"Hello and welcome to Video Games Awesome!!"Video Games Awesome! is an online show centered around five friends who sit on (and behind) a couch and play video games, offering their opinions, cracking jokes, and sometimes just hanging out. It began in June 2009 as a spin-off of Awesome Video Games, as a way for the creative team behind that series to release content and stay visible between updates of AVG. Since then it has more or less overtaken its show of origin in terms of content and popularity. Hosted by Fraser Agar and co-hosted by Kyle Huinink, Deacon Publicover, Becky Blow and Ben Taylor (who temporarily left the show to attend college but has since returned).Much of the show’s appeal stems from its casual and laid-back atmosphere. The show is unscripted and intentionally does not focus on hardcore gaming, instead emphasizing fun above all. Many installments are designed to provide the perspective of gamers approaching a game for the first time; to that end, most of the games played are current at the time of the episode's release (though they have occasionally dabbled in retro gaming with titles like Earthbound and Doom), and usually some or all of the cast has not played the game before, allowing for genuine first impressions and reactions.Featured on That Guy With The Glasses affiliate Blistered Thumbs here and on YouTubehere.In May 2012, the Adsense on their YouTube account was disabled, cutting off the VGA's income. As a result, they have since started uploading their videos to Blip again and primarily hosted on the still-under-construction Video Games Awesome! website.
Abusive Parents: While playing Babysitting Mama, due to the game chastising them for "shaking the baby" too often due to touchy Wii controls, the group eventually lapse towards this out of frustration.
Fraser was also a pretty crappy parent during the Heavy Rain playthrough.
Anything That Moves: Ben frequently plays this up for laughs. He often makes lewd comments at things ranging from the potentially underaged characters in Let's Play Ballerina to his cat/girl/boy/whatever "fiancee" Nekoevangeline on Minecraft Awesome, to inanimate objects, or even his fellow co-host Fraser.
Datura was an especially (and unusually) erotic episode, from Fraser groping a statue of a woman to wanting to slap a pig's ass.
The Artifact: Fraser still introduces the show as "Video Games Awesome Live", even though they haven't done an episode that wasn't live since early 2011.
All right, I'm gonna continue with aughts. I'm not gonna get sidetracked. [Less than a minute later] Sorry guys, I got sidetracked. Is aughts yelling at me?
The Bard: Fraser will often sing little songs about the game he's playing.
Gun shop owner: Said he worked at Hartfield's, jewelery store just up on Broadway. Kyle gasps Fraser: What's that mean? Kyle: The jewelery store...no wait, that's a shoe store. Nothing. Fraser: But the jewelery store...pearl earrings...layaway...LC...bank...shoes...woman? Police... Kyle: Cops...Police Cops. Fraser: Investigation. Murder investigation! The murder was in the jewelery store! Kyle: (overlapping) Sea...it happened by the sea...C is for Catwoman!
Bond One-Liner: After drilling a bad guy in the heart in Heavy Rain, Fraser comes up with a ton of them:
Fraser: Part two! Drill to the heart! [...] I guess you're the one who got screwed, or, look out for those heart-holes...I hear they're catching! Looks like the diagonosis is...murder! [...] [reading Kshade's comment] This is not a drill...and then make some reference to the painter who made This is not a pipe. [...] C'est n'est pas drill [sic]. [...] I'm a regular René Magritte!
Not too long after, when a character's clothing is caught on some caterpillar tracks and crushed:
Bootstrapped Theme: Ya Burnt by Starship Amazing has become the de-facto theme to the show after it (and the rest of the album, Ya’ll Stop Bloggin’) was played on the show.
Canada, Eh?: The all-Canadian team really loves it when any game features Canada as a setting, such as Scott Pilgrim (Toronto) or Deus Ex Human Revolution (Montreal, where the developers are from).
The Future Minecraft Build was split into two segments, with the first ending on a cliffhanger of the Doctor from Doctor Who escaping in a DeLorean after his TARDIS broke down.
The Adventure Build ends on a wall that would take several weeks to break through to save NekoEvangeline.
During the Microsoft Press Conference at E3 2011, the gang find out there is a new Star Wars game...on the Kinect.
Several times during the Duke Nukem Forever gameplay, when they think Duke will finally get a chance to go outside and kick some ass, only to be stymied by yet another obstacle. Like this.
A number of Fraser's Seussian rhymes are reacted to this way.
Cosplay: They usually dress up like characters from the game they play that day, which Becky makes herself. Some examples here.
Couch Gag: Literally, when the gang enters and exits the screen in a manner befitting the game they're playing. For example, with Harley-Davidson Roadtrip, they "rode" the couch in like a motorcycle.
