Emer Prevost… a static character?

Wow it seems nobody gives a shit about Asalieri anymore! Well I can’t blame people, he’s done terrible things but it doesn’t change the fact that the only reason he does anything is for the attention. Should we continue to discuss his poor behaviour? definitely. Should we discuss him just for the heck of it? No, not really. The good news is people are wising up to Eric’s constant need to shout bullshit so we’re getting less and less people going on “crusades” based on Eric’s work. I heard that Eric had recently made up some more bullshit on channel awesome a while back (the new name for TGWTG) but nothing seems to have come of that so its farcry from when he said the website would die from lack of traffic or when Eric claimed crucifixion was a thing. To me, the sign that no one wants me to write about Asalieri is a good indicator that Eric simply doesn’t have any sway anymore. People watch him for his content… but they aren’t believing it. Which is honestly the best thing that could happen. I don’t write these posts to ruin these people and make people ignore them. I write them to stop their pointless hate crusades and so their content becomes primarily for entertainment and less about harassment and lets be honest here… that’s what their content is supposed to be about anyway.

But enough about Asalieri’s long-running descent into obscurity, he’s still going to claim I’m going after him despite the readerbase here not caring, let’s talk about Emer Prevost! When we last saw Emer Prevost we saw:

1. He makes frequent pointless observations that have nothing to do with the object of analysis
2. He’s easily impressed by things that aren’t really impressive. Like a random cameo of catwoman even though that cameo implies that the catwoman he liked had died.
3. He skips almost 90% of the content he’s supposed to review
4. His work is extremely lazy.
5. Emer has extreme difficulty explaining or even justifying his decisions, moral or otherwise.
6. Emer, just like Asalieri, isn’t doing so hot in the views department.
7. Emer generally gives contrarian opinions for the heck of it. Given that he can’t justify them anyway it makes sense.

Now those who paid attention to TIR system I use to rate people on this blog. Emer Prevost got an F+ on his talent score which means a grade around 40-49 or so. The Talent Score refers to an individual’s ability to make entertaining and thoughtful content. Was this an okay rating? Well let’s take a look at some his game reviews as quite frankly he’s not very good at reviewing movies so let’s see if he’s just as lazy in video games.

Special Thanks to Strump for directing my attention to his video game reviews.

Alight since these reviews are somewhat short I’ll probably do about 3 of them. Maybe more but definitely not less than 3. As per usual there will be a timestamped description of what happens during that period of time (may include quotes) followed by commentary.

0:00 to 0:12 Theme song from Hellsing (the anime) plays.

Yeah… I’d like to remind everyone that Emer Prevost stated that he’s so scared of copy-right protection that he refused to show any copyrighted material in his reviews. Even though he still has a poster of the movie in his thumbnail which could get him DMCA’d…
I would call this hypocrisy but I could assume this is before he got DMCA’d so maybe he just wasn’t as scared of copyright law as he is now. But does this mean he is less lazy?

0:13 “In 1990, Jackie Chan was a veritable unknown in the united states. In fact, the only things most people would know him for in that time would be his small roles in the cannonball run movies.”

Woah. Actual research? Holy crap. I mean it actually looks and feels like he did a google search and took the time to actually understand the information that popped up. That’s more effort than I’ve seen for a long while. I’m not joking.

0:25 Emer notes that Jackie Chan would generally be unknown in the U.S unless you watched a lot of Hong Kong action films AND correctly displays a poster of Police Story (a 1985 film). He notes that Jackie Chan’s lack of popularity in the U.S didn’t stop Hudson from releasing his game in North America.

I’ve got nothing bad to say about Emer’s research and analysis at this point in time. If he keeps this up, I might actually have to conclude that he can do good work if he fucking tried to. In other words, if Emer keeps this up, I might actually have to polish his ass verbally.

0:45 Emer says that his review series is titled “buried treasure” probably ruining any ambiguity as to whether or not he hates the game. The game boots up and Emer begins playing the game. Emer notes that the character representing Jackie Chan doesn’t look like Jackie Chan but it shouldn’t matter since as a martial artist, the only important thing is that Jackie should kick butt. AND then…

1:00 “In fact the person in this game is a such an asskicking machine that the game should actually be called ‘shaving Chuck Norris action kung fu’ *record scratch* What the fuck is wrong with me, my last video had a sulu is gay joke and now I’ve degenerated down to a shitty Chuck Norris joke? Good god, I didn’t even like those stupid fuckin jokes when they were supposedly funny and popular. Damn even I’m fucking disappointed in myself on this one. Let’s try and get back on track here” – Emer Prevost, I’m not making this up. He really said this.

