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Here's what Jeff and Adam think of your late-game expansion.
MaximusBlack: And I'm an angry black man.

Life's A Glitch TV (commonly abbreviated as LAGTV) is a YouTube channel hosted by two Canadian guysnote  named Adam (NovaWar) and Jeff (MaximusBlack). They have done some Let's Plays for Resident Evil 5, Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 2, although they are mostly known for their StarCraft II commentary series called "When Cheese Fails 101", which was retooled for a season "Will Cheese Fail?" and has since returned to the "When Cheese Fails" format. Though which player will win is not necessarily known because of the existence of double cheeses.

Unlike their contemporaries such as Day9, Husky Starcraft, and TotalBiscuit, who cast games from the level of Tournament Play, LAGTV casts fan-submitted replays of mid- to high-level Ladder games submitted by their fans, in an attempt to analyze in-depth what happens when cheese tactics fail. The games are typically cast blind, with neither NovaWar nor MaximusBlack knowing what is going to happen. While the series is primarily intended for entertainment, Adam and Jeff are also excellent commentators, dissecting in detail what each player is doing right and wrong. Players who want to learn how to defend against cheese—or perpetrate it!—should consider this show required reading.

LAGTV also casts more traditional 1v1 Ladder games, typically introduced as "Normal-Ass Normal Games" to keep them separate from When Cheese Fails 101 proper. They have additionally produced a series called "NovaWar Says," in which Jeff has to play 2v2 StarCraft games under constraints chosen by Adam. Their second channel, LAGTV2, was originally slated for just Minecraft gameplay videos and has since panned out into a Lets Play channel of various games and their "Dear LAGTV" series.

MaximusBlack and NovaWar are known for their insightful analysis, upbeat personality, natural chemistry and poop jokes. Lots of poop jokes.

MaximusBlack was crowned King Of The Web for the period of June 1 - June 15 2012.

Head to their website for more.

MaximusBlack and NovaWar have eased back on Starcraft casts and are now running a Podcast called Technical Alpha. However, they still go back to it with some regularity, and Jeff continues to stream the game.

Speaking of Technical Alpha, they record it on Twitch every Thursday night, starting at 8:00 PM EDT. The podcast is broken down into three sections: video games, movies and TV, and Tech Support (when they answer questions presented to them by Patreon pledges). Originally, they had a third member, PanicSwitched, but after about 70 episodes, he was forced to leave the podcast due to a promotion at work and the increase in responsibility that came with it. Expect lots of critique, lots of unintentional hilarity, and the occasional argument or soapboxing.

We are looking at some examples for When Cheese Fails 101, so Maximus, hit me up with that noooooooooooise! *boiyoiyoiyoiyoooing*

