A real consumer advocate and a gentleman, RIP.
I'm quite late to the news given that I was on vacation in New York City, but still I must comment on this sad turn of events. On that day in history, on May 24th, 2018, John P. Bain, aka. Totalbiscuit, passed away from cancer. When I heard about this from a good friend of mine on DA, I was a hell of a lot more shocked than sad, given that not too recently on May 1st of this year he retired from reviewing games due to his health regarding the battle with cancer and stuck to playing games with his wife; at that time I theorized he would have about 1 to 2 years to live. The reason I expressed shock at the time when he died is simply because his death arrived much earlier than I thought and during the time between then and his retirement I simply prepared myself for his eventual death from cancer (though I admittedly missed the memo that he possibly can die in 2018 and he did). God, thinking about then and now makes me wonder if we of humanity wasted our time and energy getting wrapped up in dumpsterfire covfeffe politics instead of finding a cure for cancer; hell I felt more angry at our constant failure to do so (and kind of right now as of this writing). Even so when d-bags come out and think his death made them happy and say a bunch of garbage stuff that somehow justifies his death, especially that guy from Bioware, as if he was a part of ISIS or Justin Carmical. F--k them, but I'm not going to waste my time and energy ranting about them, since I feel like it wouldn't do TB service, especially after his untimely passing. I'm well aware of his recent dumb behavior involving him being exclusionary towards Trump supporters and people who voted for him, his negative overreaction to the "Are Traps Gay?" thing and suggesting the fake news media hold the current POTUS accountable when the reality is not so, but I'm not bothering to go over them either so instead I'll focus on my positive experience with him and the good he did in his life, and it's better this way.
I first came across him sometime in January 2013, when Angry Joe was doing a top 10 list of worst games made in 2012 in his experience and one of the segments had Bain doing a voice over commentary on the game featured in said segment, Gettysburg: Armored Warfare. I was quite intrigued by the work of the guy who did a pretty good summary of how bad the game is in spite of its unique concept. And admittedly did get hooked on his work, seeing his take on truly bad games like The War Z (aka Infestation), Rambo the Video Game, and Day One: Garry's Mod (of which he stood up to the wrongful takedown of that video in question after it came out at the time), hell I would encourage you to look them up (if you haven't already) to see how well he exposes the horrid quality of the games in question. Not to mention he was quite a good ally in the ongoing Gamergate controversy (or rather war) when much of the mainstream media was bashing the GG group by ripping the garbage "Gamers Are Dead" articles a new um, organ along with the trash comparisons of gamers to ISIS and responding to nonsensical statements by the ExtraCreditz schmucks. Not to mention he held many podcasts called the Co-optional Podcasts, on various videogame related topics with many guests such as AngryJoe, Nerdcubed, Jim Sterling (that chump), Superbunnyhop, and Yatzhee Croshaw; and plenty of them were enjoyable (especially the one on Metal Gear 7: Phantom Pain on the day the game came out) though I have not seen them all and frankly not in the mood to, I have other things to do you know. But I will say that he managed to be a pretty good game reviewer even in a time when many mainstream reviewing sites were becoming unreliable (and I'm pretty sure still are), and keeping up his ouput of interesting content even when he was succumbing to cancer since his unfortunate acquisition of it in 2014; it's safe to say he fought to the bitter end to keep his channel going. Though admittedly I lost interest in his work when he began to have less and less negative WTF Is...? videos but I respected his choice to do so in regards to his health and me again other things to do in life.
I haven't kept up on what's going on with him outside of his struggle with cancer until his passing but I will say that never did wish death on him, quite the opposite in fact. I mean the best thing I can wish people is to live as long as possible ideally for around 100 years at least but sadly that doesn't happen often (but hopefully I might but that's another story), especially in regards to Bain. He was one of those fellows online and offline that I can like and respect and dislike in some regards over those after mentioned issues in the first paragraph but still like to an extent. I just don't think we'll ever see someone who is as talented as him again for a long time, no matter how good whoever's the "spiritual successor" can be; it's one of those times that well make me upset when good talented people die and bad dudes don't (but then again there was Justin Carmical and the recent allegations of his sleazy Weinstein-Cosbyite antics), no matter how timely their deaths are. I will give my condolences to his wife Genna and his son who now have to live without him and so do we the gamer and internet community, he definitely will be missed, no matter how highly or lowly we think of him.
I hereby salute him in honor of his contribution to gaming culture, farewell friend.
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