Okay… while I’m glad that Emer has made this mistake. At least I don’t have to polish his ass with praise. But still… what the hell? I mean you had to have edited in the record scratch and even he admits the joke sucked… so why keep it in? I mean I wouldn’t keep something that I knew sucked in any of these articles I write? Emer Prevost knew the joke would suck, knew that he hated the joke, AND did it anyway?

This is a very special kind of lazy.

1:33 “anyway, this whole game can be summed up like so. Jackie here, walks around, kills everything that moves and advances to the next stage”

Uh yeah no. There’s bonus levels and stages where you have to advance while lava rises.

1:40 Emer adds that despite the game being simple, the game is still fun.

Uh Emer…? Are you going to explain why? Any talk about the enemy design? Any talk about level layout? What about bosses? Anything?

1:55 Emer lists the moves you can do “You have a kick, a megaman-like charge punch, and a series of special moves such as rolls and roundhouse kicks. You collect these special moves by kicking frogs. Yeah you heard me; all these special moves come from the bodies of murdered frogs”

Okay first off. Megaman-like charge punch? Megaman doesn’t do charge punches and also Emer forgot to mention that said charged punches are limited and can only be done 5 times barring refills (in fact in the footage he shows, the energy bar depletes by one unit when he does the punch… so how he missed this I don’t know unless of course it was lazyiness). The next thing I would like to add is that the frogs don’t die, you can see clearly in the footage that the frogs drop the powerups when hit… and then jump off screen. I don’t get how you could come to the conclusion that frogs are so fragile they die when kicked and combine that with the on-screen visual feedback that includes frogs not dying when kicked,,. unless of course you’re being completely lazy.

2:16 Emer then lists off the enemies (but not exhaustively). He says most of them die in one hit despite the fact that most of the humanoid enemies don’t as even his footage shows that and I can as someone who’s played the game can tell you that most enemies don’t. Emer then fills his contrarian quota by saying that the game is easy (yeah I dare you to name a hudson soft game that’s easy) and this is in spite of the fact that the footage shows him getting his ass kicked to near death by flame birds (that’s level two IIRC). He adds that its cool that Jackie Chan is a badass who kills flaming birds in one hit… also fulfilling the quota for pointless analysis that doesn’t cover the actual target of analysis.

So I’m gonna make commentary short for this part…. is Emer a freaking static character. Like its been years… and he’s still making the same mistakes. I know habits die hard and all that but how lazy do you have to be not make one improvement from movie reviews to game reviews?

3:19 Emer says that the game has scrolling stages and that they’re hard. He says that if you take any time to think, you’ll be killed. His character gets killed and he says that the death animation looks cute. Emer then says that only in a nintendo game can a death look cute.

If the scrolling stages are hard emer… then why remark that the game is easy or can be summed as “Jackie here, walks around, kills everything that moves and advances to the next stage”. Its this complete lack of consistency that is a recurring problem in Emer Prevost’s work. One moment he’s saying something’s terrible, the next he’s saying that very same thing is awesome. I don’t get it? Why the fuck can’t Emer make up his own mind? He’s got the time to edit in stupid record scratch sound effects. Why not bother to proofread?

3:30 Emer remarks “No wonder people think video game’s desensitize people, when death is this fucking adorable”

Emer can use google, at least he did for the first minute of this video… but he failed to use google to look up what desensitization means.

“to cause (someone or something) to react less to or be less affected by something : to cause (someone or something) to be less sensitive”- http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/desensitize

To desensitize someone, it means to make them feel nothing; not feel more or feel something else. Game’s desensitizing you to things such as death means that a game would frequently display death to the point that the player no longer treats such events with urgency or emotional response. For example, in call of duty one would kill plenty of terrorists and perhaps for the first few times you might feel really happy (or possibly depressed if you’re that empathetic) because you killed an enemy but eventually you’d get bored and start feeling nothing. That is desensitization. Its actually resensitization when one begins to associate an emotion with a previously emotionally neutral event. So in this case Emer isn’t facing desensitization but actually resensitization as he’s finding death funny and cute. My guess is Emer spent one too many calories on the first part of the video and therefore opted to use as few as possible for the rest of the video.

3:40 Emer correctly notes that you have only one life (as in you die once and its game over) in the game. Emer says that this doesn’t matter since you’re given an “assload” of continues and says that most of the enemies are easy to beat so it doesn’t matter.

