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Retsupurae
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Retsupurae (Web Video)
"When it comes to Let's Play, you can find just about every color of the rainbow if you know where to look. You got your funny Let's Plays, your informative Let's Plays, and your narrative Let's Plays that make up all the colors found in Skittles. Unfortunately, if you look in the wrong places, you can find the shit-browns and vomit-greens of camcorder Let's Plays, self-proclaimed game reviewer Let's Plays, and singalong Let's Plays. ... If quality Let's Plays are what you're looking for, you're in the wrong place, because today... Retsupurae!"
— ResearchIndicates

In an age where just about anyone can create content and post it for others to see, the online community can serve as a prime example of quantity over quality. This naturally extends to the Let's Play community as well, with new YouTube videos posted left and right filled with asinine commentary, the game being played on release date without any idea if a Let's Play of it would be a good idea, MacGyver-like technical solutions such as filming a TV screen on a camcorder, barely edited material with minutes upon minutes of filler, and worst of all, barely any quality control to sort out the good videos from the bad ones. One should take it as a rite of passage to view at least one video game walkthrough narrated by a squeaky-voiced college student who imagines himself to be the next Bob Saget, and may the Lord help you if they try and sing along to the game's background music.

This is where Retsupuraenote  came in: an experiment hosted by Something Awful regulars Michael "slowbeef" Sawyer and Ben "Diabetus" Whitfield (with recurring guest appearances by Proteus, Shmorky, Dave_o, and Psychedelic Eyeball, among others) where the two find the worst of the YouTube community (usually Let's Plays, but sometimes extending to webcam videos, game reviews, and television shows) and then mock the living shit out of them, though they do tend to mock LPers that are just sorta weird. As such, Retsupurae became widely appreciated for putting terrible Let's Players back in their place.

They also expanded their range to include riffs on longplays of full-length video games ("Wrongpurae") and Flash submissions to Newgrounds ("Retsufrash"), focusing on the game itself rather than the person playing it (most of the time, anyway); and newer series like "Crappy Pasta", which was later renamed "Slowbeef's House of Horror", in which slowbeef does dramatic readings of terrible video game-related creepypastas, "Kickstarter Nonstarters" and "IndieNoGo", where they riff on ridiculous Kickstarter and IndieGoGo projects, respectively. Beef and 'Betus also recorded a podcast called Retsutalk, which can be found here.

Their videos can be found on YouTube. The team also had an offshoot feature on the Something Awful front page named Webcam Ward, which ran from May 2009 to October 2010, wherein the hosts (initially slowbeef and Khad, but later bringing on Diabetus) would talk over videos that they generally didn't cover as part of Retsupurae, such as an episode of The Irate Gamer's "Haunted Investigators". The crew has made a number of Livestreams, many of which can be found here. The first was left unrecorded since it was merely meant to be a test, but a fan has recovered said test Livestream and uploaded it to Youtube.

Aside from slowbeef and Diabetus' videos, many others have tried their hand at Retsupurae in light of their success, especially other Something Awful regulars such as Chip Cheezum and General Ironicus, whose videos can be found on the former's YouTube channel. There's also a fair amount of overlap between accounts, and it's not uncommon to see slowbeef guest-commentate on Chip's channel, for instance. There's also several smaller Retsupuraers that have sprung up, such as LesBeardly, LargeMentalBlock, College Reunion Group, TheStrawhatNO!note  and VNDLP.

The last official Retsupurae video (a Wrongpurae of OverBlood) was completed in March 2018, and the channel went dark with zero fanfare or update afterward. Word on the channel's status officially came in late 2019, with slowbeef commenting that while he and Diabetus had discussions on the final fate of the channel, neither was "really ready to call it". That time finally came in mid-October 2024 with a PSA from Slowbeef, confirming that it was indeed the channel's final video, with the two thanking their viewers for watching and informing them of their latest activities — the two periodically continue to stream on Twitch, even collaborating every now and then.

    open/close all folders 

    Works Riffed on by Retsupurae 

Retsupurae provides examples of:

    A - G 
  • Aborted Arc:
    • In December of 2012 they started a Wrongpurae of King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, but it hasn't continued past part 7 in May 2013. This has been lampshaded several times, such as the description for the last Noir video (which also seemed aborted before they finished it over a stream) saying "Now you can't say we never finish what we start! No I've never heard of King's Quest VII."
    • Part 1 of their Wrongpurae for Amazon: Guardians of Eden was uploaded in March of 2014. Part 2 was never uploaded.
    • A Wrongpurae of Ripper in a crossover with Lowtax got up to 7 episodes before slowbeef had to cancel it and restart it with Diabetus.
    • The Wrongpurae of Room Break was halted with just four of the game's six chapters completed, after it was mutually agreed that nothing could top Chapter Four's iconic ending where Barack Obama shakes hands with a grey alien at a peace treaty.invoked
    • Their riff on Space Adventure Cobra: The Shooting (titled "Cobra 3D") stopped without announcement at part 6, with the goons feeling the game was too boring to riff on, with little to no payoff.
    • The Wrongpurae of OverBlood 2 lasted only two parts before being unlisted on the channel.
  • The Ace: Parodied with "JacobMC", who according to slowbeef and Diabetus is BillyMC's older brother, a Harvard graduate, beat Ninja Gaiden 2 with his eyes closed, and registered Hypercam2.
  • Angrish:
    • When a character is somehow locked inside a car during "Pursuit", Proteus is reduced to a sputtering wreck:
      Proteus: How... how did... how is she locked in... th... she j... ho... but tha... but... you can't...
      slowbeef: I know you can't.
      Proteus: You can't—!
      slowbeef: I— I know! Not in any modern car in the world!
    • In their Retsupurae of The Nostalgia Critic doing an LP of Bart's Nightmare, they speculate that he even writes in Angrish. In general, they frown upon this being used in LPs due to their dislike of exaggerated commentaries.
  • Aside Glance: Discussed in Arrival in Hell II.
    Protagonist: [looks at the screen] Bollocks.
    slowbeef: But see, look at- is that a fourth wall?
    Diabetus: "Bollocks"? Is that where you have the goofy sitcom music play? [hums goofy sitcom music]
    slowbeef: On the next episode of Bollocks...
    Diabetus: We'll be right back with more Arrival in Hell II!
  • Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!:
    • It's suggested as why the villains in Crime Patrol keep jumping out of cover to shoot you:
    slowbeef: You know what it is? It's not that we're a great cop, we have this beautiful gun that everyone just wants to take a look at.
    • The Let's Player of B-mer-mine is interpreted as this, as his video recording skips over every other couple of seconds of gameplay.
    • In "Guestsupurae: Sara vs Frocto," Frocto spends just a little over two minutes on FarmVille before briefly switching to Dead Drunk, and then abandoning FarmVille entirely.
  • A Winner Is You: Most of the Flash games they riff on, but probably the worst offender is "Metroid; Beginings" [sic]. After possibly hours of struggling with frustrating controls, floaty mechanics, and a whole crapload of game breaking bugs, defeating the final boss, Dark Samus, causes her to explode... and that's it. No credits, No Ending, the game just sort of ends with Samus trapped in an empty room. (The poor guy who played the game for them actually went into the .swf file using a decompiler to confirm this.)
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
    • slowbeef and Diabetus are very disturbed by the "Users who liked this video also enjoyed" sidebar for Arrival in Hell 2. Featuring "Meet'N'Fuck Kingdom", "Bowser and Peach Hentai", and the Eddsworld flash "Dental Appointment".'
    • After Diabetus reads several of PewDiePie's other video titles, coming across things like "MY TOILET DIED ;_;", "LIBRARY OF NAKED MEN", and "WTF THAT VAGINA HAS ARMS", he comes across one titled simply "Siren: Blood Curse Part 2." It's brought up how weirdly normal that last one is in the Retsutalk about the video.
  • Blatant Lies: slowbeef likes to tell Diabetus about ridiculous future events in whatever video games they're commenting on, which are obviously false. Subverted slightly in that sometimes he's telling the truth. This is brought up by Diabetus.
    Diabetus: See, I can't tell if you're lying or not.
    slowbeef: [snickers]
  • Bold Inflation: Diabetus sometimes uses this to directly contrast with the ridiculousness of the video game.
    Diabetus: (while navigating the Minotaur's labyrinth) KING'S QUEST SIX!
    Diabetus: (during the "Dance of the Bones") THE QUEST OF KINGS!
    Diabetus: (when an ornate dragon statue rises to cover up a safe) RISE OF THE DRAGON!
    Diabetus: (after Mookie and Sharon play an April Fools' joke on John Mayor) DEEP FEAR!
  • Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
    • In the second part of the Lechuza riff, slowbeef takes special note of the "Thank You" part of the credits, which goes to Lasse Carlsson, Linda Wagnerius, and Bloodbath Gojira Pripps.
    • In Crappy Pasta III: Hear Its Cry, the author goes into great detail describing the blocks and the music of the Blood Whistle treasure room, and then casually mentions that Toad's skull was split open and pouring blood.
      Diabetus: Again, he puts the most important details second. "The music was slightly changed, Toad's head was split open..."

