Web Video / Rerez

"It's. Just. Bad."

— Shane, in every episode of "Just Bad Games".

Rerez is a Canadian YouTube web-series run by Shane Luis. The show covers different gaming peripherals, consoles, and other devices. He also has a few sub-series on his channel, including "Positives & Negatives" and "The Worst Ever Series". Shane's channel can be found here.

Shane also has a second channel. Originally Rerez Live (featuring live-streamed events), and later named Rerez II featuring miscellaneous videos, the second channel is now known as Hot Take: Video Game Rants, featuring videos about current gaming topics, and hosted by Shane and his video editor Adam Keresztyen. That channel can be found here.

On June 7, 2019, the channel began the "Just Bad Games" series. It's a series that picks apart a game, focusing on its context in comparison to other games, game play, graphics, story, and its development.

On May 15, 2021, the channel began the "Best Ever Series". Described as the best things in video games sometimes are not what people think they will be, this series focused on video games with the best and enjoyable experience that tends to be overlooked by some people.

On November 30, 2022, the team launched a new channel dedicated to their "Next Game" series. Unlike their usual scripted shows, this series is more of a podcast where Shane and Adam pitch their separate ideas for a new installment in a game franchise, usually one that has been dormant for several years. Their pitches are submitted to a guest producer who gives their thoughts on each pitch before declaring which one they liked more. The channel can be found here.

Rerez joined Channel Awesome in 2014, but parted ways with that site in September 2016 due to the controversy surrounding it at the time.

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Rerez contains examples of:

• Accentuate the Negative:
  • "Negatives" videos try to find four bad things about games or gaming products that are generally accepted as great. The inverse is true for "Positives", where Shane tries to find four good things about some of the most notorious games - though by the end, he's again accentuating how bad those games are, and why the positives don't outweigh the negatives (and vice versa for the negative points on those good games).
  • The "Just Bad Games" series is this, taking a look at "bad" games and criticizing their graphics, gameplay, story, etc.
  • The "Worst Ever" series looks at a variety of consoles, primarily knockoff or plug-n-plays but also includes official ones that flopped hard.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Morphman is introduced as being "designed by Dynamic Dimensions Development that was distributed directly on digital disk", complete with a sound effect at the start of every word beginning with D.
• Alliterative Title: There's a series called Gabby Games.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Discussed with "Just Bad Games" Batman: Dark Tomorrow and Superman: The Man of Steel where knowledge of particular comic events or storylines is needed to understand the games.
  • Gundam 0079: The War for Earth comes with "miles" of in-universe database text to explain the backstory.
  • As they found out the hard way Gender Wars takes this even further, as not only is the story never properly explained in the game proper despite existence of FMVs, neither are the controls or mechanics, requiring both the main manual and the quick start sheet just to get up to speed. And shield regeneration isn't covered in either of them.
  • Defied with Balan Wonderworld. Shane and Adam know the game has a novel that expands upon the otherwise vague story, but they didn’t read it since it wasn’t included with the game.
• Alternative Character Interpretationinvoked: The licensed games of "Just Bad Games" often reinterpret their protagonists to be different from their real counterpart.
  • Batman gets a dose of Idiot Hero.
  • Superman is like Batman but is also The Friend Nobody Likes.
  • Aquaman and Indiana Jones, however, seem to be more like their normal selves with a strong dose of Only Sane Man due to the in-game ridiculousness.
  • Duke Nukem is portrayed as Too Dumb to Live in their playthrough of Duke Nukem Forever.
• Berserk Button: Shane has a few.
  • As shown in "Scam Clone Consoles!? - Retro Game & Retro Mini Review", "The Worst SNES Classic Ever 2" and "Worst Nintendo Switch Ever", hearing the Neo Geo intro play wrong.
  • Seeing "www.touchgameplayer.com" added to title screens of games included on many bootleg consoles.
  • Road Fighter. He'll point out that he hates Road Fighter in any video where a hack or clone of it is present.
  • Serves as the point for the "Worst Ever" and "Just Bad Games" series, as the various games and consoles played by Shane and Adam trigger their ire quite often with broken gameplay mechanics, controls, graphics, story or any combination of them.
  • Slot machines in non-Adventure Games, as seen in "Worst Plug & Play Console Ever 2".
    Shane: Slot machines! Slot machines!! I HATE SLOT MACHINES!!!
  • He's also not particularly fond of motion controls, since many times they are implemented poorly.