Cuteness Proximity: The Kinectimals tiger for Ben ("His name is Skittles!"), and the Let's Play Ballerina outfits for all the guys ("She looks darling!").
Fraser: They wouldn't have walked into this situation. They have a plan.
[Nathan grabs a pool cue and attacks the closest man.]
Fraser: That's the plan!
Determinator: After spending almost ten minutes trying to get the infamous Veni Vidi Vici trinket in VVVVVV, Fraser declares he's spent too long on it to give up. He then spends another thirty minutes trying to get it, almost until his hand gives in, before finally succeeding.
Double Standard Abuse: Female on Male: During a Phoenix Wright playthrough, Becky messed up the intro by clicking on the wrong game in the Wii menu and Fraser relentlessly made fun of her for it (for the record, he did apologize, though it was hard to hear through his laughter). She was most displeased. Later, when they came back from a commercial break, Fraser had put on a pair of sunglasses and Becky was smiling.
Becky: Welcome back to Phoenix Wright!
Fraser: ...I fell down some stairs.
Ben: Into a bag of doorknobs.
Downer Ending: The Duke Nukem Forever episode. The gradual drop of excitement to outright depression amongst the crew as they progress through the game is heartbreaking.
Easy Mode Mockery: Averted, they always play on the easiest setting and call it 'Super Fraser mode'.
Enforced Method Acting: Fraser apparently forbids the others from playing or learning about some games until they play them on the show. He also wouldn't let them see the Babysitting Mama doll until he gave birth to it on camera.
Epic Fail: For one of the You Don't Know Jack questions, all four of them chose the wrong answer, but to their surprise, it was the Wrong Answer of the Game, giving them all a huge bonus.
Excited Episode Title!: Usually in the pattern of [Game] is AWESOME! or for multiparters - [Subtitle]! - [Game] is AWESOME!
Far East: The "Frasia" build in Minecraft, mixing ancient and medieval Japan, China and one Korean turtle boat. Anda Megazord. Also, the non-build challenge area Shiro Shiro.
Just how many giant cocks did their original Minecraft server have?
And the first structures built in the second one were giant cocks.
In Duke Nukem Forever, Duke is given a chance to draw up a battle strategy on a dry-erase board. Fraser spends five minutes drawing an army of giant cocks attacking the monster. Later, a kid asks for Duke's autograph, so Fraser draws cocks in his book.
Kyle: I feel that Duke would autograph with a cock.
As part of the Minecraft Awesome Anniversary episode, Fraser had all the builders create a field of cocks, with one massive diamond cock to tower over them.
Game-Breaking Bug: Fraser seems to be a magnet for these. In Harley-Davidson Roadtrip, the game stopped accepting controller input, twice. In Dead Island, he got his truck stuck on a wall, and stepping out of the vehicle killed him, twice. In Amnesia The Dark Descent, essential puzzle pieces glitched themselves out of existence, twice.
The Ghost: The Doctor (from Doctor Who, frequently just called "Doctor Who" by Fraser) in the Minecraft Future build, who creates diversions for Fraser-as-the Master and only just escapes in his TARDIS through various eras in history. Finally appeared in The Simpsons build.
Good Bad Bugs: invoked In Dead Island, Fraser somehow got stuck in rage mode for about ten minutes, with all all the experience bonuses that came with it. The downside was that it made the game scream at him for the entire time.
Hoist by His Own Petard: Fraser had the guys play Scene It: Twilight, thinking the joke would be on them. He then started to regret it.
Fraser: So, yeah, you guys may think I'm vengeful and fickle god, but I know the names of all my subordinates. I take time to know each of them. (turns to a Minecraft player) Who the hell are you?!
And in Mario Party 2, after Fraser concedes a loss due to his carpel tunnel making him worse at button mashing.
Fraser: Way to make fun of my impediment, you dyslexic fuck!
Jack-of-All-Stats: According to Fraser, he's ideal for action games. Ben's better at them, but is deathly quiet while concentrating, and Becky provides more comedic panicking, but is terrible at them. Fraser's somewhere in the middle.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Fraser makes fun of Deacon all the time and troll his fans given the chance, yet at the end of his vlogs and live shows he always says he loves them.
Kindhearted Cat Lover: The live show announcements Fraser posts on YouTube almost always feature at least one of his and Becky's cats.
You could essentially play a drinking game with how much game trivia the team gets completely wrong - even when they're right in the middle of playing the relevant game. Just watch Fraser play Portal 2 completely positive that there's going to be a giant rebellion of robots as a major plot point.
