YMMV / Jimquisition

• Anvilicious: Their ongoing attempts to call out & attack the arch-capitalism used by the industry in order to siphon as much profit as possible and their justifications for doing so, which are not to the benefit of the players or the quality of the games.
• Awesome Ego: While there are people who decry Jim for being an egotist (despite that being the whole point of the joke) or more seriously, declare they use their ego to hide their own bias and political agenda behind a shield from criticism, there are plenty of people out there who, when Jim goes into ego mode, agree with them.
  • It helps that their Large Ham really kicks into overdrive when the people they're dealing with have even smaller names, yet even bigger egos than theirs, like virtually unknown indie devs who release shit onto Steam and try to smother any attempt at criticism by waving copyright strikes and censoring comments left and right. Jim always notes that this absolutely never works... before proceeding to utterly rip those devs to shreds by explaining that all they succeed in doing is making them more famous, and that they will forever be known as nothing but "that one studio that tried and failed to take on Jim Fucking Sterling, Son".
    ''When people say the name "Jim Sterling", they think of Jim Sterling. When people say the name of Kobra Studio, they think... of Jim Sterling, temporarily, before they turn away from you, and cast their eyes up to the heavens, where they will stare gratefully into the cosmos, and they will all, in unison, in grateful unison, they will all thank God for me.
• Awesome Music: The show's theme song Born Depressed by Drill Queen.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Near the end of Jim's video on episodic games the video was repeatedly interrupted mid-sentence by clips from Rednex's 'Old Pop in an Oak'. Weird as this was, it served to illustrate their point, since what they were actually talking about was how crudely breaking a game up into smaller parts when it wasn't designed to be experienced that way only served to disrupt the immersion and take players out of the experience.
  • Another one occurs in Look After Your Workers or Get Out of Video Games; Jim goes on a rant about how companies finding themselves in the position of growing so quickly that they can't sustain themselves need to get out of that position, cutting themself off with "And another thing"....before wagging their finger to the tune of Annoying Dog Appears. For almost an entire minute.
• Broken Base:
  • Jim's constant coverage of "first person survival horror games on Steam" divided their fans on whether or not Jim should keep covering those games because of how hilariously bad and broken they are or if they should stop doing them so that they can do something different for the channel. Jim did address the issue and promised they would try to cut back on the survival horror games a bit. Nowadays, they still do this type of game, but mocks both them and themself by admitting it at the start of each one.
  • Their Jimquisition episode on Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 stirred up some strong emotions: essentially, they claim in the video that they created an amazing Jimquisition episode on the controversy behind the game not seeing import^note Ostensibly, according to some sources, because of fears on the part of Koei Tecmo potentially damaging feminist outcry if it was released to the American market. They claim that the episode "said everything you wanted [them] to say," but that a shadowy conspiracy of "SJWs" boycotted and censored it off the net. Jim goes on to refuse to provide any details ("Don't think critically about this at all! Just take my vague word for it!") but insists that it happened and that the best way to fight the power, as it were, is to spend lots of money buying things from them. The situation is an obvious satirical metaphor for the game itself, mocking both the publisher and games press for what they perceived as drumming up sales and spite-buys by inventing a previously-nonexistent controversy out of whole cloth. They also made fun of elements of the gaming community for being easily goaded into giving Koei Tecmo free publicity for a game none of them personally wanted or cared about, only doing what they did since they thought it might be censored. There are those who liked the joke, those who wished they had cut the joke out partway through, either because it was wearing thin or to actually explain the situation (which hasn't been as well-publicized as, say, the "Fake Gamer Girl" issue of sarcastic episodes' past), those who simply disagreed, finding the hypothesis they defended to be more nonsensical than the one they made the video to deride, and those who were out-and-out angry with Jim for not taking their side on the issue of perceived censorship.
  • Their video on the Steam Greenlight trailer for a game called "Tranny Gladiators" [sic], in which they censored the title so it appeared as "Tr*nny" instead and simply referred to it as "T-slur gladiators" when talking. The issue in this case was less over the game, which many people agreed was terrible, and more over whether or not Jim was right to censor. For the record, the developers would go on to publicly apologize after finding out that the offending word was a slur.
