2019:
At the start of the year, he claimed there would be “no reviews until Summer”. Of course, he still refused to bring up Puppet Steve.
He also said he can’t do “old style reviews” as the YouTube algorithm has changed. No further explanation.
He would post an angry rant on Facebook about Tessa Thompson being in Men in Black: International. Crying that it should be the “Men” in Black. Even though it was established in the first movie that women serve too. The third movie even revealed the person running the MIB is a woman. Seems a little misogynistic to me.
It did not help when I received an e-mail about a comment posted on CommonSenseMedia’s video. A woman stating that her fiancé used to be married to Chris’ current wife, Nicole. One day out in public, Nicole spotted her, ran up to her and slapped her. This led to Chris grabbing her by the shoulders and punching her in the face. Her fiancé did something that scared him so bad, he keeps a bat by the front door.
In another comment, she revealed she filed a police report.
How have we not paid more attention to this? It sounds like a big deal. How did I just sweep it under the rug?
Of course, like any story like this, take it with a grain of salt. But I doubt someone would make up a story like that about Bores in 2019. Long after his star faded.
Continuing…
He went to ToyFair again, and his editing had gotten sloppy. At one point he runs into Todd McFarlane, and Todd says into the camera “listen to Chris” and in a panicked whisper tells him “Puppet Steve! Puppet Steve! They know me as Puppet Steve!” Why Chris left that in the video I do not know. It’s still up too! One of the Fortnite videos.
He also recorded a video that ended up showing his face. He deleted it but it lives on at DailyMotion.
Interestingly, he acknowledged his work on Puppet Steve on an Irate Gamer social media page. Why now and not in 2016 I don’t know.
In April, he would announce the “Irate Gamer” would return in the Summer.
He showed on Puppet Steve that he bought a Switch. I’m sure that lead to all sorts of content on both channels. … Right?
Summer comes and goes, and no Irate Gamer. Around August he starts asking his fans about podcasts.
Also in August, he would angrily accuse Grant Wilson of plagiarism. Ironic, I know.
Claiming that Grant looking at the “emotional” side of a ghost is stealing what he does. Chris’ ego regarding his paranormal work was starting to spiral out of control.
Why did Chris bring up podcasts? Because he started one. Joined by his friend Tim Warner (remember him from the TMNT cereal video?), we got GeekTime: The Next Generation.
What was the original GeekTime? It was a feature on the Howard Stern Show hosted by Ralph Cirella. Basically, talking about all things nerdy, likely with the sardonic bend that Stern is known for. It was cancelled when Stern’s chief operator, Marci Turk, removed all non-Stern programming. This is going by old Reddit comments.
Chris decided to start the podcast because he felt current “geeky” podcasts weren’t good anymore, calling out Kevin Smith in particular. He was upset that he kept talking about his life-saving weight loss and not focusing on geeky stuff.
It was not good.
Neither Chris nor Tim have charisma, a helpful skill for talking nonstop for 2-3 hours. They kept interrupting themselves with sound clips like a shock jock.
The first big mistake was posting them on Podbean before YouTube.
The second big mistake was the preview clip he posted to YouTube. The podcast starts with an annoying 90 second theme song that lists off various “geek” stereotypes. I think it was from the original GeekTime since it sounds cynical and sarcastic (fitting for Stern). Chris included the entire thing in the preview. That song alone turned off a lot of his audience.
The third mistake was the next preview they posted. Where Chris declares the 2019 Joker movie sucks. Except he admits in the video he was only going by the trailers. In fact, neither of them had seen the movie. It was heavily disliked.
He would post several clips on YouTube, but people didn’t really care for them. Only one that got substantial views was a segment where the two talk about the Nostalgia Critic’s terrible review of Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
The other subject matter was either uninteresting or littered with ill-informed takes. Tim asking about the point of the PlayStation 5, Chris upset that Terry Bogard got into Smash Bros instead of Peter Pepper from BurgerTime, and a lot of basic takes on Star Wars and Marvel.
Eventually he posted the full episodes on YouTube, but by then, nobody cared. In fact, the first five were removed, leaving only the sixth and final episode. He even closed the Podbean page.
Though some episodes were preserved on the Internet Archive.
Over on Puppet Steve, he talked about Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled. He was ill-equipped to talk about it, making mistakes like referring to Coco as Crash’s girlfriend. There was a gameplay segment at the end, however he did not record it. He stole it from YouTube creator MKFireAndIce. You can tell because in CTR:NF, your gamertag is always displayed.
His anger towards other ghost hunters would continue, ranting about Jason Hawes using the term “confused spirit”.
He would bring up watching HBO’s Watchmen, calling it so bad it made him want to ‘quit geekdom”. Calling it confusing and boring. But the actual reason likely lies deeper. Chris is the type that gets annoyed at media that “pushes their politics into everything”. Given the race-driven nature of HBO’x Watchmen, this likely set him off. Prior to the show’s premiere, he would mention on GeekTime that making the show’s villains white supremacists would “alienate white comic readers”. A line that says so much.
Around the end of 2019, the Federal Trade Commission found YouTube in severe violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). They were collecting data on young children without parental permission and ended up paying a hefty fine. In response, YouTube would implement some drastic changes to children’s content. No comments, no favoriting, and severely reduced income.
Somehow, Chris was not affected by this for Puppet Steve. No idea how he managed to circumvent it. But the channel still carries all the bells & whistles normal channels enjoy. Even though it’s clearly a kid’s channel.
The year would end with Chris screwing over one of his longtime fans. A man named Mike wanted to get the IG DVDs after losing his copies. Getting the first three seasons was easy but getting 4 & 5 took longer. Chris told him he needed to get more DVD-Rs, which Mike understood.
Eventually Season 4 & 5 arrived, but the marathon feature on 4 didn’t work. He contacted Chris who told him “I’ll fix it”.
