Broken Pixels (sometimes spelled Brok3n Pix3ls) was an MST-style video game mockery show on 1up.com that ran from 2006 to 2009. Its longest-lasting and most popular hosts were Seanbaby, Shane Bettenhousen and Crispin Boyer. Many of the games played were ones that had previously been featured on "Worst Games" lists in Electronic Gaming Monthly or Seanbaby's Web site, and thus the hosts tended to have professional history with some of the games, usually because they had been forced to review them before.
The games ran from So Bad, It's Good (like Night Trap) to just plain bad (Superman 64), along with some games that many consider classics (Altered Beast (1988)).
The show died off around the same time as EGM did, as 1up.com was bought by UGO Entertainment. It had a brief Spiritual Successor called Shame Night.
Tropes used, called out, or referenced in Broken Pixels include:
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: An enemy in Red Steel ends up with his face in his own crotch. When the corpse vanishes offscreen, Crispin reasons that anyone who can achieve auto-fellatio can transcend and become pure energy.
- Author Tract: Crispin believes the author of the Congo instruction manual made all the animal enemies female as a Take That! against an unfaithful ex-wife:"It may sound cute, but she's a fucking whore like my ex-wife!""The spider will fucking nag you to death and then sleep with the guy who cleans the pool."
- Beware the Nice Ones: Crispin, the quiet one, got more foul-mouthed as the show drew to a close."I'm going to choke myself with this cord and masturbate..."
- Black Comedy Rape: One of the most common jokes in Wirehead, where they assume that the bad guys rape Wirehead after each failure. Similar jokes come up in the Red Steel and Space Pirates episodes.
- Bowdlerise: Some of the videos were re-uploaded with some of Seanbaby's banter cut out or audibly dropped due to taking some language too far (such as referring to Tobey Maguire's dance scene in Spiderman 3 as "the faggiest thing I've ever seen").
- Brother–Sister Incest: The crew's theory on the brother and sister featured in Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch: Make My Video.[video shows the brother and sister getting physically closer in what's supposed to be dueling staredowns, but looks more like this trope]Crispin: What's going on with the brother and sister—[smash cut to the two of them inexplicably sprawled out next to each other on a wrecked bed]Sister: This isn't going to work!Shane: Are the brother and sister in bed?!
- Closest Thing We Got: The guys conclude that this is how a random chubby white guy came to be the player character in Virtual Hydlide.Seanbaby: [as the developers] "We gotta get a good mo-cap guy." "Well, we can't." "Can we get that doughy guy who programmed it?"Shane: This game was developed in Japan ... they needed to hire a white guy to be in the game, and they found one!
- Crazy Cultural Comparison: The guys discuss the trope while playing Cho Aniki, with Seanbaby wondering if the game's blatant homoeroticism means something else in its home country of Japan.Seanbaby: That's the thing about Japan, you don't know. This could be their idea of awesome.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: A few of the early episodes saw host duties rotating between the Seanbaby/Crispin/Shane trio and four other 1up.com employees: Mark McDonald, Luke Smith, Darren Gladstone, and Andrew Pfister. The latter four disappeared pretty quickly into the show's run. The first thirteen episodes were also released on a "whenever we feel like it" basis and featured two games instead of one. As a consequence, they were usually longer than the later episodes.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: While playing Bible Adventures:Seanbaby: God, can you get the seagulls off me? I understand that that guy's a heathen, and he's not following your word, but I know that seagull is yours.
- Seanbaby then tries out a hydraulic springboard that seems specifically designed to dump Miriam in the river.
"Well played, God." - Exploding Barrels: Exaggerated in Target: Terror, where the baggage storage of an airport is filled with exploding barrels in a variety of colors. The guys posit that they were all confiscated from travelers.
- Fission Mailed: As Seanbaby demonstrates, forgetting to grab baby Moses (or deliberately tossing him into the Nile) in Bible Adventures doesn't prevent you from completing the level. The game even says "Good work! But you forgot Baby Moses!" before booting you back to try again. They also run into the trope while playing the first mission in Red Steel, where the PC gets shot and knocked out almost immediately.Seanbaby: What the—?! That's my game?! I get shot as soon as I go in? This is bullshit!
- Four-Point Scale:Shane: EGM gave this a 2 back when we used to give everything an 8.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: In Hooters Road Trip, there is a brief clip of The Girls Next Door star Holly Madison in her pre-fame days, putting on an atrocious Southern accent to welcome the player to Georgia.