  • The Jimquisition episode "Why It’s Morally Okay To Pirate All Of Nintendo’s Games" stirred up quite the controversy among fans. Jim is completely fed up with Nintendo's totalitarian approach to copyright and fair use, and they tell their fans sarcastically to go and pirate Nintendo's games because if Nintendo can't be bothered to follow the law, why should the fans? Those siding with Jim believed they are 100% correct and have no sympathy for Nintendo since the company screws everyone else over. Those that disagreed with Jim complain that their position is hypocritical and petty, and that their "Just Joking" Justification is using sarcasm as a thinly veiled attempt to tell people to go pirate Nintendo's games. This, combined with the Zelda review, have caused some to label them as anti-Nintendo. This has of course led to arguments if they really are such, and further from there if them being so is justified or not.
  • Jim's review of the game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice became this because Jim ran into a problem that rendered the game Unintentionally Unwinnable after several hours of gameplay. They gave it a 1/10 and their usual dose of vitriol for having that game-breaking flaw, even though they had considered it worthy of a 7 or 8 before then (high praise from them) and had a lot of good things to say about it. What really broke the base was that they later realized that this review was premature and that their review was probably unfair, and they took it down and recorded a new review. This has led to a few opinions - either Jim's earlier review was perfectly justified because the game did render itself unwinnable and that could have happened to anyone else, their review was far too harsh and they threw a huge and unprofessional temper tantrum, or that they should have taken a middle ground, praising what it did well but deducting a few points due to the bug they encountered. For the record, they eventually went with the latter option... and now occasionally mocks the drama of their earlier review.
  • Jim's reaction to Valve's content policy in 2018^note Allowing anything other than illegal content or blatant trolling gathered a fair amount of backlash. Jim began the video by showing a game called AIDS Simulator, declaring that Valve was endorsing this game because they had announced that they would only block illegal content from their store. A decent number of Jim's fans naturally agreed with Jim's long-held and well-known belief that Steam needed curation. Others, however, felt that this was hypocritical, as Jim had already complained about Steam removing several visual novels which were (accurately or otherwise) declared pornographic — the backlash from this event is what lead to Valve's policy. To make matters worse, AIDS Simulator actually did violate Steam's policy (as it was straight-up trolling), and its removal shortly after Jim's video was released made their omission of "straight-up trolling" as a reason for removal far more noticeable.
  • The commercial edits that take classic commercials and remix them into saying various, usually naughty things, that became a main gag of the channel towards the end of the 2010s and start of the 2020s. Fondly liked by the Twitch streaming viewership as part of the show's character, YouTube fans tend to find them instead tedious, unfunny, and a poor replacement for earlier gag and joke skits.
  • Jim’s decision to disavow and condemn the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise following the revelations that its creator, Scott Cawthon, donated $42,000 to Republican Candidates. Supporters of Jim’s decision feel that Jim is right to criticize Scott for using his profits to prop up candidates with Anti-LGBTQ agendas, with it being understandable and justified to retract any prior praise of it when considering what its profits are being used to promote. Detractors, however, argue that Scott is entitled to use the money he earns in any way he desires and find Jim demonizing Cawthon’s actions to be rather callous as Scott being a Republican was an Open Secret, with Jim ignoring the fact Scott also donated $50,000 to the Trevor Project, making for a net gain of $8,000 to LGBTQ individuals. There’s also a third camp who agrees with Jim’s decision to boycott the FNAF franchise but takes issue with Jim spewing vitriolic hatred towards Scott. This camp argues harrasing Scott while acting passive to the people who harassed Scott’s family makes Jim just as guilty as that group.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Their mocking pronunciation of phrases like "Triple A" and "live services" will stick in your head after you've heard it.
• Discredited Meme: By their own admission, they felt that "Ubisoft Iconic" had lost its bite after Ubisoft itself poked fun at it during the lead-up to E3 2017.
