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• 10-Minute Retirement
  • After playing Desert Bus, he feels that its existence is proof that he's failed in his mission to warn the world about shitty games, and he declares his retirement. Then he finds a cartridge containing a hacked version of Simon's Quest, the first game he ever reviewed, and decides to do one last review for old times sake. After discovering that the hack did its best to fix most of the things the Nerd complained about, it makes him realize that his efforts were not in vain after all, and that the show must go on.
  • Once more, in the Mega Man episode, his frustration at the direction the series took in Mega Man X5 drove him to quit once more, tossing aside his nerdy shirt and all. That is, until he wound up on a time-travelling adventure where he realizes that having a series that people care about was actually rather nice. He then jumps back to the present, where he discovers that Bugs Bunny has put on the shirt and continued the series in his absence, so the Nerd beats the shit out of him, takes his shirt back, and gets right back to playing shitty games. ...and into the cruel clutches of the craptastic Mega Man Soccer...
  • The events of Episode 200 sparked another retirement of sorts. Instead of retiring from reviewing games, he retired from being angry. Trying to develop his own game and experiencing the many difficulties that come with the territory made him realize that most shitty games aren't shitty on purpose or even because of developer incompetence, but due to outside factors such as Executive Meddling and strict deadlines, which made him appreciate these games a whole lot more. In the next episode, he says that he's just "The Video Game Nerd" now, and jumps into the game of the episode with an open mind. Said game, The Last Ninja, ends up being so unimaginably terrible (even worse than Jekyll and Hyde!) that it brings him back to his old angry self, and at the end of the episode, he declares himself the Angry Video Game Nerd once again.
• Accentuate the Negative: Played straight.
  • Many viewers forget that he deliberately accentuated the negative in his review of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, as pointed out on Cinemassacre's FAQ, because it was meant to be a caricature of easily-angered gamers. In a James and Mike Monday playthrough of the game, he admitted that it was a nostalgic game for him, but he was grateful that it was so flawed because it gave him so much material to work with for the series.
  • Played straight up with Ninja Gaiden. However, the review was done this way not to emphasize how bad of a game it was, but rather how hard and challenging it was. He did the same thing with Zelda II and Ghosts 'n Goblins
  • When he reviewed Street Fighter 2010, he stated that if you get past it having nothing to do with any other part of the Street Fighter series, limited controls, and an impossibly difficult last stage, it's actually a pretty decent game. Nonetheless, he still has a good time grumbling at all its bad points.
  • Note that The Nerd doesn't always do this. He generally gives quite a lot of slack to So Okay, It's Average invoked or So Bad, It's Good games, more than most Caustic Critics would, and he occasionally does whole episodes on games he loves like Castlevania and homages like Swordquest. He will also often include games that appear in the same series as the real bad ones, and often they get some praise. This is both for completion and comparison, since often it will serve to let you know there is no excuse for the company that made it. Examples include his Godzilla review and Back to the Future re-review. He flat out praised Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, perhaps because so much had already been negatively said about the game, but ostensibly because it showed truth in advertising: No road can contain that truck.
    • He also plays with the trope in the Big Rigs review when he accentuates the lesser negatives of the game (bland graphics, no music or sound except the engine noise, texturing glitches, etc.). He explains that any normal game could be picked on endlessly for these sorts of problems, but in comparison to the rest of the brokenness of Big Rigs, nobody seems to mention them.
  • The Nerd unwittingly tempts fate with regard to this while the Joker is forcing him to play Batman: Return of the Joker for the NES. After complaining about the game at length, the Nerd comments that it's actually a decent game overall, just an excessively hard one. So the Joker decides to make him play the Game Boy and Genesis adaptations of the game, driving the Nerd over the edge.
  • There are also instances where he is obviously looking for something to make fun of.
  • Flat out stated in his Colecovision review:
    Nerd: Now, I know we mainly focused on the shitty aspects, but lemme tell ya: That's the name of the game.
  • Inverted and played straight in the 2013 Wish List episode: when the fans asked him to review the bad Sonic the Hedgehog games, his response was simply: "What bad Sonic games?" Still, he did take a look at some less-than-favorable Sonic games, like Sonic Blast, Sonic Labyrinth, Sonic R, Sonic Shuffle, and Shadow the Hedgehog. In reality, James Rolfe said the last Sonic game he played was Sonic Rush, which he enjoyed.
  • Lampshaded in his review of Seaman: the Nerd acknowledges that he seems negative while playing it, but still praises the game for being original and innovative for a virtual pet game.
  • Bootsy, from the Board James series, once said at a convention that he thought the Nerd's rant about Ghostbusters II on NES not having a pause button seemed forced and unnecessary, and pointed out the game can be beaten in about 20 minutes (provided you don't die of course), so the game doesn't really need a pause button.
  • This trope is also lampshaded in the Chex Quest episode, as the Nerd acknowledges that all three games are good and he has to resort to nitpicking. He even has to fill in his swear quota just because he can't find anything in the games that makes him furious.
  • Similarly, with Treasure Master, there's an entire section where he's having a good time mowing down enemies in a moon buggy, only to remind himself he's not supposed to be having fun and he's only doing it for the contest.
  • Subverted when it comes to Atari 2600 games. The Nerd is a lot more lenient towards covering Atari games considering the lack of of technological resources and the inexperience of most designers making video games at the time. That means that there's not really much to say other than if a game sucks or not so he usually doesn't devote whole episodes to it unless there's a specific reason to it like in his Halloween (Atari 2600) and Atari Sports videos.
• Achievements in Ignorance: He somehow manages to get Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing to run on a Commodore 64.
  • He does the same with a SNES emulator when playing "Hong Kong 97".
  • Later still in the "Aladdin Deck Enhancer" episode when simply slapping the keyboard somehow pulls up a video on YouTube.
• Actor/Role Confusion: Some fans seem to believe that the Nerd and his creator James Rolfe are supposed to be the same person, when the Nerd is just a character and James is an actor.
  James Rolfe: It's funny how people usually see videos on YouTube and take them at face value. The same people probably believe that I go around in real life, wearing a white pressed shirt, stuffed with pens in the pocket, and saying "fuck" all the time, and talking about buffaloes taking diarrhea dumps.
  • This is lampshaded for comedy at the beginning of his Beavis and Butthead review:
    Opening narration with scrolling text: The Angry Video Game Nerd is not real. He's a character. Some of the games he plays would cause a person to lose their mind, break something, or get hurt. To put it another way, don't try this at home.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Every now and then, the Nerd will admit that amidst all the awfulness of the games he covers, a few deliberate jokes within them actually manage to work:
  • While covering The Simpsons: Bart vs. the World, he gets a chuckle out of a ghost who inexplicably has the face of Waylon Smithers.
  • On the SNES adaptation of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, he shamelessly admits that the game's intro cutscene — featuring a naked Arnold walking into the bar as various objects conveniently censor his midsection Austin Powers-style — is funny.
  • While he overall pans the NES title based on The Three Stooges, he's greatly amused, even charmed by the Bait-and-Switch Credits playing out the title screen for a Ghostbusters II game, much to the confusion of Larry, Curly, and Moe.
  • With the opening cutscene of Big Nose Freaks Out, he admits that the name of the "Savings + Bones" bank in the opening cutscene is a clever pun, though he's less impressed with the much less clever "Bones 'R' Us" store next to it.
• Adaptational Villainy: While the TV commercials and video game portray Pepsiman as a heroic figure, the real Pepsiman turns out to be a malicious Humanoid Abomination who destroyed the life of the "Pepsi for TV Game" guy behind the scenes, leaving him a broken shell of a man with nothing left to live for but revenge, and now plots to turn the whole world into Pepsi.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Often.
  • On Winter Games: "This is a blizzard of balls!"
  • During his Star Trek review: "You're relieved to finally start walking around and doing stuff, but only then do you realize how astronomically ass this game is!"
  • The Game Graphic Glitch Gremlin.
  • Invoked during a Pokemon-esque battle with Ghosts And Goblins where he tell the game to "Feast on some fried fuckfarts!"
  • Taken up a few notches in the Beetlejuice review. Every criticism he has about the game is rephrased into an alliterative term - without fail. Well, almost. There is Bad Music. You don't have to keep track if you don't want to; he lists them all by the end of the review.
  • Exaggerated in Aladdin Deck Enhancer episode. And even combined with Motor Mouth.
• Aerith and Bob: In the Beetlejuice episode, he gives all of the game's flaws creative and swear-filled names like "Bouncing Bullshit", "Perpendicular Dick Ploys", etc. Until he gets to the game's out-of-place music, which he just calls "Bad Music".
  • In "The Incredible Crash Dummies" episode, he points out how Darryl oddly has a pretty regular name, while the other characters typically have car-related names (e.g. Slick, Spin, Spare-Tire, and Lube Job).
• Agony of the Feet: The Nerd accidentally drops a TV on his foot while trying to mount an Atari 5200.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Richard, the guy who created the Nerd's Nintoaster (a toaster with its internals taken out and replaced with the internals of an NES) attempted to fix the Nerd's Atari Jaguar CD, which was getting connection errors. After trying everything possible to no effect (including wiring it directly to the Jaguar, eliminating all possibility of a connection error), he concluded that the machine was sentient and deliberately preventing people from playing it.
• All Just a Dream: The Nightmare in Elm Street episode. However, when the Nerd wakes up, he's horrified to discover that he's still wearing the Power Glove, which leads him to review it on the next episode.
• Alternate Company Equivalent: Seeing Joueur du Grenier as the alternate company... AVGN is the equivalent of JdG (bespectacled geeks who review bad old video games and get angry), Mike Matei is the equivalent of Seb (the assistant who likes to annoy the main character), LJN is the equivalent of Infogrames (a rainbow-themed video game company that is repeatedly behind bad games the reviewer is covering) and Fred Fuchs is the equivalent of David Goodenough (name taken from a video game's credits and used as a scapegoat character for a bad game's flaw).
• Alternative Character Interpretation: In-Universe.
  • According to the Nerd, the intro to Ghosts 'n Goblins actually goes this way:
    "A couple has just got done having sex in a cemetery. I'm not even kidding! What else does this look like?! He's not wearing clothes! Next thing: Satan shows up as if saying 'Yeah, I wanna get into some of that!' and takes her away. That's the plot. Is that the greatest opening to an NES game, or what?!"
  • According to the Nerd, Sega is actually a Sentient Electronic Global Annihilator hellbent on world domination and consuming the universe. He says this due to Sega Channel (connecting yourself to their network), Sega having the balls to take on Nintendo in the "Genesis does what Nintendon't" campaign, and Sega's planetary theming (Sega Saturn and canceled Sega Neptune).
  • In "Bible Games 2", he thinks the enemies in Sunday Funday are militant atheists trying to kill the protagonist for trying to go to Sunday school.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • In his "Mega Man Games" episode, where his present self meets his 2004 self. We see that when he initially did his Jekyll/Hyde video, he was talking into a teddy bear nanny cam.... which for some reason has a 2015 date on it.
  • Invoked in the "Superman 64 Returns" episode, where Unreal Tournament 2004, Commander Keen, and Pepsiman are all used as examples of "hot new games" while James promotes ExpressVPN.
  • Referenced in the Taito Legends 1 & 2 episode: While playing Violence Fight, he asks why the NYC stage has the Twin Towers in the background even though the game was set in the early 1950s, about 15 years before construction started, and seemingly in L.A. of all places!
• Ancient Grome: The Nerd's review of the NES game Day Dreamin' Davey has him keep mislabeling a few stages of Ancient Greece as "Ancient Rome", even though they show Hades' lair and Mt. Olympus.
• And Another Thing...:
  • At the end of his very first review (Castlevania 2); he thanks the listeners, bids them good night, and cuts to black...only to come back quickly to add that the game's ending sucks too.
  • Exaggerated in his review of Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure; combines with Leave the Camera Running.
• And Knowing Is Half the Battle: In his review of Polybius, he mentions how 90% of anything posted on the internet is complete bullshit.
  In fact, when a bull takes a shit, it decomposes into digital matter, which evaporates into cyber airwaves, which becomes... the internet. Now you know.
• And Show It to You: The Nerd does this to himself at the end of "Bible Games 3", in response to a game telling him to "give your heart to Jesus".
• Angrish: A staple of his reviews. Notably, James' tantrum during the Scrooge special.
  HUMBUG! BAH agabaggablughraghablugga— HELL!!
• Annoying Video Game Helper: invoked In the Independence Day review, he's annoyed by the voice always reminding him to "take out the generators".
• Anti-Hero: The Nerd is generally pleasant to most people until they turn out to be less than wholesome themselves, and has fought against Satan with Jesus on multiple occasions. Then again, he is a coarse, foul-mouthed rage-a-holic who brutally beat up and decapitated Bugs Bunny (Though he certainly had it coming).
• Anti-Humor: "The Nerd's Anger Management"
• Apocalyptic Log: His review on Polybius
• Applied Mathematics: Chronologically Confused features the Nerd in front of a board filled with nonsensical equations and formulae, including at points a Triforce and a drawing of Mario.
• Arc Number: In Hong Kong 97 the Nerd realizes that Hong Kong '97 keeps trying to divert his attention to the number "97".
• Aroused by Their Voice: In his NES Days Re-Revisited episode, the Nerd decides to call the phone number in the Who Framed Roger Rabbit game, only to find that what used to be a recorded message giving tips for the game is now a sex hotline. Aroused by Their Voice indeed.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: He LOVES this trope.
  • On the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game:
    AVGN: It sucking fucks, it fucking sucks, it fucking blows, it's a piece of shit... and I don't like it.
  • He says something similar when talking about the radar in the Independence Day episode... "It's too small, it makes no fuckin' sense, and... I don't like it."
  • From the Deadly Towers review, probably because the fans had already taken all the best lines:
    This game is a chicken-lickin'-finger-fuckin' son of a bitch! This game is BALL CIDER! The assholians bow down to this piece of shit! In other words, the game sucks.
  • Here is the biggest Cluster F-Bomb in the whole series, in the Power Glove review:
    "Now you're playing with power." (Pause) Now you're playing with fuckin' shit! You're better off fuckin' shit than fuckin' with this fucked up shit! Fuck this shit! You don't know shit about how fuckin' shitty this fuckin' shit is! It's so bad it sucks! It's so fuckin' suck it fucks! And I...can't take it anymore.
