No Spoiler Warning this week. Again. We spent so much time fighting with audio that when the video stream began flaking out we were too grumpy, tired, and frustrated to deal with it. But we should have it all hammered out next week. In the meantime, Mumbles has compiled a list of her top 10 favorite Spoiler Warning Episodes. Go read it. Number 1 will shock you! (It shocked me, anyway. Her #1 is the episode where I basically griefed the entire cast through incompetence.)
But if we’re doing easy-breezy “top 10 list” type contentBecause I got nothin this week, and I’m elbow-deep in the guts of Good Robot right now and don’t have time to make something intelligent. then the least I can do is pitch in. So here is my top ten list of favorite Spoiler Warning episodes:
10. Elevator Source
All I remember is how much fun it was to make this episode.
9. Mass Effect 2 Finale: Don't Fear the Reaper
We worked hard. We did our best. And in the end, we managed to kill off Miranda. That’s the only true winstate of Mass Effect 2.
8. Spoiler Warning: Railroad to Nowhere
Bad graphics, worse gameplay, and truly horrendous puns. What more can you ask for?
7. Hitman Absolution EP11: Ultimate Defenestration GOTY
Yes! Shove him out the window! Again! Do it again!
6. Dark Souls Special Part 2: Hashtag DESERVED
Lots to love about this episode. George Weidman is our guest, and this is a game he’s really into. We get a PvP invader, and it goes far better than we could possibly have planned or hoped for.
5. New Vegas EP45: Fission Mailed
Josh wanted the incinerator shishkebab, which can only be obtained if you play the Honest Hearts DLC, which none of us wanted to do. So Josh tormented us all week, which drove us so crazy Rutskarn read aloud a Wikipedia article about lizard penises. And then after all that horror, I caved for no reason and let Josh play Honest Hearts anyway, thus punishing Mumbles, who was the only person who didn’t deserve it.
4. Amnesia: The Horrible half-hour long mastercraft shitty joke.
Normally, Amnesia is a dark, torturous, uncomfortable journey. Normally, conversations with your friends are filled with hilarity. But in this episode those two things are reversed.
3. New Vegas EP35: Spy is Demoman!
Josh has a plan. His plan is stupid, pointless, suicidal, and exposes half a dozen bugs and glitches in the process. But it works anyway. That’s why we love him.
2. Battlefield Hardline Episode 3: Miami Arrest Mans Force
The game’s pretensions of being a gritty crime drama only make it that much more ludicrous, but in the end it’s Rutskarn’s cop monologue at the top of the episode that push this one over the top from good to great.
1. Skyrim EP20: The King's Speech
This has all the fun of blasting people off ledges, plus crazy Bethesda AI follies, PLUS pointless chaotic stupid shenanigans from Josh, PLUS Ulfric Stormcloak sits on a sweetroll.
Honorable mention goes to Hitman Absolution EP4: Ranting and Raving, where Rutskarn and I tag-teamed one of the dumbest cutscenes in any videogame ever. That episode wasn’t really funny so much as cathartic. Also good is Hitman Absolution EP14: Please Love me!, where Mumbles brings some much-needed levity to our bitching and moaning. The only reason those didn’t make the list was because I didn’t want more than one instance of Absolution on the list. It was a fun season, but I honestly hated that game.
Also worth a mention is Fallout 3 EP7: Can't Stop the Signal, when Josh gave THREEEEE DOG a grenade-in-the-pants.
Footnotes:
[1] Because I got nothin this week, and I’m elbow-deep in the guts of Good Robot right now and don’t have time to make something intelligent.
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Revisiting a Dead Engine
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
You’re doing it wrong. Top 10 posts should only ever have a single entry per page…
Also, please refer to Episodes by game, S5EP35 doesn’t mean anything to me without clicking the link or inferring the game from the word ‘incinerator’ in an earlier entry.
And you need more adverts, above, below and to both sides of the single entry per page. Get the adverts as close as you can, ideally make them indistinguishable from what you are talking about.
I’m glad you enjoyed the one-of silly episodes like Amnesia and the elevator mod as much as I did, those were great.
In #5, I think you mean the Shishkebab, not the Incinerator. He’d been lugging the Incinerator around since the early game.
One things I notice is that the more story-driven or linear(ish) games, such as Walking Dead, Last of Us, Deus Ex and so on don’t get much of a showing in either list. It is mostly the sandboxes with the freedom to dick around that seem to generate the most fun for the cast, probably because it gives Josh more opportunity to go off the rails and do really stupid stuff (like murder the whole of Caesars’s legion in Fallout NV).
Although oddly, the ubisoft sandbox fun of Assassins Creed doesn’t seem all that popular. And by ‘oddly’ I mean: ‘completely unsurprisingly for obvious reasons’.
Spoiler Warning is at it’s finest when something ridiculous and unpredictable could happen at any second. It’s why I always feel a little disappointed when they play a more linear game (even though they’re still fun watching).
