Awesome / The Angry Joe Show

• In his Angry Review of [PROTOTYPE], Angry Joe karate kicks a helicopter.
• Angry Joe demands a refund for Sonic Free Riders... and succeeds, despite video game stores usually refusing to refund opened, non-faulty games. (He claimed the game was broken.)
  NO ONE SAYS NO TO JOE!
• Getting invited to Spike TV's Video Game Awards 2010 and obtaining an interview, despite (or possibly because of) thoroughly bashing the previous installment!
  • Now while the interview was far from perfect, Joe displayed why he's called Angry Joe and he took to task the game industry's repeated appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator (though some people didn't really see it as "awesome" and thought Joe was being very unprofessional and immature about the whole thing).
  "Not every gamer is a slobbering idiot sitting on his mom's couch!"
• Donning his Corporate Commander outfit (sans helmet) and making an anti-SOPA PSA outside of the United States Capitol Building despite snipers gathering on the roof as he was filming.
• Top 10 Reasons We Hate ME3's Ending. What is really awesome, and sad is that it is not in his traditional hammy performance, but it is completely stoic. You realize real soon that it's not Angry Joe, but Joe Vargas himself.
• In all his Kinect game reviews, he always has shown his displeasure with the device but in his Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor review he ends it with calling Microsoft out on trying for over a year to promote a device that is broken and makes games more difficult to play.
• Despite realizing it won't change much (and the comments still throwing shit at the poor woman), he spends about ten minutes in his "Top 10 Gaming Controversies" video calling out the sexist reaction to Feminist Frequency, even dishing out a scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech near the end.
  • And it's so awesome at least part of it deserves to be quoted:
  Joe: Historically, in a male-dominated gaming industry, has the Damsel in Distress trope been used over and over? You bet your ass it has! Would it be cool if developers continued to explore other stories in addition to those? Yes, it would! Does it sometimes make women feel uncomfortable to be oversexualized non-stop in the games that they play daily? Sure! And maybe that's something that you will never understand or even care about, but do they have a right to say something about it without being called a feminazi, without getting death threats or rape threats? Hell yes, they do! And I'll defend their right to do it against anyone ... So take a breather and realize, it's perfectly fine for women to ask questions, to criticize pointless, exploitative material, and to look forward to more games that elevate their gender to more than just goals and objects to be won or saved, but into legitimate heroes in their own right. And after all that, if you still don't get it, bro, and you think she should die and every feminist with her, it's because, number one, you're a fuckin' idiot. Number two, you couldn't give a shit about anyone but yourself. And number three, outside your mother, you've never had to actually care about what other women think or feel, say a gamer girlfriend, or hell, in the future, your own daughter. Imagine that, and the games she'll play. And like it or not, more and more women are gamers, just like you and I.
  • See why this is number three on his list here.
• His Guild Wars 2 review. He points out how the avoids many of the annoying tropes common in other MMORPGs, including grinding, loot, and monthly fees. It's also one of his longest reviews, capping at 31 minutes.
• The ending of his Dragonball Z Kinect review. Visual Effects of Awesome doesn't begin to describe it.
• Him being in Paradox Interactive's stream of Dungeonland.
• In his Top 10 Gaming Controversies of 2012, Joe gives a critique of the Greek government for its arrest of the Bohemia Interactive employees under the pretense that they were spies, he points out that anybody that wants a layout of the base they were taking pictures could do so with Google Earth, and berates the government of Greece for imprisoning innocent people to make it look like it's actually doing something.
  • From the same video, Joe stuffs his face with Doritos and Mountain Dew, effectively calling out Geoff Keighley for "Dorito-Gate". After this, Joe proceeds to expose how and why game journalism derailed to essentially advertising for major game companies, all the while admitting that he's just a gamer who loves making videos for his fans.
• Though not on his own show, him and the Angry Joe Army taking over Lord Vyce's ship on Atop the Fourth Wall.
• Angry Joe's Superman vs Batman: Top Reasons Why Superman Wins! He shows a deep analysis and understanding of both characters and doesn't say Superman is "better", just that he would more likely win. One of the big ones is the argument that Batman is smarter; he states that he is not, Superman displays scientific knowledge far beyond him, while Batman is more knowledgeable in certain areas. Notably cited; many times Batman survives is due to Plot Armor or bad writing, such as Batman's kryponite ring is often presented as being more effective against Superman than chunks the size of a fist; in arguably their most famous fight, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman only barely survived even though Superman was holding back, and that whenever they do fight in canon and Elseworld stories, Batman only barely survives or is outright defeated. His top reason, in "Hush", one of the most regarded Batman stories, he cites that Batman openly admits that all things equal, Superman would beat him.
