Castle Magus

"We discuss very rare video games appearing on the Netflix show, King of Collectibles."

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Yeah, shows like this are very skeevy. I don't even much like watching Pawn Stars[1] (on the rare occasions when I go into the kitchen and that's what happens to be on the TV that my sister is watching). It's vaguely interesting when they give the history on a thing being sold, but the actual buying/selling of the things always leaves me feeling like somebody just got ripped off (though, granted, it sometimes seems like it's the pawn shop guys who got ripped off). But at least on Pawn Stars, the people selling the stuff are actually coming into the pawn shop to sell the stuff. It's not like the Pawn Stars guys are going to the homes of people and just trying to convince them to sell shit cold, kind of out of the blue.

As such, this King of ConsignmentCollectibles show (which I have not seen and have zero interest in ever seeing) sounds like it makes Pawn Stars look like Antiques Roadshow by comparison.

[1] - Yeah, I momentarily forgot that Pat Contri was actually on Pawn Stars.

"YouTuber Guru Larry, AKA Larry Bundy Jr, has said some crazy things about Pat online over the past decade. We discuss some of the most outlandish claims that Larry has made about Pat, and Pat issues a special challenge..."

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Wow. Just wow.

...

...

Okay, so... the only thing I knew about Guru Larry before this was that he used to be on ScrewAttack, where I watched a few of his videos, and that he was (and technically still is [I almost put a link there, but then decided against it]) on Channel Awesome, where I did not watch any of his videos. And that was it. That was the grand sum and total of my exposure to and knowledge of Guru Larry. This is the first I've heard of any sort of beef between Guru Larry and Pat the NES Punk. And, of course, I had no idea the guy apparently was such a scumbag (assuming, as always, that Pat and Ian are on the level here, which I still as of yet have no reason to doubt).

That said, that bit ("bit" both in the sense of a small portion and in the sense of a performance piece, e.g. "he was doing a bit") at the end of the video where Pat literally pulled out $5,000 USD and challenged Larry Bundy Jr. to come to SoCal Gaming Expo and present incontrovertible evidence of the five claims against Pat that Pat enumerated in this video for which Pat would pay him $1,000 per claim if he (Larry) was successful at proving them true was just... it felt slimy to me. Yeah, I know, Pat was just, as I said, doing "a bit," but still.

Basically, my interest in watching these "Petty Pat" things (and all the similar stuff before "Petty Pat" was officially a thing) can only be described as morbid, and even that might be an understatement. I seriously feel like I need to go take a shower after watching these things, sometimes. And yet, I still watch them, even so.

(To go off on a bit of a tangent, I'd completely forgotten that Pat had done a collab with Spoony/Noah Antwiler back in ye olden dayes. I knew about Pat before he did his collabs with James Rolfe and Spoony and it was pretty cool seeing him work together with those guys. And... yeah, I'd have to agree with Ian's opinion of Spoony these days. Last I saw of Spoony before I abandoned Twitter entirely... he, uh, wasn't doing so hot, like, at all. But... maybe he's actually doing better more recently? I hope so. I haven't yet watched those videos there, as of posting this, but I'll be doing that in a bit. Might even make another, separate post about them later.)

"Pat responds to an Intellivision Amico shill who says Pat is jealous of their books and questions why his face appears in the rival's Nintendo book."

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Okay, three things. First, the thing mentioned in the title of the video only comes up in the last two minutes of the video itself. Second, I appreciate the little theme song. Third, assuming that everything Pat and Ian say about the guy here is accurate, and I have no real reason to believe otherwise, then wow that Brett Weiss guy is a massive piece of shit, because that's a textbook example of some asshole "paying" people with worthless "exposure" and nothing else.

And I'm done. That's all I have to say about this video.

In a more general sense, I'm actually kind of very slightly more vaguely interested in buying Pat's books now than I was before. Still not interested to the tune of $60-$80 per book, or $30 for the digital only version, though, mind you. That's nothing against Pat specifically, really, because I wouldn't pay that much for any fucking books, I don't care what they are. If other people are willing to pay that much for his books, then more power to them and to him.

"It's Christmas, but a bad Intellivision Amico investment has left Pat without money to buy struffoli -- what happened?! Pat details the Amico disaster, plus a bonus holiday NES game review!"