  • Played for Laughs in the "Superman: Man of Steel" review, as Steel keeps getting increasingly frustrated by Superman calling him his friend. Not that Superman seems to notice.
• Body Horror: The yellow money ghost of the money wasted on Data Design Interactive games, due to the sheer amount of money wasted, is horrifically bloated compared to the others.
  Yellow Money Ghost: Existence is PAIN!
• Catharsis Factorinvoked: Shane and Adam admit that, after half an hour of trying to get past the first interactive moment of Gundam 0079: The War for Earth, seeing the Gundam unleashing its vulcan cannons and blowing away the first Zaku is incredibly satisfying.
• Checkpoint Starvation:
  • Morphman has this during the first section of gameplay, as the save feature doesn't become useful until after a long stretch of gameplay. Death at any time boots you back to the start. Shane and Adam quickly go mad after the fourth time they have to sit through the minute-long intro video before the first "gameplay".
  • Gender Wars lacks any sort of save or checkpoint function in the middle of missions. Compound this with the game's long levels, unfair difficulty, and general badness, and it's easy to see why Shane and Adam did not have fun playing it.
• Christmas Episode: For Christmas of 2021, "Just Bad Games" did an episode on "The Grinch" for the PS1.
• Clip Show: By way of a Top Ten List, Top 10 Worst Games Nobody Played consists of ten previous reviews in full^*Morphman, Spider-Man & The Sinister Six, Gundam 0079: The War for Earth, Superman: Man of Steel, Flatout 3, Batman: Dark Tomorrow, Steel Harbinger, CiD the Dummy, Phix: The Adventure and Batman & Robin, alongside some additional material between entries featuring corrections to the original reviews, pointing out facts the original episodes didn't have time for, and even praising some of the games such as Batman & Robin for its ambition even despite the terrible gameplay.
• Compressed Adaptation: Gundam 0079: The War for Earth suffers heavily from this, with the compression most keenly felt when Char backstabs Garma; Shane and Adam contrast this with all the development and foreshadowing this plot thread got in the original series, and note that the game's version of that event more or less comes out of nowhere.
• Continuity Snarl: As pointed out in the review of ReBoot for PS1, it seems to take place before the beginning of the series (as evidenced by the "Grand Opening" banner on Dot's Diner), yet features characters and enemies that Bob shouldn't have met/encountered yet.
• Damned by Faint Praise:
  • For particularly bad games featured on "Positives", Shane may struggle to come up with four good things for the game, and resort to listing superficial details or even outright flaws as positives.
  • Shane declares that Interstellar Wrestling League is the best game for the HyperScan but considering that it is one of five games that were ever released for the system, that's not much to brag about.
  • Lights Out for the Game.com is considered the best game for the system but not only was it one of twenty games released, it was included with the system meaning it was essentially free.
  • Skate City Heroes has an option to restart challenges quickly and painlessly. Considering the dysfunctional motion controls make failure a near-guarantee for some challenges, it's one of the game's few features they appreciated.
• Deal with the Devil: FlatOut 3: Chaos and Destruction was funded by the Devil... with the $10 he had in his pocket and the condition that the developers put in a level where the player eternally falls down a flight of stairs. He's genuinely impressed that they made the Shovelware title to end all Shovelware titles with it by porting a janky Wii title to PC, saying they "scammed not only me, but every gamer in the whole world."
• Department of Redundancy Department: Mentioned in "Just Bad Games" for C.I.D. the Dummy where it's pointed out that C.I.D. stands for Crash Impact Dummy which means the full title of the game would be "Crash Impact Dummy the Dummy".
• Determinator:
  • Showcased in the "Just Bad Games" series; no matter how difficult, broken or unintuitive a game is, Shane and Adam will finish it no matter what. Especially prominent in games with lots of Trial-and-Error Gameplay (such as Gundam 0079: The War for Earth and American Hero), which usually require a lot of restarting to get to the end.
  • This is taken up a notch with their video on Crash Dummy, where they end up buying it on 3 different consoles after getting stuck because of a bug on the Nintendo Switch release.
  • With Phix: The Adventure they hunted down pixel-sized (yes, they really were that small) collectibles which unlocked three Brutal Bonus Levels which they eventually completed after 317 deaths.
• Dub Name Change: The boys go along with Gundam 0079: The War for Earth calling Bright Noa the more natural-sounding "Noah Bright", though they point out the Romanization of "Zaku" as "Zak" despite the in-game database using the former, and get lots of mileage out of the strange pronunciation of the "Duchy" of Zeon as "J'eanne" or "J'ohn" (...as in toilet).