  • Achievements in Ignorance: Adam and Jeff are often quick to point out seemingly poor choices newer players make that actually win them the game. A more experienced player would know not to try them, but a less experienced player (against whom a newer player would usually be pitted) wouldn't know how to counter them.
  • Berserk Button: If you are winning a match, you better hope you don't do something stupid to throw it away in the endgame, especially if your opponent has made every mistake under the sun and has essentially given you the match on a silver platter. Otherwise MaximusBlack will destroy you.
    • It is also not advised to send the casters replays of worker rushes.
      NovaWar: (after about twenty seconds of Stunned Silence) WHY IN THE FUCK! DO WE GET! THIS! HORSESHIT! WHY DOES IT HAPPEN?! WE HAVE TWENTY - SIX - HUNDRED EMAILS FOR WHEN CHEESE FAILS, AND 90% OF THEM ARE THIS SHIT!
    • People who intentionally drop their rank to take part in their tournaments (and thus mop up the other unsuspecting players) is good way to get them angry (and a good way to get a public shaming)
    • They become utterly contemptuous of cheesers who get sour and Trash Talk their opponents when their cheese fails. While they'll mock bad players, they'll at least give them credit for being graceful losers, but when a cheeser fails then insults their opponent (especially when they whine about "OP") they won't hold back.
  • Big "NO!":
  • Big "OMG!": A favourite phrase of MaximusBlack's whenever something extraordinary happens, such as FireToBlaze's Ultralisk rush and Ketroc dropping a Planetary Fortress right next to his opponent's Nexus, and especially Exogenesis VS BabyV.
    • Another instance was when Sushihukka used pylons to wall off Lovato's mineral line.
  • Boring, but Practical: Mentioned in Behind Enemy Mineral Lines where pUreseduction manages to keep a drone alive inside his enemy's base for nearly eight minutes, netting constant surveillance one what his opponent is up to, eventually forcing his opponent to throw down a Pylon and Photon Cannon to deal with it. Maximus and Nova both agree it was by far the most cost effective drone ever.
  • Catchphrase: Several.
    • "Good afternoon/evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is NovaWar/MaximusBlack!" "And I'm __________!"
    • Hit me up with that noise!
    • Whenever a player's attempted cheese backfires on them, they are said to have "shit the bed."
      • Whenever the units get killed, they are also said to be "shitting the bed".
    • "Uh Jeff? I have a question for you."
    • "Sour about life."
    • "Bouse."
    • "You Fool!"
    • "At what cost, Jeff? At what cost...Jeff?!"
    • "Ain't nobody got time for that!"
    • "Go home, you're drunk."
    • What the HELL was THAT?!
    • "Uh, Jeff? That blue block is moving."
    • "You just never know who's going to throw on LagTV."
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Discussed In-Universe. The commentators frequently note that the majority of cheesers play Protoss, and usually do it with a Photon Cannon rush.
  • Contrived Coincidence:
    • In Season 1, Episode 8, players HuiTing and Nysskel are both scouting with their scouts coming so close that their fields of vision overlap, but never spot each other until HuiTing is leaving one of the possible starting areas, causing Nysskel to think that's where HuiTing's base is. As a result Nysskel pulls off a Photon Cannon rush on a base that doesn't exist.note 
    • A random game between Colonpounder and Dickbruiser. Jeff and Adam are amazed that such a game actually happened on accident.
  • Crazy Enough to Work:
    • MaximusBlack lampshades that a "Four Gate"note  only ever works because nobody uses it because it doesn't work, so nobody expects it.
    • Diceyface tricked Smug into thinking he was AFK while building a Command Center in the corner of his base, then loading up a single SCV and taking both to the edge of the map. Smug spends a few minutes trying to find him before giving up, assuming it was a glitch or bug. Both Adam and Jeff declare it the greatest cheese ever.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle:
