Favorite YouTube Gamers?

General and high profile video game topics.
DaHeckIzDat
Posts: 1997
Joined: April 9th, 2015, 1:41 pm

Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » May 6th, 2015, 2:14 pm

Do you follow any gamers or reviewers on YouTube? I like Peanutbuttergamer, Jontron, and Caddicarus.

Hardcore Sadism
Posts: 271
Joined: April 7th, 2015, 7:10 pm

Re: Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby Hardcore Sadism » May 6th, 2015, 2:38 pm

Anyone that doesn't force me to listen to an insipid cackle (Pewdiepie) or watch them imitate others (Markiplier).

Vexer6
Posts: 295
Joined: April 9th, 2015, 12:14 am

Re: Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby Vexer6 » May 6th, 2015, 4:31 pm

I don't think PewDiePie is "insipid" at all, though I don't really follow him that closely. I mainly follow Totalbiscuit, Angry Joe, Caddicarus, True Review, and a bunch of people in the Chaos Theatre like The Autarch, Joshscorcher, Fawful's Minion, RabbidLuigi, Quarter Guy, etc.

DaHeckIzDat
Posts: 1997
Joined: April 9th, 2015, 1:41 pm

Re: Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » May 6th, 2015, 4:42 pm

Vexer6 wrote:I don't think PewDiePie is "insipid" at all, though I don't really follow him that closely. I mainly follow Totalbiscuit, Angry Joe, Caddicarus, True Review, and a bunch of people in the Chaos Theatre like The Autarch, Joshscorcher, Fawful's Minion, RabbidLuigi, Quarter Guy, etc.


Caddicarus is awesome. Right up there with PBG for me. I wanted to like Angry Joe, but his reviews are just so long! I can get everything an Angry Review has in a CGR Undertow vid in, like, a fifth of the time and without the bad jokes. I watched half a Markiplier video and turned it off because of his incessant screaming. I won't even watch Pewdiepie for the same reason. I also like Honest Game Trailers. Those are pretty funny.

User avatar
Rev
Posts: 1487
Joined: April 7th, 2015, 7:31 pm

Re: Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby Rev » May 6th, 2015, 5:32 pm

I like several youtube channels- ProJared, AVGN, Johnny vs., spida1a, Game Sack, and The Game Theorist. I'll have to check out the other ones!

User avatar
velcrozombie
Posts: 610
Joined: April 12th, 2015, 3:37 pm

Re: Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby velcrozombie » May 6th, 2015, 8:59 pm

I don't watch as many gaming videos on Youtube as I used to (less free time than I once had and I'm trying to use my gaming time more for actually playing games), but there are a few I like: Two Best Friends Play/Super Best Friends Play (just tons of diverse material), Jontron, Game Grumps (depends on the game), AVGN (despite talking down on him before), ProJared and Totalbiscuit. For fighting games I like The Excellent Adventures of Gootecks and Mike Ross. I also find some of the KIds Play "blank" videos to be fun, especially when the kids are given old-school games like Mega Man or Mike Tyson's Punch-Out to play.

I only watched one Angry Joe video (his review of Skullgirls) and that made a bad first impression, since he didn't seem to know or understand anything about fighting games; I made a snap judgment and might have to give him another shot.

I don't care for Pewdiepie at all now, but I'll admit to watching his play-through of the original Silent Hill and having a decent time. The biggest problem with him to me is that you very quickly see everything in his arsenal and, after that, it just becomes boring and immature very quickly. He seems like a nice guy, and I don't begrudge him his success (even if I do find it baffling), but I do hate all the imitators that he inspired.

DaHeckIzDat
Posts: 1997
Joined: April 9th, 2015, 1:41 pm

Re: Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » May 6th, 2015, 10:48 pm

I like Peanutbuttergamer and Caddicarus pretty much for the same reasons. They're both hyperactive and funny, and besides reviews they also do things like top ten favorite [whatevers], or just funny game related videos. A little more than a week ago Caddicarus put out a video about all his favorite PS1 cheats, and a while before that a list of tips and strategies to use in Bloodborne. PBG also has a separate channel for his let's-plays where he puts things like "Sucking at Super Mario Galaxy" and (my personal favorite) his Hardcore Minecraft and Terraria series. Jontron doesn't review games so much as he posts funny videos about the games where he gives his impressions about it as well with the help of his cyborg parrot Jaque.. He's pretty profane, which I could live without, but his stuff is funny enough to make up for it.

