Ugh... I got through about half a dozen of these entries yesterday and after being generally impressed (i.e. said submissions rising above my fairly meager expectations) I decided to stop lest I come to a moment of crushing disappointment slash realisation that I had in fact already breezed through the best 5% and would soon enough taking every stop on the shit train to shitsville.
So I started up again this morning and, after noticing that the order of films had been reshuffled since yesterday picked one at random to start with and this was it. It will also most likely be the last one I watch today as this one has left me colder than a frigid penguin drinking a slushie.
As has reading through this comments thread to which I must comment: at least the single post history posters commenting on other videos with glowingly positive reviews have the grace to say "I'm here cause I know you wot made this" and not "I'm a completely impartial observer with no ties to the author whatsoever and my opinion stems entirely from my own objective opinions and not some knee-jerk defensive posture... Hi mom!"
To poster #13, I would've thought that having five of the most iconic characters in contemporary video game culture from five of the most iconic video game franchises in history in a single video would be enough to remind us that it is in fact video game related without slapping on an over-exposure filter and cranking it up to 100. That in contrast just smacks of a cheaping out and covering up your poor lighting with an even worse "visual effect".
The laugh track is not only utterly annoying but entirely unconvincing. Layer the damn thing a few times and make it feel like an actual audience and not a bunch of people sitting around sniffing glue and attempting a rough impersonation of an episode of MST3K. And again poster #13, I agree with your statement that "'Friends' has a laugh track at the end of EVERY line," but the key word here is "end" whereas the so-called laugh track in this clip seems to arrive at arbitrary points often distracting from whatever lame joke is competing for attention at the time.
Which bring me to the lame jokes. I can't really comment on these, as there aren't any, because it appears that the author seems to think that a series of pop-culture references constitute "gags". In reality this clip feels like the line "A bunch of widely recognizable video game characters walk in to a bar" and then sits around patting itself on the back while you wait for the punch-line which never materialises.
Like, for one good example, the Zelda character naming screen popping up; this is not a joke, it is a reference. What could make it a joke would be to, say, have the entity in control of the naming process give him a moniker like "ShitBumPoo" as many of my friends like to do, and have Link react in a moment of agitated frustration like the old Warner Bros. cartoons where the character speaks with the animator who is tormenting their existence. This, I'll admitt, is a fairly lacklustre alternative but at least it somewhat approaches a joke.
The acting, with the exception of Mario, is wooden and stilted at best and I don't get any sense that these characters are who they're supposed to be. I mean, I get that they're outside of their prescribed contexts but isn't that the joke? That they are who they're supposed to be but not where? This comes off more like a bunch of ordinary people sitting around on their couch cosplaying a bunch of random video game protagonists.
Like, the only reference to Chun-Li being Chun-Li is the standard anime "glee" pose, which is so non-specific that you could replace Chun-Li with "arbitrary generic anime character" and it would be as appropriate. And excuse me if this is racist, but why isn't Chun-Li played by *the only Asian girl in the entire clip*? If there is some joke there it seems to be so subtle as to completely overshoot my own obtuse interpretation of a joke which equates setup + punchline = lulz.
As far as positive comments go, I like the Mario interview scene and thought the costuming was pretty darn good.
Everything else was a lame attempt by a group of people who don't really seem to understand where the humor could have been properly exploited or, indeed, what humor is at all.
Hmmm... I think I've been watching too much Zero Punctuation this morning...
). We will take note and learn from it, and apply what we've learnt either in future episodes of PALS or in our next production. Or hopefully both!