    • Most notably Episode 3 of Will Cheese Fail Season 9; Terran cheeser MeOrYou combines multiple different cheese tactics with a Game-Breaking Bug and executes it all perfectly without missing a beat. Jeff declares it the single greatest cheese he's ever seen, and his favorite episode of either Cheese Fails series.
    • In Will Cheese Fail: Biggest Handicap Ever Edition, Joshimuz utterly destroys TeRa despite going afk for over half an hour and only having a single Worker Unit due to his attempted cheese. Once Joshimuz actually sends out troops, he completely steamrolls his enemy's bases, barely even having to micro.
  • Epic Fail:
    • While everything at When Cheese Fails revolves around the cheeser finding the tables turned, some moments are so epically bad that they receive the "FAIL" stamp seen in the page picture. Its first appearance was here. Exaggerated by the second season.
    • One episode of Will Cheese Fail saw a player lose despite his opponent going afk for over half an hour.
    • At the start of TechnicGoose's match, Adam asks Jeff to give him the "sound of a goose if it was techno". Jeff starts clucking as, despite being Canadian, he has no idea what a goose sounds like.
    • iFSoulmaN vs NucleoPhille: Nucleo attacked a morphing Baneling with all of his Zerglings. The Baneling exploded and killed twenty-six Zerglings, causing Nucleo to Rage Quit and Adam and Jeff to spend the next two minutes laughing themselves sick.
  • "Eureka!" Moment: In Sushihukka vs Lovato, MaximusBlack and NovaWar couldn't figure out why Sushihukka kept constructing pylons in Lovato's mineral line until MaximusBlack confusedly asked if Sushihukka was trying to wall off his opponent's minerals so he couldn't mine. Cue Big "OMG!" as they realize that's exactly what he's doing.
  • Fanboy: Adam and Jeff are this for The Elder Scrolls.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Besides players often being taken off guard because they failed to notice something critical, Adam and Jeff have been blindsided because they weren't paying attention to the minimap. Most notably, they both thought FireToBlaze's Ultralisk herd died off before it could start because they failed to notice the explosion of blue at a different base where they were actually hatchingnote .
  • Foregone Conclusion: Given the title of When Cheese Fails, once its seen which player the cheeser is, it's clear that that player will lose the match. The excitement comes from how the other player manages to come back after being put at a massive disadvantage. The only exception to this was when both players try to cheese each other. Will Cheese Fail was an attempt to avert this, but as Jeff explained, the majority of games sent in were of cheese succeeding very unceremoniously, and were far less entertaining.
  • For Want Of A Nail: It's not uncommon to see games where the cheeser curbstomps their opponent up until they make a single crucial mistake that costs them the game, or where a single unit ends up making all the difference. The season 3 finale is a particularly good example: The Protoss player falls to a double Zergling rush, but his Zerg ally plants a Spine Crawler which not only picks apart an entire base on its own, but manages to stay alive long enough for his Zerglings to take out the bases of both opposing players - all because neither of them deigned to notice the Crawler until it was too late.
  • Four Is Death: One of Jeff and Adam's most frequent tips for countering Protoss cheese is that you should use exactly four Worker Units to kill a Pylon.
  • Heterosexual Life-Partners: How Jeff and Adam usually portray themselves. There's very occasionally some mild Ho Yay that gets Played for Laughs.
  • Hurricane of Puns: Inevitable when they cast a game between Colonpounder and Dickbruiser. Some were accidental puns, others were not.
  • Hypocrite: Players will sometimes complain about their opponent's cheese tactics in the chat, when really said opponent was just fighting the complainer's cheesing with their own cheese.
  • In-Series Nickname:
    • Zealots are all named Bob, Stalkers are Steves, Colossi are Giraffes, and Marines are Billie Jeans. Players with hard-to-pronounce names are also given alternate nicknames; for example, Jadaba becomes known as Jabba.
