Videos about Video Games (that are interesting)

Seeing Rock8man dredging a quote up from the depths of a 14-year-old thread to post a Tim Rogers video made me think we needed a more on-point thread where people could post YouTube (or whatever) videos concerning video games.

So, worried that that interesting video essay you found isn’t quite journalismy enough for the games journalism thread? Or concerned that it doesn’t make sense to post it in the self-promotion thread because you had nothing to do with it? Or want to post a video that is not Twitch related, so it doesn’t make sense for it go in the Twitch thread?

Maybe post here instead.

(If there is a thread like this already, I never noticed it. Apologies if there is one.)

I’ll get things started by linking back to the aforementioned absurdly long Tim Rogers video.

Also, here’s some dude named Tom doing a playthrough of a dungeon-crawl:

Which is not a video game, but I always liked his boardgame playthroughs.

Everything done by Noclip is just incredible. Here are some of my favorites - but if you only watch one, definitely start with the Flight Sim doc. Danny brings out emotions I never thought I’d feel about Flight Sim:

Other favorites:
Hades documentary series
Arkane Studios
The Making of Outer Wildsf

Noah Caldwell-Gervais also was already brought up once or twice here. Longform pieces worth watching. Haven’t checked out his latest on Watch Dogs yet though since it just dropped.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_7ngJDbUQE

Channel link

Also, hbomberguy does a variety of videos - and sometimes a deep dive on specific games.

(And if you didn’t guess from watching the FO4 vid, he wasn’t a fan of FO3.)

FNV is great but its muddy graphics really lessened my enjoyment of it.

I like him a lot too. His travelogues are even better. I remember someone here posting his NWN video and thinking I’d watch some more of his video games retrospectives but ended up watching his videos about travelling through the desert instead. Though, I eventually made my way to his video game ones.

This is such a great idea for a thread. I had no idea there people other than Tim Rogers doing deep dives into games on video.

The travel idea was inspired by Fallout, so I’d say counts. And it’s one of my favorites work of art, to be honest.

I haven’t seen a lot of them, so maybe I have missed the best of them, but most video game reviews I have watched are terrible. Somebody doing an hour on why a game doesn’t work while they admit they enjoyed it just doesn’t work for me. The over analysis is just is a buzz kill.

I’m not sure I have a specific one to cite, but Joseph Anderson (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyhnYIvIKK_--PiJXCMKxQQ) is very good, though he can go insanely long on some things, e.g. his four hour video on Witcher 1 or five on Witcher 2.

Yeah, Joseph Anderson is very good. I’m not sure I have the time or will to watch his loooooong videos but his channel is definitely worth investigating.

I shared this recently on The Long Dark and Subnautica threads but it’d be right at home here:

https://youtu.be/rlj0JK-CDuQ

And this is a fantastic and fascinating interpretation of The Witness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOJC62t4JfA

I really enjoy Summoning Salt’s videos about speed running history. The Punchout Video in particular was a great watch.

For longer-form essays about games, I like Adam Millard

… as well as, for RPGs, NeverKnowsBest

Even when I don’t agree with them,* they almost always have something interesting to say.

*Or when, as a geezer who remembers Pong and they being comparatively young, I see that they got some detail of videogame history wrong. No really, there were comuter RPGs with action combat before Diablo. Just ask anyone who remembers Ultima 8. But it’s always fascinating to see how subsequent generations interpret the meaning of history.

I have tried to watch a few of his and couldn’t get through them. He actually reviewed one DLC as being “too short to be worth $15”, which I find to be about as subjective as you can get. Quantity over quality I guess.

I can’t recommend this Action Button review of Tokemeki Memorial enough. I just finished the section called “The Point”, it’s about an hour long, and it can only really be fully understood if you watch the rest of the video too, but it’s the first time in his reviews that he ended up in a place so profound, and it’s a complex set of feelings that he’s trying to express here, so it’s understandable that it takes a while to do it properly.

And don’t worry about the fact that you’ve likely never heard of Tokemeki Memorial, or that you’ll likely never play a Japanese game that’s never been translated. He goes through every gameplay mechanic, ever interface screen, every dialog choice, ever nuance of the game, so you’ll be as familiar with the game as he is by the time you get to “the point”.

Watch a 6 hour video? Ha ha! No.

I don’t say this lightly, but I think it’s a better use of my time than most TV shows on Netflix or HBO or Hulu or other services. For me, at least. It has to hit that threshold for me to choose to watch it instead of watching a TV show or a movie or playing a game or reading a book. All his videos cross that threshold for me, but this one definitely does. It’s certainly a very unique one.

(One reason is that it’s a game that no one watching it has likely ever played. So for that reason, he actually goes through two complete walkthroughs of the game in the video, which illustrate it much better than just talking about in the abstract. In the first sections of the video, when he’s just talking about the game, I kept thinking “how? How can a game do all the things he’s talking about?” But then the actual two playthroughs illustrate everything).

I forget which thread this doc about Nihon Falcom history was posted in a few months ago, but I really enjoyed it. Almost an hour, but interesting for fans I thought.

Yes! That History of Falcom video was very interesting. Fascinating to hear about 80s Japan and a company that went from being a computer store to being one the biggest games software companies, only to then lose all their talent to other game companies and to become a modest game studio that’s still around.