"This is a floppy disk. If seeing one of these gets you excited, then have I got a treat for you! LGR: commentary, history and snark on retro computer games and more! Floppy disks, big box PC games, odd hardware and software, The Sims series, stories of tech history, first-person thrift-shopping, and Let's Plays on games that make no sense!"
— Old channel trailer
Lazy Game Reviews, most commonly known by its abbreviation LGR, is an online video game review show by Clint Basinger (no relation to Kim Basinger) reviewing games mostly for PC, Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Apple Macintosh, as well as reviews of The Sims series. Despite the title, reviews are actually extremely extensive and detailed.
The channel is divided into several shows:
- The normal reviews, where he goes over some game or hardware. He gives an in-depth history of the product being reviewed, going over good and bad points before giving his recommendation.
- A spin-off is Review Quickie, which is a shorter version and the content is more about his experiences with the game rather than an in-depth review.
- LGR Plays: A 20 minute or so video of him playing some game. Usually doesn't play the game for another episode, except in some cases.
- Oddware: As he puts it, reviewing "hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, or obsolete".
- PC Builds and Restorations: Videos of him building and/or restoring old computers.
- LGR Thrifts: Footage and commentary on his shopping sprees at thrift stores.
- Tech Tales: A few minutes on the history of a company that was around back in the early days of personal computers.
- LGR Blerbs: As he puts it, "It's just a spot for unscripted updates and random things...that don't merit a full video on LGR but are too large for Twitter."
You can watch his reviews on YouTube.
He also has a food channel known as LGR Foods, and a channel for extra, miscellaneous videos known as LGR Blerbs.
Greetings! And welcome to a TV Tropes thing…
- Accentuate the Negative: He is a snarky reviewer, so it's bound to happen. Aside from that, he does a good job of weighing the pros and cons of games he reviews. Though towards the latter half of the 2010s, the snarkiness starts to tone down quite a bit unless something about the thing he's covering annoys him.
- Added Alliterative Appeal: Happens quite often, with a Lampshade Hanging in the Chex Quest review.
- Angrish: In the Pharaoh's Tomb video, he progressively breaks down into anger as he recalls loving the game as a kid, but hating it now because of the level's Malevolent Architecture and poor hit detection.
- Arc Number: 17. Why 17? Because it's an odd number. Very odd.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In his review of The Sims 3: Master Suite Stuff:"I've grouped the items from this stuff pack into four groups: crap, more crap, useless crap, and pajamas."
- Artifact Title: As acknowledged several times, over the last few years the title "Lazy Game Reviews" is no longer accurate in any way — his videos are highly comprehensive and not lazy, he covers topics other than games, and a large portion of his videos aren't even reviews."'I know, I'll do a quick, simple little video about Sega PC ports.' Annnnnd now it's half an hour long, even after editing. I cannot lazy."
- Further discussed in the 2018 recap video, after which the channel's full title was dropped in favor of just calling it LGR, complete with a new intro. The sole exception are the December videos, which uses the classic holiday intro that uses the original title.
- Author Appeal:
- He's a huge Duke Nukem fan, and tends to reference the series in his videos. He also uses games from the series, mainly 3D, to benchmark computer systems and accessories.
- Wood grain. Anything with a vintage wood grain veneer will quickly win his design approval.
- Author Avatar: His The Sims reviews will often feature himself as a sim, toting his self-made Lazy Game Reviews T-Shirt.
- Awesome, but Impractical: You can expect a good majority of the things featured on Oddware to be this.
- Bait-and-Switch: Done twice with the #1 spot on the "Top 17 List" videos:
- In the "Top 17 Games of the 2000's" video, he initially crowns Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (his #1 game in the "Worst Games of All Time" video) for the #1 spot, before realizing he has the "wrong Top 17 list" and quickly giving the real title to Half-Life 2.
- In the "Top 17 Games of 2013" video, Cookie Clicker is proclaimed to be the #1 game at first. Clint then jokes that he probably could make a genuine case for giving the spot to Cookie Clicker, before giving it to Grand Theft Auto V.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: In "LGR Plays: The Sims 2 University""So if your Sims had certain points, or whatever... or no parents, or 'previously abducted by aliens', you'd get scholarships."
- Broke the Rating Scale: After playing Doom with the Thrustmaster Pinball Wizard controller, he gives it 10 stars out of five.
- But Wait, There's More!: Inverted in his review of The Sims 3's expansion pack Master Suite Stuff.
- Call-Back:
- The "Top 17 Games of the 2000s" video has him jokingly giving the #1 spot to Big Rigs: Over the Road Racingnote , before quickly realizing he had the "wrong Top 17 list" and moving on to the actual #1 game.
- The boxed edition of Grim Fandango he mentions getting during his March/April 2013 wrap-up video makes an appearance at the beginning of his review of The Incredible Machine.