    • If a player reaches 5,000 minerals in the bank (in a game where you are expected to spend minerals CONSTANTLY and never hoard), it's called Facebook Money. FireToBlaze almost reached 10,000 minerals at once, which prompted the casters to give that milestone a new nickname: Oprah Money. AlbinoFly then proceeds to not only force Jeff and Adam to reveal a milestone for 15,000 minerals, Google Money, but also coin a term for 20,000 minerals, dubbed OPEC Money.
    • Surrounding a defensive structure with worker units so zealots/zerglings can't kill it is called the Circle of Life.
    • Using Ravager's corrosive bile, especially in groups, is referred to as "dropping mix tapes".
    • Using a single pylon to power multiple protoss structuresnote  is an Artosis Pylon, after Starcraft player Artosis who frequently does exactly that.
  • Interface Screw: In at least one NovaWar Says episode, MaximusBlack had to play an entire game with the screen flipped vertically. Both of them were so disoriented that they actually had eye strain.
  • Kansas City Shuffle: A handful of games have the cheeser getting into a Terran player's base before they can complete their wall-off, only for the Terran player to move their SCVs and Command Center to the nearest expansion before completing the wall from the outside and trapping the enemy inside what used to be their own base. Case in point.
  • Large Ham: Both casters often become this.
  • Man of a Thousand Voices: Maximus is always the sound effect guy, "hitting NovaWar up with that noise" before the start of each match, providing his own interpretations on the battle noises of certain units, and doing a-capella "epic music" during particularly large-scale battles.
  • The Merch: Discussed In-Universe. NovaWar once joked about making "Bob the Zealot" T-shirts.
  • Moose and Maple Syrup: Both casters have extremely distinct Canadian Accents, right down to saying "aboat" (NOT ABOOT) instead of about. They also tend to make exclusively Canadian pop culture references by accident, failing to realize no one will get them until it's too late. On more than one occasion they've referenced Tim Horton's, and once they even compared a fast unit to Donovan Bailey, before lampshading how obscure the reference would be to non-Canadians.
  • Motor Mouth: Both men are capable of this, but the crowner probably has to be NovaWar's epic tangent in this game where he rants for over 40 seconds without pause!
  • Non Sequitur: Both Adam and Jeff are prone to these. However, at one point, Adam took it to a whole 'nother level and basically turned an entire episode into one.
    • In the later years of the channel, one of the common complaints was that these were taking up more and more video time rather than proper analysis. In fairness to Jeff and Adam, the later years were mainly taken up by Cold Cast Marathons, with considerably lower game quality.
  • Nuke 'em: Season 4, Episode 4 saw BakaNeko demolish her opponents base using two Planetary Fortresses and a lot of nukes.
  • Overshadowed by Awesome:
  • Rage Quit: Per typical StarCraft etiquette, any player who leaves without typing "gg" in the chat is assumed to have rage-quit, and this tends to happen a lot in LAGTV-casted games. One particularly memorable early episode had a Protoss player ragequitting one minute into the match because his probe died in an attempted proxy cannon rush.
  • A Rare Sentence: In AlbinoFly's match, MaximusBlack notes near the end that things are looking grim for him.
    MaximusBlack: He's almost down to his last five bases! ...And that's a really weird thing to say.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In particularly obnoxious matches, the casters will break down step-by-step exactly how much their cheese failed.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: Misspelled chat messages are mocked.
    NovaWar: You know what's better than a Planetary Fortress? A "polanetary forotdds". Those are so OP.
  • Running Gag:
    • "But at what cost, Jeff? At what cost... Jeff?"
    • Jeff's utter inability to do a decent Bane voice.
    • During their second Will Cheese Fail cold cast marathon, Jeff mistakenly thinking Consuela sounded like a Japanese man's name caused both Adam and the chat to make constant Consuela puns for the rest of the marathon.