  • His ending to the video crosses over into heartwarming. His final verdict? These two shouldn't be fighting. They're best friends, and they KNOW they're stronger together. It ends with him showing a customized Batman Emblem with a Superman S emblazoned inside.
• Joe got a ton of interviews at E3 2013. The awesome factor comes in when (A), he talked to Major Nelson and asked him some hard-hitting questions about the Xbox One, and that he's a one-man team, and the interviews turned out damn well considering.
  • One question in the interview was Joe pointing out that it's probably easy to flip a switch and turn off the DRM, leading to Nelson rudely grabbing the mic and calling out if he's an engineer. A few days later when Microsoft announced they were reversing the DRM policies, this moment was immortalized here.
• He does a pretty good Deadpool impression for his review.
• Just the way Joe utterly slammed Ride to Hell: Retribution.
  • Special credit goes to how he blows his stack with the game's portrayal of women and how they all want to bang the main character... even if it's mere moments after they've been sexually assaulted.
    Joe: That is disgusting, awkward, tone-deaf, shameful, wrong, juvenile, dirty, creepy, insulting, and it's JUST PLAIN FUCKING STUPID!!!
  • Also, for blasting the developers for selling it despite being an Obvious Beta (even though the concept of What Could Have Been was cool and interesting), and planning to release two more games afterwards (GaidenGames, perhaps, but the point still stands) to milk money off of the "franchise".
  • In-game, he admits that he eventually got pretty good at scoring headshots on a regular basis. This is illustrated by a brief clip of him using a handgun, and taking out 5 enemies with 5 well-placed shots.
    Joe: Oh yeah, don't fuck with Angry Joe when he's so fucking tired of playing this damn game!
  • After Demon Joe has a long and rather intimidating monologue about how reviewing the game would destroy him and he'd never review again. How does Joe respond? "No." The unfazed look on his face makes it all the more awesome.
  • The end of the review, where Joe kills Demon Joe a second time by giving the game a 1/10.
    Joe: I have exorcised the demons!
• Joe's rant on the technical issues of Total War: Rome II for 30 minutes!
  • Also showing how the preview of the game, with the designer's voice-over stating that it was still unfinished and would get better, and then adding that he has asked the Angry Army and no one could even get it to look that good.
  • Playing the game for over 30 hours before reviewing it despite it frustrating him beyond belief so he could be as fair as possible and get all the bugs listed. And having the balls to accuse other reviewers of only playing an hour or two before giving it a high rating.
  • There was also this amazing quote:
  "I'm gonna be focusing mostly on its problems in this review, so it's gonna feel like I'm being unfair to the game in your twisted point of view. That couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, I love this game more than you do because of what I'm about to do. You see, the beauty of what I do is that I don't have to kiss anyone's ass! So what you're about to get is pure honesty from a Total War fan of more than a decade."
• Given how greatly the Broken Base is on Grand Theft Auto V's controversial content, Joe coming out and saying that GTA V deserved the props for actually trying to tackle scores of issues most games see as too volatile to handle has to say something. Likewise, him blasting the people who believed that scenes of misogyny and Cold-Blooded Torture were somehow MORE controversial compared to straight-up murder.
  • And, while he's made this same point in a few of his other videos, Joe ultimately dismisses the controversy as secondary to how good the gameplay is, and that GTA V's Even Better Sequel credentials were more than enough to invest full-price on.
• Joe absolutely exploding at EA over Battlefield 4's terrible launch.
• Joe calling out YouTube over (yet another) screw up. The real cake is Joe asking Google if they're going to give back the money that they gained from the Content ID incident to charity if they agree with publishers who generated revenue off of a five-ten second clip. The pause that Joe gives after that really shows he's not pleased with Google's stance...
  • Then after a few seconds, he snaps and calls them out for being a money-grubbing MegaCorp
• In the Stick of Truth review he introduces Corporate Commander to the Dragonshout.