- The "Katy Perry Sweet Treats House of Pain" from his review of "The Sims 3: Katy Perry Sweet Treats" makes a reappearance during his reviews of The Sims 3 Expansions Diesel Stuff and Supernatural.
- The utopian future in the Into the Future expansion reminded him of Sweet Treats in theme. So what does he do? Set everything on fire.
- His Cities: Skylines review opens up with him saying the exact same thing he said in the opening of his SimCity (2013) review.
- In his review of The Sims 4 Backyard Stuff, he happily notes that "you can actually drink the lemonade [from the pitcher] this time and it's not just good for farting on", a reference to his The Sims 3 Outdoor Living Stuff where he complained that the lemonade pitcher was a purely decorative item and Sims "may as well just stand there and direct their farts towards it".
- Catchphrase:
- "NOPE!"
- He starts off most videos with a hearty "Greetings!" ("And welcome to an LGR thing!")
- The "Tech Tales" begin with him giving a brief summary of the history he's going to cover, followed by "What happened? This is LGR Tech Tales, where we take a look at noteworthy stories of technological inspiration, failure, and everything in between."
- The "LGR Thrifts" videos begin with him saying something random, then he says "Let's go thrifting!"
- “X of the Y variety.”
- He tends to use "daggone" and "daggonit" to express frustration and/or place emphasis on something.
- Deadpan Snarker: Pervasively so; he'll be sure to point out any absurd on-screen happenings with the same mildly-whimsical tone of voice he uses for the drier, more informative parts of the video. This is more common in his scripted reviews; for videos he does live commentary on (such as LGR Plays), he's prone to breaking into fits of laughter instead.
- While reviewing Mario Teaches Typing, when gameplay finally began, he gave an extremely technical explanation of how keyboard input works over what he called very dull gameplay.
- Department of Redundancy Department: This is one of his main things, along with being the Snark Knight.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: "Lazy Game World", the world he created for his review of The Sims 3: Town Life Stuff, consists of nothing more than a single road in a rather phallic shape."So I went ahead an founded Lazy Game World, and placed my new lots randomly around a lovely curved road that's absolutely not insinuating anything at all."
- Double Entendre: He will drop one whenever he can get away with it.
- From his NCR-386 review:
"It's just particular in how it likes its disks inserted. I suppose if I had big black disks stuck in me all day I would be particular as well."- His review of the Master Suite Stuff pack for The Sims 3 is loaded with these, due to the questionable names of the items included, i.e. a toilet called "The Seat of Romance" and a wall lamp called a "Delicate Dangling Participle". This leads to him calling out the developers for being as immature as he is.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Aside from his firstnote video that doesn't involve gaming (which involves Clint threatening to kill a doppelganger of himself), he made quite a few console reviews before mainly settling on computer gaming. In addition, he also copied The Angry Video Game Nerd in terms of style, demeanor and even appearance, changing his shtick from "being constantly angry" to "being too lazy to do proper review" (hence the Artifact Title).
- Edutainment Show: "Oddware" and "Tech Tales". The former series discusses obsolete and obscure computer peripherals and software, while the latter series goes in depth on the history of once-influential tech companies.
- Five Stages of Grief: Mostly used straight (denial, anger, suffering and acceptance) in the final YouTube chapter titles of his "I bought a 25-year-old printer & regret EVERYTHING" video where his attempts at getting a late-1990s Canon printer to work properly don't work out.
- Food Porn: On his official Twitter, Clint started posting photos of his 'LGRwiches', his very delicious-looking sandwiches. After his followers exhibited interest in Clint starting a food channel, he obliged, and LGR Foods was born. So far, he's made sandwiches and noodles, complete with sensual jazz saxophone music, longing shots of the finished product, and a sign-off that says what everyone has been thinking the whole time."I hope you're hungry now, because I am." (fade to black, chomp/slurp) "Mmm..."
- Funny Background Event:
- At the beginning of his Sims 3 University review, he shows a few other games in the background as he holds the cover up, as a typical opening to his videos. One of them is the 2013 SimCity reboot, with "DRM" written in Sharpie over "City." It later shows up in the review of SimCity itself.
- At one point during his Town Life Stuff review for The Sims 3, while listing some of the objects included in the pack, his Sim walks by in nothing but pink underwear.
- Given the nature of The Adventures of Ninja Nanny, it's fitting that the Windows 95 system clock on the lower right corner is at 4:20 PM for the entire video.
- Gender Flip: The Female Lazy Game Reviewer, a text-to-speech program with a female voice that shows up to take over reviewing duties for Clint whenever he's sick, as well as showing up randomly at other times.
- Glove Snap: Clint gleefully does this in his review of Life and Death, thanks to the mask and gloves
included in the box.(snap!) "Beard not required, but totally recommended." - Gosh Dang It to Heck!: The strongest words he will usually use in his videos are "crap" and "frick". That doesn't mean that there aren't any exceptions.
