Why do you dislike SuperBunnyhop?
I put off answering this one, because I knew I’d have to rewatch his videos to really recall all my reasons, and I finally worked up the nerve to do it.
First, his position on the journalistic integrity thing was dumb, especially when he got his journalism professor to interview on the matter and basically blew him the fuck out. Also he was on the game journo pro list, which is kind of scummy in of itself.
I’ll be honest, his coverage of stories can be pretty good, like his look at MGS2, MGS3, The Witcher, and Bloodborne versus HP Lovecraft. I liked his MGS3 review overall and I felt like it tapped into a little of how the game worked with its vertical slice thing, and how there were so many different possible tactics you could take.
Watching the witcher sum up, he even gets into the combat a bit in a way that’s appreciable, even if I personally hate the witcher’s combat, even witcher 3’s. I gotta give him credit for that.
Minus massive props for playing a doom source port that allows looking up AND jumping. Also for admitting to quicksaving as a form of savescumming. In the process he does however mention how fucked up hitscan weapons, cones of fire, regenerating health, and iron sights are.
I mean shit, I can’t call the guy horrible. Though I can say his dark souls review isn’t very good. The high difficulty of early games was influenced by their arcade origins, not technical limitations, and contra is like half an hour to an hour long if played from beginning to end. They could afford to be hard, and they were very fair about the ways they were hard. Super Mario Bros restarted you at the beginning of the world if you got a game over, ninja gaiden did too, also shatterhand, and castlevania, and a lot of games on the system had actual save game functions, mostly RPGs, but also Metroid, Megaman, and Zelda. You’re not SUPPOSED to use save states for those NES games, hell, you’re devaluing games like Doom and a lot of other PC shooters for using save states. This is why I insist on sticking with auto-saves or only saving on level transitions. The first half of the review is all about the theme that I don’t really care about. The coverage of the combat is a sales pitch and more shallow than I’d really like. A lot of the talk on the level system is filler.
His coverage of Castlevania Symphony of the night triggers a kneejerk reaction from me up front for him remarking on how the original castlevania games were nothing special or rather humdrum, when they prioritized extreme focus on attacking at the right times in grueling level designs with enemies placed to make it very difficult to move forward or skip any of them. Points to him for backdashing, minus points for not shield-dashing. He does point out how shitty the level design is though, which is something I was expecting him to miss. Overall his impression does seem to be about the same as mine.
In his Zelda videos, he touches on how Link to the Past was more about dodging things and had less tutorials, but doesn’t really go into how lackluster OoT puzzle and enemy design was. And he complains about dumb shit like the room scrolling not fitting his conception of the space or something. He catches himself trying to quantify things, when he’s quantifying the wrong things and when I personally think greater quantification or more precise quantification is what we need in games analysis. Not to mention that Adventure of Link was a greater commercial success than many games that came to follow, sitting right about at the average for sales of the series and being a critical success in its own time.
Also it really pains me how he harshes on himself, used to read the headlines of each section with a really bored voice and acts like this self-conscious jaded fuck sometimes. Like he knows that he’s silly, but has to play it off ironically and begrudgingly to sooth his conscience.
Going to his Megaman Legends review is probably a good palate cleanser, because I haven’t played the game before, and I find it’s a good way to check whether a reviewer can actually describe and break down a game by going to a game I don’t have experience with. He complains about the tank style camera controls, but doesn’t mention how the concept of dual analog literally hadn’t been invented yet. I’ve gotten worse senses of how a game is supposed to be played than this. He does run down some of what the enemy design is like with video examples, and how the tank style controls work with forward and backward (and apparently strafe) movement work with shooting, and the free aim feature that locks you to the ground. I’ve seen worse even if I’d prefer more detail personally. I also feel like he missed out by not covering megaman legends 2 or the failed MML3, with the failed facebook campaign, which is practically what put Keiji Inafune in his current position.
I want to say I dislike his videos, because I don’t want to subscribe to him and I’m used to saying it about people at this point and I suppose it’s kind of expected of me, but he’s honestly not totally shit, and surprises me with alright descriptions of gameplay most of the time. His breakdowns of things tend to feature more correct information than incorrect information, and include genuine insights that aren’t common knowledge or repeating what everyone repeats. He gets the seeds of topics that would be interesting to talk about. He’s not Extra Credits, he’s clearly way above their level and the majority of the other amateur reviewers out there. Maybe what he lacks most is vision and knowledge of specifics? Vision isn’t something you can really fault a guy for. It’s hard to elevate the format. Knowledge of specifics and intricacies, I dunno, that’s kind of advanced stuff. Who can really say? If we had more people at his level then we’d be in a better place.
Someone asked me about Sequelitis, that’s next. Soon®
Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints 
Where is the criticism? This article was surprisingly positive. I was expecting something on the level of your matosis postings.
I personally like Bunnyhop a lot. Compared to the alternatives, he’s head and shoulders above them in terms of knowledge and entertainment. However, I have the same problem with him that I have with every other reviewer: he’s not actually very good at games. He spends more time talking about story or background or some other shit without really digging deep into the gameplay or features. He often complains about things being difficult or obtuse in a way that makes me roll my eyes. He thinks Witcher 3 has good combat which tells me he’s definitely not very good at brawlers and probably hasn’t played much Ninja Gaiden or DMC.