• Don't Shoot the Message:
  • Some of Jim's detractors feel this way about them. They agree with their complaints about video game companies engaging in anti-consumer practices and appreciate that they are bringing awareness to these issues... but feel that their videos, while informative, do little to actually help fix the issues faced in the gaming community, especially with Jim's condescending attitude and lack of constructive criticism. Additional criticism of their content is that Jim pads their videos out by rehashing the same core points that had already been covered in the first ninety seconds of their videos, creating an Anvilicious tone, or that the videos don't offer much new for people already invested and informed in gaming issues, causing Jim's videos to feel like cases of preaching to the choir.
  • The (in)famous Perfect Pasta Sauce episode is easy to dismiss as "food comparison", but that comparison there serves a practical purpose of a marketing example and is part of the message: trying to chase after a target group that already has their perfect product of choice is pointless, while there is potential to corner the parts of the market that were left dormant in the chase after the most trendy thing. Also, regardless of what your company is producing, conducting actual marketing research is far more viable to give results than merely looking at what other companies are doing or trying to get into a competition in an already oversaturated market.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • After a single appearance in the 2016 game awards episode, the Cornflakes Homonculus garnered unexpected success and Jim has stated they already plan to do more with the character.
  • Duke Amiel Du H'ardcore became really popular due to his "elite gamer" attitude and hilarious skits mocking said elitist gamers, to the point where he got a proper spin-off show starting on September 21, 2017 called Commentocracy and even a spin-off video game in the works!
• Fanon: Scott Cawthon has stated that he got the inspiration for Five Nights at Freddy's from a reviewer who criticized the Unintentional Uncanny Valley effect that Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. had. Seeing as the most viewed video of Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. was done by Jim, many fans began to assume that Jim was the one responsible for it all. Cawthon has neither confirmed nor denied this, but Jim addressed this in an episode in November 2016. They mostly confirmed the story, right up to saying that they had an amiable conversation with Cawthon on the subject. In the episode, Jim said that even though the Five Nights games aren't their cup of tea, they hold Cawthon as a shining example of how to positively react to criticism.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Primarily with Laura and Gavin, thanks to Jim sharing a podcast with them.
  • While there are some political differences between Jim's fans and those of The Cynical Brit, the two do have a reasonable degree of overlap and fans do seem to appreciate the two sticking up for one another.
  • This is also the case with SidAlpha, a smaller YouTube content creator who first gained an audience by reviewing Digital Homicide's games after Jim was sued by them. Said fans stuck around, and in early 2017 they brought Sid's being DMCA'd by Dentola Studios to Jim's attention, resulting in a massive Colbert Bump for Sid when Jim made a video on the matter. Not long after that, a second DMCA against Sid by the developer of Fur Fun was acknowledged by Jim again, resulting in another influx of subscribers.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Jim was despised by The Escapist community at first, who found their persona too abrasive and arrogant. Once Jim ramped up the arrogance to comic degrees and retooled their performance to include more structured discussion, the community warmed to them and many comments describe how they went from hating to loving the show.
  • This is also a bit ironic, especially since they weren't the only abrasive arrogant Brit on the Escapist.
  • To avoid potential conflicts of interest, they decided to go fully independent, only taking money from their Patreon and refusing to advertise on their site.
  • Jim grew a reputation that had them branded as someone who would come down hard on shitty video games and most of Jim's audience watched the,m just for that alone. Other viewers, while liking Jim's Caustic Critic persona, noted that they were probably being a little too rough on indie developers.^note Jim would also make fun of the developers directly as they did with Digital Homicide and Kobra Studios, though they seems to have mostly backed off from doing such things towards indie developers after the lawsuit filed against them by Digital Homicide. Jim would start to ease up on their abrasiveness and offer suggestions to improve the game and they also started a mini-series that shows them genuinely enjoying a game and recommending it to others. If a game is god awful, they’ll still tear it to shreds. Jim has also taken a stance against harassment in general and knows their words can be quite influential. In the FucKonami News segment during the "Genitals" episode, Jim tells everyone that general horsing around is fine, but directly attacking people in the industry is never okay.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Jim's trip to Valve and the subsequent video on it gradually became this for a number of reasons:
    • Valve's justification for no content-control was that Visual Novels were such an unexpected success, and that they wanted to be "surprised" by other unexpected successes - in 2018, Valve wound up (temporarily) removing a large number of these games after they were falsely accused of being pornographic, leading some of Jim's viewers to wonder why it was so easy for visual novels to get removed, but so hard for asset-flips to get the same treatment.