  • Another one, from Superman 64 when he fails to complete a stage in time:
    "Fuck! Ass! Bitch! Cunt! Fart!"
  • Before that, there was also the NES Accessories episode in which he shouts "FUCK!" in place of the word "FIRE!" with the Konami Laserscope, and he also thinks he can say anything besides "FUCK!", like for example "ASS!":
    "SHIT! BITCH! CUNT! FUCK! FART!"
  • Another much more subtle example appears at the end of his Rocky review, where, after his usual ranting about things he'd rather do than play the game, he ends with "I'd rather eat raw eggs".
  • Also in the Rocky review:
    "It's a bunch of putrid anal shit coming out of a rhinoceros's asshole. It fucks up the ass, shits out the mouth, piss out the nose, dookie out the ears, diarrhea out the dick, shits for the birds. The control for this game is poo-poo".
  • His obscure enemy roll call for Wolverine (NES).
    "It's time for the enemy roll call: We have green rotary dial telephones, Silver Surfers in flying wheelchairs, Silver Surfers air-guitaring, John McClane from Die Hard, The Grim Reaper throwing skulls, Frankenstein monsters wearing metal masks with visors like Geordi from Star Trek, and bubbles."
  • In the "Making Of" video, James remarks that he has a lot of AVGN shirts, and why.
    James Rolfe: "As you can see, I have plenty of Nerd shirts because they get fucked up all the time. Bloodstains, shit-stains, missing buttons."
  • In the Atari Porn video, he talks about different groups being offended by Custer's Revenge: parents were offended when their kids got a hold of it, women's rights groups were offended since the object of the game is to commit rape, Native Americans were also offended by the premise... and, finally, the Nerd, himself, is offended because the game sucks.
  • In his Beetlejuice review, he counts off everything that sucks about it: Bouncing Bullshit, Perpendicular dick ploys, Bitch barriers, Inanimate Anal Assassinations, Fruitless farts, Diarrhetic diversions, Freeform fuckery, Pinpoint piss-taking, Rat trap crapshoot, and Bad music.
  • From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Revisited: "When you're Hyde, you're just defending yourself from evil monsters. You should be going around the town beating people up, walking into bars, starting fights, getting drunk, raping women, and causing a ruckus!"
  • In his joke "Brutal Chex" commercial from the Chex Quest episode: "It's Chex on steroids! Illegal steroids! Made from broken glass, rusty fucking nails, and whole-grain rice!"
  • In his "Bad Final Fight Games'', he mentions that all you need for a North American Sega Dreamcast console to play Japanese games is an Action Replay plug-in, but he has to rant about the fonts used on the box of the Action Replay.
    The box pissed me off so much I had to research fonts. The sticker on the actual cartridge is using Bauhaus MD BT, but the logo on the box is Arial Black, and on the bottom, they use Algerian. But that's not all. When you turn this sonovabitch over, they commit the ultimate graphic design sin. They used MOTHER-FUCKING COMIC-SANS! At least it's not Papyrus, or Papyrus-Sans.
• Art Evolution: Mike Matei's title cards. Pointed out in the episode in which the Nerd re-visit his earliest videos, he comments on how even the title card from the Top Gun episode was crappy, just to have it replaced in that moment with a dramatically better one.
  AVGN: Oh, okay. That's way better.
• Ass Shove: The Bat-Nerd does it to the Joker with all the Batman games reviewed. (Except the good one.)
• Atomic F-Bomb:
  • The sheer intensity of the way he screams "FUUUUCK!" after seeing and playing the Godzilla games that he always wanted to play as a child, but which were released after his video game-playing prime had passed, is almost scary; it helps that the famous Godzilla roar was mixed into the scream.
  • In his Top Gun review, directly following the iconic "ASS!"
  • The exact same sound clip was used when he ordered a custom Atari 5200 controller when he couldn't use the originals, only to discover it wouldn't fit in the controller ports.^note The joystick originally came with a Y-adaptor cable; the joystick did not include the 5200 controller's keypad, so the cable was used to connect both the joystick and an original controller to the 5200 consoles. Apparently, due to the Nerd buying a previously-owned joystick, he did not receive the Y-adaptor that originally came with it.
  • His brief bout of rage after accidentally restarting his Predator game ends with one of these.
  • It's also referenced by name and used to powerful effect in the Ghosts 'n Goblins review.
  • In the Darkwing Duck episode, after the Nerd realizes that if you stand on a platform too long, a safe drops on you, he lets out one that's so long that it spans a multitude of shots and ends in an explosion.
  • In the Seaman episode, when he finds a Famicom Disk System game (Explosive Fighter Patton) that actually has the word "fuck" in it, he lets out an Atomic F-Bomb for so long, he neglects his Seaman and lets it starve to death. Said F-bomb is played over dramatic music and a montage of nature.
  • In the Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero episode:
    • He lets out one of anguish after he gets crushed by a falling pillar for the umpteenth time.
    • Once he reaches his Rage Breaking Point after he sees Sub-Zero being made into mincemeat by a Humongous Mecha, he lets out a genuinely angry one.
  • After playing for a few hours into Final Fight: Streetwise, his game froze and he reset... only to find out that the game doesn't auto-save unless he went out of his way to complete specific missions. He let out a FUCK loud enough to cause a massive earthquake and ensuing tidal wave that destroyed the west coast and could be heard echoing throughout all of Canada.
• Audience Participation Song: "Or say 'Cowabunga? COWA-FUCKING PIECE OF DOG SHIT!"
• Author Appeal:
  • It sure seems like Rolfe has an odd obsession with corprophiliac humor. Case in point, one of his old, pre-AVGN movies is titled It Came From the Toilet.
  • James Rolfe loves horror movies and this fact is clearly evident in the extra work he puts into Halloween-themed AVGN episodes and Cinemassacre updates.
• Autopilot Artistry: In his Zelda II: The Adventure of Link review, the Nerd finds it impossible to beat the Final Boss, Dark Link, so he puts on the Power Glove while sarcastically declaring it to be a better challenge. After that, he stops paying attention to the game and starts giving his concluding remarks to the review. He gesticulates while speaking, and these simple hand movements happen to be registered by the Power Glove in such a way that allows Link to beat Dark Link. The Nerd remains completely oblivious to his own unintentional victory until he turns around and shuts off the television.
• A Winner Is You: The Nerd HATES games that do this, especially games that he's actually taken the effort to defeat for his reviews. Especially noteworthy is the ending of his Little Red Hood review, when, overwhelmed and angry at how Nintendo Hard the game was, he WANTED to see a shitty ending. And he got one.
  Nerd: (reading from the ending screen) "Oh my dear little Red Hood! Thank you for your coming!"
  *lets the controller slip from his fingers onto the floor*
  Nerd: You did not disappoint. (drinks some Rolling Rock)
• Back to the Early Installment: The "Mega Man Games" review has the Nerd being sent further in time to the events of previous episodes, first to his 2007 Independence Day episode, then to his 2006 A Nightmare On Elm Street review, before finally arriving in 2004 with his very first bad video game review, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He inspires himself to continue reviewing shitty video games in the first place.
• Bag of Holding: In episode 159: Tomb Raider games, the Nerd loads a seemingly regular backpack with two guns, three grenades, extra ammo, three rifles, and a bazooka.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In the Pepsiman episode, the Nerd makes us think this episode is going to focus on Yo Noid! for the NES. This goes as far as having a Yo Noid! title card at the beginning of the video and fishing the game out of a litterbox filled with cat turds. Then Pepsiman himself shows up and transforms the game into the Pepsiman game (along with several other product-placement games the Nerd would rather review) getting the episode back on track.
  • The Nerd appears ready to slug Bugs Bunny once again at the end of the Garfield episode... but exchanges a Fist Bump with him instead while wishing him "Happy Holidays" and inviting him to play a game on the NES. Seconds later, the Nerd delivers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to him for the first time since the Mega Man episode.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: While he talks about his experiences with the Total Recall game:
  "I remember playing it for the first time as a kid. It was a Friday night, my homework was all done, my mom took me to the video store, I rented this game, I took it home, man, I played it, and it just FUCKING PISSED ME OFF AND RUINED MY WHOLE GODDAMN WEEKEND!"
• Bamboo Technology: Fred Fuchs somehow managed to make a computer out of bamboo, coconuts, and hyena feces.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The 100th episode starts with the Nerd monologuing about how he has come to hate video games thanks to shitty games, and how he wished humanity wouldn't have invented them in the first place. After going berserk, R.O.B. tries to get rid of all the videogames, replacing them with Gyromite and Stack-up, proclaiming that shitty games would no longer exist thanks to this. It's then that the Nerd realizes that he actually enjoyed the time playing all those games and battles R.O.B. to stop him.
  • In the Contra How I Remember It episode, it's revealed that the whole reason he plays shitty games is that as a kid, he found the monkey's paw and used it to wish that he could play video games for a living when he grew up. He got that wish... with the catch that the games he plays are horrible.
• Been There, Shaped History: As The History of Super Mecha Death Christ reveals, Super Mecha Death Christ has had an influence in history from its first chronological appearance in 2000 BC, where the prototype spontaneously appeared after the events of The Wizard of Oz 3: Dorothy Goes to Hell (one of James' earlier videos) and was subsequently destroyed by the cavemen, the Vikings, and the Egyptosaurus. There's a laundry list of appearances, but suffice it to say, SMDC had way more influence on history than Forrest Gump did.
• Benevolent Genie: Frees one from a thermos in the Aladdin Deck Enhancer episode. He's a laid-back kind of guy who grants all of Nerd's wishes with no hiccups. Even the one where the genie is wished to go swim in a septic tank.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The Nerd ends up getting strangled by PatTheNESPunk after destroying the Nintendo World Championship cartridges. That said, the PatTheNESPunk character is probably only just 'nicer' than the Nerd in the video itself.
• Big Bad: LJN published about 60% of the terrible games he reviews. This carries over to the official game, where the final level is named after LJN and is rainbow-themed.
• Big Damn Movie:
  • The AVGN movie involves, among other things, Area 51, the US Army, a giant mecha attack, a Zombie Apocalypse, a Robot War, and aliens. Oh yeah.
  • Referenced in the Desert Bus video. After the Nerd comes out of his 10-Minute Retirement, he declares that he must venture outside of his game room and do something bigger than he's ever done before.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Invoked at the start of "Atari Porn", which has the Nerd giving a summary of the life of General Custer as a segue into Custer's Revenge. He even lampshades it.
    "..Now, why the fuck did I just tell you all that?"
  • The Nerd is shocked in Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero when he finds himself fighting a Humongous Mecha, for some reason.
    AVGN: "It's Blaster!"
  • The sudden appearance of the people of Whoville in "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers", Even The Nerd is baffled by this.
  • The "Shits Kitchen" segment in the Jurassic Park: Trespasser review. It comes out of nowhere when a referenced pile of shit wasn't present for the set-up joke and isn't referenced again once the joke is completed.
    AVGN: (to the audience) Sorry folks, won't happen again.
• Big "NO!":
  • Lloyd Kaufman lets one out for humor when told by the Nerd that he's going to be playing shitty games based on his most famous creation, The Toxic Avenger.
  • In the closing seconds of part 11 of his 12 Days of Shitsmas, with only one more present to unwrap, he gets tempted to give himself and the viewers a sneak peek at what's inside. He only tears open the bottom left corner, but what he sees is enough to bring this trope into play. For those who are curious, it's the LJN logo.
  • In the Treasure Master episode Nerd lets out one after he finds out that the contest - through which he was hoping to get money - had ended on April 11th, 1992.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: Despite his generous use of swear words and scatological similes, he sometimes ends up using these instead.
  AVGN: ...I got more... You're a poopy-head!
• Big "WHY?!": The Nerd lets out one near the end of Dick Tracy at the start of his meltdown induced by the game having no continues.
• Bile Fascination:
  • It's Lampshaded early on that the Nerd subjecting himself to horrible games is entirely a torment of his own making, but after the Christmas Carol parody episode, he decides that he can't handle only playing good games and goes right back to bad ones.
  • In his Transformers: Convoy no Nazo episode, the title card has the Nerd fighting Megatron, who says to the Nerd "Stop playing shitty games!", to which the Nerd cries out "NEVER!"
  • And in the R.O.B. episode, after he gets beaten to within an inch of his life and R.O.B. is in the process of destroying all games except the two it was programmed for, instead of thinking about the good games he's played, he flashes back to all the horrible piles of digital crap he'd reviewed, gathers his Heroic Resolve, and shouts, "I WON'T FUCKING HAVE IT!"
  • Discussed in both of his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES) videos, where he begs the viewers not to use this as a reason to play it.
  • In Life of Black Tiger, Fred Fuchs plans on exploiting the Nerd's video for financial gain. By telling everyone to avoid the game, they're going to buy it out of curiosity and give him money to develop more bad games.
• Bilingual Bonus: The Nerd discusses in one Transformers episode that the game's title (Transformers: Convoy no Nazo) "translates to 'Mystery of Optimus Prime'", which kind of makes sense, given that Prime's Japanese name is referred to in the title as "Convoy", and the Japanese game's box cover title is also referred to in English as The Transformers: Mystery of Convoy (Or "Comvoy" as it's actually spelled, due to a now-archaic quirk of Japanese that 'm' and 'n' are interchangeable at the end of syllables)^note The titular Mystery refers to the identity of Prime's murderer, as the 1986 Transformers film didn't see a Japanese release for another four years.
• Bladder of Steel: Discussed in his review of the NES version of Ghostbusters II:
  AVGN: I mean, if you have to answer the phone, or take a shit, it's like, "Tough shit if you gotta take a shit!" You gotta take a quick shit! You gotta have turbo turds! I'm trying to play the game, I've got shit stains in my pants, and an answering machine that says "Sorry, I'm playing Ghostbusters 2 on Nintendo." What a selfish game. Bottom line, have a fucking pause button, god damn it!
• Bland-Name Product: With the notable exception of Atari, almost every recognizable trademark in the movie is replaced with a parody name, including "Gamecops", "Eee Tee the Extra Special Alien", "War Duty 3000", the "OMG Grand" and "Mantaray Bay" casinos, "Dingleberry's" Ice Cream, "Actifiction", and so forth.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The AVGN lampshades this in his review of the NES version of Metal Gear:
  "Man, these translations suck. Couldn't they just get anyone to proofread this shitload of fuck?"