Skyrim and New Vegas are top tier Spoiler Warning. Nothing else has come close.
I only like the super serious stuff when they have good discussions about the game. Everything else is distraction.
Deus Ex, while comparatively linear, had pretty good room for some Cuftbertian hijinks during the city hub quests. Schroedinger’s Pimp is one of my favourite episodes.
“Are you still dragging around that body?”
“….no”
Indeed sidequesting generally in Hengsha was the highlight of that season, culminating in the shootout at the Hive after punching out Bobby Bad. But then we infiltrate Tai Yong Medical and the game gets a lot less interesting from then on out, yeah.
As for AC2, the best part was probably the trolling in World 1-1.
Yeah, Deus Ex had some good moments early on. Actually I’ a little surprised that the whole dragging the body around the streets for ages didn’t make it on to one of the top ten lists.
Yeah, Deus Ex season had also its moments. Multiple Levels of Failure was propably the high point of that season. Actually that whole week was a kind of high point at Spoiler Warning… (eps 23-25)
Not sure what my favourite episode would be – maybe that one from the Alan Wake season where you slowly fought those shadowy dudes – but my favourite episode title has to be:
Marlow Briggs and the Heavy Thing That Needs to be Over There
Sets me off every time for some reason!
Yeah, I came to post how much I enjoyed the Marlow Briggs season as well… That episode and the one with all the helicopters or the one with the flaming balls of fire…
Aww, too many to choose from! Very memorable too. I mean, Skyrim season had loads of good stuff too but it’s been so long since I watched any of them. Been recently re-watching the Dishonored series.
Episode title: Marlow Briggs and the Grotto of Animal Cruelty ftw. :)
Honestly I didn’t much care for the Skyrim season, but Marlo Briggs was awesome right up until they had to fight the god of wind. (Mostly because I was groaning about their insistence on how ridiculous a “European” dragon was when it was obviously a Feathered Serpent, ie. Quetzalcoatl. My college Aztec Art-History classes made an impact on my brain, and I didn’t know it until that moment.)
I’m rather surprised that neither Metro, nor Alan Wake had an episode make it to a list..
I’ve watched The King’s Speech so many times. Good fun had by all.
Correction: Good fun had by everyone who wasn’t the king. :)
Yeah, sitting on a sweetroll sucks.
My personal favorite from the Skyrim run was Josh getting arrested and then taking out his retribution by murdering all the Whiterun guards that were sent to help him attack the dragon. I admire him keeping it up as long as he did.
I am just fixated on the experience of that one guard.
It’s down to him. One on one with a dragon. All his comrades have been burnt alive, or vanished mysteriously. Thinking of the songs that will be sung of his heroic stand, he mentally readies himself to die and raises his sword. Suddenly, he feels a jerk around his midsection, the world flips upside down, and all fades to black as Dovahkiin Fluffburt finishes the sweetest sneak-suplex the world has ever seen.
Capped off at the very end in the most beautiful manner possible, with Josh in an impossibly high pitch of voice: “Oh my god there’s so many!”
OMG. I was right. This site picks up Gravatars. I just needed to actually assign a pic to mine. Finally I am slightly less generic in this community (I’m sure you wavatar users are all wonderful people too.) I should have googled this a long time ago.
Also yes, I’d forgotten about the suplex, that makes it even better.
I’m surprised you left out the one where Josh stole the Silver Rush.
A Night on the Town is absolutely, no contest, my favourite episode, foreshadowed at the beginning of the episode “…but first, we need to get some sort of supplies”.
Oh wow! Totally forgot about that one. Woulda made the list.
Which would mean New Vegas would be on the list 3 times.
Man that was a good season.
The Boomers episodes had some great lines.
Simple Reading Comprehension had the awesome montage of Josh trying to follow the instructions needed to navigate the artillery barrage.
Then over in Boom Goes the Dynamite, we get our second montage as Josh tries and (eventually) succeeds in wiping out the Boomers tribe. “Dear God, why?” is a favorite Josh-agony-cry in that one.
Somewhere in one of the montages Rutskarn tries to complain about TF2 and Mumbles starts singing, “You don’t know about TF2, you’ll never be maaarieeeed!”
It’s making me want to start watching the whole thing again.
I really liked the last episode of Fallout 3 too, with ultimate fuck you to the Brotherhood of Steel only to be murdered by a random Super Mutant.
Fitting end for the original Cuftbert.
Ahem. If that was a Super Mutant, it was one that was shaped like a turret.
Do not blaspheme against the holy writ of Spoiler Warning again or you shall be stripped of your bonnet.
See, i nearly went and checked to see if i was remembering it right. But then i was like “nah, i trust myself”
That trust was misplaced.
I blame the Jet… and the Psycho, the Buffout, wine, beer, vodka, irradiated snacks, and various mutated animal parts.