    • Valve claimed that the launch of Steam Direct would result in "less but better games" being released. This prediction did not come true, as Jim naturally pointed out.
  • Jim's insistence on repercussions for people who abused the DMCA became harsh when PewDiePie had a DMCA filed against their Fire Watch video, after he said a racial slur in an unrelated video years later. Jim almost completely ignored the DMCA and instead claimed PewDiePie should have had worse repercussions.
  • In a video discussing poorly done ports to PC in 2013, Jim referred to Durante, the modder that corrected many of the flaws with the PC port of Dark Souls, as the "Batman of PC gaming." Fast forward two years later to 2015, and Batman: Arkham Knight becomes one of the most notorious PC Porting Disasters of all time, making Jim's offhand snarky comment into an uncanny prediction.
  • By Jim's own admission, their frequent portrayal of Ubisoft as incompetent bumbling losers who can't do anything right and shouldn't be taken seriously, complete with the Catchphrase "Oh, Ubisoft!" delivered in a patronizing tone aged poorly with the revelation that the company was allegedly keeping known sex offenders on the payroll and in positions of power while deliberately allowing them to prey on employees due to their close relationship with its CEO.
  • Similarly Jim's old catchphrase when talking about Konami, "Because Konami is Konami and Konami is the worst" has, by their own admission, lost all meaning now that we know multiple companies engaged in similar or worse abuse practices to Konami and many of them also engaged in sexual abuse on top of that.
  • In September of 2013, they sang the praises of PAYDAY 2 as a game that was able to succeed with a sensible budget, a focus on gameplay over graphics, and not going silly with marketing. All of this praise now stings a bit to watch after they had to make a Jimquisition episode in 2015 slamming Overkill over its addition of pay-to-win microtransactions and its abundance of DLC. Thankfully, this situation got better in 2016, when the devs purchased full ownership of the game from the former producer, and the first thing that they did was remove the microtransactions. Jim was very pleased when they heard the news.
  • In their first Jimquisition on Digital Homicide, Jim practically laughed off the idea that the brothers would actually try and sue them. Fastforward to March 2016 (roughly a year and a half later) and the duo actually attempted this, resulting in almost an entire year of emotional stress and legal problems for Jim among other things.
  • In their Dungeons of Kragmor video, Jim ends it by giving Digital Homicide genuine praise at the fact that the studio is actually trying to make a decent game. Even though they said it wasn't perfect, they still enjoyed everything the game had to offer. Skip to two months later where Digital Homicide decided to file a lawsuit against Jim, thus nullifying said praise about the company. Jump a few more months into 2016, and now Steam has taken down every single Digital Homicide game, including Dungeons of Kragmor, thus eradicating any tiny chance Digital Homicide had of making a somewhat okay game and recovering from their Slaughtering Grounds controversy.
  • They view their initial shtick of playing an over-the-top fascist dictator as having become this due to the political climate that emerged in 2016, causing them to change it to a carnival showperson in 2017.
  • The amicable comments Jim gave circa 2016 to Scott Cawthon for his development of Five Nights at Freddy's based on prior criticism for his style (including that of Jim themself) became this after it was revealed that Scott made monetary donations to Republican political groups, including those against LGBTQIA+ communities. Jim wasted no time denouncing that he "absolutely sucks" for this, with all prior respect for him evaporated.
  • Many jokes throughout the channel's lifespan have revolved around Jim being a terrible, demanding, borderline abusive boss to their employees, including for one long stretch regularly shouting bizarre demands at their editor Justin McDaniel. All of the above and especially the latter are significantly more uncomfortable in light of the messy and public dissolution of their professional partnership, allegedly in part because of Justin accusing them of being a terrible and demanding boss.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "Defending Call Of Duty", they plays a role as a mocking art critic, asking, "Where's the tutorial that teaches you the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do?". They pretty much preemptively summed up a key element of the central premise of Antichamber.
