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File:SpoilerWarning 8862.jpg

The Spoiler Warning crew. From the left: Josh/Reginald Cuftbert, You, Shamus, Rutskarn and Mumbles.


Cquote1

Josh: Ok, so next episode... Hopefully there will be less rage-filled discussions about how much Bethesda deserves to die in a fiery pit.

Rutskarn: I don't know, why change the formula now?

Shamus: I know; we've got a good thing going here. The worst thing they could do is put a good game now: They'd put us right out of business.
Spoiler Warning: Let's Play Fallout 3 (Episode 20)
Cquote2


Note: This entry has nothing to do with actual Spoilers. If you were looking for that kind of Spoiler, check out the Spoiler Policy page.

Spoiler Warning is a DVD Commentary-style Let's Play group, whose main style consists of deconstructing, analyzing and (in some cases) ruthlessly mocking the plots and characters of the games they play, usually while using a play-style designed to showcase pieces of the game in ways that 'normal' players usually won't see (i.e. by playing the game like it was a tabletop role-playing session and they are The Loonie). They tend to favour Role Playing Games.

The group (in order of appearance) consists of:

  • Shamus Young: Better known as the author of DM of the Rings as well as a contributor for The Escapist. Tends to serve as Mister Exposition, and also the most opinionated of the group.
  • Josh Viel: An anime reviewer for The Escapist. Plays the game, with the others as backseat drivers.
  • Randy Johnson : The Player for the majority of the Mass Effect LP (taking over for Josh a handful of episodes in), Randy left after season one was finished. Started the group's now signature Chaotic Stupid play-style.
  • Rutskarn: Added to the group for the Fallout 3 LP. The group Troll, Pungeon Master, and hipster.
  • Mumbles: Added to the group for the Bioshock LP. Her job is to be almost, but not quite, too cool for the show.
  • Chris "Campster" Franklin: Added a few episodes into the Deus Ex Human Revolution season. Runs the video game youtube series Errant Signal, and provides Straight Man analysis (and a few jokes).

The games LPed so far are:


The LPs provide examples of:[]

  • Accentuate the Negative: The group, particularly Shamus and Josh are harshly critical and will quickly pick on parts of the game that they find frustrating. Though they do point out the parts they like in the games and note that as harsh as they are, they do actually like the games (though in the case of Fallout 3, it's more because the game is fun).
    • And then there's Half-Life 2, which is practically non-stop gushing.
    • They also note that in the first episode of New Vegas that of all the games they've done to that point, New Vegas is definitely better written, if hardly flawless.
      • And again at the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, when Shamus admits that the game blew away his expectations, and allowed him to like Take Cover shooters. (Though he still disliked Mass Effect 2.) Both he and Josh think that they like the game more after their LP, unlike with most games.
  • And There Was Much Rejoicing: For Fallout 3, destroying the Citadel at the end of Broken Steel.
    • The group's reaction to getting Miranda (who is distinctly Plot Armored compared to other characters) killed in the endgame of Mass Effect 2.
Cquote1

 Shamus: This is like Christmas...

Cquote2
    • At the end of New Vegas, Shamus' reaction to the incinerator's destruction.
  • Angrish: The April Fools Let's Play of Trainz 2 reduced Rutskarn to angry, incomprehensible ranting.
    • Similarly, Mario Auditore going "It's-a me, Mario!" has the same effect.
    • The Season of Mystery made Josh go into this at the end.
  • The Alcoholic: The original Reginald Cuftbert, during Fallout 3, succeeded at picking up addictions to practically every habit-forming substance in the Capital Wasteland. Appropriately, 'addiction to new substance' became one of the parts of their Drinking Game.
    • In New Vegas, Cuftbert manages to become addicted to alcohol just by drinking a single bottle of whiskey. This is also the reason why they later picked up Cass as their companion due to her Whiskey-related perk, though she later ditches him due to his Stupid Evil nature.
      • It's even sillier than that: due to a quirk of the game's addiction system, you can't actually be addicted to "alcohol". Cuftbert instead gets addicted to whiskey specifically. He later picks up addictions to scotch (a specific type of whiskey!), beer and wine.[1]
  • Ascended Meme: During a rousing session of Assassin's Creed II's "Run Over Pedestrians With Your Horse" minigame (troper's warning: Said minigame may not exist outside of Josh's demented imagination), Rutskarn began singing They Might Be Giants' "Older", a reference to Shamus' famous "Rollercoaster Bowling" video.
  • Awesome but Impractical
  • Berserk Button:
    • Idiot Plots and Railroading pisses them the hell off, with Bethesda earning a special place for Fallout 3.
    • Yeoman Kelly Chamber of Mass Effect 2 in particular is a sour point for Mumbles because Kelly happens to be her name. She's also disgusted by Mr. Plinkett's voice.
    • Mentions of Little Lamplight.
    • The incinerator in New Vegas that Josh lugs around for no reason whatsoever.
    • They generally don't like it when characters spare the villains for incredibly weak reasons other than "It'd be wrong to kill them" or simply not take the initiative to kill the villain standing in front of them. Shamus was particularly upset about how in Honest Hearts the option to tell Graham to simply execute Salt-Upon-Wounds wasn't immediately available without a perk (though it turns out he just missed it).
  • Big "What?": Common reactions to particularly outrageous/stupid plot events, especially from Rutskarn.
  • Big No: Mumbles is... quite upset when she realizes she called Triple H Triple X by mistake.
    • Also Shamus during the Probing Questions special.
  • Brick Joke: Rutskarn's Face/Off pun in the Amnesia episode.
  • Catch Phrase: Most of the team has one.
    • Mumbles' "God-dammit, you guys!"
    • Mumbles correcting the pronunciation of Caesar:
Cquote1