  • Broken Record: Diabetus' commentary becomes this in one video, regarding savestate scumming:
    Diabetus: We should try, like, savestating our commentary.
    Diabetus: We should try, like, savestating our commentary.
    slowbeef: We should try savestating our commentary, you said?
    Diabetus: -ing our commentary -ing our commentary -ing our commentary.
  • Butt-Monkey: Tyler, ActionBastardAway's special guest, who spends the entire video rarely speaking, being berated, and being called "a petty douchebag." Diabetus has mentioned Tyler in multiple videos whenever a guest appears in a video for the sole purpose of silently remaining in the background to take the blame for the LPer's own mistakes.
  • Captain Obvious: Lots of bad LPers point out things that are blatantly obvious as a substitute for worthwhile commentary.
    • Diabetus also had a moment of this in the Last Alert LP. In one cutscene, three characters are mentioned and are named Red, Blue, and Black. Diabetus' reaction? "Those are colors."
    • From Dark Seed:
      Mike Dawson: These pillars hold up the mausoleum.
      Diabetus: Wow! I know how things work! I understand basic architecture! Guess I learned enough for today, bye!
    • From Crime Patrol:
      Rookie Partner: [under a sign reading "Danger: High Voltage"] Holy— This thing'll fry you!
      slowbeef: Thank you. Thank you for explaining what signs do.
  • Cargo Ship: Invoked in "Cool Minecraft Audio Mods"; the horrid sound quality coupled with the strange grunting noises the LPer makes partway through the video has the two hypothesize that he's attempting to fellate his microphone.
  • Cassandra Truth: In the Metroid: Other M retsupurae, slowbeef starts foreshadowing that the little furby-like creature is actually Ridley by giving it the Ridley voice from their Metroid Prime LP. After a few minutes of this, Diabetus responds with "I think I understand what you're inferring, but I have a hard time believing it."
  • Catchphrase:
    • "Dead to Rights!" at the end of some longplays.
    • slowbeef's "Oh my lord" and "God almighty".
    • In many Wrongpuraes, when there is an illogical puzzle, nonsensical plot twist, or something similar, slowbeef will say something along the lines of "Oh, shut the fuck up!" or "Fuck this game!" There's also sarcastic praise like "This is the greatest game ever!" or "Stunning!" for moments that are particularly goofy or complete wastes of time.
    • slowbeef also tends to say "Wait, was that editing?" when there's a sudden cut (mainly when it seems out-of-place given the rest of the video).
    • "What the hell is this?!" has also been used increasingly often by slowbeef.
    • Diabetus seems to be fond of "Makes you think, doesn't it?"
    • Diabetus also frequently says "SPRING BREAK!" when pretending to be excited.
    • Diabetus also has "so, there's that" and "that <verb>s my <noun>!"
    • "THE QUEST OF KINGS!"
    • [sitcom style] "Classic X!"
    • "That was awful." after the LP or game is over.
    • During Wrongpuraes, slowbeef likes to say "Oh get the fuck outta here!" when something breaks his Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
  • Celebrity Resemblance:invoked slowbeef and Diabetus point out that Professor James looks a lot like Northernlion.
  • Censor Box: The "Unregistered Hypercam 2" banner censors some nudity in the Cobra Wrongpurae.
  • Civil War: In Let's Play Pokemon - For The Queen, after noticing the player in question has a Jolteon named after ElectricalBeast, the duo jokes about a British civil war started by British LPers who see ElectricalBeast as their true king.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: While it's present in their commentary, they do NOT like it when it's used as a crutch for a lack of humor. Lampshaded at one point:
    slowbeef: You know, I swear like a sailor, and even I think this is shameful.
  • Complexity Addiction: A common theme for the Dahi̇r İnşaat videos slowbeef and TieTuesday riffed on was that the group in question is dedicated to automating things just because they think they can, rather than because it's something simple but still time-consuming enough that automation would be a good idea. It's also incredibly uneven, where ridiculously-complex things — up to and including on-site assembly of a giant armed quadcopter — are shown to be completely automated, and then some incredibly simple step at the end that absolutely could be automated — such as actually loading the ammo belts for that quadcopter's gun — has to be done by hand. The Drive Market features one entire floor dedicated to sorting merchandise into individual machines, only for them to dump everything all together onto a single conveyor belt that then requires human operators to sort it all out again to put the items in the actual "aisles". The aforementioned quadcopers utilize a design to airlift cargo, but then restricts its movement to existing roads anyway by using a pair of truck-mounted generators to power it, thus also requiring the use of flag semaphore to coordinate unhooking and reattaching the power cables as necessary every time the convoy reaches a bridge or any other kind of overhead obstruction.
  • Computers Speak Binary: Apparently, the pitchman in "Kickstarter Nonstarters: The New Era of Modern Computing" not only believes in this trope, but he's convinced that those zeroes and ones are actual zeroes and ones (instead of an abstract concept) and has based his idea of "busco quadnary" on adding two more numbers to binary, which he thinks will somehow make programming "twice as fast". slowbeef, who has dabbled in some programming, is absolutely flabbergasted by this, and that's not even the only thing wrong with the pitch video.
  • Continuity Lock-Out: invokedIn slowbeef and Diabetus's riff on Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) (which slowbeef is playing), the two admit that he sort of tuned out on the franchise a few years back in the early videos. This means in regards to a lot of characters (particularly in Shadow's subplot) that were established from previous games, the two frequently either make guesses in regards to their importance, or are just confused.
  • Continuity Nod: Not just between Retsupurae videos, but between Retsupurae and their normal Let's Plays as well.
    • When slowbeef finally took the time to play Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and got to the Quadraxis boss, the very first thing to spring to his mind was SNES9X.
    • On a similar note, in this video from that very same LP, Diabetus mentions "light beam aquaired." A couple videos later, slowbeef notes that none of the other Metroid flash games on Newgrounds can spell "acquired" correctly either.
    • While discussing combination weapons from Dead Rising 2 in this video, guest Toffile asks slowbeef if he ever combined the banana, knife, and rope.
      Diabetus: So this is "Bowser's Evil Test".
    • In some Retsufrashes of horror-themed Flash games, Diabetus refers back to the infamous John McCain face from Arise 2.
    • Subverted eventually, in a video where slowbeef and Diabetus guest-commentated on Vicas' playthrough of Super Mario 64 with his feet, on Tick Tock Clock, and specifically pointed out how they got through all of it without any ElectricalBeast jokes.
      slowbeef: Not everything can be about Retsupurae.
    • Back when slowbeef did screenshot LPs of games, it was a Running Gag that they always had a head explosion. A minute into the first Dark Seed II Wrongpurae video, slowbeef brings up that he did a screenshot LP of the game back in the day before asking Diabetus what he knows about the game; Diabetus says he doesn't know or remember much, but he does mention hearing that there's a head explosion. He also suggests that the painkillers prescribed to Mike Dawson are "Shinobix".
    • In turn, during their Wrongpurae of Clock Tower II, Diabetus observes that they had worked out some of the game's mechanics while standing in the bathroom - alluding to Dark Seed II's LPer frequently parking Mike Dawson in the same room.
    • Around ten minutes into It Came From the TurboGrafx, the professor dismisses the protagonist's claims as the stuff of "pulp fiction," prompting Diabetus to wonder, "Wait, are they naming movie titles now, like we used to do?"
    • Crime Patrol, as a Light Gun Game, stars the player as a cop who shoots absolutely anyone who points a gun at him. The wrongpurae is thus named "Jack Slate's First Day on the Force" after the similarly-trigger-happy hero of Dead to Rights, for which slowbeef and Diabetus previously did a Let's Play.
    • Their King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow Wrongpurae was (at first) jokingly titled "Meet 'n Fuck Kingdom", after a Newgrounds video that kept popping up in the "viewers also liked" section of their Retsufrash videos. slowbeef and Diabetus would eventually do a riff on Meet 'n Fuck Kingdom, and titled it "Quest for Glory".
    • From the end of the extremely-shaky Skyrim's Enigma Mod: "Well, it's a funky new directing style, that's for sure."
    • The duo handled Metroid Beginings [sic], which has its opening credits text slowly rotating. Diabetus immediately jokes that it's using the YouTube stabilization like the Skyrim video did.
    • Snatcher prints important words in all-capitals, to which the duo during their LP responded by shouting those words whenever they popped up. Early in the Metroid: Other M wrongpurae, the subtitles display the Bottle Ship's name in all-caps, to which Diabetus shouts that the ship is full of Snatchers.
    • In the video that makes fun of DarkSydePhil, there's a scene where he forgets to unequip the coolant spray and has the misfortune of getting into a firefight with it. In the riff on Hard Edge, there's a scene where coolant gases fill the room from several locations, causing Diabetus to joke that DSP is attacking the player character.
    • In the Retsufrash for the first Bloody Rage, when slowbeef is playing with the character creator and discovers he can make his character an inch tall, General Ironicus notes that "it's like we're playing a real MDickie game", referencing the time he and Chip played The You Testament and discovered it's possible to get trapped at the bottom of a staircase by making a character who's too short to ascend them. At the very end, slowbeef also mentions something about BigAl2K6, the subject of "The Most Shameful Thing in the World".
      • In Bloody Rage 2, where Barack Obama is a playable character, the group at one point discusses the sound clips the creator of the game chose to use for his attacks. Ironicus notes that there had to have been at least six quality sound boards for Obama, recalling that he and Chip used one for an episode of their No More Heroes LP, and "that was years ago!"
    • When asked to pick a direction to go in during Fog, Lagoman briefly contemplates with "Left or right? Left or right?!" before picking a direction.
    • In part 44 of their Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) wrongpurae, Diabetus is trying to convince slowbeef that Shadow (who, according to slowbeef, controls similarly to Sonic but more sloppily) is the Luigi to Sonic's Mario, suggesting he get in the mindset of playing as Luigi, then stating "frankly, you should play as nothing but Luigi".
    • Indienogo: Kamehamehuh? consists mostly of an overweight man doing katas while wearing a Dragon Ball shirt, barely able to keep himself in frame as he does so. Diabetus eventually comments "he could become a great M.U.G.E.N character someday".
    • A Running Gag in their playthrough of Afterfall: Insanity involves Slowbeef replacing his current fire axe with any new one he comes across. When Bearpigman finds a fire axe in Paradigm Shift, which was uploaded just after part 5 of Afterfall, Diabetus comments that it "feels like we've been dealing with fire axes a lot lately".
    • When wondering what kind of person enters haunted houses and doesn't just leave once haunted things happen at the end of The House II, slowbeef notes that it really would just be a better idea to leave right then and come back in the daytime, saying "I don't care how much of an irate ghost hunter you think you are!"
    • After the first couple minutes of Vorago consist almost entirely of a married couple arguing with one another following a car crash, Diabetus wonders if the player is taking the role of the couple's marriage counselor.
    • At the end of Dead Space (this game has tons of it), slowbeef notices that the creator of the game tagged it with the keywords "horror", "cult", "prophecy", and his own username. Diabetus then jokes that one of the tags should be "General Dysisa".
  • Creepy Monotone: slowbeef does this when reading the "Crappy Pastas" in order to make them seems a little creepier than they are. Comes back to bite him during his reading of I HATE YOU when he and his guests spend nearly a minute clearing up some confusion in the reading caused by slowbeef's lack of inflection.note 