    • Either Adam or Jeff (usually Adam) screwing up their When Cheese Fails titles.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Whenever Adam sees or hears something mind-bogglingly stupid or full of Narm, don't be surprised if he gets up out of his chair and walks out of the room.
  • Seen It All: Jeff thought he'd seen it all. And after five years of casting Starcraft II and playing it since the Brood War days, you can see why. Then the 14-Nexus game happened, and he had to re-evaluate.
    • And then came TeamRHI attacking his opponent with nothing but legions of probes, forcing him to re-evaluate again.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: "NovaWar Says" makes MaximusBlack perform builds under crazy restrictions. For instance, there's the "Tripping Balls" build which involves no combat units save for Sentries and hallucinations.
  • Sore Loser: In When Cheese Fails Season 4, Episode 4, Shierra spells out "F U" in pylons after BakaNeko wipes out his attempted cannon rush with a nuke.
  • Sound-Effect Bleep: F-bombs (and/or worse) are usually bleeped out. Videos that aren't bleeped get a special "Mature content warning" preface.
  • Stunned Silence:
    • After ranting and raving about a particularly stupid move, the casters will sometimes suddenly go dead silent. If a move is particularly stupid/ridiculous such as the Protoss who rage quit one minute into the game because he lost a probe, they'll go dead silent mid-sentence.
    • Alternately, it's been known to happen when a particularly ballsy move succeeds, such as when FireToBlaze first successfully spawned twenty Ultralisks and then again when he spawned thirteen more.
  • Tempting Fate: "If he, somehow survives this (which he won't), I will... (quit LAGTV?) ...yeah."
  • There Is No Kill Like Over Kill: In Season 4, Episode 4, BakaNeko takes out her opponents base using only Planetary Fortresses and nukes, including dropping four nukes at once to take out the last few buildings.
  • This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: In one game, there's a really awful player who hoards resources, builds at a snail's pace, gets one of every unit, researches useless upgrades at random, and doesn't even bother to scout outside his base at all. In literally any other game his opponent would exploit that bad gameplay and crush him in short order. But it just so happens that his opponent is attempting a feigned disconnect, trying to trick the enemy into leaving and forfeiting by faking a glitch. This tactic is supposed to end the game quickly one way or the other, but this specific type of bad opponent forces him to sit and waste over half an hour of his time before he gives up and starts playing a real game again. The cheeser does win, but it takes around a full hour. As Jeff puts it...
    Jeff: Josh... just got hard-countered. Literally.
  • Tower Defense: The last several minutes of BaDitO versus Candelot was less of two armies seeking to wipe out each other's base and more of Candelot's fleet trying to hold off infinite waves of Zealots.
  • Verbal Tic: For the first three seasons, not pluralizing things. "This guy has a many Zergling." "Whoa, check out all these Void Ray!" "Lots of Void Ray beats lots of ling, right Jeff?" "Uhh, right, Adam."
  • Wham Line: "Uh Jeff, the blue block is moving." A line that herald's Ketroc's victory as he lands his Command Center right next to his opponent's Nexus and upgrades it into a Planetary Fortress to win the game.
  • Zerg Rush:
    • In Game 17 of their fifth Will Cheese Fail Cold Cast Marathon, BaDitO beat his opponent Candelot, who had an entire fleet of Void Rays, by sending a couple dozen zealots into his base every twenty seconds. Jeff and Adam watched in awe as Candelot couldn't kill even half of the Zealots before they started attacking his buildings and workers. The pair compared it to a Tower Defense game with BaDitO's Stalkers representing Candelot reaching level two and the Zealots gaining charge as level three.
    • Game 11 of their second Will Cheese Fail Cold Cast Marathon saw TeamRHI attack with hundreds of probes, not using any normal attacking units until the end of the game. When Jeff and Adam checked, they saw TeamRHI's opponent had killed 545 worker units.

