I listened to some of his videos last night, and despite the full-of-himself character (which is usually a turnoff, and was indeed a turnoff when I gave him a go a few months back), I enjoyed what he had to say. As the guy making his argument in the video, he does make a compelling case and he saves the character for the beginning and end instead of pimping the character throughout the video.
I even started enjoying his facetious attitude after a few episodes, when it's clear that he's not actually that bloated in the head. It's all a part of the show. He's not my favorite video game show - that'd be Super Bunnyhop followed by Caddicarus - but I'm starting to get into him myself.
If you like his stuff, you might like Super Bunnyhop. He did the "Konami vs The Internet" video last year that got traction when it got taken down by Konami, but he's got great videos dating back to 2013.
Come sail your ships around me, and burn your bridges down.
I've actually just started Super Bunnyhop's catalogue and I agree that it's really good.
But... I guess I just don't think of him as a "pundit," like Jim or Joe. He's more of an academic, like MrBTongue. Not sure which I like better, as comparing them is hard. They're trying for very different things.
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Got Me To Care
This is just a review of the Jimquisition, by the way. I agree that aspects of Jim Sterling the man and Jim Sterling the character are mixed up in one another, but I generally have no trouble telling when he's acting and when he's not. And, as one major point of criticism, Jim will not let a bad running gag die until he's beaten the dead horse's bones into pulverized dust.
The first season of the show, as he himself has admitted on multiple occasions, was laughably bad. The topics were badly-handled, the visual design and structure was borked, and in general I would just avoid them.
But, as time went by, he found his footing. He turned into a voice for consumer advocacy and, ironically, sanity. Before I started watching Jim Sterling's videos, I didn't pay too much attention to dire critics on the internet predicting the downfall of the game industry. His ex-colleagues on the Escapist, for instance, were (and are) largely a bunch of nostalgia-addled grognards who regularly hate on and victim-blame fans of modern games in disgusting and disingenuous fashion.
But Jim got me to care. He helped me to understand what was wrong with the game industry and why. He helped me to see what I, personally, could do to make it better. And he did it without ever insulting the gamers, the customers, the ordinary people who just like games and don't see why all these people won't shut up about an imaginary golden age that never actually existed.
And he does it in short, to-the-point videos that keep on task without wandering off-track, as some other personalities I like sometimes do.
He is, in short, the best pundit of his kind that I'm aware of. He's angry, but I've never felt he was angry at me. Jim once said that the problem with gaming's angry, toxic community wasn't that there was too much anger, but that gamers channel it in the wrong places, focusing it at women and minorities and imaginary boogeymen coming to take away their porn, rather than the dumb corporate assholes running the medium into the ground because they're the sorts of people who can't hold a puppy for five seconds without killing it in a mixture of stupidity and malice. And it was a great point.
If you're in the know about the state of the industry, it's still a great rage fix, and if you're not, it's very educational.