• Even though Joe loved Titanfall for its Mini-Mecha battles being blended seamlessly with parkour-style combat, he didn't fall into the "Believe the hype." slogan, and brought legitimate criticisms to its absolutely lackluster campaign mode, and lack of private servers or Pilot/Titan customization. All that said, he still thinks that its sci-fi action is definitely a step beyond Call of Duty and Battlefield (in fact part of why he wants more focus on the campaign is because he finds the war set in the game would make for a much better story and setting than the tired invasions of America in the modern military shooters) and can be elevated into the future by its development team into a true Titan of First Person Shooters.
• Joe being the only one on the TGWTG site to openly praise Man of Steel while the vast majority on the site hated it and gave valid reasons why it doesn't deserve the bashing it got from critics.
• While playing Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Joe gets into a fight with a Warchief named Olgoth the Humiliator... who quickly turns out to be That One Boss given his habit smugly walking off whenever Joe is forced into the game's Heroic Second Wind system. Said system causes Olgoth to hit the combat level cap of 20 and gain an effective One-Hit Kill with his spear. Needless to say, when Joe finally beats him (with decapitation) we cheer with him. It also crosses over into Funny Moment as Olgoth repeatedly beating him causes Joe to undergo what can only be described as a descent into insanity.
  • And then, when Olgoth returns for the scripted Nemesis Arena fight in Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Joe freaks out. But then he immediately goes to work and puts Olgoth down in a single run of the fight... but then the game crashes because it doesn't play well with recording setups. Still an impressive revenge, nonetheless.
• Calling out Capcom for going mad with copyright claims, a poor release trailer for Street Fighter V and making the game a PS4 exclusive.
• While it is a very contentious topic, for those who side with Joe in the Nintendo scandal, his calling Nintendo out for their ridiculous copyright claims, pointing out that many fans tend to apply a Double Standard whenever the company screws up in favor of Nintendo in contrast with other companies and makes his refusal to cover their games very justified in the eyes of some.
  • What's even more awesome, however, is that Nintendo seems to have listened, since his review of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was uploaded, and hasn't been taken down as a result of copyright issues!
• Angry Joe's review of the new Star Wars Battlefront has him chewing out EA for cutting pieces out of the game and forcing gamers to pay nearly double or triple for the experience that we got at the regular price for Battlefront I and II. Whether it will do anything or not, it's nice to hear him tear into EA for it, especially for veterans of the first two Battlefronts.
• His minute-long wordless segment at the beginning of his Mass Effect 3 review which summarizes his entire opinion purely through body language and facial expressions.
• Yakuza 0: Angry Joe and Other Joe's reaction to Kiryu jumping out of the balcony to the window and entering the bathroom where there are several Yakuza members, much to their amusements.
  • However, it got even better when they saw Kiryu kicking the Yakuza in the face and making him fall down from the window Kiryu entered a moment ago.
• How does Joe start his review of Doom? By suiting and arming up as Doomguy and going to Hell to kill not just Demon Joe and Corporate Commander but also a small army of demons and Satan himself (played by Other Joe)! The reason? Making him play Umbrella Corps, which is considered by many to be a hideous spin-off of the Resident Evil franchise.
  Corporate Commander: Oh shit, it's Master Chief!
  Demon Joe: (completely terrified) No, that's DOOMGUY!
  (cue the slaughter)
  • His T-Rex roar at the end of his rampage was just icing on the delicious cake of pure awesomeness.
  • Even more Awesome for Doom itself... Joe immediately says that it's worth buying and has his Badass Seal of Approval at the very beginning of the review. Then it turns into a crowning moment of Funny when it looks like he's gonna end the review right then, but continues on to explain people why he thinks this.
• Joe calling out Hello Games for their blatantly misleading advertising of "No Man's Sky" in his review.
• In his review of The Last of Us Part II Joe doesn't simply criticize the game's infamous twist of killing Joel and playing as Abby because it killed Joel. He actually proposes an idea for how it could have worked by having the player witness a traumatic event as Abby, build up to her wanting her revenge, and the player doesn't even realize the target of her revenge until it's too late. Then Ellie meets Abby, and forms a duo with her, until Abby learns who Joel and Ellie are. Then she kills Joel. He came up with an idea for how the plot could have worked in a few minutes. As the game is, he points out that the game's plot is held back by mostly focusing on Abby and her friends, whom he finds to be poorly written characters. To top it all off he notes the message about revenge falls flat since Abby goes around murdering so many people herself and never seems bothered, which is a big part of why he finds her so unlikable.
