Moving on from the nightmare that is Action 52 the Angry Video Game Nerd takes a bit of a twist, in this episode covering “game glitches” in all their various forms.
We start off with an intentionally glitched version of the opening. Once that crashes (literally) we get to the Nerd just trying to enjoy some NES games. This doesn’t go well for him as the games seem to be bugging out, quite fantastically. He tries the old “blowing into the games” trick, which never did any good, tries changing games, and finally has to give in to the fact he as a “Game Glitch Gremlin” hounding him.
This is shown in the episode as a literal gremlin.. one that has an Irish accent, for some reason. Played by Kevin Finn, the same person who was the Ninja in the Ninja Gaiden review, he hounds the Nerd and his attempts to play games in this episode. From making Metal Gear an absolute mess to ironing out the face of Mike Tyson, the Gremlin is beyond obnoxious here.
James takes a moment to explain how to actually clean a game cartridge, with generally good advice. For what it’s wort, the a cotton swab and glass cleaner or the best grade alcohol you can find are what you want to use.
Following the cleaning tip, James goes over a few programming bugs in some games. He touches on a somewhat famous glitch in Mega Man 2 before telling a story from when he was sick during college playing Mega Man 5. Yes, he tells the story like it happened when he was a child, but nope — a later video with Mike would stress it was actually during College, so around 2000 or so!
He even covers Cheetahmen 2 one more time, addressing a random bug which may load the “hidden” levels of the game that are normally inaccessible, before he moves on to more strange things about Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros 1, 2 and 3, Mario World, and Mountain King’s famous “Glitch Heaven” on the Atari 2600. He even touches on The Legened of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii, talking about a bug he encountered but sadly couldn’t replicate.
We finally reach Rocky, on PS2. This game was released on several platforms, and is notoriously buggy. Here the Glitch Gremlin comes in one more time bringing all his skill to the game. Audio looping issues, characters melting in the floor, and more. James tries to clean the disc, but given these problems are part of the programming and not due to disc damage, well, that won’t change anything.
Finally, we reach the best part of the episode. After all the crazy bugs we’ve seen, the loading errors, crazy data exploits, and zombie Rocky characters we reach the one, the only.. The Clubber-Fuck!
It has to be seen to be believed, but in this case the game wound up rendering the character model for Clubber Lang (Yep, Mr. T himself) as a contorted mess of human anatomy. It goes down in Nerd history as probably the single funniest moment ever – I can’t recall a time before, or since then, where I’ve had as much of a deep laugh as I did this. It made the whole episode worth it.
The episode ends with James destroying the Rocky game disc (obviously a CR-r was used for the destroyed disc) freeing the Glitch Gremlin who promptly glitches up the Nerd’s world. It’s a pretty funny ending, not anywhere near as hilarious as the Clubber-Fuck but a nice happy way to close out the episode.
Final Rating: 4.0/5
This is an interesting one, as it deals with a more esoteric topic with gaming — software and hardware issues to be precise. When games, especially on cartridge based systems, glitch up, the results can be pretty wild, thanks to the more basic nature of the technology. The episode acts as a nice showcase of some of these situations, and did teach me a few trick in some classic games I enjoy.
While some of the jokes were great — especially the Clubber-Fuck — the episode is lacking a bit in the rest of the Nerd feel and style. It’s not bad, just different, and that knocks it back just a bit overall.
Still, it’s a pretty nice one on a whole, especially for the chance to see some interesting bugs in well known games.
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