Wow. First off, if you use a continue, you go back to the first area of the level. It’s a continue not an extra life. Second, the gameplay footage frequently shows Emer with nearly no life so I highly doubt the game is easy (and as I’ve noted, I don’t find the game easy at all). Third, the health refill pick up only healths 2 HP and are sparsely distributed. So you’re pretty much going to die unless you perfect play most of the level.

4:07 Emer then talks about the bosses, showing a buddist statue as one of the bosses. Emer says that bosses are really creative.

Well I can’t argue with Emer here. The bosses are real creative. Unfortunately it is at this point that I realized that Emer has not beaten the second level of the game as all footage from the game shows that he’s only gotten to the second level. The second level is the lava and ice level (it begins in lava and then ice near the end). In fact the second boss or any of the other bosses are nowhere to be found. So literally I don’t think he’s beaten a game that is only 1 hour long.

4:26 Emer talks about the bell powerup which takes you to the bonus levels. “hitting these will take Jackie and his master to heaven it seems” says Emer, not noting that there’s other bonus levels aside from the cloud hopping one thats only on stage one. He describes the cloud hopping bonus round and states the points gained from the bonus level is used to get powerups like health or extra continues. Emer concludes that the game is good and he highly recommends pirating it by downloading the rom of the game.

Wow this review sucked. No indepth explanation of the level design, bosses or anything. It also frequently shows that he didn’t play past the second level of the game. All in all this review was lazy.

Oh he reviewed another game I’ve played. This will be funny… in a tragic sort of sense.

0:28 “We now look at a complete anomaly in the video game world *shows picture of fist of the north star*”

What? I thought…. I thought we were reviewing cool spot?

0:29 “We all know that anything was licensed has a real good chance of sucking donkey balls *pictures of licensed games flash by*”

Okay so we’re less than a minute in and I’m confused as to what he’s even reviewing in a review titled cool spot. Great. Oh and he flashes the swamp thing game twice… ran out of pictures there Emer?

0:49 “you would think that a game based on a product’s mascot would truly suck right? Well this is not the case with Cool spot on the SNES. This mild-mannered platformer brings alot to the table.”

Brings what to the table? Jumping? Shooting? Finding things hidden in the level? Oh vey this is going to be one of those reviews where you just say shit without knowing what they mean isn’t it?

1:02 “Just who or what was this coolspot guy anyway? Well back in the early 90s, 7up decided that they needed some sort of a mascot”.

*Googles actual date of Coolspot’s creation* Finds 1987 as the date…. come on Emer… you did research in the last review I looked at! What the hell happened here?

1:16 “Instead of coming up with a cutesy ass character from out of nowhere, they decided to bring the little red spot on their cans and sodas to life and make it the coolest damn thing on the planet”

Coolspot, ‘coolest damn thing’ on the planet? Had to fulfil that contrarian quota didn’t you Emer?

1:29 “Seriously just fucking look at him”

Yeah he’s a red circular bingo chip with a face and no nose. I don’t know about what the readers think but the coolest damn thing on the planet is a hard sell to make. I mean we’ve got nukes, Main battle tanks, Nature, Flowers, Vaccines, Humans, Humans who do great things, Video games and life itself and I’m not even close to naming the coolest things ever on the planet. But just to be sure:

1:32 “Shit this guy [cool spot] makes Fonzie look like a fucking nerd”

Can we get with the review already? You’re not doing a very good job convincing me that a red bingo chip is cool; stop trying.

1:36 “*screen goes black* Well a happy days reference, that’s a first for me”

Is this a anti-humor? Or is this no humor? I can’t tell the difference because Emer can’t make a joke that actually works.

1:46 Emer goes on to talk about and waste the viewers time by explaining that a video game was made and that 7up marketed their mascot.

Oh and did mention that Emer also says “was-was” for some reason. It’s really awkward it sounds like it was an editing error, like he tried to merge two audio clips and it just ended up making a vomited mess.

1:59 “this game kicks ass in ways I never thought imaginable”

Well there’s your problem Emer, you can’t imagine to begin with.

2:10 Emer explains the basic premise of the game. Collect items and collect enough and you can go to the end of the level and open the cage. Fight enemies who attempt to kill you. Emer lists the enemies but not exhaustively and instead concludes that there’s a “ton of other things”.

2:24 “The enemies are perfectly balanced, so they have to actually work to actually kill and you have to actually do a little bit of work to actually kill them”

Wow this review actually sucks because the word actually is used so many times its actually pathetic. I think this may actually qualify as actually laziness because actually I can’t think of how you could actually make a sentence that both reads like it actually had no work in it and actually has no actually business containing so many actually words.

