#techtv

If you ever wondered:

"Gee whiz, when am I going to see my favorite autistic monkey man YouTuber talk about my favorite twice dead video game review deep cable TV show?"

X-Play Classic - Disgaea: Hour of Darkness Review

Strategy RPGs are getting a kick in the ass, dood!

XPlay was (almost) always bad. It started out as a show called "Extended Play", which was a pretty normal game news/reviews show on TechTV.

It was still Adam Sessler, but this was before Morgan Webb -- his cohost here was Kate Botello. Again, things were pretty normal and average. When TechTV got bought and converted to G4, "Extended Play" was changed to become "XPlay" and over the course of a year or two, got retooled to be "funny."

This meant a lot of long, pointless, annoying comedy skits between the game coverage, and a lot of reviews often contained "jokes" as well.

I liked to catch the occasional episode of Extended Play, but XPlay quickly became totally unwatchable. And since it was the early 2000's, a lot of that humor was intentionally very smug and offensive. This was the peak "boys will be boys" era of, like, EGM dedicating pages to swimsuit centerfolds, the stink of endless men's cologne sampler ads, and Playboy featuring CG renders of a topless Bloodrayne. Things were dire.

It's easy to forget that, given how long ago that original run of XPlay was. Rose-tinted nostalgia sets in because it was basically one of the only TV shows dedicated to games and industry news at that time. But it was foul. When I stop and actually think about it in-depth, I have no fond memories of XPlay whatsoever, because I have no actual memories of XPlay at all. It became something I avoided whenever possible. The show was insufferable.

Hearing that Adam Sessler has been having a perpetual, ongoing meltdown for months is really depressing, too. I used to try and take the dude's side, because he seems completely fried by "toxic gamers" coming after him, but he's also like... not stopping? At some point you'd expect the guy to walk away, but lately it seems like every few weeks he's going on another rant about how he hates video games now and is glad he "left." Except he never actually leaves. He just quote-tweets the next guy in line and goes on another 25 tweet rant about how everyone else is the worst. He seems completely broken.

His latest meltdown is because somebody called out one of these XPlay "comedy skits" -- and all he would have to do is spare a moment of reason, say "it was a different time, and a lot of things have changed since then, including me." But it's just another platform for him to scream and vomit about gamers again while the audience pelts him with peanuts. The dude has given up in every way except the ones that actually matter.

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