Unskippable is a weekly web series hosted on The Escapist. Graham and Paul snark over the opening cutscenes of various video games, in a styleinspired byMystery Science Theater 3000.The show was born as part of the Escapist Film Festival, where its pilot episode garnered enough votes to become a regular feature. It proved successful with the site's audience (who liked a bit of game humor), and has continued ever since.Cutscenes are chosen based on several factors (and yes, they can be skippable). Terrible writing, poor pacing, and Cliche Storms are a plus, but even great cinematics can get the Unskippable treatment if the duo can think of enough silly things to say about them.In 2009, Unskippable finally took on Hideo Kojima, the king of overwrought cutscenes, with Metal Gear August, a satirical look at Guns of the Patriots. As expected, the game was so cutscene-heavy that it took them 5 episodes to get through the cutscenes. And by "the cutscenes" we mean some of the cutscenes...in Act One...of five.The episodes can be found here.The snarkers in question, Graham Stark and Paul Sanders, are also the creators of LoadingReadyRun. They have also experimented with a live Let's Play, found here. This morphed into a new series called Graham & Paul Let's Play, found here.
Paul hints at it with a comment about the girls' outfit in the Vanquish review.
Artifact Title: they now mock skippable cutscenes, and even not-particularly-interactive first-person sequences. This is Lampshaded first in the Quantum Of Solace episode, and then again in the Left 4 Dead episode.
Continuity Nod: These are usually the same as their running gags. The Grandia III episode included a throwaway reference to a joke from their The Getaway episode.
And again in the The Bouncer episode with a reference to their Dirge Of Cerberus vid.
And again in their Digital Devil Saga episode. This appears to be a trend.
The Darkness spawned a running tally on the theme of "And that was the Nth time I died", for whenever the protagonist loses consciousness while in first person.
(laughs) I don't think we can use that joke, Randy.
Many references to Samanosuke from Onimusha 3, and "That guy from Lost Odyssey". "Well hello there, Mister Resilient. Didn't he just get blown up? Twice?"
And the shouting of "MATILDA!!!" when the planes took off in Haze, a nod to an emotional cutscene from Ace Combat 6.
A reference to the "Bernie" cutscene character from Lost Planet, which goes all the way back to the pilot episode (which some viewers might not have seen, because the pilot wasn't available among the regular episodes initially).
When they did Jak II Renegade, they equate the Dark Jak transformation with a Werehog. When they actually doSonic Unleashed, One of the lines used for Sonic's transformation scene is "I'm gonna kill Praxis!"
Their riff of Grandia III' involved them mistaking a particularly Hot Shonen Mom for the main character's older sister. The very next video had them purposely going out of their way to avoid referring to the characters' relationships to avoid a repeat mistake.
From their Battlefield: Bad Company episode: "And thus is the curse of the controllable vehicle section at the beginning of first-person shooters. The Darkness, Far Cry 2, Bad Company... you will never end one conscious."
Several times now, if a crow (well, it was a raven once) shows up in the cutscene, they refer to him as "Russell," and even act as if this is the same bird throughout the various games.
Dishonored: "So these were the guys that attacked Bayman in DoA 5! It all makes sense now!"
Crazy-Prepared: The bandits from the Fist of the North Star game, who evidently put up cages in ten foot increments across the entire desert.
Credits Gag: Since most of the cutscenes that they lampoon are the intros, they get a lot of mileage out of this type of joke.
Crossover with Zero Punctuation. Yahtzee joined them for Star Ocean, and in return Graham gave a brief X-Blades review as an opener for Yahtzee's Halo Wars video.
Ensemble Darkhorse: Okay, not really an ensemble, but the guys declared the chicken in the opening of Fable III to be the "most compelling" character of any cut scene they watched.invoked
Faux To Guide: Their 100th episode was about how to make more cutscenes like those they mock.
Flat "What.": Their responses to the weird ending to the opening of Cursed Crusade.
Franchise Zombie: "You get the impression Sonic Team really wants to be making other games, but they aren't allowed to, so they keep having to ram Sonic into the games they'd rather be making?"
Hey, It's That Voice!: Their reaction when they realized that the same voice actress did the opening monologues for both Eternal Sonata and Ace Combat 6, and again, though with a different emotional response, when they realize "Commander 'Lightspeed' Kenny" is also in Red Faction: Guerilla.
And in the end credits of Assassins Creed II, it becomes "Hey its that guy", with "Nolan North isn't just doing the same voice in every game, he's doing the same character."
The Halo ODST credits read "Nathan Fillion plays the same character in everything and, frankly, I'm okay with that."
Incredibly Lame Pun: In the Arc Rise Fantasia video, the hero and a dragon are falling from the sky, and Paul says the game should be called "Arc FallFantasia". Graham imitated a shout, saying "Get off the stage!".
Loads and Loads of Loading: In a different sense than the usual one. Early in The Darkness, the protagonist receives an unloaded shotgun. Which he then spends several minutes slowly, carefully loading in the middle of a heated car chase. This is thoroughly mocked.
Made of Iron: That chicken at the start of Fable 3. Hoo boy. However...
Memetic Badass: They think the dog in Dead to Rights is way more badass than his owner and suggest that to underscore this there should have been a scene of the dog lapping up whiskey out of a bowl.invoked
Moral Dissonance: Lampshaded In-Universe with Genji: Days of the Blade, when they note the good guys were apparently trying to commit genocide.
MSTing: The whole point of the series. Directly parodied in their Wolverine review:
In the Prototype 2 review they call out James Keller for his repeated attempts to kill the near-invincible Alex Mercer by stabbing him despite this not even messing up his jacket.
"Your knife is not doing anything! Stop trying to use it!"
Left the Background Music On: Played with in Radiata Stories, but also in Genji: Days of the Blade'': "Oh, there's an actually flute in the scene. I thought that's just what Japan sounded like at night."
Space Western: When seeing a duster-and-fedora-clad man pull out pistols in the trailer/opening cutscene of Star Wars The Old Republic, they remark that Star Wars was always a Space Western, but they'd never seen it have a space cowboy before.
Space X: If a spaceship was full of slaves, they should be rowing with space oars.
In the Quantum Of Solace video, Graham suddenly realizes that there's a Press A To Skip prompt in the corner and seemed embarrassed.
Likewise, in their review for Left 4 Dead, both are taken by surprise at the ability to skip the cutscene that they scramble looking for the controller, only to find it has run down its batteries, forcing them to continue to watch.
For their Let's Play of Legaia 2 Graham noted that he was pressing every button he could to try and skip the opening.
Unstoppable Rage: Wolverine Uncaged - "Good lord man, do you have a stabbing quota?"
Weird Moon: A Running Gag is that the moon in (especially JRPG) cutscenes is "so big that if real, the Earth would long ago have been torn apart by tidal forces". Seeing a big moon in a non-JRPG game sometimes causes them to quip "Is this set in Japan?"
The snarkers in question, Graham Stark and Paul Sanders, are also the creators of LoadingReadyRun. They have also experimented with a live Let's Play, found here
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