• Body Horror: The thoroughly glitched boxers on Rocky for PS2 were either FUCKING SCARY or funny as hell.
• Book Ends:
  • The shot of Simon's Quest at the end of the 100th episode, considering it was the first game the Nerd reviewed.
  • Also in the Desert Bus episode, when the Nerd (after his "retirement") takes the game off his shelf and smiles.
  • In the end of Part 3 of the LJN episode, the version of Back to the Future that he had Sam Beddoes of Freakzone Games (the developers of The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures and The Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation) help improve on ends up being worse than before, prompting the Angry Angry Video Game Nerd Nerd to call him out for making the worse game ever, and becoming the very thing he was fighting against, after 15 years of reviewing LJN games. The Nerd then realizes that he is a shitload of fuck.
• Bookcase Passage: In the Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) review, one of the Nerd's game shelves opens up to a Torture Cellar for shitty games.
• Booze Flamethrower: At the end of the Rambo episode.
• Born in the Wrong Century: After seeing the newer Godzilla games, the AVGN laments that he was born too early and instead had to grow up with the games he had just previously reviewed.
• Bottled Heroic Resolve: He uses Billy Mitchell's Hot Sauce to give himself sufficient gaming powers to beat Transformers: Convoy no Nazo.
• Bound and Gagged: Every now and then.
• Bowdlerise:
  • Spoofed in the Action 52 review's "TV Version" clip:
    AVGN: Whoever came up with this is an ass[bleep]!... Ass!... Hole?... Ass[bleep]! Television makes a lot of sense.
  • In the crossover episode with Captain S, the Nerd's foul language gets toned down to fit with the G-rated, Saturday morning cartoon feeling of the show. It gets lampshaded at the end when all the characters get scandalized when he says "Merry [bleep] Christmas!"
  • Parodied in the the Atari Porn episode that rereleased on YouTube in November 2023 as “Atari Pork” in the style of an old-school television edit, complete with the “modified from its original version” disclaimer and all language and sexual references crudely dubbed over.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • In the Chronologically Confused Zelda Timeline:
    AVGN: We have a sequel to the original, a PREQUEL to the original, a sequel to the prequel, a PREQUEL to the prequel, and a SEQUEL to the young Link of the prequel's prequel! WHAT THE FUCK?!?
  • When playing Mega Man X5, two things about the game that quickly get on his nerves are explosions and dialogue. Then both start happening at the same time.
    AVGN: Explosions! Dialogue! Explosions and dialogue! At the same time!
  • Combining "cat" and "asshole" into "catshole" at the end of Mortal Kombat Rip-Offs also counts... complete with Nerd's tangent about said catsholes.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • He offers the controller to the viewer in his Dragon's Lair review.
  • In Halloween (Atari 2600) video, the Frankenstein Monster comes to life and grows in size until it exits the TV screen and enters the room, leading the Nerd to use a Super Scope to blast it.
  • In his Nintendo Days Revisited review, the Nerd plays Top Gun again. It appears as if he is about to actually land the plane, but instead the plane flies out of the TV and out the window.
  • In his Schwarzenegger Games review, he comments on how the guys fly off the screen. What happens next? Everyone flies out of the TV.
  • In the same vein as the Top Gun plane exiting the TV, in his Star Wars review, the boss's life bar in one of the Super Star Wars games is so long that it exits the TV and keeps expanding.
  • Though usually reserved for outtakes, in several episodes (especially when another person is present), he can be seen laughing when he's supposed to be angry and/or serious about the game he's playing. This is especially noticable in the Ikari Warriors episode (unable to stop laughing at Guitar Guy's "Where Did The Hair Go?" song) and just about everything in the Toxic Crusader episode.
  • In the Punisher/Bayou Billy video, the Nerd cringes when PatTheNESPunk mentions the E.T. Atari game, and tells Pat to not speak its name. Pat scoffs at the Nerd's reaction and tells him not to make such a big production out of it, followed by an Aside Glance from both of them.
  • After shitting on Bugs Bunny's face in Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout, the Nerd takes a quick moment to assure the audience that it wasn't real, holding up the fake butt he used to get the shot.
  • One of the more direct cases of this was in Game Boy Accessories, where he states that it would be cool to see the "Booster" accessory fight a Game Gear, "but that would take me extra weeks".
• Breaking the Reviewer's Wall: Sometimes he gets into fights with characters from the games, and in a few rare occasions, enters the game he's reviewing.
• Breather Episode: Contra: How I Remember It, which has the Nerd review the first two Contra games on the NES, and while he takes shots at Force, Legacy of War, and The Contra Adventure, most of it takes a backseat and is more positive in tone. It also ends with a heartfelt message how playing good games like this can bring back memories of playing with your old friends and how the good times are never truly gone.
• Brick Joke:
  • The mail on his Street Fighter 2010 review.
  • Leatherface and the bicycle in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre review.
  • Mentions of "the Poopie Man" in the Halloween (Atari 2600) review.
  • An inadvertent one: in the "Wii Salute" video, which portrays a silly re-enactment of the Console Wars using the real consoles as props, a simple picture of a Sega Saturn is used instead of a real one, with an accompanying caption explaining that the Nerd (and by extension, James) doesn't own a Saturn. The opening sequence of the next episode has a quick bit showing that, in between episodes, four different people sent him a Saturn!
  • The Batman reviews had the Nerd simply telling the bad games that he was "BATMAANNN...." before putting them down in an agitated manner in the first part, with them not being mentioned. Come the end of the second part, said bad games ended up being shoved up The Joker's ass.
  • In the review for the NES Die Hard game, he comments how the game seems to try and follow the movie too much (i.e. John cutting his feet), and comments this would be like in a Lethal Weapon game where dog biscuits are used as power-ups. Years later he reviews the actual Lethal Weapon NES game in 2014, and expresses disappointment that dog biscuits are not used as power-ups.
  • Perhaps the ultimate Brick Joke , with a touch of Call-Back , happens at the end of Majora's Mask, which has a framing device of being the new year countdown, from 2019 to 2020. At the start, he had put masks on TMNT, Action 52, and Jekyll & Hyde to unmask in 2020. When he unmasks them, all three have turned into a game he mentioned "Maybe I'll review THAT in the year 2020" all the way back in Bible Games 2: Raid 2020. Sure enough, 11 years after the joke was made Raid 2020 was The Nerd's first review of 2020.
• Broke the Rating Scale:
  • He coins the world's strongest expletive just to describe a set of games. It's so strong that both the audio track and his mouth are censored. Consider what does get through and...
  • Later, he finds that Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure is so bad, it actually takes him a while to come up with a strong enough insult for it.
• The Bus Came Back: The Ikari Warriors episode marks the long-anticipated return of Guitar Guy to the show.
• But Thou Must!: In the Pepsiman episode, every attempt the Nerd makes to play something else, or even to drink his beer, is thwarted by Pepsiman either turning his other games into Pepsiman for the PS1 or turning his drinks (and other things) into 20 fl.oz. bottles of Pepsi. Even when it appears he'll let the Nerd have some of his Rolling Rock...
  AVGN: [takes a sip from the Rolling Rock bottle Pepsiman gave him; Spit Take ensues] This isn't Rolling Rock. It's-it's not even beer! This is Crystal Pepsi! And it's old, it's- What is this, from the 90s? It's all flat! You know what? Fuck you, you're shit and your game is shit!
• By-the-Book Cop: Discussed in the Bill & Ted episode:
  AVGN: Bill and Ted were the ultimate cheaters. What have we learned from the movie? If you're failing your history course but happen to have access to a time machine, bring the history to the classroom! If that happened in real life, would the teacher give them an automatic "A", or say, "Yeah, that's pretty amazing you brought Abe Lincoln here, but you still gotta pass the test."
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: Discussed and parodied in his Atari 2600 Halloween episode wherein he plays Haunted House, an Atari game where a character is a person wandering a dark house with only their eyes visible.
  AVGN: It's just common fact, that in the dark the only thing you can see are someone's eyes!
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": An extended discussion of all the real-life animals, or mythical creatures with pre-existing names, which in the Zelda universe have totally bizarre names. He ends up being pretty disappointed to discover that the rocks in Zelda are called "Rocks".
• Call-Back:
  • The ending of the Atari 5200 episode features the exact same Atomic F-Bomb that the Nerd let out in the Top Gun episode (like, the sound clip was reused).
  • In the Pitfall episode, there's a small call back to The Crazy Castle episode:
    AVGN: That would be like the Easter Eggs were full of diarrhea and the Easter Bunny was shitting all over your face... but I had enough with bunnies and shit lately...
  • There's a callback to the Super Mario Bros. 3/The Wizard episode in the Game Glitches episode:
    AVGN: Moving on to Mario 3, The Glitch Gremlin usually stays away from this one. Yeah, it's a little too crowded with demonic possessions.
  • In the outtakes of the Nintendo World Championship episode, Pat mocks the Nerd about how he's a better gamer than him, making reference to many of the Nerd's failures from past episodes, including his inability to land the plane in Top Gun.
  • From his Star Wars games review: "And what's this? The program engineer shows his face? I wish it was Fred Fuchs!" (referencing his "Bram Stoker's Dracula" review)
  • And before that, he mentions Fred Fuchs in his review of Winter Games: "Who programmed this thing?? Maybe it was Fred Fuchs!"
  • In his "Schwarzenegger Games" review, when reviewing the Total Recall game, commenting on a graphic of Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in a movie theatre and showing the credits, the AVGN muses, "I miss Fred Fuchs."
  • Fred Fuchs is also the name given on the generic rendering of a credit card in the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure game review.
  • In his second "Bible Games" review, the Nerd ends the review by looking at BIBLE GAMES... on CD-i! Much later, in his Dark Castle review, he ended the review the same way.
  • In the same episode, the Nerd sarcastically utters that the cartoonish dragon seen in the Genesis version of Dark Castle will give him nightmares, likely a reference to James Rolfe's own short autobiographical film The Dragon in my Dreams.
  • In his re-visit of the Back to the Future game, he said he was experiencing deja vu because he stuck the game cartridge in the Nintoaster. In his first Back to the Future review, he stuck the cartridge in an actual toaster.
  • The Nerd has tried to land the plane in Top Gun four times: Initially in his Top Gun review, again in his Power Glove review (ironically, the only time he landed it successfully), again in the NES Accessories video when he used the U-Force. And finally, he revisited the game during his Back to the Future re-review, and once again tried to land the plane. This time, the plane exited his TV and flew out of the basement.
  • In his Silver Surfer (1990) review, the Nerd says that just thinking about the game makes him feel like having an anal evacuation. He says the same thing about the Power Pad in his NES Accessories review.
  • Also in that review, he says "It would be easier to pick fly shit out of pepper... while wearing boxing gloves!" This topic is brought up again in the Transformers episode of Over Analyzers, where James' character claims that boxers deliberately do this to have shitty gloves later during the boxing match, as some sort of advantage.
  • In his McKids review, he comments that the character can walk on water. Then he asks, "Who does he think he is: Jesus Christ?" He asks the same thing in his Rambo review.
  • In his review of the Independence Day video game, he thought that he should be doing something better with his time than playing the game, such as playing with dog turds. Later, when he reviewed Ricky 1, he complained about being harassed by The Nostalgia Critic, and asks, "Don't you think I have enough videos to make?! That I have nothing better to do than, y'know, play with dog turds?"
  • In his Virtual Boy review, he describes Waterworld as "like puking on a pile of shit." Fast forward to the Toxic Crusaders episode, in which he actually does puke on a pile of shit.
  • One of his descriptions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES is "diarrhea coming out of my dick." Fast-forward seven years, and Bill And Teds Excellent Adventure for the NES is "diarrhea coming out of an old woman's bleeding vagina."
  • In Board James, another one of James' projects, when Bad Luck Bootsy asks where the shark from Shark Attack is from, Board James says "Lake Titicaca!" In the "Alien³" episode, the Nerd says the game has as much to do with the movie "as Space Hunter Nebula M has to do with Lake Titicaca."
  • Two of the lines in the AVGN Theme Song ("He'd rather eat the rotten asshole of a roadkilled skunk" and "He'd rather have a buffalo take a diarrhea dump in his ear," were first said by the Nerd himself in the "Back to the Future" review (Episode 6; the theme song is first heard at the beginning of Episode 7.)
  • In the The Adventures of Bayou Billy and The Punisher episode, Nerd quips that one of the villain mugshots in The Punisher looks like PatTheNESPunk when Nerd destroyed the Nintendo World Championship carts. Punk's face noticeably and repeatedly twitches.
  • In his review of Desert Bus he tries to cheat and pulls out his old "hold down the button with pliers" trick that he used back in his Terminator episode. Unfortunately for the Nerd, the devs thought ahead and he nearly crosses the Despair Event Horizon upon discovering that the bus constantly veers to the right, so he has to constantly monitor it anyways.
  • In his review of the Beetlejuice game he is seen wearing the same dark-rimmed glasses he wore in the AVGN movie.
  • In part 10 of The 12 Days of Shitsmas, we see the Nerd taking a look around his room as he waits for his game to load (the process takes just over a minute). He spots a dent in the ceiling, and it shows some "Crazy Castle" footage of the Nerd throwing Bugs Bunny, which produced the dent. He looks down and sees the Toxic Crusaders game on the floor, still drenched in shit and vomit. He then looks at the wall and sees a T-shirt and poster of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game.
  • In part 11 of The 12 Days of Shitsmas, when the Nerd is annoyed that in the Universal Studios Theme Park game, Woody Woodpecker cannot let the player character get in a ride, he quips "You Woody Bunny fucking pecker piece of shit!" This is the exact line he blurted to Bugs Bunny / Woody Woodpecker in the Crazy Castle episode before the bomb explodes.
  • The Mega Man Games episode is rife with these, considering it deals with the Nerd traveling back in time to past episodes and interacting with younger and younger incarnations of the Nerd to show them different Mega Man games. It also ends with the Nerd coming back to the present, only to find Bugs Bunny has taken over his job. He then gives him a "Birthday Blowout"-esque No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and throws him over his head a la "Crazy Castle", ceiling damage and all.
