VGJunk
is a blog about video games classic and obscure hosted on Blogger. It was started in 2010 by a snarky and self-deprecating British gamer. Until its end in 2019, the blog usually updated once a week with an article detailing a playthrough of an old or classic game, or an article spotlighting tropes, character archetypes, or music remixes in games.
The blog also has a Tumblr viewable here.
Games reviewed by VGJunk include:
- Abadox
- Blood
- CarnEvil
- Castlevania
- The Chaos Engine
- Comix Zone
- F-Zero (1990)
- Final Fight
- Ghosts 'n Goblins
- Ghouls 'n Ghosts
- Gunsmoke
- James Pond
- Mega Man 3
- Punch-Out!!
- Road Rash
- Smash TV
- Splatterhouse
- Splatterhouse 2
- Street Fighter EX
- Sunset Riders
- Zombies Ate My Neighbors
Tropes
- 20 Minutes into the Future: Lampshaded in the review for Mad Gear, a Capcom arcade game from the late eighties. The game took place in the future year of 2011. When was the review published? November 2010.
- Author Appeal: The author admits to liking beat 'em ups such as Final Fight a great deal.
- He also adores Halloween and monsters associated with the season, such as ghosts and reanimated skeletons.
- Damned by Faint Praise: VGJunk tries to find some good in most of the games he reviews, but it is harder with some games than with others. An example of this trope is invoked in the review for Barney Bear Meets Santa Claus, where he declares that the coloring book is the best activity in an admittedly meager lineup of mini games and activities.
- Darker and Edgier: Parodied in the article 5 Terrible Ideas for "Mature" Gaming Reboots.
- Death by Irony: In Scare Bear, one of the obstacles that the titular bear faces is a lethal honey pot.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Some of the earliest articles are far more wordy and lack as many screenshots as the later ones.
- Halloween Episode: Every October, VGJunk covers horror-themed games.
- Hurricane of Puns: Knight Games is so boring that VGJunk is reduced to this when he gets to the level where two knights fight with axes."I'm gonna axe this knight some difficult questions, I've got an axe to grind, he should just axe-ept his inevitable defeat, etcetera."
- Letters 2 Numbers: "Slaves 2 Meat", the second album of VGJunk's band Flesh Hammer in the review of Popstar Maker.
- Running Gag: The author's tendency to introduce games as highly specific "[X]-em-ups", such as "shinobi-em-up" Charlie Ninja.
- Take That!: There are some delicious ones sprinkled throughout the articles at various celebrities and games, such as this one in the review for Deer Hunter for the Game Boy Color:"I'm playing as a monumentally slow, convulsing, gun-wielding dullard, and if it wasn't fun in Duke Nukem Forever then it's not going to be fun here."
- Tempting Fate: VGJunk sometimes does this for humor when he gets in an uncontrollable or difficult situation, or to tease that he found a game that is unlikely to be good in the first place (licensed dreck, for instance) to be of poor quality.
- Totally Radical: Some of the games reviewed on the blog feature this, on account of being made in the 80s and 90s. VGJunk himself sometimes invokes it to parody the trope, sometimes out of affection, sometimes not.
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: A ghost in Mansion of Hidden Souls is described as bearing an accent like Dick Van Dyke's terrible Cockney accent and a bad Australian accent at the same time.
- A Winner Is You: Several games, befitting their retro and/or arcade nature.
- The Super NES game based on The Lawnmower Man has an underwhelming ending: "Jobe has been defeated. Game completed."
"You're right, incredibly underwhelming ending sequence, I should just forget about what's going on and just accept that The Lawnmower Man is over."
