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Vermain
Sep 5, 2006



It'd be remiss of me to not mention my favorite long-form video game essayist in this thread, Noah Caldwell-Gervais. Noah has a very strong novelistic style of writing that, combined with his presentation (a folksy "guy talking over a few beers" tone and a relatively barebones garage band-style recording setup), lends a warm atmosphere to his analysis that really draws you in. He's well read, has a lot of penetrating insights into the themes and flow of games as narrative experiences, has a wonderfully understated sense of humor, and is surprisingly candid about his own experiences when it comes to how he relates to the games he covers. Some of his old videos are rough around the edges - Noah hadn't quite mastered the fine art of audio mixing until around his Mad Max video - and there's next to no fancy editing, but the overwhelming majority of them are highly listenable and endlessly enjoyable.

If you want a good introduction to him, I'd say his video on Tyranny is a good place to start. It's pretty short (by Noah's standards, anyways) and has a lot of good discussion about Tyranny's themes of language and symbolism as a means of power and control.

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Vermain
Sep 5, 2006



The RE video was intended to be a broad-strokes overview of the series, specifically tracking its evolution in both gameplay and in presentation. It was highly interesting for me - someone who's never played an RE game in their life - as a broad analysis of how the series came to prominence (especially at a time where 3D graphics were just at the point to feasibly simulate a genuine moment of terror), got drunk on its own success, fell into complacency, and then eventually reinvented itself as one of the top video game horror franchises in the modern era. I can definitely understand someone being disappointed if they were looking for a more focused analysis of the themes and gameplay elements of the series' big ticket entries, though.

Vermain fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Oct 28, 2021

Vermain
Sep 5, 2006



Mr. Fortitude posted:

It was a miss for me because he had really weird opinions on the Resident Evil series. Like, he acts like every game starting from Resident Evil 4 until Resident Evil 7 was a complete trainwreck with no redeeming qualities and an entire 10 minute segment of his video is just a rant talking about how godawful RE4, 5, 6 and both Revelations games are to the point even those who weren't as keen on the action heavy RE games found it a bit much.

But Noah's videos are like that to me anyway. Sometimes they're great and hit the mark and sometimes he comes to really weird conclusions or misses the mark completely.

Ah, that's totally fair, then. Youtube's comment section makes it hard to see competing opinions and perspectives unless you really dig deep down, and most other people I know don't have the patience to watch a full 8 hour video. v:shobon:v

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