the leading man is my tpye

I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Like others, I ran across VGHS on Netflix while browsing for anything semi-interesting. I watched the first episode and thought it was OK for what I expected it to be...a cheesy high school comedy-drama. It's a cheesy high school drama. But with a cool gamer twist. I picked it up again after about a month, just because it was there, and watched the second episode. Still cheesy, but more interesting and clever. So I continued watching it. I'm glad I did. Now, I'm in my late 50's, and an old-school video gamer. Haven't played much in the past decade or two, but once a gamer, always a gamer. = )Once I saw what the writers and producers were up to, I was hooked. I finished the series, LOLing and often ROTFL from the clever way they integrated gaming into the series and dialog. Clever, clever, clever. I lost it when the social gamers were introduced.I contemplated the series for about a week and read some reviews...then decided to watch the first episode again, which led to the second, third, etc.. Still cheesy high school amateur dialog, but I picked up on even more cleverness that I had missed the first time. The overly done expressions and smack talk is hilariously geeknerdy with just the right amount of jockbullyness thrown in. I especially love the immersive portrayal of being in the game. VGHS might seem juvenile, but if you're a gamer and can get over yourself for watching it, I believe you will thoroughly enjoy this series.

So it was late one night, scrolling through Netflix, and I thought,Video Game High School, why not? I like Gaming.Am I watching the same show as everyone else!? I had to give up after 17 minutes of excruciating garbage.Set in the future, (bullies fly off on a tandem bike) we are introduced to this nerdy skinny kid, who is playing a FPS Shoot Em Up with his friends. He somehow luckily defeats this "pro", and automatically is now a student at Video Game High School.Everything was painful. The acting was mediocre and way over exaggerated, I felt like I was watching something made in media studies by 16 year old students. Each character is automatically unlikable, geeks are skinny, bullies are broad, every girl is subjectively attractive? And the lines they delivered!? Cheesy, childish and downright stupid.The parts where they were gaming - similar to counterstrike/cod/battlefield with real people - all enemies are out in the open, each player turns into bytes when shot.It is just so off the mark, the gaming in know way represents games at all.To summarise, making a show about gaming could be great, but think about your main audience, late teens to early twenties, gaming enthusiasts who actually might be interested in a show like this. And make it appeal to them, have characters with a little depth, make the gaming as realistic and potentially gory as possible (Playing a war game with no blood or tactics?) This show feels like it is made for very young children ie: simple plot, dialog etc etc I could rant for hours about how terrible this is... But, maybe give it a chance, see if last longer than 17 minutes.

Each season is so dramatically different from the other, its as if you're watching 3 separate shows. The first season: It's immediately clear this show was created by youtubers. It's funny, irreverent, yet lacking the capability to deal with real substance. The second season: It contains all the humor and quirk that made the first season enjoyable to watch, yet there are issues delicately woven in. Relationships, parents, and friendship are explored, without the show feeling contrived or fake. Personally, this is my favorite season. The third season: I never would have thought in a million years that a show titled Video Game High School could ever carry so much emotional weight. It's character-driven story line is poignantly realistic, yet I feel remorse over what the show use to be. I watched the first and second seasons because they were fun. They were funny, but not How-I- Met-Your-Mother funny, with one liners and punchlines. It was the kind of fun everyone has experienced, the casual yet incomparable fun with friends that makes one forget life exists outside of that moment. However this feeling is absent in the third season. The fate of the characters doesn't seem so concrete and certain. Maybe things don't turn out alright. Maybe they never will. The characters fall prey to real- world issues. And while these issues are explored fantastically, I still find myself missing when I could sit down, turn on the TV, and know I was in for a barrel of laughs.

First let's start with the great stuff, which there is plenty of.The cinematographers clearly knew what they were doing. Shots are excellently composed, lighting and camera work are top notch, particularly in context of the budget, and the entire work (thus far) has been visually compelling. The digital elements are intuitive and well done (intuitive by being instantly recognizable and relatably - for example, when a player was shot in the game, there would be a bunch of digital pixels that flew off them. It makes a lot of sense and looks cool).The soundtrack is fluid and on-key, building tensions and emotions and complimenting the arc of the story as it progresses. It's nothing particularly amazing, but it's great for the budget. The supporting actors also do a quite good job, although, like all amateur actors, there are some flaws.It's important to give credit to these backstage guys who made a really clean, professional looking film. Because honestly, I was legitimately impressed. But that's where the good impressions end, and the bad begin.I gave this work such a low review because, frankly, the acting and writing is AWFUL. Literally offensive. A fair, even good, portion of the jokes hit pretty well, but the characters are atrocious. BrianD, the 'protagonist', is arguably the bigger douche between him and his cliché, one-dimensional, nonsensical antagonist rival, The Law. Brian never listens to people, is generally psychopathically inconsiderate of other people, and is incredibly standoffish with anybody that disagrees with him. So is The Law, but hes SUPPOSED to be that way, he's the bad guy. Whats the point of making the protagonist as mean as the antagonist? I hated them both. At least the Law was a good actor, but BrianD gave a wooden, comically unconvincing performance that felt like a 'very first stab at acting ever'kind of acting.Characters don't evolve, they just do random things that don't make sense. Everybody is a huge dick to Brian, then they're suddenly not, and then they are again, and there's no reason why. Ever. Characters change without events occurring, and thats baffling. The writing makes it so that the character change is the impetus for the event, not the other way around, which is how it should be. Brian and his on-again off- again romance with Matrix, the lead female, is baffling, forced, and awkward - a set of traits that describe most of the movie.Also, a piece of work that bills itself as a 'video game movie' has an embarrassingly poor understanding of the medium. It's like the producers have never actually watched any eSports. Of course, adaptations are never perfect, but its so far off the mark that, as a gamer, I felt cheated. I wasn't expecting them to translate CSGO or CoD perfectly, but a respawn + CTF + dramatic 'evil villain speech' cliché inside a COMPETITIVE GAME? It just felt alienating.That's a good word to sum up the review. Alienating. I felt uncomfortable, confused, and apathetic to the characters' plight. The writing was bad, the actors were bad, and this work is bad. 3/10, with 2/10 points added for visuals.