Web Video / Save State Gamer

"Well howdy, fans, and welcome to another edition of the Save-State Gamer, coming to you live from via satellite!"

"If there's one thing I've learned from my one year of experience of video games, it's that I know everything about video games."

— Crisbo Herrs

Meet Crisbo Herrs: an inept video game reviewer with absurdly poor gaming skills, an inability to do research, a considerable ego, and a deep admiration for the Angry Video Game Nerd.

Crisbo is the main character of the Save-State Gamer show, created by writer Philip J. Reed. The show is one of various parodies of The Irate Gamer, such as the Third Rate Gamer and the Irritated Gamer; the Save-State Gamer's videos use Stylistic Suck as their driving force, with various jokes being direct parodies of jokes from the Irate Gamer's reviews.

Each of his videos have been compiled into this playlist. In light of Phillip Reed's tragic suicide on July 2022, the Save-State Gamer archive exists to preserve both the Save-State Gamer and Reed's other videos.

Reviews

• Freddy Pharkas
• Top 5 DSi Games
• Gilligan's Island^note (Parody of the Irate Gamer's Home Improvement review)
• Wii Wheel Product Review^note (Parody of the Irate Gamer's NES Mini review)
• Fallout 3
• Muscle March
• History of Video Games: Part 1^note (Parody of part one of the Irate Gamer's "History of Video Games" and his pre-Irate Gamer "Back to the Past" videos)
• Mega Man Retrospective
• Dual review of Zombie Nation and Color a Dinosaur^note (Parody of the Irate Gamer's Super Mario Bros./Super Mario Bros. 2 review)
• Commander Keen^note (Parody of the Irate Gamer's Monster Party review)
• Hotel Gaming (numbered review "10.5")
• Pac-Man^note (Parody of the Irate Gamer's Aladdin (Capcom) review)
• Portal
• Bible Adventures

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This series contains examples of:

• Adaption Displacement:invoked
  • He believes that Rescue from Gilligan's Island was adapted into the show Gilligan's Island.
  • According to him, Pac-Man was so popular in the media that they even made a video game about him.
• Bad "Bad Acting": His overall line delivery is rather flat, with any hint of emotion sounding forced.
• Bread Milk Eggs Squick: In "History of Video Games", upon time-travelling to the past, he reminds himself to "stock up on some Yummy Mummy, and some Sharkleberry Fin, and tr*nny porn where the pubes aren't shaved."
• Breathless Non Sequitur: In the Wii Wheel review:
  Save-State Gamer: The only thing I have to wonder about is why this came with Mario Kart. Well, after doing some research, I discovered that my real father is the guy who sleeps behind the dumpster at Walgreens.
• Button Mashing: Parodied. He is always mashing buttons and is never holding his controller right during his reaction shots. In some shots, he is not even using a controller at all and is instead using a TV remote or a closed D Si.
• By "No", I Mean "Yes":
  • His thoughts of Contra 4 in his "Top 5 DSi Games" video vary between him praising the game for being "perfect" to harshly criticizing various aspects of the game.
    Save-State Gamer: There's a brilliant game here. In fact, it's close to perfect, and I wouldn't change a thing! Contra 4: Avoid it at all costs.
  • He goes on about how the Wii Wheel has minor drawbacks, emphasizing the fact that they are indeed drawbacks... before saying that he can't think of a single drawback about the thing.
  • He goes back and forth between criticizing Fallout 3's graphics and praising them.
    Save-State Gamer: Despite the bad graphics, the graphics in this game are incredible.
• Catchphrase:
  • "This game is okay, but it could have been a lot better."
  • Parodying a quote from the Irate Gamer's Home Improvement review, "I thought this was x, not Jungle Improvement".
  • Again parodying an Irate Gamer quote from his Ghosts 'n Goblins review, "And while I'm there, can you take the movie x down there with it? That movie was the biggest piece of shit I ever saw!"
• Composite Character: Horsefellow is based off three characters from various Irate Gamer reviews; he is a Jewish stereotype as with Ronnie the Skeleton, he repeatedly crashes through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man from the Irate Gamer's review of the Kool-Aid games, and he grants wishes like the genie from his Aladdin (Capcom) review.
• Deadpan Snarker: Crisbo himself is this, in regards to the Irate Gamer.
• Department of Redundancy Department: In his Gilligan's Island review, he calls the NES the "Nintendo NES Entertainment System video game console by Nintendo".
• The Ditz: If it weren't already obvious, the Save-State Gamer has a very flimsy grasp of video games, if not life in general. For instance, his Fallout 3 has him having to look up what the number "3" is.
• Don't Explain the Joke:
  • In "History of Video Games", he is accused of messing with the timeline by "interacting with [him]self from another point in the past". His response? "Oh, come on, I interact with myself all the time," accompanied by him holding up his hand, wiggling his fingers, and pointing to it. After a beat, he adds, "Masturbation hand."^note In addition to parodying explaining the joke, this doubles as a reference to an Irate Gamer quote.
  • invokedIn his Mega Man review, he brings up a rather infamous scene in Ring King, saying that he'll explain the joke to make it even less funny "than it was to begin with". Topping it off is him providing the viewer with a description of what "getting head" is.
    Save-State Gamer: Head is when a man puts a penis in his mouth, and licks it.
• Fake Difficulty: He complains about games relying on this, but ends up invoking a more literal example of this trope, in which he tries to make games seem more difficult than they really are.
  • His Mega Man review has him complaining about the jumps that you have to make in the game, demonstrated by him successfully making a jump...and then purposely walking back into the pit anyways.
  • In his Pac-Man review, he quite obviously is purposefully missing eating a power pellet, and says that he'll just explain in a YouTube comment that he was doing it on purpose in an attempt to be funny.
• Hostile Show Takeover: Subverted in his Pac-Man review, which opens up as a parody of the Irate Gamer's Order Up! review, before the Save-State Gamer's evil twin changes his mind about taking over the show.
• Homoerotic Subtext: He has dropped various hints to being attracted to the Angry Video Game Nerd, has a clearly labeled box of "gay porn" in his Gilligan's Island review, and even seems to have folders of child pornography of cousin Joey in his Mega Man review.
• Jump Scare: In his Fallout 3 review, with him going to a dark area in the game and saying that anything can pop up, and a former girlfriend popping up after about twenty seconds. Ironically enough, his reaction to what pops up is more of a jumpscare.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • In "Muscle March", after going into an irrelevant rant about Kool-Aid flavors, Crisbo recites one obviously intended towards Chris Bores on a meta level:
    Save-State Gamer: Now I know a few of you living all over the world may be asking yourselves, "Wait a minute, what are you talking about? Aren't you supposed to be reviewing video games? I mean, you have the word 'gamer' right in your name, but all you ever do is bitch about Kool-Aid and breakfast cereals, and you upload movie reviews where all you do is recite parts of the plot summary over slowly zooming-in promotional photographs for twenty seconds. In what language could you even loosely be defined as a gamer?"
  • In a similar vein, "History of Video Games" has Future!Save-State Gamer giving his evil self a passive-aggressive lecture after the latter shoehorns a Star Trek II reference by randomly shouting Khan's name^note lampooning the discrepancy of Chris Bores calling a character both "Mr. Anderson" and "Khan" in his pre-Irate Gamer "Back to the Past" video, tying into the video's theme of critiquing Irate Gamer's use of invokedshallow parodies in his reviews.
    Evil!Save-State Gamer: KHAN!
    Future!Save-State Gamer: Why did you say that?
    Evil!Save-State Gamer: It's from the movie; it's from Star Trek II.
    Future!Save-State Gamer: Yeah, I know, it's from...the movie. But within the reality of this piece, why did you say that? What "Khan" are you referring to? Are you referring to him as Khan? But earlier, you were calling him "Mr. Anderson", so I guess you think his name is Khan Anderson? Is that the joke? Or weren't you paying attention?
    (Evil!Save-State Gamer looks down self-consciously)
    Future!Save-State Gamer: I mean, if you've got an explanation, then...you got it, good for you. But just know that I don't. I am not privy to this information; I have absolutely no idea what I'm expected to feel by this point: if I'm supposed to be laughing, or just depressed that...you spent an entire afternoon of your life putting this together and...it really amounted to little more than nonsense.
• Running Gag: Whenever he is listing characters, he often includes Reducto accompanied by a picture of the wrong Harvey Birdman character, parodying the Irate Gamer confusing Reducto with another character in his review of the Harvey Birdman game.
• Sequel Displacement:invoked
  • The end of his Fallout 3 review demonstrates him having a very interesting grasp on how he thinks that the entries in the Fallout series (or according to him, the "Fallout 3 series") are numbered.
  • He thinks that the Mega Man series skips straight from the third installment to the ninth, leaving him wondering what happened to numbers "4-7".
• Shallow Parody:invoked "History of Video Games" is primarily a Take That! to the Irate Gamer's use of Shallow Parodies, complete with the "Lazy Movie Reference Bot 9000".
• Small Name, Big Ego: Naturally. The page quote from "History of Video Games" should clue you in.
  • Later in the same video, he is apparently convinced that he would have been rich within five years from his T-shirt and DVD sales.
• Special Effect Failure: Invoked, and also justified due to his use of Windows Movie Maker.
  • In the Zombie Nation/Color a Dinosaur review, before Horsefellow busts through the wall, you can see the black felt used for the hole effect balled up on a nearby cabinet.
• Spoiled by the Format:invoked Parodied in Muscle March, where he puts an ending card twenty seconds into the video, before continuing with this:
  Save-State Gamer: Oh, you probably want to know why I thought it was great. Well, you're in luck, because a second ago, when it looked like the show was ending, that was really just a joke that I did to make it look like the review was very short. Now imagine how funny that would be if YouTube's player didn't make it perfectly clear that we were actually nowhere near the end of the video. Imagine...
• Spoofed with Their Own Words: As an Irate Gamer parody, a lot of the satire tends to rely on this, such as this line in his review of the Wii Wheel to parody Bores wondering whether the NES Retro Mini worked with ROB:
  Save-State Gamer: And I haven't tried it yet, but I wonder if [the Wii Wheel] works with ROB the robot. Because that's a perfectly valid thing to wonder about a peripheral that hasn't been supported in 25 years.
• Stylistic Suck: The driving force behind the show; a consumer webcam is used to record everything, amateur characteristics of Windows Movie Maker videos are present, and his reviewing style obviously leaves a lot to be desired.
• Toilet Humor: His decidedly creative insults towards games tend to involve fecal matter.
  Save-State Gamer: Everything looks like...dried...diarrhea...poop...shitload of fuck.
• There Was a Door: Subverted in his review of the Wii Wheel, where he compares the awesomeness of the product to the Kool-Aid Man jumping through walls while he spends an inordinate amount of time describing how funny it would be if it did happen right that moment, all while the camera conspicuously leaves a lot of empty space for it to happen. Justified, as relying on Windows Movie Maker wouldn't allow the Kool-Aid Man to be easily edited in well.
• Wasteful Wishing: After pondering what to wish for in his Pac-Man review, his second wish, "for some reason, is to make minor progress in a video game", asking Horsefellow to "get rid of some of those dots". This is to parody the Irate Gamer using his second wish to clear a couple of stages in his Aladdin (Capcom) review.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Invoked in "History of Video Games", where despite supposedly dedicating the video to talking about the Magnavox Odyssey, we never get one bit of information about the console in question, even after he wraps up the review implying otherwise.