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Lets Play / Yo Videogames

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Warning: The following may contain hype. Viewer discretion is advised.

(car crash) YO! (ding!) Video games.

Yo Videogames is the alternate channel of Maximilian Christiansen (aka "Maximilian Dood") created November 24, 2011, dedicated to playthroughs of video games that aren't of the Fighting variety. Usually accompanied by Dr. Doom's actor for Assist Me Matthew Simmons (Although there may be more people or just Max on his own), Max goes through various videogames, either by playing them himself or by coaching someone else (usually Simmons). When it comes to livestreaming (which happens on Max's channel on most weekends), Max and Simmons are usually joined by their friends Kenny O'Brien and Steve Springer. In 2017 Max's wife Jessica started a cooking channel dubbed "PB & JaeJae", where she's joined by guest chefs like Max's sister Tess or (on Mother's Day) by Max's mother. On August 2nd 2020, Jessica gave birth to her and Max's first child, a daughter named Ripley Fawn Christiansen.

The early videos were recorded in one sitting in some cases. However, they started livestreaming their playthroughs after the footage from their Donkey Kong Country Returns playthrough got corrupted and then, uploading them parts by parts. Their livestreaming channel is here. For the Youtube channel, click here.

Games played on this channel:

     Games played 
To be completed and/or continued.

This channel provides examples of:

  • Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Played for Laughs; Max pronounces Cloud Strife's Limit Break Meteorain as "Meaty-Orean" rather than "Meteo-Rain", but insists that he's right and everyone else is wrong.
  • A Playthrough In The Limelight: Some games in this channel are played by Simmons.
  • Arc Words: If they play a Donkey Kong game, the most recurring three words? Bananas and Sex.
    • Whenever they see a bird or something bird-related in video games, expect Simmons to shout "BURD!".
  • Animal Motifs: If Tokyo Jungle is anything to go by, dogs (Pomeranians, to be precise) for Max, Saber-toothed tigers for Matt.
  • Atomic F-Bomb: Where it is the most prominent in any Maximilian-related media.
    • Cluster F-Bomb: Also happens when the guys get salty, with Kenny being a particular offender ("Fuck off, fucko!").
  • Author Appeal: Max likes to play characters that look like him (blonde hair and red clothing).
    • He's also fond of stylized suits of armor, having been a fan of King Arthur & the Knights of Justice when he was younger, and ended up doing a rare "Rate the Costumes" video for Monster Hunter: World. Max has said that if he ever made a fighting game, it would be a weapon-based fighter where everyone wore cool suits of armor, and when the chatroom pointed him in the direction of GARO he said it was fairly close to what he had in mind.
  • Backseat Gaming: As with many streamers, Max only wants gameplay advice if he asks for it, and doesn't appreciate people who shout at him while he plays a game and try to order him around. In fact, if you nag at Max to try and make him do something, odds are good he'll do the exact opposite of what you're sayingnote .
  • Bash Brothers: If the game allows co-op, expect Max and Matt to team up. More people may show up, depending on if it allows more than two players.
  • Berserk Button: Max enjoys having a social stream where he can talk to both his friends and the chatroom while gamingnote ; however, this tends to attract complainers who whine "Shut up and play the game already!". If a moderator catches you saying that, you'll get a 10-minute timeout, but if Max himself sees it you're getting perma-banned on the spot. You have been warned.
  • Bias Steamroller: Averted. Max openly acknowledges that his tastes and biases influence his opinion of a game, but still tries to give an honest opinion of them. For example, he loves Asura's Wrath for being full of over-the-top action and incredible setpiece moments, but admits that from a technical standpoint it's basically just a God of War clone with mediocre gameplay sandwiched between tons of QTE moments. On the other hand, rather than saying "This game sucks!" he'll credit it for the parts he likes and explain why it isn't his cup of tea; with BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle he enjoyed the gameplay but couldn't get personally invested in it because he's not a fan of any of the properties involved.
    • Max has also said that he's had people claim that he hates women simply because he tends not to use female characters in fighting games. He's explained that he much prefers badass women like Baiken to the "cute anime waifus" who are far more common in fighters, though he's willing to try out any character if they have a fighting style that appeals to him. A prime example of this came with Cross Tag Battle where Max played Ruby and Yang, maining the former and trying out the latter but being disappointed by gameplay shortcomings.
  • Blatant Lies: One of Max's Running Gags is giving innocuous definitions for inappropriate Japanese terms. For example, claiming that "paizuri" is a Mexican dish prepared in Japan, when it's actually a sexual term.
  • Born Unlucky: Max tends to have horrible luck in Mario Party. It's to the point that his first victory was cause for massive celebration.
  • Bowdlerise: Max was extremely censor-happy in the Gal*Gun: Double Peace series. Justified because he didn't want his channel banned from Twitch for illicit content.
  • Breather Episode: If we can consider the Super Mario Bros two-parter where Simmons retro coaches Max through the game to be one...
  • Butt-Monkey: Steve gets a lot of playful abuse from both the guys and the stream chat (who refer to him as "Steeb"). Popular targets include him "ducking"note , his love of Sheeva, his belief that Ryu and Chun Li are an Official Couple, and his insistence that Highschool of the Dead is deeper than it looks. It's all in good fun though.
    • However, if Mario Party is in effect, Max fills the spot. To put things in perspective, Steve fares infinitely better in this series than Max, and he even won a game!
  • Catchphrase: The guys each have at least a couple:
    • Max: "Dank horseshit", "You a bitch!", "LET'S GO!!!"
    • Simmons: "WOMAN!"
    • Steve: "Hokey", "The STOOOOOOORY!"
    • Kenny: "Five time!", "Twenty-one!", "BITCH, I'M WILD!!!"
  • Call-Back: A viewer, during Max's playthrough of Asura's Wrath, subscribed by the username Fruit_And_Fornication.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Max is typically good at fighters and Call of Duty, he's a bit of an idiot otherwise...
  • Crossover: Max is buddies with the Super Best Friends, who will come over and hang out every once in a while.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: If there is a game where Max passes his controller to Matt, chances are, Matt will change the controls for something suitable to himself.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: Went through a few major changes in terms of the content he produced:
    • His earliest content was actually raw camera footage of himself playing games like 3rd Strike and Modern Warfare, and did a lot of content for Call of Duty games at the same time he did the initial episodes of Assist Me. For a spell after becoming more popular, he had very early Let's Plays on his main channel instead of Yo Videogames!, which he wouldn't create until 2012. From that point on, he kept his main channel to covering fighting game news and such while leaving LPs and one-offs on Yo Videogames!, where he would collaborate more with Simmons.
    • His first year running Yo Videogames had most of his Let's Plays and such recorded in advance. By the time his playthrough of Donkey Kong Country Returns had to be delayed due to equipment issues, he began livestreaming on Twitch instead. By 2014, Max would produce almost all of his content on Twitch, with stream archives being distributed between both channels. It was by this point his friends and wife would become more active participants by showing up on occasion during the weekend streams.
    • On a more personal level, in Max's reaction to Orchid's reveal for the new Killer Instinct he had a list of the two things he wanted out of her trailer: 1) Boobs, and 2) Boobs. This can seem pretty surreal to fans of Max's later work, where he tends to roll his eyes at excessive Fanservice and thinks characters being cool and badass is far more important than their being sexy.
  • Easter Egg: Donating specific amounts of money to the stream will trigger special music/sounds:
    • $7.77: The victory fanfare from Final Fantasy VII. As of September 23, 2016, this has been updated to include an animation of Max rising up dressed as Cloud and brandishing the Buster Sword.
    • $8.95: "Rules of Nature"...played on the kazoo.
    • $10: Updated animation as of November 2016. "The Touch" by Stan Bush plays, while Max designed as Optimus Prime rolls in with sound effects from classic arcade racing games like Daytona USA before turning back into a car and riding away.
    • $19.95: "Coming to your home in 1995, only on Nintendo Ultra 64!"
    • $21: A clip of Kenny's shining moment from Dead or Alive Xtreme: "TWENTY-ONE! I WON! SUCK MAH DICK!!"
    • $23: Similar to Kenny's 21 clip, only it's Max: "23! TWENTY THREE! SUCK MAH DICK!"
      • Originally, a clip of the Tekken 3 announcer saying "CHICKEN!" and a snippet of Jin Kazama's theme playing.
    • $25: Simmons hamming it up as Emperor Palpatine: "Yesss! UNLIMITED POWAAAAAH!!!!"
    • $50 and higher (that doesn't have a specific clip): A snippet of music from AKIRA accompanied by an animation of Max mutating like Tetsuo (but still giving a thumbs up).
    • $55.55: "CAN YOU DIG IT, SUCKA?!" (A reference to Kenny portraying Booker T in an Assist Me Christmas Special.)
    • $69.69: A snippet of the song "Max, Don't Have Sex With Your Ex" by E-ROTIC of DanceDanceRevolution fame. Sadly, this one ended up retired after a certain point due to conflicts with Twitch's DMCA policies.
    • $108.95: "The Only Thing I Know For Real" (A reference to one of the Twitch chat moderators who became well-known for donating this amount periodically.)
    • $200 and higher. An animation of Max's Evil Counterpart The Scrublord, with Cloud's head on his spiked pauldron, walking out from the shadows, punching the fourth wall and giving his best Evil Laugh. All while the beginning of Trailblazer plays, followed by the No Mercy Scare Chord and finally the KI 2013 announcer saying "Godlike."
      • Originally this was for everything above $300, then above $230.
  • #EngineeredHashtag: Invoked in July 2019, where Max started the hashtag #BringBackKI to draw attention to the Killer Instinct franchise and hopefully encourage Microsoft to produce a new entry in the series; at its peak, the hashtag was trending at #3 in America.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Max, while fighting Donkey Kong Country 2's final boss, did NOT noticed that he needed to deliver another hit to beat him.
  • Fantastic Racism: Played for Laughs; during Bethesda's E3 2018 presentation the guys adopted a pretend hatred for Argonians, the Lizard Folk from the Elder Scrolls games.
  • Freak Out: Played for Laughs; when the guys were playing Soul Calibur VI and browsing through other peoples' custom characters, they ended up finding a Maximilian. Max ran from the room screaming.
  • Gamer Chick: Max's wife, Jessica, is this to some regard. She isn't much of a hardcore gamer, but sometimes joins her husband in some of his Let's Plays. Notably, she made a full playthrough of Ni no Kuni with Max (both are big Studio Ghibli fans) and absolutely adores Ori and the Blind Forest. She also participates in rounds of Super Smash Bros. and Mario Party with the crew, and is very good at puzzle games to the point where she was the boss of their Puyo Puyo Tetris Boss Rage video. There's also the fact that not only did Max get Jessica into Monster Hunter: World, but she ended up playing it even more than him (though the fact that Max had to stop for a while to cover new fighting games did slow him down a bit).
    • There's also Max's sister Tess (X-23 from Assist Me), who is an avid Crazy Taxi fan, but is only well-versed in games she and Max have played together growing up, like Super Mario Bros..
  • Halloween Cosplay: In a Mario Party 8 playthrough, Max is dressed as Jeff Lebowski, Simmons as Walter Sobchak, Jessica as Stitch and Steve as K. Oh, and Benny is a lobster.