Vexer6
Posts: 295
Joined: April 9th, 2015, 12:14 am

Re: Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby Vexer6 » May 6th, 2015, 10:58 pm

DaHeckIsDat- I don't see how long reviews are a bad thing at all, I love that Angry Joe goes into great detail on every aspect of a game, as there are far too many reviewers that gloss over or flat-out ignore parts of the game that I actually want to know about(even VGC is guilty of doing that from time to time), and that really helps me determine whether it's for me or not, also I don't think his jokes are "bad" at all(I laugh my ass off every time Corporate Commander shows up).

I much prefer long reviews over the way-too-short video reviews that sites like IGN and Gamespot do, as they usually gloss over too many things and I never get a sense of whether i'll like the game or not from watching them.

BTW, who are CGRUndertow and Mark Pilier? I've never heard of them before.

Another Youtuber I really like is Jim Sterling. Not a huge fan of Yahtzee though, as I find his reviews extremely hit and miss(for every good one like Order 1886 or Ride to Hell: Retribution, there's a lame one like Call of Juarez: The Cartel or Duke Nukem Forever)

Velcrozombie-Angry Joe never actually reviewed Skullgirls(though he did play it in one video), and he knows plenty about fighting games as he's reviewed several of them(King of Fighters 12, Soul Calibur V, Injustice: Gods Among Us, Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, Mortal Kombat 9 and most recently MKX), so I think you should definitely give him another chance, check out his hilarious review of Ride to Hell to start:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1HTKWX15oo

User avatar
velcrozombie
Posts: 610
Joined: April 12th, 2015, 3:37 pm

Re: Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby velcrozombie » May 6th, 2015, 11:20 pm

scotland wrote:I appreciate these lists, but can you tell me why you like who you like?

For instance, I blunder into Gamester81 and Classic Game Room reviews alot. They are both old timey gamers who seem to have a real joy for the old systems. In both cases, they use knowledge as the bedrock of their review, not ranting or complaining or profanity, and they come off as genuinely nice and rational mature people who just happen to love video games.

I might try the ones with two gamers playing and yakking, like James and Mike Mondays or the Two Best Friends. I can see the appeal if they can stay focused on the game for the most part.


For the sake of my awful attention span, I will only try to explain why I like Two Best Friends Play (or, since there are four of them now, Super Best Friends Play), being that they are my favorites:

- Three out of the four members spent years in QA testing in the gaming industry before being able to make a living off their videos/podcasts/merchandising etc., so they have a fairly informed perspective on how the gaming industry works. That also gives them a lot more to talk about when they play games they either personally worked on or games made by companies they've worked for in the past.

- They've all known each other for a number of years (10+ years for three of them, about 5 years for the youngest member) and live in the same city (Quebec), giving them a large number of mutual memories and experiences to draw from.

- Theme weeks/months: they do a lot of these, based on either subject matter or genre. Some of these are reoccurring (every October for the last three years has had a daily video on a horror game, this is going to be their second August of doing a different video on wrestling games each day), while some are one-time events (last July they did an entire month of games based on Marvel Comics characters, they've done weeks on Strider, Godzilla and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Matt has recently completed an ongoing series of videos on James Bond games, etc.) and some are regular events (their fighting game series Friday Night Fisticuffs and Saturday Morning Scrublords, with the former reserved for classic fighting games and the latter being reserved for terrible/janky/obscure fighting games).

- Having four members means lots of possible configurations with wildly differing social dynamics, especially when you also take into account the solo videos each member does from time to time. Admittedly, some of these combinations work better than others; any video with Pat is usually going to be more interesting than one without due to his synergy with all of the other members and his temper.