  • Creepypasta: The "Crappy Pasta" series riffs on some particularly awful video game pastas.
  • Cyborg: Brought up on occasion, though for some reason the duo assumes that cyborgs are completely robotic, instead of living beings augmented by cybernetics.
  • Deep South:
    • Diabetus gets some stick for being from Alabama, especially here. He has since come to embrace the stereotype for the sake of comedy at times.
      Mini-Boss: (In an overblown redneck accent) HEE-HEE, GUY, AHM GUNNAH DESTROY YEW!
      Diabetus: ...That was a guest voice by me, Diabetus. Hope you enjoyed that rendition.
    • Where in time is Mario? has an LPer so Southern that even Diabetus is surprised. The duo particularly end up assuming that his "alternative" to save-stating every five seconds (i.e. using the emulator's rewind feature to go back five seconds) is done by literally lassoing Mario and pulling him backwards through time so he can try again.
  • Designated Hero: invokedA common theme between wrongpuraes is the games in question having protagonists that either are unlikable, are pathetic, act villainous in spite of being shilled as good, or a combination of the above.
  • Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: slowbeef in the video IWBTG, after screaming at a guy for getting the name of the guy who created Tetris wrong.
    Daft23: Damn you, Ketslakov!
    slowbeef: What? Who the Hell's—
    Daft23: Ketslakov, it's the guy who invented Tetris.
    slowbeef: NO IT ISN'T, IT'S ALEXEY PAJITNOV, YOU FUCK! ...Oh why did I say that on camera?
  • Does Not Know His Own Strength: Said of King Graham from King's Quest V when he tries to tap a staff on the fortress door to open it, but ends up shattering it.
    Narrator: The staff lies in several broken pieces on the steps.
    Diabetus: Several? Jeez, Graham.
    slowbeef: "Grandpa, what the hell is wrong with King Graham?" "Graham does not know his own strength."
  • Dude, Not Funny!:
    • Diabetus has this reaction in parts 3 and 4 of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, asking slowbeef how he's expected to joke about Nimdok and Ellen's scenarios, which are about the Holocaust and rape respectively. They sidestep this problem both times by having Diabetus play dumb for most of the videos - when he "figures it out" for the former, he has this reaction until he gets distracted by one of Nimdok's creations, and in the latter he stages a huge argument with slowbeef over general grievances he's had with the show (and promptly dropping them once Ellen defeats the rapist).
    • In "The LP is terrible... I hope it doesn't last", the duo has this reaction (with Diabetus saying the trope name) to the LPer making a Michael Jackson joke in a video recorded only about a year after his death.
  • Dull Surprise: The LPer in Desert Storm by Vlad the Implaer is so monotone and lethargic in his commentary that the crew riffing it got very bored and tired by the end of the video.
    slowbeef: Oh my god, he's putting me to sleep.
  • Easy-Mode Mockery: Played with. Both slowbeef and Diabetus have said that they'd rather watch a competently done Let's Play on an "easy" difficulty than one at "normal" or "hard" difficulty where the LPer spends most of their time getting killed. That being said, they won't hesitate to mock an LPer who chooses the easiest setting of a game that's regarded as being pretty easy to begin with.
  • The Eeyore: Cherrydoom, who occasionally guests in slowbeef and Diabetus's videos, is extremely pessimistic and sarcastic. slowbeef himself sometimes acts this way, especially in the earlier videos.
  • The Ending Changes Everything: After the Wham Line in "Huzzah!", it becomes apparent how all the commentary is made up of general criticisms with nothing specific about the video.
  • Ending Fatigueinvoked: slowbeef and Diabetus get very, very bored with the Marathon Boss fight with Crystal Boy at the end of Space Adventure Cobra, as well as the showdown with Lord Vlaew at the end of Exmortis 3.
  • Exact Time to Failure: slowbeef on Arise 3: "I'd like to imagine you're in the doctor's office and your doctor's like, 'I have some bad news, you have exactly ten minutes to live.'"
  • Failed a Spot Check: Some Let's Plays make it painfully obvious that they were directly uploaded to YouTube without the LPer going over the video first (that or just having extremely low standards).
    • Kayin (of I Wanna Be the Guy fame) not noticing the giant mouse cursor in "Let's Point at Super Metroid".
    • WHO IS A POKEMON IN THIS CRAZY WORLD where only 2/3s of the game is shown due to the LPer zooming in the screen.
    • Choose from: watching an LP, a lamp, or some Mario figures. The title says it all.
    • ZeldaAAaaAAAGH. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time becomes a terribly glitchy mess.
    • GAK, where roughly two fifths of the video consist of a solid green rectangle due to an encoding error.
    • Let's Play Sonic thhhhhe Hhhhhhhhhhhhedddddddddd Hedgehog ggggggggggggg features such a breathtakingly choppy framerate that the audio and video lag and skip like no other Retsupurae subject before it. It also has the window briefly resizing to show the player's desktop and a Steam chat window.
    • "Colonel, I didn't manage to avoid drowning!" has a non-technical variant: DarkSydePhil is confused by an "M9 Bullet Full" message because he thinks he doesn't have the M9 — when it's clearly visible in the weapon menu, and he equips that very same M9 not two minutes later without any comment. Both riffers are astonished.
    • In Kickstarter Nonstarters: Androx, Demon of Fire, the creator accidentally moves the game window out of video capture range, showing the title bar, and then moves it back in. This is not edited out of the video. He then runs into a missing warp event when trying to go through a door, and rerecords the footage having inserted the warp, but also without removing the old footage. Keep in mind that as part of a Kickstarter page, the video was meant to encourage people to fund the game's development.
      Diabetus: I need to get a little bit of advertising in this gold, in case you forgot this game.
      slowbeef: If you fund this, you will be able to minimize the window during gameplay. Just wanted to show that feature off.
    • In "George Wood Reviews Earthbound... Twice?", the Gaming in the Clinton Years video for EarthBound suffers a technical glitch midway through in which the audio disappears. slowbeef and Diabetus then watch the "Corrected" version of the video which includes the full audio of the review — only to forget the intro and outro that usually feature in the YouTube presentation, much to the duo's disappointment.
  • Fan Disservice: The general reaction to seeing Luke McCabe at the end of the Crime Wave RP in nothing but a speedo. But just to subvert things, the president's daughter then sits up from behind him in a bikini.
  • Felony Misdemeanor: Used for humor:
    • Near the beginning of this video, slowbeef asks "What sick Nazi fuck only gave [Billy] four and a half stars?"
    • Then in this RP, slowbeef and Diabetus speculate that the four people who disliked the original video were The Grinch, Scrooge, Satan and Hitler.
  • Finger Gun: In response to the Bloodless Carnage in Crime Patrol:
    Diabetus: And to think the officer's just pointing his finger and going, "pew-pew."
  • Foreshadowing: In their Dark Seed II riff, Diabetus briefly says that he's heard very little about the game, maybe something about a head explosion. This happens in the final stretch of the game.
  • Four-Point Scale:
    • slowbeef said this about YouTube videos during part 2 of the Eternal Darkness retsupurae.
      slowbeef: If you get one and a half stars on the fuckin' internet, that's like being at the Special Olympics and having them tell you, "you have to leave".
    • One running theme of Restufrash is that games on Newgrounds will often have overwhelmingly positive review scores no matter how bad they are. Perfect or near-perfect scores are handed out like candy, even if the people giving the ratings have a lot of complaints about the game, had nothing good to say about the game, completely hate it, never finished the game, or even never started the game.
      • Bizarrely inverted with one Jack French review which described the game as "one of the best detective games" while giving it a score of a half star out of five.
      • The "Sonic Boom City" retsufrash covers a game that literally does not work, and as such has multiple zero-star reviews. Then they find one person "gave [it] the benefit of the doubt" and rated it two and a half.
        Diabetus: Wow, that's like Newgrounds in a nutshell right there.
        slowbeef: "Benefit of the doubt"! People found that helpful! That is the least helpful review in the world!
    • One of the insults slowbeef hurls at Space Adventure Cobra is that IGN would probably give it a 6.
  • Funny Background Event: "Serious Dad" has a child repeatedly walking throughout the video in the beginning, which the RPers notice immediately. This is subverted when the LPer shows his kid how to play the game, then triple subverted when he leaves and never shows up again.
  • Gainax Ending: Played for Laughs in the end of the riff of Move or Die. The player clicks the link to give them feedback, and under "Other Comments" types "They were all released the next day, right?" Immediately following is a short montage of scenes from fellow ZapDramatic production Sir Basil Pike Public School, illustrating the reuse of certain character designs - ending with the vice principal (who has the same design as Mrs. Grimm) sending the player back in time. It finally ends with the infamous "Do you think I can take off my clothes here?" bit from Ambition episode 3.
  • GIS Syndrome: Pointed out in the Lechuza RP. In the respective Something Awful thread, the goons went out of their way to find almost every single image asset used in the game from across the internet, using Google Image Search.
    slowbeef: [on the "Graphics" credits] This is kind of bullshit, by the way. Like pretty much every art asset in this game was ripped off.
    Diabetus: Thought just the Google logo would be under the "Graphics" part.
  • A Good Name for a Rock Band:
    • In the Space Adventure Cobra Sega CD Wrongpurae:
      Text: Mobile Riders in the flames of hell!
      Diabetus: "Mobile Riders in the Flames of Hell" is the name of my band, actually.
    • During the MuscleBomber2021 RP:
      slowbeef: ROCK ENEMIES! They're not Rock Amies!
      Diabetus: "Rock Amy is my favorite band!"
    • A variant: In "Assjoe's Silent Hill", PA Master makes reference to a walkthrough in the comments section that chooses to refer to a specific event as "the ghost revenge". Mr. DJB notes that he would love to watch a movie or play a game given that title.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!:
    • In Jikkyu Oshaberi Parodius, the LPer says "crud" at one point, spurning the RPers to comment on such.
      Diabetus: "I don't wanna swear, but crud!"
      Shmorky: Yeah, crud! FUCKING CRUD!
      slowbeef: [as the LPer's mother] "Watch your mouth, Henry!" [as the LPer] "I'M PLAYING GAMES FOR THE INTERNET, MOTHER!"
      Diabetus: "Why don't you shut the heck up, you bitch?!"
      slowbeef: "FIDDLESTICKS, YOU SLUT!"
    • Lechuza's protagonist at one point shouts "Holy schmuck!", much to the amusement of Diabetus and slowbeef.
    • The standard sci-fi "Blast!" curse was used in Space Adventure Cobra. Not long after saying "Holy shit!" This inconsistency was not lost on Diabetus.
      Diabetus: Hold on, how can you say "Holy shit!" and then "Blast!"?
      Diabetus in mock voice: "Holy shit, consarn it!"
  • Gratuitous German:
    • A toy shop owner in King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! uses a stereotypical German accent and a few, incredibly butchered, German words. slowbeef seems to have some basic knowledge of the German language, as he sounds in pain after hearing the butchered pronunciations.
    • This popped up again in Prisoner of Ice, where slowbeef is very audibly annoyed by the even worse German (from Nazi characters, no less).
      Nazi Guard 1: Raus, Amerikaner! Schnell!
      slowbeef: [laughs] "Raowse, Ameri-conner, schnell! They didn't pay me very much."
      Nazi Guard 2: Raus! Schnell!
      slowbeef: "These are the only two German words we looked up!"
  • Guilty Pleasures: The Apocalypse video is no doubt this for slowbeef and Diabetus. Despite all the bad puns, barely paying any attention to the longplay, and slowbeef actually apologizing in the video tags, they both genuinely have a lot of fun firing pop culture reference after pop culture reference.
    slowbeef: Well look, we had fun doing it!

