LogFAQs > #936374603

jpenny2 posted...

I can understand someone enjoying the rage. Watching a nearly forty-year-old man rant and rave and spew childish insults is funny, at least on some level (and if he were playing a character, it might actually be almost genius). However, I can't see anyone enjoying the constant begging and all the dead air. When he's not raging or clowning around, he's pretty damn boring.

What is most interesting to me isn't even the rage or his "boring" segments. It's how bad he is at anything he plays. Even if you are bad, you should get better just by accident based on the sheer amout of time you are playing video games. You should get better at shooters, just by playing them. But if you look at the slowed down clips from Mighty D for example of Phil's, you see how just godawful not his aim is, but also how incredible bad his reaction speed is.

But also when it comes to creative problem solving, awereness and logical reasoning. A favourite example of mine would be his Dark Souls 2 playthrough. He is wearing relatively heavy armor and using a tower shield (heavy fucking shields, excellent at blocking btw). Now, in Dark Souls, the heavier the equipment you wear, the slower you roll and the less i-frames you have. So Phil is fairly heavy, mainly due to his tower shield, but not fucking once does he use it to block, he always tries to roll out of attacks. This doesn't go well.

So what then happens, is that he looks for a cheap ass tactic to beat the game. And in Dark Souls 2 this works, he uses the Lightning Miracle to do massive amounts of damage and beat the game without any effort. Then an expansion drops, the Lightning Miracle gets nerfed and all Phil does is whine a bitch the entire time that the devs are bad, don't know what they are doing and refuses to adapt in any capacity.

Another great example is XCom Enemy Unknown. He plays through the tutorial and instantly forgets anything the game has taught him. And this happens with dozens of games, it's not a fluke. Any game that explains anything is immediatly lost on Phil.

But also in shooters, he literally has zero awareness, he never notices opponents, and forgets that after sidestepping 3 feet to the left after walking through a door and then running backwards backs him up in a wall that he needed to step 3 feet back.

The excuses are just like a reflex now, and not that interesting really. It's never his fault, this has been memed to death. But the process that proceeds it is what I find so interesting. Even if you do something you dislike, if you just keep doing it over and over, you'd get better just by sheer repetition. But the instant Phil does something, he seems to forget what he did before hand. It's like everytime you walk into a new room, your brain resets and all previous knowledge about the building is instantly lost.

He is a raging narcissist, this is kind of boring, because you can never call a narcissist out. Yes, the mind of a narcissist is interesting, but it's not what makes Phil interesting. It almost seems like he has a cognitive disability that renders him unable to retain new information. You cannot choose to forget, and like I said, just by doing something over and over, muscle memory should kick in. And to circle back to Dark Souls 2, if your approach to a boss doesn't work, maybe try something different. But Phil also never tried different strategies. He just keeps doing the same thing until he happens to win. Never tries different strategies, never tries to learn boss patterns, nothing.

DOOM Eternal is a great example too, he has no situational awareness, barely makes use of the movement system, doesn't think to NOT pick up ammo after using only one bullet, thus wasting it. Doesn't save power-ups or medkits for whenever they are most relevant.

His thought process is extremely limited, narrow and funnily enough, straight forward: Get from A to B, with as LITTLE effort as possible. So this is what I cannot fathom, he should pick up a couple of things just by by the sheer amount of games he plays.

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XboX GT/Steam/Wii-U - Nazanir