Lets Play / Criken2

Criken2 is a gamer and Youtuber who showcases him and a few of his friends playing games. They typically are in co-op, with all the shenanigans that entail. While he records the full gameplay of whatever he's playing (and usually streams it on Twitch), the highlights only ever include the funniest and/or most insane parts of it. This has led to all of his videos being very humorous.

Criken usually works with game clips tied to a particular game, but also does a series called "Criken's Fun House", which have clips not tied to any particular game, and a side series meant to satiate the fans waiting for "Criken's Fun House" called "Criken's Quickies". They, nonetheless, seem to update rather sporadically as of late. Is affiliated with Rooster Teeth and sometimes collaborates with Broteam. After a long period of staying The Faceless for his videos, he did a face reveal in the Pax Podcast of what was then TheGameStation, which can be viewed here.

In July of 2017, it was announced at a panel at RTX that Criken had joined the Lets Play network of Rooster Teeth, following this, Criken and two of his main cohosts Tomato Gaming and Bedbananas formed the subgroup Sideshow in May 2018.

Games Criken and Company Have Played

• All Points Bulletin
• ARMA
• Chivalry: Medieval Warfare
• Counter-Strike
• Cry of Fear
• Dark Souls
• Dark Souls II
• Dark Souls III
• Dead Island
• Dead Island: Riptide
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• Far Cry 3
• Farming Simulator 2011
• FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage
• Garry's Mod
  • Elevator: Source
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
• L.A. Noire
• Left 4 Dead
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Limbo
• Little Inferno
• Loadout
• Mount & Blade
• Natural Selection 2
• Resident Evil 5
• Resident Evil 6
• Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City
• Rust
• Saints Row 2
• Saints Row: The Third
• SCP – Containment Breach
• SCP: Secret Laboratory
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
• The Ship: Murder Party
• Sleeping Dogs (2012)
• Star Wars: The Old Republic
• Sub Rosa (FPS Game)
• Two Worlds 2

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Tropes that appear in these videos:

• Aborted Arc:
  • Whenever he reaches the third video in a series (Dark Souls II Co-Op, Dead Island Riptide: The Adventures of Sam B, etc.) the preview for Part 4 will be shown at the end. And then never released.
  • Justified for The Adventures of Captain Andytrout, as his hard drive was corrupted and the footage was lost. He plans on continuing the series someday.
• Achilles' Heel: Thalassophobia, fear of the ocean and creatures in it. Dedicated horror games are relatively no problem, but even the sharks in a game like Wind Waker freak him out.
• Axe-Crazy: Boon, who sometimes gets really into a game.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Criken is pretty much renowned for his wacky antics, but that doesn't mean he can't get dangerous when the situation calls for it. Just ask the Lords Of The Hunt.
• Book Ends: The first enemy that gives Criken and Tomato trouble during their Dark Souls Randomizer Challenge is the "walking stick" thing. Nineteen episodes later, what should they find in Gwyn's boss room but one last walking stick.
• Buffy Speak: Criken has not been exempt from this, displaying some traits in certain videos.
  Criken: OH! HES A... A ASSASSINS CREED!
• Butt-Monkey: Everyone has their moments of this, though Skippy is the most common victim. More specific examples include:
  • VaatiVidya in the Dark Souls III playthrough, although he does have his minor moments of revenge. "Lore quiz," anyone?
  • Dave during his first round of Barotrauma; after dying on the ship, he respawns several times but always fails to get the shuttle back to the main ship. At one point he states there are two dead bodies in the shuttle with him, both from his previous respawns.
• Canon Welding: Toward the end of the Dark Souls Randomizer Challenge, Criken decides that Dawde Wetpant will be transformed by his maggot infestation into Edwad Emberpants, protagonist of his earlier Dark Souls III playthrough.
• Catchphrase: Criken and his friends have many of these.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Criken is signified via white text, Tomato tends to have red text, Oats (or the secondary character in a 2-player game) has yellow text, and game audio is black text. (Unfortunately for OCD viewers, these colors change very often.)
• The Corrupter: BedBananas in Dark Souls III, to the point where he leads Criken into the "Usurp the Flame" ending.
• A Day in the Limelight: Certain videos are only Criken and only a single friend of his; examples of this include his Aliens: Colonial Marines video, his Resident Evil videos, and his Dark Souls videos.
• The Dreaded: Criken and his hammer quickly became the bane of the enemy team during the 2012 Polaris Chivalry: Medieval Warfare Battle Royale, as well as anyone in his way during the Free For All. Husky Starcraft referred to it as "Releas[ing] the Criken!"
• Epic Fail:

• In the previous video, The Wrath of Gimps, Criken pulls out his parachute too late after doing a jump in the first Penthouse Crib mission, being totally unable to get on the building after a point, thus failing the mission. His partner calls him on it.
• When Criken and his friends play Barotrauma things usually spiral into hilarious failure. Special mention needs to go to the round that opens this video as according to Criken they only played 20 minutes and somehow managed to all die before they even left the dock ^* Tomato shot through MrLawlMan and accidentally killed Criken in the process. Then the sub started exploding due to a series of engineering failures injuring Tomato and BedBananas, leading Tomato to declare the round a wash and drag Bed's injured body up with him into the fire to burn to death. Despite what Criken said, this all happened within ten minutes.
• In "Terminator Mode: Sub Rosa", in their second match, Criken and the others think they've figured out who the Eliminator is, and promptly shoot them dead. It turns out the player that they killed, BrettUltimus, was actually the Savior of humanity, the very person they were supposed to be protecting.

