@vinny If there was a Youtube purge I expect sub numbers would probably go down universally, but in the end the really popular guys would mostly recover, whereas the smaller, middle-of-the-road channels (like mine) would be more forgotten and languish in even greater obscurity.
I'm not entirely against Youtuber thumbnails in concept, but I am against having the host portraits be so tiny and cut out so poorly. Take some greenscreened glamor shots of multiple facial expressions or something, I don't know. These are bad, and not funny-bad.
Hearing them talk about Dusk left a really sour taste in my mouth. Figuring out what Jeff will or won't like feels really arbitrary sometimes. He praised Battle Princess Madelyn, a game he admitted "was just Ghouls 'n' Ghosts." Then, for Dusk we get "even if it was good, I don't care."
And Ben's point of "If I wanted to play this kind of game I'd just play Quake again" is almost actually insulting? It is so massively, sweepingly dismissive of not just indie games, but of even bigger budget games, too. That's like saying the existence of Final Fantasy 1 on the NES eliminates the need to play Ni No Kuni 2. Why play Super Mario Odyssey when you could just play Super Mario 64 again?
If you don't like the game, whatever. Everyone has different tastes. But "why play new game when I can go back to old game" is still a bad take, especially from someone who was on like, three or four Smash Bros. clone quicklooks last year.
@danryckert Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden was originally started in RPG Maker, and then at some point they scrapped the whole thing and remade it in GameMaker Studio.
It's a shame Sega never fixed the controls in Crazy Taxi HD. There's no analog control at all; the game reads the stick like a d-pad. A few of Sega's other HD ports had that problem, too.
@brad Yep, that town you visit in the first level of Rondo is actually from Simon's Quest. There's a sign on that first town screen before the steps, and if you touch it and press up on the d-pad, it'll actually pop up a little dialog window saying "TOWN OF ALJIBA." It is the town in Simon's Quest where you get the blue crystal.
@jeff From what I remember hearing, there was actually an effort to remaster Clayfighter 63 1/3rd a couple years ago because I guess high-resolution photos of all those clay models still exist somewhere. But the guy from the original development team that still owns the rights is apparently kind of crazy and was actively destructive towards the project. It sounded like any new Clayfighter project would have to go through him first, and everybody would rather steer clear of having to do that. Here's information on that from the Clayfighter wiki.
I appreciate adding b-roll footage to these now, because it helps to see what they're talking about.
But at the same time, I kind of feel like maybe this just turns it in to a weaker version of a Quicklook? And I'm seriously questioning who's going to be watching an hour-long video review that is, for lack of a better term, half-disconnected rambling over gameplay footage?
At least with a Quicklook it's live commentary and reactions to what is currently happening. These keep live commentary but now the gameplay footage is only vaguely relevant to the topic at hand.
To me, a review is concise and informative. There are people out there putting out reviews that are like, five sentences and a score. Heck, that's basically what the "GiantBomb Gaming Minute" bumpers were that Jeff was doing for the radio arm of CBS.
I just don't know if this is what I want from this kind of review. There are definitely long video reviews out there on the internet, but those are typically very deep, analysis-focused things that borderline on dissertations. Usually they function to uncover a deeper truth about a game. This is just a conversation, and kind of a repeat of conversations also had in other videos and other podcasts.
Consider me luke warm on this idea. I want more video reviews from GiantBomb, but I don't think I want them like this.
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