Reviews Series / Gaming In The Clinton Years

Hilarious in all the wrong ways

Having seen many different kinds of video reviews, I've noticed that they vary in quality from fairly good to laughably bad. Gaming In The Clinton Years falls squarely into the latter category, and is so amusingly bad that it ends up being rather memorable for a series that is over 20 years old.

The series is based on a public-access TV show that a man named George Wood put on in the mid-90s, and was uploaded to YouTube in the site's early years. The series tries to review video games, but ends up falling prey to many different problems.

1. Wood is often unable to complete even the first levels of certain video games without cheating. I'm not the sort to bash games journalists for not being as good as hardcore gamers or not liking some difficult games, but this is just pathetic.
2. Wood frequently contradicts himself, sometimes in the same video. For example, he complains about the controls in Ape Escape before later saying that they aren't all that bad.
3. Wood gives out arbitrary review scores, especially difficulty- it's unclear whether a low rating means that the difficulty is too easy, too hard, or just poorly balanced.
4. Wood's videos are poorly made, even for the 90s, with the B-roll often playing sound while he's doing a voiceover. Some videos even have more serious problems, such as the audio cutting out in one version of the EarthBound review.
5. Wood's videos are poorly written, often resulting in him rambling, giving gameplay hints rather than reviewing the product and going off on tangents. A few videos end rather abruptly without much of a conclusion. It makes me wonder whether he had a script.
6. Wood has some rather peculiar fixations and opinions, such as complaining about the Toy Story video game not using Silicon Graphics computers, or wishing that Tomb Raider III would have Lara get breast cancer.
7. Lastly, Wood uploads duplicates of videos that are already on his channel. This isn't an occasional occurrence, but it's happened hundreds of times, and for cases in which there are already two separate versions of the same video, or videos purely consisting of B-roll. As a result, 287 separate reviews end up translating to over 1,000 videos on his channel.

As you can see, there's little reason to consider Wood a very credible reviewer, or to trust his verdicts. Despite that, his reviews are amusingly badly done, especially for reasons #2, #5 and #6, which make him more memorable and enjoyable than most amateur reviewers. The aforementioned Toy Story and Tomb Raider II review(in which the breast cancer remark is a suggestion for the sequel) stand out, since few people would ever make reviews like those..

In short, this series is hilarious in a So Bad, It's Good way, but I'd recommend the review that Caddicarus did of this series for a humorous and informative look at this series.