  • The Beavis and Butthead episode includes a moment where the Nerd is playing the SNES game and discovers a person on a menu saying that "This game sucks!", the very same sentence that the Nerd used to start his very first episode. He has an epiphany and claims that this game taught him everything he knows about reviewing games.
  • The Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) episode has the Nerd recall a previous Christmas special where he answered requests to review the bad games in the Sonic the Hedgehog series with "What bad Sonic games?" He then acknowledges that when they talk about bad Sonic games, the one he is reviewing is the one everyone was clamoring for him to do. In the end, he takes Sonic 2006 into the torture dungeon from the Dark Castle episode.
  • Episode 100 R.O.B. the Robot has the Nerd fighting the giant-sized R.O.B. with a bunch of Nintendo accessories as his weaponry (The Super Scope, Power Glove, Power Pad, and Konami Laser Scope). It's the same gear he used to fight off the devil in his Super Mario Bros 3 episode.
  • The Life of Black Tiger episode features every single moment when Fred Fuchs' name was mentioned before Nerd actually gets to him.
  • In DOOM he says he already reviewed DOOM on Atari Jaguar during his Atari Jaguar (Part 2) episode. He proceeds to insert a clip from that episode.
• The Cameo:
  • Shit Pickle turned up due to his similarity to the enemies in Action 52's "Ooze".
  • Richard Daluz, creator of James' "Nintoaster", appears in voiceover in the Atari Jaguar video, discussing his attempts to fix the Jaguar CD that James had sent him.
  • The AVGN has a small cameo in the Cinevore's music video parody '''Piece of Meat'''.
  • Other Internet personalities like Doug Walker and Keith Apicary appear in the AVGN movie.
  • In episode 5 of THE UNLIMITED Hyoubu Kyousuke The Nostalgia Critic and The Angry Video Game Nerd appear out together in a Tokyo amusement park as random spectators.
  • James' other characters make appearances alongside the Nerd: the Bullshit Man appears in the Tiger Electronic Games episode to vent over plastic packaging that requires scissors to break through (in this case, packaging for a Tiger Electronics wristwatch game), and Board James came in the AVGN Games episode to show the Nerd his own version of Monopoly.
  • And here comes the Earthbound episode which can be considered as a KING OF THE ENTIRE AVGN SERIES in this regard. Every single character from all the prior videos is featured: Shit Pickle, Guitar Guy, Ninja Master, Trucker James from Big Rigs episode, the eponymous Bimmy, Tong Shau Ping from Hong Kong 97 episode, and the list goes on.
  • He also made an appearance in the YouTube Celebrity version of I Choose You To Die by Star Bomb.
  • Episode 164 has Macaulay Culkin showing up to play various Home Alone games with the Nerd.
  • The Aladdin Deck Enhancer video has the Nerd watching a video by The Gaming Historian on the device while trying to figure out how to get it working. At the end of the review as the Nerd wishes for all Deck Enhancers to explode, we get even more cameos including the likes of Rerez, Stop Skeletons From Fighting and of course, Gaming Historian himself as their respective Deck Enhancers go boom.
  • In the PepsiMan episode, Mike Butters reprises his role as the live-action actor from the PS1 game (aka the "TV-Game Guy"). His life has been ruined by PepsiMan and is seeking the Nerd's help to destroy him once and for all.
  • We finally get to see Fred Fuchs in person when Nerd reviews Life of Black Tiger — quite a recent PS4 game — which could be Fuchs' own "masterpiece". And it's a double cameo due to the actor playing him — Gilbert Gottfried.
  • Game designer Seamus Blackley, who happened to be the executive producer of Jurassic Park: Trespasser, appears as a voiceover in the episode for an impromptu interview about the game and its shortcomings. Turns out he was the one responsible for The Nerd getting stranded on that island in the first place. Shesez of Boundary Break fame also shows up to explain how the game's health mechanic and less than stellar hitboxes work.
  • The Nerd mentions that he "borrowed" his copy of Final Fight: Streetwise from Matt McMuscles, who later calls in to provide a synopsis for the game's second half after the Nerd loses hours of progress to a crash (thanks to the game's lack of an autosave feature).
  • The three-part 200th episode, which focuses on LJN, has an appearance by Sam Beddoes. Sam helps the Nerd make a better version of Back to the Future (NES), as the latter is revealed to have inherited all of LJN.
  • The Doom episode has John Romero reprising the Icon of Sin.
• Can-Crushing Cranium: A very funny one occurred in the Atari Sports video after he talked about how football is the sport that everyone gets the most worked up over, followed by pushing a bunch of cartridges off the shelf behind him and then crushing a beer can on his head while screaming.
• Can't Live with Them, Can't Live Without Them: The Nerd seems to have this relationship, not with a person, but with shitty games. He repeatedly states how much he hates shitty games... but he won't stop playing them. It's repeatedly mentioned in the show that there's no one forcing the Nerd to play shitty games... no one but himself.
• Captain Ersatz:
  • The Loony Fan from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre review is based on Chop-Top from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
  • The man who sells him the games is based on Alfredo (the gas station owner) from Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, and even singing the same song the character does at one point.
• Captain Obvious: When criticizing the Virtual Boy's size for a portable system, he remarks, "My ass is portable!"
• Casual Danger Dialogue: When looking at the Jurassic Park game for the 3DO, he notices that the mini-game where you're being chased by a T-Rex doesn't show any hands on the steering wheel. He guesses that the driver either has their hand on the bottom of the wheel or is steering with their knee, and then goes on to note that the driver must be pretty casual about the situation to steer like that, and imagines them doing this on a cell phone at the same time.
  Nerd as Driver (on cellphone): Hey, I'm stoppin' at Dunkin Donuts, you want me to pick up a coffee? What's that? Oh, just some fuckin' T-Rex behind me. Yeah, what an asshole.
• Caustic Critic: Note that this is very much just the Nerd's exaggerated persona - when James reviews media as himself, he's actually more generous than most Internet critics. He is apparently rather soft-spoken, which comes as a shock to people used to him as the AVGN. Contrast with The Happy Video Game Nerd, who inverts James' concept and even has gotten James' seal of approval — by subscribing to Derek's YouTube account.
  • Exaggerated in his review of Ghostbusters (1990) for the Sega Genesis, when he declares that the world is coming to an end due to him liking the game.
  • And up to twelve after reviewing Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage, when he finds out that it was a LJN game and gets a Heroic BSoD as a result.
• Censored for Comedy: Discussed in the Action 52 review:
  Whoever came up with this is an ass***! Ass! ...Hole? ...Ass***! ...Television makes a lot of sense.
• Cerebus Retcon: It is implied that the "TV Game Guy" was forced to host Pepsiman instead of willingly chugging Pepsi and engorging snacks.
• Character Catchphrase:
  "I am DEAD. FUCKING. SERIOUS."
  "What were they THINKING?!"
  "What a shitload of fuck."^note Censored to "What a buttload of crud" in the Captain S crossover, due to the more family-friendly nature of that series.)
  "Let's pop this fucker in!"
  "Let's play some shitty games!"
  "I would rather (do something involving animal shit) than play this game!"
  "What a piece of shit!"
  "It's like puking on a pile of shit!"
  "What a joke!"
  "ASS!"
  "Fuck. Fuck! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUCK!" as seen here and here.
  "You think that's enough?"
  (when having to do something very tedious) "Oh my God. This takes forever."
  "Let's flick that shit switch and crank up the diarrhea dial! It's [insert title here], ON CD-I!"
  "Did they even test this shitty game?" / "Couldn't they just get anyone to proofread this shitload of fuck?"
  "Makes me wanna have an anal evacuation."
  "I wish it was Fred Fucks".
  "This game is half-ass, which is the opposite of ass-hole."
  "Fuck this game, watch it go!"
  "It's one of those 'where the fuck do I/you go' kind of games."
  • Exaggerated in his Schwarzenegger Games review, when he reels off several of these in quick succession with increasingly flattening inflection: "I am DEAD. FUCKING. SERIOUS. What a shitload of fuck. What were they thinking." (Takes a sip of Rolling Rock).
  • Super Mecha Death Christ: FUCKERS!!!!!!
  • Bullshit Man: "You know what's bullshit?" Of course eventually followed up with: "That's bullshit!"
• Characterization Marches On: Earlier videos were mostly Rolfe taking on the "Angry Video Game Nerd" role through and through, pretty much a bratty kid talking trash about almost everything. More recent installments have involved him inserting more of his Real Life personality into the character, reserving the old Jerkass behavior more for reactionary purposes. Which are, well, pretty common.
• The Chew Toy: Half the fun is simply watching the Nerd suffer and become increasingly unhinged over the course of the video.
• Chimney Entry: In "How the Nerd Stole Christmas", the Nerd plans to steal all the good video games in Gameville and replace them with bad ones. He enters the houses through the chimneys the way Mario travels through warp pipes.
  Narrator: Then he ducked down the chimney, a bit absurd, but if Mario could do it, then so could the Nerd.
• Chirping Crickets:
  • In the Action 52 episode, when he tries to play Alfred and the Fettuc (for the second time) the game never loads and the Nerd is left only with a dark screen and the sound of crickets.
  • In the Nintendo World Championships episode, Pat the NES Punk and the Nerd both have Imagine Spots about what it would be like if they owned both the grey and gold NWC cartridges. Pat imagines himself at an awards ceremony winning an award for Best NES Collection (grudgingly presented to him by the Nerd just to rub salt in the wound). The Nerd imagines himself putting both cartridges on his shelf with the rest of his collection and just standing there looking at them with the sound of crickets playing.
• Christmas Episode:
  • "Bible Games" (2006)
  • "An Angry Nerd Christmas Carol" (2007)
  • "Bible Games 2" (2008)
  • "Winter Games" (2009)
  • "How the Nerd Stole Christmas" (2010)
  • "Bible Games 3" (2011)
  • "Wish List" parts 1 and 2 (2013)
  • "The 12 Days of Shitsmas" (2014), a series of short reviews for 12 shitty games.
  • "Bad Game Cover Art" (2015), a series of short videos discussing covers of video games that are released daily each day in December until Christmas.
    • That being said, the official Christmas Episode of 2015 is a video on Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero.
  • In 2016, the Christmas Episode covered several accessories for the Sega Genesis and had the Nerd and a friend opening them as presents on Christmas Day, an oddball episode that involves more of them playing with the accessories, not so much review of them.
  • "Lightspan Adventures" (2017)
  • "Home Alone Games" (2018)
  • "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" (2019)
  • "Garfield" (2022)
• Christmas Miracle: Finally, the Nerd discovered an LJN game that is not a steaming pile of fucking shit (namely, Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage). Appropriately, this happened on part 2 of the 2013 Christmas Episode.
• Classic Cheat Code: The Nerd uses the "A, B, B, A" code to revive Kyle Justin twice during the Ikari Warriors episode. This is the code in-game to get a free extra life.
• Clip Show:
  • Part of the December 2010 episode is a recap of all the previous Christmastime episodes.
  • LJN History & Movie Games features clips from previous LJN reviews.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Doesn't even begin to describe him.
  • In the third CD-i segment, he literally drops some F-Bombs - as in Zelda-esque bombs with "F" imprinted on them - (as he described it), while shouting... "FUCK!" for each bomb.
  • Also, after his Laughing Mad sequence for Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, he flips off both middle fingers and clucks like the Cluster F-Bomb Chicken.
  • There's his exploration of various NES accessories, one of which was a headset Zapper with voice activation. He then found out that he didn't have to shout "Fire!" to make it shoot. Hilarity Ensues as he goes on into a literal precision F-strike.
    "I just shot down a duck, by saying fuck."
  • Parodied with a line in his Dracula video.
    "Oh eff—I mean fuck!"
  • The end of the Ghosts 'n Goblins review directly references the trope title.
  • The Godzilla games episode ends on such an epic Cluster F-Bomb that he runs out of swears that can properly convey his frustration and invented a new one just to satisfy his pent-up rage, which is apparently so bad that it gets bleeped out, even on his show.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: He actually calls for his viewer's help to defeat Giygas in the Earthbound review.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  "Purple for "Putrid Gameplay", Blue for "Bad Musical Abominations", Green for "Graphical Farts and Garlic", Yellow for "Piss-Poor Lack of Loyalty to Source Material", Orange for "Orange you a fucking idiot!", and Red for "High-stress Anger-Inducing Masochism"! Put that all together, and you have all the colors of the shit-rainbow! Hooray LJN."
• Comical Angry Face: The Nerd excels in doing this. Practically his signature facial expression is a thick-browed scowl or screaming his head off.
• Comically Small Bribe: In the Nintendo World Championships video, he attempts to trade PatTheNESPunk for a copy of the titular cartridge, which usually has a price in the low five digits. Nerd's first offer is Combat for the Atari 2600—the system's pack-in game, which is worth about three dollars. He then follows up with a box of NES games he picked up recently, including Golf, two copies of Home Alone, and the Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt combo cartridge (also a pack-in), most of which are worth less than ten dollars... and a golden NWC cartridge.
• Competing Product Potshot: Parodies the tendency of game companies to mock their competitors a couple of times:
  • The Nerd parodied the commercials for the Sega Genesis in his "Sega Genesis Vs. SNES" video. In his commercial, the Nerd is playing a SNES until an announcer says, "Hey, kid! You still playing Super Nintendo? Look what Sega Genesis has got!" After a montage of Sega Genesis games is shown to rock music, the announcer says "And Super Nintendo has got this." and shows a clip of Baby Mario crying in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.
  • The Sega CD review opens with a parody of a real ad for the system, in which a black man appears on a dimwitted kid's TV and says "Hey! You still don't own a Sega CD? What are you waiting for, Nintendo to make one? You have seen the games, right?" before blasting the kid with fast-paced clips from the Sega CD's library. In the parody, both characters are played by the Nerd (with the black man receiving a Race Lift as a result).
• Compilation Re-release: The first two episodes were re-released in the mid-2000s as "Bad NES Games" together with various other shorts in the "Quickies" tape of the "Cinemassacre Gold Collection".
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: No surprise this happens a lot since a great part of the games he reviews are full of terrible Fake Difficulty.
  AVGN: The game cheats. That's all there is to it. The game fucking cheats.
