After quite the long wait, in October of 2015 we got that years Halloween AVGN episode: The Crow: City of Angels on the Sega Saturn.
Now, you may wonder why the long wait? Sure, James wasn’t producing episodes at the same rate he was a few years beforehand, but 3 months felt like forever. As it would turn out, James had moved out of the house which had the basement Nerd room in it and had a re-creation of said basement in his garage! That means that, from now onward what we have is a somewhat cramped copy of the room that many of us had grown to love.
There’s actually some drama around the creation of this new room, but I won’t get into it here. It suffices to say that, as the story goes, the creation of this room was the final thing that Kyle Justin had to do with the Nerd, or James in general and, like Bootsy, he would go off to do his own thing. I don’t want to focus on real life drama, but it can’t be ignored that, while I certainly wasn’t aware of it at the time, things weren’t very good in the Cinemassacre universe.
If you pay attention in this video, when you do see James, you’ll notice that everything in the background looks closer. At first I thought it was a camera or a seating change. Nope, turns out it his is because this was the first episode filmed in the re-created room. Get used to the lack of camera angles and the tight shots, it’s nothing but this going forward.
Anyway, to the episode. it’s Mischief Night at the Nerd home and, to honor that night, the Nerd decides to review The Crow: City of Angels on the Sega Saturn. Yep, we have a game based on the poor sequel to the amazing film that was The Crow. James covers a bit of the film, including its tragic history involving the death of Brandon Lee.
Finally getting to the game, we have a mediocre third person beat-em-up style thing in a near identical play style as Resident Evil. Yeah, that means tank controls. If I may go on a little aside, I hated these types of controls when I was a teen, but when I complained about them I was told they were “fine” and everyone else liked them. Come 20+ years later and everyone complains about them now and, ironically, I’m somewhat okay with them, depending on the game. Onimusha for example works better with them for me than Resident Evil ever could….but I digress. Point is, it’s just funny once again how things change.
The game is another one of those “everything is just bad” cases — music is bad, sound design is bad, visuals are bad, gameplay is bad the camera is bad, everything is just bad. That’s really the only way to describe everything here — it’s just bad.
At the end, as a way to plug the upcoming Halloween episode of the then-running Board James series, we have Board James show up on the Nerd TV (which, thinking about it, this may be the last time we see the “classic” Nerd AV setup) to suggest a “better game” for him to play — 13 Dead End Drive. Yeah, that video too relates to the Kyle Justin drama, but I won’t go into it here — see the Cinemassacre Truth reddit for that one. What it boils down to is, this was a perfect chance to tie things together and James did the plug well. The episode wasn’t explicitly made for it, and the tie in felt natural, if that makes sense to say.
Final Rating: 3.5/5
It’s an average episode. It’s not bad, unlike the game, and while it’s a short episode it doesn’t feel too short — there just isn’t much to say, and it’s another one of those “watch the Nerd get more and more frustrated just trying to play this thing” episodes. Slightly more common at this time in AVGN, but an appropriate one for the game, I feel.
There really isn’t much more to say — indeed, really everything surrounding this episode is more interesting and important than the game review itself. It’s weird how I’m only realizing this 8 years later.