This entire video may as well have been titled: 'Why Jim doesn't understand irony.'
His whole 'persona' is that of an pompous, self-important games journalist, the irony apparently being that he isn't in fact any of those things. Except that he is. Just because you overplay your assumed persona doesn't make it 'ironic', it makes it painful. The irony would be to engage the audience as a know-nothing self-important egotist, and in delivering the act present an argument that is, in fact, the opposite of that.
The very fact that he calls Duke Nukem out on his apparent lack of self-aware irony is ridink-dam-donkulous. Duke Nukem succeeds on the levels of irony that Jim is blatently unaware of. Duke is over the top, crazily machismo and, in fact, worshiped and adored. He is a caricature of the action hero superimposed upon the surface of a nearby planet! The pure hyperbole which is his only recongizable characteristic forces the player to attempt to mediate this bent perspective purely to keep two feet in that universes ground.
When the whole world is screaming at how fantastic Duke is, himself included, and you can actually see he is an overindulgent hero it forces the realisation of: Man this guy is actually a douche, into your perspective. Otherwise you could not sanely inhabit the world you are introduced to.
Duke doesn't need to be self-aware himself, nor does anybody in the game world, they are equally ridiculous. The makers, however, are blatently aware of this oddity, and push it to its extreme. The player plays the game to be Duke, to fill the role of ultimate action hero, but in portraying this vision to its maximum potentional, we realise that its not exactly all its cracked up to be. The dissonance between the thrill of the action and the dispelling persona of Duke creates the whole frickin' experience.
Jim, on the other hand, bloats his performance while attempting to be self-deprecating and insightful. I don't think he is too full of himself, actually. But I don't think he deprecates himself either. It smacks of a inferiority complex more than anything, pushing a big image onto people because you are dimly aware of your shortcomings, but instead of addressing them, you put on a facade. As for insight, well, read the above.
ark Forces a badass that went guns blazing while cracking jokes? Or Vice-Versa? You had freedom to decide this as you played. The characters' experience was yours.