• Content Warnings: The Beavis and Butthead episode begins with a Don't Try This at Home message in reference to the original cartoon.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Nerd mentions "Fred Fuchs" from his Dracula review in his Winter Games review.
  • When the couch gets destroyed in the Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle review, the Guitar Guy comes out from under the wreckage. He's been there apparently since the beginning of the series, though you only learn about this in the Battletoads review.
  • The Guitar Guy (whose real name is Kyle) appears behind the couch again in a later episode . . . As a skeleton.
  • Literal example: in Ikari Warriors, Kyle complains that the Nerd isn't playing his theme song anymore. The Nerd acknowledges he thought wrong when he thought people were sick of it. The next episode starts with Kyle's theme, and the Nerd gives him a knowing nod.
  • In Bible Game 2 he briefly mentions Raid 2020 and says that he might review it in the year 2020. Come 2020 his first episode of the year was none other than Raid 2020!
  • In the "Pong Consoles" episode, one of the consoles the Nerd plays is the same one that Richard Daluz sent him in the Atari Jaguar review, as a consolation for not being able to fix his broken Atari Jaguar CD.
  • In Tiger LCD Games The Nerd says he would rather play DOOM on Atari. Later in DOOM, one of the games he plays is an Atari 2600 game based on DOOM, which he finds impressive.
  • In part 6 of the 12-part 2014 Christmas Special, the Nerd finds himself reviewing an Olsen twins game on the Game Boy Color. The Nerd then states that he knew this would happen since the Toxic Crusaders episode when Lloyd Kaufman briefly brought up the Olsen twins games and the Nerd said that he would potentially try them in the future.
  • In Beavis & Butthead The Nerd remarks that playing the game is less fun than playing 52 Card Pickup. In Action 52 he had previously remarked that playing 52 Card Pickup was more fun than playing Action 52.
  • In Planet of the Apes while the Nerd is separating his good games from his bad ones, he hesitates for a moment when he gets to Bible Buffet before shrugging and putting it back on the "good" shelf. Nearly 10 years earlier when this game was reviewed in the first "Bible Games" episode, the Nerd admitted that he kind of liked it in spite of (or maybe because of) how bizarre it was.
• Continuity Porn: The dream sequence in the EarthBound (1994) review is fueled by this. The Nerd finds himself in his own version of Magicant where he comes face-to-face with the destroyed copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, Bimmy, the trucker from the fake Big Rigs commercial, and even the cluster of shit from his Atari Jaguar review. Other brief character cameos include the Glitch Gremlin, the Joker and Cowardly Lion (as played by Mike Matei), R.O.B., Shit Pickle, Jason Voorhees, and the ninja from the Ninja Gaiden review, to name a few.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Instead of an ironically cruel death, Freddy Krueger forces the Nerd to play his NES game. (Though Freddy did try to kill him when he took a shit on the cartridge.)
• Cool Old Guy: Lloyd Kaufman, the creator and director of the Toxic Avenger series, was invited to the Nerd's game basement to play and give thoughts on some games based on the cartoon series Toxic Crusaders. He may be 70, but he keeps up with the Nerd's brand of low-brow scatological humor so well, even creating some funny moments of his own.
• Cool Shades: The Nerd briefly wears some sunglasses in the first Terminator game review.
• Cosmic Retcon: The Y2K bug caused the events of his earlier "Wizard of Oz 3" video to be wiped from existence. This is referenced in The History Of Super Mecha Death Christ.
• Country Matters: The Nerd occasionally uses the word "Cunt", although it's not heard that often.
  • During the NES Accessories video he tests a voice-controlled contraption using Duck Hunt. The "c" word is among the swears he uses as he attempts to shoot a duck down:
    Nerd: You can say anything! Shit, Bitch, Cunt, Fuck, Fart!
  • One part of the Amiga CD32 episode has the Nerd use the word and other British swear words in an attempt to "adapt" his swears.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • In his Little Red Hood review, he points out that even though the title character is shown kicking a Mook on the cover, you cannot kick your enemies in the game.
  • In the Cheetahmen review's opening theme song movie, The Nerd plays the SNES game Phalanx, a space shooter. He then looks closely at the cover of the game, which has an old southern man with a banjo. He looks to the camera, confused. (Yes, this is real; the publishers did this hoping it would grab people's attention).
  • There's also his Big Rigs review, which has him pointing out that the police cars on the cover aren't actually a part of the game. Amusingly, the description on the back mentions "staying one step ahead of the law", which the Nerd is quick to point out as a lie.
  • In Commodore 64 he is impressed by how the Commodore 64 port of Street Fighter II has the same graphics as the arcade version since that is what is pictured on the box. He later finds that the game is a horribly made port and that they used screenshots grabbed from the arcade version to hide that fact.
• Cover Version: His Nintendo Power review features Kyle Justin performing a cover of the Nintendo Power jingle and the beginning of his "Double Vision" (Colecovision & Intellivision) review, Kyle does a cover of Foreigner's "Double Vision." The Angry Video Game Nerd's theme has also been covered and remixed by fans of the series countless times in nearly every single genre of music.
• Creator Thumbprint:
  • Rolfe is a huge fan of the horror genre, and it shows in his annual Halloween specials, dedicating daily updates on his Cinemassacre site to surprisingly thorough horror movie history.
  • He's also a fan of the Godzilla films as well.
  • His Castlevania marathon has him start by mentioning it as one of his favorite franchises.
  • He starts his review of DOOM by saying that at the time he got the game, he didn't know about the concept of "system requirements" for PC games.
• Crossover: With The Nostalgia Critic. Repeatedly. And consistently over-the-top.
  • With Captain S, in a Christmas special of said series.
  • With PatTheNESPunk, for a review of the ultra-rare NES World Championship cartridge.
  • With Lloyd Kaufman of Troma in the Toxic Crusaders games episode. And he's quite a Cloud Cuckoolander.
• Cross-Popping Veins: In his logo. The shape also suggests a game controller's directional pad.
• Crucified Hero Shot: James lying bloodied and charred from his fight with R.O.B. —With the trademark white shirt, of course.
• Cultured Badass: For a guy who spends all day playing old video games and swearing like a sailor he has a surprisingly in-depth knowledge of Scottish folklore, recounting the meeting of St. Columba and the Loch Ness monster in the history of Super Mecha Death Christ. Though in his version the monster was Satan and Death Christ drove him off.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Both of the fights between the Nerd and Bugs Bunny. Bugs is the first to get his ass kicked, but he later comes back in the Crazy Castle review to exact his rabbit revenge.
  • The Humongous Mecha battle in Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero has the Nerd helplessly watching as Sub-Zero is tossed around like a ragdoll.
  • In Game Glitches the Nerd loses against the Glitch Gremlin who simply corrupts the graphics of the Nerd's game room and even the Nerd himself.
  • In DOOM the Nerd first defeats the Devil with his BFSG ^note  his Big Fucking Shit Gun and then proceeds to attack John Romero's head with the chainsaw when he says he can't get the game running on the Nerd's Commodore 64.
• Curse Cut Short: From the Jaws section of his Spielberg movie games review: "Smile, you son of a- Mmmmm!"
• Cut and Paste Environments: A major complaint he has in his review of Action 52, in which he gets annoyed very quickly at the number of Space Shooters which are basically the same. Reaches the level of "Why Did It Have to Be Space?"
  • Also shows up in his re-review of Back to the Future (NES).
    Nerd: The rest of the street stages are all the same, except they change the color. No effort. Time is money. Don't design another stage; just change the color, and kids will think it's different. Do they think we're idiots?
  • In Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde Re-Revisted the Nerd mentions that the Japanese version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES) had different stages but the U.S. version removed a few and replaced them with repeats of previous levels. he says it probably made the Japanese version better like eating a turd vs eating a chocolate covered turd.
• Cute Kitten:
  • His black cat Boo, a.k.a. "Death Kitty" has made a few appearances:
  • In the second part of the Atari Jaguar episode, the Nerd is attacked by the Atari Jaguar logo. He thus summons Death Kitty to fight it and proves quite badass.
  • In the NES accessories episode, it plays with the screen for a few seconds, as well as defacing the Power Pad when the Nerd references what pets can do to it. The Nerd also attempts to use him to control the Roll'n Rocker, only for Boo to walk off it 5 seconds later.
  • AVGN turns into Boo at the end of his Michael Jackson's Moonwalker review.
  • His white cat, Little Yeti, is used to torture the Nostalgia Critic into submission in the Final Battle behind-the-scenes.
• Damned by Faint Praise:
  • Action 52, he compliments G-Force Fighter in this backhanded way.
    "It's another 2D shooter. You know what? This would be okay... for Atari 2600. The only two controls are move and shoot. This game was made in 1991, the same year Super NES came out. Not to mention, if you wanna play a good 2D side-scroller game on the NES, try fucking Life-Force."
  • He grudgingly concedes that CrazyBus is "the definitive Venezuelan Bus game".
  • In ''Seaman, this is his reaction to the game's oddly elaborate backstory.
    "The creature was said to be the reincarnation of a Pharaoh's son who fell in love with the Priest's daughter who was turned to a fish by the god Thoth, and the pyramids were built by the Priest as a beacon to guide the Pharaoh's son back where he was eventually found again! (drops the booklet in shock and looks at the camera) Well, they definitely put a lot of thought into it. THAT'S A LOT OF BACKSTORY FOR A GAME WHERE YOU JUST STARE AT AN EGG!"
  • His verdict on Ghostbusters II for NES:
    Nerd: Ghostbusters should be nothing more complicated than just running around and zappin' ghosts. So it's a huge, huge improvement over the first game. (pause) But that's not saying much! It still sucks monkey fuck and pukes diarrhea up your fucking asshole!
  • After a very negative review of the N64 port of Carmageddon, he notes that the AI of the other racers actually works, so it's not quite as bad as Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.
  • Hudson Hawk for the NES changes things up by having the Nerd try to compliment the positives instead of tearing it down.
    "Well, this is the part of the episode where I give a final judgement on this game, where I go off on a big epic rant and tell you all the things I'd rather do and different types of feces that comes out of different animal anuses, but instead, I'm going to look on the positive side. Yeah. Just for once, because there has to be something good about this game. Well... uhhh... it functions. Didn't freeze. Follows the movie, somewhat... uhh it only has three levels, it has a pause button. It doesn't have high-pitched shrieking music that makes you want to rip your brain through your ears. It's NOT "The Last Ninja", it's NOT made by LJN. It may be shit, but it's not actual shit. I think that's a good thing. You can't die from it, probably not. It doesn't give off any odors. It tastes like nothing compared to the liquid ass of a gasoline-guzzling gorilla, nor is it as repulsive as a Hag Fish that can produce gallons of snot on cue to choke its predators. IT DOESN'T COMPLETELY SUCK SO BAD THAT IT'LL MAKE YOU RIP YOUR BALLS OFF AND SHOVE THEM IN YOUR EYE SOCKETS. IT'S NOT THE GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING APOCALYPSE! IT'S JUST... a game. But the best thing about this game, is that it's easily destructible.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • The Bayou Billy/Punisher crossover with PatTheNESPunk was written to be a darker look at the Nerd's anger; he insists on murdering an innocent saxophonist in The Punisher despite Pat's pleas to spare him, then makes fun of Pat for trying to play nice. Then to add injury to insult, he reveals that he hid his real golden NWC cartridge and destroyed a fake one, for no reason other than making Pat's life hell.
  • Polybius is a Halloween Episode in the style of a Found Footage that details the Nerd's descent into addiction as he just has to keep playing just one more game of the titular Urban Legend.
  • Berenstain Bears delves into the Mandela Effect behind the spelling of the series, culminating with the Nerd crossing over to another dimension to meet an alternate self.
• Dark Reprise:
  • A low-tempo version of the AVGN theme plays us into his 100th review. It reflects the Nerd's increasing disillusionment with his once-beloved NES games.
  • In the Desert Bus episode, after the Nerd announces his retirement a somber piano version of the theme plays over a montage of the Nerd through the years.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • The episode in which "the guitar guy" (Kyle Justin) who sings the Nerd's Theme Song helps review Battletoads.
  • And again in Ikari Warriors.
  • Fred Fuchs personally gets to shine in the review of Life of Black Tiger.
• Deadpan Snarker: This is the Nerd's default mode, from which he gradually transitions to full-on rage. From the Sega CD review, for instance:
  Superior Officer from Ground Zero Texas: Let's see some fire-power or I am personally going to call headquarters and find out what hole they dug you out of—
  The Nerd: The hole in your ass.
  Eddie from Double Switch: Hey...
  The Nerd: Hey.
  Eddie: Hi.
  The Nerd: Hi.
  Eddie: My name is Eddie—
  The Nerd: Hi Eddie.
  Eddie: —I need your help. This is my building, and since the neighborhood really sucks—
  The Nerd: Like this game sucks.
  • Lloyd Kaufman has a few moments:
  Nerd:[after complaining about Toxie losing his mop] You know, for someone whose motto is "It's clean up time," Toxie sure doesn't clean up much
  Kaufman: Well what do you expect? He doesn't have his mop.
  • After the Nerd complains about toxic waste suddenly killing Toxie, Lloyd drops this golden line:
  Kaufman: By the way, speaking of toxic waste, if you ever want irritable bowel syndrome, watch The View.
  • His response to the Nerd complaining about a glitch that occurs when you go down a hill:
  Kaufman: You see the downhill thing is symbolic. It's all downhill... Like my career.
• Deal with the Devil: When the Nerd says he'd sell his soul to play DOOM, the Devil from the first game appears to take him up on his offer.
• Death Trap: Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero has an unholy amount of them; platforms can collapse for no reason, sending you falling to your death; there's a pillar that almost always crushes you, and after that there's another pillar; dead ends have been malevolently put in the game just to have you trapped somewhere as an object comes down and crushes you.
• Decision Darts: The 100th episode (R.O.B.) reveals that the Nerd takes a pen out of his pocket protector and randomly hurls it at his wall of games to determine his next review.
• Dedication: The Seaman episode is dedicated to Leonard Nimoy, who lent his voice to the game.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Fester's Quest, apart from the game footage.
• Demonic Possession: The Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge the Nerd played for its review was possessed by a rather nasty demon.