While playing Catherine, Fraser ignored the items tutorial, thought the chat room was lying when they said he could use items, despite an instruction to do so sitting in the bottom right corner of the screen, and then criticized the game for not explaining this feature to him.
Intentionally invoked from time to time, when Fraser confidently describes things incorrectly, such as combining the plots of several movies. This is done mostly to troll the chat and Ben.
Large Ham: Fraser as Santa in the intro and outro of the Minecraft Christmas build.
Macro Zone: The "Benormous" build in Minecraft, featuring a room with a couch and TV, and a giant-sized garden.
Man of a Thousand Voices: Fraser, while narrating games without voice acting; sometimes switching to drastically different voices for the same character (sometimes even mid-sentence).
Mega Crossover: While a few pop cultural references appeared in prior Minecraft builds, the future-themed one has a continuing story arc of the Master from Doctor Who (portrayed by Fraser) chasing the Doctor, and ending up in a soundstage filled with a multiple-franchise space battle centred on Star Trek's Borg. Later, Fraser discovers Tomorrowland, an unmanned Gundam, Invader Zim's house, Cogswell Cogs from The Jetsons, the Matrix, 2015 Hill Valley from Back to the Future Part II, Planet Zebes from Metroid, New New York from Futurama and others.
Metaphor Is My Middle Name: While Ben plays Limbo poorly, Fraser states that his middle name should be "Reckless Abandon". Fraser later uses the phrase to describe himself.
Never Live It Down: Neither Fraser nor the server mods will forget Ben killing the wolf Ruddadog in Minecraft. invoked
No Fourth Wall: The team (especially Becky) constantly deliver lines directly to the camera/audience. Particularly lampshaded in episodes where they have to sort out settings on Xbox Kinetic games and thus have to show the (usually invisible due to greenscreen) studio on screen through the Kinetic's camera, causing Ben (or the chat) to cry out "No, the fourth wall!".
Non Indicative Name/Odd Name Out: The fifth Minecraft build that was named after one of the team, instead of having a pun based them like "Frasia" or "Deactor Seuss" is simply called "Kyle".
Noodle Incident: Occasionally one of the gang might reference some past event without going into detail. Fraser apparently once shat on a train.
Oh Crap: Despite his foggy memories of prior playthroughs of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney while playing the game on VGA, Fraser instantly realises that Manfred van Karma means business just from his name being uttered.
Fraser: He has a face tattoo so that you'll remember him. Ben: So that he won't look the same as everybody else? [...] Fraser: The Japanese use different-coloured hair, Americans use face tattoos.
The Quiet One: Deacon. Cementing the Duke Nukem Forever episode's Mood Whiplash when he speaks possibly the most he ever has on VGA to explain why he considers it a bad game.
Fraser will often skip, ignore, or misinterpret the game's instructions, onscreen or otherwise - the official stance is that they don't want to bog the episode down with them going through tutorials or reading manuals, but more often than not this results in Fraser and company asking the chat to walk them through the game. For example, in Catherine, he thought the chat room was lying when they said he could create a block, even though the command to do so was highly visible in the corner of the screen.
In Uncharted 2, the old man sends Nathan and a guide to find the remain of his expedition:
Fraser: Are we going to hunt a bear?
Fraser talked over the "Dis or Dat" instructions in You Don't Know Jack, and burned the rest of the round asking the others what he was supposed to do.
They skipped a tutorial for Chick Chick Boom and were thus mystified by Corncobman.
After the instructions for crouching in Dead Island flashed on and off, Fraser claimed that the game hadn't told him how to do it.
And in Deus Ex Human Revolution, the elevator code is mentioned (and displayed in captions) twice, but Ben and Fraser don't notice it.
In Dead Rising 2: Off The Record, Fraser keeps making waypoints on the map, but puts them at the wrong place and then complains about being lead the wrong way. At the beginning he also completely ignores the icon indicating where he is on the map and thinks the waypoint THAT HE MADE HIMSELF TO KNOW WHERE TO GO is his current location.
Refuge in Audacity: Some of the titles for the show suggested by the chat-room during the Deus Ex playthrough.
Fraser: I don't even wanna say some of these out loud...
Retirony: The cactus trap Professor Frink built for Deacon in The Simpsons build was said to have happened both on his birthday and one day before his retirement.
"Unsubbing." Fraser thinks it's hilarious when people go out of their way to announce that they're unsubscribing (usually because of too many/not enough Minecraft episodes), so they and their viewers like to come up with other vapid reasons for unsubscribing, usually in the format of "Not enough X, unsubbing".
Mr./Mrs. X is Y. Started when Fraser started trolling one of his mods called mrchrismad, frequently calling him Mr. Chrisismad; ever since, the live chat applies this to anger or any other emotion any of the cast is feeling.