Mike ordered History of Video Games Volumes 1 & 2 and they also took way too long. He tried contacting Chris but no answer. He put in a fraud notice to PayPal, and Chris quickly shipped them out. Including Pursuit of the Paranormal as a bonus (though he just threw the disc in a HoVG case).
Finding GeekTime, he asked Chris in the comments about Season 4. Chris tells Mike he hasn’t forgotten and is rebuilding the menu.
Then, close to Christmas, Mike ordered a Minecraft playset for his kid off eBay. A few hours later, he got an alert from PayPal that Chris Bores sent him a refund. Confused, Mike thought it was for Season 4. Instead, it was for the playset, and Mike realized the person he tried to buy from was Chris. Infuriated, he sent him a message that he crossed the line and was going to inform me. Chris told him he already gave away the playset and he forgot to remove the auction.
This did inform us that Chris has a side business selling toys on eBay. Specifically, the stuff you see on Puppet Steve.
2020:
At the start, something shocking happened.
Over on Puppet Steve, he posted a video looking at some Street Fighter figures and manage to get James Rolfe to voice Ken.
It’s not entirely out of nowhere. Chris was not-so-subtly hinting that things were resolved. Though we wouldn’t see the full realization of this until later.
Another year of ToyFair, getting in just in time before everything went to shit.
I don’t remember much about these. He did look at My Hero Academia toys because “the fans asked”, but a lot of the videos were potato quality and hard to hear.
He did the Top 15 Baby Yoda toys. The Mandolorian was blowing up around this time.
Some craziness over at Facebook. First was a clip from Ghost Adventures that showed a shadow that looks like an alien. It’s incredibly phony. You could almost see the guy in the background moving it. Yet Chris claims this is what his research was talking about. … We’ll get to that.
After that, when E3 was cancelled due to the pandemic, Chris gloated, claiming the show used to be great until GameSpot came in and “took over”. That they pushed out “the little guy” as they realized they could make money. I have no idea what he’s talking about. It makes less sense when you consider GameSpot has been around since 1995.
Chris started making himself something of a pariah in the paranormal community. In a Facebook group, he got salty at someone for not doing a ritual “his way” and ended up getting banned for being a total dick. He couldn’t seem to accept that there’s different methods to ghost cleansing. It is a pseudoscience after all.
On April 23rd, the channel’s 13th anniversary, Chris would announce the return of the Irate Gamer. Not Chris Neo, but the original version. There was some rejoicing.
Announcing that his big comeback would be about Ghostbusters on NES.
It would be a while before the video would go up. Until then, he started yet another channel. The Ghost Doctor, his third attempt at ghost stuff..
The first video was an introduction. The second video caused psychic damage.
Chris stopped caring about his image and spouted a lot of nonsense about a “Woke paranormal pandemic”. Bringing up ideas like lizard people, claiming certain celebrities are Satanists, that you don’t have to believe in Satan to be a Satanist, that aliens are really deformed ghosts (which is what he was referring to in the Ghost Adventures clip), how we no longer have picnics in cemeteries, and so much other craziness. The mask was off.
A few days before the comeback video, Chris held a stream providing an update. It’s about 10 minutes long and answers questions. I didn’t really watch any of these.
The comeback arrived.
Starting up right after the Duck Hunt video, IG explains his absence as “stuck playing Zelda II for four years”. Though he contradicts that with the “Five Years Later” title card from Avengers: Endgame.
But rather than half the population getting wiped out, it’s… angry reviewers. Showing missing posters for retired creators like Armake21, Jedite1, Spoony, UrinatingTree (who switched to sports commentary), PlayItBogart (who now streams as a drag queen) and for some reason Sly Dog Studios (he wasn’t even an angry reviewer). Then an article on how the AVGN went to hunt for them, and a missing poster for the Irate Gamer but it uses the edited picture from Encyclopedia Dramatica where his head is shopped onto an adult baby. An attempt at being self-aware?
It spoke to me that in 2020, Chris was still stuck in 2007.
The reason for picking Ghostbusters is that Ernie Hudson told him to do it. Using the site Cameo, he paid for a video of Hudson and plopped it in. For Hudson you could tell this was just standard procedure as he mentions some of his other non-Ghostbuster roles.
The review portion was a lot of the same stuff, but with more semen jokes. He says the game gave him trauma “20 years ago”, but that would have been 2000. Did he mean 30 years ago? Or did he first play Ghostbusters when the PS2 was about to come out?
Eventually he resorts to Game Genie, and yells at the audience as he mentions the AVGN, having wanted to avoid using Game Genie like him. For some reason he references Shit Pickle.
After that he did a 40-minute stream talking about the next episode.
Then came the trailer for the next episode. It was Dick Tracy on NES. With the AVGN.
All that hinting and winking lead to this. A crossover.
The internet went… “meh”. It wasn’t the big earth-shattering event he thought it would be. The reaction was either “It should have happened years ago” or “Irate Gamer is still around?”
But it also brought a lot of IG fans out of hiding to crow about how they’re friends and that means he’s immune to criticism.
He’d host another stream to talk about the crossover and how it happened. He claims that James is the one to suggest he go back to doing Irate Gamer. Personally, I have my doubts.
Either way, he says they’re friends now. I find that hard to believe since both the Ebegging Spoof and the Opening Up video are still on your channel. The latter especially since you made several baseless claims against James with no evidence.
On July 15th, the crossover arrived. Except it wasn’t really a crossover, it was more a glorified cameo. All that hype, including selling t-shirts, and it was nothing more than a few minutes.
The first six minutes has him talking about the Dick Tracy movie, the merch, a slam towards the Nostalgia Critic for no reason, until finally getting to the game. It’s about what you expect, it’s hard, it’s hard, there was a Genesis version that was so much better, until eventually he gets a call from “the chief” to get him a partner. Said partner being the Nerd. Then an awkward scene of cursing and screaming that ends with Shit Pickle.