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This is a "Pat the NES Punk" episode (as opposed to a CUPodcast[1] episode) about the colossal scam and failure that was the Intellivision Amico. It is not a funny episode. It's pretty close to the polar opposite of funny. That's not to say that it wasn't still morbidly entertaining, in its own way. That said, it was mostly just 30 minutes (well, more like 18 minutes, because around 5 minutes in, I bumped it up to 2x speed) of Pat saying "I told you so" and ineptly clowning all over the people[2] who supported the Amico and who, more specifically, criticized Pat for criticizing the Amico. Said clowning mostly just involved showing clips of them saying dumb things about how supposedly orgasmic the Amico was going to be, which is pretty much all Pat needed to do to show how clownshoes those guys are. His inane, insipid skits "responding to"/"interacting with" them were just superfluous, in my opinion.

And... ...also a review of the Snow Bros. NES game, I guess? He managed to squeeze that into the video as well. That part of the video was okay, at least. Except for the bits where he tried to tie it back into the Amico shit.

I mean, I get it. These assholes had been gunning for Pat for the past couple of years at least, so it probably felt cathartic for him to make this video, and in that sense I can appreciate it for what it is. I'm just saying it was also a very unfunny attempt at a "funny" video.

[1] - Which is ending, aside from occasional one-off things, as was recently announced and as I only just learned today. Given that my viewing of (Youtube clips of) it had been dropping off recently (mostly due to the fact that they seemed to be more and more using the podcast as a bludgeon against people who wronged them, rather than, you know, just generally shooting the shit about video games or whatever, which was the main reason I started watching it in the first place), this doesn't bother me as much as it would have, say, two or three years ago.

[2] - The only two of which I'd ever even heard of prior to this video were Stuttering Craig (of the now defunct ScrewAttack.com [the old URL for which just redirects to Rooster Teeth/Death Battle now], which I entirely stopped paying attention to after Handsome Tom left/was kicked out of ScrewAttack back in 2008) and Tommy Tallarico himself, who I've never much liked. Of the others who were lampooned in the above embedded video, I'm not able to name a single one of them now, 20 or so minutes after watching it. Well, no, I know one of them apparently was named "Nick," like one of the two main characters in the Snow Bros. game, but that's about it.

"Digital games are set to take over the physical game market relatively soon, according to analysts. Just how much is true and why?"

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Could've done without the CLICKBAIT HISTRIONICS?! in the video title, because nothing they said or referenced in the video is remotely surprising. Yes, of course, the glorious digital future is here. Clearly, obviously, physical media will (eventually) go the way of the dinosaur. The industry has been barrelling toward this outcome, full speed ahead, for at least a decade now, and all that time they've been conditioning the game-buying public to blithely accept it, just as they've conditioned the game-buying public to accept every other shitty thing the industry has wanted to push through over the past two or three decades. And same as Pat and Ian in this video, I'm not going to discuss here whether that's a good thing or a bad thing (hint: it's not a good thing), at least not any more than I already have. I'm just saying that it is what it is, and it will be what it will be, and there's not much of anything that anyone can do to change that.

"We discuss the Super Mario Bros. Movie trailer! What do we think about the animation and how the voice acting sounds?"

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I'm not insulted by the Chris Pratt Mario voice the way Pat claims to be, and I don't have a straight up hate-boner for Chris Pratt the way Ian seems to, but I still don't care for the voice. Simple as that.

Essentially, Chris Pratt's voice is for the Super Mario Bros movie what the pre-redesign Sonic model was for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. To restate, Chris Pratt is the audio equivalent to Ugly Sonic. Well... okay, no, Chris Pratt's voice isn't quite that uncanny valley nightmare-inducing, I guess... but it's still not great.

That said, kids aren't going to give a fuck. Hell, most 30-40-somethings who grew up with Mario aren't going to give a fuck, either. Even I don't really give all that much of a fuck. Chris Pratt voicing Mario is not a RUINED FOREVER or Jumping the Shark moment for me. It's a Mario movie. Even with and despite the crappy Chris Pratt voice for Mario, the movie is going to be inoffensively fair-to-middling at worst and will probably do well enough. *shrug*

(Can't wait for the inevitable follow-up The Legend of Zelda movie with Timothée Chalamet voicing Link, though. ¬_¬)

"A sealed video game collector put out a video filled with lies and misrepresentations about me."