  • Jump Scare: Something of a Running Gag; whenever Max gets really into a game (like he did with Dark Souls II) you can expect Jessica to sneak up behind him and do something like crumple a paper bag or get his attention while wearing a monster mask, just to mess with his head. It always works.
  • Keet: Kenny
  • The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Max came back from EVO 2017 and reported that he kept running into big names in the FGC (like Akira Nishitani, one of the men who helped create Street Fighter II, and Daigo Umehara) who said they were big fans of his work, which utterly stunned him since these are people he himself admires.
    • Team Four Star are also fans of Max (though during the Dragon Ball Fighterz open beta, they jokingly claimed that he was ducking them). In turn, Max confirmed that he'd been watching Dragon Ball Z Abridged in order to get up to speed on DBZ before FighterZ comes out (and he used the Ghost Nappa song in his Nappa breakdown video). It helps that both groups are friends with Matt McMuscles.
    • Max is a huge fan of Jim Lee, so naturally he had this reaction when Jim subscribed to his channel.
    • Max and Jirard Khalil are friends as well, and will occasionally pop into each others' Twitch streams in order to donate large amounts of money for gift subs.
    • Final Fantasy VII is Max's all-time favorite video game, so he was understandably moved to tears when Yoshinori Kitase, the director of the original game and executive producer of Final Fantasy VII Remake, asked him for a picture and revealed that the Remake development team would watch his reaction video to the reveal trailer whenever they were feeling down, since his enthusiasm reassured them that they were doing the right thing.
  • Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Played for Laughs; Max and co. will often claim they are experts in things that they clearly have no interest or understanding of, most often seen when they are faced with a reference to Japanese anime or games. Even when the chat tries to correct them they'll ignore it and claim they are right.
  • Mistaken Nationality: While streaming Cuphead, someone tried to troll by saying "Max is such a weeb that he married a Japanese woman". Max's response: "MY WIFE IS CHINESE, FUCKFACE!"
  • Never My Fault: A Running Gag in Max's stream, with him blaming the chatroom for his failures, and if the chat points him towards an item or secret he almost missed then he'll act like the opposite is what really happened. Of course, he's just being facetious for the sake of humor.
  • No, You: Kenny tends to lapse into this when he's upset, even if it makes absolutely no sense. For example, while playing Overcooked!:
    Max: Kenny, the meat's on fire!
    Kenny: You're on fire!
  • One-Steve Limit: The reason Matt Simmons is usually referred to by his last name is because the group has another friend named Matthew and that was how they distinguished between the two. Likewise, Max has another friend named Steve (who occasionally shows up on stream and is one of his chat moderators), but he goes by his nickname Bojack.
  • Phrase Catcher: Whenever Jessica kicks butt in a video game (especially Super Smash Bros.), you can expect Simmons to shout "WOMAN!" More specifically, whenever she gets the Smash Ball he says "WHY DOES WOMAN ALWAYS GET IT?!"
  • The Power of Rock: When the guys played through Resident Evil 4 in early 2017, Andrew remarked that the only way the game could possibly be better was if there was a sick guitar riff every time Leon Roundhouse Kicked a zombie. So naturally, the Hype & Rage compilation video does exactly that.
  • Rage Quit: Simmons came very close to this during his run in Mega Man 2: The Wily Wars especially after he died nearly at the same time as the boss. It took the fans to bring him to finish it.
  • Real Life Writes the Plot: Just before EVO 2018, Max said that his "Fighting History" series of videosnote  had to be put on hiatus because Benny has taken to acting more unruly when on camera as he's gotten older, which made filming the show nigh impossible.
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter: Benny.
  • Self-Deprecation: Max will occasionally make fun of the videos he made back before he hit it big. He especially loves mocking his old Call of Duty instructional videos past where he just narrated over gameplay in a very dry, analytical manner, calling his younger self an "asshole" and saying that nobody should listen to someone who sounds that bored when he plays a game.
  • Screams Like a Little Girl: Max when he's freaked out, which he acknowledged by adding an emote of Homer Simpson screaming to the channel.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: One of Max's Running Gags; if he sees or hears something that he considers "too much", he'll pretend to end the stream early by cuing up the outro sequence.
  • Series Mascot: As usual, Benny, Max's pomeranian. Some of his playthroughs even includes a Benny-cam.
    • Taken to an extreme where the Benny-cam is on while Max plays Tokyo Jungle as a pomeranian.
  • Sir Swears-a-Lot: Everybody here doesn't exactly have a clean mouth, but Simmons stands out the most, with Max right behind him.
    • The Swear Jar: Following the birth of his daughter Ripley, Max decided to curb this tendency by implementing a virtual swear jar where he donates a gift sub for every swear word he utters on stream; considering one stream ended with him having cursed over three hundred times, he decided that he'd really have to work on it or else risk draining his bank account.