2:50 Emer states there are floor traps such as barbwire, traps and water. He notes that water instantly kills you. He brings attention to the health bar that is literally a face of Cool spot that melts as you take damage. Emer says the death animation that consists of coolspot falling backwards and then getting back up is cool and a “that I just need to show”.

So Emer… care to explain to me how this death animation is cool? Because its not really cool, if anything its pretty standard. I mean its like a earth worm jim’s death animation. Or any other game where a death animation plays as the background goes dark. What the hell makes it cool anyway?

3:18 Emer says “damn this is awesome” while still looking at the death sound effect.

Gee, you could be reviewing the level design, the actual roles of the enemy or providing critique on game mechanics… instead you’re jerking off to the death animation.

3:23 Emer says that the game’s controls are “tight and flawless” while showing his character failing to grab onto a rope and falling flat on his face.

No I have no comments to make here. The sheer dissonance between his words and the footage should be enough.

3:35 Emer decides to be so contrarian that he contradicts himself by saying that the jumping is wonky.

Wow so the controls are “tight and flawless”, except the they’re not. Wow consistency.

3:38 “Spot is able to rocket… very high distances… when you jump and… if you don’t know this… over time… it is… it is-it is gonna cost you and it is gonna piss you off-but-but-but once you actually have his jumping down… then it won’t post a huge problem for you.”

Do you smell that masterful stroke of pure lazyiness? Couldn’t have a second take there could you emer?

4:06 Emer says there is a major problem in the level design in that the “draw distance is really fucking short”.

“Draw distance is a computer graphics term, defined as the maximum distance of objects in a three dimensional scene that are drawn by the rendering engine”

Now to be fair this definition isn’t in dictionaries. The real issue however is that the term to be used is scaling as the camera is too zoomed in to show important details in advance where as character models are too big. Of course Emer is too lazy to express his problem properly. But let’s enjoy his attempt to explain it.

4:10 “Let’s just take this level right here for instance. You have no enemies to worry about so… so you don’t have to worry about dying from taking damage, but you have a lot of precision jumping to do, in fact that’s all this level is, its just… its just percision jumping. Now since Spot jumps so high and the draw distance is so short, it is a bit of a challenge to figure out where the hell you’re supposed to land and death will happen… and it-and it will happen often the first few times you play this level. So those of you who are quick to anger may want to find a cheat code to get past this level.”

Pure genius writing and editing skills.

4:57 Emer notes that this game has won awards for best music and asks the viewer to listen in.

5:14 Emer then proceeds to say that Tommy Tallarico makes great music and that everything he touches is good.

No complaints here. Tommy Tallarico was the guy who was involved in the Terminator on Sega CD music. If you haven’t heard it you really should.

5:26 Emer points that its hypocritical to have such a well remembered game on a review series called “buried treasure” and says he’s going to redefine the series to mean any game that just isn’t well remembered.

Wow that’s a terrible excuse. You’re talking about a game that won several awards and that most people probably would have played on the ground that it won awards and was a well marketed title. But then again I’m not surprised.

5:26-end of review: Emer than goes to talk about Cool spot goes to hollywood by just showing the cover of the game and saying that he didn’t really like it. Emer Also says that Cool spot is available on many systems so finding it shouldn’t be too hard to find a copy (what telling us to download the roms isn’t viable this time? CAN we have some consistency?). Emer then calls everyone “kirbies” and tells them to play the game. He ends the review with a kirby dream course animation of dancing kirbies with the words “try this game out!” in the background.

Wow random and lazy. Next review please.

OH this is gonna be rich. One of the worst reviewers I’ve ever seen playing the worst NES game that was mever released. Both narrow superlative but extremely amusing none the less.

0:20 This review is a quickie and the title of the review series is godawful games. Okay glad to see there will be no surprises of opinion here

0:26 “Oh boy I have found the worst game ever made”

Okay 2 problems already. Number one this game is unreleased, that means it wasn’t really made, your playing a beta. It exists, but in terms of actual legal definition of the term “made” as in legal property, it doesn’t exist. In fact “worst game ever made” would imply that the game actually went commercial… this is clearly not the case with cheetahmen 2

Number 2 if your definition of worst game ever made is “it exists” then clearly you haven’t been browsing flash games. Because seriously, there’s plenty of shovelware out there, Cheetahmen 2 is a high profile piece of garbage, but its no where near E.T or whipped up in a basement with no coding skills flash game levels.

0.30 “I know that others have reviewed it, but I really need to speak on this”

I can’t wait to see what he has to say.