  Mumbles: Kaiiiiiiiiiiiii-sarrrrrrrrrrr...

Cquote2
    • Rutskarn calls someone's name several times sequentially when he's trying to cut in.
    • Rutskarn opening with "Okay, so, like, here's the thing..."
    • Shamus mentions how "this is what bugs [him] about [game]", then explaining what.
Cquote1

 'In the Original [INSERT NAME OF PREQUEL/SPIRITUAL PREQUEL GAME HERE]...' (Drink!)

Cquote2
    • Josh's "STOP! SHOOTING! ME!"
    • Someone mentioning a criticism and Shamus going "Euugh, yes!" and elaborating. Often coupled with "This is what bugs me about X/this game-"
    • Someone making a suggestion for Josh to do something stupid, to which Shamus responds "Strongly in favor of."
    • During Alan Wake, Rutskarn's "Coffee? I LOVE COFFEE!"
  • Chaotic Stupid: The general playing style, which is both partly to (usually) show contempt for the story and partly for the lulz. This even describes how Josh plays the game (using/carrying weapons he puts no skills into, charging headfirst into battle with a stealth build/in a cover-based shooter) though he usually makes it work somehow (though not without dying multiple times).
  • Chekhov's Gun During the New Vegas playthrough The Incinerator.
Cquote1

   "Okay, it's time for you Incinerator, to do what I always knew you could do"

Cquote2
  • Cherry Tapping: One fast forward sequence during New Vegas had Reginald Cuftbert beating a Freeside thug to death with his bare hands... over a period of several minutes.
  • Comedic Sociopathy/For the Evulz: A major part of their humor, especially in Fallout 3. Not only do they nuke Megaton, they blow up Three Dog and take the chance to kill Brotherhood of Steel members whenever possible. In the Mass Effect series, this takes the form of trying to take Renegade options whenever possible.
    • This even lead them to choosing the Paragon option for the endgame of Mass Effect 2.
Cquote1

 Rutskarn: Ok, let's evaluate this rationally. On the one hand, the technology would be extremely useful, would help the galaxy, and-

Shamus: -Prove the existence of the Reapers...

Mumbles: And there's no way the Reapers would ever attack in the future, right?...

Rutskarn: Hold it, hold it. On the other hand, I actually do have a counterpoint: *ahem* Fuck the Illusive Man, blow it up!

