I don’t have the patience for those videos but as some1 who was reading stuff on JStor yesterday I certainly cant claim the higher ground
id have infinitely more patience for these if they were written articles its true
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if only blogs weren’t dead and/or on life support =(
i have frequently considered doing edited videos since apparently everything has to be in video essay form now and then just felt like the effort wasn’t worth it
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yeah i know 43595395890345894954 people in that situation it feels like at this point. everyones fed up with video but also stuck in it
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it’s something that’s also troubling me a lot.
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i might try and engineer one big video and then tell people they have to follow my blog if they want more, lol. but i’ve also seen lots of massive video essays pop up that didn’t get much viewership - so that could just end up feeling like a timesink that goes nowhere.
Just thinking about some of this as problem of production cost (effort + acquiring and materials), a NPR style narrative-podcast seems like the obvious form that the would-be bloggers of 2023 could pick up to accommodate a video essay watching audience without becoming video editors and visual artists. I guess this was kind of what rebind io did for a little but that wasn’t very successful (just a thought, but she went to the same college I did, where our curriculum was to teach eng 101 students to do podcasts, so I wonder if this is where she got the knack). I find NPR narrative podcasts really cloying and impossible to trust, but they are easy for people to listen to and lots seem to really like them.
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i think podcasts can be useful and they are less work than edited video (though still a lot of work esp for more edited ones, as i can attest). but i do think they’re a different audience than people who watch video essays and appropriate for different contexts. video essay audiences tend to skew younger and towards people who are more natively online. podcasts have had their own waves of hype and are a pretty over-saturated landscape in their own way as well. and it’s a more niche landscape that youtube, and less easy to skim than writing. so i’m not sure that’s a great solution to the problem of visibility.
i personally also just don’t like listening to podcast analysis of games (even ones that are relaxing to listen to like Watch Out For Fireballs) unless they’re a more broad discussion about the space around games in general. cuz i do think looking at images really helps to talk about games on a more granular level.
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If I knew I was going to spark a discussion on essay youtubers I would have posted this instead.
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yeah
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Super Boy 3 (Master System)
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the pannenkoek2012 videos aren’t criticism or an essay or even meant to reveal something novel about programming — they’re a window into a peculiar functional understanding of a game in service of a nonsensical goal. the dedication and focus they have for finding the fewest a presses possible over a decade is fascinating in itself
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I can strain to see a nobility in pursuing your own alien goals, but what hurts is that there’s an open book and someone is inventing their own alphabet instead. I see this and I think of thousands of years of theology straining to build by excavating the ground underneath.
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i don’t strain but i adore gazing into the abyss for anthropology. i have been heart of darknessing into taylor swift fandom recently and the human imagination is amazing
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tbh i prefer pancakeman’s belabored reinventing of the wheel to having no explanation at all:
sniq has uploaded dozens of videos like this recently, barely any of which have any commentary at all
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Pancake has a whole channel of that!
that vid at least has some notes in the description
Waterworld (Virtual Boy)
music by Jonathan Dunn
Virtual Boy Wario Land (Virtual Boy)
Yume Koujou: Doki Doki Panic (Famicom Disk System)
Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, translated as Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic and usually referred to as simply Doki Doki Panic, is a Japan-only video game developed by Nintendo in cooperation with Fuji Television (who also made All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros.) for the Family Computer Disk System to promote its event called Yume Kōjō '87 (translates to Dream Factory '87).
All Night Nippon Super Mario Bros. (Famicom Disk System)
This super-rare, Japanese-exclusive floppy disk game was an overhauled rerelease of Super Mario Bros. that was only ever made available through a raffle sponsored by Fuji’s popular radio program, “All Night Nippon.”
The first level now takes place at nighttime, some of the enemies have been changed to suit the likenesses of a few of the radio show’s DJs, and various other changes have been made to background and item graphics. The ending is also different, resembling more the end of Super Mario Bros. 2 (“The Lost Levels,” not the American game originally released as SMB2) than the original’s, but the Toads now look like various personalities from the show. Much of the game actually looks like SMB2 - it appears as if the levels from the original have been transplated into the framework of the sequel.
You also can now play as Luigi, and he plays just like he did in SMB2 - he’s far more agile than Mario, but he’s also a bit more unwieldy thanks to his speed and his slipperiness on flat surfaces.
Though most of the stages feature minor differences from the original SMB (mainly in enemy placement and number), a few stages have been swapped around, and a few have been outright replaced with stages from SMB2.>
The biggest and most notable change, and the one that really makes this version worth checking out, is the inclusion of somewhat altered versions of the final special stages from SMB2.
To access levels A-1 through D-4, you have to beat the game eight times in a row. Notice the stars to the top-left of the title screen’s logo graphic? That shows how many times the game has been successfully completed. You can play with either character, and warp zones don’t disqualify a run of a game loop from the count, so here’s how I did the video:
Playthrough #1 is done with Mario, and all 32 stages are shown. No warps at all.
38:34, 2nd loop with Mario begins.
All loops after the first are of a higher difficulty level.
Warps zones are used in playthroughs 2 through 8.
Stage order: 1-1, 1-2, 4-1, 4-2, 8-1 through 8-4.49:56, 3rd loop with Luigi begins.
59:00, 4th loop (Luigi)
1:08:43, 5th loop (Mario)
1:17:54, 6th loop (Mario)
1:26:57, 7th loop (Luigi)
1:36:39, 8th loop (Luigi)
1:45:57, 9th playthrough (Luigi) - starts at level A-1 and shows all of the special bonus stages. The game no longer begins at 1-1 after the eighth loop has been completed.
Only 3,040 copies were released. Due to high demand and limited supply, listeners were told from December 15 to December 19 to send a postcard which would be entered into a lottery for 2,000 of the copies. The card must be postmarked by December 20 to qualify. Winners received a reply postcard to alert them to send a money order for their copy. 1,000 copies were sold directly at Nippon Broadcasting System’s music center window on December 20, which lead to a long queue of prospective buyers in front of the building. In addition, Famicom Tsūshin (Famitsu) and Family Computer Magazine (Famimaga) each gave out 20 free copies to their readers in a lottery. The deadline for Famitsu was December 25 while Famimaga’s was January 15, 1987. Famitsu received over 30,000 submissions.
The game is a remix with most of the level designs adapted from Super Mario Bros. along with the likenesses of the show’s hosts as sprite swaps. It takes place in the ビバ王国[4] (Biba Ōkoku, Viva Kingdom), which is named after “Viva Young”, the slogan and subtitle of the All Night Nippon radio program. It is also the name of that show’s newsletter. Likewise, the “幻の商売繁盛”のコーナー[5] (“Maboroshi no Shōbai Hanjō” no kōnā, “Illusionary Business Prosperity” corner) that Bowser lures Pitiable Sunplaza in with is the name of a recurring segment in Sunplaza Nakano’s show. He would perform a guerilla gig at a small business, usually a restaurant, and overwhelm it with customers. Other games with a similar concept of Mario meeting Japanese celebrities were found on the Satellaview, with spiritual successors such as BS Super Mario USA, BS Super Mario Collection, and a version of Wario’s Woods. Kaettekita Mario Bros. was another similar project.
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