  • He followed this up by putting The Last of Us Part II in his worst games list of 2020, pointing out the general lack of innovation in gameplay, the glaring moment of the game's treatment of revenge for Ellie and Abby, the favoritism given to the latter over the former, the inflated accolades given by the game media industry; and, finally the story's overtly dark setting and narrative and unlikable characters taking away any enjoyment one could derive from the franchise retroactively.
    Angry Joe: When you completely shit on the characters that we've loved for so long; when you replace them with worse characters; when you treat your few, new good characters like shit and misuse them even; when you leave everything in a worse place than before, and make us not even give a shit about the license anymore, it is a bad fucking time, period! And a bad fucking game! [...] And that's why, for me, The Last of Us 2 was so disappointing, that it went to the worst games of the year! And you can add on to that the overreaction from developers and industry insiders who circled the fucking wagon, calling this the best game ever made as a knee jerk [reaction] to some upset fans who voiced their concerns with the game after some of the leaks were shared.
• Alex had previously been The Scrappy for the show, but his input on videos games during Extended Review Discussions and now being the one responsible for Rapid Fire Reviews has given him more recognition for his honest-to-God analysis, critique and depth on the titles he has played. With Joe being naturally incensed on the Obvious Beta nature during the Outriders Angry Review and going on a tirade about how some players continue to excuse and justify these types of games at launch, Alex calmly offers his rebuttal against the same players from one of their live-streams.
  Alex: No, no. Stop making excuses for people who delay the game for nine months to put it out in this state. Stop. This is why games continue to come out in this state because people like you are making excuses for people like them. It is not appropriate; this is not how video games should have to work. There are literally companies you can hire to stress test your servers for you to make sure that shit doesn't happen and they chose not to do that so they don't get credit for working on the weekend because they didn't do their fucking job for the last nine months. That is not how this work. Games come out unfinished because you people keep apologizing for them. "Oh, no, it's fine! No, this big plate of spaghetti's got shit all over it, but it's fine: the spaghetti underneath's still good!" No, stop it! That is not how this works. You, as a consumer, you paid your money - you deserve better. Have some more fucking self-respect.
  Angry Joe: Amen.
• The entire Tranquil Fury-laden "The Reason You Suck" Speech Angry Joe gives to CDProjektRED for rushing out their latest game, Cyberpunk 2077, Overlaps with Tear Jerker as Joe sounds really disappointed with them, as he was really looking forward to the game.
  School PA System: CDProjektRED, please report to the principal's office. CDProjektRED to the principal's office immediately!
  Principal Joe: (swirls around in his chair) Have a seat.
  (CDProjektRED sits down, Principal Joe sighs heavily and pulls out the game)
  Principal Joe: What the fuck is this?
  (CDProjektRED doesn't respond)
  Principal Joe: Did you bite off more than you can chew? You're supposed to be setting an example for the other kids, not joining them and encouraging this shit! I'm really disappointed in you. You used to be on the "A honor" roll! You you remember your last win for us? Witcher III!! It was a school legend! And now look at you, you're on the wrong path.
  CDProjektRED: No! That's not true!
  Principal Joe: Yes! Yes, you are!
  CDProjektRED: But, but they're my friends!
  Principal Joe: (annoyed) Don't— Yeah, you want to explain this to me?
  (Principal Joe pulls out an aluminum foil pipe, CDProjektRED gives an Oh, Crap! in response)
  Principal Joe: Who gave this to you, huh? Live Service Hard Drugs?! Are you serious?! Tell me who gave this— Did EA give this to you?! CD— CDProjektRED, you do not need to be messing around with this kind of shit!
  (cut to a flashback where CDProjektRED meets up with EA (played by Alex), Activision (played by Other Joe) and Bethesda (played by a woman) before cutting back to Principal Joe)
  Principal Joe: You're better than this! You know, I'm sorry i have to do this to you but, detention. Detention for the rest of the semester! No! Detention until this entire situation is fixed! Get out of my sight! I can't— I can't even look at you anymore.
  (CDProjektRED gets up and leaves)
  Principal Joe: TURN YOUR LIFE AROUND, YOU STILL CAN! AND STOP HANGING OUT WITH THE BAD CROWD!! Gooooooddd!! How do I reach these kids?!
  (The Cyberpunk 2077 logo appears then fades out to Angry Joe's space station as gun clicks are heard offscreen. Joe then walks on screen with a sour expression on his face and fires three random shots offscreen, he can only say his usual catchphrase at this entire situation.)
  Angry Joe: You done fucked it up!