    H - M 
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In-Universe example, when Diabetus made jokes about Ellen's fear of yellow in the I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Wrongpurae, only to find out it's stemmed from a rape she experienced in her past. He even gave a What the Hell, Hero? to slowbeef for not warning him of this ahead of time.
  • Have a Nice Death: During their King's Quest V wrongpurae, they joke about the game's death messages and come up with their own. Diabetus later jokes that the narrator is incapable of feeling empathy towards Graham.
    Narrator: (after Graham falls off a branch and breaks his neck) Thanks for playing King's Quest V!
    slowbeef: That's the death message? That's like, "Thanks for buying our product, here's a bullshit death."
    Diabetus: "You wasted money on this. So here you go! Have some bullshit!"
  • Hell Is That Noise:
    • The town music, from King's Quest V, which they consider to be overly loud and almost unsettlingly cheery, and, to a lesser extent, the calmer remix used in shops, has this effect on them.
      Diabetus: Kuroinokaze recorded this just for us... to kill us!
    • LP Mario 64... very slowly have them worried for the computer the LP was played on due to the fact that it sounded like it was just roaring to keep up with the emulator.
  • Hiccup Hijinks: Diabetus gets the hiccups around the second half of the Dark Seed Wrongpurae. Of course, slowbeef lampshades it a few times.
    slowbeef: ...You've been drinking scotch, Diabetus?
  • Hurricane of Puns:
  • Hypocrite: In Space Adventure Cobra, the main character's internal monologue calls Crystal Boy a chicken-shit due to his apparent tendency to shoot when your back is turned. Immediately after this text appears, the longplayer selects "Flee" from the dialogue tree, prompting slowbeef to ask who the chicken-shit was here.
  • Hypocritical Humor: At the end of a Pokemon retsupurae, after slowbeef complains about how the LPer is just spewing nonsense and memes, Diabetus does the usual "Dead to Rights" ending. slowbeef immediately points out the hypocrisy of this, then says it himself.
  • Hypno Pendulum: Referenced at the start of episode 10 of Ambition:
    Courtroom official: She was seen leaving around 9:30pm.
    [A giant pocketwatch swings back and forth]
    ...
    slowbeef: I feel like I've been hypnotized watching this.
    [the watch disappears]
    Diabetus: "You want to play better game" - oh.
  • I Knew It!:invoked Diabetus seems to have quite the knack for accidentally predicting major plot points and Twist Endings in wrongpuraes long before they happen. Most notably, he correctly guessed the killer's MO in Ripper, made a joke about Eike being secretly immortal in Shadow of Destiny, claimed that The Town with No Name had Science Fiction elements long before its Twist Ending and asked whether Mike from Car Escape was actually Mike Ehrmantraut just before The Reveal that the game takes place in the Breaking Bad universe.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink:
    • In "Pinball Wizards' Growing Pains," Diabetus has to do commentary alone for a brief period, during which slowbeef gets up to make a drink.
    • In "Adults React to PewDiePie," one of the viewers says nothing and instead pours a drink and face palms.
    • At the end of one of the Ambition episodes, slowbeef can be heard opening what sounds like a beer can.
  • I Need to Go Iron My Dog: At the end of "Mario, Party of One?", when talking about nice comments they should leave Joshey164, this exchange happens:
    Diabetus: "Please invite me to your next party."
    slowbeef: Don't go that far, I'm not coming.
    Diabetus: No, no, I got a thing actually. During his next party I have a... I'm busy.
    slowbeef: I've got a really cool Wario Party to go to.
  • In Name Only: slowbeef and Diabetus have a lot of fun with Super Don Quixote's... loose interpretation of the source material. note 
  • Insult to Rocks:
    • In the "True Shit" Wrongpurae, when Diabetus comes up with the alternate title "BillyMC the Kid" for the "game", slowbeef immediately goes into Sincerity Mode and claims that Billy (or anyone else for that matter) could have made a better game. He makes a similar comment after mentioning someone calling Mike Dawson a "grown up Billy MC".
    • During the Metroid Beginings [sic] retsufrash, slowbeef says he can't make a "better than Other M" joke, because that's an insult to Other M.
  • Ironic Echo: One of the many ways the duo riffs on the LPer.
    Quadraxis14: Curse this hack!
    slowbeef: Curse this video!
    Diabetus: Curse you for existing.
    Quadraxis14: This hack is a hack... of hacks.
    slowbeef: YOU'RE a hack!
    Diabetus: I wanna hack my eyes out.
  • It's Personal: One reason for the Resupurae of the Policenauts review was that it was apparently posted on a thread regarding slowbeef's translation hack which he was still working on at the time. Even worse was that it was apparently full of spoilers in the gameplay shown, such as solutions to puzzles, which slowbeef blacked out for the Retsupurae.
  • Jerkass: The goons have a field day during the Monster In My Pocket RP, where "ActionBastard" lives up to the latter part of his name in when he continuously bullies his friend, Tyler, over not being as good at the game.
  • Jitter Cam: "Skyrim's Enigma Mod" has this effect, caused by the player using YouTube's camera stabilization feature on gameplay footage recorded from Fraps. It leaves slowbeef absolutely stunned and demanding an explanation, and draws comparisons to The Office.
  • Joke and Receive:
    • In "True Shit", when the main character heads to the upper floor of the saloon, slowbeef remarks "And now, we go up for a whore!". Turns out that that is exactly what he's there for.
      slowbeef: What? We really were getting a whore? I was kidding!
    • In "Surgical Strike a.k.a. Explosion!: The Game", near the end where the main character is relaxing on a beach and is approached by three girls in bikinis, Mr. DJB casually remarks that "It'd be great if these beach girls just started exploding." As if on cue, they immediately do.
  • Jump Scare:
    • Abused in quite a few flash games they've riffed on, particularly Arise (with a notable case where the game throws every previous jumpscare in sequence at the player when they get close to the end), Paradigm Shift (there's one on damn near every screen if you wait around long enough, enough that it was described by the player as "like Arise with GIFs"), and Real Horror Stories (upwards of two or three at a time every couple of seconds). Their reaction is generally the opposite of what the creator was hoping for.
      Diabetus: Huh?
      slowbeef: I dunno, I think that was scary. I was only half paying attention.
  • Lame Comeback: When a Newgrounds user left a harsh review on Pursuit, Godlimations called him a 'poo poo head'. slowbeef and Proteus don't address it, because, really, what needs to be said?
  • Large Ham: slowbeef at choice times, such as when a video enrages or excites him enough, or when playing up spectacle or drama when it's otherwise not present.
  • Let's Play: At the end of 2014, Retsupurae came full circle with slowbeef and Diabetus riffing on slowbeef's playthrough of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). Afterfall Insanity more or less ended up the same way, as slowbeef started recording the game himself after only one episode of someone else's longplay.
  • Let Us Never Speak of This Again: In "Diablo IV," once the duo finishes viewing the first episode of the American Darkstalkers cartoon:
    Diabetus: Let's just never speak about this again.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading:
    • thehof's LP of Half-Life 1: Blue Shift consists of nothing but this and blindingly bright graphics, probably due to the fact that he's playing this on the never-officially-released (i.e. hacked) Dreamcast version.
    • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) managed for a time to hide the fact that it had killed slowbeef's PS3 by doing so during a loading screen.
  • Ludicrous Precision: The creepypastas slowbeef riffs tend to treat measurements of time this way, writing things like "This continued for 25 seconds" or "I sat there for maybe 25 seconds, horrified by what had just happened." Even funnier, the times themselves are often implausible, like spending 10 minutes running Mario down a featureless corridor.
  • Male Restroom Etiquette: One video has them reacting to a Flash Video depicting a man giving a standup routine based around male public restrooms. They make fun of him for at one point saying people should follow this.
  • Manipulative Editing: In their Retsupurae of Dark Seed II, slowbeef edits out the main character finally winning at the ring toss carnival game, replacing it with a clip of one of his earlier failures. He claimed Mike Dawson would never win under their watch.
  • Meanwhile, Back at the…:
    • slowbeef is fond of parodying this trope when MSTing video games with silly or nonsensical plots. In fact, he mentions in "Resident Seavil 2" that several comments on the previous installment actually complained that he was using the joke too much. He then attempts not to say it throughout the rest of the video, only to grow increasingly frustrated with himself as he repeatedly does so without meaning to.
    • slowbeef and Diabetus take The Town with No Name to task for overusing this trope, which seems to be some sort of out-of-place Shout-Out to Back to the Future and foreshadows the Twist Ending.
  • Memetic Badass:invoked Created by the goons during their riffs:
    • In a parody of such, JacobMC, the fictional brother of BillyMC is said by slowbeef and Diabetus to not only have a Harvard degree, but is also able to finish Ninja Gaiden Black with his eyes closed and actually register his Hypercam. invoked
    • Rock Knight from the RP of Cobra's Space Adventures, who barely shows up in the game at all, but is the Batman of the game universe in terms of skill according to slowbeef and Diabetus. invoked
  • Mondegreen Gag:
    • A few examples from the Rise of the Dragon RP:
      Chang Li: It is also known by my humble self, and others, that you are investigating this affair.
      Blade Hunter: What others?...
      Diabetus: "Whatevers"? ...Did he just say "whatevers"??
      [...]
      Blade Hunter: ...It seems he gave her some bad juice.
      Diabetus: Some bad Jews?
      Blade Hunter: ...It's bad with a capital 'B'.
      slowbeef: I think "juice"... Wait—"bad with a capital 'V'?"
      Diabetus: No, no, I think the game's just really racist.
    • In ElectricalBeast's LPs, they consistently mishear his introduction as "The Giant of Let's Plays" rather than "The Jolteon of Let's Plays."
    • Two instances occur in Let's Rock Out!:
      LPer: I can do this!
      Diabetus: You're Buddhist? I don't see how that's relevant.
      ...
      LPer: This part is kinda easy for me.
      Diabetus: This part is Chinese for you? Muse isn't that hard to understand.
    • Also occurs in the riff on HarmfulGravemind, who has a Luxembourgish accent:
      HarmfulGravemind: Now comes... Wendy Koopa!
      Diabetus: Friendly Koopa?
      slowbeef: (imitating the LPer's accent) Friendly Koopa!
      Diabetus: That's a misnomer, sir.
  • Mood Dissonance: During the first "Slowbeef's House of Horror", the protagonist of the story just witnessed his friend getting killed at the hands of the game. And spent the night in a Hotel, during which he smashes his laptop and goes to sleep to see if he has the same nightmare he's been plagued with since he started playing. After he wakes up from the sleep he goes on to say how he was having the best day he's had in months, much to slowbeef's chargin.
    slowbeef: Your friend just died.
  • Motor Mouth:
    • slowbeef becomes one during his playthrough of the timed Arise 3, much to the confusion of Diabetus — and the viewers — since he had exactly 10 minutes to cure a "letal virus".
    • slowbeef does it again in "Let's Pl-.............aypokemonwithnoaudio," where he narrates the game in the style of Diabetus in Let's Read About Survival Kids. Only in this case, his narration has to race to cover the dialogue before it vanishes from the screen — and often fails. For bonus points, he sometimes has to pause mid-sentence due to the video lagging.
  • Ms. Fanservice: Brittany Cole in the Crime Wave Wrongpurae. The blatant fanservice is repeatedly mocked by the duo, who interpret it as a sleazy porn flick going on throughout the game.
  • MST:
    • Diabetus has also done more traditional MSTing on the Battletoads (Pilot) and the Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) series' infamous episode "Curse of the Lion Men" on retsupurae's YouTube channel.
    • The Retsufrash and Wrongpurae videos from slowbeef and Diabetus are riffs on the games themselves; the former category targets Flash games and animations on Newgrounds while the latter provides commentary over longplays.
      • This came full circle with the Wrongpurae of Shinobi Legions; the longplay footage is mostly comprised of cutscenes telling a typical ninja-movie story.
      • Likewise with Metroid: Other M, in which the duo riffs the game's "Theater Mode" rather than the gameplay itself, since their focus is on the abysmal story.
  • Mundane Made Awesome: Played With in "Asura's, Like, Wrath IS THE MOST AWESOME THING LET'S DO THIS" - the opening of Asura's Wrath is pretty awesome by itself, but ImmortalHDFilms's reactions are so over-the-top that it twists around to this trope.
    Chip Cheezum: Oh my god, do not show this man the first Superman movie!
    General Ironicus: Can there be a series where this guy just watches DBZ 'cause I would subscribe to the man.
    slowbeef: [imitating ImmortalHDFilms] "I'm amazed by fucking anything!"
    ChipCheezum: "Wait a second, there's a power level even further beyond!? WHAT!?"