Minecraft

  • Artistic License – Religion: Jeff doesn't seem to know even the most basic elements of Christianity, which is doubly funny because 1) his Minecraft avatar is Black Jesus and 2) Adam is a devout Christian, and will call Jeff on his errors.
  • Attack! Attack! Attack!: Jeff tends to kill any mob he comes across, which has caused trouble in both the long termnote  and the short termnote .
  • Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: Jeff's adventures in the Nether tended to turn into this.
    • Happens almost perfectly in Part 40, where he charges at a Ghast while shouting, then turns around and runs away while screaming like a little girl.
  • Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Jeff pretty well has a one-track mind when it comes to diamonds. This has lead him to taking insanely foolish risks, charging into danger blindly, and sometimes passing up or even destroying valuable resources like Redstonenote  because he doesn't give a damn about them.
  • Climactic Music: Jeff enters the nether
  • Emotions Versus Stoicism: The guys' playstyles can be summarized loosely this way. Adam is cautious and prefers to get everything in order (like securing food supplies and shelter), while Jeff charges headlong into adventure and danger which often causes more trouble than it's worth.
  • Epic Fail: "FailCraft" episodes in the Minecraft series show unusual or strong screwups.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: In his house in Minecraft, Jeff had built a "pit of death", an extremely deep pit with lava at the bottom. This pit has killed Jeff 3 times, and helped in causing him to lose a lot of valuable items.
  • Hypocritical Humor: Jeff is fiercely protective of his possessions, but several times he's just plain taken things from Adam's house without asking permission. Likewise, he'll ask Adam to drop everything and help out, but when Adam asks for help he grumbles and complains the whole time.
  • Nintendo Hard: The pair wasn't very fond of the Temple of the Gods adventure maps.
  • Odd Couple: Comes across very strongly in the Minecraft videos. Jeff's videos will feature adventuring, risk taking, exploring, etc., while Adam's involve growing food, building or adjusting something, or doing more "maintenance" type things. The pair gladly lampshades it by referring to themselves as Indiana Jones and Martha Stewart.
  • Orphaned Series: In one stream Jeff remarks that Lagcraft is being discontinued because it wasn't pulling down the kind of viewership numbers they wanted. He still does Minecraft himself, both solo as Bousecraft and sometimes in conjunction with other YouTube streamers.
  • Perfectly Cromulent Word: "Volumptuous", a word Jeff coined to describe watermelons. Presumably a portmanteau of "delicious" and "voluptuous", since he previously compared said melons to Pamela Anderson's breasts.
  • Sadist Show: To an extent, since the viewers in the chatroom are always eager to see Jeff die by his own hand. Usually this is driven by his boasting about how he's a "Minecraft pro" and is amazing at the game. Part of the reason the guys were hesitant to restart the series (besides its not being very profitable) was that Jeff had improved in the interim and they knew fans wouldn't enjoy it as much.
  • Screams Like a Little Girl: Jeff, especially when he runs into Creepers. Lampshaded by Adam in one episodenote , where he says "Welcome to Lagcraft, where Jeff tests his vocal range every time he dies in lava."
  • Tempting Fate: After Jeff does well in the first session of Lagcraft Season 2 due to playing things more cautiously, he gets boastful, calling himself a Minecraft pro and saying that not even seasoned players could do as well as him. So naturally in the second session he reverts to his usual careless ways and falls into lava twice within the span of 30 minutes, losing all the diamonds he'd collected up to that point (not to mention getting killed by a Gold Armored Zombie because he charged it while at low health in the hopes of scoring the armor).
  • Too Dumb to Live: Jeff has a few problems in Minecraft, including digging straight down and/or upnote , attacking anything that moves, and focusing so much on adventuring that he can't be bothered to maintain normal food suppliesnote .
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change: Part of the reason Adam and Jeff hated the Temple of the Gods maps so much was because they tried to turn Minecraft into a Platform Game, which it isn't made to do at all.

Technical Alpha:

  • Aborted Arc: When Realm Royale first hit the scene, both Adam and Jeff got into it to the point where they discussed it repeatedly on the podcast, and used it to announce a new project, titled "Realm Royale Replays." Then the game underwent several massive gameplay shifts, which led to most of its playerbase abandoning the game and the two of them shaking their heads in disbelief at how Hi-Rez managed to sabotage their own efforts so badly. RRR got only one episode before it was discontinued.
  • Ascended Extra: PanicSwitched was originally a longtime fan and subscriber of LAGTV. Then he became the podcast's Third Guy, until he left due to no longer having the time to dedicate to it.
  • Berserk Button: Several, but one of particular note is games that enter Early Access or a Beta and never reach full launch. Jeff and Panic got into an argument over Star Citizen because of this once.
    • Adam hates people who buy the newest iteration of the iPhone every single year, because it's wasted money for hardly any improvement. Hilarity ensued when Adam admitted to buying a new GPU for his computer despite already saying it was barely an improvement over the current top GPU on the market. (In Adam's defense, he doesn't own the top GPU currently on the market.)
    • They also hate Political Correctness and when social movements with good goals get taken off the rails by extremists and opportunitsts.
    • As of the COVID-19 Pandemic, COVIDiots have joined the list of things that piss them off. They have zero tolerance for anyone who denies the virus exists, downplays its dangers, anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and anyone who objects to or breaks lockdowns or restrictions. Justified, as they both have families to worry about, and in Adam's case, that includes his nonagenarian grandmother.
  • The Chew Toy: Several, including PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Xbox ONE, and Apple fans.
  • Digging Yourself Deeper: Tends to happen during Tech Support segments where they're asked questions about women, relationships, or dating.
  • Suddenly Shouting: Happens all the time whenever a Berserk Button is pressed or they get pissed off over a topic in general. It's rare that an episode happens where someone doesn't break out shouting.

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