Pat the NES Cunt

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oldbones

Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by oldbones » Sat Dec 08, 2018 3:25 am

It is a grey area but Nintendo has more money than god so their lawyers would easily be able to bankrupt any individual using stall tactics in court even if they though they might not win. I don't really give a shit about nintendo so I don't follow the goings on in that world. Who else is using the nintendo logo and are they selling that product? The only one I know is fat boy bob and even he didn't use the nintendo logo on his book cover. Sure he basically used a smb3 recreation but again no mario and no nintendo. If I didn't know better I would guess he consulted a copyright lawyer when making the cover of that book.

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Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by VoiceOfReasonPast » Sat Dec 08, 2018 10:21 am

Keith Chegwin wrote:
Fri Dec 07, 2018 5:19 am
Guest wrote:
Fri Dec 07, 2018 2:26 am
Haha just heard word that several people have reported Pat to Nintendo for selling his unlicensed NES book and Nintendo are looking into the matter. I hope Nintendos lawyers spin it so he gets in trouble somehow.
It's probably a non-starter. Because if it wasn't and they could sue everybody who made unlicensed Nintendo books, then why didn't they go after Bob Chipman before he unleashed Brick-by-Brick on the world?
They probably took one short look at the book and decided it'd be better to never bring it up ever again.
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Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by Keith Chegwin » Sat Dec 08, 2018 10:41 am

I dunno. If I were them and I could sue him, I would. I'd say to him 'we have enough autism and tedium associated with our brand, thank you'
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Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by Kugelfisch » Sun Dec 09, 2018 5:13 am

Keith Chegwin wrote:
Sat Dec 08, 2018 10:41 am
I dunno. If I were them and I could sue him, I would. I'd say to him 'we have enough autism and tedium associated with our brand, thank you'
If only SEGA did that back in the days.
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Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by MegaNigger » Sun Dec 09, 2018 4:41 pm

Kugelfisch wrote:
Sun Dec 09, 2018 5:13 am
Keith Chegwin wrote:
Sat Dec 08, 2018 10:41 am
I dunno. If I were them and I could sue him, I would. I'd say to him 'we have enough autism and tedium associated with our brand, thank you'
If only SEGA did that back in the days.
We coulda had actual Sonic 4.... :(
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Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by Guru Larry » Fri Dec 14, 2018 11:07 am

Looking at the Amazon reviews of Pat's book, aside from the usual sycophantic fanboys calling it the bestest book evar, there's this guy, who manages to encapsulate Pat entirely in this review. Guy deserves a medal! :D

https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Nintend ... filter-bar
High Production Values and Content, Sadly Flawed by Biased and Nostalgia Fueled Reviews
December 14, 2017
--------

Since 1/2 stars are not allowed, my true rating is 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

----Part 1, the good, the not so good, and the okay

Pat Contri better known as "Pat the NES Punk" ran a kickstarter in 2015 to fund his book, Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library (1985-1995), it was successfully funded during that period and this book is the result of that funding and multiple years of hard work on Pat and his contributor's hard work and effort.

One thing you won't see in this review is me taking away from the contributions and hard work put into this gargantuan effort to effectively catalog and review over 750+ titles released for the NES in the USA and PAL territories. However as the saying goes, all that glitters is not gold is very appropriate here. Underneath the glossy hardback exterior lies the meat of the book - the written content and specifically the reviews written by Pat himself which I'll cover in a bit.

Herein lies any & all issues I have with this book. But more on that in Part 2 below.

Pat likes to call himself a historian on retro games from the NES/SMS/TG-16 era of systems as those are the three systems he grew up playing and along with John Delia has produced a well regarded if criminally overlooked documentary series called The Video Game Years (TVGY). This series (in the episodes I've watched) is a brief overview of the yearly history of video games from the late 70's until the late 80's where the series currently is due to lack of funding and needed effort from the producers (and sadly lack of interest from gamers).