• Evil Brit: Waddy, with his noticeable accent and propensity to mess around with the others before killing them.
• The Faceless: Until this video.
• Fun with Subtitles: His Signature Style, and possibly one of the pioneers of using subtitles to humorous effect in gameplay videos.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel:
  • During "The Adventures of Edwad Emberpants," VaatiVidya tries to explain the setting's rich mythology to Edwad and the importance of his mission to rekindle the flame, while BedBananas whispers warnings not to trust Vaati and urges Edwad to "end the lore."
  • Ironically flipped around in Bloodborne, when Vaati has a more flippant attitude towards things like NPC deaths and BedBananas argues kindness, something the boys lampshade.
• Large Ham:
  • Da Xing has a ridiculously deep voice and is usually screaming either profanities or screaming utter gibberish.
  • Boon is a Screaming Warrior more often than not.^note May be explained by the fact he served some time in the army, damaging his hearing to a lesser extent
  • Buck's incredibly odd and distinctive voice combined with his eccentric behavior leads to this in spades.
• Nice Guy: Shayne Hawkins, a soft voiced player who's often bewildered by the games he's in and regularly pleads "don't kill me!" while running and hiding in multiplayer death matches.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: All the members lean into this on occasion, but Buck is the most frequent offender due to how quickly he can shift between being unnervingly calm to screaming like a man possessed. Bed Bananas also likes playing the part, though he's usually calmer about it.
• Only Sane Man:
  • Criken in most videos, if not then its Skippy, who is still rather insane.
  • Vaati begins the Dark Souls III as the Straight Man to Criken and Bed's antics, but by the end of the series is just as willing to goof around with the "Chameleon" spell as the others.
• The Poorly Chosen One:
  • Criken's Dark Souls III character, Edwad [sic] Emberpants, spends most of the series as The Load his fellow champions BedBanana and VaatiVidya have to escort to his destiny. Though Edwad does display flashes of competence, he never fully grasps his mission, and at Bed's urging ends up seizing ultimate power for himself to rule over a world of darkness.
  • BedBanana himself became this in Warcraft 3: Literally the Lord of the Rings Trilogy when he was given the role of Frodo. Near the end he decides to start repeatedly using the ring because he hadn't gotten many chances to use it throughout the campaign, only for his continuous spamming of it during the final battle with Gollum to summon two instances of the Witch-King to them causing a total campaign wipe at the very end.
    BedBanana: Everyone's going to be so mad D:
• Religious Bruiser: We learn in the "90's Kids" LP of XCOM: Enemy Unknown that Da Xing is very religious, and doesn't appreciate people dissing God.
• The Reveal: For a long period Criken's face had been unknown to his viewers, until he made a live appearance at PAX East 2013.
• The Roleplayer: Criken and his buddies, who can cause difficulty when a game calls for less improv and more gaming skills.
• Sound-Only Death: Expect to hear Criken and his friends to make wacky and outrageous noises when they die. It's even more hilarious when Criken actually has to subtitle the noises they make, and at one point he acknowledged that hes become somewhat of an expert at transcribing death sounds.
• Special Guest: Crackbone of the defunct Janus Syndicate at one point was in Criken's games. Criken stated that this was actually unintentional.
• Those Two Guys: Buck and BedBananas tend to be on similar wavelengths and occasionally team up for weird roleplays, especially when playing SCP: Secret Laboratory.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: After suffering through he and Tomato's Dark Souls Randomizer run, Criken finally got the Lordvessel from, hilariously enough, its normal drop point, preventing a softlock.
• Too Dumb to Live: Occurs many times in Criken's videos; see Epic Fail.
• Troll: Criken and his friends like to mess with each other a lot. Usually Skippy.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: If any game allows such, you can count on Criken to do it. Consequences be damned.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Criken is, in his own words, gravely afraid of water creatures. Naturally he must face several such creatures while playing Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate as well as Subnautica.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • In Board Game Night: YES MY GATEKEEPER, Criken and his friends play so ineptly they reach the point in the game where there's less than five minutes left until the Gatekeeper wins. The Gatekeeper appears and announces a rolling contest where the winner takes all remaining keys, but everyone's panicking too much and none of them hear him over their arguments causing them to run down the clock as they suffer extreme Sanity Slippage in their panic.
  • He and Tomato's Westerado playthrough hit this when in his fervor to kill the Murderer after discovering him, Criken barrels headfirst into his lair with no regard for preparation, leading to he and Tomato being underequipped to handle things and causing their entire playthrough to fail requiring them to start all over again.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour: Discussed during a SSB4 video on Vinesauce. Criken was apparently only 15 when he started making videos, and was well aware of how people would react hearing someone so young play the kind of games he liked. As a result, he stuck to using subtitles until he became older.

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