    N - S 
  • Naked People Are Funny: This is why the commentary on "Kane and Lynch's Spring Break" is derailed from riffing on the LPer to riffing on the game.
  • Nightmare Face:
    • Generally averted in the Lechuza RP, which the pair summed up as essentially being Arise without the pop-scare JPGs - thus, Arise without anything to actually qualify as a horror game. But ironically, the title screen may unintentionally startle some viewers (like it did to Diabetus. Twice.) as it depicts the protagonist of the game wearing a wide-eyed expression, pouting fish-lips, covered with dirt and wearing slovenly clothes.
    • The duo quickly concluded that the bad ending to Paradigm Shift, wherein the protagonist just flees town without calling in a missile strike to destroy the town and eradicate the virus, is the "real" good ending after the actual good ending results in the protagonist reuniting with his girlfriend (despite not doing anything differently in the actual escape), who turns out to have the least-human-looking face in the entire game.
  • Non-Indicative Name:
    slowbeef: OK, so he called it "Let's Play" but he's not really talking. He called it Worms but it's not Worms. So "Part 1" is maybe the only truthful part of this except there's no "Part 2" yet and I guess judging by that, there never will be!
    • slowbeef also notes this with Paradigm Shift, wondering why it's named in a way that suggests it will change how video games are created or played but then has a plot which is a bog-standard ripoff of Resident Evil.
  • Noodle Incident: In The Unfair Retsupurae, Diabetus mentions taking a "violent shit" that somehow resulted in several deaths but was still less loud than the player's reactions to the game's difficulty.
  • "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • Not So Stoic: Diabetus is known for being one of the calmest of slowbeef's co-commentators. When he breaks, something has gone very wrong. For example, in the Dark Seed II Wrongpurae, when the longplayer seemingly tries to finally edit his umpteenth time going through the mirror maze, but cuts at the wrong points so Mike actually goes backwards through part of it:
    Diabetus: Wait, was there editing there?
    slowbeef: Yes.
    Diabetus: ...Editing what?! More mirror maze? "Wow, I got through that a little too quickly that time."
  • Obvious Betainvoked: Metroid Beginings [sic] stuns the duo with how outrageously buggy it is, which provides much of the video's humor. Of note is how often Samus falls out of the map and renders the game unwinnable, forcing the player to restart from the beginning... not that there's a way to "win" to begin with.
  • Oh, Crap!: During the RP The Marios, this is the trio's general reaction when the creator of the bad LP in question, LuwiigiMaster, disses Retsupurae during his LP. Diabetus later comments that he should pre-screen LPs before bringing the gang over to riff them. If one reads the comments, the guy apparently was trying to purposely make a So Bad, It's Goodinvoked video just to get RPed.
  • Once Done, Never Forgotten:
    • An early scene in Space Adventure Cobra gives the player the option to look at the female lead's feet. Retsupurae's subsequent characterization of Cobra immediately became that of an obsessive foot fetishist who may or may not actually care what the feet are connected to. Of course, it didn't help that Cobra described them as "A work of art".
    • The duo is certainly not letting ProtonJon forget that she was tricked into doing an LP of a Super Mario World romhack because she heard that the maker was dying of leukemia, which turned out to be a lie. Every video that she's commentated in features this as a punchline towards the end of the video, with two of said videos being nothing but the punchline.
  • Once per Episode:
    • If doing a Gaming in the Clinton Years Retsupurae, Diabetus starts with a Double Entendre related to the game George Wood is reviewing in his best Bill Clinton impersonation. It gets to the point where slowbeef is completely astounded by how many Clinton jokes he can come up with, considering the subject matter:
      "Are you ready to contend with what's in my pants?"
      "After I play Buster Brothers I'm gonna bust a nut!"
      "I'll show you why they call me Big Dong Donkey Kong."
      "Look in my pants and I'll show you why they call it the Playstation."
    • Also, starting with the Wrongpurae of Last Alert (and intially meant as a one-off reference to their LP of Dead To Rights: Retribution where they did the same thing), every episode now ends with them both saying "Dead to Rights."
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: One of the biggest running gags of the Dracula Unleashed riff involves the terrible accents of the many, many carriage drivers the player encounters, who all seem to have trouble deciding if they're trying to sound Cockney, Bostonian, Irish, etc. This becomes an unintentional Brick Joke when late in the game, an in-game newspaper reports that the town has been dealing with drunk carriage drivers, and the duo realizes that it explains everything perfectly.
  • Orphaned Punchline: The final boss of Galerians leaves the two out of material with how it drags on, so a portion of it is cut out. When they come back slowbeef and Diabetus are talking about enemas.
  • Overly Long Gag:
    • The beginning of Pursuit, where slowbeef and Proteus get stuck in Dialla's apartment for several minutes trying to collect everything Dialla seems to think she'll need - and then not thirty seconds after finally being allowed to leave, they're immediately sent right back in for a different plot event.
    • Diabetus drawing out an "Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..." during a particularly long stretch of nothingness in their Dark Seed II wrongpurae.
  • Overused Running Gag: Towards the end of Resident Seavil, slowbeef becomes annoyed at their running gag of staying quiet for the elevator sequence.
  • Perverse Sexual Lust: In "So there's that", MageKnight404, who inserted himself into a romhack, reveals that he has this for Linoan. The duo react the way you'd expect.
  • Poe's Law:invoked The guys have a little trouble with this sometimes.
    • In "The Marios" they mistake a troll for an actual moron, at least until he drops a line indicating that he was purposefully making a video to be featured on Retsupurae. The duo decided to start pre-screening videos beforehand after realizing they'd been fooled.
    • In "Amnesia: The Dork's Descent", Diabetus and slowbeef argue about whether or not the LPer's hysterical terror is staged. Diabetus is positive that it is, while slowbeef merely hopes so. The fact that the LPer in question, Jenomorph, favorited the video just hours after it was uploaded may support that theory.
    • They also occasionally have trouble accepting that Gaming in the Clinton Years was a "legitimate" video game show, as opposed to a very elaborate parody.
    • "Let's Play Sonic the Hedgehog, but Second..." features SuperBrosTV being wholly incompetent at practically every aspect of Let's Playing Sonic the Hedgehog - to the point even the title of the video is incorrectnote  — despite his whole gimmick for the LP being an in-depth walkthrough complete with extensively looking over maps of the stage at the start of each video. Diabetus actually asks multiple times, "is he fucking with us?" He eventually comes to the conclusion that it has to be on purpose, while slowbeef is still unsure by video's end.
    • "Mario Dies At The End" features BlackMetalGhost being incredibly incompetent at Super Mario Bros. 3, including dying to a Goomba in the very first level, twice, because he apparently doesn't understand the concept of pressing more than one button at a time, enough so that Diabetus quickly comes to the conclusion he has to be playing a joke and declares he's going to "do some research" afterwards. In this case, the question is quickly forgotten after the video ends with a wildly out-of-place heavy metal guitar riff over the Please Subscribe to Our Channel text.
    • "The Future of Video Games TODAY!" features an Oculus Rift "game" where the player ogles anime girls. The first stage is an otaku's room with garbage bags and empty bottles on the floor, which makes slowbeef wonder if the game is supposed to poke fun at the kind of people who would play it.
  • Police Code for Everything: From their riff on Lodge Massacre, the Sequel Hook at the end features police sirens playing in the background. Diabetus imitates a cop, saying "We got a 10-53, someone's making a sequel to a bad flash game, over."
    slowbeef: "Deadly force authorized."
  • Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Several really bad ones delivered by the killer in the Psycho Killer riff.
    Morgan James: ...Hang up... forever.
    slowbeef: ...Seriously? Shut the fuck up.
  • Pungeon Master: Diabetus. Referenced by Slowbeef in the Blood Whistle Crappypasta in which Peach makes a couple puns related to the way she killed some of the story's characters ("They got a little sharp with me so I pushed them over the edge). After reading this, Slowbeef says to Diabetus, "She's starting to sound like you."
  • Quintessential British Gentleman: Their take on ElectricalBeast, whose accent is so exaggerated it seems fake. In the second video they did on him, slowbeef refers to comments from the first one regarding his accent, saying "British people are like 'I can't believe how British he sounds'." Their ElectricalBeast retsupuraes have even created all-new English stereotypes between the group: Specifically, the English can now travel through toime and telepor'.
  • Railing Kill: Double Subverted. Diabetus remarks during Crime Patrol that it missed an opportunity to do one of these, only for one to happen a second later.
    Diabetus: That brave stuntman gave his life.
  • A Rare Sentence: "Mario Dies At The End" starts off with Diabetus reading the single comment on the original video, which the duo quickly notice is not something they ever expected to hear about a Mario game, and which quickly sets the tone for the video - namely, BlackMetalGhost dying to practically everything that can kill you in the first few levels of Super Mario Bros. 3, no matter how unlikely.
Diabetus: The one comment on this video is "those Goombas are kicking your ass".
slowbeef: The menus are, too. Wait, did you say Goombas?
Diabetus: Goombas. When has that ever been said in a Mario game? "Whoa, I didn't see those Goombas comin', man!"
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: slowbeef gives one of these to Quadraxis14 in the "SNES9X" retsupurae. Here is the speech without the Verbal Tic:
    Shut up! There are no viewers. No one watched this to the end except me. It is a seriously horrible video, Quadraxis14. There is no skill in replaying the same thing over and reloading save states over and over again. A monkey could do this. A kid can do this. It doesn't matter I don't know what the point of the video is. I don't know know why you're doing it. It will not make you popular in school. It will not get you girls or anything. It's a waste of time. I'm sorry. I'm taking away from 'On Liberty.'
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: The main two themselves. slowbeef is quick to upset and can get passionate when he criticizes someone or something, while Diabetus almost always stays collected, and is noted as being near impossible to anger. Diabetus even mentions this in Retsutalk #17 (calling himself the superego and slowbeef the id)
  • Reference Overdosed: The guys try to take this trope to the absolute limit in their RP of Apocalypse dropping Bruce Willis movie references (since he starred in the game) for around 20 minutes until they give up and start referencing pretty much anything from pop culture by that point.
  • Rescue Sex: At the end of their Ninja Hayate riff, after saving the princess, Diabetus tells it as it is.
    Princess: My hero!
    Diabetus: "I'm gonna get laid, hyuh!"
  • Retool: Centrally, Retsupurae consists of riffing off preexisting media, but the content has changed several times in the channel's lifespan. It was originally born out of making fun of bad Let's Plays, but quickly drifted into new sub-shows covering other content, such as video games in their entirety through pre-recorded longplays (in a subseries titled "Wrongpurae"), bad online Flash games ("Retsufrash"), bad creepypastas ("Crappypasta"), bad crowdfunding campaigns ("Kickstarter Nonstarter and "IndieNoGo)", and others. A lot of this had to do with the two main hosts' increasing discomfort with exclusively targeting Let's Players, partly because it started to come off as bullying, partly because some of the subjects they riffed attempted retaliation via false copyright claims, and partly because due to Retsupurae's increasing popularity, some were intentionally making troll videos to get featured on their channel.
