Earlier this year I was struggling pretty hard to find anything funny about video games anymore, and was seriously considering putting Point & Clickbait on an indefinite hiatus until, well, everything stopped being a fucking nightmare.
I did not do that. Instead, I asked James “Jickle” O’Connor to help out, and he has since done a stellar job which I want to take a moment to recognise in the traditional form of a listicle, which is how games journalists communicate.
In no particular order other than chronological, here are ten delightful pieces of James from the year of our lord 2019:
ALERT: Experts Predicting Surge In Uncles Asking You To Explain Anime To Them This Christmas
Some of my favourite James pieces are the ones that have a sort of quiet wholesomeness to them which is something I can never manage because I am a perpetually angry and insufferable pissant. This piece contains that bumbling uncle energy that even the most embittered reader of a satirical website recognises is a call for gentleness and confusion, and the line about Cowboy Bebop made me feel a hundred years old so fuck you James. Moving on.
Tea Spilled: Neil deGrasse Tyson Is In A Public Twitter Feud With Crash Bandicoot
This one already crosses the line from “haha, lol” into “terrifyingly plausible” based on the subject line alone and quite frankly the imaginary tweets that James made up for this article are entirely too much like something Neil deGrasse Tyson would be capable of posting. The man (Neil) is a deranged lunatic and I do believe that he would kill Crash Bandicoot given the chance – although perhaps in a rare moment of empathy that I would not normally extend to this serial pedant who deserves a smorgasbord of wedgies (again, Neil), I think there’s a part inside all of us which would strangle the bandicoot given the chance.
New Wolfenstein To Explore Alternate History In Which The Nazis Were Defeated In 2016
This article was unbelievably popular and there’s a good reason for that: it’s very funny. In a clever twist on the old alternate history gag, James quite rightly highlights both the modern resurgence of Nazism and the failure of liberal politics to stop it. Must-read jokes in this piece include MachineGames ongoing and increasingly angry refusal to discuss the possibility of any violence in the game, and the final line about it being banned in America and Australia. Punch Nazis.
Nintendo Denies The Existence of ‘Wet Bowser’
I will not be discussing Wet Bowser but I will be pointing you to this article which makes a clear and undeniable argument for the existence of such a beast. Like the ancient writings of Lovecraft himself, only with less racism, James’ dark knowledge weighs heavier on my mind each day.
Powerful: The Protagonist Of This Shooter Will Say ‘This Is Bad’ Every Time He Kills An Unnamed Foreigner
I think my favourite part about this article is the increasingly absurd antics of the already absurdly named ‘Gruff Irons’, who starts off simply saying “this is bad” after a routine murder and ends up blowing up a series of orphanages so that the game director can have him say “this is bad” as he examines the body of each child. The real punchline to this is that this article is basically identical to the interviews that the Modern Warfare team gave before launch this year. Kill me honestly.
Nintendo Announces HD Remake of That Three Year Period in High School When You Didn’t Want Girls to Find Out That You Played Videogames
I certainly can’t think of any people who the highly specific situation described in the title of this article could apply to and that’s what makes this article great. If it were to ever apply to anybody that I knew I would be devastated.
Inclusivity Win! This White Man in the New Call of Duty Will Be Named After An Asian Woman
It’s honestly pretty easy to make fun of Modern Warfare but it’s hard to do it in a way that actually makes you laugh rather than just scream and this article nails it, although depressingly it wouldn’t be far off the sort of claims that they have made about this series. Although the title gag alone is great, James unloads a blast from his spice weasel to kick things up a notch by revealing that Private Lucy Liu dies in the first few minutes after being “viscerally exploded”. A win for inclusivity and a win for our website.
Sonic the Hedgehog Movie Delayed To Add Scene Of Sonic Fucking A Car
He really wants Sonic to fuck a car. He keeps bringing it up. I’m not going to encourage him by talking about it.
Five French New Wave Classics You MUST Watch Before Avengers: End Game
This is probably the piece that, if I may be so bold as to claim certainty of all universal knowledge and perfect clarity of cosmic events, James was born to write. The headline is already a delightful pisstake of the sort of phoned-in listicle that accompanies every MCU release but only James O’Connor could actually turn out five different and increasingly absurd French New Wave classics which somehow tie into Marvel’s stupid bullshit. It is impossible to pick a favourite from these five delightful films and I will not insult the other four by pretending I can.
Ubisoft Scrambles As The Division 2 is Sworn Into Congress
I laugh like a fucking idiot every time I see this headline. 11/10.