Cquote2
    • In New Vegas, they also "completed" Boone's quest by having him kill the wrong target (specifically his old friend Manny), telling him that they just wanted to see him die and killing him when he retaliates. Later on they said that they didn't want to kill Boone, only wanting to "mess with him" and didn't know that he'd actually become hostile afterwards.
  • Cowboy Bebop at His Computer: A common way to annoy Mumbles is to feign complete ignorance about comic books (specifically Batman) and invoking Animation Age Ghetto.
  • Cutting the Knot: A (un)surprising amount of quests get solved this way, i.e. by horribly murdering the quest-giver.
  • Deadpan Snarker: All four of them.
  • Deconstruction: The group's main hat.
  • Designated Hero: Another sore spot of the group is when a game tells you a person is supposed to be heroic and good, even when what's happened in-universe so far gives no reason to support this. Amongst other things they point out that the accusations against Saren in Mass Effect objectively come down like nothing but paranoid ramblings with no evidence (and then mocking the flimsiness of the evidence you do find), that the Brotherhood of Steel continues to insist that Reginald Cuftbert is a hero who's supposed to save the Wasteland and not a mercenary even though he's killed half of them, nuked Megaton, killed Three Dog, tried to kill Little Lamplight, and a lot more, and that Ezio is a egotistical revenge-driven spree killer who kills hundreds of guards just doing their job while letting the Big Bad walk away to cause more mischief because suddenly "it won't bring his family back".
  • Disproportionate Retribution: As punishment for throwing a bottle at a Metrocop, Josh gets stuck to a wall by a glitch and is given a thorough thwacking.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: Both Rutskarn and Mumbles never fail to be distracted by Samara's fashion choices throughout Mass Effect 2.
  • Die, Chair, Die!: inverted, Alan Wake got hurt by a chair by walking near it
  • Drinking Game: Has an official one. Take a shot if (1) The main character dies. (2) If all contributors talk over each other at the same time. (3) Whenever the game they're playing gets compared to whatever game it's a sequel/Spiritual Successor of (double that if it's by Shamus). (4) Whenever the game crashes on-screen. (5) Whenever Josh mucks up in combat and starts blaming the interface, swears or uses his Catch Phrase. (6) Whenever said mucking up causes a near-death experience that causes him to spam healing items. Other options depend more on which game is played, such as substance abuse in Fallout and the 'rogue cell' gag in Mass Effect 2.
    • Josh and Mumbles eventually decided to play the game themselves during Honest Hearts in order to drown their bloodlust for each other.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: Reginald Cuftbert of Fallout 3, slayer of Three Dog, The Enclave, and The Capital Brotherhood (and a lot of other things in-between), died for good (and unintentionally) in a Random Encounter with a non-named super mutant not two minutes after finishing the last quest of Broken Steel. The group decided this was too good an Anticlimax to waste, and stopped playing.
  • The Eeyore: Shamus will find something to complain about in just about anything going on.
  • Even Chaotic Stupidity Has Standards:
    • At the end of the main Fallout 3 campaign, they refused to use the Modified FEV due to the fact that it is tantamount to a slow suicide, with the player not being immune to any of its effects despite what Eden (who is unaware that the Lone Wanderer is born a wastelander) says.
    • A better example was their all-rescue streak in Bioshock (naturally, with Shamus lampshading that the 'gains' of going all-harvest were so minimal so as to render the 'moral choice' pretty much moot).
  • Early Installment Weirdness: It is kind of wierd looking back on the first season with the lack of Mumbles and Rutskarn and the inclusion of Randy.
  • Evil Laugh: Once given permission to do Honest Hearts after being vetoed against doing so previously and tormenting the rest of the cast for an entire week's worth of episodes, Josh indulges himself in deliciously vile bouts of laughter in jubilation in having gotten his way.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Shamus not spotting things happening on-screen happens semi-regularly. It's even happened to Josh a few times, and he's the one playing. Shamus also admitted to having failed to spot Liberty Prime during his first play-through of Fallout 3. For those not in the know, Liberty Prime is a 50 feet tall Humongous Mecha and tends to dominate the room it's in, which you visit several times during the course of the game.
    • Josh also points out during the Mass Effect 2 series that a large group of Quarians failed a spot check on their wost enemy in the middle of their home
  • Fission Mailed: 'The Great Crash' in Fallout: New Vegas.
    • This was shortly followed by the episode 'Fission Mailed', in which Shamus inadvertently made Josh go do the Honest Hearts DLC.
  • Flashback Cut: The opening of Human Revolutions involved Shamus saying the reason they weren't playing the original Deus Ex first was due to problems with the others' computers in viewing his stream properly. We then cut to a flashback of how said stream looked to the other players. (WARNING: Not for the faint of heart or ear.)
  • Fridge Logic: Pointing out the in-universe Fridge Logic in the games they play is their secondary hat, like the above Little Lamplight question and why, for whatever reason, C4 is classified as a concealed weapon in Fallout: New Vegas. In one case, Josh is impressed when Papa Khan lampshades the Fridge Logic of Cuftbert coming to his home and talking to him while having no idea who he is.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: Rutskarn's attempt at playing Hitman eventually devolves into killing everyone 47 sees.
  • Grumpy Old Man: Shamus. They occasionally mock this by referring to him as a curmudgeon who hates all games.
  • Guest Star Party Member: Chris "Campster" Franklin, creator of "Errant Signal" as guest commentator for Deus Ex Human Revolution.