• Early-Bird Cameo: Before becoming a fixture on "Just Bad Games", Adam's first appearance in Rerez was in Worst Console Ever Made 3, wherein Shane ties him up (with duct tape) and forces him to play the Wireless system with him.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Rerez took on various iterations before settling into its current form. Originally a rather standard game review show, their focus would eventually shift mostly to consoles and other gaming hardware, before returning to game reviews full-time with the "Just Bad Games" series.
  • The first episode of "Just Bad Games", which reviews an obscure game titled Burglar X, is much shorter than most later episodes and has Shane say "It's just bad" at the end in a fairly calm tone, unlike later episodes which have him say "It's. Just. Bad" in an angry manner.
  • The third episode of "Just Bad Games" Pu Li Ru La isn't really a bad game per se; the worst things about it are its overly cluttered scenes and surreal vibes, which is what Shane and Adam discuss. The comments point this out and since then, less emphasis has been put on games with odd visuals.
  • The Money Ghost's first appearance gives him a very high-pitched squeaky voice reminiscent of Stitch. His next appearance would give him the lower-pitched monotone he's more known for.
• Every Episode Ending: The "Just Bad Games" series has Shane boiling down the discussed game as "It's. Just. Bad.".
  • This gets played with in the Tiny Toon Trilogy episode where Adam starts to say the line only for Shane to interrupt him to point out that they covered three games and then to interrupt again to say it himself, citing "It's always my line!"
• Failed Attempt at Drama: Invoked by Adam and Shane where after Taye smoothly picks up his gun in The Quiet Man, the footage cuts back to when he was getting endlessly punched in the groin from the previous playthrough.
• Framing Device: "Worst Racing Games Of All Time" sees a group of Money Ghosts, all related to racing games, sharing their stories on a bus as they get ferried to Purg.
• Fridge Brilliance: Invoked by Shane in his "Positives" video on Superman 64. After struggling to come up with a final positive for the game, he brainstorms the lore behind the game, and concludes that the reason why it's is so bad is because it takes place in Lex Luthor's virtual world, whom would have made it deliberately cumbersome to navigate in order to torture Superman.
• Fridge Logic: Discussed during Gender Wars when a few missions supposedly take place at night... except that the game is supposed to entirely take place in massive underground structures, where visible day/night cycles really wouldn't make sense.
• Funny Background Event: In Left Alive, a molotov is used to take down some enemies but also accidentally lights up their allies. They didn't realize this until the video was being edited.
• Fun with Acronyms: In "Just Bad Games" Hunt Down the Freeman, Adam refers to the game's many unclear objectives as "Simple Hidden Actions that are Relayed Terribly to the player". It is immediately shortened to "S.H.A.R.T. Spot".
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • "Just Bad Games" Charlie's Angels opens by informing the viewer that playing the Nintendo GameCube version of the game without a memory card traps the player in a loop where they will repeat the first level endlessly.
  • In "Just Bad Games" Daikatana, Shane warns against saving the game near an enemy they dub "The Glitch Wizard" not only due to how buggy the fight itself is but because if you do make the mistake of saving too close to the enemy and then defeat it, the game will crash and completely corrupt your save thus forcing you to use an older save if not restart the game entirely.
• Gretzky Has the Ball: The duo admit they don't know much about football in their review of Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football. Their intro segue mixes up a lot of sports terms, e.g. "Let's bat the puck out of the sand zone".
• Groin Attack: A VERY lengthy one happens in The Quiet Man due to a glitch in the game allowing the player to hit an enemy in the beans almost indefinitely. They accentuate it with video of a hot dog getting squished and a squirrel eating nuts.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The Quiet Man throws you into the game without giving the player any indication on how to use the controls. Entering the pause menu shows some controls, but they're all presented in neon-sign styled pictograms without words.
  • The ReBoot game has every level be a Timed Mission. Once you fix all the Tears in a level, the timer disappears. What the game never tells you is that the clock doesn't actually stop - if you don't finish the level before the time limit runs out, you get a "bad" ending to the level, and if you get too many of these, you get the game's bad ending. Which is a lot harder when you can't see the timer. Shane and Adam are dumbfounded when they realize this.
  • The level involving Poison Ivy's lair in Batman & Robin becomes this after a certain point. In one lab, you have to search the shelves for a key item with no indicator that it's there (and without having to do this for any other item before now); then you have to find a tree in the middle of a hedge maze and press a knot on it that unlocks another area. There, you must break things to open another secret room, destroy a wall that has no indication that it's breakable, and enter this super-secret lab to find the key to the end of the level. In other words, you have to deal with a gauntlet of nested secret rooms with neither precedence nor hints.