  • Revenge Fic: The duo theorize that Mike Dawson must have done something to get Cyberdreams mad at him, considering Dark Seed II portrays him as the most obnoxious man alive who only a single character in the game can stand being around for more than a few minutes.
  • Romantic Comedy: slowbeef theorizes, at the end of Super Bummerman 2, why musclebomber keeps saying "amy" instead of "enemy".
    slowbeef: Amy must be like this bookworm chick who's into Let's Play, so he's trying to get his nerdy friends to help him do one, so he chose Super Bummerman!
    Diabetus: That sounds like the makings of the perfect teenage romantic comedy.
  • Running Gag: Tons of them:
    • One of the longest-running in the early days was pointing out when there was an Unregistered Hypercam 2 watermark in the corner of a video. The duo were even amazed to eventually learn that there's a third version. Eventually fell off as LPers moved on to more recent editing software that didn't add watermarks.
    • When making fun of adventure games, announcing an abrupt end to character interaction with variations of "Okay, bye!"
    • When a character opens their mouth ridiculously wide, Diabetus starts holding a note as if he were an opera star.
    • When a character has their mouth slightly open but aren't saying anything, or when they stay seemingly frozen in place (usually accompanied with an empty stare), Diabetus gives a static "Uuuuhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnn..."
    • Diabetus frequently uses a whiny "Unh!" grunt whenever a character punches or throws something.
    • "The Ridley voice" — a comically high-pitched voice coined by the duo during slowbeef's personal let's plays of the Metroid Prime Trilogy — has become the duo's voice of almost any reptilian enemy they encounter in a riff.
    • Diabetus's mentioning of different themes of music with ridiculously-specific names (eg. the "return the book to the library theme" in Dark Seed), usually during games that were lucky to have a dozen songs.
    • slowbeef's using a Mentok-esque "bweeeeee-oop" during teleportation of rapid camera movement.
    • The duo tends to have a Moment of Silence during Deep Fear's elevator screens. slowbeef progressively gets irritated by this, even stating that he's getting sick of having to keep the joke up.
    • Around the time when they started Retsutalk is when "I have no X, and I must Y" became one of these. It eventually lead to their Wrongpurae of the game in question.
    • In the Negotiator/Ambition series, slowbeef is repeatedly surprised at their title screens, revealing that the Flash games had an executive producer.
    • slowbeef's Bane impression and Diabetus stepping away from the microphone to yell whenever part of a Newgrounds review is in ALL CAPS.
    • After drawn out opening credits scene, Diabetus often pretends as if they were the closing credits, only for slowbeef to tell them the game hasn't started yet.
    • During the Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero Wrongpurae, Diabetus would occasionally say "Sub-Zero X!"
    • Blood, from the Crappy Pasta videos, particularly blood described as "hyperrealistic" or splattered over everything in sight.
    • In Slowbeef's playthrough of Afterfall: Insanity, exclusively using the fire ax (as well as replacing it with a new one whenever he comes across one).
    • Whenever there's Stuff Blowing Up, you can expect a joke or two about Michael Bay needing some alone time while watching it, especially during Surgical Strike and Dahi̇r İnşaat's military videos.
    • slowbeef trying to imitate a certain genre or comedy style and deliberately botching it, such as his attempt to do a Private Eye Monologue in Noir: A Shadowy Thriller, or how his back-and-forth movie title-dropping with Diabetus in Apocalypse devolved into him reading out the name of a movie in the middle of a sentence without context.
  • Sanity Slippage:
  • Sarcasm Failure: During the Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero Wrongpurae, Diabetus attempts to make a joke about the fire-breathing dinosaur:
    Diabetus: I.... I'm sorry this is ridiculous.
  • Scenery Porn: Parodied in "SnakemanMN Wants to Be the Guy", slowbeef and Dave_O begin to marvel at the amazing detail of the background of I Wanna Be the Guy when SnakemanMN pauses the game for two minutes to answer his phone.
    Dave_O: You see there's purple bricks; but then there's also... hold on a second... grey ones.
    slowbeef: Woah, you're right! I would never have noticed that if he hadn't paused the game for a full minute to pick up the phone.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
    • slowbeef tried to get Diabetus sit through a DeceasedCrab Let's Play of Jack Chan's Action Kung Fu, the latter immediately says "No, fuck this" and they gave up upon hearing DeceasedCrab's voice, ending the riff there.
    • Slowbeef and Diabetus get about halfway through Plumbers Don't Wear Ties before abruptly ending it, with later comments being made that shortly afterwards, the game ran out of material to joke about.
    • Chip and Ironicus start on a Minish Cap LP, but when the LPer says his cat is addicted to human sweat just one minute into the video they immediately give up.
  • Self-Deprecation:
    • Diabetus and his family are occasionally made the butt of jokes. In the RP of Nostalgic Rage's Mario 3 LP, they go on a tangent about if the LPer (who has a thick southern accent) is actually Diabetus' Dad. In another video, the self-titled "Worst Retsupurae Ever", Diabetus wishes the Pokemon LP would evolve into pornography, having to quickly add that he meant human porn, not Pokemon porn.
      slowbeef: Look, I know you're from the south, and you don't understand how evolution works, but still...
      Proteus: He's from the South, so he understands having sex with animals, but these aren't real animals.
      Diabetus: I'm from the South, and evolution is what happens when Pokemon evolve into the Bible, right?
    • Near the end of the Nocturnal Letters Retsufrash, Diabetus comes to the conclusion that the titular game was made in the South due to its terrible graphics and Brother–Sister Incest subplot.
    • The Kickstarter video for the "Wheelo" has text-to-speech audio with terrible quality, which prompts Diabetus to comment in the first few seconds that "they sound like us in our early videos".
  • Separate Scene Storytelling: slowbeef and Diabetus play with this trope by acting as if the video game narrator for King's Quest V is really reading a book to his grandson. The "grandson," who the duo names Billy, then proceeds to ask questions to his grandfather about the oddness of the story.
  • Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Shows up in some of the Crappy Pastas, "Blood Whistle" and "It Wasn't Lavender Town" in particular.
    slowbeef: "Their only purpose in creating this mod was to mentally and psychologically flagellate the naive soul poor enough to take the bait of its mysterious origin..."
    Diabetus: Is that the mission statement behind this ROM hack, really?
    slowbeef: (laughing) God almighty. I need thesaurus on every single...
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: In the Cobra wrongpurae, slowbeef and Diabetus sit through seven hours of the titular character's space adventures, only for it to end with a hurried sequence of events that the pair summarize thusly:
    slowbeef: Your two sisters died for a weapon I just shot...!
    Diabetus: Well, that was all pretty pointless, wasn't it?
  • Shout-Out:
  • Similarly Named Works:invoked In "Retsufrash is Art", slowbeef and Diabetus watch a playthrough of the ugolegend Flash Art Game "Loneliness" but read the user comments from the unrelated Art Game "Loneliness." without realizing their mistake.
  • Skewed Priorities: "Daft23 Wants To Be The Guy!" consists entirely of Daft23 trying and failing the same two rooms in I Wanna Be the Guy and, by the end of the video, ultimately making no progress whatsoever. This leaves the duo absolutely flabbergasted when he does cut something from around halfway through the video, and they merely have to wonder just what could have been too much even for this low of a quality standard to not make the cut.
  • So Bad, It's Good: invokedslowbeef has this reaction to Shadow: War of Succession. In a very intense way.
    slowbeef: I have to get a 3DO emulator tonight!
  • Sound-Effect Bleep:
    • Abused horribly in Raven Rage's Let's Play of Super Mario Brothers 3. The effects used to haphazardly censor his profanity included an obnoxiously loud bleep, an obnoxiously loud siren, farting and belching noises, and shattering glass. This was riffed on mercilessly in the commentary:
      slowbeef: "You guys got somethin' other than glass breakin' and fartin'? ...Think I got a siren."
      Proteus: "I don't know, let me see what I can get on freesoundeffects.com."
      Diabetus: "I'm gonna behead a chicken, you got one of them Yak Bak machines?"
    • "Test Your Mig--oh it's over" features a random, TV-style bleep in the middle of the source video. The duo makes fun of this both when it happens and in the post commentary.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance:
    • Space Adventure Cobra doesn't have that many music tracks, resulting in some wildly inappropriate music at times. Of course slowbeef points this out at every opportunity.
    • The source video for "OH YES I AM DOWN WITH THE SICKNESS" uses "Decadence" by Disturbednote  as background music for an LP of a Facebook anime-style profile picture application. The duo pretends to be otaku who think this is awesome.
      Diabetus: This music doesn't fit with what's going on at all!!
    • The sudden metal music at the end of "Mario Dies at the End" catches them both off guard and brings slowbeef to hysterics.
    • "Final Zone 2 Part 2" opens with Round 4 of Final Zone II as Momoko Ring, in which what sounds like the pop song opening theme of an anime plays in the background. In a top-down military shooter. The riffers joke that the soundtrack was composed before the game's genre was finalized.
      slowbeef: This is so not appropriate for the action!
      Diabetus: It's what she's listening to in her ears. It gets her into the killing mood!
      slowbeef: Final Zone II: Shit Just Happens and Then I Don't Know What.
      Diabetus: Final Zone II: Our Pandora Is Really Broken.
  • Space "X": Diabetus makes a big deal about the "Space" part of Space Adventure Cobra and the two of them prefix random things with "space" and talk about how things are the way they are because it's space.
  • Spin-Off: Webcam Ward, a video series on Something Awful with slowbeef and Khad (Diabetus took Khad's place from When Fur is Rubbed the Wrong Way on) commentating on various other Youtube videos.
  • Spin-Off Babies: The videos on Sir Basil Pike Public School — a series made by the same developers as Ambition and reusing many of the same assets — have the title "Ambition Babies".
  • Spoiler Opening: PTSD: Pokemon Traumatic Stress Disorder is an RP of a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers LP that consists of a failed attempt to get through a dungeon, preceded by a minute and a half of anime music playing over clips that spoil every plot twist in the game after that point.
  • Stealth Insult: During the credits of King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!, slowbeef and Diabetus notice that Roberta Williams was credited as a "Harpy" and a "Rat", and assumed that the game was insulting its very own creator.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial: The Meet 'N' Fuck Kingdom video has all the sex scenes censored out, with the player adding in text lying about what the character was doing.
    Narration: And then they drank tea. They certainly didn't engage in six incredibly frustrating, boring, and shameful sexual mini-games that were so needlessly complex, these three girls are essentially the final bosses of Meet n' Fuck Kingdom. Nope.
  • Sweet Home Alabama: Diabetus is from Alabama, and has the Southern Hospitality trait down to a tee with his more deadpan sense of humour and stoicism. During the State Flag round in "What is Madmatty Thinking?" "Correct!" he immediately recognizes the Alabama flag from a vague written description, without even seeing it.