0:36 “tonight I’m looking at Cheetahmen 2”

Oh so that’s what the title of the youtube video was about. I thought you were just playing star wars battle front 2 or something. Glad to see you didn’t edit in the present and you still didn’t edit back then. BTW guys this article you’re reading is about Emer Prevost. You notice how redundant this is, because that’s how I feel when I get reminded what review I’m watching AFTER reading the title of the video and its only been 5 seconds because the intro music doesn’t really count as material!

0:46 “They made a sequel out of one those shitty games from action 52. That alone should have been a red flag. But I pressed on”

GET ON WITH IT.  What the fuck is the point of these opening statements. What was the alternative? NOT doing the review? Not playing the game and then doing the review anyway? Of course you played the fucking game. This video wouldn’t be here unless you played it! Am I supposed to feel sorry that you metaphorically put a fork in the electrical socket and get zapped? I thought this was a quickie? Because it feels like filler.

0:52 “Because this is a quickie, I’m gonna make this as short and sweet as I possibly can”

I could go two ways with this. I could note that quickie is a term for quick sex and go that route. Or I could recall that I just got mad earlier due to POINTLESS REDUNDANT STUPIDITY THAT TREATS VIEWERS LIKE GOLDFISH. Gosh I didn’t this was a quickie review emer. There was a like a 30 second musical intro with the huge words quickie in it. Did you proofread this shit?

0:56 “Absolutely everything about this fucking game is bad. The graphics are so bad they made my eyes hurt. I have seen better graphics on the apple 2”

Wow, so reviewer on games… talks about graphics first… Graphics is the least of the problems that cheetahmen 2 has. Uh… yeah…. I wasn’t expecting to have to go on a rant about why you should talk about graphics last… especially considering we are in an age where retro games do extremely well to the point that games like minecraft have shit graphics and do extremely well. Also I would like to note that cheetahmen 2’s graphics isn’t really bad enough to cause eye strain, its pretty standard for NES so hey gotta get that contrarian in there.

1:08 “oh god and the sound too… the sound is almost like… the sound I would compare to having your eyes raped. I literally could make better music with a flute up my ass”

Oh wait I stopped too early. Here comes the full contrarian bullshit. Literally the music was the best part of cheetahmen series. There’s remixes upon remixes of the iconic song. Its the only good thing to come out of the game. I’m not kidding either. Here’s a some remixes.

The simple fact of the matter is the song is well liked by the music community, and there’s plenty of remixes of the game especially in Japan. But hey I guess Emer must have a damn good ass to make a song better than this masterpiece.

1:24 “don’t even get me started on the almost non-existant sound effects”

What? There’s plenty of sound effects. There’s the twang for shooting and jumping. A “Huah” when you get hit and hit others. What? That’s standard. The NES can’t handle too many sounds at once you know.

1:30-1:45 Emer finally talks about the controls and about how they suck because you can’t crouch even though that’s not a fault of the controls but a fault of game design. Bad controls means a bad control layout or unresponsive buttons and delayed actions. Bad game design means not having controls for critical actions or there not being enough actions to give proper gameplay for the player. Not being able to crouch to shoot tiny enemies and jump and accurately shoot flying enemies would count as bad game design not bad controls. Though he doesn’t go into any extreme detail about the game design or literally anything else that would actually explain why the game sucks, I’m not surprised. What surprises me however is:

1:46 “Now I sincerely mean it, I wanna hunt down the cocksuckers who made this fucking atrocity and torture them… severely.”

No I don’t think I need to say anything about this blatant sociopathy. I mean I think wanting to kill people who’s only crime was making a game that wasn’t released and couldn’t be played unless you specifically went out of your way to play it by breaking the law (emer has already established he uses emulators and is okay with piracy) speaks for itself.

2:12 Emer says the game makes him physically ill, then asks Muttly from wacky races to finish the review. A picture of Muttly and Dick Dastardly show up on screen followed by Muttly’s iconic laugh.

I didn’t know you could do so many things wrong in 2 minutes. OH and there’s no gameplay footage beyond the first level. So how he can physically be sick from a game that he clearly didn’t even force himself though is beyond me.

Well that was all I’m gonna say about Emer Prevost’s reviews for a long while. He clearly hasn’t changed in several years so its clear that lazyiness is endemic to Emer Prevost. Therefore I have to revise the score for talent

Talent = F-

The rationale for this is that Emer Prevost could easily get a D or even a F+ if he tried but its clear that he enjoys not trying. I can’t give a higher grade just because he might not be a complete fuck up. He has to earn it first and considering he can’t even review cheetahmen 2 properly… prospects are slim.