  • Gundam 0079 has four non-indicative icons on the screen for some keyboard controls. The player must know what the icons do (and use them) before the game points out what they do.
    "If you didn't know what they meant, you wouldn't be able to get to where you are right now!"
  • Hunt Down the Freeman is filled with confusing level design and moments where it becomes difficult to parse what the game wants the player to do next. The duo come up with the phrase "S.H.A.R.T. spot" to describe these.
  • Gender Wars has very large levels with no map and only vague objectives to complete, leading to tons of aimless wandering and backtracking just to figure out how to beat each mission. It also features no tutorials or explanations of its game mechanics besides what's in the manual and reference sheet.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": The Stinger for Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings is an outtake where Shane says "Sure, you do do that-" only for Adam to cut in "You said doo doo!" causing them both to start laughing.
• Hell Is That Noise: Much of the audio during gameplay in Canada Hunt consists of a whirring noise that sounds less like wind and more like a jet engine in the distance. Weirdly enough, this doesn't bother Adam and Shane as much as the strange acoustic music in the menus.
• Here We Go Again!: In the stinger of the DDI Shovelware Special, one of the Money Ghosts asks whatever happened to Data Design Interactive. An announcer explains that the company went under in 2012, but their CEO formed a new company, Carnival Games, to port DDI’s back catalog onto the Nintendo Switch. Cue the DDI Money Ghost pulling a Mr. Creosote.
• Heroic BSoD: In the "Worst Ever" episode on the "Game.com" handheld, when he sees that one of the games for it is a port of "Batman & Robin", he freezes as clips from the "Just Bad Games" episode on it are superimposed over him.
• Hong Kong Dub: Inverted. In Charlie's Angels, Adam and Shane notice that the voice acting isn't properly synced with the voices from the actresses that appear in the film. When they switch to the French audio, the synching fits better. Neko, the developer, is a French company.
• Hurricane of Puns: Just before starting up Phix: The Adventure:
  Adam: SOUTH's like we're AMPED to POSITIVELY CHARGE the ATTRACT mode and venture NORTH with Phix: The Adventure!
  Shane: Puns are fun!
• Ice-Cream Koan: "Be Unique Yourself, Enjoy Every Moment", the tagline of a DVD/EVD player similar to what Soulja Boy tried to sell as the SouljaGame Portable Screen. To be fair, this is likely a "Blind Idiot" Translation.
  Shane: What does that even mean?
• Invisible Anatomy: In a few episodes of "Just Bad Games", Money Ghosts can be seen holding objects despite their lack of arms.
• I Was Just Joking: At the end of Left Alive, Adam wonders why one of the villains isn't dead and asks if he's a robot or something, and Shane confirms it with an unimpressed tone with the very next scene, much to Adam’s annoyance.
• Just Eat Gilligan: In Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, there is a moment in the game's story where the antagonists are holding Indy hostage at gunpoint unless he hands over the treasure that they're looking for... even though Indy not only doesn't have said treasure, it's right next to them in the box of cannonballs in plain sight. Needless to say, Shane and Adam are very quick to point out that all they need to do is just look to their left and they'll solve the problem.
• Large Ham: Both Shane and Adam tend to have somewhat intense reactions when finding out or explaining flaws in the games they cover. They also make a lot of silly voices.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • In "Just Bad Games" Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, Adam and Shane note that the dialogue of an NPC in San Tomanicus sounds like something the developers snuck in to vent their frustrations at the game. ("...ran out of time", "released before he should have.", "The process was incredibly rushed.")
  • Occurs again in the Balan Wonderworld review when Shane and Adam point out that the protagonists are nothing more than a simple Palette Swap of the same two models.
    Money Ghost: "Repeating the same assets over and over and just changing the color?" (multiplies) "Who would do that?"
• Leave the Camera Running: This is one of the main complaints Shane and Adam have about Morphman; as it was released in the early days of CD-ROM games, the developers decided to show off their then-new 3D tech by including painfully long stretches of Morphman just moving around from place to place, to the point the only gameplay is clicking buttons that randomly pop up under the game window.
• Machinima: Often used in the "Just Bad Games" series of videos where the actions of game characters reflect confusion or frustration of the players.
