Gary

[Matt]

Hopefully someone at Blizzard knows what's going on.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/loadingreadyrun/1973-Gary

-m

[Emperor Gum]

Sorry, I didn't find it very funny. Um, it felt like it needed a better second half. Might have been better if Paul had been working on Rock & Roll Racing 2 unknown to anyone else. Then throw in Jer and James sitting awkwardly at a PAX booth with Diablo III and StarCraft II, whilst Paul's next to them with a game with horribly outdated graphics. Then maybe the stinger is that everyone ignores D3 and SC for RRR2.

[Yaxley]

You know who's awesome? Bradley Rains is awesome.

You probably knew that, but I thought I'd mention it.

[goat]

Didn't work for me either. I was expecting a joke about how Gary was frozen in Blizzard time or something, but instead I ended up with a list of upcoming products and services provided by Blizzard.

I did enjoy the bit about pneumatic tubes powering battle.net, though.

edit: Oh, and the muffled "oh shit oh shit oh shit" didn't come across as muffled to me at first, I was trying to figure out what it was at all.

[aeric90]

Paul was great. Panicked Paul is about as fun to watch as manic science Paul. I could have watched a Scooby Doo thing with him running through doors for a whole video.

[Drinnik]

I thought it was a bit... meh.

I did enjoy Paul at the beginning and think that up until he ran in the office shows he has a great talent for physical comedy. His noises he made at the calender and at the PAX dates were reminiscent of Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean, and I think Paul could play a Bean type character amazingly.

[ThrashJazzAssassin]

Didn't do anything much for me. There was no drive to the sketch, since it as soon as it became clear what the central concept was it became simply a matter of waiting for Starcraft II and WoW to be mentioned in turn. There were some good lines, and the performances were good, but on the whole it didn't really go anywhere.

Also, it stretches credibility that Gary is so out of date on the games that his own company makes, but is aware of what PAX is; WoW was released only a few months after the first PAX, after all. It's possible to think of explanations for this, but that requires the viewer to be sufficiently invested in the video to think about it, and I don't think the video engages the viewer enough first time around to be able to get away with this. Equally, it's possible to view the discrepancy in what Gary knows as an added joke about the lack of in-house communication, but it's not acknowledged, so once again it only occurred to me as I sat here writing about the video.

[sdhonda]

Good to see a tiny bit of Scott Pilgrim influence in there. I suspected that film would leave an impression on you guys.

[Metcarfre]

Whilst I am normally loathe to having vidja game stuff in the weekly LRR vid (plenty of Unskippable and ENN for that), I thought this one worked relatively well. Bradley Rains music was, as per usual, great (originally from Twitter Abuse, as he told me on... Twitter). However the shift in pace from the start to when he arrives in the office was deflating. Also, missed a solid opportunity to mention Duke Nukem Forever rising from the ashes. Not sure if the timing would have worked with your submission schedule...

Alternative ending; Paul's character gets fired in a tragic/hilarious manner. Stinger; he gets hired by Valve to work on Episode 3.

[Lisra]

Yeah, well.. I... hm...

I did laugh, so mission accomplished, I guess, but on the whole I was waiting for an even bigger punchline, which never came.

The battle.bet being run on tubes explains a lot though.

[Keab42]

Yeah, it was a bit of a one-joke sketch but it was still funny, if only for Paul's over the top responses.

Where were the running through the corridor bits shot? I loved that bit with all the paper planes thrown onto it.

[Metcarfre]

I believe it's the Engineering/Computer Science building at UVic.

[Gap Filler]

I'm surprised a good Silicon & Synapse ref was passed up there (or maybe it was subtle enough to miss; oughta rewatch just to clarify). Neat vid otherwise, if a little one trick pony at times.

[HockeyEngineer]

That was the 5th floor of the ECS building at UVic. The building designers really should've known better than to construct an engineering building with lots of interior airspace, 'cause us engineering students will gladly fill that airspace with paper aircraft.

At one point on a similar landing on the 3rd floor, a few students constructed an entire paper airport and lined up all the aircraft next to the runway. It was awesome... until the faculty had it torn down...

[wartjr2373]

I really liked this video. Although I'm not really a big Blizzard fan, Paul's acting made the video hilarious. It may have been because he was also the one who wrote it, but I thought he played the character of Gary really well.

Side-note: Why is the video called Gary? It doesn't really describe the video in any way.

[falconknight06]

I personally found this video really funny, though I can appreciate other people's problems with it. They just weren't as big a deal to me. Another good video guys!

[Littleman 64]

I liked it. It was simple. Straight forward. Not much to get. A pallet cleanser.

[Metcarfre]

I liked it. It was simple. Straight forward. Not much to get. A pallet cleanser.

?

[Slack Mesa]

I liked it. It was simple. Straight forward. Not much to get. A pallet cleanser.

?

Oh, now you're just being silly. You know very well that Littleman 64 meant "palette cleanser."

[Emperor Gum]

?

[EnglishMQ]

Paul was funny in it, and I got the gist of what you were going for, but I didn't really find it funny, sorry.

[co9ol]

I must say, I really like the cinematography. The video just looks really good. The way you blured the background really made their faces stand out more.

[arch4non]

I'm not sure if it was intentional or purely coincidental, but this video seemed like a Jab at Duke Nukem. It was a guy so far out of the loop he was years behind, every game listed was started and completed during Duke Nukem Forever's development cycle, and Jer emphasized the word 'Forever' when talking about working on WoW the entire time.

[Lord Chrusher]

I also though of Duke Nukem Forever.

I do not think the joke of someone 11 years out of date on their own company was quite strong enough to hang a video on.

[sdhonda]

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