  • Shout-Out: Simmons is prone to this.
    • The animated intro ends with a sequence based off of the opening to YuYu Hakusho, with the doods falling towards the camera and ending when the main character (Yusuke/Max) points at the viewer.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial: For Bandai Namco's official Soul Calibur VI livestreams, Max created a custom character named Lady M. Aria, an undead blood hunter with a separable double sword, who is totally an original character and has absolutely nothing to do with any popular video games out there. The same goes for Kenny's custom character, Justice Rider.
  • Triumphant Reprise: At the end of the Blood Iori Boss Rage, the Slam Jam Remix of Guile's Theme plays when Guile lands the finishing blow on Blood Iori.
  • Troll: Another Running Gag is Max trying to weed out disruptive people in the chatroom by making deliberately provocative statements to bait them into responding; Super Smash Bros. Melee is a recurring target, with Max saying it's not a real fighting game and that people who play it don't shower. This usually includes a moment where Max Stage Whispers into the microphone "I'm trying to get rid of the twelve-year-olds, chatroom!"
    • All of the guys love trolling anime fans, usually by talking crap about modern shows and popular trends or by deliberately getting their facts wrong (conflating shows like Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece into a single story). That said, most of the guys do actually like anime (though their tastes lean towards shows made in the late 90s and early 2000s) and Simmons is the only one who seems to go out of his way to screw with fans because he knows he can get a rise out of themnote .
  • Unsportsmanlike Gloating: One of the features of the crew's Mario Party streams is the "pop-offs", wherein the winner gets the chance to celebrate while a song of their choice plays. Kenny is the undisputed king of this, since he typically shouts so loud that it leaves him hoarse afterwards (and in one memorable instance he got on the ground and air-humped like Voldo while shouting "SUCK MY DICK!").
  • Viewers Are Geniuses: Since the most recent videos are now from his livestreams, Max got assistance from his channel's chatbox. Some cases involve subscribers having tips and statements as usernames. However, some of them, on the other hand...
    • Dark Souls II was the pinnacle of this: the stream was full of trolls which caused Max and Matt to fail repeatedly.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: In a strange sense, Max has this relationship with his regular chat audience: they troll each other back and forth, with Max usually acting like an abusive father and the chatroom providing fake "hints" and teasing him when he's killed in games. However, when he's being serious Max has said he has the best audience on Twitch and possibly the entire Internet, and explained that he enjoys getting to hang out with thousands of people who have similar tastes in games and are cool, friendly, and welcoming to newcomers. And obviously, he has such a large audience because of his honest passion for games and his upbeat, positive attitude.
    • Steve and Kenny also have this relationship. While the crew are no strangers to throwing barbs and jokes at each other while discussing games, Steve and Kenny often have it turn into whole arguments while Max and Simmons watch and sometimes add fuel to the fire by pointing out a flaw in either of their reasoning. However, despite all their arguing, they're never really mad at each other and have even used their argumentative relationship to bait Max into a false sense of security when he was an imposter in Among Us
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Most of the games in Max's catalogue have yet to see the end. Granted, Max's library is HUGE, to the point where the amount of game he's actually finished can be counted on one hand easily.
  • Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Played for Laughs; when Max and Jessica announced that they were expecting a child, the chatroom cracked jokes that Max would name it "Rollback Netcode Christiansen" or "Maximilian Victor Christiansen II" (MVC2), and Max played along by pretend that he liked the ideas. When they finally announced the baby's name and gender, they did it as a contest, challenging the chatroom to pick the correct name out of a list of candidates including Cloud, Leon, and Maria and challenging the chatroom to guess the real one. Their daughter's actual name: Ripley Fawn Christiansen.

 
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Video Example(s):

"Stop this Deadly Alliance"

Raiden uses a very specific phrase to describe Quan-Chi and Shang Tsung teaming up, and Steve of the Yo Videogames crew doesn't let it go without comment. (Video Source: https://youtu.be/PS5R1GCUMBU)

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Title Drop

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"Stop this Deadly Alliance"

Raiden uses a very specific phrase to describe Quan-Chi and Shang Tsung teaming up, and Steve of the Yo Videogames crew doesn't let it go without comment. (Video Source: https://youtu.be/PS5R1GCUMBU)

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4.45 (11 votes)

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