I find it interesting that the ‘one-offs’ have quite a high showing in the list. I guess it is because you can just compress all the silliness of a whole season into a couple of episodes.
Fun fact:
I was editing this post in two windows at once and didn’t realize it. Window A and Window B. I kept working in B. Finished the post. Hit publish. Left.
Then I go to close Window A and it’s like, “Hey, you’ve got unsaved changes! You want to save them?”
I’m like, “I don’t remember making any changes, but sure.”
Then I see the post has reverted to some ancient early revision. So I back up and restore the previous revision. That restores the lost work, but somehow un-published the post. Which is why this post vanished for about 2 hours.
To belabor an already overly-long story: Everything SHOULD be fixed now.
I was wondering why it was showing up in my RSS feed but not letting me access the article itself.
And I suppose we can all look forward to an inevitable Fallout 4 spoiler warning at some point in the future?
I am exceedingly fond of when THREEEE DOOOOOOOG got grenaded, I remember laughing so hard I almost hurt myself. Which is always a good thing, when it comes to Spoiler Warning. :)
Amnesia is definitely also in my top ten, that was just… it was just… it was something, all right.
That was probably the definitive moment when Spoiler Warning went from a pretty interesting analytical let’s play series to one of the greatest thing ever put to the genre.
I am disappointed by this list’s distinct lack of Amensia: A Sex Machine for Pig Butts. Also Chris’ Very Slender Evening, although you weren’t there for that one so I guess I can let it slide.
Woo! Pig butts! :P
Pig Butts is not listed on the Spoiler Warning page.
Wonder what the Google ad crawler would have thought of the episode title, if we still had ads.
Shamus should rig that episode page so that all the ‘from the author’ links have suggestive titles, or are all links back to the Pig Butts episode.
I was thinking the same thing about Amensia: A Sex Machine for Pigs. Probably my favorite episode of Spoiler Warning. Mostly because it 30 minutes of sophisticated commentators all going for the lowest common denominator, with nothing high brow in sight.
I loved the Amnesia sequel episode even without noticing most of the callbacks (I think I’d only recently started watching at that point?).
Almost all of your anniversaries/specials have a special place in my brain. Even the grandma game murder episode.
This is a list that would be incredibly difficult for me to come up with in its entirety. Sure, I can name a few moments that were good – GrenadeInPants, throwing people out the window, fus-rho-dah-ing Lydia off the top of the greybeards mountain, Elmo face, king speech, marlow briggs almost anything, Dark souls pvp intruder…but the list goes ever on and on, drawn from the games where they began. So far awry the seasons have gone, that I must follow because I can.
Next task for Mumbles: top 10 list of Spoiler Warning puns.
One of my favorite Spoiler Warning puns has to be “the Fawkes and the hound“. Josh’s and Shamus’ reactions make it all the better.
One of the Skyrim episodes has Rutskarn improv a somber description of the centuries-long ritual involved when an ancient Nord warrior decides to become a draugr–just so Josh could punch it in the face. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I love that episode.
Seconded.
The one where the Drauger Lord gets K.O.’ed by his own tomb’s trap was also comedy gold.
That was pretty great.
I think my favorite though is when he kills pretty much everybody in Markarth(?). Like, twice. And got arrested 8 times? Them was good times.
How can you forget the finale of the Fallout 3 season?! An absolutely show defining moment. The sheer satisfaction and schadenfreude of the cast destroying the dumbass Brotherhood combined with horrible Bethesda writing and some extra shenanigans on top to boot!
I was laughing out loud during the entire sequence.
Remember: You’re not a mercenary.
A highlight for me is the finale of New Vegas where the incinerator finally did what it was born to do.
I think the consensus is that there are waaaaaay more than ten beloved episodes of Spoiler Warning. Which is par and purpose of these lists, but I wouldn’t be the smug sycophant that I am if I didn’t point it out.
Personal favourite is S5E25, “Of The Taco”. Because Rutskarn is a cockney orphan, and Mumbles a southern belle.
Wait.. there’s no spoiler warning and it’s all Mumbles’ fault so that’s why you’re doing a top-ten list?
I’m surprised nothing from fallout3 made the list. Josh taking all the drugs at the end and fighting naked enclave soldiers (or maybe he thought that because of the drugs) was awesome.
It was Mumble’s fault, rather than Mumbles’ fault. :D
Now I’m getting the urge to rewatch old seasons. Darn it, Shamus. lol
If you start from the beginning, you can do a thing – keep track of every time Josh dies and identify the source.
Would make some interesting metrics.
One of my long standing ambitions is to re-watch everything and note down whenever a cast member sings. Then maybe compile all those moments into a “Spoiler Warning Greatest Hits” collection. :D
Episode 4 of the Marlow Briggs season is my personal favorite, in no small part due to what happens at about 18 minutes in.
My favourite is that New Vegas one with the two incinerators and the Great Crash.