Then they challenge each other to see who beats the game first. IG clearly uses Game Genie (but doesn’t say it) and still loses as the AVGN used the “beat a game button” from a previous video. IG declares revenge, but it’s never followed up on.
Afterwards, he would do one more stream. The last one he ever made.
I know one of these streams had some awful Smash Bros takes. He pushes Peter Pepper again, then gets angry that Joker from Persona 5 is in is and claims that Smash Bros should only have characters older than 20 years. By that logic, and using Ultimate as a base, only characters from 1998 or older would be allowed in Chris’ dream Smash roster.
Screenwave’s Justin Silverman would hold an AMA and reveal that the plans for the crossover were much different. It was going to be about American Gladiators, and they would have been in the same room. Ending with the two settling their differences and beating up the fans that kept the feud going. Like everything in 2020, it was cancelled due to COVID. Honestly, I’m glad we didn’t get that version. It sounds really cringy.
Justin did sound upset that the crossover was posted on Chris’ channel and not Cinemassacre.
With newfound popularity, Chris clearly had to take advantage of this. First with a compilation of Season 1 with some commentary.
The real follow-up was a video on Nintendo cereal.
Bringing back I Rate the 80’s, Chris decides the best course following a seemingly impossible crossover was to talk about a discontinued cereal. He really pushes “Breakfast is Ruined”. It was a meme years ago, trying to push it now seems desperate.
He actually takes a bite at one point. No disgusted reaction though. Either the cereal is still good after a few decades, or it wasn’t the Nintendo cereal.
The video ends with a painfully cringy reenactment of the old commercial.
Over on Ghost Doctor, he would post a video where he claims to have heard the ghost of George Floyd. Seriously. Even though he’s in Ohio and Floyd was in Minnesota when he was murdered.
The cereal was a misstep, but surely, he’ll recover with the next vi- It’s TMNT again…
A 20-minute video about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade game. He made sure to emphasize that it was 20 minutes all over his socials.
To make this special, he went to Cameo and paid voice actor Rob Paulsen to record a couple videos for him.
He gushes over the Arcade game and once again talks about the first NES game. He brings up what he calls the “Phantom Menace Effect”, the idea that people convince themselves something is good, and you weren’t allowed to badmouth it, like the Phantom Menace. I don’t think that’s how it happened…
After he finishes talking about the game again, he moves onto the sequel AKA the port of the Arcade game. Where originally Chris claimed “it sucks” from the start, here he acted like he was uber-hyped, and praised the addition of two new levels. Maybe he learned his complaint about them in 2007 was horribly ignorant?
There was a bright spot. He finally acknowledges that Turtles in Time was an Arcade game first. Only took 13 years. Though I wonder if he did the research, or just learned about it when he bought the Arcade1Up machine.
Following that was as video on… Urkel-O’s.
For context, during the Nintendo cereal video, he brings up the existence of Urkel-O’s, a cereal tie-in with the popular sitcom Family Matters. Chris erroneously refers to him as the “I didn’t do it” kid, when his catchphrase was “Did I do that?”
Because several people thought it was a joke, Chris decided to make a video showing it was real. He seemed surprised that they thought it was a joke, like he doesn’t understand that his years of editing in fake moments would somehow backfire.
He replays the joke from the prior cereal video but poorly dubs himself with the correct catchphrase.
He also said the comments wanted him to do a “Family Matters rant”. I don’t think Chris understands what his own channel was at that point.
Another cereal video so soon after the first ended up hurting his channel. Despite the high of the crossover, the views plummeted after that.
He would follow with a video that’s obvious to anyone. Going over how console ports of Arcade
games are often inferior. It was almost 17 minutes long.
The video was about what you’d expect. Poor research (admitting he had no idea Contra was originally an Arcade game), terrible takes, no understanding of console limitations at the time, and of course it was boring.
Ever since Arcade1Up started sending him cabinets for Puppet Steve, Chris has gone deep into Arcade gaming. He set up his basement to look like an old Arcade, and basically got rid of all his current consoles. Even though they’re just as capable of playing the same emulated Arcade titles as these replicas. Much cheaper too.
I suspect he got rid of his current consoles because around this time, Steve was announced for Super Smash Bros Ultimate. I feared that Chris was going to be insufferable on the Puppet Steve channel. Make 100 videos all about Smash. But… he never did. He never even brought it up. I know he had a Switch; he made a Puppet Steve video about it. It’s possible he sold it to pay for more of those cabinets.
He follows up the console port video with RoboCop. For the third time. Sort of…
Chris decided to talk about various RoboCop games, and that included recycling clips from his 2011 RoboCop reviews. I don’t just mean the game footage and audio; he recycles sketch footage too. Switching between his rooms, his clothes, his camera quality, and he doesn’t address this at all. He mentions in the description it has a “little bit of old” but the video ignores it.
Interestingly, one part he recycles from the original is done with new footage. Likely due to Eric Allen being the one to say line. Makes me wonder what happened.
Oh, and he paid for a Peter Weller video on Cameo.
Afterwards a video on Punisher games. This was the first video to have help from fans. Chris asked on Facebook to get assistance on videos. Hopefully they were paid.
This one was boring but had lines that showcased they were written by someone else. Though the constant mispronunciations (LGN, ESREB) raised some eyebrows.
Remember Pursuit of the Paranormal? The big pilot episode that he screened in a small Ohio theater? The whole thing is on YouTube now. Only it’s under the Ghost Doctor banner. He posted it on the main IG channel as well.