- Hell Is That Noise:
- Invoked in LGR Plays Skyscraper Simulator, where starting a game provides an obnoxiously loud screech. Naturally, it's brought up multiple times as the main reason that This Is Gonna Suck.
- In his Creative Game Blaster review, he found playing Test Drive 3 wasn't exactly the best choice of game to play with the sound card.
- He had to turn off the sound when reviewing Vette! because the PC speaker handled the sound of the engine revving, which he describes as "instant ear rape".
- In a semi-behind-the-scenes video he made while filming a review using an IBM PCjr, the fluorescent light bulbs he uses reacted with the infrared wireless keyboard, making the computer think keys were being pressed rapidly, causing a never-ending stream of beeping noises.
- The gameplay music in the long lost shareware title Batter Up freaks LGR out, as it's nothing but two high pitched notes being played in succession. Unlike the other examples, he purposely kept the sound on to show it off.
- Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: In earlier hardware reviews, he compared the size of what he reviewed to completely random items that most people wouldn't have just lying around. These included:
- When reviewing the Compaq Contura Aero, it was the same width as a PSP candy case and the length of a set of huge prop old-timey keys
- In the Zenith Z-171 review "It's about the same size as two oversized clothespins. So if you have one of these, that says about how big it is."
- The Bernoulli Box, at least the model he has, is about same size as a few half-chewed Garfield chew toys.
- Clint compared the AverMedia Live Gamer Pro recording device with several nonsensical items, until finally settling on showing it had about the same footprint as an Xbox 360 controller.
- Homeschooled Kids: In his Batter Up! review, LGR says that he was home-schooled for part of his childhood. During this time, he would get many Edutainment Games from book fairs and shareware sources as part of his education, which is why he always has "Edutainment Month" each year and more generally has such nostalgia for PC edutainment.
- The Internet Is for Porn: For... whatever reason, during his Monorail review he finds a giant Porn Stash that he claims to be half a gig worth, he calls it a "wank bank".
- Lame Pun Reaction:
- He groans about the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer's name, which is a pun on "audio" and "video".
- A reaction to the back of the "Sims 3 Katy Perry Sweet Treats" box:
"'In Katy Perry Sweet Treats discover a sweet new hangout' hur-durr, how clever and punny." - Let's Play: His "LGR Plays" series, where he plays through both old and new games for about 20 minutes or so. Unlike standard Let's Plays, he doesn't continue any series past one episode, the only exceptions being his Duke Nukem 3D playthrough and a three-part playthrough of Wasteland, if only because his party died on the third episode.
- Non Sequitur: Likes to play this for laughs."Yes I'm sun burnt. I went outside for two minutes and that's what happens. So... Let's go thrifting!"
- No Plot? No Problem!: If there's a game that has this or any other unexplained aspect, Clint will create something to varying levels of absurdity and yet it'll still make some amount of sense.
- Not the Intended Use: Every time he gets a niche controller for Oddware, he plays a game that the controller was not supposed to be used with. So far he's done:
- Doom II with the Thrustmaster Wizard pinball controller
- Grand Theft Auto V with the Philips Virtual Pinball controller
- Doom (2016) with the InterAct Pool controller.
- Duke Nukem 3D with the Altara Felix Pointing Device (to showcase issues using it for games) and the Big Keys "ABC" Keyboard (in that the keyboard uses an alphabetical order layout, screwing with the controls)
- He used the Saitek Farming Simulator Controller (basically a steering wheel, pedals, and a control panel) on Doom and Super Mario Bros. 3.
- Though not a controller, he uses the view finder of an old camcorder (which was a 1/2" CRT display) to play Fallout 4 on.
- Similar to the previous example; he's played Fallout 4 and Cuphead on an old black-and-white TV set.
- Overly Narrow Superlative: Claimed that Breath of the Wild was the best Zelda game he had played, after admitting that it was the first one he had played since the original.
- Pop Up Video Games: He is quickly disappointed when he finds out Disney's Coaster isn't one of these even though the main menu make it look otherwise.
- Precision F-Strike: Profanity is almost never used outside of Duke Nukem videos, but in the review of Zoo Tycoon, he names the bathrooms a variety of juvenile names, but the last one is named "Take A Giant Shit". It's only in text, so it's also a Funny Background Event.
- His Extreme Boards and Blades review has a bleeped Precision F-Strike moment, to express his shock at the end upon his discovery of the game's sequel.
- A typed Precision F-Strike occurs in his Golden Oldies review, at the end of a session with Eliza.
- An accidental Precision F-Strike happens in his Sonic's Schoolhouse review, when the bouncing letters from the game conveniently just happened to spell "FUK"; he highlights this as his overall opinion of the game.