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Between this and the Amico stuff (and the Diablo Immortal stuff), it seems like, more and more often, the videos I see from the CUPodcast are Pat and Ian ranting about how people are misrepresenting and lying about them. That said, the fact that Pat and Ian are pissing these assholes off enough for them to put out disinformational hit pieces against them in response to which Pat and Ian feel the need to defend themselves says that Pat and Ian are doing good work, I guess?

I dunno, it's all becoming kind of tiresome to me, right or wrong.

"What are the top 25 SNES games? We discuss a game list curated by journalist Seth Abramson."

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As always, lists like this are the opinion of whoever made the list (Seth Abramson, again, in this case) and nobody else. As such, Pat "throwing shade" (his words, not mine) for the list being "wrong" (my word, not his, but that's basically what he implied if not outright said) is kind of petty, as he (Pat) is not the arbiter/gatekeeper of that shit, any more than Seth Abramson or me or anyone else is. Basically, my enjoyment of this video was marred by Pat's constant "I don't think <insert game> should have been that high on the list" shit and his "well clearly these list-makers have only played the 'popular' games and don't know the full breadth of the library like me (even though there were several games on this very list that I myself knew nothing about) so their opinions are inferior" shit.

Additionally, to "throw shade" back at Pat, I've heard of all the games on the actual list, even if I haven't played all of them. The ones Pat called out as ones that he thought should have been on the list but weren't... not so much. And some of the ones on Pat's list that I have heard of and played, no... not top 25 for me. And I don't even have to have fucking played Tecmo Super Bowl to know that I wouldn't have put it anywhere near the top 25 on any list of SNES games, mainly because I don't give a shit about football games, no matter how "good" they are. See how my opinion, which obviously differs from Pat's, would inform how I'd rank things if I made a futile list like this? Yeah.

I absolutely disagree with both of their opinions about Castlevania IV, regardless of where it may have appeared on the list. Sure, Bloodlines is great, too, but Castlevania IV is one of my favorites. To say "it's not my favorite" is fine. To say "I don't like it" is fine. To say it "doesn't feel that much like Castlevania" is asinine.

And Ian calling Secret of Mana a "Zelda clone" is kind of ignorant and silly. *eye roll*

I mean, I still like these guys, and I agree with their opinions about 99% of the time otherwise, but sometimes they just get a little too hoity-toity for my tastes, such as here. And I don't even necessarily fully agree with Seth's list myself, either.

(I would've probably had Terranigma in my own such list somewhere, if I ever were to make one, but then, that game wasn't even released in North America, so it's not surprising to me that neither Seth nor Pat and Ian mentioned it at all.)

"We spoke to the developer of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection at Comic Con. We discuss what we saw and the goodies planned to be included!"

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Huh... I didn't know that about the third TMNT Game Boy game (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue), that it was basically a Metroidvania game. Makes me wish I'd gotten it as a kid, since I only owned and played the first two Game Boy games. And, yeah, Back from the Sewers wasn't nearly as good as Fall of the Foot Clan. The only good thing I can say about BftS over FotFC is that the second game used the actual Krang theme[1] when you fight him, unlike the first game which just used some generic boss music. As for the soundtracks over all... ... ...*shrug* I like them both. The second one's probably got more to it, though. I hope the third game's is as good. ...I mean, I guess I could just listen to it and see/hear.

And yeah, on the whole, the Cowabunga Collection sounds pretty awesome. I'm sure I'll get it eventually.

Ah, the days back when Konami didn't suck shit. I.e. back when they actually still fucking made real-ass video games.

[1] - For reference. (EDIT) I tried linking to the actual TV show version a few times, but the videos kept getting blocked/removed for whatever dumbshit reasons, so fuck it. *weary sigh* It's basically the same as the arcade game version, there, just a lot slower and more mellow. (/EDIT)

"GameStop has fired employees and opened their terrible NFT marketplace."

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*apathetic sigh*

Still wouldn't piss on a GameStop if I happened by one that was on fire.