- Freudian Trio: Seanbaby is the excitable, foul-mouthed, and easily distracted Id. Shane is the focused and levelheaded Superego who tries to keep things on track when the others are getting bored or distracted by the game. Crispin is the laid-back Ego who balances them out, though depending on the episode he may display more Id-like behavior.
- Gone Horribly Right: How the hero in Virtual Hydlide came to be, according to Shane:Shane: This game was developed in Japan...they needed to hire a white guy to be in the game, and they found one.
- Groin Attack: Crispin decides to shoot a bunch of enemy soldiers "in the dong" while playing Metal Wolf Chaos.
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: The titular character of Robocop comes across as this, thanks to his in-game dialogue and the lines Seanbaby comes up with for him.Robocop: (upon shooting a civilian) Uh-oh!Seanbaby: (in between fits of laughter) He was programmed to say "Uh-oh" when he murders civilians!
- I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: This happens a lot when the guys are playing Target: Terror and the FMV shooters from American Laser, due to their tendency to blaze away at everyone who pops up in their field of view, including the civilians who are wandering through an active crime scene/besieged spaceship/nuclear power station under attack by terrorists. They often lampshade the inevitable results.Shane: Next time I'm at an actual crime scene, I'm just gonna pop up, be like "Hey, don't shoot me!"
- In Name Only: Several of the licensed games the crew plays.Crispin: Is this reminding ANYONE of the hit feature film White Men Can't Jump?Seanbaby: Oh yeah, I'm that Puerto Rican chick. I WANT TO SCREW, BILLY!
- It's the Only Way to Be Sure: Crispin decides to massacre everyone in Detroit while playing Robocop, leading Seanbaby to name-check the trope.
- Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: Crispin lampshades not being able to shoot a gang member through a widely spaced wrought-iron fence while playing Robocop.
- Mistaken for Gay: As usual, Seanbaby insists that Phil Collins is "the championship level of gay." They're also convinced that the player character of Escape From Bug Island is gay and that the cut men in Ring King are giving their respective boxers blowjobs. (In their defense, the animations in the latter game really, really look like the cut men are doing exactly that.)
- More Dakka: The guys are delighted by the sheer number of firearms available to the titular mecha in Metal Wolf Chaos.
- Rage Quit: The presenters get so bored with Spider-Man 3 on the Wii that they beg the director to cut. During Lifeline, Shane gets so fed up with the heroine that he lunges, screaming, at the screen. Likewise, he just gives up and leaves during Red Steel.
- Running Gag: There are several.
- Aja Kong being a
Memetic Badass. - Seanbaby and Crispin mocking Shane's attraction to older women such as Martha Stewart and Rue McClanahan.
- After Balls of Fury, Seanbaby became fond of telling game characters to "have your grandma pull the car around".
- Aja Kong being a
- Seinfeldian Conversation: The guys will occasionally stop talking about the game they're playing and detour into odd conversational tangents. Probably the best example is when Seanbaby recounted the time that he and three other guys watched a Taco Bell worker defile their food while on a late-night burrito run.
- Snark-to-Snark Combat: The guys' banter often falls into this trope.Shane: (while playing China Warrior) Why can't he kick while ducking? That sucks.Seanbaby: I'm telling you, you should have learned from when I said several times "You can't fucking kick while you duck."Shane: I didn't believe it. I thought it was just user error.
- Spiritual Successor: Shame Night. It was problematic for several reasons: The hosts were dull and had little chemistry. Instead of superimposing the hosts over the game footage, the show would either cram both into the frame, or keep switching back and forth. Instead of editing episodes down to the funniest ten minutes, entire hours of Shame Night would be uploaded raw to 1up.com.
- Stinger: After the credits of some videos.
- Take That!: The guys aren't afraid of poking fun at certain people or stuff they don't like in general.
- Seanbaby gets in a potshot at Carlos Mencia, one of his favorite targets, during the Cho Aniki episode.
- The Metal Wolf Chaos episode is one long series of sarcastic jabs at George W. Bush.
- Tempting Fate: Shane does it twice while playing China Warrior. First he declares that he is better at video games than Seanbaby and Crispin, then gets hit in the head with a rock less than ten seconds after taking the controller. Having not learned his lesson, he brags about his skills a minute later and gets hit by another rock almost before he's finished speaking, much to Crispin and Sean's amusement.
- Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: Seanbaby speculates that this is what happened with the Jaguar game AirCars, which looks and plays like a beta version that someone rushed to market to make a quick buck.note Seanbaby: I bet the development team would go "Wait, they released that?!"