  • Their claim that Hyrule Warriors would be able to have ridiculous characters like "the bug princess from Twilight Princess" was months before Agitha, Princess of Bugs, was actually announced as a playable character for the game. They also claimed that it was odd that a new console generation was being released without a remake of Resident Evil, a few days before Capcom announced Resident Evil HD Remaster. Finally, Jim claimed that Electronic Arts would start taking their demos off of online stores and put the demos just on their own service, which EA did forty-seven minutes after the episode aired. They are now a self-proclaimed prophet of the gaming industry after these three unlikely claims have been made fact.
  • In their "Best of Steam Greenlight Trailers" on Chipper & Sons Lumber Co., they commented on the Unintentional Uncanny Valley of some of the characters. While their video, unfortunately, sank the developer of the game into a deep depression and made the dev even consider suicide, it also inspired the developer to create a survival horror game. That developer's name is Scott Cawthon, and the game he made based on that review is Five Nights at Freddy's, one of the most successful indie franchises in the world.
  • In Jim's video discussing paid mods on Steam, they criticize the concept, stating how it would become like Steam's Greenlight service where consumers would get hit with crappy, buggy, and stolen content and be charged for it. Only several hours went by after the video was posted when Valve then announced that they would no longer use the paid mods model. They released a second episode that week as an apology.
  • One Jimquisition episode, Vertigo, is about various limiting conventions on playable female characters in video games (attractiveness, righteousness, stereotypically feminine motivations/goals, and dependence on male characters) that, to their knowledge, are only all simultaneously defied by one female character, Vertigo, a psychotic giant venomous dinosaur from Primal Rage. About three months later, Invisible, Inc. comes out, a game focusing on the titular organization whose leader, Central, also defies all of these restrictions.
  • In Jim's Jimquisition episode "The Slaughtering Grounds: A Steam Meltdown Saga", they mention that the developers behind The Slaughtering Grounds threatened to sue them for slander unless they apologized. The developers never bothered to follow through and this was in December 2014. Fast forward to March 2016 when the developers filed a lawsuit against Jim for damages, loss of business, pain and suffering, and demanded that they make an apology video for the next 5 years. In the end, the developers lost the lawsuit after their attempt to subpoena Valve for the details of several anonymous Steam users caused Valve to pull their entire library from Steam for their obviously hostile attitude. Digital Homicide have not developed any games ever since. And they still haven't received an apology!
  • In SO, THAT FACEBOOK AND OCULUS RIFT THING..., Jim mentioned that Valve is the only gaming company they would want to see the Oculus Rift in the hands of. Less than two years later, Valve released the HTC Vive, a widely praised VR System more immersive than the Oculus Rift.
  • In March of 2016 with "Ubiconic", they made fun of Ubisoft for overuse of the word "iconic", even for things that aren't iconic. Future article and videos would have Jim add "(actual iconic, not Ubisoft iconic)" whenever they used the word. In May 2017, Ubisoft's pre-E3 teaser had a small gag where they manage to restrain themselves from using it, even favoriting a comment pointing this out.
  • In July 2018, they devoted an episode to discussing the tragic figure that is Waluigi, especially in the light of his disconfirmation from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. One discussed element was the lack of good quality merchandise for him, and how even if he had a decent amiibo, it paled in comparison to the amount of merchandise made for something like a Piranha Plant... and then Jim noticed a Piranha Plant hand puppet and announced that they were buying it immediately. Its return for the second live action segment of the episode was amusing enough, but when a Smash Direct aired four months later and it turned out that a Piranha Plant was made playable in Smash instead of Waluigi...
    Jim: Fucking Piranha Plants get more love than Waluigi does!
  • In late March 2019, Jim devoted an episode of The Jimquisition to the cons of the Epic Store and offhandedly mentioned how other publishers are trying to use their own launchers. One of the examples Jim mentioned was the Bethesda Launcher for Fallout 76. About two-and-a-half hours after the episode was uploaded, Bethesda announced that they would be back to releasing their games on Steam instead, retroactively including Fallout 76. Bethesda would then announce three years later that they were scrapping their launcher altogether.