Is this your beef with bunnyhop? I fuckin’ love him, to the point of getting a retard-grin on my face while watching his videos for the first time, but every time he reveals his apparently mediocre skill-level I die a little on the inside. All that being said, I can partly forgive him because he’s really young. I’m pretty sure he’s like 26 or so. He grew up way after challenge was a main focus of game design, so he will never quite appreciate games on the same level as somebody that grew up with old games. Props for him overcoming that to the extent he has, though.
LikeLike
You’re right. I don’t honestly have a beef with him. This article is completely mistitled. Prior to writing it up as an answer, I wasn’t totally sure about superbunnyhop. I thought maybe he wasn’t so great, maybe he was a one hit wonder, maybe lazy in similar ways to MM. On reviewing his content to write about him, it was all pretty good. And he’s put out good stuff since then, like the first level of every sonic game, and a few others. I was preconditioned to think negatively, and it’s hard to move from that anchor. So I’m sorry for that, this is probably overly harsh.
You have a very strong point about him not being good at games. I wish I had brought that up more. His witness video made me cringe.
He’s on point a lot, especially about social issues or issues of perspective, frequently taking the community’s side rather than the journo side (though he was a part of gamejournopro).
Also funny that you should blame his being bad at games on him being too young at roughly 26. I’m 23. I don’t think appreciating old/challenging games is something restricted to old timers. I don’t think he has an excuse for not being good at games. I don’t think you can be in his position and reasonably be bad at games.
But yeah, I can’t really bash the guy in nearly the same way. He does his job. Sorry for the title being misleading.
LikeLike
Well, here are my thoughts on the age thing. Old games are inherently abrasive thanks to their serious (occasionally sadistic) level of challenge and to a far lesser extent their “bad graphics and sound.” On top of that, most people have a bias towards their first time with something. Therefore, I feel that people who did not grow up with old games are exponentially less likely to appreciate challenge because new games are so retardedly easy. I laugh heartily every time somebody says Dark Souls is the hardest game of all time. Also, the most important thing is that back in the day you had access to way fewer games and therefore were constantly forced to master games because they were all you had. Nowadays, if a game is kicking your ass you can turn down the difficulty in the fucking options menu, use RPG shit to make things easier, or just immediately play one of millions of games at your fingertips thanks to the internet.
So, the problem with modern games is that they’re so rarely challenging and therefore if you started playing them you might not ever be exposed to actual challenge, let alone learn to love it. Props for overcoming this shit. People like you disprove the obnoxious, inevitable counter-argument of “you only like old games because of nostalgia.” I personally only started playing NES and Genesis games in my early twenties and it was like witnessing a renaissance period for me.
LikeLike
This is a guy who’s videos are very hit and miss. I loved his RE4 video, but his one on Axiom Verge. I didn’t much like his MGS3 review either. Partially because I don’t much like the game, but the guy clearly went into full fanboy mode regarding it. He barely talked about the gameplay at all. He went on about a fucking sidequest, which barely qualifies as one. You can faff around in a house for a bit. Woopie! I felt Matthewmatosis’ review of the game was much better. At least he went into some level of depth on the gameplay. But he still overpraised it.
LikeLike
*hated his one on Axiom Verge
LikeLike
I know this is kind of a obscure little thread but I actually do have some slight beef with him which is odd because I really liked his reviews at first. However I think Gilgame310 said it best, he is very hit or miss. He also has a very bad tendency to go full on fanboy and nostalgic which was especially bad about with his review of MGS3 and his comparison video of Morrowind and Skyrim despite him countering himself claiming he wasn’t just being nostalgic with Morrowind, it was so obvious he was not to mention his review was almost a carbon copy of Fallout 4 in regards to Skyrim versus Morrowind when really watching both. I also dislike his lack of a review score in his reviews and I think he often plays the games he plays the games to the point he eventually looks or finds fault in what he is playing which granted, most reviewers have the opposite problem since they don’t play games long enough to give a real honest review but he almost plays them just to find fault with them. However my least favorite thing about him as a reviewer though is he get all hipster-like and jaded in his attitude when he is reviewing a game to the point he just sounds like he is droning. Is he the worst reviewer on Youtube? No because he does break things down pretty well and he makes pretty good points and he is certainly more sane than say Ponstory Games about reviewing (seriously, Ponstory Games once titled a video “There is no such thing as glitches” and was actually trying to argue a case about video game glitches with even a large number of people disliking the video not to mention he’s really arrogant despite the backlash he gets.). However, he’s got some habits as a reviewer he needs to consider addressing and for God’s Sakes give a score rating for a game like on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. It would cut his video length significantly and give people an idea about whether they should buy or rent a game or save their beer money or whatever it is they like to spend money on. I think a lot of people prefer something straight to the point as oppose to some college aged dude droning about his criticism and praises of a particular game title.
LikeLike
Also this is coming from someone who loves the Metal Gear Solid Franchise as a whole giving him this fanboy criticism
LikeLike