I’m telling you guys, check out the Polygon Overview videos with Griffin McElroy. He’s aces.
We both know you’d just end up screeching and making lots of inside jokes.
Will do, stusser.
Unfortunately Armando, you’re well spoken, thoughtful, actually funny and rather quiet. You’re like the total opposite of anything popular on YouTube. Fail harder noob!
IGN has hired Max Scoville.
I mean, you guys laugh, but I got a lot of creepy requests to read people bedtime stories when I did a video review of a keyboard once.
In all honesty, though, it’s atrocious trying to find good Let’s Plays/Quick Looks/Video Reviews. There’s the “Interminable Screaming Pre-Teen,” the “Awkwardly Obsessive, Muttering Neckbeard Tinkering with Obscure Settings for Hours on End,” the “Nice Guy Who Has the Perfect Representation of the Most Unlistenable Sort of Stereotypical Nerd-Voice,” and of course classics such as “A Bunch of Loud-Mouthed Idiots on a Skype Call Smoking Weed and Dying a Lot” and “Guy Desperately Trying to be Yahtzee but Mostly Just Sounding Like a Mildly Angry British Teenager Somewhere on the Spectrum.”
If I ever found a channel where 1 or more people consistently played the games well, talked about them with more substance than just describing what’s happening on-screen at any given time, worked in insights and jokes smoothly and wittily, and possessed voices with more aesthetic grace than early 90s Scandinavian black metal vocals, I’d probably cry a little.
MBMBAM is one of my favourite podcasts. It’s well worth starting at the beginning and going through the archives. I’m less of a fan of the D&D one so far, mainly because they play it a lot straighter than Harmontown does. By the way, the other McElroys are prolific comedy podcasters too. Justin and his wife do a great medical history one called Sawbones, while Travis has started one about doomsday prepping called Bunker Buddies.
Apart from those two I haven’t found any really good generalist ones… Maybe Pyrion Flax, but he’s 50% DotA. but if you specialise a bit there are loads. Scott Manley for space games, for instance. IamPetard for RTS (though he seems to have stopped).
That’s another reason I was annoyed at TotalBiscuit: too many videos of Hearthstone and whatever the fuck MOBA he plays. He probably gets more hits / stream viewers for less work so I don’t really blame him, especially with his ongoing issues.
It would help if YouTube let me filter by name within a channel. The channel operators would probably revolt though.
Yep. Griffin definitely has a stereotypically nerdy guy voice, so if that turns you off-- your loss.
I don’t know about TB but a lot of YouTubers split out their coverage into playlists.
Well I can give you a nod towards a crew (4-5 regulars) who put together deep lets plays. I present you Spoiler Warning. A group of people who think about, analyze, and discuss games at a deeper level than most. Also puns.
Off the top of my head, for strategy games:
Northernlion, quill18, and Das24680 are all pretty good.
If you could make a Giant Bomb like site, that had people with even half a clue about the games they were quick looking, it would be a huge success. I find GB to be actively annoying, in almost every possible way. Those quick looks are a great opportunity to get a feel for what a game is like, but they are usually completely squandered by the participants being either clueless, not funny, hating the game, or some combination of the three.
“In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. This becomes more and more true every year, to the detriment of society as a whole. I want to see people that have actually bothered to take the time to understand what it is they are suppose to be covering…I can’t be the only one.
I second and highly recommend Das24680. Probably my favorite YouTube Channel for well over a year. Das is calm, mature, and insightful about the games he is playing.
-Todd
Seconded. I don’t really match up with his taste in games but I love Justin’s Polygon Overview stuff. I’ll still watch the occasional Giant Bomb one (the Velvet Sundown quicklook was great).
I largely stopped watching QLs for this reason. In the early years they made more of an effort to understand and showcase what the game was trying to do (whether or not they liked it.) That kind of playing ethic is almost completely gone from their coverage.
Polygon Overview didn’t quite work for me. My loss or whatever, that’s okay.
These guys do too many 50+ episode Let’s Plays. I don’t see a way to subscribe to specific playlists on YouTube.
Pewpewchewchew used to be my go-to channel for strategy games, but he switched to Let’s Plays a while back to try to monetize his channel.
Anyway this is kind of a tangent. I’ll wait for TotalBiscuit to feel better.
Could you give me a TL;DR version? That is a lot of text!
-Todd
We need a like button before video responses so we can mark which posts are truly excellent, like that one.
Oh boy…I’d be really shit, because for a start you’d be lucky if you got me in front of the camera, maybe if i was wearing one of those Anonymous masks? And my voice would need to be run through a voice synth thing, and you would not get to see anywhere around my home, so the camera would be in tight on my mask, maybe i’d do a little window showing the game (but that sounds like too much effort already). It would be a dry watch.
Content wise would be ok, i’ve been around games long enough to know all, but never, ever, ever give me a AAA game from later than 2005 to review. That is sort of like the warning you get with gizmo about not getting wet etc. So yeah i’d suck, but atleast i’d save you all a bunch of money you’d waste otherwise (if you took my advice that is) :)
I’d be terrible to watch unedited. Cue scene:
speaking: So in playing this game I discovered some really neat features. First off when…
baby cries
walk away from computer for 10 minutes
speaking: umm where was I. Lets see, I’ve got the menu up. I think I was talking about some scenario design thing. Oh yeah, the characters are really…
mumbles off camera to answer wife
walks away, comes back in 40 minutes
speaking: so much for having an hour. May as well pack it in.