Whenever Fraser changes a game's difficulty to Easy to play on, the chat room praises him in some variation, that he "Passed the game's stage on Hard Mode." In fact whenever Fraser changes the difficulty to Easy Mode, he and the Chat Room declare the game is on Super Fraser Mode, the hardest difficulty imaginable.
Becky and Ben telegraphing obvious solutions to hacking puzzles in Mass Effect 2.
That one and that one. And those two...
Scandalgate: In Sideway New York Fraser referred to his rap (used earlier in a Minecraft build) containing the word "niggaz" as being subject to Goldteethgate.
The remains of the Minecraft Giant World after the giant Creeper explosion.
Fraser putting TNT and lava in the troll part of the Minecraft server's first anniversary build.
Scenery Porn: Every Minecraft build. Taken further by the "artistic" pull-away at the end of the first anniversary of the original server.
Serial Escalation: They started off doing ten-minute segments weekly, which soon bloomed into multi-hour live shows daily. For the Skyrim release, they were live for nine hours straight.
Sore Loser: Fraser hates to lose, especially to Ben or Deacon.
Sound Effect Bleep: Done with words. Early on, any swears would be removed from an episode in post and either blanked or replaced with inoffensive words from elsewhere in the episode (this was heavily and repeatedly lampshaded whenever it happened). This practice eventually fell by the wayside, especially as more and more of their shows were done live and they started doing M-rated games.
Team Mom: Becky. She makes treats, sews costumes, and keeps Fraser's trolling in check. She's also the executive producer of Awesome Video Games and Video Games Awesome!.
The Babysitting Mama doll started to get used as a fill-in for absent party members, and now routinely gets included in videos, and gets it own costumes when the others dress up. They've since named it Hank.
Becky's Sackboy plushie has begun to make appearances as well.
Pretty much all of Fraser's Minecraft builders are this, trolling Fraser with green couches, green "crouch rooms" and the occasional green comfy chair.
During Arkham Asylum, Fraser started trolling Ben by saying, "And I thought they smelled bad on the outside!" in out-of-context situations. Then they both started trolling Becky by saying it every few minutes. Then Becky trolled everyone by calling it a Star Trek quote.
Fraser trolled the others with an edited version of the Just Dance 2 trailer, which showed the same clip of terrible dancing over and over. He also set them up to play a "mystery game", which turned out to be Scene It: Twilight.
Fraser did the same thing with a trailer for Dance Star Party the following year.
Santa Claus trolled the Minecraft Christmas build at the end by griefing all the buildings.
The guys are put off by the brutal carnage Kirby unleashes during Kirby's Epic Yarn, especially in light of the fact that the "enemies" don't attack him, can't even hurt him, and are just going about their business when you run across them.
They (especially Fraser) got really pissed off at Kratos during the God Of War III playthrough because of his tendency to massacre innocent people, especially women, often in cruel ways. Fraser even said that Kratos impaling himself was the best thing he'd ever done.
The Minecraft server had to be whitelisted due to griefers.
The chat during live streams is now Turbo club-members only to prevent the show's increasing viewership from spoiling the games being played and trolling Fraser and co.
A Worldwide Punomenon: In the Minecraft Christmas build, there was a penis, but also a large chicken in the ice sculpture contest. The latter was disqualified because they "already had a giant cock".
The Creeper Testing Ground in the Minecraft Beckyni Bottom build had 0 Days without injuries.
In the Frasia build, a shrine to "Super Quiet Creepers" had a "0 Days since last explosion" sign.
The Mine all Mine Offices and bunkrooms in the adventure map build proudly declares a massive two days without an accident.
In Heavy Rain, Ben uses this as a Bond One-Liner when a bad guy's loose clothing is caught on some caterpillar tracks.
Days without an accident: zero.
You Fool!: Fraser uses this speech pattern a lot while imitating the cast of Asura's Wrath.
Fraser: FOOL! You cannot hurt me with my sword! That only makes me stronger!
You Just Told Me: During a session of Rhythm Heaven Fever, Ben often was a lot better at the games than Fraser, and the chat frequently cheered on Ben or a member of the gang that wasn't even present whenever Fraser did do well.
Fraser: (reading the chat) Fraser "Ben is better than me in every way" 2012
Becky: Well, you said it.
Fraser: Must've been drunk.
Becky: No, you just said it, just now.
Fraser: I did? Wow...oh fuck.
You Say Tomato: The group's pronunciation of "Dr. Seuss" (like "Dr. Zeuss") was immediately called out by the entire chatroom.
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