"And this... is The D-Pad." Cue music.
The D-Pad is a weekly hour-long video game web radio show (formerly a podcast) starring Rick Desilets, John Selig, and CJ Haley. Nick Bebel was the original "Player 3" until an unexpected hiatus in the summer of 2013, and Ian Selig was briefly added during this time. Recurring guests have included Holly Fletcher, Meghan Zaremba, and Dan Suitor.
While the show is primarily geared toward video games, it also spends time on movies, television, music, and pop culture in general. Considered a complete reboot, the original podcast is rarely mentioned at all on-air. Original fans of the show are often referred to as "The Threes", while fans of the live show are referred to as "The Goombas".
There have been several segments on both the website and the show, including:
- Ouya, Oh No: the latest unfortunate Ouya news
- R-Rated: uncensored movie reviews
- Bebel's Short List: video game reviews
- Live from the Brown Carpet: live blogging of awards shows
- Good News, Bad News: big announcements with significant pros and cons
- Game Over: articles calling out individuals or groups
- Putting Our Guests to the Test: subjecting guests to setting track times in Super Mario Kart
A special event called Sonic Week was held the week of June 19-26, 2011 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. The June 19 and 26 episodes of the show were Sonic-focused, and the team released LetsPlays of six Sonic games on their website, making 12 hours of content over eight days. Afterwards, they decided to get into Let's Plays outside of events, playing 5 Days a Stranger, Kirby's Return to Dream Land, and more. In August 2013, they began a long-term video series called The Legendary Let's Play, pledging to play every Legend of Zelda game. The team has put out over 230 videos totaling 65 hours of playtime, and a Let's Play page is in progress.
Provides examples of:
- Ad Bumpers: The podcast featured bumpers for Open Lounge, while from 2012-2013 it featured ads for UNregular Radio instead.
- As You Know: Turns up anytime the hosts want to convey news to the audience which they already know themselves.
- Beginner's Luck: Rick had never put together a March Madness bracket before 2011, then proceeds to beat the rest of the pack by a mile. Naturally, when it came time for Fantasy Football, he took dead last.
- Berserk Button: The Wii is not two GameCubes taped together.
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Bonus Episode: Early on, an extra episode was marked as a "Bonus Stage" which featured Rick and Nick enduring a one-hour cake race. - Bonus Material: R-Rated, Game Over, and Live from the Brown Carpet. Also The D-Pad: Let's Play, which seems to be taking on a life of its own.
- Booze-Based Buff: Somehow, Rick's drunk lap of Mario Circuit 2 gave him the fastest times on the show, even though he wasn't exclusively in first sober.
- Butt-Monkey: Rick made the mistake of saying in an early episode that he used a Google spreadsheet to keep track of his progress in Pokémon Black Version. The other hosts have reminded him about this in nearly every episode since.
- Catchphrase: IT'S THE C-PAD!!
- Ouya?
- Oh no.
- Ouya?
- City Shout Outs: To Worcester, Boston, and Somerville, where the show has been recorded over the years. Also occasionally to Providence, RI and New Haven, CT.
- Continuity Nod: Shooting the puppy. And spreadsheets. Callbacks to the original podcast with no in-show explanation thus far.
- Crossover: Once upon a time, the hosts of Open Lounge appeared on The D-Pad, and vice versa.
- Documentary Episode: "Safe Haven"
followed Two-Bit Pictures through the 48 Hour Film Project in New Haven, CT. - Drinking Game: Every tenth episode of the podcast featured a drinking game you can play with the hosts. The hosts usually have a drink or three while recording, but these specials usually crank it up to eleven.
- Episode 10: "Highway to the Danger Zone" invites the audience to join the hosts in a Power Hour.
- Episode 20: "Volume Up" has the hosts volume-chugging from two-liter fishbowls.
- Episode 30: "Waddle Dre" was played a bit looser, as the group had been drinking heavily already (see Missing Episode below).
- Episode 40: "Thor's Hammered" features a game of Edward Fortyhands. Followed by a drunk lap in Super Mario Kart.
- Episode 10: "Highway to the Danger Zone"
- Drunken Master: Rick claims to be good at video games sober, but substantially better when drunk.
