YMMV / The Geek Critique

• Broken Base: The collab with DK Vine covering the Donkey Kong Country spin-offs. Fans of the website loved their inclusion and the comedic skits included, while those unfamiliar with the site found their appearance awkward and prefer the more professional feeling of Josh's other videos.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The Sonic Heroes review opens with a story of Josh recounting how one of his friends skipped on playing the game with him on launch day to go on a date, with Josh revealing towards the end of the video that his friend would end up marrying the girl he went on a date with. Josh then laments how he got the raw end of the deal, a few months later, Josh got engaged to Alisha aka "The Bird Lady".
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • Not many were happy with Josh's scathing review of Mario Kart: Double Dash!! feeling many of his arguments about its balance and track design compared to Mario Kart 64 didn't hold water. Josh has since admitted had he known the game was a Cult Classic he would've approached his review differently.
  • Josh got quite a bit of pushback for his lukewarm opinion towards the first Metroid Prime game, as the game is a Sacred Cow among Metroid fans and considered one of the best games on the Nintendo GameCube. Not helping matters was that Josh’s complaints about the game being too easy were primarily caused by playing the game on the Metroid Prime Trilogy Collection, which lowers the the default difficulty of all three games.
  • A lot of people got upset at Josh calling Sonic Heroes the worst mainline Sonic game, ranking it below the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Sonic and the Secret Rings. While he does say that Heroes is better than both from a more objective viewpoint, since the game has next-to-no appeal to his personal tastes (being very untraditional for a Sonic game, emphasizing more specific forms of play based on context, and being heavily tutorialized), he would rather play worse games that at least appeal to his sensibilities; thus, its low ranking. Still, there are those that still feel his stance on the game is unfair, whether because they thought it was based too much of his critique around an offhand comment in a pre-release interview about "returning to Sonic's roots", the fact he used cheat codes to skip the majority of Team Chaotix’s campaign, or because he predominately played the PC version, which is known amongst the game's players as one of the more unstable versions.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Josh has a habit of unintentionally predicting the future of games (or series) he reviews, especially in his Metroid videos.
  • At the end of Zero Mission, he says "it's a damn shame the 2D series ended in 2004." This was about six months before Samus Returns was announced.
    • He does the same talking about AM2R, (and Nintendo's seemingly unnecessary DMCA of the game) saying it felt like Nintendo had stopped caring about Metroid. This was about two months before Prime 4 and Samus Returns were announced simultaneously.
  • When talking about the Meta Ridley boss fight in Prime 1, he jokingly says "Ridley for Smash Brothers!" Ridley was confirmed to appear in Smash Bros Ultimate just under a year later, complete with a Meta Ridley alternate skin.
  • When talking about what an underappreciated gem Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze was in its time, he briefly mentions how much the game deserves a second chance on the Switch. Lo and behold, a port of the game was announced for the Switch a mere six months later (to much greater success).
  • The Zero Mission example came full circle when, at the end of his Samus Returns video, he says "Come on, it's been 18 years since Metroid 4. It's way past time for Metroid 5." About a year later, MercurySteam's take on Metroid Dread was revealed.
• Funny Moments:
  • In the review for Metroid: Other M, when Alisha breaks character to complain how Samus has apparently forgotten all about her adoptive family, rambling about "Bird Dads" (to Josh's confusion), in a parody of how easily the game manages to hit the fandom's Berserk Button.
  • Josh and DefinitiveDubs perfectly summarize the ridiculousness of Shadow the Hedgehog in a mere four lines of dialogue:
    Josh: Now more than ever, flinging your super-powered spiky hedgehog up slopes, off ledges, and through loops and valleys in the pursuit of speed… isn't really the focus. (as clips from other Sonic games play) Ah-ah. Too boring. Too outdated. As old as the green hills. Ugh. No, the focus of Shadow the Hedgehog is—
    (cut to the game's intro with Shadow overlooking the city and arming a rifle)
    "Shadow": "Making those who mocked you, those who would stand in your way suffer, like the ignorant sheep they are, by dispersing vigilante justice the only way a true anarchist like Shadow the Hedgehog knows how!"
    Josh: (over gameplay of Shadow using the Egg Vacuum as "Chant This Charm" plays in the background) —By turning your foes into eggs with this stupid chicken gun from Billy Hatcher!
    "Shadow": "This is how Don Yoshi wants it done!"
  • Josh avoiding mentioning Kiddy Kong during his re-review of Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, to the point where his image is even removed from pictures of promotional material and the sticker on the game cartridge. Special mention goes to the video segment where he admits that there's a topic he can't bring himself to avoid any longer... which Brothers Bear is the best Brothers Bear, with this entire portion of the video getting its own theme song. The kicker is that the video ends immediately before Dixie can break a barrel with him in it.
• Nightmare Fuel: The normal end card was considered too upbeat to match the tone of the Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) review, so instead, the videos of Sonic 2, 3, and Adventure have black-and-white slowed down videos with super-slowed soundtracks...as if our memories of Sonic's better days were distorted into some kind of Bad Past. The ruination of Sonic 06 is presented as being so complete that it poisoned the entire franchise, past, present, and future, and everything about it, making even our good memories of Sonic seem like lies.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - ACTUALLY ALWAYS SUCKED.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - YOUR MEMORIES ARE LYING TO YOU.
  • Sonic Adventure - AN OVERRATED FAILURE.
• Tear Jerker: His Sonic 06 review, especially the end and its thumbnail videos, really emphasize his feelings about the game and the destruction it brought to the reputation of Sonic, a franchise that defined his childhood and identity as a gamer.
  In the twelve years since that fateful day, generations of gamers who never played a SEGA console, who never knew Sonic as any sort of icon have come of age... To them, all this character has ever been is a joke, a laughing stock, a relic who got his start on a collection of very old platformers that were never really that good to begin with. To so many people, this is a series that never managed to make the leap to 3D, and it's something that should've been put out of its misery a long time ago.

  Sonic '06 is the reason that SEGA could release a trio of games that might have been considered a return to form for any other series, and yet nobody remembers them as anything but an aberration. It's the reason that renaissance never took hold, just as much as it's the reason that nobody remembers the renaissance that could've been. Heroes didn't make people forget the year of Sonic, this did. So it went, so it would go... Every success was overlooked. Every failure was amplified. And the legacy of every single game that I grew up playing... That I grew up loving... All of the memories that form the core of the reason I do this... And the series that made me a gamer, the series that gave me this dream, the character who WAS my childhood hero...

  The legacy of Sonic the Hedgehog was erased from the timeline. And the only thing left... was bullshit.

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