James Rolfe aka de Angry Video Game Nerd heeft met zijn karakter de Nerd een carrière gemaakt en is zeer geliefd bij ons retro gamers. De video's zijn altijd erg informatief, grof en vooral erg grappig. Vandaag staat zijn nieuwste video in het teken van de Super Nintendo game Earthbound die niet alleen zeer duur is, maar ook een fanatieke groep fans heeft. Pak wat te eten en te drinken, want deze aflevering duurt maar liefst bijna 40 minuten.

This video has been in the works since last October (2017), when I first started the playing Earthbound on the mini SNES Classic. It wasn't originally meant to be an AVGN episode. It was for myself.

I never played much of Earthbound before, but it's a game that always appealed to me. Yes, even when I saw the ads in Nintendo Power. The only reason I never played it much was because I was too busy with Final Fantasy 3 (6) and Chrono Trigger. SNES has so many amazing masterpieces, it's almost impossible to play them all. But after more than 20 years, I owed it to myself to complete Earthbound.

The gameplay took me 45 and a half hours. After recording it all, I decided to put all those hours to good use, and make a video. At first, I didn't think it would be an AVGN episode, but more of a casual "James review". But I realized there were plenty of wacky moments in the game that the Nerd could react to.

If you're wondering about the characters' names such as "Milly" and "Lilly", my 4 year old daughter named them. To write the script, I had to search through 45+ hours of game footage, to confirm and describe accurately all the moments that I wanted to comment on. Then came a bunch of researching facts, and developing my own personal theories. It turned out, I had a ton to say. It became the longest single-part AVGN episode, by total accident (running nearly 40 minutes). On top of that, I couldn't resist adding a dream scene with laborious green screen effects. In total, counting gameplay, writing, shooting, editing, the entire video took 137.5 hours to finish, making it the 2nd most time-consuming AVGN episode to date. (Episode 139: Mega Man still barely holds the record at 138.5 hours). Ironically Earthbound was meant to be a break for myself, but it turned into a major task, as all my other projects screeched to a halt.

I had fun with this video and am happy with it, but now that it's finally done, I hope to get back to my personal long-term projects such as a film and a book I am trying to write. But I will always be jumping back and forth with AVGN episodes. I'm always trying to keep those coming.

-James