• Department of Redundancy Department
  Nerd: They just cut out the logo with cheap paper and they glued it on...with glue.
  • In the theme song:
    To play the shitty games that suck ass
  • In his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles review:
    Nerd: And you know what pisses me off? Every time you fall down, you have to walk through the entire room all over again. All the enemies come back, so you have to fight everybody all over again.
  • In "Schwarzenegger Games":
    Nerd: Whoever came up with that idea is a real cocksucker! ...that sucks cock.
  • In Ghosts N’ Goblins:
    Nerd: Anyone who wants to get far in this game, my rules are: Number one: Get the knife. Number two: Get the knife. Number three: Get the knife.
  • In "AVGN Games":
    Nerd: Okay, whoever came up with this is—
    In-Game Nerd: Whoever came up with this level is an asshole!!
    Nerd: Yeah, exactly. They read my mind. They're an asshole. Which means that the asshole who made this game acknowledges that they're an asshole, and that I'd call them an asshole! ...You asshole.
  • Also, from the same episode:
    Nerd: It's the Giant Claw. It's as big as a battleship! How did it get in this game? It just barged right in, like a battleship crashing into a harbor. It's taken so many hits, like bullets on a battleship! It's a flying battleship!
  • In his review of Bart vs. The Space Mutants:
    Nerd: It's also really funny that people just casually walk by. If I was walking through the mall and I saw giant bouncing doughnuts and killer marshmallows, walking shows and spring-jumping shoes, moonwalking shoes, paper bags with legs, paper bags with scary fucking heads, and killer towels, I think I'd shit my pants. Shit would come out of my ass.
  • In the Tiger Electronics games episode, during the part when the Nerd struggles to open the blister packaging of the Batman wrist game:
    The Bullshit Man: I especially love when you buy scissors and you need scissors to open the scissors.
  • In the Crazybus review from The 12 Days of Shitsmas series:
    Nerd: Who found this gem and put it on a Sega Genesis cartridge with a case? They're shit diggers. They dig for shit.
  • In the Chex Quest episode:
    Nerd: And you know there were kids flipping their shits back in '96? It was called the Shit Flippers of '96.
• Derailed Fairy Tale: Red Riding Hood has an interesting take on the children's classic.
  "Once upon a time, there was a girl named Little Red Riding Hood. She liked to jump in the air and whistle out her vagina. She kicked at trees until Big Bird's ballsack would appear. —what, that's not the story?"
• Despair Event Horizon: Desert Bus pushes the Nerd to the brink of despair, convincing him that his efforts are in vain and complaining about bad games is a pointless pursuit. He decides to give up, and during his 10-Minute Retirement plays, one last game, a custom hack of Simon's Quest with many of his original complaints addressed and corrected. This renews his hope that his complaints about bad games are heard and can bring about change, so The Show Must Go On.
• Deus ex Machina: Literal case during his battle with The Nostalgia Critic. The Critic begins channeling the power of Satan, and the Nerd is helpless, until Super Mecha Death Christ 2000 B.C. 4.0 Beta shows up.
• Developer's Foresight: The Nerd learns this the hard way when he tries to cheat Desert Bus by putting a wrench on his controller:
  Nerd: They made the bus veer to the right on purpose! They thought of everything. Ugh, goddamn you Penn & Teller!
• Disproportionate Retribution: In his revisit of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Nerd (who himself has been transformed into Hyde) is so pissed off by the game that he goes and digs up the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson.
  
  It then gets subverted when Stevenson's skeleton rises up and says 'Fuck you!' to the Nerd and foils his revenge.
• Distracted by the Sexy: In the Sega CD episode, while playing Night Trap, he sees one of the girls (Lisa) priming herself up in a nightgown for fanservice... in a bathroom, no less! But when she sees an auger in the shower and opens the door in an attempt to get it out while thinking it's her friend Megan in a "scary costume", he thinks, "Uh-oh... she's in trouble," but gets too distracted to activate the (color-coded) trap that the auger is getting on, leading to the augers capturing her and attempting to drain her blood.^*BTW, the game he's playing is the Bowdlerised 1994 Sega CD version.
  "You know what? I'm supposed to save her, but that spoils the fun."
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: During the Ninja Gaiden's montage of Ryu saying "What the...", one of them is suspiciously similar to one particular thing.^note It looks like Ryu is getting head.
  Nerd: What is going on there?
• Don't Explain the Joke: In his "Star Wars" review:
  Obi Wan: Luke, choose the force!
  Nerd: Get it? Instead of "use the force", it's "choose the force", that's clever.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: When reviewing Doom, he mentions how you don't just say "doom", you either give the word extra emphasis or call it "fuckin' Doom".
• Double Standard: In his Atari Porn review, the Nerd calls a woman who bangs a lot of guys a "whore" and then almost immediately calls a guy who bangs a lot of women a "stud", although he does sound sarcastic when he says it.
• Double Take: Mistakingly beating Zelda II by wearing the Power Glove on his hand.
• Downer Ending:
  • The Atari 5200 review ends with him failing to play the console, complete with him getting his chain yanked by mail ordering a controller that doesn't work for the console.
  • Game Glitches ends with the Game Graphics Glitch Gremlin corrupting the Nerd's room leaving a helpless Nerd.
  • In his Ninja Gaiden review, he and his ninja mentor ultimately give up trying to defeat the Final Boss.
  • The Seaman episode has him realizing through the eponymous smart-mouthed fish-man asking about his family, Sega naming their consoles after planets, the Sega Channel peripheral for the Genesis plugging us into Sega's network, and "SEGA" meaning "Sentient Electronic Global Annihilator" that Sega is trying to take over the world. He tries to stop this scheme by speeding up time using the Dreamcast's internal clock until the Seaman has been withered away by the sands of time, but the effort ultimately proves fruitless as the Nerd's reality becomes a Recursive Reality for the Seaman.
  • The Shrek Fairy Tale Freakdown review ends with the Nerd being sacrificed and burned alive inside a giant effigy by Shrek Cultists who have infiltrated positions within the deepest parts of the US government.
• Dramatic Irony: The 2018 Christmas Special has Macaulay Culkin as a Special Guest for the Home Alone game reviews... except the Nerd doesn't recognize him for well over half the episode.
• The Dreaded:
  • The Nerd is terrified of the E.T. game. Subverted by the end of The Movie/Episode 120, where he concludes that despite its flaws, it's not the worst game of all time.
  • To a lesser extent, The Nerd regards the LJN logo with dread.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Following the Dracula reviews, the Angry Vampire Game Nerd begs the sun to "vanquish" him.
  • The frustration of playing Ikari Warriors drives Kyle Justin to shoot himself in the head with a Zapper. This causes him to flicker and disappear until he is revived with a code, like the characters in the game.
  • At the end of the Alien³ episode, parodying the ending to the actual movie.
  • After reviewing the Mega Man (Classic) games, he decides to review one more, "Mega Man Soccer". Upon seeing how horrible Capcom made it, he jumps out the window.
• Drunk Driver:
  • In Ghostbusters: Part 1 The Nerd says that the other drivers on the road during the driving scene are drunk because nobody stays in their lane. He also points out how you are the one that has to pay for the damage if they hit you because every hit takes away in-game currency.
  • Subverted in the Desert Bus review: even though he's a heavy drinker in his reviews, he grabs his beer while he's driving the bus, thinks about it for a second and puts it down instead of taking a drink ("I'm driving").
  • Also subverted during the Ikari Warriors review. He tells Guitar Guy that if the person drives, he (the Nerd) will drink beer.
• Duck Season, Rabbit Season: Done in the review of The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2.
• Duct Tape for Everything:
  • The Nerd deals with the Virtual Boy's unwieldy design by duct-taping it to his head.
  • He also duct tapes the Power Glove's sensors to his TV to keep it from falling off.
• Dude, She's Like in a Coma: In his review of Legend of Zelda II, he implies that Link may have raped an unconscious Zelda while she was under a sleep spell.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: At the end of the Captain S crossover, the Nerd merrily announces "Merry [bleep] Christmas!", shocking everybody with his language, he ends up being sent back to his home and receives the Home Alone 2 cartridge from Santa Claus as a punishment for being foul-mouthed, ignoring the fact that the Nerd just helped Captain S to save him and Christmas from the Game Genie. In the Christmas Carol episode, it turns out receiving that game was the last straw that caused the Nerd to go Scrooge. Nice Job, Santa.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • R.O.B. briefly appears near the end of the NES Accessories review as the Nerd points out "there's one (accessory) particular that I didn't mention", three years and fifty-three episodes before being formally introduced in episode 100.
  • The current Nerd Room made its full debut in Batman: Part 1, but it can be spotted in one brief insert shot during the previous episode (Superman 64).
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The Nerd doesn't appear on screen in the first episode of the series and in the second, a review of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he plays the game for only about a minute because it's so bad. While the third episode (The Karate Kid) is the first to identify him onscreen as "The Angry Nintendo Nerd", the first version of the current theme song doesn't appear until episode 7 (McKids).
  • Also discussed in his review of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, where the Nerd points out that a lot of the criticism against the game for being so different from the rest of the Zelda series overlooks the fact that at the time it came out, there WASN'T a Zelda series yet.
  • Another odd thing about the early episodes is that the now-familiar "Nerd Room" set, a roomy basement overflowing with games, TVs, consoles, and gaming memorabilia didn't appear until episode 50. Before that, the Nerd went through a series of much more modest setups, usually consisting of a game shelf and some Nintendo Power posters.
  • Some of his early reviews, especially from 2006, were extremely short; The Karate Kid only runs for 3 minutes, as does Double Dragon III and Wally Bear and the No Gang. It wasn't until the 2007 season that he regularly started to make videos over 10-15 minutes.
  • The first few episodes had the Nerd wearing shorts and socks before he switched over to his khakis and brown shoes.
  • Mike Matei stopped drawing his familiar title cards for the series after episode 100.
• Easter Egg:
  • You can sync the episode of the review of the Wizard of Oz SNES game with Pink Floyd's'''Dark Side of the Moon''' album. Done in purpose as a reference to the urban legend that the Wizard of Oz movie could be synced to the album.
  • The title of the The Berenstain Bears review keeps alternating between Berenstain and Berenstein
• Edutainment Show:
  • His reviews actually fall into this category, when you think about it. You may learn something you never knew about an old console or game while being entertained at the same time.
  • Many of his more recent episodes (2010 and beyond normally) were a little more like a documentary.
  • His reviews also focus on game design flaws, as well as other things that make a game less enjoyable, that all serve as a long list of don'ts for aspiring game designers.
• Enemy Mine: He has joined forces with The Nostalgia Critic to review The Making of TMNT: Coming Out Of Their Shells as they both are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans. Sure, they technically became allies at the TGWTG Brawl, but still...
• Enforced Plug: In later episodes, there are segments where the nerd goes off-character to plug the sponsor. For an example, in Doom episode, he plugged Express VPN.
• Epic Fail:
  • Has several examples thanks to the Power Glove:
    • Stairs become a major obstacle for him in Castlevania.
      "Don't go up the steps; go down the steps. Don't go up the steps; go down! Don't go up the fucking steps; go d—aww, how the fuck am I going up there again?"
    • In Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, even the very first opponent in the game scores a TKO on him:
      "I lost to Glass Joe. I lost. To GLASS JOE."
  • He has such a low opinion of Tiger Electronics handheld games, he thinks they're worse than LJN!
  "There's a difference between something that's old school and something that's outdated. Old school is like the Atari 2600. The games are primitive, but they're still fun to play. You can always go back to them. Outdated is something you never want to go back to. Tiger games are so outdated, they were never in-dated! They were a fad, like pogs! If they were an experiment in the '70s and they only made a few of 'em, then I could accept that. But, no, they milked these things for all that they're worth! You thought LJN was the grand champion, the almighty shitty game factory? Tiger put LJN to shame! Yeah, LJN laid down turd after turd after turd, but Tiger was like a machine gun ass, shitting out turturturturturturturtu-t-turd! These are the worst games I've ever had the honor of playing, if you even count them as video games! People have discussions like, "Are video games art?" or something like that. Well, I have a better one. "Are Tiger games video games?" These are a caveman's version of video games! These were a step back in human evolution! These are the most desperate attempt at entertainment! You could save up for a Game Boy, or just go [imitating the Tiger handheld sounds] eh-eh-eh-eh-eh. Yeah, well, [while simulating hand jerking and alternatively flashing the middle finger] eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh. J-Just, what the Hell?! T-These things, how'd they waste so much plastic to make these things?! It brought the game industry down as low as it could go! It's proof that Jesus died in vain and legally changed His middle name to "Fucking"! The only thing I could think of to use these things for is to wipe your ass with it! You might as well save that toilet paper, it's worth a whole lot more! [drinks Rolling Rock]"
  • Then he gets to the Tiger Wrist Games, which he is incredulous to even existing. And then he gets to the Tiger R-Zone, which he says with utter seriousness that it is a shitty version of the Virtual Boy.
    Nerd: Yes. I said that. As if the Virtual Boy isn't already shitty enough!
  • When the Nerd couldn't get his Atari Jaguar CD add-on to work, he sent it to Richard Daluz, the guy who invented the Nintoaster^note An NES inside a toaster housing and the Super Genintari^note A composite system that plays NES, Super NES, Sega Genesis, and Atari 2600 games. Even HE couldn't get it to work. This was his report:
    Aah, yes, the Atari Jaguar CD... What a steaming pile of fucking shit that was... I wanna make sure there's nothing wrong with the console itself first just to rule it out. So I plug in a game, push the power button, the Jaguar logo comes careening towards me in the foreground, and after a particularly hilarious fucking startup sequence, I'm playing Tempest 2000. Woooaaah! So now I know there's nothing wrong with the console itself. Time to move on to the CD unit. So I plug it in, hook up the additional 47 cables that came with it, push the power button, the logo comes careening towards me in the foreground, snarls, and... The red screen of death, indicating a connection problem. So, the first thing I did was deep clean every single contact point on both the console and the CD unit. I turned it on; red screen. Then I went back and made physical adjustments to every contact point in both the console and CD unit so they'd make a more solid connection. Turned it on; red screen. Finally, I just said "fuck it" and directly wired the two sons-of-a-bitches together, completely bypassing any and all cartridge ports and ruling out the remote chance of there ever being any kind of connection issue between the two systems. I turned it on and, guess what? Red screen! So at this point, I pretty much just gave up and shipped everything back to him, along with a Pong machine, which pretty much said "I'm sorry man. This thing is just too shitty to work on." I think, between the flaming-fuck-you-middle-finger-red screens, and getting snarled at the same time, this machine has become self-aware and does not want to be repaired. That is my diagnosis, Richard out.
