubt he has any material for that.

Nowadays the extent of Chris’ ghost obsession is to yell and scream about the current ghost hunting shows on TV and claim that his work was stolen by them. Without providing examples. But he did say he’ll make videos about it starting this year. Grab the popcorn.

The Irate Gamer Game scam

We’ve established that Chris is lazy and quite dumb, but it also turns out he’s gullible as hell. As is the case with the Irate Gamer Game. Chris advertised that the game was coming for years, showing concept art sometimes. It finally saw release in 2013 as a crappy iOS mobile game. It only existed for three months before getting pulled for low quality. Turns out the whole thing was a lazy reskin of another mobile game called Commander Cool. Hmm, lazy rehash of something more popular? No, I don’t know anything like that.

At the very least, Chris did admit he got played like a chump. So that’s something?

Suicide victims burn in Hell!

This… is awkward to talk about.

In early 2014, Justin “JewWario” Carmical took his own life. He was a beloved content creator and the internet was shocked by his sudden suicide. Chris on the other hand, never having heard of him, responded to the news with “He will suffer in the afterlife as the universe doesn’t take kindly to suicide”. Yeah, real insensitive remarks from him.

Turns out hindsight is a huge bitch. In 2018, when Channel Awesome was being torn down by disgruntled employees for what they perceived as “unfair treatment”, it was accidentally revealed that Carmical was a predator that targeted underage girls. Something that only the higher-ups at Channel Awesome knew and they covered it up. Yeah…

Does that vindicate Chris? No not at all. If anything, this just reveals Chris’ terrible mindset about suicide, that their spirits will suffer. It’s a real dark and unkind mindset to have, especially to the countless suicide victims that clearly needed help for legitimate mental problems.

But if there’s anything I learned the last few years, it’s that there’s a lot of cruel people incapable of empathy.

“It’s not my fault! It’s James Rolfe’s fault! And everyone else!”

October 2014, months after finishing his storyline while still in the middle of the Skylanders deluge, Chris posted a 39-minute rambling vlog going over his “career”. Most of it amounted to “It’s James Rolfe’s fault that my YouTube career has failed! He undermined me! No, I won’t show evidence”. It was a whiny stupid video of a desperate man clinging onto some relevance in the hopes of getting viewers back, all while bashing someone far more popular than him. It kind of worked… until they went away again due to his own incompetence.

Then it turns out this victim complex decided to stick around, as over the years he would start blaming others quite a bit. He blamed YouTube for several aspects, he blamed Machinima for “undermining him” too, he also blames “the ghost hunting elite” for hiding his work and taking down his website. Please tell me “elite” isn’t a dog whistle for Jews this time.

Seems really easy to play the victim these days. Who’s next on the blame game?

2015 Explosion of Content

After a few more quiet months following his “opening up” video, Chris made a big comeback March 2015. He started having a set schedule of three videos a week and even released regular Irate Gamer videos (kind of). People suspect this is due to him joining a new Multi-Channel Network and had a set requirement for how he gets paid. In this case, three videos a week. However, what Chris provided was pretty… lame. Enjoy videos like Chris explaining a GI Joe reference, Chris talking about his greenscreen, Chris reviewing a website, opening a LootCrate, and Chris’ attempts at Let’s Plays… they really sucked.

Chris also took this opportunity to experiment new styles. They didn’t work at all. They were his “crazy reviews”, where Chris decided to act like a total loon when talking about Splatoon and some movies. With sped-up voices, way more slapstick, and… just baffling ideas. People hated them!

His regular Irate Gamer reviews also took a major hit. He decided to focus solely on beloved NES classics, and bash them for stupid reasons. People hated these videos too! Chris just couldn’t win with his new ideas. All those new "fans" he made from the Opening Up video? Jumped ship so fast.

There was a super-secret project Chris was working on, but we’ll get to that later.

The Whimpering End of History of Video Games

Though History of Video Games began in 2009, most of its episodes were in this decade. Including remakes of the first three… for some reason. A large number of them were released during his 2015 boom.

However, this series was nothing but failure after failure. The facts were inaccurate or downright wrong, the attempts at humor were terrible (even by his standards), the whole series was a mistake from someone that tried so hard to prove he was legit, only to prove he didn’t have a clue. That’s not even getting into how Ralph Baer chewed him out for inaccuracy (though that took place before the decade).

At one point, Chris referred to this series as his “opus”. Seems egotistical considering his so called “masterpiece” ended on the Intellivision in 2015. Six years of videos and he only got to 1982. That’s a pretty weak opus. Unlikely to continue considering all the circumstances too. I doubt he even has all these old consoles now.

PLACE AD HERE! (not an offer, just a title)

Around the end of 2015, Chris seemingly ran out of ideas and just posted video after video shilling crappy tech and mobile apps. The man seemed like a billboard that would promote whatever Chinese garbage you threw his way. He did manage to squeeze out one last Irate Gamer video in 2016 with Duck Hunt, but then it was shilling shilling shilling. Before silence.