• Moon Logic Puzzle: Said verbatim when describing the ridiculous puzzles in Tiny Toon Adventures: Plucky's Big Adventure.
• invokedNausea Fuel: The boys have this reaction to a particularly off-colour gag in Gender Wars. You can find a snowman in the female base's cloning lab, an area that is kept at a very low temperature. Cute... until you realize that it's still nowhere near cold enough for actual snow, especially not outside. Plenty of harvested white fluids, though!
• Never Needs Sharpening: Sometimes, flaws are twisted as positives in "Positives", such as the ability to skip a third of the game in Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, or the overall hilarity of Ride to Hell: Retribution.
• Never Trust a Title: Despite being called Canada Hunt, most of the locations in the game are based in the United States. The map shown in the background of the main menu even showcases the Gulf of Mexico.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics:
  • As Shane realizes, almost literally every asset in Flatout 3 is lifted from previous games by the developer, Team6. This includes essentially porting entire games from their back catalog into Flatout 3 as separate modes (for example, "Speed" mode is basically a stripped-down redo of their F1 game Speed). The game is essentially the highest-prestige asset flip ever made.
  • In Popeye, Shane and Adam discover that all the assets are from pre-rendered model packs that one can easily buy online, including the model for Popeye himself!
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Flatout 3 and its completely unnecessary character selection screen is loaded with this. There are blatant parodies of Uwe Boll, Vin Diesel, 50 Cent, and Ron Jeremy. (There's also "Silen Einnor", whose named when flipped is "Ronnie Nelis", owner of the company that made the game. Don't think Shane and Adam let that go unmocked.)
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • Whenever they want to indicate that the audio you hear is the in game audio, they put one of these up just so you don't think it's the editors making a joke.
  • When playing Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, after a botched quick time event that cuts immediately to a loading screen, they have to clarify that they weren't doing a Manipulative Jump Cut to make the game seem worse than it already is.^note During this moment, Shane and Adam point out that the game doesn't have any death scenes when you failed, meaning there is no way to understand why and/or how you failed in certain segment.
  • When playing Rogue Warrior, the game crashes numerous times. They also show that the bullet holes in the game fade away after a time. They play Fallout 3 to show how the bullet holes are better in that game. The game crashes and the "Stopped Working" window pops up with this to say:
    Fallout 3 Crash Window: You might think this is a joke and it didn't happen but it totally did. Fallout 3 crashed off a fresh install using the latest version fresh from Steam.
    Shane: Oh wait, Fallout 3 just crashed.
    Adam: That's, uh... unfortunate?
    Shane: Enough.
  • In Batman & Robin they have to verbally state that they did not edit what Batman says when you fire up "Bat-Galaga".
    Batman: I want my medication.
  • In "You Don't Know Atari!" episode, when going over the brief history of various game companies and their origins, they mentioned Taito got its start as the first domestic producer of vodka in Japan, complete with a brief visual disclaimer stating it was a fact.
  • When playing a particularly frustrating boss fight in Skate City Heroes, text reveals that a member of the Rerez team broke into tears at one point, immediately followed by the words "No joke."
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: Shane and Adam actually like the Tutes in Wii Music, as confused as they were about them.
• Overly Long Gag: Shane and Adam's separate demonstrations of the fact that Wii Music completely lacks any rules or penalties for players, beginning with Adam going through a playthrough of "Daydream Believer" by holding one note on tubas for 40 seconds straight. Later, Shane passes one of the instrument "tutorials" by playing absolutely nothing, complete with extended silence.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: His "worst console" reviews get more specific as time goes on. First he reviews the worst console ever, then he reviews the worst Plug N Play Game console, the worst Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles console, the worst Super Nintendo Entertainment System bootleg console, the worst driving console, and then the worst Soulja Boy consoles.
• Pac Man Fever: The topic of "Reel Gaming", where Shane discusses select instances of this trope and how accurate (or inacurate) they are to real life, using examples from various movies and TV series.
• Pixel Hunt: Phix: The Adventure puts a literal spin on pixel-hunting: you have to find incredibly tiny, bouncing white specks in each level to tick that percentage counter to 100. Shane and Adam realize that something's up when they clear the first world and see that the completion percentage is still ridiculously low; once they figured out that those bouncing pixels weren't a display error but a collectible, they reviewed the footage for the first world and discovered that they'd walked right past its white specks eleven times (at one point collecting one by complete accident), completely unaware. A later video points out that while the collectibles were hard enough to spot on modern day monitors, with lower resolution CRT TVs that were common when the game was released, they would've been essentially invisible.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
  • Inverted in Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis, they say that everyone knows the basic stories of Batman and Superman but the game assumes that people know the gist of Aquaman as well.