He would post two Halloween reviews. The first was on Ghouls n’ Ghosts, the sequel to Ghosts n’ Goblins. It was mostly complaining about how hard it was, how the graphics are better (because it was on Genesis), and incredibly awful jokes. There was also a bit where Chris throws the cartridge, and it hits the fan that helped produce the episode. I’m bringing this up for later.
The second would cover The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror for Game Boy Color. It was an utterly boring video that Chris attempts to spice up with Simposns clips, but to no avail.
Over on Facebook, following the 2020 election, Chris talks about the “lying media” and uses it to bring up the “backroom meetings” he had with YouTube and the gaming industry back in 2011-2012. But he’s too scared to reveal it because he thinks he’ll get killed like the guy that outed Tom Hanks as a pedo (which is based on outdated info).
Just tell us Chris. What horrible secrets did you hear? It’s been 10 years; I doubt it matters now.
He posted a video about some NES book. It’s no longer on the channel.
Then for the final video of the year, he would talk about a Dragon’s Lair replica Arcade cabinet. By the way, this was the new Irate Gamer Neo. Not talking about new games, but overly expensive emulators.
2021:
The year started off with a video on the NES launch titles. What would be an interesting video under a better creator was a boring mess with the butchering of Japanese names and incorrect information (he calls Super Mario Bros a launch title when we don’t know when the game came out in North America).
He followed with a Flintstones review, talking about the two NES games. It was mostly an excuse for him to talk about old Hanna-Barbara cartoons.
Then Chris tried to launch another new series over on the Ghost Doctor. He was so confident in this one, he cross-posted it to the Irate Gamer channel. “Pop Culture Paranormal”, a series where he explores media with paranormal aspects. First episode is about The Ring. He says he had to watch it a second time to understand it (how?) and believes the events of the movie can happen in real life. He barely gets into the Japanese mythology of it though, something I feel is important considering the source material is a Japanese book.
This was the only episode.
Then some coffee table books about the NES. He says a friend made them, while also taking the time to toss some bizarre criticism at Pat Contri’s book.
Then a video he was proud of; one he claims calls back to 2008. Godzilla vs Kong. This was the highest viewed video of 2021 as it came out close to the release of the movie.
There’s no actual Godzilla vs Kong game, so he just looked at a bunch of Godzilla games and a couple King Kong ones (there’s not many).
He used a confusing scoring system, grading them for things like “second-hand value”.
Interestingly, he looks at some Japan-only Godzilla games. He doesn’t say much, but they’re there.
He revealed that he has an insane bias against strategy games, calling them a “waste of time” and how you’re always waiting. How a turn takes 10 minutes. That tells me that he didn’t know strategy games have an “End Turn” option and simply sat there picking his nose until the game kicked over to the enemy.
But the ending is likely what Chris meant by “like 2008”. He’s attacked by the Mecha Irate Gamer, a super-jank Mechagodzilla recolor with his face. At least the animator got his weird jaw movement.
More recycled content as Chris once again talks about discontinued Kool-Aid flavors. It was incredibly dull, full of recycled footage from this 2009 Kool-Aid Man review, and a blatantly fake interview with the Kool-Aid Man’s stuntman Tom Anthony. He never published the full interview so I’m calling fake until he shows otherwise.
Remember the Chris Neo videos about Mario and Game Genie? He compiled them all into one 25-minute video, with a dash of new footage.
Then the second (and last) episode of the revamped Irate Gamer Neo, talking about another Arcade cabinet. This one lets you download ROMs on it. He also brings up the yet unreleased game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Saying he’ll put the game on the cabinet.
Because 2021 was about “Irate Gamer nostalgia”, he brought back the summer movie list. Claiming the last one was made 11 years prior (he’s wrong, he made one in 2015). Two of the movies ended up not coming out in 2021 (Top Gun Maverick and Mission Impossible 7), and for some reason he mentioned superhero movies that he didn’t put on the list. I guess so people in the comments didn’t ask where they were?
After that was a video about a very unexpected game. Stinger. The English version of the second TwinBee game. Weird enough, this feels like something he DID play as a kid. But the info was still off, and he called it a scandal because a lot of the TwinBee games didn’t come out here. As well as a cartoon, but it was an OVA and clearly not made for TV.
Instead of something new, Chris would post compilations of the first three seasons. Even though he already posted a Season 1 compilation. I have no idea if anything is different between the two.
After those was a video on Gremlins. What should have been a Christmas episode was posted in May.
He covers just about every Gremlins game, including the ones on Commodore 64. Though most of the video was about Gremlins 2.
There’s a horrid bit where he repeats the cartridge throwing gag from Ghouls n’ Ghosts with the fan that helped him. He dodges it, only for the cartridge to hit him twice then go up his ass as he moans in pleasure “daddy cartridge”. Yes, this is real.
Chris does pay for another Cameo, this time from the movie’s lead Zach Galligan. After he finishes talking about Gremlins 2, we get a video of Zach giving his experience with the game. It was the best part of the video, and even Chris’ fans thought so. Most of the comments were about Zach’s testimony.
After three months of nothing, one last Irate Gamer video was posted. Micro Machines.
He contradicts himself about beating the NES game multiple times in the past (later saying he “never beat this level”), randomly references Armake21 for no reason, confuses a Micro Machines PS2 game with Duke Nukem Forever (I have no idea how), and re-enacts the ending of The Breakfast Club to close the video. Because he mentioned it once earlier.
Though the part that really baffled me is that he said he jumped ship from Nintendo to Sega (NES to Genesis). I found this odd because in all the years he’s done his show, he never showcased this. He was always talking about Nintendo, sometimes Atari, he didn’t talk about a Genesis game until the second Power Rangers episode in 2014.
And that’s where things end off.
Next time, the epilogue.
At the start of the year, he claimed there would be “no reviews until Summer”. Of course, he still refused to bring up Puppet Steve.
He also said he can’t do “old style reviews” as the YouTube algorithm has changed. No further explanation.
