I’ve told you a few times before that my biggest influence to writing reviews is the Angry Video Game Nerd. Naturally, I can’t help but have to review a video game based on him. So, here’s my take on AVGN: Game Over.

Now the first thing you have to understand is this is a downloadable game you can get free from the AVGN website (PC only for now, sorry Mac users) so that’s already a big plus. However, that comes with a big downside: the game’s only as good as the PC you play it on. It’s a rather big game and, with my crappy computer, it lags quite a bit sometimes. It also means we have to load it up. Now it’s already been addressed that this can take “about 5 minutes” on the site, but I would have to believe that would need to be a decent computer. For me, it’s actually taken up to 20 minutes to load. And since you can’t use your computer during those times, you can watch his hilarious reviews while you wait. I actually spent the time playing SSB:B.

Well at least the long loading time gives us the chance to look at the loading graphic he made. I don’t know why, but there are some things that bug me about it. First off, we have the AVGN and a mysterious black robed person (which I assumed was the main villain) looking cool and originally drawn Freddy, Jason and the Top Gun jet vector scaled, Roger Rabbit and Bugs Bunny just copy and pasted from their original artwork, Simon from Castlevania in his NES pixels and I’m not sure about the TMNT and Silver Surfer (could be either original artwork or vector scaled). Why all the different styles? They seem to clash: the sleek look or the original drawings are over powered by the cut and copied ones. Why chose to change some, but not others? Speaking about choices, and this is a little spoiler, but all the characters depicted on the loading screen are in fact in the game. EXCEPT for Roger Rabbit. How’d he get there? He’s one of the tackiest looking people there and not even in the game. One more thing about the loading screen, it reads “Loading… so be fuck’in patient!” “Fuck’in”? Not “Fuckin’”, as a word is normally put when the G is omitted from a verb? Whatever. These things are no big deal, but they REALLY came to bug me when it’s on my monitor for 10 to 20 minutes.

Finally, the game starts, and we get our first introduction to the most kick-ass thing in the game: the music. I’ll go a bit more into details about that later on, but what we hear is one of many alternate versions of the AVGN theme song. At the same time we see the lyrics go by up on top of the screen, “Guitar Guy” playing the song and the Shit Pickle bouncing on the lyrics. Still, little things bug me here: NOTHING is in sync. The lyrics scrolling don’t follow the music and the Shit Pickle isn’t going at the same rhythm of the lyrics or the music. This might have been hard to do, but it would have been so awesome if done right. I guess this does help when it lags during the intro, as it often happens with me. While this is going on, we see scenes of the AVGN destroying characters from video games he reviewed. But, I have one of the same problems with this as I did with the games chosen to be on the loading screen: all but one of them is actually present in the game. Even worse, it’s the first one we see: Spider-man (which I had to wait until my game lagged at just the right moment to see that’s who it was). With so many characters in this game, why did he have to do this? It just boggles my mind, but once again, it’s only really annoying because I had to wait so long for the game to load. Now, I know what you’re thinking “if it annoys you, why don’t you just skip it?” Well, it’s because you can’t. That’s right, unlike most games, you can’t skip the intro video to the game by simply pressing enter, or space, or whatever. You can press esc and completely leave the game, but that defeats the purpose…

Ok, so finally we get to the main menu. Now, here’s honestly what happened the first time I played the game. Since this is a computer only game and the controls can be different in each game, I wanted to check out the controls menu, so I pressed the down arrow… and nothing happened. I kept pressing down and still nothing. Up, left, right: nothing. Thinking my computer might have frozen (the idea of which set my mind to flames) I pressed enter to see what might happen just to get sent to the Load/New game menu. Frustrated, I started a new game, not thinking I could go back, and tried a few other buttons. Finally I figured it out; this is one of those games where A S D W are the directional controls. So finally I had to exit the game, load it back, wait the 20 minutes, watch the starter video and get to the main menu to go down and see the controls to figure out my other moves. Ends up J and K are attack and kick and you can charge your punch and do a bunch of different combos (they suggest you play around to figure it out). Ok, I kind of get it: the arrows on the left, two buttons for controls on right, just like an NES controller. Cool, but misleading. Why aren’t the arrow buttons the directional controls? Is that just TOO obvious? Having to use different directional buttons to move around to the menu that shows you the controls isn’t well thought out: it means having to know the controls before you can learn the controls. Well, at least my readers will know better.

Now let’s start the game. At the beginning, we get a little cut scene. It’s nothing to big or detailed: basically just that the Nerd decided to play a game for his review, only to get sucked into his TV. The first level he arrives in is a Mario Bros. world called Super Nerdy Bros. I found this hilarious, due to the video “The Anger Begins”, implying that the Nerds first rage was at Super Mario Bros. so this was a really good way to start the game. Upon entering the world, the Nerd has no idea what to do, so he just uses the old game cliché: go to the right. After he beats the boss of the world, he goes onto the next, and so on. After the level “James’ Quest” (which he hilariously asks who James is) he finds a glowing letter. That’s when the mastermind of the game appears, I never really caught or cared about his name though. Here we learn that there are 8 magical letters (bet you can figure out what they spell) that apparently link the real world to the video game one. So, now you need to collect them by continuously going from game world to game world. I know it doesn’t really sound like much, but it really does add to the game, at least it’s no longer just aimlessly going left to right after this point.

