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Doom 64 Video Review

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DoomUK said:

I prefer Yahtzee's approach to reviewing games over everyone else's. Five minutes of no-bullshit opinions, with enough explanation without it becoming a tl;dw affair.

Which are also tongue in cheek and should be taken with a grain of salt. Then again, I suppose most people don't watch game review videos to help make an informed purchase decision but to be entertained, so whatever. :P

As for HVGN, according to the guy himself the character was meant to be an anti-AVGN, at which it succeeds. Wine instead of beer, overly enthusiastic instead of being overly cynical, a dark brown shirt instead of a white one, etc. Admittedly whether you like him or not is an other matter entirely. Personally I like the fact that instead of being an AVGN clone like Irate Gamer and co. he actually put a spin on the idea, even though the execution could be better.


@Gecko Yamori: Well, in most cases the games these guys are talking about are simply frameworks to build the episodes around. So when, say, AVGN's episode on Winter Sports is about a grown up man getting mad at an old game rather than the game itself, discussing the game as a result of watching the episode would be silly, no? Of the personalities mentioned here TB is the only one who does his main show for informational purposes and with the game itself being the focal point (although some of the WTF is-episodes may have missed that mark a little bit...).

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I dunno, Rolfe does go into some informative details in some of his videos. Swordquest, for instance, is practically a giant love letter to an incomplete series of Atari video games made for the sole purpose of a giant competition; I forget if he ever gets angry at the game at all!

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Jodwin said:

Which are also tongue in cheek and should be taken with a grain of salt. Then again, I suppose most people don't watch game review videos to help make an informed purchase decision but to be entertained, so whatever. :P

According to more serious video game reviews, I should buy every new Call of Duty that's rolled off the conveyor belt because I fail to understand what makes a good game if I don't. Even Kotaku celebrated BLOPS 2 - a website that's often more reserved in its praise of games than others. Comedic effect notwithstanding, I'd rather take the word of a guy who says something is stale garbage if he thinks it is, as opposed to someone who pontificates that shit smells like roses.

It's not like he disparages every game he reviews, anyway. He lets you know he likes something when he likes it. And no one should base their purchase decisions solely on others' opinions, at all.

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DoomUK said:

According to more serious video game reviews, I should buy every new Call of Duty that's rolled off the conveyor belt because I fail to understand what makes a good game if I don't. Even Kotaku celebrated BLOPS 2 - a website that's often more reserved in its praise of games than others. Comedic effect notwithstanding, I'd rather take the word of a guy who says something is stale garbage if he thinks it is, as opposed to someone who pontificates that shit smells like roses.

It's not like he disparages every game he reviews, anyway. He lets you know he likes something when he likes it. And no one should base their purchase decisions solely on others' opinions, at all.

What a review, or reviewer, says per se is irrelevant, but it's important to know why they say what they say. Looking at AVGN, for example, Rolfe goes to lengths to find bad things to say about the games because that's what the show is about. He himself has even said that he's made videos about games that "Rolfe" likes but "AVGN" hates. Similarly it's important to know why, for example, IGN praises CoD and tells everyone to buy it. Bottom line is, that if a review is being facetious you can't really take what's being said as a true opinion of the person writing the review, because that opinion you're seeing could just be made up for a fictional persona.

Regardless, of course you should never make a purchase decision based solely on the opinion of someone else. It's always better to have an idea as to what the reviewer likes and dislikes, how those align to your own tastes and then figure out what the review means to you. Ie. if you know that the guy writing reviews for site X loves modern military shooters and hates old school ones, and you personally are the opposite, you can still use his reviews by turning them upside down. This is why I personally check out Totalbiscuit's videos: I disagree with his opinions quite often, but he makes it clear why he thinks the way he does, and then by using that knowledge yourself you can more easily make up your own opinions.



edit: You're also making it sound like CoD games are objectively garbage. They probably aren't deserving of the praise they get, but if they were that bad I'm not sure they'd be selling as well as they are. So just because someone else likes a game you don't doesn't completely invalidate their miserable existence. :P

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You know what I don't get? Why these video game review dudes have to have some sort of specific personality, such as being irate, angry, happy, whatever. It's like they lack personalities of their own, so they have to put on some sort of show. If I were to do that (and considering I'm an amateur filmmaker, I probably eventually will), I would just present myself as is and inject my personal brand of humor into it, without the pretense of being of a particular state of mind.

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His review was probably the first time for me that I'd seen some form of analysis of Doom 64, and it intrigues me how different Doom 64 truely was from the other console versions back then.

Honestly the first time I heard about Doom 64, I thought it'd just be a straight up Doom port on the Nintendo 64 and not a completely different game (of sorts). Makes me want to try out the Doom 64 wad for the PC at some point.

I find the HVGN an interesting break from the typical "angry" video game reviewer that's kind of oversaturated these days.

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GoatLord said:

You know what I don't get? Why these video game review dudes have to have some sort of specific personality, such as being irate, angry, happy, whatever. It's like they lack personalities of their own, so they have to put on some sort of show. If I were to do that (and considering I'm an amateur filmmaker, I probably eventually will), I would just present myself as is and inject my personal brand of humor into it, without the pretense of being of a particular state of mind.

Why? Because AVGN happened. In case you're unfamiliar with the history of AVGN, it started as a joke where Rolfe made a few episodes to show his friends. Then quite a while later he put them online, people found it and it became popular. If you make a timeline of all the game review shows on the internet, AVGN is pretty much the first one and its initial success was a total fluke. Every other similar show that followed simply saw AVGN's success and decided to try and reproduce it. There's not much else to it.

Then again, it's true that your average Joe doesn't have much a personality that would make tens or hundreds of thousands other people watch his videos. And if you're planning on making a living with video game videos online, those are the kinds of viewership numbers you need to be hitting.

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Jodwin said:

Bottom line is, that if a review is being facetious you can't really take what's being said as a true opinion of the person writing the review, because that opinion you're seeing could just be made up for a fictional persona.

You can never be sure what anyone says about anything reflects their actual opinion. I don't really care if Yahtzee secretly loves all the games he's dissed over the years - what's said in his reviews is often very accurate observations about certain flaws in games, humorously articulated or not.

Jodwin said:

You're also making it sound like CoD games are objectively garbage. They probably aren't deserving of the praise they get, but if they were that bad I'm not sure they'd be selling as well as they are. So just because someone else likes a game you don't doesn't completely invalidate their miserable existence. :P

Suffice it to say, they're the gaming equivalent of the average cheesy summer blockbuster movie. I'm convinced many if not most people play them because they don't care about, or simply don't notice the flaws in them that bother miserable bastards like me. Sales numbers say nothing about the quality of the product.

GoatLord said:

I would just present myself as is and inject my personal brand of humor into it, without the pretense of being of a particular state of mind.

You'd need to put videos of yourself out there to get some assessment on this.

But there's a reason why some celebrities (which in the 21st Century includes people like AVGN and others) get into "character" before presenting something. You need to have a very articulate, extroverted and engaging personality to pull this stuff off without being an actor of sorts. Of course, if you have one of these, go for it.

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