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.