Angry Video Game Nerd Episode 97: How the Nerd Stole Christmas – Episode Review

It’s time for Christmas in… February? What? Yeah, that’s just how the episode reviews panned out — we’re at another Holiday episode already and it’s mid-February. At least in Season 4 when we had Winter Games it was a bit more generic of an episode.

This time around, as the title suggests, we get an AVGN take on the “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” story that oh so many love. It’s quite the production, honestly, illustrated with a version of the Grinch song made specifically for this episode.

Like I said, it’s a Grinch parody; a damn good one.

If you know the Grinch story then you kind of know what goes on here — the Nerd laments having so many terrible games pushed his way, while everyone else gets good games for the Holiday.

The episode doesn’t hold back either. With short, simple descriptions the Nerd covers easily two-dozen games or more — I’m not even about to try to count them, but it’s a great many of them.

The episode flows how you’d expect — the Nerd steals the games, replacing them with terrible ones. When the gamers awake, they discover the terrible games and instead of being miserable, they love them, almost ironically; this parodies how many people actually enjoy bad games in a backwards kind of way, much like how some people appreciate bad films.

Elevator Action is one of the many games shown, if only for a few seconds, in the episode.

In any case, the story ends with the Nerd returning all the good games and everyone having a good time. Give or take, anyway — the Nerd plays yet another bad game, but such is his life.

Final Rating: 3.0/5

I can’t say this is a bad episode — it’s not. It’s actually pretty damn great, and fans seem to love it. Of course, being what it is it’s not so much an Angry Video Game Nerd episode as it is a “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” parody which happens to be based on the Nerd character and done as an episode. For that it’s wonderful, but as a typical episode it’s just nothing special.

Take it for what its — some holiday fun, sadly being reviewed well out of season.