  • Highly-Visible Ninja: How Cuftbert is played in the Fallout games. As a Stealth and Melee build, his favored assassination technique is to plant explosives in others' pants, commonly uses weapons that he is for all intents and purposes incompetent with and generally favors a Leeroy Jenkins approach.
    • Not to mention his favourite weapon; the perpetually burning Shishkebab. How anyone manages to stay stealthy with a Flaming Sword is anybody's guess, but Reginald does it somehow.
    • Assassin's Creed II is already Highly Visible Ninja: The Game, but Josh's extremely unsubtle play style and confusion with the controls sure as heck doesn't improve matters. Much lampshading on how tearing off a few posters compensates for his misadventures abound.
      • They finally succeeded at the Stealth Based Mission by rushing through the courtyard and stabbing a person in the face before he could cry out.
  • Hostile Show Takeover: The reason for the Team Fortress 2 episode? The Spy sapped the Normandy.
    • Shamus at one point gets sick and can't record for a week during Alan Wake. The rest of the crew treat the event as this.
  • Hurricane of Puns: Rutskarn do these a bit. The end of the Trainz episode eventually devolved into this.
    • The word "chip" loses all meaning during episode 27 of New Vegas thanks to Rutskarn and Mumbles.
  • Hypocritical Humor: Josh is called a nerd for recognizing Laura Bailey as Lust by Rutskarn, who participates in LARP sessions.
  • Iconic Item: The pre-war bonnet in the Fallout games
  • I'm a Humanitarian: In Fallout: New Vegas, Mumbles is often urging Josh to take up cannibalism, which he always refuses for the sake of not wanting to waste a perk. Of course, he does at one point absentmindedly eat a piece of human flesh he looted from the Fiends.
  • Insistent Terminology:
    • It's pronounced Kai-Sarr, not Caesar. Mumbles loves pointing this out.
    • Shamus was very insistent about referring to Mass Effect 2 as a "cover-based shooter" instead of an RPG.
    • Reginald Cuftbert is not a mercenary, at least according to the Brotherhood of Steel.
  • Impractically Fancy Outfit: The crew had problems with Ezio's getup, often referring to it as "the clown suit". They're generally quite mocking of impractical outfits.
  • Infant Immortality: Something that seriously ticked them off when dealing with the Little Lamplighters.
  • Kick the Dog: During Honest Hearts, Josh killed a dog who wasn't even hostile to him for the hell of it. Then everybody else called him out on it. Then Rutskarn explicitly named this trope. And commanded someone to add it to this wiki. So we did.
    • That and killing Veronica for the hell of it after killing off her entire family. Video Game Cruelty Potential in general is a major part of the series.
    • He also makes sure to go out of his way to try and emotionally crush Wayne Haas in Human Revolution in a way that still lets him progress with the game.
  • Kill'Em All: The group's "canonical" ending of Fallout 3. The New Vegas ending was much the same way, with only the Fiends and Powder Gangers thriving (barring characters and factions they never met).
    • Defied in Human Revolutions where Josh outright refused to pick the 'everyone dies' ending because it made no sense (well, marginally less sense than the other ending options) even as the others were egging him on to do so.
  • Kill Him Already: They will usually say this when the protagonist simply stands there and lets the villain talk.
  • Leeroy Jenkins: Cuftbert in all his/her incarnations loves to get into situations that he/she is unequipped/underleveled for for, such as murdering the Brotherhood of Steel within the Citadel, taking down Fortification Hill, rushing in with Biotic Charge, punching Securitrons, and taking on the Boomers wearing nothing but Benny's fancy suit and a bonnet. Through the power of drugs, spamming attacks and sheer luck he manages to make it through. Eventually.
    • Turns out that this process works quite well during Dead Money with an Unarmed build. However the consequence is that the story and the background information (most of which is discovered via taking the time to read terminals and talk to characters) is rushed through and just barely explained by Josh to the confusion of the rest of the group.
    • This is not helped by Josh's tendency to level in certain skills, then pick up powerful, exotic (and usually heavy) weapons that do not benefit for said skills, then to carry said weapon around, refusing to sell it, even when its out of ammo. When the rest of the team invariably points this out, he continues to do so just to Troll them. Statements to the effect of "Thank goodness you have all those points in energy weapons!" are a Running Gag in both Fallout games.
    • However, they make an exception for Human Revolutions, where Stealth is at least attempted with some success.
  • Legacy Character: Reginald Cuftbert, who is associated with their general Chaotic Stupid playstyle. He even has a Distaff Counterpart in Regina Shepard. The character somehow manages to find his way to Assassin's Creed II as assassination target Francesco de Pazzi.
  • Lord British Postulate: The group went to extreme lengths during the end-game of Mass Effect 2 to get Miranda (who has extreme Plot Armour on the suicide mission) killed without having to bring her along in the party or killing off anyone else they liked in the process. They managed it, although Jack died in the process. They didn't seem to mind.
    • The amount of times the crew 'killed' Elder Lyons (only for the game to resurrect him because he's unkillable) in Fallout 3 can only be counted using several pairs of hands. They finally got their comeuppance in Broken Steel, but by using a legitimate plot point instead of bugs.
  • Lower Deck Episode: Any filler episode featuring Rutskarn and his other LP crew, Jibar, Phase and Blackfox.
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Reginald Cuftbert's valiant crusade against the Boomers featured several dozen angry NPCs with grenade launchers, missile launchers, and even ARTILLERY SHELLS blowing Reginald's limbs off.
  • Munchkin: Josh's playing style usually involves crit-stacking. However, he's also quite prone to doing the exact opposite.
  • Nice Hat: Reginald Cuftbert wore a bonnet throughout both Fallout playthroughs. He later replaces it with Mortimer's Top hat.