The point being made here is while the research and information provided in TVGY is high quality information, it is provided in bite sized chunks, it is usually well thought out and researched with no dispute in the quality of the information provided outside of the external commentary provided by the special guests who are invited to commentate on the areas they are "experts" on. With wildly varying results.

So why am I bring this other project of Pat's up, simple. Pat is the overall content approver/editor of the material here (his name is on the book after all), with some of the same familiar faces from the video game years contributing reviews and special features you will hear a lot of the same author's voices in both areas of the book (reviews and special features). But in this case Pat has full creative control of what goes into the book and what doesn't. Sadly this creative freedom didn't have oversight by someone to help him with his...shall we say biased and nostalgia ridden reviews that he wrote. Sadly the book consists of a large portion of these reviews by Contri in the book.

Reading page by page, there is some very insightful reviews being presented by other contributors that usually aren't Pat. Approaching the end of the book as I am now, I am confident enough to write this review (at this time I am almost through the letter 'T' and having read all of the supplemental material before diving into the review section afterwards) with enough information to provide what I believe a fair review of the material and make valid criticisms as well.

As mentioned in my review of Math Manent's Nintendo 64 Anthology (which covers the entire N64 library worldwide) the only thing that held that book back from greatness is the author's bias and slanted view of certain titles in the N64 library, the same is true for Pat's book (except in this case more objectivity and less nostalgia would have been a benefit here).

Many of his reviewers are able to leave bias and nostalgia at the door or at the very least tinge that nostalgia with objective, rationale when reviewing the games. I made mention of an author's voice earlier, I have gotten used to reading enough of Pat's reviews that without looking below in the reflections section, I can pick out one of his reviews without much of an issue.

In most cases this wouldn't be a bad thing, however in this case I believe it hinders the quality of the book because Pat cannot seem to get past his past memories of playing this game as a kid or some anecdote about his friend Kevin, or borrowing this game from his Grandparent's neighbor who owned over 100 NES games which where never played, or even some game he played at an arcade to then get for Christmas or a Birthday or down at the local Kiddie City. As you can see these are the items I'm only picking out from memory, but the overuse of these anecdotal memories leads one to believe that Pat's writing style is that of a "One-Trick Pony", an author who can't do anything but reminisce without having the ability to be objective in said reviews.

Now arguably some out there reading this are like how do you separate yourself from your past memories and I would somewhat agree with that sentiment. However, with no quality control and oversight in editing Pat continually over and over made the same anecdotal comments again, again and again. As a reader, I got less and less out of a review of his because I knew that the bias and nostalgia would overshadow the quality of a certain game regardless of what it actually did play like.

For the record he is not the only reviewer to fall into this trap, however others like Ian Ferguson and Brett Weiss managed to only make occasional references to when they first played a title and don't make it a center of their narrative. I single Pat only because of this fact, considering he wrote a bulk of the 700+ reviews himself this narrative voice gets old very quickly. It's like watching any of his Youtube videos on repeat to suffer through the same 'funny' jokes that your 'hip' Uncle would tell every holiday, if you read a review with his voice in your head you can see he writes exactly as he performs in his skits (which get overwrought and tiresome quickly) and which isn't necessary the best thing for this book.

With that being said, I will highlight some of the good points, the reviewer who covered many (if not all of the RPG's & Strategy games) did an excellent job. Even though NES era strategy games aren't my thing, I applaud their knowledge (and courage) to tackle such a daunting genre in it's early years on the NES. Having played quite a few of the early Square & Enix RPG's myself again I see the reviews were done thoroughly and objectively as well.

Looking at some of the other guest reviewers I want to single out Ian as well because he managed to do anecdotal quips in his reviews, but also add in insightful information such as famicom version differences, information on the company and other related games which in my opinion, is how a review should be written on games from a 30 year old gaming system or for that matter any gaming system regardless. Some of the other reviews had a 'voice', but it wasn't obtrusive or annoying and serviced the reviews as needed without adding in un-needed remarks that Pat seems to be a master of.