  • Jim says in the Jimquisition episode on Mighty No. 9 that Capcom "should really put [Mega Man] out of his misery". This becomes almost poetic knowing that in addition to the critical divisiveness of Mighty No. 9 that Jim was already discussing, Capcom would later go on to revive the success of Mega Man thanks to the comparatively-positive reception to Mega Man 11.
  • In a video about Misaimed "Realism" in June of 2020, Jim criticizes the unnecessary heights devs go to achieve a realistic degree of violence in games, with an off-hand joke being that while they keep making gore more realistic, the sex scenes in most games still look like two mannequins mashing against each other. A little while later, The Last of Us Part II, one of the games they criticized for this search for realistic gore, would release with a pretty Narmy sex scene that would go memetic, proving Jim's point.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of the complaints had by viewers in regards to the show's quality over the years is that the Jimquisition has repeated the same points again and again during the late 2010s' and early 2020's. While many of these fans would not disagree that these points are reoccurring issues, the issue is seen as focusing too much on these issues without addressing other points in game culture critique, or repeating the same arguments again and again without alteration, that in turn leads to a show that feels like it is spinning its wheels instead of continuing ongoing debates or contributing to them in new and interesting ways.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many people ask Jim why they don't do more positive videos and why they're always angry at the gaming industry. Jim replied that they have made positive videos, but those recieved far fewer views than their usual rants against the games industry and terrible indie games. In other words, people only want to watch Jim Sterling tear games and publishers a new one.
• Lowest Common Denominator: Jim calls video games made to be shilled/advertised by famous let's players as "YouTube fodder"; a game designed to gain tons of popularity within the YouTube community and the fans of famous LPers so that fans are tempted to buy the game. Jim trashes such games because they feel that the games don't offer anything different from the norm or are riding on whatever popular Memetic Mutation bandwagon is in season in hopes of people being gullible enough to buy the game. Jim did give one exception to Roundabout, noting that while the game does seem to be designed for people to do a let's play on (due to the very wacky concept of the game), they find the game actually good, fun to play, and able to stand on its own merits.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Jim Fucking Sterling, son!" ^ExplanationAfter Jim uploaded a blind first impressions video of The Slaughtering Grounds to their YouTube channel, the developer got defensive and made a response video under the pretense of a "review the reviewer" series. The sheer unprofessionalism of this move made a laughing stock of the game and its developer, and the video's frequent usage of the phrase "I'm Jim Fucking Sterling, son!" became a hit with both Jim and their fanbase.
  • Ubisoft Iconic. ^ExplanationJim quickly got sick of Ubisoft labeling virtually everything as iconic in promotional materials (including things that hadn't been released beforehand, and thus physically couldn't be iconic), and whenever they referred to something as iconic, they would qualify the statement with "actually iconic, not Ubisoft iconic"
  • Please don't be mad at me for posting on TVTropes. I breathe through my skin.^{Explanation (spoilers for MGS V)}While Jim really liked Metal Gear Solid V, they found the game's excuse for Quiet's lack of clothing so hilariously contrived that they turned it into a meme, claiming that skin-based photosynthesis could be used as an excuse for anything, no matter how heinous.
  • "Is this memes?" ^ExplanationJim's standard reaction to anything quirky or weird, usually used in response to some of the more bizarre entries on Best of Steam Greenlight. Has of late taken on a more condescending tone towards games that rely upon Memetic Mutation to sell themselves.
  • #FucKonami ^ExplanationJim Sterling's famous for their discussions and reporting on Konami's ongoing failings and pettiness (including countless DMCA takedowns on their videos and even a blacklisting), which led to them coining the catchphrase "Fuck Konami". Eventually, someone who used the aforementioned hashtag typo got hilariously retweeted by Konami, which, with Jim's help, exploded on Twitter, Reddit and Twitch.
  • SKELETON WARRIORS ^ExplanationEvery time Jim's language trails off towards particularly coarse language, especially a certain C-word, expect this to pop up. Heck, sometimes they just throw it in for a jarring comedic effect.