• Epileptic Flashing Lights: He's reviewed a few games in which feature these, though he doesn't actually show offending scenes often, usually instead cutting to him reacting while the room reflects the flashes in various colors.
  • In his Swordquest review, he comments on the games' room transition effect, only describing it as being scary (the effect itself is harmless).
  • In his Transformers games review, he comments on the Japanese-only Famicom game at when Optimus Prime forms in the beginning and when you lose a life, the black background suddenly starts flashing rapid colors, which James jokes is the game's attempt to give him a seizure.
  • In his Taito Legends video, he outright refuses to show Operation Wolf due to its flashing being so bad (in large part due to it being a fast-paced, but primitive Light Gun Game) that it legitimately could cause seizures in photosensitive viewers.
    AVGN: This makes it a rare instance where the game is actually so bad that I can't show it for safety and health reasons.
• Episode Title Card: Once per Episode up until episode 100. All drawn by Mike Matei, and all featuring a caricature of the Nerd, more often than not with relevance to the topic of the episode.
• Establishing Character Moment: His very first words:
  Angry Video Game Nerd: This game sucks.
• Even Angry Nerds Love Their Mamas: In the Super Mario Bros. 3 review, it's not the SHIT PUKE that pissed the Nerd off about the possessed cartridge in the first place. It's the line "Your mother sucks cocks in Hell!"
• Every Car Is a Pinto: The tendency for tanks to explode when they run out of fuel in Ikari Warriors is parodied.
• Every Episode Ending: Not all of them, but it often involves destroying the cartridge of the game reviewed.
• Everyone Has Standards: During the Bible Games episode, the nerd shows us one of his limits (though he had said the first sentence straight in an earlier review, so he was probably trying to make up for that).
  Nerd: You would rather listen to your own infant child puking to death. That is, choking on his own puke chunks...That's disgusting, I apologize.
  • In Bible Games 2, he was appalled when one of the possible answers in the quiz sections to Exodus: Journey to the Promised Land is kill all babies. ^ContextThe original question for the quiz was "The king of Egypt told the Hebrew midwives to...", in which the aforementioned answer is one of the possible choices along with "look for Moses". The correct answer is "kill male babies".
  • He also apologizes for something he says in his Indiana Jones review. "I'd rather drink buffalo shizz! That's a combination of shit and jizz. Yeah, that's foul. I apologize."
  • He was disgusted by some of the Atari porn games. When playing Philly Flasher, he is utterly revolted at the sight of an old witch shooting milk out of her breasts and later the two guys who were catching the drops from the witch masturbating, calling it "fucking nasty, man!" Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em is similar as the concept of it involves two pixelated women who are heavily implied to be consuming semen.
  • While reviewing the Sega Genesis version of "Action 52", he was shocked to see a dog in the game freeway being run over by a car. In the same game, he demanded to know what was the deal with "dead cats" in another game on the same cart.
  • In the Toxic Avenger review, the nerd is shocked at Lloyd Kaufman being even more vulgar than he is.
  • In his video response to The Nostalgia Critic decoding his secret message saying, "Lick my shit, Nostalgia Critic", the Nerd says that the message was actually "Lick my balls, you piece of shit Nostalgia Critic." James Rolfe then points out that licking one's shit/balls is way too gross for the Nerd.
  • The Nerd is infamous for making heavy jokes involving bodily fluids (mainly shit, obviously), but when he says the title of the game Seaman, he simply looks at the camera with a blank stare and shakes his head before saying "No, I'm not going there".
    • Case and point: When he has to say the name of the game again:
      Nerd: So what do you do in this game? Well, the instructions say "You are free to enjoy Seaman-" [starts smacking himself in the face with the manual] AWW NO! NO! NO! NOOO! It's "Sea-man". SEA. MAN. Not "semen". [Beat] ...As in jizz! Splooge! MAN-BAZOOKA JUICE!
  • He was horrified with some of the games in his Amiga CD32 review. In the intro to Beavers, it shows a rabbit taking a gun straight to one of the female beavers while Kang Fu not only is a train wreck to look at, it has a jarring game over screen that shows a kangaroo carcass in the desert.
  • On seeing the infamous game over screen of Hong Kong '97^note A picture of the corpse of one of the victims of the Bosnian Genocide, the Nerd is horrified and almost begs for the picture to be fake.
  • He was appaled and grossed to hear quite an unpleasant rant from Macaulay Culkin: making The Human Centipede with Marv and Harry.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: In-Universe: Parodied at the end of his Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde review remake.
• Everyone Is Satan in Hell: Parodied in-universe - Near the end of the Super Mario Bros. 3 review, the Nerd starts finding all kinds of obtuse Satanic imagery and references in the game, until the game turns out to be possessed by the Devil and attacks him.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • He is a nerd, he often gets angry, the show is about video games.
    "To play the game, you need the Game Boy. Here's the game, that's the boy, this is the Game Boy."
  • Shit Pickle. He's a pickle, and he's got a big (well, relative to his size) dollop of shit on his head.
  • Also the Nerdy Turd, a large turd with the Nerd's face on it. Created for the Magnavox Odyssey review. The only sound it makes is fart noises.
  • "Hey, you like my new invention? I call it the "Gyromite Controller". ..It plays Gyromite."
  • The Nerd lampshades this in "How the Nerd Stole Christmas":
    Ballz is an aptly-named travesty on SNES
    That makes no sense and is a cockamamie butt-brained mess!
• Exact Words: When the Nerd seeks out a ninja master for training at Ninja Gaiden, the ninja master wistfully says he has not heard that name in a long time. Not because nobody has come to him for training in that time, but because everyone he's trained mispronounced it "Ninja Gay-den", whereas the Nerd used the correct pronounciation of "Guy-den".
• Eye Take: When the Nerd begins playing Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, his first response to the game's legendarily awful program is his eyes widening.
• Eye Scream: When confronted by Michael Myers, the Nerd jabs the joysticks of a pair of Atari controllers through the eyeholes of his mask, evidently to little effect.
• "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner: In the "Berenstain Bears" episode, the alternate-timeline Nerd exclaims "Now these are the real Bad News Bears!" as he's being mauled to death by the Bloodstain Bears.
• Failed Dramatic Exit: After suffering the NES Bill And Teds Excellent Adventure game, AVGN walks off the screen only to run back in front of the camera to attempt a more accurate description of how much it sucks. This happens twice.
• Failure Montage: Regularly does this when a game is particularly difficult, showing clips of the increasingly frustrated Nerd repeatedly failing a section.
• The Faceless:
  • Mike Matei, who always wears some form of costume or makeup (That is, until Board James, where Matei becomes Motherfucker Mike). However, Mike finally appeared as himself at the end of episode 129.
  • Freddy Krueger's face is covered by shadow or obscured otherwise in the A Nightmare on Elm Street episode. He looks just like the Nerd.
  • Initially the Bullshit Man, until The Reveal that he's...Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Face Palm: The Nerd can't help but do this during Plumbers Don't Wear Ties and during his Dracula review.
• Failed a Spot Check: In the Alien³ review, he complains that the game doesn't tell you how many people you have left to save before you can proceed to the next level when part of the HUD periodically switches back and forth between displaying the timer and the number of people left.
• Fake Crossover: The crossover with The New Adventures of Captain S.
• Fake Difficulty: The biggest reason why the games the Nerd reviews suck.
• Fantastic Drug: Bubble Bobble was a childhood obsession of the Nerd, and his review of it is treated as a drug addict having a relapse.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • To the nerd, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is this trope. Out of a six and a half minute video, exactly one minute and 12 seconds is actually spent playing; the remaining time has the Nerd going on about how horrible it is, chugging back his beer several times, and essentially begging not to have to play it or that the viewer not play it. And it really is that bad.
    "And I am dead fucking serious. Dead. Fucking. Serious." *breaks into laughter as the video cuts away*
  • Another time, when Jason Voorhees is forcing him to play the Friday the 13th NES game and say good things about it, the Nerd at one point gets caught badmouthing it and runs away before Jason pins him in a corner. At first, he pleads for his life...then Jason takes out the cartridge, and the Nerd begs to be killed instead.
• Fetish Retardant: In Atari Porn, the Nerd plays Philly Flasher, which treats us to the sight of an old witch squirting milk from her breasts into the mouths of ejaculating men below. Even a lover of vulgarity like the Nerd is utterly revolted at the sight of this.
  "Oh, God! What the fuck?! This game really disturbs me, but I don't get it. Is this supposed to be erotic? I don't know about you, but I'm not at all turned on by some old, wrinkly, shitty witch titties! That's fucking nasty, man! What sick fuck came up with this?! What were they THINKING?!"
• Fight Scene Failure:invoked Intentionally used in the Star Trek review, where a shot show him jump-kicking a wall for no reason, which Kirk actually did once.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: Seen in the "Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle" review.
• Fire-Forged Friends: The Nerd and Captain S in the crossover Christmas special.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Lampshaded in the "Frankenstein" episode. In the Frankenstein NES game, an NPC warns the player of a monster they must fight ... and then the monster shows up on the very next screen.
• Flanderization:
  • Kinda. His earlier reviews (back before his Screwattack partnership) had him act much calmer, with some swear words popped in at times. Now he swears much more often, and he's more over the top angry. Beer drinking was also a one-time action in his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde review, now being a staple of his series.
  • Another way to put it is that before, he was simply an "Angry Video Game Nerd" who became angry at the constant suckage of the games he played. Now, he's an insane muthafucka. Compare his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reviews.
  • Early on, the Nerd was basically a bitter adult who played games he hated as a child to vent decades of anger, and only went deliberately seeking out bad games that were new to him on special occasions. He also seemed to genuinely regret the time he was wasting. Later on, as he ran out of games he had prior history with, seeking out bad games became his entire shtick, to the point where he often comes across as an outright masochist in later episodes, addicted to finding and playing as many bad games as possible because he self-destructively craves making himself suffer. He also started forcing himself to almost always finish the games around this time, rather than giving up whenever he'd had enough.
• Flashback Cut: Demonstrated in his Rambo review when he briefly flashed back to a satirical remark he made in his Chronologically Confused video about what the next Rambo movie might be called.
• Forbidden Fruit: Several of his videos involve the revelation that the best game based on a licensed property is also the one that's hardest to find and the one he had no chance to play as a kid (usually due to No Export for You). His Back to the Future video, for instance, has him slog through multiple terrible adaptations, before trying out one that was only released in Japan and discovering it was miles better, and his Godzilla video featured a similar case where the only Godzilla tournament fighter of the 90s had its English release canceled. That said, he's also made the unfortunate discovery that sometimes games are rare for a reason. He noted in one video that when there's only one game in a franchise that didn't make it to America, that game will either be the only good one, or the worst one by far.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • In his Die Hard review:
    Nerd: So is this game gonna be great, or is it gonna suck? Well, take a wild fucking guess!
  • After making several observations about how Superman 64 keeps throwing Pass Through the Rings missions at him.
    Nerd: So what comes after this? [screen cuts to black with a large question mark in the center] No, seriously, I want you to guess. [beat] More rings.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the Friday the 13th episode, he complains about Jason's mother in that game reminding him of the annoying Medusa Heads from Simon's Quest, only to remember it was actually Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse and he asks himself, "What, I hate that game too?" Indeed, once he actually reviews it, he gets incensed at the game's notorious difficulty and furiously rants about it like a regular Nerd episode despite introducing as the best NES Castlevania.
  • The Nerd mentions Richard Daluz's Nintoaster in passing during his review of the Atari Jaguar CD. It is the console he plays Action 52 on in THAT video.
  • Also overlaps with Brick Joke: In his earlier review of the Back to the Future games: he stuffs the cartridge in a toaster. This overlap was lampshaded.
  • In the Making Of special, when James demonstrates how he has hooked up so many consoles to a single TV, he uses the CD-I as the example and shows us how he activates it, but adds "I don't know why I'd ever want to play CD-I again." Guess what console he uses in the Dark Castle review?
  • In the Pepsiman review, the Nerd gives a bit more attention to Mentos when listing products that stuck to commercials. Mentos turns out to be Pepsiman's weakness. He also calls Pepsiman a "weird T-1000-looking Japanese Pepsi mascot", and the video's ending is a Shout-Out to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • His occasional "Chronologically Confused" segments, which feature a much less angry and scatological Nerd complaining about oddly named sequels and media being named differently in different countries.
  • His more educational segues when he talks about old neglected consoles and trivia about games' source material (particularly horror movies and Looney Tunes cartoons).
  • Episode 46 is him reviewing a good game for once (Super Mario Bros. 3).
  • Episode 102 is a making-of documentary that shows how James goes through the process of making an AVGN episode, ending on a three-minute review of Barbie for the NES.
  • AVGN Special: Contra Memories features James Rolfe recalling the first time he beat Contra. It ended up spawning a brief side series. ^Note(other games covered: Sonic, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, Super Mario Kart, and Double Dragon)
  • His review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III as the self-described "Angry Movie Nerd".
  • The Sega Genesis Accessories episode. Instead of being a traditional episode with the Nerd in his game room doing a traditional review of each of the accessories, it features the Nerd with his friend Keith unwrapping each accessory as a present on Christmas morning and playing with them and making a mess of the fake living room in the course of the episode. Also, the Nerd never actually loses his temper or becomes angry the course of the episode and there is far less swearing.
  • The Polybius review barely even shows any footage of the game—the episode instead becomes a parody of Found Footage horror films and the urban legends surrounding the infamous arcade game.
  • The Immortal episode, which is largely done in one continuous shot, is shot in a different room than the Nerd Room, and uses archaic language evoking old plays.
  • The Atari 5200 episode. He never got to properly review the console, as the episode was more about trying to get a working controller for it.
  • The Vegas Stakes episode, which is a parody of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, complete with a Hunter S. Thompson-esque voice and personality for the Nerd.