-----Part 2, ok, so what's WRONG with it?

Now onto my main gripe (as if reading some of the above you can guess what it might be already, can't you), I'd be more apt to call it a nitpick but cannot because it bothered me so much. That being specifically the ratings found in the book and Pat's reviews specifically (some of you know where I'm going with this already) but he's not alone either.

Most all reviews in this book fall victim to many of the previous points I've made earlier, bias and nostalgia without objectivity and fact checking (this last point is mostly directed at Contri himself going on flawed memories instead of facts in his reviews, see my comments about TailSpin below).

Many of the reviews should be 1-star higher or 1-star lower in numerous cases (and that's without this writer's bias showing through, as many of these titles I don't have nostalgia attached to them since many I didn't play until I was much older). With that being said, let's look at a few examples.

Cobra Command by Data East, rated 1 1/2-Stars, this was one of the major reviews that I took issue with when reading the book, this is because the comparison examples Pat makes when reviewing this game to make his case for the review are just so off-base and considering other games of more dubious quality are rated the same or higher than this title, this game is easily a 2 1/2-star to 3-star game.

It is not perfect (mainly due to the strange scrolling the game uses) however graphically and musically it stands in good company with many other NES B-roster titles. It most definitely is NOT one of the worst on the system. Pat continually references the SMS version of Choplifter going under the assumption about the reader that they were themselves kids who grew up in the USA during the NES era and that they would be intimately familiar with not only that version of the game but the Sega Master System itself.

Now days many of us retro gamers are familiar with the system and it's library, some more than others, however as most of us who bought this book are kids of the 80's and grew up with the NES (only 'THAT' kid had a SMS as most of us knew) (Point of fact: the SMS was HUGE in Brazil, but never in the US), Pat speaks with an 'absolute authority' that everyone was intimately familiar with the SMS version of Choplifter (which is the game he directly compares Cobra Command to) when in actuality the game has literally two things in common, 1) a helicopter and 2)rescuing hostages. In my estimation that is NOT how to make a balanced review and more importantly it does not give this game a fair shake and as it should not be put it in the same league as the garbage games released by American Video Systems or Color Dreams.

Just because he had THAT system that's no reason to assume the reader did the same and then give this game a bum rap because of a childhood memory associating both games in his mind is very careless instead of you know being objective and through with a review. For shame Pat.

TailSpin (1991) is another example of Pat's ignorance shining through, we all know, it's not a great game and I'm not arguing the rating given to it, I'm just pointing out this specific sentence. "I'm going to chalk up Capcom's shortcomings here to the fact that they typically didn't do shooters...." Excuse Me....?!?

Did the author forget Capcom's other shooters of the period (1984-1992) 1942, 1943, Legendary Wings, Exed Exes, Savage Bees, Side Arms, Section Z, Vulgus, Varth, Forgotten Worlds and even at a stretch Gun.Smoke. They (Capcom) can hardly be overlooked when it comes to making shooters on the NES or elsewhere, since the exact opposite is true because they were extremely prolific when it came to that genre (and even continued publishing games from the genre well into the late 1990's frequently).

I'm thinking Pat has utilized his world-famous "selective memory" here as he is known to do when it comes to proving his point about things he thinks he's an expert about just to be right (when he usually isn't). Sigh....

Dismissing Capcom and saying Tailspin could have been better with more experience developing games for that genre is something that could have been easily fact checked if the author cared enough to search Wikipedia or some other list of games by the developer to know how untrue that statement IN FACT really is.

Tailspin wasn't good because it wasn't good source material for a game, period. It doesn't stand nearly as tall as other Disney properties such as Duck Tales, Rescue Rangers or Darkwing Duck. The lack of quality is more from Capcom wanting to cash in on the Disney license and not caring about the quality of the game more-so than their lack of experience creating shooters.