  • (Not that one) ^ExplanationStarting with the Jimquisition article by Ben McCurry on Paul Ryan of Brash Games, the article is also plastered with images of United States politician Paul Ryan with an text overlay "Not that one", which was carried over to the Jimquisition show "Exposure" where in every mention of Paul Ryan first brings up the politician with Jim following up with "Not that one". This has spread to most media pieces talking about Brash Games, when the name Paul Ryan is followed by (Not that one). Even Paul Ryan (Not that one) used it in his now infamous statement. Happened again when Doug Bowser became the next Nintendo of America CEO, causing Jim to go "not that one" for the actual Bowser character in the Mario games.
  • Triple ayyyyy^ExplanationJim's scornful tone when referring to "Triple A" video games has been adopted by many of their fans and others critical of the game industry.
  • TODD.^ExplanationConstantly addressing Bethesda Director Todd Howard by barking his name like an accusation whenever they discuss the latest Bethesda controversy (usually Fallout 76) until "Todd" feels like an Inherently Funny Word.
  • Bizarrely, Sterling's recurring nonsensical word "chungus" spawned an entirely unrelated Looney Tunes meme known as "Big Chungus", which has since eclipsed the original meaning.
• Mis-blamed:
  • From Jim's fans in regards to the Unity engine. Almost every single bad game that Jim finds/plays on steam used the Unity engine, which Jim's viewers started to equate to bad quality. Jim eventually spoke up and said the Unity engine itself is a pretty decent game engine and the reason why bad games make the engine look bad is due to the overuse of stock assets instead of trying to come up with their original assets or at least make the use of stock assets thematic. Another reason is that the free version of Unity automatically adds the engine's logo bumper to the game's startup. Naturally people who churn out low effort games are likely to use the free version, making "Made by Unity" one of the first things a player of these games sees.
  • Any time Jim does a negative review of a game (typically AAA), expect allegations that they're doing it for clickbait and 'ad revenue', even though they have made it clear, multiple times, that the Jimquisition website does not use ads.
  • While Jim does review games, not all reviews are written by them. Some reviews are done by their fellow reviewer and podcast member, Laura Kate. If Laura writes a review no one likes, they assume Jim Sterling wrote the review and blame them for it.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Jim giving a nearly perfect score to Modern Warfare 3, a game criticized by many gamers for barely doing anything new, and giving low scores to games like Sonic Colors and Mario Kart 7, games that were praised by gamers for changing up their series in ways that were seen as good, has been a real sticking point on why some people don't take their reviews seriously. This only worsened when Jim gave negative opinions on games like Kid Icarus: Uprising and Star Fox Zero that actively attempt to have novel control schemes rather than polished, tried-and-true ones.
  • After their falling out with Dynasty Warriors 9, Jim has pretty much ignored how the game itself has addressed its flaws and some fans that stuck with it (or came back after a long absence similar to Jim) have recognized that it has improved since its disastrous first impression. Then again, with how several of the improvements were locked behind a paywall (including Zhang He's signature claws), and being a long-standing outspoken critic of the culture of "rush a sloppy half-finished game out and patch it later" in corporate game development, both of which go against Jim's consumer-focused policy and views, they have plenty of reason not to bother giving it a second chance.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The beginning of "Red Ashes", where Jim starts out laughing uncontrollably at the idea of paying a subscription to play Solitaire without ads on Windows 10, before calming down, then their calming breaths turn into frustrated pants, then slowly turn into agonized screams. The last one in particular sounds like it would have been absolutely terrifying if Jim hadn't thankfully cut it off early.
  • The Cornflakes Homunculus. Even it agrees that it should not be.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity:
  • Typically averted, because even if a game is bad, usually sales won't jump up full of people wanting to experience its badness for themselves. Viewers prefer to watch Jim play the bad game and comment on it. Sometimes, these developers' attempts at trying to engineer this trope even backfire spectacularly.