He would post an angry rant on Facebook about Tessa Thompson being in Men in Black: International. Crying that it should be the “Men” in Black. Even though it was established in the first movie that women serve too. The third movie even revealed the person running the MIB is a woman. Seems a little misogynistic to me.
It did not help when I received an e-mail about a comment posted on CommonSenseMedia’s video. A woman stating that her fiancé used to be married to Chris’ current wife, Nicole. One day out in public, Nicole spotted her, ran up to her and slapped her. This led to Chris grabbing her by the shoulders and punching her in the face. Her fiancé did something that scared him so bad, he keeps a bat by the front door.
In another comment, she revealed she filed a police report.
How have we not paid more attention to this? It sounds like a big deal. How did I just sweep it under the rug?
Of course, like any story like this, take it with a grain of salt. But I doubt someone would make up a story like that about Bores in 2019. Long after his star faded.
Continuing…
He went to ToyFair again, and his editing had gotten sloppy. At one point he runs into Todd McFarlane, and Todd says into the camera “listen to Chris” and in a panicked whisper tells him “Puppet Steve! Puppet Steve! They know me as Puppet Steve!” Why Chris left that in the video I do not know. It’s still up too! One of the Fortnite videos.
He also recorded a video that ended up showing his face. He deleted it but it lives on at DailyMotion.
Interestingly, he acknowledged his work on Puppet Steve on an Irate Gamer social media page. Why now and not in 2016 I don’t know.
In April, he would announce the “Irate Gamer” would return in the Summer.
He showed on Puppet Steve that he bought a Switch. I’m sure that lead to all sorts of content on both channels. … Right?
Summer comes and goes, and no Irate Gamer. Around August he starts asking his fans about podcasts.
Also in August, he would angrily accuse Grant Wilson of plagiarism. Ironic, I know.
Claiming that Grant looking at the “emotional” side of a ghost is stealing what he does. Chris’ ego regarding his paranormal work was starting to spiral out of control.
Why did Chris bring up podcasts? Because he started one. Joined by his friend Tim Warner (remember him from the TMNT cereal video?), we got GeekTime: The Next Generation.
What was the original GeekTime? It was a feature on the Howard Stern Show hosted by Ralph Cirella. Basically, talking about all things nerdy, likely with the sardonic bend that Stern is known for. It was cancelled when Stern’s chief operator, Marci Turk, removed all non-Stern programming. This is going by old Reddit comments.
Chris decided to start the podcast because he felt current “geeky” podcasts weren’t good anymore, calling out Kevin Smith in particular. He was upset that he kept talking about his life-saving weight loss and not focusing on geeky stuff.
It was not good.
Neither Chris nor Tim have charisma, a helpful skill for talking nonstop for 2-3 hours. They kept interrupting themselves with sound clips like a shock jock.
The first big mistake was posting them on Podbean before YouTube.
The second big mistake was the preview clip he posted to YouTube. The podcast starts with an annoying 90 second theme song that lists off various “geek” stereotypes. I think it was from the original GeekTime since it sounds cynical and sarcastic (fitting for Stern). Chris included the entire thing in the preview. That song alone turned off a lot of his audience.
The third mistake was the next preview they posted. Where Chris declares the 2019 Joker movie sucks. Except he admits in the video he was only going by the trailers. In fact, neither of them had seen the movie. It was heavily disliked.
He would post several clips on YouTube, but people didn’t really care for them. Only one that got substantial views was a segment where the two talk about the Nostalgia Critic’s terrible review of Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
The other subject matter was either uninteresting or littered with ill-informed takes. Tim asking about the point of the PlayStation 5, Chris upset that Terry Bogard got into Smash Bros instead of Peter Pepper from BurgerTime, and a lot of basic takes on Star Wars and Marvel.
Eventually he posted the full episodes on YouTube, but by then, nobody cared. In fact, the first five were removed, leaving only the sixth and final episode. He even closed the Podbean page.
Though some episodes were preserved on the Internet Archive.
Over on Puppet Steve, he talked about Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled. He was ill-equipped to talk about it, making mistakes like referring to Coco as Crash’s girlfriend. There was a gameplay segment at the end, however he did not record it. He stole it from YouTube creator MKFireAndIce. You can tell because in CTR:NF, your gamertag is always displayed.
His anger towards other ghost hunters would continue, ranting about Jason Hawes using the term “confused spirit”.
He would bring up watching HBO’s Watchmen, calling it so bad it made him want to ‘quit geekdom”. Calling it confusing and boring. But the actual reason likely lies deeper. Chris is the type that gets annoyed at media that “pushes their politics into everything”. Given the race-driven nature of HBO’x Watchmen, this likely set him off. Prior to the show’s premiere, he would mention on GeekTime that making the show’s villains white supremacists would “alienate white comic readers”. A line that says so much.
Around the end of 2019, the Federal Trade Commission found YouTube in severe violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). They were collecting data on young children without parental permission and ended up paying a hefty fine. In response, YouTube would implement some drastic changes to children’s content. No comments, no favoriting, and severely reduced income.
Somehow, Chris was not affected by this for Puppet Steve. No idea how he managed to circumvent it. But the channel still carries all the bells & whistles normal channels enjoy. Even though it’s clearly a kid’s channel.
The year would end with Chris screwing over one of his longtime fans. A man named Mike wanted to get the IG DVDs after losing his copies. Getting the first three seasons was easy but getting 4 & 5 took longer. Chris told him he needed to get more DVD-Rs, which Mike understood.
Eventually Season 4 & 5 arrived, but the marathon feature on 4 didn’t work. He contacted Chris who told him “I’ll fix it”.