  • Similarly with Fast & Furious Crossroads as none of the characters from the films are explained to the players.
• Porting Disaster: invoked Skate City Heroes isn't a particularly great game to begin with, but the core reason the game appeared on Just Bad Games to begin with is because the Wii port's (which Shane and Adam played) poorly implemented motion controls made it much clunkier and harder to play than on the original PS2 release. They even go as far as to recommend the original PS2 version to those who want to experience the game for themselves.
• Production Foreshadowing: The Stinger for "Just Bad Games" Chicken Blaster, uploaded on September 23rd, 2019, has a Money Ghost mention that he's in purgatory for a game about dogs playing football. That game, Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football, would not be covered until over a year later on October 9th, 2020.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Every episode of "Just Bad Games" ends with Shane saying "It's... just... bad!"
• Recycled Animation: The Money Ghost going "Is that Peepee?" from Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football is recycled for the review of Spider-Man And the Sinister Six, made especially noticeable by the Money Ghost wearing a referee outfit, which doesn't make sense in the latter game. Adam even lampshades this when the two talk about the animation of the game.
• Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud: There is one line of "dialogue" in Morphman that just says "Acts scared," but it looks no different from any other line of dialogue in the game, so Shane and Adam decide to voice it anyway like the character is actually saying it.
• Running Gag: There are various recurring gags in "Just Bad Games" series.
  • "The Ghost of the Money You Wasted on [Insert Game Name Here]/This Terrible Game", also simply kown as The Money Ghost.
  • In V.I.P., anytime the titular acronym comes up, what the acronym stands for changes every time.
  • There are several moments in the Hercules The Legendary Journeys. Including rejecting the usage of Rumble Pak every time they're trying to save or the sexy disco glide for Hercules' walk animation or going back to the first town and always mentioning that the Cyclops boss got unceremoniously killed via cutscene.
  • After finding out the singer from The Quiet Man is named Lala, everytime Adam or Shane say her name a clip is shown of an in-game character saying it too.
  • Throughout the Morphman review, penises are only ever called "canards" (after the rather unfortunately-placed stabilizer fin of the same name on a jet).
  • After the tutorial of Hunt Down the Freeman saw the player character being called "Dirtbag" by a Drill Sergeant Nasty the remainder of the review finds ways to slip it in even after his name is revealed to be Mitchell.
  • Ever since the Rogue Warrior review, the series uses the sound of a bleating goat for Sound-Effect Bleep moments. This is in reference to an early cuss from Demo Dick, where he describes a mission as "a total goat-fuck".
  • Adam never gets to say the full "It's. Just. Bad." line. Started with the "Bad Games" series, the joke gets used in the "Worst Ever" videos too.
• Sampling: The Charlie's Angels review ends with them using sound effects from the game to remake the intro to "Blue Monday".
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Shane does this a lot in his "Worst Ever" series of videos.
  • Shane and Adam suffer this during the "Batman & Robin" episode of the "Just Bad Games" series, with them slowly going mad as they play it, with Adam letting out a Big "NO!" of horror after Shane reveals they've got more of the game to play when he thinks it's over.
  • There are moments of this in "Just Bad Games" Hercules: the Legendary Journeys due to having to replay sections of the game over and over again because the game doesn't auto save and a platforming section where attempts using the standard N64 controller somehow kept failing only for a third-party controller accomplish it on the first try.
• Save Scumming: Discussed in "Just Bad Games" Batman & Robin as a workaround for the frustrating and tedious clue hunting gameplay: save the game, wait for the crime to occur, see where the crime is happening on the map, load up the earlier save and travel to the location ahead of time.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Attempted by Adam during "Just Bad Games" Daikatana after yet another scene of the AI partners doing something stupid and/or dying, in this case Superfly just standing there and letting a zombie kill him.
  • The Money Ghost's response to C.I.D. the Dummy is to immediately flee.
  • Ditto when found by Duke in an outhouse in Duke Nukem Forever.
• Seppuku: Subverted in Phix: The Adventure. After defeating Señor Shogun, the Final Boss, he offers to apologize and raises his blade up as if he was going to kill himself. Shane and Adam panic for a moment but are relieved when said boss doesn't kill himself over the issue.
• Serial Escalation: To Shane and Adam's mounting horror, Flatout 3: Chaos and Destruction has a worse Steam rating than the majority of games they've reviewed - worse than Fast & Furious Crossroads, Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football, The Quiet Man, Left Alive, Rogue Warrior, and even Daikatana...