    T - Z 
  • Take That!: Aside from the concept of being a gigantic Take That to Youtube Let's Plays, there are quite a few aimed at other sources.
    • From Let's Play *incomprehensible*: "He's still not as bad as Chip Cheezum."
    • From the Retsufrash of the game Death Trap:
      slowbeef: Well, what do you expect? It's Death Trap, AKA Saw for idiots! I mean, even more so than usual.
    • During their Earnest Evans video, one of the game's anime cutscenes features a camera angle centered on the corner of a jail cell, and the angles of the floor and walls appear to be way out of whack... or, as slowbeef puts it:
      slowbeef: 'Jail', by Tim Buckley.
    • In Retsupurae 3000, slowbeef comments that a logo on a secretary's desk resembles the Ctrl+Alt+Del logo. His next sentence begins with "Speaking of bad art..."
    • After making several largely-positive references to movies in Let's Play IMBD, slowbeef throws this in during the final boss fight:
      slowbeef: Hey, just so you know, The Big Bang Theory sucks!
    • In the King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow Wrongpurae, Death claims he cannot cry. They list a series of depressing movies that he's watched more than once. Among them are the Michael Bay Transformers movies.
    • Deep Fear features a character named Mookie. slowbeef makes a couple of disparaging references to the author of Dominic Deegan.
    • On slowbeef's now-private riff in one of Tobuscus's videos (overlaps with Insult to Rocks):
      slowbeef: I am the Tim Buckley of Let's Play... nah, I'm gonna apologize to Tim Buckley for that one.
    • slowbeef takes a dig at Andrew Dobson (author of So... You're a Cartoonist?) when mocking the Limited Animation in Ninja Hayate.
    • In "Resident Seavil Part 2", slowbeef decides he might have more subscribers if he randomly shrieks and yells "CONSENSUAL SEX!" over and over.
    • The Slender and Happy Wheels videos that slowbeef uploaded to the account are not only blatant potshots towards the games themselves, but to YouTube users that almost exclusively LP said games.
    • The description for "This Let's Play is Highly Recommended for (DATA EXPUNGED)" (which is In the Style of a SCP Foundation article) brings up/discusses SCP-231 as so:
      Viewing the original version has now been classified as procedure 111-Montauk, and is now how we traumatize that girl from SCP-231 instead, because that whole entry was terrible. Seriously, this wiki was supposed to be creepy horror stories, right? That one was just gross.
    • In the final part of "Ambition Babies", choices the player makes during the first scene overall have no effect on how the second scene plays out. Diabetus' reaction: "Choice is meaningless, it's Mass Effect all over again!"
  • Technology Marches On:invoked Pointed out in "Mad About Mario", where slowbeef notes that by the video's upload date in 2013, it had been a long time since they'd last seen an unregistered HyperCam 2 LP.
  • Tempting Fate:
    • In their Gaming in the Clinton Years Xenogears Retsupurae:
      slowbeef: Okay, this is Xenogears. So there's no fucking way you have a Bill Clinton joke.
      Diabetus: (In faux-Clinton accent) "I'll show you something that's Weltall."
      [Beat]
      slowbeef: (Astounded) Shit...
      Diabetus: Sorry.
    • During the Arise 4 RF, slowbeef mentions the how easy it is to accidentally click off a window during the game's awful combat sections, while he's fighting one of the enemies. No points for guessing what he does almost immediately afterwards.
    • Invoked during "Adults React To PewDiePie":
      slowbeef: [Sigh] Y'know, maybe I'm making to much of this, maybe it's not that bad. I'm sure it has some appeal and there's probably nothing that terrible in these videos I mean you know—
      PewDiePie: Look! He's raping her, he's raping her!
      slowbeef: I'm sorry, what was that?
    • This becomes an unintentional Running Gag throughout the Hopkins FBI wrongpurae, where slowbeef and Mr. DJB joke about stupid things Hopkins is about to do to solve a puzzle, and then he actually does them no matter how ludicrous. "I Was Just Joking" practically turns into their catchphrase throughout the entire series.
    • After the end of the mission in Surgical Strike, the protagonist goes to a tropical island to vacation with some bikini babes. DJB responds to this with "It'd be great if these beach girls just started exploding." They immediately do, courtesy of Kabul.
    • Near the end of Dracula Unleashed, Diabetus mocks Alexander's inability to protect anyone, commenting that he would come back into the house where his fiance is in along with Van Helsing and find it swarming with vampires. Seconds later, Alexander walks in on Van Helsing on the floor of the house, being attacked by Dracula.
    • In Sonic '06, the very first thing Diabetus says in the first part of the saga is "Will it explode your Playstation 3?". Sure enough, halfway through the game Slowbeef's PS3 went kaput.
    • Diabetus seems to have developed clairvoyance for imminent silliness. From their RP of Metroid: Other M's theater mode:
      Diabetus: If only grappling was authorized...
      Adam [in game]: Samus, use of the Grapple Beam is authorized!
    • During "Assjoe's Silent Hill", Mr. DJB notes that he feels that they're "not at risk", no matter what they do, because there are no forests to eat them (in reference to the two "Fog" games the group tackled earlier in the stream). slowbeef enters a room that the game notes a "nasty smell" is coming from as he's saying this, and five seconds later a jumpscare kills him.
  • This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: In the animation "Refund", the character screams in a monotone "BITCH, GET THE FUCK OFF ME. DIE, BITCH, DIE. GO TO HELL, YOU LITTLE BITCH, DIE." Later in the video, it provoked the following discussion.
    slowbeef: I— maybe it was, like, how to get a refund... Like, "Don't be afraid to take back your pumpkins."
    Diabetus: "This is an example of a defective product. Here's what you should do in this situation, bitch."
  • This Is Gonna Suck:
    • Diabetus gives his Deadpan Snarker take on the trope at the beginning of Queenie Z's LP of Eternal Darkness:
      Queenie Z: Hello everybody, welcome to my Let's Play: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Ruh-Queeum!
      Diabetus: I have a good feeling about this.
    • Also during one of the live streams, when Diabetus first shows slowbeef a blurry Super Mario Galaxy LP:
      slowbeef: Episode ninety tw-oh, get out of here.
    • In the Vampire Hunter Ina video, slowbeef gets a feeling about the overall video once the music comes on.
      slowbeef: Oh, Rammstein. Good choice... if you're angsty.
    • "The LP is terrible... I hope it doesn't last" starts with slowbeef stating that he had only seen 3 seconds of the original video. We then see said three seconds...
      teddybearmassacure: Okay! Welcome back to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Part FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!
      Diabetus: Ooh, you weren't kidding.
    • In part 7 of King's Quest VII, slowbeef is horrified to discover that the next part is nearly an hour. Made funnier by the fact that part 7 is the last one they actually riffed.
    • At one point in the Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) playthrough, upon seeing that he'll have to play Crisis City again as Sonic, all slowbeef can say is a flat "Oh no."
  • Title Drop:
    • In their Trapped Retsuflash:
      Narration: Why do I feel so... trapped?
      Proteus: Oh, I see what you did there.
      slowbeef: I can't believe that they actually did that.
    • Later, during the third game of the series they throw in forced title drops to all three games in the series — Trapped, Pursuit and Escape — in immediate succession.
    Dialla: Why do I feel so... trapped?
    slowbeef: "W-why do I feel so trapped?!"
    Proteus: I feel trapped! Trapped in this pursuit—
    both: —and I have to escape!
  • Together in Death: Joked about in "Jack Slate's First Day on the Force" when a Crime Patrol mook dies clutching a box in a warehouse.
    Diabetus: Aww, he was in love with that box.
    slowbeef: Now they can be together forever!
  • Toilet Humor:
    • A Running Gag in their Rise of the Dragon Wrongpurae involved the inexplicable fart noises the machines make.
    • Their riff on Deep Fear had a few fart jokes due to bubbles occasionally appearing behind John Mayor in underwater sections and a theory about air grenades. In part 3 of the wrongpurae, slowbeef brings up an anecdote about someone in his office who is apparently such a Gass Hole it affects other people's productivity.
  • Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket: "A Day in the Life of DarkSydePhil" parodies Phil's inability to perform basic actions in games, as well as his tendency to blame said games for his own incompetence, by applying the same thing to real life actions such as starting up a car, unlocking an iPad or even eating pasta with a fork.
  • Unfortunate Names:
    • Diabetus' real name is apparently John Assfucker.
    • Hammerbolt Joe and Crystal Boy, from the Space Adventure Cobra longplay.
      slowbeef: Is this supposed to make me afraid of Crystal Boy? Because his name is still Crystal Boy.
    • Soldier Boyz has squad members Butts, Lamb and Brophy.
    • At the start of the Hopkins FBI wrongpurae, Mr. DJB giggles at Bernie Berkson's name, but quickly takes it back once he realized what Bernie did.
  • Unusual Euphemism: Alexander's "Magic Map" in King's Quest VI.
    Narrator: Alexander pulls out his "Magic Map".
    Diabetus: Yeah, that's a euphemism if I've ever heard one.
    slowbeef: Every time he says that, I'm expecting something horrible!
  • Verbal Tic: A few forced examples as part of a gag:
    Second Kaizo Mario World Retsupurae: SNES9X
    I Wanna Be The Guy Retsupurae: Please Stop Let's Playing I Wanna Be The Guy
    Battletoads Retsupurae, with 007's shyer, nerdier brother.: Battletoads. Battletoads. BATTLETOADS. Battletoads.
    • Diabetus really likes to say "Battletoads", by the way - he does it several times completely unprompted during both his Battletoads LPs and his MST of the Battletoads pilot.
    • As mentioned above, slowbeef demonstrated in "Resident Seavil 2" that his habit of narrating illogical or abrupt story transitions with "Meanwhile, Back at the…" is more deep-seated than he realized when he unsuccessfully attempted to not say it throughout the whole video.
    • slowbeef says "y'know?" or "know what I mean?" almost constantly in the middle of casual conversation, such as during Retsutalk.
  • Viewers Are Morons: Justified in Nightmare House where the solution to a puzzle is blatantly told to you on a nearby note, due to it being another Moon Logic Puzzle. Which kind of defeats the purpose.
    slowbeef: Now, seriously—you remade the game and you kept these shit puzzles in? Like, you had the whole opportunity!
    General Ironicus: It would be really clever and keep people out if he didn't just tape the instructions to the wall right next to it.
    • Pointed out in the Cobra Wrongupurae when the game showed a flashback to something right after the game told Cobra what had happened.
      Diabetus: You had to flash back to this? How stupid do you think we are!?
  • Violation of Common Sense: In Arrival in Hell, slowbeef and Diabetus have to kill a demon (with burning flesh) - by attacking it with a deodorant flamethrower.
    slowbeef: We use the matches with the deodorant to get a flamethrower, to kill the beast with the burning flesh!
  • Visual Pun: In "A Day in the Life of DarkSydePhil", one scene has Psychedelic Eyeball draw a dog with two floppy ears. As in floppy disks.
  • Wham Line: From "The Marios":
    Luwiigi Master: [laughter] Oh my God, I'm sorry, people, it's just that I keep thinking about all these other Let's Players who, like, got made fun of by Retsupurae...note 
    slowbeef: Aww, shit! [commentary proceeds to derail entirely]
    • And another from "So there's that":
      Raymond: Linoan, I love you.
    • A few days earlier than "The Marios" comes this example from "Huzzah!":
      slowbeef: So, I know we were gonna wait until the 9 minute mark, but, um... I-I thi-I think they've seen enough. Should we tell 'em?
      Diabetus: I... Yeah, I- I think; we can't keep this up any longer.
      slowbeef: Yeah, uh, we actually haven't been watching any video. We're gonna splice this right over any one of DeceasedCrab's videos.
    • Duke Crabtree's immortal line from the final chapter of Ambition: "Because I'm a terrorist!"
    • After spending the entire video listening to George Wood's contradictory schizophrenic ramblings about the Toy Story game, he makes one comment that genuinely shocks Slowbeef and Diabetus:
      George Wood: Bottom line, when all is said and done, Toy Story has better gameplay than either of the Donkey Kong Country games.
      slowbeef / Diabetus: WAIT, WHAT?!
  • What Did I Do Last Night?: According to slowbeef, he and Diabetus got drunk and woke up to find that they had recorded an hour and a half retsupurae on an LP of Last Alert with no player commentary.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: invoked Basically the entire point of this video, where slowbeef and TieTuesday poke fun at a Fun Kids Smile web cartoon that uses plagiarized Disney characters and "jokes" about Domestic Abuse, sex and Toilet Humor. Even worse, there's more.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: Diabetus gave slowbeef a big one after slowbeef deliberately withheld the Holocaust and rape plot points from him during their riff of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, since it resulted in Diabetus accidentally making a lot of bad jokes.
  • What the Hell Is That Accent?:
    • Their reaction to Mrs. Ramirez in the Wrongpurae of Dark Seed II. They eventually narrow it down from "European Mish-Mash" to "Vaguely Irish/Swedish", but have definitely ruled out any sort of Hispanic accent like her surname implies.
    • Stanley from Prisoner of Ice draws this particular comment from the riffers, especially once he starts screaming "Mah engines! Mah ennngiiiiines!"
      TieTuesday: I can't even... begin to tell you what kind of accent they were trying to give him! I thought it was like shitty Southern at first, and now I just straight up don't know!
  • Who's on First?: In "Mass Erect", DJB jokingly interprets Diabetus reading a review by "youngerme" to mean that Diabetus was claiming to have written the review in the past:
    Diabetus: by youngerme4427: "sex my favorite"
    DJB: "Younger me?" You wrote that one, then?
    Diabetus: Yeah. What can I say? Sex my favorite.
  • Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Uttered by slowbeef in the first part of the Escape RP when Dialla has Dan McNeely at gunpoint. Subverted by Dialla actually taking the shot.
  • Work Info Title: "Meet 'N' Fuck Kingdom". slowbeef uses this as his justification for essentially ignoring the playthrough entirely and reading reviews instead.
    slowbeef: You meet her, you fuck her. It's Meet 'N' Fuck Kingdom!
    slowbeef: We met her. That means we all know what's gonna happen next.
  • Worth It: Diabetus comments that the head explosion in Dark Seed II made sitting through the game worthwhile.
  • You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: During the Metroid Beginings [sic] retsufrash, slowbeef and Diabetus log on to Newgrounds to see the review scores.
    Diabetus: Alright, I gotta - Three and a half out of five!
    slowbeef: [laughing] Where? The first one? No, wait...totally?
    Diabetus: No, I mean, just - aggregate.
    [Beat]
    slowbeef: You're kidding me.