These are just two examples of lazy, phoned-in reviews included in the book (specifically) from Pat (I know he had plenty of them to write, but come on, have some pride in your work man...) sadly these helped to tarnish the overall excellent quality of this tome. The content should have had a professional editor take a once-over to make suggestions and then help with unifying "the voice of the book". The art direction of page design is uneven (especially in the later half of the book when Pat starts devoting one-page reviews to certain games, (some less deserving, no matter their relevance and importance in the NES library) which help to destabilize the design and flow of the book (for instance, is Super Jeopardy worthy of it's only one page spread? That answer is no. However...because Pat needed an entire page for Super Mario Bros and that was the game that came before it, that's exactly what happened).

It's decisions like these, that hurt the overall quality of the book when reading it from front to back. And I'd argue that a large percentage of 4 & 5 star book reviews on this very site haven't done more than a cursory look at some of their favorite games without actually (you know) reading the very content of the book they seemed to care enough about to write a review. In this day and age who does that right? Right???

----The Wrap Up

So like Pat's reviews in his book, take my review with a grain of salt and score it 1-star higher or lower depending on your take on things (but do yourself a favor and READ THE BOOK and make your own mind up before then to see if any of my complaints have any merit or not and decide for yourself is all I ask).

I wished I would have enjoyed it more, but was sullied by the overwhelming dependence on Mr. Contri's part to fall back on a lazy and repetitive writing style he fell back on and used as a crutch that really doesn't suit the 200-odd reviews that he had a direct hand in writing (mainly because it feels like you're reading the exact same thing 200 times in a row).

The book for what it is an excellent resource for exploring the NES library as long as you 'disregard the reviews', make up your own mind and using it as nothing more than a reference guide to discover all of the games you missed or didn't know about growing up as I'm trying to do, then you will truly get something out of it that is worthwhile. I'm going to try and finish it up soon but hopefully it won't take long because of something that I've read is when leaving me in dismay of something Pat just wrote - that something that either isn't the 50th time he's mentioning Kevin or just blatantly writing mis-information that he sadly truly believes to be correct.

***Note: For transparency, I Kickstarted this project when the campaign was running and did not purchase it from Amazon, if any changes have been made in later printings, I am not privy to these changes. And as much as I'd like to believe that Pat can make those changes in later revisions of the book in digital format, I don't think they would be done, why you ask, well because he's Pat Contri (and for those who have followed his work, that should say more than enough), and with that knowledge out there, honestly what else needs to be said.

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Le Redditeur
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Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by Le Redditeur » Fri Dec 14, 2018 1:17 pm

Yes, the Autismo Maximus medal. Jesus fucking Christ, look at that fucking wall of text to shit on a Pat the Nes Punk book.

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Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by Keith Chegwin » Fri Dec 14, 2018 3:37 pm

Le Redditeur wrote:
Fri Dec 14, 2018 1:17 pm
Yes, the Autismo Maximus medal. Jesus fucking Christ, look at that fucking wall of text to shit on a Pat the Nes Punk book.
You'll hurt Larry's feelings. He's probably the one who wrote that review
Kugelfisch wrote:
Sat Mar 21, 2020 2:05 am
Imagine spending a billion US dollars to be a loser. Could've watched animu and be one for free.

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Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by mad bum » Fri Dec 14, 2018 9:13 pm

Keith Chegwin wrote:
Fri Dec 14, 2018 3:37 pm
Le Redditeur wrote:
Fri Dec 14, 2018 1:17 pm
Yes, the Autismo Maximus medal. Jesus fucking Christ, look at that fucking wall of text to shit on a Pat the Nes Punk book.
You'll hurt Larry's feelings. He's probably the one who wrote that review
I was about to say "Written by Larry Bundy"
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Re: Pat the NES Cunt

Post by Guest » Fri Dec 14, 2018 9:52 pm

Larry should join kiwifarms for more asspats

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