  • Perverse Sexual Lust: Towards Tali and Garrus in Mass Effect and its sequel, moreso the former.
  • Pet the Dog: Characters that are liked are generally treated favorably.
    • In Mass Effect 2, the group occasionally force Josh to not take Renegade options (usually helping out injured aliens) and play nice (to his frustration), particularly when it comes to Tali.
    • And Mordin. Josh in particular seems to have a lot of respect for him.
    • Josh also ends up saving the companions in Dead Money just because he likes the characters. He also sticks with House for a surprising amount of time before finally killing him (ironically right after House gives the order to exterminate the Brotherhood of Steel, something that Josh would've gladly done out of his own volition).
  • Precision F-Strike: Rutskarn's reaction to the 'Golden Mask' debacle in Assassin's Creed II. Also in the climax of Mass Effect 2.
  • Railroading: The group's arch-nemesis, and one of the quickest things they will point out. The most frustrating example being Shepard being forced to work with Cerberus in ME2 despite the fact that Shepard is a Sole Survivor of one of their "Rogue Cells".
    • A quest in New Vegas involved going into the headquarters of Caesar's Legion. They killed Caesar and every living human in the camp. Mr. House says while it will hurt the Legion in the long term it's not going to keep them from participating in the final battle, to groans from the quartet. However, as a commenter pointed out, this sort of thing was fairly typical for the Romans and it's justified and lampshaded in-game by several characters.
  • Promoted Fanboy: Inverted. The regular hosts were self-proclaimed fans of Errant Signal, and thus got its creator to join their merry band.
  • Obviously Evil: One of the things that the group like about Human Revolutions is that despite the fact that Frank Pritchard is consistently a jerk to Adam Jensen and David Sarif is a Cyberpunk CEO, neither are actually evil nor do they backstab Jensen at any point in the game.
  • Running Gag:
    • Someone (commonly Shamus) getting upbraided by the others for spoiling the plot of the games they play.
    • Rutskarn's (under legal drinking) age.
    • Reginald Cuftbert the Third starting every episode of Bioshock by trying to dig his way out of Rapture with his wrench, before quickly becoming distracted by something shiny and/or killable.
    • The mockery of Cerberus in Mass Effect 2, where everything questionable was handwaved as being caused by a 'Rogue Cell'. In the end, the crew decided that the Collectors themselves were a 'rogue cell' due to the sheer stupidity of their plan.
    • The incinerator in Fallout: New Vegas, which Reginald lugged with him for practically the entire season for no reason at all, much to Shamus' annoyance. The incinerator was finally destroyed by a C4 trap that was laid for the end boss, Legate Lanius.
      • Also in that game, someone suggesting Josh do X, and Josh responding, with false ignorance, "What's X?" or "I have no idea what you're/you guys are talking about".
      • Mumbles' insistence on taking up cannibalism.
    • In Assassin's Creed II, jokes about Ezio's unsubtle outfit are aplenty.
      • Not to mention Josh's playing style.
    • DXHR: Josh not taking the "Parachute" augment, no matter how convenient.
    • Shamus mentioning how something will cause people to "yell at us in the comments".
    • COFFEE? I love COFFEE.
  • Sanity Slippage: Spending time watching Josh's calculated trolling in the form of playing New Vegas as randomly and stupidly as possible induces this upon the group, especially Shamus.
  • Sarcasm Failure: The climax of Mass Effect 2 causes most of the cast to suffer from temporary Sarcasm Failure (of the 'I have seen something too stupid' kind). Especially Rutskarn, who hadn't seen it before.
  • Serial Escalation: The Saints Row episode. Just... The whole episode. Josh finally meets a game where is playstyle is (almost) the norm for expected behaviour. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Shaggy Dog Story: In Mass Effect 2, the story of Thane took this bent (which was lampshaded). He was recruited, never used once, never talked to once, and then killed by debris in the opening rounds of the Suicide Mission. Basically, all that (plot-mandated) ado for absolutely nothing.
    • In Assassin's Creed II, the team basically proclaimed the entire carnivale of Venice as this, considering you went through a lot of pointless minigames just to have the prize taken away due to a bribe.
  • Shiny New Australia: This trope was mentioned off-hand during the climax of Mass Effect 2.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: The opening for ME2, which features Shepard being blown out of the Normandy while a jaunty jazz tune plays.
  • Stating the Simple Solution: Another trademark is to question overly complicated quest proceedings (which they're Railroaded into) with asking why they don't do the obvious, i.e. commonly kill someone.
  • Stealth Based Mission: Another apparent pet peeve of the group, given their response to the forced stealth section in Assassin's Creed II (which is supposedly a stealth game — not that Josh plays it like one in any given way).
  • Stating the Simple Solution: Shamus pointed out that the entire reason Mass Effect 2's plot exist is apparently because nobody thinks about mining, booby-trapping, disabling or otherwise blockading the Omega 4 relay, since it's the only way the Collectors can enter the rest of the galaxy. Doesn't help that the Arrival DLC mostly invalidates the point of the relay.
  • Stupid Evil: Their opinion of Cerberus, specifically in how their research always seems to end up killing more humans than the main villains and never actually produces anything useful in the end. Likewise, they consider The Illusive Man as a Smug Snake at the very best.
    • Likewise, they accuse Caesar's Legion and The Templars of being pointlessly evil for no real reason.
    • And, of course, Josh himself. (Or at least his playstyle for the purposes of the LP.)
  • Suckiness Is Painful:
    • Josh's playstyle and Rutskarn's puns occasionally have this effect on the others.
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 Shamus: Is this my blood? I think this is- I think I'm bleeding. Guys, I think that pun...