- Explicit Content:
No, not like that. The show has always been uncensored, both on UNregular Radio and independently. - Fan Community Nicknames: The hosts referred to their (questionably existent) fanbase originally as their "threes upon threes of fans", now better known as simply "The Threes".
- Fans of the live show are usually called "Goombas".
- Gag Censor: In the (increasingly rare) event that something needs to be censored, it's often replaced by a sound effect from a classic 8-bit game.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: The hosts, most prominently Rick and Nick, and John and CJ.
- Hey, It's That Sound!: When a podcast episode goes to its musical break, a Mario coin sound effect is heard.
- Intermission: Every episode features a few-minute "pause break" with musical interlude.
- Let's Play: Originally just a bonus while the podcast celebrated Sonic Week in June 2011, it soon became a staple of the group's online presence. Over 230 videos and 65 hours have been produced so far.
- Live Episode: Every episode since its reboot in September 2012, but the podcast also had "We're Doing It Live!", a half-hour episode recorded with a live audience at ImprovBoston's Geek Week Festival.
- Mascot: For a brief time Nick's chinchilla, Zooey, was an unofficial mascot of the podcast.
- Multi-Part Episode: Sonic Week consists of Act 1, Act 2, and six Let's Plays in-between.
- Once an Episode: IT'S THE C-PAD!!
- Every episode is dedicated to someone, and "Ouya, Oh No" has been a particularly popular segment as well.
- Our Slogan Is Terrible: Somehow, the show always seems to end with one of the hosts suggesting it's time to "shoot the dog".*
- Thankfully, their actual slogan is the much more appropriate "You game?"
- Please Subscribe to Our Channel: At the start and end of most episodes.Nick: ''It's game over, man! Game over! Now go level up at Podsmiths.com."
- Power Trio: The hosts, in various forms:
- Big, Thin, Short Trio: Rick is Big, John is Thin, Nick is Short.
- Chromatic Arrangement: Rick is green, John is red, Nick (and later CJ) is blue. A subtle Shout-Out to Something Remote, a movie/webseries featuring Rick, John, and CJ as a chromatically-arranged Comic Trio.
- Right on the Tick: Every new episode is online at exactly 12 noon. Even when it didn't.
- Running Gag: Plenty.
- Most episodes begin with Rick giving the audience a tired "Heyyyyy, everybody." The others noticed.
- Likewise, episodes usually end with someone saying it's time to "shoot the dog".
- Rick and his spreadsheets.
- Sequel Episode: "Retcon + Cats" featured guest Christopher Osborn talking about the book he was working on. A few months later, he returned in "A Gran Grimoire" to plug the now-completed Easily-Distracted Tales.
- Shout-Out: Quite a few, including about a month of references to Ben Drowned after Rick showed it to the others.
- The show's ad bumper on Open Lounge ends with Rick asking "You game?"
- The show's intro always ends with "and this... is The D-Pad".
- Most episodes end with the hosts "shooting the dog".
- At the start of the show's second season, Rick mentioned that the podcast is in the same spirit as (and in many ways inspired by) Top Gear (UK).
- The "Putting Our Guest to the Test" segment was an homage to "Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car".
- Significant Reference Date: The podcast began the day after Rick's 24th birthday.
- The following year, the show "rebooted" with a more structured format, and the addition of Good News, Bad News, Bebel's Short List, and Putting Our Guests to the Test as official segments of the show.
- Sound-to-Screen Adaptation: Word of God states this is the ultimate goal of the show. The D-Pad: Let's Play is a checkpoint.
- Stealth Pun: The D-Pad's website is dpadup.com. Every other account? downrightdpad.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Obviously Rick and Nick were chugging 40s during the podcast's 40th episode special and not just an equivalent volume and alcohol content. What do you mean, a forty doesn't sound like that?
- Title Drop: Inverted. Most episodes take their titles from a particularly funny quote from the audio itself.
- Two-Act Structure: Early on, the first act was more structured and the second act was played more loosely.
- In the live show, the first act is mostly news and commentary, while the second act is more opinion and debate.
I AM JOHN MOTHERFUCKING GODDAMN SELIG
