Angry Video Game Nerd - Vol 1 (Review)

Apparently its James Rolfe's birthday today.

James Rolfe somehow managed to make a career out of yelling about 20 year old video games. Starting out as a series of Youtube videos, Rolfe's "Angry Video Game Nerd" series quickly stood out from the pack, just watching this guy brutally curse out some of these old games for a few minutes and it's easy to see why he is one of the most subscribed youtube users of all time. Eventually, James got hired to produce these videos for Screwattack.com and later Gametrailers.com. This DVD covers his first couple of youtube videos and his first official year as the nerd. These episodes mostly set the basic layout of the series, each review ranges from 3 to 10 minutes and during that time he exposes some the flaws in the games like high difficulty, tedious gameplay, bad controls, and even spelling errors...while cursing like sailor. There are few people who can really make fowl language itself funny and Rolfe mostly succeeds at this. My favorite of these early episodes is "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" which is a game so bad that the nerd doesn't even bother showing us much of the actual game and I think it's one of the best written episodes of the series.

It would have been easy for him to just keep doing quick straight reviews but thankfully, Rolfe starts to experiment a little with the format in the latter end of this run. "Friday the 13th" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" showcase higher production values and these episodes start Rolfe's habit of adding some kind of entertaining storyline in addition to his reviews. Rolfe injects his real life passion and knowledge of films into an episode that talks about confusing movie titles. The Christmas episode that concludes this run is another highlight that sees a group of reviews for unlicensed Christian bible games. At this point Rolfe doing a great job of keeping the series from growing stale. This show is pretty damn good for an Internet series. I'm not as crazy about the show as I was a year ago, but I can say that The Angry Video Game Nerd doesn't disappoint.