• Frankenstein's Monster: The "Franken-Nerd", which AVGN creates to play shitty Frankenstein games in his stead. It eventually turns on him, and AVGN has to play Frankenstein: The Monster Returns while being strangled by it.
• Freak Out:
  • The Nerd goes completely fucking loco at the end of the Dick Tracy review. He starts screaming about the Nintendo Hard aspect of the game, coming closer and closer to the screen, screams, starts drinking beer like crazy (wetting his clothes in the process), starts shouting muffled nonsense while pushing his face into a pillow, a brief montage of him screaming "FUCK" in various parts of his house follows, and even then, he pierces the cartridge with a drill. Then he looks at the cartridge, spinning because he wasn't holding it and it was still on the drill, with a demented stare, at that, and the screen finally cuts to black as he destroys it with his hammer. While the cartridge is spinning.
  • It's been noted the sheer ire of this particular Freak Out concerning Dick Tracy was because this was one of the few games the Nerd owns that he hasn't been able to beat for over 20 years and actually harbors sincere animosity for. Projecting real-life frustration via the Nerd persona equals one of his most batshit insane rants ever in the series.
  • Done again in his second revisit of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. After too much time playing the game (and, arguably, too much liquor), the Nerd goes on a rage-blinded mission with a cape, top hat, and a cane to dig up Robert Louis Stevenson's grave for making the book that inspired the game; after the skeleton somehow comes back to life, proclaiming it's the devil and commanding the Nerd to play the game some more, the Nerd wakes up with the game still in the toaster-turned-NES. He has an epiphany...
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In the Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing review, when the nerd is attempting to see just how fast the truck can go while reversing, as it goes beyond ludicrous speed, you can briefly see images of Winnie the Pooh, Miss Piggy, Darth Vader and Spock appearing on-screen.
• Freudian Couch: Near the end of his Seaman review, James starts taking Gillman's extremely personal questions so deeply to the point where he treats his futon like this, speaking to the Gillman as if it's a therapist.
• Fridge Brilliance:invoked
  • The Nerd has an extreme case of this himself when he revisits Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Toward the end of the review, he begins to think it is actually a clever game, as it makes sense that Jekyll's weapon doesn't hurt people since he symbolizes good, how you get a game over when Hyde physically passes Jekyll since in that instance it would mean evil triumphs over good, and many other bits of symbolism in the game. Of course, even after realizing this stuff, he still hates the game for being awful.
  • His "evidence" for Super Mario Bros. 3 being possessed had to take forever to come up with, and it's truly a spectacle of nerd theory-dom.
  • He doesn't use his 'Beat-a-Game button' on the original Ninja Gaiden, but on Ninja Gaiden 2 instead. Why? Because he never beat the first one so he wouldn't be able to use footage of the ending cutscenes.
• Fridge Logic: Invoked in his Ricky 1 review:
  Nerd: Oh my God. An exploding doormat to keep burglars out!.... I always thought burglars came in through the window. And what if it was a neighbor or a mailman or something?!
• From Bad to Worse:
  • The Tiger Electronics episode is basically one long case of this trope, with each of their products only serving to piss off the Nerd more and more. It says everything that when he gets to the Game.com — widely regarded as one of the worst handhelds ever — he actually considers it a respite from the other Tiger products, since it at least has actual console-type games and some features which were innovative (if badly executed) for the time.
  • Playing the NES Top Gun game is bad enough for the Nerd, then in the Power Glove episode he plays it with the infamously clumsy-to-use Power Glove, an experience he describes as "like puking on a pile of shit!" Then the infamous landing sequence happens. Subverted, in that he finally gets a successful landing with said Glove, leaving him speechless at his unexpected success.
  • Waterworld? He's not a fan of it. Finding out that there's a Waterworld game on Virtual Boy, which he already hates? Once again, "it's like puking on a pile of shit!"
• Frothy Mugs of Water:
  • Word of God says the Rolling Rock bottles are actually filled with water. Justified because James shoots the footage in the morning and doesn't want to drink alcohol that early.
  • In the 'Spider-Man' episode, you can see that it is indeed water in the bottle (as Spidey tips it away claiming it to be 'corporate bullshit' and 'Shit Rock'), although this might be purely because of the nature of this shot; who the hell would actually tip perfectly good beer away like that?
  • It's also visible to anybody who has seen enough bottles to realize the tint of the liquid should be darker if he were actually drinking beer, but it's a lot less indefinite and an actual admission.
  • This is a common practice in the film business, as filming often requires multiple takes; using real alcohol get actors very drunk very fast. Also, it would be a lot more difficult to chug like the Nerd does it if it were real alcohol.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In the Winter Games review, the Nerd eventually goes on a rant about how the control setup is essentially frantic mashing of random buttons. He does an example of this while saying so, facing the camera and using the controller plugged into the NES behind him. Viewers looking past him during this moment will notice the figure skater in the game doing several (relatively) impressive moves; all of which the Nerd previously noted he couldn't do when he was trying.
  • Much the same happens when he tries to beat Zelda II with the Power Glove. The Nerd is busy talking about the Nintendo Hard nature of the game and the shittiness of the Power Glove while lamenting how he's never been able to beat the game. All the while behind him, Shadow Link is handily defeated by the Power Glove's random movements, something he was never able to do when he actually tried his hardest.
    AVGN: [While Link goes to the far-left corner, crouches and swings his sword repeatedly] In conclusion, it's still a great game. But many considered it the black sheep in the Zelda franchise. And understandably, it's very different from the first game, but obviously, Nintendo didn't want to rehash the same game over again, [Link completely drains Shadow Link's health, defeating him] so they tried something new. Some people were confused, and admittedly it had some mixed results. [Link grabs the Triforce of Courage from the elder] But it had a legacy of its own. [Link is next seen slowly spreading out the Triforce of Power, Wisdom, and Courage in front of the sleeping Zelda while the AVGN is still talking] It was the first Zelda game that had towns to visit, and they had a magic meter, and many games copied its style such as The Battle of Olympus and even Rambo. Bottom line, it's a good game, but a very frustrating one. [The incantation of the Triforce wakes up Zelda] I'll never beat it as long as I live. Nope. [Turns off the TV and walks away, then rushes over and turns it back on, staring in disbelief while the ending plays]
    • This is of course Played for Laughs and an Easter Egg for those aware of the famous glitch (crouching in the corner and stabbing) used for beating Shadow Link in Zelda II.
• Fun with Acronyms: At the end of the Seaman review, the Nerd develops a wild theory that involves Sega actually standing for Sentient Electronic Global Annihilator.
  • During the Mega Man Games video, the present Nerd travels back to the time of the Nightmare on Elm Street review and explains that he's been traveling to points in AVGN history. While the past Nerd and clones wonder what "AVGN" stands for, one past Nerd speculates that it stands for Audio/Video Graphics Network, while another past Nerd claims that it means A VaGiNa, leaving the present Nerd unamused.
  • Ask the Nerd about what WWF stands for - his answer would be Wisecracking Wiener Fuckfarts.
  • Yet another example comes from Mortal Kombat Rip-Offs episode: SHADOW is defined by the man himself as Shitty Heap of Ass Doused in Orangutan Wizz.
• Future Loser: During the 2007 A Christmas Carol parody, the Nerd sees his future self playing various shitty Wii games and the future Nerd eventually has a heart attack while playing Boogie to the tune of "Walking on Sunshine".
• Gag Sub: In the Polybius review, if subtitles are turned on during the Jump Scare at the end of the video, a bunch of numbers appears in the subtitles despite nobody speaking. They can be translated to the following using a Polybius square:
  PLAY POBIUS
  PINUS
  SAVE ME SAVE ME SAVE ME SAV
  PLAY POBIUSPLAY POBIUSPLAY POBIUS
  PLAY POBIUS
  SAVE ME SAVE ME SAVE ME SAVE ME SAVE ME SAVE ME SAVE ME SAVE ME
  SUBTITLE GAGS ARE FOR NERDS
• Gainax Ending:
  • The ending to his Star Wars review, in which a buffalo shits through his window and covers his floor in buffalo dookie. For no apparent reason.
  • The ending of his Seaman review. The Nerd sets the game so far ahead in time that it seems that real-life time follows suit, as the Nerd is reduced to a skeleton far in the future. Then, time starts reversing back to Christmas 1982 as we go through James' whole history as James and eventually as the Nerd. The very ending has the Gillman and the Nerd's positions switched, with the Nerd in the tank while the Gillman roams free.
• Genius Bruiser: He's gotten surprisingly ripped for such a stereotypical nerd, as the Big Rigs episode's sleeveless reveal shows.
• Genre Savvy: The Nerd created a Frankenstein's Monster, but also added a way to shut it off.
• George Lucas Altered Version:
  • Invoked when The Nerd shows clips of what his earlier videos would be like if he went back and added new special effects, then reveals that he was just messing with his fans and that he'll simply shoot new reviews that expanded upon his older videos instead of going back and altering previously released videos.
  • Parodied in the review of Masters of Teras Kasi.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: A humorous in-universe example, lampshaded by the nerd himself:
  AVGN: Whoever came up with this is an ass*BEEP*!!!...Ass....Hole?....Ass*BEEP*! Television makes a lot of sense.
• Glitch Entity : Super Pitfall often has random sprites appearing at the edge of the screen, including miscolored copies of Pitfall Harry that the nerd refers to as "The ghost of Pitfall Larry" and "Pitfall Gary"
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • All the time, but there are particularly plenty of examples in his Plumbers Don't Wear Ties review:
    AVGN: There's dogs applauding!! I didn't even know that dogs were fucking watching!!
    AVGN: Bu... th... uh... wha... A fucking chicken mask?! ...An UPSIDE DOWN FUCKING CHICKEN MASK!
    AVGN: WHY IS IT NOW JUST A HEAD OF A PANDA?!
  • In "Wish List Part 2", the Nerd judges Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage to be a decent game. Not great, but not bad either. Then he takes a look at the box to see who made the game. And finds the LJN logo.
  • In the Seaman review, the Nerd puts in another game called Explosive Fighter Patton for the Famicom that gives him a message that has "fuck" in it. The Nerd promptly loses his mind knowing that there's a game, released earlier than Hong Kong '97 (which had the famous "herd of fuckin' ugly reds" phrase), on a Nintendo console, that uses the word "fuck".
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Used in a few examples in his review of Super Pitfall when an angel and a devil fight over Harry's body every time an enemy kills him. Even funnier is that when Harry falls into spikes at one scene, the game would freeze up while the angel and devil are hovering for a few seconds before Harry finally "dies".
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: "Cunt-thrust", inspired by the ladies who "restore Link's health", so to speak, in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Often done for comedic effect to underscore his normally extremely-salty language:
  • In the crossover with Captain S, the Nerd's foul language got humorously toned down.
    AVGN: Home Alone in the Nintendo Entertainment System, what a buttload of crud.
  • Also happens while reviewing the SNES Terminator game, but still manages to retain some profanity.
    "Holy mother, and fucking god, shit, holy mackerel, gosh dangit, how is it not over yet? How long could this first level possibly go?! Unless maybe the whole game is like this. I just can't fucking believe it!"
  • And again in the review of Lester the Unlikely while trying to get past the cave stage:
    "The next level's inside a cave, and now things are becoming very labyrinth-like. On top of bad control, I don't even know where to go." (Lester falls down a pit) "Aw, doodoo!"
    A little while later...
    "Oh, no, why do so many games have to have bats?!" (Lester dies) "AW, DOODY!!"
  • In the "Schwarzenegger games" review:
    Nerd: This game blows ass, sucks duck cunt fucking shit munching bunch of pile of.... poop.
  • In his "Rocky" review:
    Nerd: It's a bunch of putrid anal shit coming out a rhinoceros asshole. It fucks up the ass, shits out the mouth, pisses out the nose, dookie out the ear, diarrhea out the dick, shit's for the birds. The control in this game... is poo-poo.
  • In the "Dracula" review, he does this but then "corrects" himself:
    Nerd: (after dying in the game) Aw, F! I mean, fuck!
  • While he swears a lot during his review of Sunday Funday, the words he uses to wrap up the review before moving onto the next game are simply, "Oh.... boy."
• Greater-Scope Villain: Tiger Electronics manages to top LJN on AVGN's hate list, but they are only looked at for one episode. To him, their games aren't even real video games but cheap knock-offs and imitations on outdated technologies.
• Grossout Show: Especially in its earlier day; the Nerd enjoys talking about an obscene matter like shit, has shat on various things in the past, has been shat on, etc.
• Guest Fighter:
  • Bugs Bunny, who intrudes the Nerd's reality just to kick the crap out of him.
  • The Nerd and Kyle Justin were the guest characters (...and Ma-Ti from Captain Planet and the Planeteers) that were not part of the TGWTG.com crew that appeared in the Anniversary Team Brawl.
• Guide Dang It!: Really, really pisses him off. Justified, in that when NES games were first released, not everybody had access to guidebooks and video game magazines for help. But perhaps the granddaddy of examples is when he played Little Red Hood, and discovered that in Stage 8, the key to exit the level doesn't appear unless you first buy one Invincibility Potion and three Slingshots!
  Nerd: (aghast) How would anyone know to do that?! It's like, you're playing the game, and all of a sudden the game throws you a curveball and changes the fucking rules!! It would be like if you were playing Super Mario Bros., and there was one level where you couldn't jump on the flagpole unless first you collected EXACTLY 29 coins, stomped on 3 Goombas, and got 1 Fire Flower!
• Guilty Pleasures:
  • According to his review of "The Making of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Coming Out Of Their Shells Tour," he had a cassette of the tour, which he would listen to all the time, but is ashamed to admit it.
  • He also admits to liking "TMNT 2: The Secret of the Ooze" as a guilty pleasure, despite (or perhaps because of) thinking it's cornier than the first movie.
• Gushing About Shows You Like:
  • The main purpose overall of his Super Mario Bros. 3 and Castlevania series reviews. This is especially prevalent for Super Castlevania IV, since he had criticisms for the other games, but that game garnered nothing but praise.
  • He also sometimes gushes about features he likes, like how the Atari 2600 and Sega Genesis controllers use the same type of plug as several other game controllers so that when he encounters one he doesn't like, he can just swap it out for either of those two and it will still work.

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