Work in progress. Editorship is requested.
Darksydephil/DSPGaming (Philip Burnell) is a 30 year old YouTube video gamer personality that is best known for his live commentary on his video game playthroughs. Due to constant trolling and negative backlash towards some of his videos, he has been given the nickname “The King of Hate” and has a fan following.
Origin
Darksydephil began his YouTube career in 2007 on his original channel, Darksydephil. It is rumored that his first playthrough that he did was Fallout 3. He rose to fame with his Heavy Rain playthrough which is considered to be one of his funniest playthroughs of all time.
His popularity was further expanded with playthroughs of other games such as Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Mass Effect games, Fallout games, and PS Move games with his best friend John Rambo. In summer of 2010, Phil lost his normal everyday job and as a result, he partnered himself with Machinima in fall 2010 thus making him a full time YouTube employee.
Spread
DSP is also known for his other segments such as Friend Request Ridicule (cancelled), Ask the King, DSP Tries It (cancelled then rebooted), Poorly Cooking with the King (cancelled), Week in Preview, Release Day Unboxing, The Hateful Truth, and Project 7 (cancelled, then rebooted, and is now on indefinite hiatus). He also does annual traditions such as an April Fools special, a Mega Man week, a Halloween special, and an end of the year countdown of DSP’s funniest moments (funniest racist moments in 2010), worse moments (changed to worst gaming trends in 2011), and the best games of the year.
Criticisms and Controversies
People have often been critical of how Phil does his playthroughs. Many critics have claimed that DSP is completely unobservant in some situations and often ignore simple facts about the gameplay which is shown in such playthrough such as the HD remake of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Black Mesa. In his Metal Gear Solid 2 playthorough, viewers noted at DSP’s inability of using the L2 button which activates health rations in the game and also Phil’s failure to use stealth techniques. In part 9-11 of his Black Mesa playthrough, DSP struggled with a crouch jump on a certain platform and has accused the failure to do a crouch jump as a game bug. Phil has been noted for accusing parts of games to be bugged without realizing that the failure to complete a task in the game is actually his fault and not the game’s fault. As a result, Phil’s “haters” have uploaded reaction videos of these moments.
In April 2010, DSP began a playthrough of Splinter Cell Conviction with 13 videos. One day, DSP received a copyright strike from Ubisoft and had his channel taken down. However, Ubisoft claims that they did not send a copyright strike to DSP and it was later revealed that a troll by the name of Steve Jones sent DSP the fake copyright strike. As a result of the Steve Jones controversy, Darksydephil was used as an archive channel to this day. Phil also created a new account called DSPGaming which is used for his current playthroughs, RedDeadDSP which was only used for his playthroughs of Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire due to a previous copyright strike on Phil by Rockstar Games during his GTA IV Lost and the Damned playthrough, DSPFinalFantasy which was used for a playthrough of Final Fantasy XIII, DSPStreetFighter which was used for any fighting games playthroughs, and The King of Hate HD which was used for non-gaming vlogs.
Other controversies included the end of Phil’s Godfather II playthrough which was cancelled due to a nudity strike, and as a result, Phil could not upload a playthrough of Dante’s Inferno due to the nudity. When nudity was involved in Phil’s playthroughs of God of War III, Red Dead Redemption, and Heavy Rain he used funny images to block out the nudity.
In 2011, DSP showcased his hatred of the mainstream media especially after the bashing of Duke Nukem Forever. In July 2011, Phil bashed Playstation Magazine for giving Catherine, F.E.A.R. 3, and Captain America First Soldier the same score of 7/10. He later got into an intense feud on Twitter with freelance game reviewer Mitch Dyer. In October 2012, Phil defended Resident Evil 6 after critics bashed the game. To show his defience to the mainstream gaming media, Phil gave Resident Evil 6 a 9/10 and placed it at #4 on the top 10 games of 2012.
In 2012, DSP was involved in numerous feuds with the popular YouTube gaming personality Toby Turner (Tobuscus Games). The rivalry began when Phil posted a video stating that he was outraged when ads for college football video game NCAA Football 13 which featured Turner appeared on the side of DSP’s videos. Throughout 2012, Phil has often bashed gamers such as Turner, PewDewPie, and IJustine and called them “phony YouTube gaming personalities.” This incident was placed at #2 on DSP’s Worst Gaming Trends of 2012.
Plans for 2013
In January 2013, DSP announced that he was going to make changes to how he would do his playthroughs. The first change is that Phil play less games every week and upload less videos everyday so that people can catch up. Phil also announced his new segment called Retro Replay in which he will replay a previous game from his early days as a YouTube gamer and post it on his main channel. He has also unblocked everyone in the comments section and will now post all fighting game coverage on his main channel. Finally, DSP announced the creation of a new channel called TheKingOfHateVlogs where Phil’s non-gaming vlog-like segments would be shown. So far, fan reception has been positive to these changes.
Personal Life
Philip Burnell is 30 years old and lives in a condo in Connecticut and currently has a 20 year old girlfriend named Liana who is also a Machinima partnered YouTube gamer and goes by the name of Panda Lee. In many of his videos, Burnell has often discussed about his back problems in which one of his disks is disconnected due to unknown reasons. He states that walking, driving, and doing other normal activities for a long period of time can have a painful impact on his back. DSP states that he would like to move out of Connecticut due to high condo property taxes and would like to afford a surgery to fix his back.