Cquote2
    • Alluding to Fallout 3 can have a similar outcome.
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 Mumbles: Lemme get this straight. So my father was putting together a project before I was born...and he got in trouble and he died for it. And now I have to pick up the project and purify the wasteland.

Shamus: Yes. Thank you, Mumbles. Excuse me, I have to throw up blood.

Cquote2
  • Tempting Fate: During the first episode of the Half-Life 2 episode, Josh proclaims how he's yet to find a significant bug in the game. Not two seconds later he gets stun-locked into a wall while a bugged Metro Cop keeps whaling on him non-stop.
    • Some few episodes (and uncomfortably many bugs) of Half-Life 2 later, they eventually lampshade having done this.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The Fallout Reginalds' favorite kill methods are to put explosives down unsuspecting people's pants. And then there's the time they assassinated the leadership of the Omertas with C4... While sitting in the same room[2]...
  • Troll: If they're not picking on the game, they're picking on each other. And when they're not doing that, it's the audience's turn.
  • Tsundere:
    • Apparently, all it takes for Christine to trust Reginald is to chase him around the Sierra Madre casino while unloading many, many buckshots into his ass. Thank goodness for Good Bad Bugs.
  • Uriah Gambit: Sarah Lyons in Fallout 3. Miranda and Jacob in Mass Effect 2.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: Mumbles calls Shamus out on his shoddy parenting skills when he lets Josh play Honest Hearts after he did everything in his power to irk everyone else because they wouldn't let him play Honest Hearts.
  1. It's actually just an interface bug. The addiction is listed as alcohol in the Pip-Boy, and reacts to any alcohol consumed.
  2. They survive, if only just barely
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