What did Chris need all that money for? What could he have possibly been doing? Well…

The Rise (and Fall?) of Puppet Steve

During the Summer of 2015, around the time Chris announced he would be reducing his output on the main channel (claiming “family reasons”), he secretly started a side-channel intended for children. A low budget “remake” of the old educational puppet show The Letter People with his own set of “updated” puppets. His output was slow, only releasing a few videos likely due to low numbers. He spent that time looking at what kids liked on YouTube, and realized they really liked toy unboxings. This led to him starting another side-channel, this one he would have two of his puppets (Marty and Muffin) unboxing toys. However, only two episodes happened before he would bring in the new permanent host. The spawn of Shoggath itself, Puppet Steve. Based on the default player avatar in Minecraft, Puppet Steve would excitedly unbox toys while shouting “SUPER COOL” at kids and wave the toys around like they were shiny keys. His early videos had him try all sorts of things. “Crazy movie reviews” (even kids hated those too as he never did them again), trailer reactions (he brought those back, but for some reason started with the R-Rated Sausage Party) before settling on toys toys and more toys. He soon found his golden goose in the form of Five Nights at Freddy’s. Turns out kids really love that series, and they flocked to his videos like vultures to a carcass. He also made Puppet Steve his new home for Skylanders content… for the one year it had left before Activision pulled the plug.

Surprisingly, Puppet Steve ended up being a success. His subscriber count skyrocketed past his Irate Gamer count as more and more kids laid their eyes on his poorly shot puppet show. It got him access to ToyFair, and people donated him stuff to review, on top of all the stuff he had to buy. Maybe that’s why he sold his ass out on Irate Gamer? To pay for all the toys on Puppet Steve. What could go wrong at this point?

Well, views are way down. As of this writing, his latest video on Series 12 of the Minecraft Mini Figures line only has 18k views after three days. That’s not good considering he has over 630k subscribers now. Maybe every video being over 10 minutes long has something to do with it? He’s not exciting to listen to, especially since he ne longer uses a “funny voice”, just his normal one. Yet he calls himself “a kid” …

With YouTube’s new policies in cooperation with the FTC after violating COPPA, Puppet Steve doesn’t have much of a future either as kids content will be curated hard, and won’t earn as much money. But hey, at least he always has eBay. … PFFFFFFFT

Weirdly enough, Chris spent over a year denying he was Puppet Steve. Blocking people on Facebook that brought it up. Eventually he turned around about it… kind of. He’ll mention it, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. That started happening around the time this did.

The Failed Revival

March 2018, out of nowhere, Chris announced that the Irate Gamer was coming back. Except not really. Instead it would be the all new “Chris Neo” show. An immensely scaled down Irate Gamer with none of the slapstick, the cursing, the characters, or anything his stupid fans actually liked. Instead, have an over-sized pair of neon glasses! … No?

Chris Neo was Chris at his most boring. Talking about Sewer Shark and Deadly Towers but without any enthusiasm. It was a more effective sleep-aide than previous doses of Borian.

Of course, if it was just that, it might have stood a chance. But no, Chris decided “how about four fucking videos about Mario Game Genie!” Nobody liked that. He also tried to cash-in on Avengers Infinity War by making a video where Thanos wiped out people in video games. It was dumb and didn’t catch on. Chris posted one last video about Arcade 1Up before vanishing again. Barely seven months. Not even enough for a baby.

Needless to say, this comeback was a massive failure. People wanted Irate Gamer, they didn’t want “Stupid glasses guy dully talks about video games”, they wanted “stupid guy falls over playing video games”. For some reason. Surely Chris Neo’s failure would convince him to bring back Irate Gamer right? NOPE!

Podcasts: The Final Desperate Move

During Summer 2019, Chris was asking about podcasts. How strange. Then he mentioned that he’s going to do a podcast. Yeah sure, I’m sure it will work out just as well as all your other failed proj- it happened. August 23^rd, 2019 on Podbean.com, we got GeekTime The Next Generation.

Named after a defunct podcast that I can’t find any information on (if someone would be kind enough to inform me, please do), Chris is joined by his friend Tim Walker as they talk about geeky things. The reason it exists is that Chris is tired of “geeky podcasts” that go off-topic. Like how dare Kevin Smith talk about his life-saving weight loss, he needs to talk about the new Star Wars trailer! Yeah, that’s basically what he said. Chris is a dick.

The important thing about doing a podcast is having charisma. Neither Chris or Tim have it, and they’re very boring to listen to. We also get instances where Tim talks about a movie, but Chris doesn’t because he hasn’t seen it. You know, it’s kind of important for your podcast to both be informed.

It’s also a venue for Chris to show just how ignorant of video games he truly is. “BurgerTime chef should be in Smash Bros over Terry Bogard” “Why do we need a Playstation 5?” “Final Fantasy VII remake is behind a paywall”. At least he admits he’s casual, why he couldn’t do that years ago is anyone’s guess.

Either way, six episodes of boring dreck. Will there be more?

Wow, I wrote way more than I thought. A lot of this I condensed into a single segment, like all the ghost stuff in one part and the storyline in one part. If there’s anything you think I overlooked, let me know.

What will 2020 and beyond bring? The unemployment line. Joking aside, I look forward to his incoherent rants about modern ghost hunting shows and how they all “steal” from him.

Will Chris realize that people want Irate Gamer? Probably not.

Will he give up on GeekTime? Most likely.

Thank you reading everyone.