I'm back! Shadow of the Erdtree video! In two hours! I wanted to stick to indies but didn't expect the Elden Ring DLC to be so refreshing. I am a long time fan of the FromSoft ARPGs, but this one was special. Not sure what's next but a certain sokoban game is high up on the list.
Shadow of the Erdtree is an interesting expansion, I couldn't hope to cover everything so the video is about a few of the DLC's great moments and a general shift I think is happening with the difficulty in these games.
It's been a while. After the D4 video I spent around a month and a half writing Pay to Win. Then my PC died right before Shadow of the Erdtree came out. Right after I fixed it I got a great deal on a new one, so lost some more time migrating things over. With the fresh start I finally abandoned Adobe Premiere for Resolve, which is way better. I managed to make the new video in 22 days, very fast by my standards.
Thanks for the kind comments and support, as always.
New video today! It's a critique of Diablo 4, just over two hours in length. I got the game on sale a few months ago and I thought it was interesting enough to dig into. I don't really play AAA games, but I'm a big fan of Diablo 1 and 2 so I though this would be a good opportunity to see how things have been going in the world of live services and trillion dollar budgets (NOT WELL). I had to fix some editing mistakes this afternoon, so the video is re-rendering. You can expect it in 2-3 hours.
I won't write 200 paragraphs this time around; I know what I'm going to work on next and--fingers crossed--it will not take as long as this D4 project did.
Hey, I'm back! New video today. It is about an underrated (imo) old shoot 'em up.
I took a needed break from the 'social' parts of the channel over the last month, but I was still working on projects. Going offline is nice! The subtitles will finally, _actually_ be up in a reasonable period of time, just need to reinstall some programs to get it done.
I'll look through my unfinished scripts in the next couple days and pick up one of the 500 games I've name-dropped in these posts ;) I've continued to work on Pay to Win 3 in the background, and it has crystallized into an outline that I'm very excited about. Once I finish a draft script I'll commit to working on it exclusively, but there's plenty of reading and writing left before then.
I actually made a video in time for Christmas! It's about Age of Empires 2, which I played way too much this year.
Thank you so much for the support on the AI video. I was not expecting it to break through the way it did, and I appreciated all the kind emails (although I'm bad at replying in a timely manner, sorry). With that said, I'm going to stay true to the videos I like making, so the game reviews are not going away. I have a follow-up to the AI video mostly written but my interest in it is waning, if I finish it most of the runtime will be discussing the nature of art and creativity. Thanks to J. for the philosophy help. Now the ramble:
Writing about a strategy game was a new experience for me, it took two or three full rewrites to come up with a good script, and I feel like the final thing lands somewhere between tutorial and review. If it is not analytical enough for your taste I hope I at least managed "comfy". There always has to be a balance between introducing things and analyzing them, and AoE2 is both broad and deep so I ended up in the weeds on some subjects. Aaaanyway I hope you enjoy the video.
Due to the holiday I probably won't be in the comments for the next few days, and the subtitles will be delayed as well. This one came down to the wire, partly due to laziness. I can only make good videos if I put love into them, and it's in short supply sometimes. I am now yulepilled and santamaxxing so I was able to finish the project in the saint nick of time.
If you're reading this you probably like my stuff, so please let me know if you are interested in coverage of popular games. I was considering Half-Life 1, and I played through the MGS series recently. If I don't have anything original to share about a topic, I usually won't make a video, but I fell in love with the controls in MGS2 and 3 so I'm thinking about it. If you've never partaken, Legally Acquire the new PC port of MGS3, it's a perfect holiday game.
Oh, and I am working on Pay to Win 3 while I do other things. So far I love the script. I've posted a couple demo sequences on my other channel, it's unlikely any of those will make it into the video but I like getting ideas out when I feel the urge.
Happy Friday! New video in half an hour. It's about the AI trend. From what I've seen, the real significance of machine learning has been ignored in commentaries about it, so I tried to connect the (popular) arguments about AI art to the scarier implications. Plenty of video game talk too, of course. I'm quite happy with it, and I hope you enjoy it. Subtitles will be available sometime tomorrow.
Thanks for the comments, as always. I have not been replying much lately but I check my comments and email most days.
I've been jumping between a few scripts, so this video took a long time. But my motivation has been great lately and I plan to keep it rolling. Since the Rusted Moss video I bought a domain and improved my website a bunch, I've been getting deeper into 3D modelling with Blender, and I've made more music for videos. Putting the time into learning this stuff is starting to pay dividends, it helps me make videos better and faster.
This is also _probably_ the last piece of groundwork I need to make the next Pay to Win video. That's on the far, far horizon, though.
**Music from the videos is finally available**
People have been asking for somewhere to listen to the music I make for videos. A lot of it is on my second channel but I just released it on Bandcamp as well. It's around 30 minutes of music that I made for videos or for fun. You can buy the album on Bandcamp for $3 CAD, or follow the MEGA link to get it for free owenc.bandcamp.com/album/jim-mcgee-pt-1.
**Serious stuff**
You may notice ads on my videos now, and I **did** put them there. I am not happy about it, but I can't really afford the amount of time that I put into my videos, and I want to continue giving subjects the level of attention they deserve. This is not a dig at you--people have been ridiculously generous with donations, they always make my day--but this is a small channel and ads are the least-bad way to monetize the videos. Please use AdBlock if you have it.
I spend a lot of time on decisions like this, so I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.