    Retsutalk 
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different: Episode 23 features neither slowbeef nor Diabetus, but is done by Ironicus, his fiance, and Chip Cheezum about C2E2.
  • Blasphemous Boast: In one of the episodes where dave_o is present, he, Diabetus, and slowbeef get into talking about how they consider the Church Of Scientology to be a Scam Religion. It gets to this trope when dave_o suggests that Joseph Smith beat L. Ron Hubbard to the punch.
  • The Cameo:
  • Evil Laugh: In Episode 36, NorthernLion has a button that produces the laugh from Dungeon Land.
  • Fantastic Racism: Toward the end of the first Dungeon World episode, Diabetus animates a statue and tells it to kill all non-humans. The statue later shows up as a horrible monster, which leads to a Brick Joke that it's a metaphor for the evil of racism.
  • Fetish Retardant: invoked In Episode 78, where the duo discusses American Horror Story, slowbeef notices that the show's attempts to sexualize Jessica Lange is this to him, because Lange happens to look a lot like his own mother, making said attempts feel very weird and off-putting to him.
  • Funny Background Event: A lot of what Dave_O says.
  • The Ghost: Proteus is apparently slated to show up on the show eventually, but circumstances (including apparently becoming a father) have continuously gotten in the way of him showing up.
  • Hilarity Sues: In Episode 15, their discussion about Sega turns into this.
  • It Makes Sense in Context: In Episode 27, the guest Tim Miller tells a short story about how he translated a Shinobi Legions video into Japanese and gave the translation to a friend/editor to see if he got everything right. She was apparently quite confused by the line "ninja hand fart", among others.
  • The Jersey Devil: Dave_o theorizes that slowbeef is this in episode 8.
  • LOL, 69: Episode 69 is appropriately titled "Nice." While the episode remains faithful to the podcast's usual videogame-related topics, Slowbeef and Diabeetus joke about the number throughout the episode. The episode ends after a long stretch of silence, intentionally left in so that it would last 1 hour, 10 minutes, and 9 seconds, or rather 69 minutes and 69 seconds. The hosts also mention having been asked by multiple potential podcast guests if they could be featured specifically on episode 69.
  • Lower-Deck Episode: The "theme" of episodes 3 and 3.5, where Diabetus and General Ironicus talk about being "LP sidekicks" to slowbeef and ChipCheezum respectively.
  • Madlibs Catch Phrase: It's the "Breaking Bad of X".
  • Never Say That Again: slowbeef's reaction to Diabetus trying Pokémon Speak, and when Diabetus tried to impersonate Yoda.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: Discussed in the case of DarkSydePhil, where Diabetus says that Phil possibly plays up his ineptitude because it garners views and reactions. slowbeef however doubts it since Phil acts like that both in and out of games and that it would be fairly difficult to keep up the act all the time without some sign of slipping up.
  • Poe's Law: Discussed between slowbeef and Woolie in episode 48, where Woolie describes a point where they attempted to parody the trend of LPers relying on overexaggerated reactions only for their fans to mistake it as the real deal and calling them out for it.
  • Pokémon Speak: slowbeef says "when you're drunk, repeating their names is the funniest goddamn thing ever", and Diabetus jokingly says that's how he speaks when he's drunk.
  • A Rare Sentence: slowbeef says he has trouble believing that he's saying the phrase "ProtonJon was tricked into doing a Super Mario World ROM hack LP."
  • RPG Episode: Episodes 45 & 49 consist of slowbeef, Diabetus, ChipCheezum, General Ironicus, and 100 HOGS AGREE playing the game Dungeon World.
  • Running Gag: Transitioning with "so there's that."
    • The Breaking Bad comparisons in Episode 2, and Diabetus fixing things in post in episode 8.
    • Diabetus mentioning that he'll fix or edit entire chunks of the recording out in post.
    • slowbeef gushing about the SA Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc thread... and in later episodes, slowbeef complaining about how he's gotten fed up with it.
    • All of the "Live from PAX" episodes begin with the duo and whoever they're with reading aloud Craigslists ads for "casual encounters."
  • Samus Is a Girl: In Episode 27, Diabetus and Cherrydoom are surprised to find out that guest MelodicWaffle is a girl.
  • Shout-Out: Episode 9 has a segment where slowbeef and Diabetus give shout outs to some Let's Plays on the forums that they enjoy.
  • Special Guest: Frequently.
    • Recurring guests:
      • General Ironicus: Episodes 3, 3.5, 13, 23, 45, 49
      • ChipCheezum: Episodes 6, 13, 23, 45, 49
      • Dave_O: Episodes 4-8
      • ProtonJon: Episodes 8, 15, 24
      • Cherrydoom: Episodes 19-21, 27, 29.
    • Dectilon and Phiggle in episode 12, Psychedelic Eyeball in episode 14, orenronen in episode 16, and TotalBiscuit in episode 32.
    • Parodied in episodes 26 and 27; the "special guest" is slowbeef both times.
    • Lowtax in episode 34.
    • Northern Lion in episode 36.
    • Yahtzee in episode 37.
    • Supergreatfriend in Episode 39.
    • Michael and Ray of Achievement Hunter/Rooster Teeth in Episode 41.
    • Woolie of Two Best Friends Play in Episode 48. Pat in Episode 54.
    • Zorak (anime/manga mod of SA) in Episode 50.
    • Jim Sterling in episode 55.
  • Take That!: Diabetus takes a shot at Jeff Dunham, comparing him favorably to PewDiePie, though as if he's surprised to be doing so.
    • It's hard to find a podcast where they don't take at least one cheap shot at PewDiePie or DarkSydePhil.
  • Un-person: In episode 8, they jokingly try to turn ChipCheezum into one of these.
  • Values Dissonance: Discussed in Episode 16 regarding how the Japanese handle Spoilers compared to North America. Basically, spoiling something in the Japanese section of the internet blackballs the user and Japanese forums can have separate threads on a game: one where people are starting the game and one where people have finished the game and can freely reveal spoilers. invoked
  • Vulgar Humor: Discussed in Episode 10, where slowbeef argues that PewDiePie is overtly bringing this up in regards to rape and other vulgar jokes in a misguided attempt to be funny.
"...Dead to rights?"
"Dead to rights."

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