Mike ordered History of Video Games Volumes 1 & 2 and they also took way too long. He tried contacting Chris but no answer. He put in a fraud notice to PayPal, and Chris quickly shipped them out. Including Pursuit of the Paranormal as a bonus (though he just threw the disc in a HoVG case).
Finding GeekTime, he asked Chris in the comments about Season 4. Chris tells Mike he hasn’t forgotten and is rebuilding the menu.
Then, close to Christmas, Mike ordered a Minecraft playset for his kid off eBay. A few hours later, he got an alert from PayPal that Chris Bores sent him a refund. Confused, Mike thought it was for Season 4. Instead, it was for the playset, and Mike realized the person he tried to buy from was Chris. Infuriated, he sent him a message that he crossed the line and was going to inform me. Chris told him he already gave away the playset and he forgot to remove the auction.
This did inform us that Chris has a side business selling toys on eBay. Specifically, the stuff you see on Puppet Steve.
2020:
At the start, something shocking happened.
Over on Puppet Steve, he posted a video looking at some Street Fighter figures and manage to get James Rolfe to voice Ken.
It’s not entirely out of nowhere. Chris was not-so-subtly hinting that things were resolved. Though we wouldn’t see the full realization of this until later.
Another year of ToyFair, getting in just in time before everything went to shit.
I don’t remember much about these. He did look at My Hero Academia toys because “the fans asked”, but a lot of the videos were potato quality and hard to hear.
He did the Top 15 Baby Yoda toys. The Mandolorian was blowing up around this time.
Some craziness over at Facebook. First was a clip from Ghost Adventures that showed a shadow that looks like an alien. It’s incredibly phony. You could almost see the guy in the background moving it. Yet Chris claims this is what his research was talking about. … We’ll get to that.
After that, when E3 was cancelled due to the pandemic, Chris gloated, claiming the show used to be great until GameSpot came in and “took over”. That they pushed out “the little guy” as they realized they could make money. I have no idea what he’s talking about. It makes less sense when you consider GameSpot has been around since 1995.
Chris started making himself something of a pariah in the paranormal community. In a Facebook group, he got salty at someone for not doing a ritual “his way” and ended up getting banned for being a total dick. He couldn’t seem to accept that there’s different methods to ghost cleansing. It is a pseudoscience after all.
On April 23rd, the channel’s 13th anniversary, Chris would announce the return of the Irate Gamer. Not Chris Neo, but the original version. There was some rejoicing.
Announcing that his big comeback would be about Ghostbusters on NES.
It would be a while before the video would go up. Until then, he started yet another channel. The Ghost Doctor, his third attempt at ghost stuff..
The first video was an introduction. The second video caused psychic damage.
Chris stopped caring about his image and spouted a lot of nonsense about a “Woke paranormal pandemic”. Bringing up ideas like lizard people, claiming certain celebrities are Satanists, that you don’t have to believe in Satan to be a Satanist, that aliens are really deformed ghosts (which is what he was referring to in the Ghost Adventures clip), how we no longer have picnics in cemeteries, and so much other craziness. The mask was off.
A few days before the comeback video, Chris held a stream providing an update. It’s about 10 minutes long and answers questions. I didn’t really watch any of these.
The comeback arrived.
Starting up right after the Duck Hunt video, IG explains his absence as “stuck playing Zelda II for four years”. Though he contradicts that with the “Five Years Later” title card from Avengers: Endgame.
But rather than half the population getting wiped out, it’s… angry reviewers. Showing missing posters for retired creators like Armake21, Jedite1, Spoony, UrinatingTree (who switched to sports commentary), PlayItBogart (who now streams as a drag queen) and for some reason Sly Dog Studios (he wasn’t even an angry reviewer). Then an article on how the AVGN went to hunt for them, and a missing poster for the Irate Gamer but it uses the edited picture from Encyclopedia Dramatica where his head is shopped onto an adult baby. An attempt at being self-aware?
It spoke to me that in 2020, Chris was still stuck in 2007.
The reason for picking Ghostbusters is that Ernie Hudson told him to do it. Using the site Cameo, he paid for a video of Hudson and plopped it in. For Hudson you could tell this was just standard procedure as he mentions some of his other non-Ghostbuster roles.
The review portion was a lot of the same stuff, but with more semen jokes. He says the game gave him trauma “20 years ago”, but that would have been 2000. Did he mean 30 years ago? Or did he first play Ghostbusters when the PS2 was about to come out?
Eventually he resorts to Game Genie, and yells at the audience as he mentions the AVGN, having wanted to avoid using Game Genie like him. For some reason he references Shit Pickle.
After that he did a 40-minute stream talking about the next episode.
Then came the trailer for the next episode. It was Dick Tracy on NES. With the AVGN.
All that hinting and winking lead to this. A crossover.
The internet went… “meh”. It wasn’t the big earth-shattering event he thought it would be. The reaction was either “It should have happened years ago” or “Irate Gamer is still around?”
But it also brought a lot of IG fans out of hiding to crow about how they’re friends and that means he’s immune to criticism.
He’d host another stream to talk about the crossover and how it happened. He claims that James is the one to suggest he go back to doing Irate Gamer. Personally, I have my doubts.
Either way, he says they’re friends now. I find that hard to believe since both the Ebegging Spoof and the Opening Up video are still on your channel. The latter especially since you made several baseless claims against James with no evidence.
On July 15th, the crossover arrived. Except it wasn’t really a crossover, it was more a glorified cameo. All that hype, including selling t-shirts, and it was nothing more than a few minutes.
The first six minutes has him talking about the Dick Tracy movie, the merch, a slam towards the Nostalgia Critic for no reason, until finally getting to the game. It’s about what you expect, it’s hard, it’s hard, there was a Genesis version that was so much better, until eventually he gets a call from “the chief” to get him a partner. Said partner being the Nerd. Then an awkward scene of cursing and screaming that ends with Shit Pickle.