• The Stinger: Some "Just Bad Games" videos will have a blooper or humorous clip after the outro.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product:
  • The primary focus of the "The Worst Ever" series, with some exceptions.
  • Also, the game CID the Dummy and its follow up/remake (?) Crash Dummy in comparison to Mega Man (Classic).
  • Left Alive takes cues from the Metal Gear Solid series, with Yoji Shinkawa working on parts of the art style.
  • Skate City Heroes borrows elements from several games, including Jet Set Radio and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and doesn't do any of them well in the slightest.
• Shown Their Work: Shane and Adam are very good at doing thorough research before covering a game, and often commit to knowing as much as they realistically can and even cover details many other reviewers would miss or not even bother with. A few examples that come to mind:
  • In the Tiny Toon Adventures PS1 trilogy, they made a point to mention The Great Beanstalk was actually a Reformulated Game of the PC game Buster and the Beanstalk, a fact many other reviewers would never think to cover and is very easy to overlook. They also ensured they were familiar with the differences between the two games as well, which just further emphasizes how wrong the PS1 game got it.
  • For FlatOut 3, they could have easily just covered the game as its own thing and called it a day. But they took it one step further and covered all the games the developer had made before, as a brilliant setup for the fact that the game is full of lazy asset flipping.
  • Phix: The Adventure was so obscure and little-known that there was virtually no documentation of the game anywhere on the Internet, or even any game guides. This is impressive when you consider one of the main collectible items in the game is a Guide Dang It! to begin with (see Pixel Hunt). They still finished the game top to bottom, even the egregious Brutal Bonus Levels (which is saying something considering this is a Nintendo Hard game where all the difficulty is of the fake variety).
  • While Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing being in the "Worst Racing Games Ever" list was a Foregone Conclusion, they take it a step further by covering its much more obscure sequel Midnight Race Club: Supercharged!, which is more or less the same game with different vehicles.
  • When talking about the Nokia N-Gage, they could've just talked about the usual reasons for its failure and called it good, but they took it one step further by showing old E3 footage from before the system's release that, among other things, showed the games running worse than they did on the final product. They even noted that while many ads for gaming products would usually show the game or product looking better than it actually does, Nokia did the exact opposite, and showed journalists and anyone else who got an early look at the system an inferior product. They went on to say that while it might've still had a tough time in the market, since it already had stiff competition, and the other options for many of its games were cheaper at the time, had Nokia not screwed up on this crucial moment to sell their system, it might've had more of a fighting chance.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Covered some of the consoles that Soulja Boy was selling under the "SouljaGame" brand.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: In Rogue Warrior, Dick Marcinko's first gameplay dialogue has him saying "It's a total goat fuck". Due to the preceding animal name, the curse word and all other swears are replaced with goat bleatings aside from an instance of "bullshit" which uses a cow moo instead. This eventually becomes a mainstay whenever a character, or the duo, curse in subsequent reviews.
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: For some inexplicable reason, the SX-86 Mini Games Console Entertainment System includes an extremely obscure horror sound novel called Ugetsu Kitan. As the game is in Japanese, Shane can understand precisely none of the dialogue, leaving him with out-of-context eerie imagery such as a mirror with an image of a girl with Prophet Eyes randomly shattering, a leap off a balcony into a bizarre realm with a weird tent, and a trip through a bamboo forest that is frequently interrupted by the sudden appearance of a random Youkai accompanied by creepy sounds.
  Shane: Uh... wah! What even is that?!
• Take a Third Option: In the Fast & Furious Crossroads video, they say that driving games often fall into either Arcade Style like Mario Kart or Simulation like Forza. The F&F game... does neither.
• Take That!: When summarizing the Gundam franchise, screenshots of various shows in the franchise are shown to demonstrate its size and length. The screenshot for Gundam SEED Destiny is scribbled out with text saying "Don't watch this one."
• Tempting Fate: When first starting up Phix: the Adventure, Shane and Adam decide to skip the tutorial and play the adventure mode, saying that they can learn as they play. However, due to Phix's magnetism mechanic…
  Shane and Adam: (In unison) Story mode! Stage 1!
  (Cue Death Montage)
  Shane and Adam: (Flatly in unison) …Training mode. Stage 1.