The game itself plays as an average beat-em-up styled game: walk and jump around, the screen freeze and enemies appear (out of portals in this game) and you can’t move on until you beat them. At the end of the level, there’s a boss, you beat him, levels done, and that’s it. The game play runs really smoothly (when my own personal computer problems don’t get in the way) and it’s honestly just a lot of fun. Short paragraph, eh?

Now, I feel like I have to get to the music and sound since I already mentioned it earlier: it rocks. Sometimes, its an awesome remix (I’m particularly fond of the Forest Link world music), sometimes it’s a completely different song and sometimes it’s straight from the game your playing (one example of this is the Ghostbusters level, where the only music you hear is the theme played over and over again, as mentioned in his review of the game). I’m actually really grateful for such wonderful music, since my game can lag sometimes. When that happens, instead of just boiling over in rage, I just lay back and enjoy. The sound effects in the game are pretty much stock video game sound effects, though I did like that the Nerd’s jump sounds like Mario’s. Another thing you hear in this game are the voices: the Nerd’s witty comments to each of the world’s titles and some dialog at the end of some levels concerning the story. My problem with this is that the volume levels are too low, and I really can’t hear what they’re saying. It also bothers me that the music is so easy to hear, but the voices sound a little muffled: all audio should be on the same level, and if not, the voices should actually be louder.

I’m going to take a little moment right now to talk to you about a common problem found in video games: the difficulty curve. For those of you who don’t know, this term simply means how hard a game gets as you progress from level to level, which can make the difference between a game that is fun to play and one that is just frustrating. The way I see it, a game can have one of 3 types of difficulty curves. First off, a game with a bad difficulty curve is one where there seems to be no order in the levels: you play something back-breakingly hard, then onto something that’s a cake-walk. Next, you have games with ok curves: all the levels are arranged from easies to hardest, but sometimes the difficulty sometimes jumps suddenly or for some levels there’s no difference in difficulty between the last few. Finally there are games with a good difficulty curves: the levels are all in order, and how much harder each level increases is at a constant rate, so you don’t really notice how much harder you have to push yourself. This game has the best difficulty curve I have seen in a long time. I honestly didn’t realize how good a job was done on it until I played it the second time.

Now, to what makes this game truly unique: the references. Now, I mean the stuff that goes beyond the facts that Rolling Rock gives you heath and pens are treated as coins, I mean stuff that you need that have seen some of his particular videos to get. Without trying to spoil the jokes, I’ll try to list off some of my favourites. Some AVGN fans might still be able to guess what it is, so they might want to skip this paragraph. Last chance. Alright, well first off, when you get to the Castlevania level, there’s something going on all throughout the level that I thought was funny. I already mentioned the Ghostbusters’ music playing through their entire level and looping about, so if you’ve seen that video, you should get it. I kind of spoiled the fact that there was going to be a TMNT and Silver Surfer level, but when you get to their bosses, you’ll probably laugh afterwards. Another thing I spoiled was that Bugs Bunny was going to be in the game, but he’s hidden. Once you manage to find him, you’ll really like it. Speaking about things that are hidden, any decent fan of the AVGN will not be disappointed from getting a game over. Finally, my personal favourite is level 10. Just, all of level 10 is great and true nerd fans will get it (you’ll see what I mean once you get there). These are just some examples of the many hilarious AVGN references in the game.

Alright, it’s almost time to end this review, so I’ll just finish off the coupe of items left to talk about. Let’s start with the negative, the falling platforms in “Boo! Haunted House” that don’t work right. Normally in a game, you stand on a platform, it shakes, falls and you go down with it. In this game, you pass right through it, then it shakes and falls. There’s even one so messed up, that it actually slides you to the right side of the screen, just to make you fall down a hole. But one thing makes up for that. You know how in Sonic, you can beat the game, then unlock “the real” ending, where you have to fight a bigger boss? Well this game has one of those, and that fight is just so awesome. Also, unlike recent Sonic games, the way to get to that final fight is really simple and easy. The game maker really knew how to make his final boss.

Well, that’s all I got to say about this game. It was hilarious and fun to play despite my computers occasional lagging. The loading time is frustrating and the opening video is unskippable, but it’s worth the wait. We also can’t overlook the all important fact that it’s free. I would have to say, if this were playable on a consol, in which I wouldn’t have to wait so long to start it up (pick-up and playability) it could of gotten a 9, but I feel I have to take off a point for that, so this game gets a final score of 8/10 and I suggest that, fan of the Nerd or not, you still play this game.

Now, do YOU have a video game based on yourself, Nostalgia Critic?