Show:Play:Digital
Host: Chick in a pixie costume
Again you'll need a strong stomach for this one. From the moment the intro shows this girl (Katherine Fletcher) done up like a giggling goblin you'll wanna reach for the spewbag. She’s reviewing Zelda Phantom Hourglass by the way.
She starts with a bit of yawnsome, “most eagerly anticipated… blah… blah…”
Spin forward to: 1.32
And drink in a theatrical forward roll with pretend dizziness.
Spin forward to: 2.21
And watch her sit on a mushroom.
Spin forward to: 2.29
And see her singing and going cross-eyed.
There’s a bunch of silly hand movements in there too that we can’t be bothered to timecode. And there’s a bit where she trots out, “Because the quality of the scripting and the characterization is so good.” Which on the face of it is just a brain-mulchingly banal, stock phrase that you hear, time after time from lazy journos. But stop a second. Has she done a writers course? What are her qualifications for lolling out even this hopelessly hackneyed phrase? Does she actually know what good characterization is? Does she really know what a good script is? Or is she just a mildly attractive girl on a toadstool? And has it really come to this?
Show:Time Trotters
Host: Popular former employee of Gamespot Jeff Gerstmann and some other not as well known guys.
Oh you can’t have a go at lovely, cuddly Jeff Gerstmann, you might cry if you can be bothered. Phfff… go on then, here’s hisnew sitego and look at it and stuff.
If we had to go alliterative would’ve gone with Time Trekkers, or Time Tourists, or even Time Trippers. You think ‘trotters’ and you think pigs. No?
Either way, we wish this was worse than it actually is, because it’d be funnier to write about. But as it stands this retro peering webisode employs an elaborate time travel premise to frame in depth coverage of a game you’ve either forgotten or never played.
At least it's having a good go at being amusing. In a ‘ha, our special effects are deliberately cheap’ kind of way. Better to be laughed with, than at.
So, they go back through time. Unconvincingly. (Cue: laughter.) There’s an abundance of very niche humor, name-checking characters you'd need to have played the game to know. (Cue: confusion.) And some other stuff we’ve forgotten even though we’ve watched it twice. (Cue: nodding off.)
People often say of TV shows or movies that, "it's not as funny as it should be", without having a clue how they could actually make it funnier. About Time Trotters we say, it's as funny as it's ever going to be. Which is to say, mildly.
We’re not expecting new episodes of Time Trotters any time soon.