    • The entire Digital Homicide debacle. It started with Jim playing an impressions video of an awful asset-flip called "The Slaughtering Grounds". Prior to reviewing an otherwise-typical shitty Steam Greenlight indie title, Jim was hardly considered a big name in the game critic industry. But the developers, Digital Homicide, took it very poorly and uploaded a petulant video mocking Jim's review (also coining the phrase "I'm Jim Fucking Sterling, son!" which Jim made into a catchphrase). This only attracted more people to negatively comment on Steam pages without buying, causing DigiHom to panic and start censoring criticism. They then threatened Jim with a lawsuit, which is when things really started geting brought to a much larger audience. It then exploded onto mainstream gaming outlets when they followed through and did attempt to sue them for originally $10m, before it jumped up to $15m. After three years of this, with all the negative attention Digital Homicide brought, the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice, Digital Homicide folded (but later returned), and Jim became one of the many notable mainstream YouTube-based game critics of The New '10s, with the likes of The Angry Joe Show and, up until his untimely death, The Cynical Brit.
    • Taken a step further with the fallout from Skate Man Intense Rescue. Jim points out that, not only has the company sunk their own reputation, but have essentially given all of its fame directly to them.
    Jim: You see, when people think of Jim Sterling, they think of Jim Sterling. When people think of your shitty, two-bit games, they think of Jim Sterling.
  • Played straight after their review of No Man's Sky caused overzealous fans to attack and crash their web site. They openly tell everyone other locations that their review can be found and mock the attack by saying all it did was boost their popularity since now people want to see why their review caused such a shitstorm.
  • Taken even further when their review of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (where they rated it 7/10 or 'good') was deemed clickbaity, resulting in fans swarming their site en masse and leaving negative comments. The review was promptly mirrored by multiple fans and this only led to people wondering what the hell was going on.
• Seasonal Rot: Starting in 2021 Jim's own admitted extreme disillusionment with the video game industry as a whole and increased cynicism regarding their ability to affect anything in it (especially following mass revelations of even-more toxic abuse than they were already regularly reporting on), reduced output of side content and first-look or analysis videos on new releases, and heavily reduced humour and gags (with the gags that remain going for poorly-received non-sequiturs consisting of lengthy, weird, off-putting distortions of old commercials edited to say dirty or disgusting things, something which used to be either short one-offs or restricted to their podcasts) all combined to turn off a lot of viewers. Not helping matters is that during this time Jim would blame their drop in viewership and subscribers entirely on the Vocal Minority who reacted negatively to them coming out as non-binary in 2020, causing many to accuse Sterling of being unable to take proper criticism of their content. Later, after starting back onto text reviews and putting out more regular thoughts, Jim would also admit that their inability to access ADHD medication for various reasons also helped contribute to this slump.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • There was a minor case of this when Jim changed the background music for their Jimquisition episodes, with a few even demanding they change it back. Eventually, however, people moved on.
  • This line is quoted verbatim in the intro circa-May 2017.
• They Panned It, Now They Suck!: Has done this enough to warrant its own page.
• Vindicated by History:
  • The music for The Slaughtering Grounds was initially bashed as horrible by Jim and other reviewers. However, Jim and several fans would later go on record to state that while the track had been looped incessantly, the track was actually okay.
  • Jim's negative stance on Modern Warfare Remastered was quite controversial, especially their choice to nominate it as #1 on their "Worst Games of 2016" list. Fast-forward to March 2017, and the news that Activision Blizzard was going to sell Downloadable Content it had already sold for the first game (rather than provide it for free), and at a higher price no less, resulted in a widespread backlash.
  • Jim's stance against cosmetics being locked off behind loot boxes were brushed off by people saying that said loot boxes (and the related microtransactions in general) weren't harmful because "they're just cosmetic". Years later where loot boxes have run rampant in AAA games that doubled down on them and one game tried to mix them with Bribing Your Way to Victory, a lot of defenders of the practice changed their stance to side with Jim.
  • Jim themself frequently likes to point to their long history of making controversial statements and predictions regarding games, business practices, or companies for which they receive no small amount of grief, only for their views to become more-common with time and their dire predictions to be proven right—for instance, the bottom falling out of the "live service" craze in early 2023 because of the model's association with games that released in an incomplete (feature-wise and/or technically) state with heavy monetization, are abandoned by the playerbase halfway through their update cycle, and of generally mediocre quality.

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