Edgelord adjacent possibly, but I like Civvie 11 and Grimbeard.
The former covers old and retro-styled shooters, the latter adventure and/or horror games.
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Been watching this Game Grumps thing about the Dendy:
Edit: Aw it’s fake, I knew it was too good to be true
The Dendy itself is at least real I guess. No ethernet capability though.
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Rein of hearts is really nice but they stopped making vids 9 years ago :crycry:
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been dipping my toe into age of empires ii again after way too long throughout the year. been catching up to some channels that cover the game and this one is probably my favorite. he casts regular games of high-level players and also bizarre / hilarious shit like this:
this other guy is an actual pro-player and also has good stuff
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i myself am not currently looking for what seems like a new lifestyle but this seems like a neat game at least to look at
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Not youtube buuuuuuut…
Just got done watching these nice folks stream Cotton 2 on saturn.
Random banter, small crowd, good stuff.
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this is a good vid, the ending starting @~18m is particularly great
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extremely entertaining no-swords Zelda 1 randomizer race with commentary by Steve Buscemi
e: the sound comes in at ~2min, it’s fine after that though
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I’ve started watching this guy and I find him amusing. He’s definitely a YouTube gamer but not the worst.
Japanese arcade YouTube accounts, all updated regularly. Fight man’s paradise.
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i made this post back a few years ago of non-shitty videogame youtubers. you all have probably heard of most of them but maybe worth looking at anyway.
my favorite on the list is Ross’s Game Dungeon, which i will often sing the praises of. i also would probably add Super Bunnyhop and Stop Skeletons From Fighting on there if i had to update the list cuz even though neither are my absolute favorite, they definitely have worthwhile stuff. also Mandalore Gaming is not too bad. my shameful guilty pleasure game youtubers i would not recommend in any universe unless you have brainworms like me is The Game Chasers.
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I like mandalore gaming as very vanilla-90s-pc-gamer reviews of video games that don’t overstay their welcome
I wish noah caldwell gervais (and especially hbomberguy) could get an editor to reduce their videos to less than 3 hours per.
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most of the 3 hour guys i totally hate. hbomb has a handful of good videogame videos because at least he tries to take interesting positions on a few of them. usually very long analysis videos i find extremely dry and boring and filled with pedestrian takes and it depresses me as a “game critic” of some sort the amount of viewership they have vs. games writers with infinitely more insight who no one reads. like i don’t need more super conservative thinking that solidifies bullshit conventional industry practices as the law of the land that define everything about games - what’s the point of even doing that.
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I actually reserve all my ire for super bunnyhop and errant signal because all they have to offer is bland polygotaku style received wisdom about games, nothing new to say at all
Noah CG’s at least got his whole 'write about games like I’m writing a travelogue" thing going which can meander to interesting places once in a while (even if it takes too long to get there)
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i don’t really agree with these takes on either super bunnyhop or errant signal because doing videos about something no one else has done or having a slightly new take still puts people way ahead in my book than people who are like “The Nintendo Entertainment System - A History” or whatever and have nothing new to say. like i don’t care!! i really don’t! but they’re certainly not the most exciting of youtubers i suppose.
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Here’s the lazy joke answer:
But to be serious I think the dry, faux-academic just-the-facts videos are popular in part because a lot of people (present company excluded, of course) don’t want to necessarily be proselytized to or listen to a bunch of strongly stated opinions from someone doing a character for their channel or whatever. Particularly if they’re just now developing a new interest in video games as a hobby and want to learn more about “how it all started”.
Also people just love stories, either telling them or hearing them, and all history is as understood by ordinary non-academic people is just someone’s story about what happened in the past that led to the present.
I guess I’m saying “boring and safe” is popular because it’s boring and safe. And I know half the time when I’m on youtube I’m treating it like a podcast service just looking for something to put on in the background while I do something else (like play games) and will gravitate towards videos that are longer as a matter of course. I don’t always stick around for the whole thing but I give the gaming history videos a shot because I think there’s always a chance I’ll learn some interesting nugget I didn’t know about before (but I usually don’t because most of those videos are just regurgitating already established facts). Though sometimes you get someone like Ahoy who is well produced and will go into a lot depth like in his series about the development of graphics or how the Cold War influenced the development of computer systems (and thus video games).
But yeah I agree there are way, waaaay too many people trying to occupy that particular space of youtube genre and only a handful really doing it well or interesting.
On another note I watched Super Bunnyhop’s two most recent videos, one about Global Warming as represented through the last three decades of strategy games and another that was just an interview with one of the lead designers on Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, and found a lot to like about both. Often his videos are pretty hit or miss with me because he falls back on just received wisdom as Tulpa pointed out but I found those two both entertaining and informative.
I don’t play a lot of strategy games so that video was pretty good at pointing out how climate is represented and implemented mechanics-wise and the related political currents influencing everything. And Ancestors, well I wasn’t going to play it but I probably will check it out at some point in the future now after hearing the interview and the developer acknowledging where they stumbled, talking about the challenges of what they were trying to achieve, and how the game itself is actually a decent lesson in current anthropological understanding of human origins.
So there is definitely utility in that format.
This ended up being a lot longer than I intended when I started typing it. I didn’t realize I had all these opinions!
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my main issue with this is that i’m not just annoyed by long dumps of received wisdom on things (because received wisdom usually = no wisdom at all lol), but that i don’t particularly find it to be entertaining or engaging on its own terms either. there’s a lot of “dumb tv” i’ll watch that is exhilarating in its own way (i.e. Ghost Adventures) that may not provide any real challenge or stimulation to me but is at least entertaining. but a lot of those 3 hour essay guys are boring and rote and don’t particularly manage to even make that received wisdom feel interesting to me. even though i think Pewdiepie is garbage i understand more why people who are in the mold of him have so many fans than some of those long essay guys.
i think some of that stuff is outright poisonous in how much it convinces you that there’s real insight to be grasped there there if you’re committed to watch for that long vs. how little content there actually is to it when you get into it. i find that more offensive than just vacuousness or whatever.
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Mrbtongue come home
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like 7 years ago i really wanted to do a video gaming 101 type series that would be pedestrian and boring but in like 20-30 minutes and cover single games. so like, hey what’s Dragon Quest and what did it influence in the past 30 years? I think there’s value in saying “I know you love Pokemon, you wanna know where that came from?”
But I never did it, and also uh i guess i don’t care anymore
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