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  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: As if the Toy Story review wasn't enough of an incoherent rambling mess of a "review" that vaguely talks about the game's quality amidst a weird rant about Silicon Graphics computers, there is a point of the review where he suddenly totally changes gears and brings up his finding of a Street Fighter knockoff figurine, with the only lead-in being him mentioning action figures. It has absolutely nothing to do with any of the rest of the review, is totally irrelevant to the conversation, and in fact has little to do with video games at all, and after the moment passes, the review continues as if nothing ever happened.
  • Broken Base: Many people dislike the series due to Wood's emotionless voice, ridiculous statements, lack of charisma, and inability to go into depth during the reviews. Still it has a portion of people who watch it for those exact reasons, and there is a portion of viewers who take the show seriously and still enjoy it.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: His review of EarthBound (1994) is no less bizarre than any of his other reviews, but for the most part it's pretty positive, and shows him being charmed by the game's humor and style. Now consider that at the time he reviewed it, the game received very apathetic ratings from Western game reviewers and had yet to be Vindicated by History.
  • He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
    • Go on YouTube and see how much bitching there is about the rating given to the game.
    • Even back when the show was still on the air, viewers were incensed by Wood's unfavorable review of Final Fantasy VII. There's even a video rebuttal where the host responds to the viewers' complaints.
    • With decades of hindsight this is now more frequently inverted, with people mocking Wood for giving high praise to notorious flops like Bubsy and the Virtual Boy.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Let's just say that this tends to happen a lot.
    • He once proposed that Eidos give the star of Tomb Raider cancer in the hopes of giving vulnerability (and—by extension—meaning) to her character. Cue Metroid: Other M (weakness and vulnerability as character enhancement) and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (coping with disease as character enhancement), the most notorious controversial moments of their respective franchises. Red Dead Redemption 2 would use both of these elements, and earned critical and commercial success in the process.
    • Made even more hilarious by the reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise, which aimed to move Lara in Wood's proposed direction (minus the breast cancer, of course). Amazingly, it seems to have worked for the most part (presumably by not going in a stereotypically feminine manner about it — like, say, breast cancer).
    • In his GoldenEye review, Wood claims that "No one buys a game specifically for multiplayer." The multiplayer aspect of GoldenEye went on to be the most beloved part of it. And then cue modern FPSes whose multiplayer gameplay eclipses the single player campaign, or are all multiplayer.
    • In his segment about the movie version of The Mask, George Wood says, "Look for Mask 2 in a couple of years. This has the potential for a franchise for Dark Horse and New Line." It took over a decade for something resembling a sequel to appear, and when it did, it quickly ended that potential.
    • While reviewing Final Fantasy VIII, he threatens to kill himself if the ninth game doesn't have voice acting. It didn't, but number ten did, meaning if he had committed suicide, it would have been one sequel before he got his wish.
    • One short segment of an episode has him mention his high hopes for the Virtual Boy, going as far as saying that it would beat out the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and the like. However, other than the Virtual Boy in the top slot, his predictions on how they would do compared to one another were surprisingly accurate: the PlayStation was the clear-cut winner, with the Saturn doing well enough in at least its native Japan, the Atari Jaguar CD further pushing Atari out of first-party development and the Panasonic M2 never even being released as an actual video game console.
    • It was relatively common for his opinions on video games to be the exact opposite of anyone else's at the time. One particular case was the review of Doom 64, when he gave it a glowing review at a time when everybody else was avoiding it, either disliking its dated pseudo-3D presentation or even figuring from its title that it was just another in Doom's then-ongoing long line of subpar ports. Come the new millennium, and more people have belatedly realized that Doom 64 is not only a unique entry in the series, but also on par with the originals in quality.
    • During his review of Super Mario 64, he praises the graphics, comparing them to Toy Story, and asks why a CGI Mario film hasn't been made yet. Fast-forward to 2018, and Nintendo would confirm that a computer-animated Mario movie by Illumination Entertainment would be releasing in theaters in 2023.
    • In his review of Mega Man Legends, he brings up the idea of turning Mario into a sports game dismissively. Take a wild guess what Nintendo would wind up doing with the franchise just a couple years later.
    • In his review of Gran Turismo, he dismisses the game as being nothing more but "yet another racing joke" and criticizes the game's controls. He ends off the review by stating that "If Sony had spent half the time on the game as they did on the enclosed booklets, Gran Turismo wouldn't be the flop that it is!". Gran Turismo would eventually go on to sell 10.85 million copies, making it the all-time greatest selling game on the PlayStation, and was universally acclaimed by critics and gamers alike, often being considered as one of the greatest racing games of all time. So much for being a "flop" according to Wood. This take could have even been avoided since, if you had even a tangential knowledge about the PlayStation at the time, you'd know how much of a Killer App the game was, and even the quickest peek at any magazine review of the game totally shoots down any possibility he was correct.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    "Donkey Kong Country is truly perfect. If you do not get this amazing new generation of Donkey Kong Country madness, you are stupid. Yes, I know it's insulting, but that's also the truth. If you're a true video game fan, you will not hesitate in the slightest bit to buy this piece of gaming history."
    • Usually, people take the two quotes and fill in their own blanks.
    • That, and a spiel he rattles off about how racing games should have both waterfalls to be driven through and police who stringently enforce traffic laws as you struggle to get your pregnant wife to the hospital.
    • Him threatening to commit suicide if there's no voice acting in Final Fantasy IX.
    • "You can play the game with your left hand, and eat pizza in the other."
    • "Front-loaded anvils". Really, there's at least one (and often more) from every review covered on Retsupurae. The extremely brief reviews of Contender and Buster Brothers, respectively, have "A nice fat K.O." cutting to a shot of Tifa from Final Fantasy VII flaunting her chest while on top of a moving train for no particular reason, and Wood's bizarre "Manneken Pis" aside. The most minor one is probably Wood expressing unfamiliarity with the Repeat Cut ("What is this, some funky new directing style?")
    • Variations of "I have a challenge for (game development company). In the next (game the development company makes), (main character) gets (terminal disease or crippling disadvantage)." Explanation 
  • Moment of Awesome: YouTuber Geoff the Hero used to make videos in a series called Gaming in the Obama Years, where he impersonated George Wood and his unique reviewing styles in reviews of then-modern games. Then he eventually met the man himself.
  • Nightmare Fuel: His Donkey Kong Country review is basically one long spiel of how much he loves the game... and immediately after he finishes talking, after footage of Diddy defeating a boss to boot, the notorious Game Over screen pops up. Quite a jarring way to end a very positive review.
  • So Bad, It's Good: Despite its horrific quality, due to the absolutely bizarre nature of George Wood's statements, along with his robotic acting, false enthusiasm, and tendency to make statements that veer ridiculously far from the public consensus (both at the time and in retrospect), the show manages to be both profoundly entertaining and hilarious.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many were rather disappointed that when George got around to actually reviewing Tomb Raider III, he didn't make any mention of his very out-there plot suggestion on his review of the previous game.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: With the demise of Silicon Graphics Inc. in the late 90s, the infamous rant about how the Toy Story game's graphics were made is now this. You'd be forgiven if you had to look up what a Silicon Graphics computer even was after watching it, not so much because it's brought up at all, but because he focused so heavily on it and mentions it by name so much.
  • Watch It for the Meme: Most people who know this series know it because of the aforementioned ridiculous statements.

The browser is all screwed up! He reads! He reads again, from a different tab! What the heck?! Is this some new funky Wiki Walking style, or what? Okay, enough of tropes.

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