Then they challenge each other to see who beats the game first. IG clearly uses Game Genie (but doesn’t say it) and still loses as the AVGN used the “beat a game button” from a previous video. IG declares revenge, but it’s never followed up on.
Afterwards, he would do one more stream. The last one he ever made.
I know one of these streams had some awful Smash Bros takes. He pushes Peter Pepper again, then gets angry that Joker from Persona 5 is in is and claims that Smash Bros should only have characters older than 20 years. By that logic, and using Ultimate as a base, only characters from 1998 or older would be allowed in Chris’ dream Smash roster.
Screenwave’s Justin Silverman would hold an AMA and reveal that the plans for the crossover were much different. It was going to be about American Gladiators, and they would have been in the same room. Ending with the two settling their differences and beating up the fans that kept the feud going. Like everything in 2020, it was cancelled due to COVID. Honestly, I’m glad we didn’t get that version. It sounds really cringy.
Justin did sound upset that the crossover was posted on Chris’ channel and not Cinemassacre.
With newfound popularity, Chris clearly had to take advantage of this. First with a compilation of Season 1 with some commentary.
The real follow-up was a video on Nintendo cereal.
Bringing back I Rate the 80’s, Chris decides the best course following a seemingly impossible crossover was to talk about a discontinued cereal. He really pushes “Breakfast is Ruined”. It was a meme years ago, trying to push it now seems desperate.
He actually takes a bite at one point. No disgusted reaction though. Either the cereal is still good after a few decades, or it wasn’t the Nintendo cereal.
The video ends with a painfully cringy reenactment of the old commercial.
Over on Ghost Doctor, he would post a video where he claims to have heard the ghost of George Floyd. Seriously. Even though he’s in Ohio and Floyd was in Minnesota when he was murdered.
The cereal was a misstep, but surely, he’ll recover with the next vi- It’s TMNT again…
A 20-minute video about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade game. He made sure to emphasize that it was 20 minutes all over his socials.
To make this special, he went to Cameo and paid voice actor Rob Paulsen to record a couple videos for him.
He gushes over the Arcade game and once again talks about the first NES game. He brings up what he calls the “Phantom Menace Effect”, the idea that people convince themselves something is good, and you weren’t allowed to badmouth it, like the Phantom Menace. I don’t think that’s how it happened…
After he finishes talking about the game again, he moves onto the sequel AKA the port of the Arcade game. Where originally Chris claimed “it sucks” from the start, here he acted like he was uber-hyped, and praised the addition of two new levels. Maybe he learned his complaint about them in 2007 was horribly ignorant?
There was a bright spot. He finally acknowledges that Turtles in Time was an Arcade game first. Only took 13 years. Though I wonder if he did the research, or just learned about it when he bought the Arcade1Up machine.
Following that was as video on… Urkel-O’s.
For context, during the Nintendo cereal video, he brings up the existence of Urkel-O’s, a cereal tie-in with the popular sitcom Family Matters. Chris erroneously refers to him as the “I didn’t do it” kid, when his catchphrase was “Did I do that?”
Because several people thought it was a joke, Chris decided to make a video showing it was real. He seemed surprised that they thought it was a joke, like he doesn’t understand that his years of editing in fake moments would somehow backfire.
He replays the joke from the prior cereal video but poorly dubs himself with the correct catchphrase.
He also said the comments wanted him to do a “Family Matters rant”. I don’t think Chris understands what his own channel was at that point.
Another cereal video so soon after the first ended up hurting his channel. Despite the high of the crossover, the views plummeted after that.
He would follow with a video that’s obvious to anyone. Going over how console ports of Arcade
games are often inferior. It was almost 17 minutes long.
The video was about what you’d expect. Poor research (admitting he had no idea Contra was originally an Arcade game), terrible takes, no understanding of console limitations at the time, and of course it was boring.
Ever since Arcade1Up started sending him cabinets for Puppet Steve, Chris has gone deep into Arcade gaming. He set up his basement to look like an old Arcade, and basically got rid of all his current consoles. Even though they’re just as capable of playing the same emulated Arcade titles as these replicas. Much cheaper too.
I suspect he got rid of his current consoles because around this time, Steve was announced for Super Smash Bros Ultimate. I feared that Chris was going to be insufferable on the Puppet Steve channel. Make 100 videos all about Smash. But… he never did. He never even brought it up. I know he had a Switch; he made a Puppet Steve video about it. It’s possible he sold it to pay for more of those cabinets.
He follows up the console port video with RoboCop. For the third time. Sort of…
Chris decided to talk about various RoboCop games, and that included recycling clips from his 2011 RoboCop reviews. I don’t just mean the game footage and audio; he recycles sketch footage too. Switching between his rooms, his clothes, his camera quality, and he doesn’t address this at all. He mentions in the description it has a “little bit of old” but the video ignores it.
Interestingly, one part he recycles from the original is done with new footage. Likely due to Eric Allen being the one to say line. Makes me wonder what happened.
Oh, and he paid for a Peter Weller video on Cameo.
Afterwards a video on Punisher games. This was the first video to have help from fans. Chris asked on Facebook to get assistance on videos. Hopefully they were paid.
This one was boring but had lines that showcased they were written by someone else. Though the constant mispronunciations (LGN, ESREB) raised some eyebrows.
Remember Pursuit of the Paranormal? The big pilot episode that he screened in a small Ohio theater? The whole thing is on YouTube now. Only it’s under the Ghost Doctor banner. He posted it on the main IG channel as well.
He would post two Halloween reviews. The first was on Ghouls n’ Ghosts, the sequel to Ghosts n’ Goblins. It was mostly complaining about how hard it was, how the graphics are better (because it was on Genesis), and incredibly awful jokes. There was also a bit where Chris throws the cartridge, and it hits the fan that helped produce the episode. I’m bringing this up for later.
