were they seriously actually trying to play the fucking game?! The instructions were on screen ffs! When he finally figures it out - he dashes like 2 seconds too late 
some fine gaming skills
There's no way this can be real... if so, that person needs to stay away from video games before they seriously hurt themselves.
It's real, first he got all defensive on twitter:
https://twitter.com/deantak/status/904219261333151744https://twitter.com/deantak/status/904223320618409984Then he wrote an article about how it was all a joke.
I intended it to be funny, and I apologize that I so misread the tone. Not just the tone of the video and the story. I mentioned from the first sentence that I suck at Cuphead. As my colleague pointed out, I misread the climate in which it was received. I apologize that so many expected the best from me, and they got horrible gameplay. I apologize to my fellow game journalists, as I just made everybody’s lives tougher again. My own responses to my critics revealed my ignorance on a number of facts. In fact, platform games like Cuphead are not my specialty.
...
I came back with video that I thought was unusable, but my colleagues thought it would be funny, too. I didn’t make a weighty judgment about whether you should buy Cuphead or not. I wrote a slice-in-time preview. It was naively devoid of context that possibly could have headed off that anger. So many people didn’t realize that this wasn’t a serious review. I was messing around at first, and I wasn’t focused and serious until I had warmed up.
BUUUUTTTTTT actually, it's part of a GamerGate Plot!
Another game journalist (and some say “shitlord”) saw my video. He clipped it to the 2.5 minutes of the most damning inept gameplay, and he posted it to his followers. He used me to condemn all game journalists, raising the smoldering issues around Gamergate and its focus on game journalism ethics. His post was political propaganda for the disenfranchised gamers, the sort who went from Gamergate to the alt-right and elected Donald Trump as president.
Before he got to it, my video had maybe 10,000 views. Afterward, the Gamergaters, or hardline reactionaries — or whatever we would like to call them — believed this narrative fit into their views about game journalists just fine. They called for my head. They said I should fuck myself. I should be fired. I had brain damage. I was distinguished mentally-challenged. I should kill myself. A couple of comments were racist.
I despise how this was triggered by a viral post that represented the worst of fake news. This was my own little Black Mirror episode, where I was the target not because I was a victim, but because I had perpetrated a wrong against this mob. It was not unlike the heat that Google endured after firing James Damore, who wrote a controversial diversity memo.
Some critics were quite funny, like one who said I had discovered the Dark Souls of tutorials (Yep, even I know that Dark Souls is a hard game and comparing games to it has become a cliché). I could see how “pulling a Dean Takahashi” would be a joke about incompetence at games. Still, it was a bit hard to laugh, because they were so expert in their cruelty and so gleeful at my expense.
And plus the haters are jealous:
One of them, Mr. Serious, called me out. I responded to him with something thoughtful, and said I wondered why the commenters were so mean. To my surprise, he apologized, and said it was the first such mean comment he had ever left. He said he looked up my bio and was jealous of my job, where I got paid to play games. I thanked him for my apology, as it restored my faith in humans on the internet.
I say I get paid to play games. But that’s a partial truth, and it causes so many assumptions to be made. I am foremost a business and technology writer who focuses on the game industry. I’ve written 14,882 stories in my 9.5 years at VentureBeat. That is 30 stories a week. But I do about a dozen or so game reviews per year. I go to a lot of preview events where I play, but most of my job is writing about game and tech companies. I have 21 years experience covering games, and 26 years covering technology. My own view is that a lot more people should be paid to play games.
My critic, by the way, has posted 196,000 tweets, or 13 times more than the stories I have written at VentureBeat. Between us, I’m not sure who has more time to actually play games. But I don’t have a lot, and I bemoan that fact. In a 15-hour work day, I’m lucky to get an hour of game time. But I don’t hate my job, as some critics have said. I’m not waiting to give my job to someone who is more eager and enthusiastic. I love this job. Not because I am a skillful or prolific gamer. Because I have fun. I live for little moments, like when Mike Morhaime, the CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, thanked me for 25 years of good coverage.
In all of my 45 years or so as a gamer — yep, since the original Pong came out — nobody ever denied that I was a proper and legitimate game fan. Until now. People who watch the Cuphead video assume that I could not possibly be a game fan. I lack the skill. I don’t deserve to be paid to play games. But during all of the time I have written about games, none of my bosses cared about exactly how good I was at playing. They required basic knowledge and competence, but not skill on an esports level.
But really he's out there fighting for the little people:
Gamers need to stop being mean to those who aren’t skillful. They don’t need to put others down to elevate their own subculture. Games have gone viral. They’re more popular than ever, reaching 2 billion people around the world. They have become a $108 billion industry. It’s silly to look down on games.
That industry will grow bigger, and gamers will get better games, if we embrace the new gamers. We don’t need to dumb games down. We can have adjustable difficulty, so that the unskilled and skilled alike can play. We can make tutorials even easier than the one that I failed at so miserably.
No, I’m not blaming the developer for my own shortcomings. I respect the designers, even if I didn’t truly understand at first the games they’ve made. I would just like to make sure that they make their games for people who are new, or noobs, as well as hardcore fans. As Nolan Bushnell, cofounder of Atari, said, games should be easy to learn and hard to master. (Yes, I know Cuphead’s tutorial isn’t that hard to learn).
No, I’m not celebrating mediocrity, like the Antonio Salieri character in Amadeus. I’m arguing that all gamers, casual or hardcore, deserve recognition. We are not all going to be esports stars who rake in millions of dollars. But we’re going to be the masses of unskilled players who make the game companies, including the makers of Cuphead, as rich as they can possibly be.
Also did you know he's respected by journalists unlike you?
My fellow journalists have come to my defense. Minotti mentioned that I broke a story on Blizzard canceling Titan (even if he slightly misremembered it). Kat Bailey of US Gamer pointed out that I wrote that Xbox 360 defects story. Brian Fargo, the CEO of InXile and the personality in gaming that I have covered longer than anyone, said, “I don’t like them picking on our Dean!”
There are people who I haven’t talked to in years who have come to my defense. One fellow said he worked with me years ago. Another asked him if I sucked back then. The fellow replied, “He was always kind to me. …” That kind of thing keeps me going, because I do believe in the karma of kindness. My friend Luke Stapley in China started picking fights with people who were trashing me. Thanks to the friends who have my back.
I appreciate the thought, but I hope we can elevate this conversation beyond a civil war. To me, bringing back a little civility, tolerance, and kindness to gaming and the internet is what we so desperately need.
Unfortunately, the video in isolation on YouTube lacked the full context. It didn't explain that we were posting this as a joke. A shitlord on Twitter also linked to this video and claimed these are the same people doing reviews. People came to the conclusion that this video was somehow part of a review, and the clip and this description did not provide the proper context to correct those assumptions. That is our fault.
None of this excuses the racism, sexism (why is your go-to insult for a bad gamer always a woman?), death threats, calls for suicide, or really even the anger that drove people to demand anything of Dean or us. If this video frustrated you, we get that. That was the point, but it's worth a laugh and not much else.
A group of people want to use this clip -- the only one of the handful he recorded at Gamescom that suggests he lacks competency -- and a Mass Effect review from a decade ago that he had to retract to justify their claims that he should not have his job and needs to be fired. In the process, you have to be intentionally ignorant of the rest of his career. But let's ignore the books he's written about the Xbox and Xbox 360 and the scoops he's had about Blizzard canceling Titan or the reach of the RROD scandal.
The Mass Effect review mentioned is in relation to how he played through like half of the game or more before learning how to equip new skills or something. Then wrote in the review how it made no sense that they give you all these but don't let you use them.