• The Problem with Licensed Gamesinvoked: Most of the games in the "Just Bad Games" series, some of it also being Shovelware.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: In American Hero, all the choices lead to an unclear "Left/Right" maze and result in the game ending after too many mess ups. If you let the game run on the first choice, a random character will give you the correct combination of directions. However, the duo take it as the developers realizing this maze was going to be a problem and call them out for giving them a third choice in such an oblique way.
  • By the end, however, they ended up doing this for American Hero as a whole, praising the work that remaster developers Empty Clip Studios put into rescuing the game from oblivion and admitting that, despite its issues, it falls closer to the "good end" of the bad games spectrum.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: The "director" of Ride To Hell: Retribution as he smacks a Barbie and Ken doll together, after being asked how to incorporate sex scenes into the game.
• Title Drop:
  • "Let's look at the Positives/Negatives".
  • Also, "Hot Take!"
  • "IT'S. JUST. BAD!"
• Toilet Humor: Expect at least one fart joke per Just Bad Games episode.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay:
  • As emphasized early on in the review, Gundam 0079: The War for Earth is... more than a little obtuse. To wit: it takes Shane and Adam over half an hour just to puzzle out what the game expects them to do in the first minute of gameplay.
  • Morphman is even worse about this. While Gundam 0079 at least explains what the buttons do (albeit after the first time you have to use them), Morphman uses context-sensitive buttons that are never labeled or explained, at least one of which will get you killed each time, and only gives you a seconds-long window to press one before you automatically die.
  • American Hero is pretty merciless, too; in addition to its many surprise instant deaths, you can miss out on huge chunks of the plot without knowing it (as the boys learned the hard way).
• Uncertain Audienceinvoked: Their conclusion of the Tiny Toons games for PlayStation, as the show was canceled by the time the games came out and the original demographic had aged to their twenties.
• Urine Trouble: Shane cracks some jokes regarding the yellow-colored liquid pools in the factory stage of Skate City Heroes.
  Shane: (Muttering) Trying to think of a way to work "urine" in there. (Speaking normally) You're in for a challenge!
• Video Game Demake: Their realization about Crash Dummy. It's a 2D demake of the 3D game CID The Dummy for iOS that was ported to Nintendo Switch, PC and the PS4.
• Violation of Common Sense: A couple stages in Crash Dummy require you to do some rather nonsensical things in order to progress. During a Lethal Lava Land stage, you have to jump directly into lava at a dead end in order to finish, and the final stage requires you to jump over a gateway that sends you down a dead end, the former of which really riles up the two.
  Shane: That actually WORKED?!
  Adam: It's… crazy! There's no way anyone thought this was okay! It's just totally counterintuitive to every game design principle you'd learn if you played any game ever made!
• Vocal Dissonance:
  • As the titular character of Morphman lacks a voice (despite games of the same software being able to have voice acting), they decide to give the muscular powerful-looking superhero a high-pitched clown voice.
  • Similarly, the bosses in Phix: the Adventure have very unfitting voices, such as Calimonstro (a Giant Squid) having a Simpleton Voice, Rollin' Rocko (a Killer Robot) having a southern accent, and Señor Shogun (a massive, imposing shogun) having Morphman's clown voice.
• Voodoo Shark: The Quiet Man has its plot holes built into the story due to its cutscenes being completely silent. When they go through the New Game Plus that allows for the dialogue to be turned on, they find that its attempts to clarify things actually make things more confusing. Near the end of the video, Shane comes up with a solution for at least some of them: make Lala Robert's daughter and Dane's sister, with Adam agreeing that'd explain both her inexplicable resemblance to Lorraine and why "her father and brother" go to extreme lengths to protect her.
• Waggle: Invoked and discussed at length in the "Just Bad Games" episode on Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, which uses motion controls for absolutely every single action imaginable, even the most menial and basic of ones much to the duo's irritation.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In Batman & Robin both Shane and Adam chastise the actions of Batman stealing a diamond from a jewelry store as part of an objective and argue with him when he fruitlessly tries to defend his actions. He gets vindicated when the duo get confused during a similar event in Fast & Furious Crossroads where Roman steals one of the terrorist group's bombs.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Indy's famous phobia is replaced with motion controls when reviewing Staff of Kings.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: In FlatOut 3, they find that the best way to win at the demolition derby mode is to simply not touch the controller, thanks to a invoked Good Bad Bug where the game misattributes damage being done to you as damage inflicted on opponents.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: The blue Money Ghost utters this upon learning the makers of Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football were planning on making a dino-dog football VR game.
  Money Ghost: You've got to be f*cking kidding me.

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