- They skew towards the quirky and the colorful - they've done full playthroughs of Deadly Premonition, No More Heroes 1 and 2, Viewtiful Joe, Prison Break, Escape from Bug Island, Guacamelee!, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Indigo Prophecy, Man Vs. Wild, Battleclash, Way of the Samurai 4 and a number of other unusual games, with quicklooks of dozen of others. In fact, they've recently created a series called Mystery Box to help them get through a greater number of these offbeat games, and have other reoccurring series to cover them (Hunting and Killing with Matt and Liam is entirely populated by the type of games that Cabela's and their ilk put out every year, for example).

- A mythology of sorts has developed around each of the members due to small dollops of personal information that leak through during their videos and podcasts, and they like to acknowledge, have fun with and twist this information.

- They worth with a number of distinctive animations and artists that make either fun intros to their videos or animation using snippets of their dialogue (Plague of Gripes, 2Snacks and Cranky Construct being the big three).

- They don't do reaction videos!

- With the exception of the first year or so of videos (where they were still getting comfortable in being themselves), they sound more like a group of people who have known each other forever who are being recorded doing what they would be doing anyway even if they weren't making money doing it. They almost never sound forced or as if they are acting, to the point they will occasionally sound genuinely irritated with each other during disagreements.

- Here's the big one - the passion they have for the niche games they enjoy is never in doubt and spills over constantly. Sometimes this even happens to games they go in expecting to hate, and their sense of surprise is infectious - this just happened yesterday on Mystery Box, when Matt and Liam were shocked to discover that a game based on Shamu and Sea World was way better than it had any right to be. Another example near the end of their NES Silver Surfer video, when this impossibly difficult game begins to yield to their efforts and they all get amazingly excited at the prospect of actually beating a level.

The best series for what you seem to be after are the Friday Night Fisticuffs videos: all four members passing the joysticks around, often playing games they are familiar or even skilled at (Woolie Madden was a former competitive fighting game player who when to EVO a couple of times and is still active in his local scene) and discussing the genre in general and how whatever game they happen to be playing fits into it in a fair amount of detail.

User avatar
velcrozombie
Posts: 610
Joined: April 12th, 2015, 3:37 pm

Re: Favorite YouTube Gamers?

Postby velcrozombie » May 7th, 2015, 9:22 am

Vexer6 wrote:Another Youtuber I really like is Jim Sterling. Not a huge fan of Yahtzee though, as I find his reviews extremely hit and miss(for every good one like Order 1886 or Ride to Hell: Retribution, there's a lame one like Call of Juarez: The Cartel or Duke Nukem Forever)

Velcrozombie-Angry Joe never actually reviewed Skullgirls(though he did play it in one video), and he knows plenty about fighting games as he's reviewed several of them(King of Fighters 12, Soul Calibur V, Injustice: Gods Among Us, Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, Mortal Kombat 9 and most recently MKX), so I think you should definitely give him another chance, check out his hilarious review of Ride to Hell to start:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1HTKWX15oo


I guess the Skullgirls video was more of a First Impressions/Quick Look video than anything else, not a real review. I haven't seen any of his other fighting game videos, but just by watching him play I got the sense that he was just mashing. If you have any experience with fighting games, you know that certain button combinations are used almost universally as inputs for special moves (at least in 2d fighting games); I wasn't seeing him even trying any of these, and when he made any of the characters do something interesting it seemed to be entirely by accident - the same way I would do when I was 12 years old playing Street Fighter 2 on my Genesis. Now that doesn't mean that he's a bad game reviewer overall, or that he can't be entertaining - but it does mean that I wouldn't trust his opinion on a fighting game. Maybe he's learned more since then?

I do like both Jim Sterling and Yahtzee. In fact, Yahtzee's the reason I even got back into video games in 2008. Very witty and clever, well-read, great comic timing and a good sense of minimalist visual design in his videos. He also has some experience in both making his own games and writing fiction (his critiques, for better or worse, have an unusually strong focus on the game's narrative), giving his reviews some additional weight. Having said all that, I recently stopped watching him. I don't know if I've just tired of his point-of-view after 400+ videos or if he's actually gone downhill, but I find him to be a kind of dreary and predictable now. He will still occasionally surprise me, but often I can just look at the type of game he'll be reviewing and already have a pretty good idea of everything he's going to say. I still encourage people who haven't watched him to at least check out the first few years worth of videos.


Return to “Video Games General”