YMMV / Gaming Garbage

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• Anti-Climax Boss: The "Boss" (read: only enemy) of Boss Fight, who managed to kill himself before Lowtax could do anything.
• Audience-Alienating Era:
  • The Spring 2014 period had a particular overabundance of recycled Unity-engine horror games, made worse by Shmorky's voice hitting a rather sappy rock bottom.
  • For most of the viewerbase, Shmorky's departure in fall 2014 essentially killed the channel, even if the reasons for his removal became understandable later on. While Lowtax would try to go on with the channel without Shmorky, he proved to be a much less entertaining personality without Shmorky to bounce off of, resulting in the channel's subscriber total completely stagnating and the videos getting a fraction of the views they attracted in the Shmorky era, while they would just continue to decline up until Lowtax's death.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: For a few seconds during Lowtax's conversation with Shmorky as he spends half an hour walking around the forest in Pulse Phobia, an image of one of The Simpsons's secondary characters appears in the foreground. It happens at an utterly random moment and disappears without explanation.
• Crossing the Line Twice: Very likely one of the biggest factors in "Let's Play: Evicted" not getting Lowtax's YouTube account shut down.
• Catharsis Factor: One of the primary reasons Lowtax and Shmorky actually liked 1.exe is just because how fun it turned out to be to shoot everything on screen.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The rapid-fire cannons in Mega Lord, whose projectile streams are impossible to avoid.
  • The bears in ''Sherlock Holmes vs. Dr. Frankenstein, which drain your entire health bar almost instantly and take many shots to take down.
• Good Bad Bugs: The So Bad, It's Good Prevention 1 and Crimelife games have more than their fair share.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Lowtax telling Shmorky that he's going to kill himself in the beginning of Flapper Racers counts as this come November 2021, when he did commit suicide.
  • The entire "golden era" of the channel when Lowtax and Shmorky were collaborating is this, with the later revelations of everything messed up with Shmorky going on behind the scenes, and how Lowtax was making these videos with Shmorky to get away from his home as his marriage fell apart, marking the beginning of the downward spiral that would eventually lead to farther unsavory revelations about Lowtax coming out and the eventual culmination in his suicide. As a result, even fans of that era may have a hard time revisiting the videos that made the channel popular at one point.
• He Really Can Act: Lowtax's performance as a cartoon-style old man in "Elderly Games 2" is pulled off surprisingly efficiently for someone who was most famous for his "acting" in Doom House.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "Let's Play: Crimelife: Somertun" is especially funny now that several people have been caught trying to sell unmodified Unity and Unreal Engine asset packs as original games on Steam, at least one of whom actually succeeded in doing so.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The channel fell into a habit of playing several indistinguishable Survival Horror games back-to-back rather than mixing up genres. In later years, seeing the same (usually free) Unity and Unreal Engine 4 assets featured in almost every GameJolt creation led to the same reaction.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Working the title of Cry of Fear into a phrase, especially ones that involve fear and/or crying.
    • Telling Lowtax to finish Cry of Fear, often in the most hilariousy deceptive, persuasive and/or obsessive of ways.
  • Discussing whether or not something is "the real Minecraft".
  • Calling something a "disgusting wad" after Lowtax's unofficial christening of Pac-Man as such.
  • "George got dead."
  • Debob
  • TRELYATE!
  • Manganoochatrelacanootratreladeb
• Memetic Psychopath: Dontrel the Dolphin, a mascot with both attitude and an unsettling appearance, made even creepier by his game's bizarre backgrounds and discordant music.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • In keeping with all of their other cluelessly "lo-fi" elements, quite a few of the first-person games have a staggeringly low FOV, moreso than most console games. 7 Days, Nine Eleven and Jennifer's Secret, in particular, can make the viewer physically ill within the span of just a few minutes.
  • Some of Shmorky's artwork in the video bumpers can qualify as this.
  • Lampshaded when warning of the extreme motion blur in Slender Lost.
    Lowtax: The following footage has not been edited in any way and will probably make you vomit.
• Never Live It Down:
  • The commenters often brought up Shmorky's history of rather bizarre and fetishistic furry artwork; his drawing of cub porn is especially infamous. Lowtax claimed that it was (at least in part) why Shmorky was booted off the channel.