The second would cover The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror for Game Boy Color. It was an utterly boring video that Chris attempts to spice up with Simposns clips, but to no avail.
Over on Facebook, following the 2020 election, Chris talks about the “lying media” and uses it to bring up the “backroom meetings” he had with YouTube and the gaming industry back in 2011-2012. But he’s too scared to reveal it because he thinks he’ll get killed like the guy that outed Tom Hanks as a pedo (which is based on outdated info).
Just tell us Chris. What horrible secrets did you hear? It’s been 10 years; I doubt it matters now.
He posted a video about some NES book. It’s no longer on the channel.
Then for the final video of the year, he would talk about a Dragon’s Lair replica Arcade cabinet. By the way, this was the new Irate Gamer Neo. Not talking about new games, but overly expensive emulators.
2021:
The year started off with a video on the NES launch titles. What would be an interesting video under a better creator was a boring mess with the butchering of Japanese names and incorrect information (he calls Super Mario Bros a launch title when we don’t know when the game came out in North America).
He followed with a Flintstones review, talking about the two NES games. It was mostly an excuse for him to talk about old Hanna-Barbara cartoons.
Then Chris tried to launch another new series over on the Ghost Doctor. He was so confident in this one, he cross-posted it to the Irate Gamer channel. “Pop Culture Paranormal”, a series where he explores media with paranormal aspects. First episode is about The Ring. He says he had to watch it a second time to understand it (how?) and believes the events of the movie can happen in real life. He barely gets into the Japanese mythology of it though, something I feel is important considering the source material is a Japanese book.
This was the only episode.
Then some coffee table books about the NES. He says a friend made them, while also taking the time to toss some bizarre criticism at Pat Contri’s book.
Then a video he was proud of; one he claims calls back to 2008. Godzilla vs Kong. This was the highest viewed video of 2021 as it came out close to the release of the movie.
There’s no actual Godzilla vs Kong game, so he just looked at a bunch of Godzilla games and a couple King Kong ones (there’s not many).
He used a confusing scoring system, grading them for things like “second-hand value”.
Interestingly, he looks at some Japan-only Godzilla games. He doesn’t say much, but they’re there.
He revealed that he has an insane bias against strategy games, calling them a “waste of time” and how you’re always waiting. How a turn takes 10 minutes. That tells me that he didn’t know strategy games have an “End Turn” option and simply sat there picking his nose until the game kicked over to the enemy.
But the ending is likely what Chris meant by “like 2008”. He’s attacked by the Mecha Irate Gamer, a super-jank Mechagodzilla recolor with his face. At least the animator got his weird jaw movement.
More recycled content as Chris once again talks about discontinued Kool-Aid flavors. It was incredibly dull, full of recycled footage from this 2009 Kool-Aid Man review, and a blatantly fake interview with the Kool-Aid Man’s stuntman Tom Anthony. He never published the full interview so I’m calling fake until he shows otherwise.
Remember the Chris Neo videos about Mario and Game Genie? He compiled them all into one 25-minute video, with a dash of new footage.
Then the second (and last) episode of the revamped Irate Gamer Neo, talking about another Arcade cabinet. This one lets you download ROMs on it. He also brings up the yet unreleased game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Saying he’ll put the game on the cabinet.
Because 2021 was about “Irate Gamer nostalgia”, he brought back the summer movie list. Claiming the last one was made 11 years prior (he’s wrong, he made one in 2015). Two of the movies ended up not coming out in 2021 (Top Gun Maverick and Mission Impossible 7), and for some reason he mentioned superhero movies that he didn’t put on the list. I guess so people in the comments didn’t ask where they were?
After that was a video about a very unexpected game. Stinger. The English version of the second TwinBee game. Weird enough, this feels like something he DID play as a kid. But the info was still off, and he called it a scandal because a lot of the TwinBee games didn’t come out here. As well as a cartoon, but it was an OVA and clearly not made for TV.
Instead of something new, Chris would post compilations of the first three seasons. Even though he already posted a Season 1 compilation. I have no idea if anything is different between the two.
After those was a video on Gremlins. What should have been a Christmas episode was posted in May.
He covers just about every Gremlins game, including the ones on Commodore 64. Though most of the video was about Gremlins 2.
There’s a horrid bit where he repeats the cartridge throwing gag from Ghouls n’ Ghosts with the fan that helped him. He dodges it, only for the cartridge to hit him twice then go up his ass as he moans in pleasure “daddy cartridge”. Yes, this is real.
Chris does pay for another Cameo, this time from the movie’s lead Zach Galligan. After he finishes talking about Gremlins 2, we get a video of Zach giving his experience with the game. It was the best part of the video, and even Chris’ fans thought so. Most of the comments were about Zach’s testimony.
After three months of nothing, one last Irate Gamer video was posted. Micro Machines.
He contradicts himself about beating the NES game multiple times in the past (later saying he “never beat this level”), randomly references Armake21 for no reason, confuses a Micro Machines PS2 game with Duke Nukem Forever (I have no idea how), and re-enacts the ending of The Breakfast Club to close the video. Because he mentioned it once earlier.
Though the part that really baffled me is that he said he jumped ship from Nintendo to Sega (NES to Genesis). I found this odd because in all the years he’s done his show, he never showcased this. He was always talking about Nintendo, sometimes Atari, he didn’t talk about a Genesis game until the second Power Rangers episode in 2014.
And that’s where things end off.
Next time, the epilogue.
I still stand by what I said a year ago where in Chris' mind he was convinced with the Dick Tracy video he was back on top and thought he could make whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, a mistake he made when he was at his peak.
ReplyDelete"he calls Super Mario Bros a launch title when we don’t know when the game came out in North America"
ReplyDeleteThe game came out on October 18, 1985 Dan. Just letting you know.