- Product Placement: Discussed by Clint himself in the "Red Baron Pizza Adventure", in which he discovers a copy of a Red Baron II that included a coupon for 75 cents off a 12-inch Red Baron pizza; since the coupon had no expiration date, this prompted him to go to a local Food Lion and use the coupon to buy the pizza. He then cooks the pizza in a stove before playing the game while the pizza is cooking. The result: the pizza turns out to be pretty good and tasty.
- Retraux: Though more enforced if anything in videos from 2009 to about 2011, due to the only video recorder he had at the time was a JVC VHS one. Clint mentions in the 1 year anniversary video that he did like the retro-styling it gave to his videos, or at least that's what he kept telling himself.
- Running Gag:
- Practice MOOOOOOOODE...
- Appearances from the Female Lazy Game Reviewer.
- The "Katy Perry Sweet Treats House of Pain".
- Clint's joking love of chairs.note
- One of the Christmas clones reminding Clint it's December and he needs to do Christmas-based game reviews.
- In his reviews of The Sims games and expansion packs, he always makes sure to say his (usually negative) thoughts on the loading screen.
- In more recent videos, his love of woodgrain has become one of these. He mentions it repeatedly throughout his videos and on social media. This eventually led to him selling limited-edition woodgrain socks as a nod to his love.
- Packing Peanuts.
- Clint's spot-on impression of Duke Nukem. He does it even in videos that aren't directly related to Duke Nukem. For example, he does it in the playthrough of The Adventures of Willy Beamish by Pushing Up Roses when he sees a blonde kid wearing sunglasses in the game, and compares him to Duke.
- Lampshaded on the LGR Foods channel, where he acknowledges it took him several videos of using Duke's Mayonnaise until he broke out the Duke voice.
- Naming a system file "FARTS" while building or restoring a retro computer.
- Self-Deprecation: Every once in a while Clint will make fun of his focus on old computer hardware as well as his habit of getting incredibly nostalgic over strange, obscure, and sometimes sub-par things.
- Shaped Like Itself:
- When he reviews the After Dark screensavers:
Clint: And then there's "Doodles," which simulates random doodles.- In one game review he mentions the game's "disk-shaped disk" and "manual-shaped manual."
- In the Mario Teaches Typing review he explains that inside the box you'll find...box insides.
- Shout-Out:
- The Female Lazy Game Reviewer is represented by a picture of Kitty from Arrested Development.
- In his review of the Christmas game Rudolph's Magical Sleigh Ride, he points out that his copy of the game came in a jewel case for a program called Too Many Typefonts, and quickly makes the connection to Too Many Cooks.
- His review of The Sims: Movie Stuff notes some of the raunchier outfits included in the horror category, including one where "you're just a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania."
- In his review of Zoo Tycoon, he states that the goal of the Marine Mania expansion is to successfully run a water park and avoid becoming the subject of an expository documentary.
- During his review of the Cities: Skylines expansion Green Cities, he notes the variety of new buildings in the game that float in the water, saying "Oh yes, Georgie, they all float."
- One of the features Clint shows off in his review of The Sims 2 Holiday Edition is the New Year's Bash, where Father Time shows up to your house and transforms into Toddler New Year at midnight. While showing off the dancing baby, a single "ooga chaka" can be heard in the background, referencing the "dancing baby" meme from Ally McBeal.
- Shown Their Work: Most of the LGR videos are 7+ minutes long. He goes the extra mile talking about the development of the game, the people behind it, and the history of ALL its releases and ports.
- Sick Episode: The Donkey Kong Country episode, where Clint had to use a text-to-speech system to provide narration.
- This had a sequel and appropriately it was to review Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest
- Slasher Smile: Starts off one video this way...Clint: OK, enough of the Richard D. James face.
- So Bad, It's Good: Invokes this trope on occasion. Said nearly word for word in his video on Streets of SimCity.
- Stylistic Callback: His 7th anniversary video features a remake of his second opening sequence, with a metal remix of Vaxeen 4U, a shot-for-shot remake of the opening scenes in HD with all the same typefaces, and the usual game footage leading it out replaced with him using an HTC Vive in time-lapse.
- Take That!: In his review of the Bowling Stuff pack, he comments that it's a pack no-one asked for, alongside the fictional "Broom Stuff" and "Deflated Football Stuff" packs. The latter has the New England Patriots logo on the fake cover art, as a nod to Deflategate.
- Theme Tune:
- Very early videos used a clip from the EDM song Chainsaw Fellatio by Venetian Snares
- He used a cut version of Vaxeen 4U for several years before stopping with intros altogether.
- The Christmas episodes use a remix of a popular classic Christmas song, such as Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare's Little Drummer Boy.
- Very early videos used a clip from the EDM song Chainsaw Fellatio
- "…and as always, thank you for reading!"