  • Lowtax was never able to live down his disastrous boxing match with Uwe Boll. Even more than a decade later it remained an infamous moment fans and critics alike loved to bring up.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Dontrel The Dolphin is pretty much the scariest thing they've ever played. Made even creepier by Shmorky's Sanity Slippage.
  • Potato Pushur isn't exactly clear what it's about, but the impression it does leave—that of a fat woman stabbing herself to allow monster potatoes inside her body to drink her blood as she transforms into a giant green vegetable monster out to make love to a giant red vegetable monster—is certainly an unsettling one.
  • Tails'... "cameo" in "Let's Play: Sonic Cracker", drawn ugly as possible with a twistedly distorted voice.
  • Survival Horror, both the game and the bumper video. The latter takes a more traditional route whereas the former... not so much.
  • In the beginning of "Let's Play: Heroes Company Modern Terror", Lowtax is voiced by a realistic-looking animated skeleton for seemingly no reason.
  • It's safe to say that a Grim Reaper with worms and maggots crawling all over its face is not a pretty sight, and if you're not careful you'll see one in the beginning of "Let's Play: Sonic Writers" and "Let's Play: Police Force 2"
  • Beestmeel is surreal enough in and of itself to qualify, but special mention goes to the player character's falling animation where its eyes are suddenly replaced with empty, black circles and a large, disembodied head of a blonde vibrating and convulsing like a bad Stop Motion Animation.
  • Despite its hilariously primitive MS Paint graphics, Torture is probably the closest a game on the channel ever got to attaining this on legitimate grounds, thanks to its copious varieties of Eye Scream.
  • "Erned Laser" may also be the creepiest game they ever played, given that the incomplete, poorly designed, flickering textures of levels resemble a cross between abstract art and an Eldritch Location. The warped, ominous, cacophonous music is definitely nightmare fuel.
  • The "Opera Ball" in Prevention 1, a cartoon face that manages to out-terrify any of the monsters in Cry of Fear.
• Nightmare Retardant: Every single horror game featured on the channel was turned into this.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: The maker of the completely insane game Beestmeel was ecstatic about the extra publicity he got from being featured by Lowtax. He has taken the opportunity to enter several threads in the YouTube comments in order to "explain" the game and to spread knowledge of his Word Salad Philosophy.
  • The same happened earlier with A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Blood Craze creator Bladevampirek, who even registered a forum account.
• Older Than They Think: Some of the Game Maker style games go back as far as 2002.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Technically, none of the franchise-based games are actually "licensed" in that they don't have permission from the copyright holders or anything. And chances are they never will, as they're generally at levels of incompetence not even LJN would touch.
• Reviews Are the Gospel: Despite otherwise having near universal acclaim among Indie Game enthusiasts, Lowtax and Shmorky's complete and utter evisceration of Cry of Fear has been followed by absolute, universal disdain on its part from the Something Awful forums and YouTube comment section.
• So Bad, It's Good: Lowtax said that he wanted to look carefully for games that are entertainingly bad to watch/play instead of just bad. Some considerable examples include:
  • 1.exe
  • 3D Goku Allstars
  • Air Control
  • Clumsy Wrex
  • Crimelife 2
  • Earth Defiance
  • Garbage Day
  • Good Elderly
  • I-Land
  • Lockup
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Blood Craze 1 & 2
  • Potato Pushur
  • Prevention 1
  • The Road Ahead
  • Rotten Prison
  • Shopping Center Manager
  • Shop 'Till You Drop 2
  • Torture
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Lampshaded in Pulse Phobia where Lowtax and Shmorky brought up the fact that some of their listeners have fallen asleep to the conversations, in a video that is almost entirely a full hour of them having nerdy chats as the player paces about a small woodland area.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The increasing abundance of Unity-engine games, often formulaic Survival Horror, over the even more primitive Game Maker-produced trash that the channel originally built itself on.
  • Shmorky's ever Flanderizing voice, especially around the time that the channel was renamed from Video Game Abomination Broadcasting.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: "Let's Play: 3D Goku Allstars". It must be seen to be believed.

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