Hello! New video today. It's about Rusted Moss, a Metroidvania with a grappling hook. I wanted to take a break from the high-concept videos and just make a review of a cool game. My video doesn't follow the structure of the game perfectly, but I still went with the "guided tour" suffix for the clean naming scheme.
This video did not take three months to make, I started three new scripts, made some tools to speed up the writing process, and am trying to get on a schedule where I can upload more regularly. I put stuff on my second channel whenever I feel like it, if you want to see WIP videos or miscellaneous weirdness check that out.
I appreciate the positive reception to the copyright video, I want to make more of these small videos before committing to the next big Pay to Win thing.
That's all for now. Next video might be about the new Amnesia game, Noita, Age of Empires 2, or machine learning. Or one of the other hundred games I've talked about reviewing in other posts. I'm not going to review it but the System Shock remake is awesome.
Surprise, new video! It's about digital copyright. I won't write a big essay this time, but this video serves two purposes: the obvious one--and my motivation for grinding to get it out quickly--is that the Internet Archive is one of the best places online. The other one is that digital copyright was a side topic I already wanted to cover in Pay to Win. Having a separate video about digital copyrights will keep the series a little more focused. Anyway, hope you like it! I recorded it the way I did to save editing time, and I'm pretty happy with how it came out.
New video today, if you didn't guess it's about Rain World: Downpour. It's my longest video by a decent margin, clocking in at ~2:13:00. I am still planning on doing a video about Dwarf Fortress, but I really wanted to talk about Downpour as close to release as possible. I thought this video would be done in February, then it doubled in length somehow. The person who wanted a montage in my last video will NOT be disappointed. Hope you all enjoy it!
--now for the blog post part--
The Downpour video feels like a chapter marker. This whole YouTube thing that has consumed my free time over the past two years started with Rain World, and I've known since I made that video that I would revisit it to play the more slugcats mod. More slugcats grew into Downpour. Rain World is still a breath of fresh air. There are few games that offer such total, fine-grained control over a character using only seven buttons, and in a time when gameplay is being diluted or automated away games like Downpour are important to the health of the medium.
Going back into Rain World feels like a relief after playing pretty much anything else. While many games feel like the player is piloting a machine, Rain World's connection between player and character is totally frictionless. It is a miracle.
-
I was surprised at how generally well-received the last Pay to Win video was, especially with the Mario bashing. The subject matter of the video meant a lot to me, and before release I wasn't sure if it was going to be the best video I've made or the worst. In retrospect, it's very good, but there are some mistakes, some unclear writing, and some fat that I should have cut. The video assumes you already know the "orthodox" history of games in some depth, which may have led to confusion when I'm throwing around tons of names and companies. I wanted the video to be a little bit confusing but I think the level of detail obscured my actual argument at times.
That doesn't mean I'm going to quit taking detours to talk about integrated circuits that I enjoy, just that I want to find a way to combine all of these things into the main argument of the series. Future Pay to Win videos will feature control theory and cybernetics, so I'm hoping the talk about Pong's logic design can turn into foreshadowing instead of just a fun (for me) digression.
My responses to the criticism I received might have seemed combative, but I do take legitimate criticism seriously and I will address some of it (indirectly) in future videos. YouTube comments are not a great way to talk to people, and I'm sorry if I was rude or dismissive to anyone. YouTube also usually refuses to show me any comment threads I've replied to, which does not help matters.
This is just a roundabout way to say what I always say: thanks for the kind comments. Have a good weekend!
Hi! New video coming some time today, if YouTube cooperates. It's an hour and a half long and pretty dense, you'll see why it took so long to finish I think.
Spoilers: It's the next Pay to Win video, and it's a history following games from the first pinball machines up to the release of the SNES. I'm trying to take a fresh look at the classics, and relate the early history of games back to machine gambling and forward to the game design of today. The role of video games as a scapegoat, and their place in society is also a big focus. It's kind of all over the place to be honest but that's to be expected when a project goes on for two months longer than you thought it would. I am still very happy with the final product.
This video, like the previous one, is kind of a building block, and the next two (three? twenty?) Pay to Win videos will be about bringing all of the threads from episodes 1 and 2 together through the story of microtransactions/lootboxes/etc.
---
I need a break from Pay to Win though, so I think the next video will be about Dwarf Fortress, one of my favourite games that finally got a YouTube-video-friendly graphics pack for its Steam release. I will have to assess how burned out I am before I promise anything though, I played a ton of DF as soon as it came out so I might need a break to ensure that video is as good as I want it to be.
Thanks as always for the kind comments. Merry Christmas if you celebrate, happy holidays if you don't.
New video coming out... NOW! Maybe a bit of a surprise topic, but I hope you like it. Thank you all for the kind, insightful comments as always. Everybody who asked for recommendations or donated over the last little while has done a great service to my ego :)
But seriously, thanks so much.
*what is this new series about*
I kept it very general in the video, so here's the fuller version of what Pay to Win is about. It will be a series of videos about the relationship between games and money. I want to get into how financial incentives affect the way video games are designed on a very granular level, and how these design choices fit into a greater history.
I want these videos to feel like a collection of short game reviews that support an overarching theme. As we get further into it, there are lots of crazy stories to tell, lots of weird games to show off, and improved writing and performances from me.
The whole Pay to Win idea started with a connection I noticed between Diablo Immortal and crypto games, and that's where I want to end up, tracing these design ideas and incentives from gambling to arcades to home consoles to online games to DLC and so on.
The first episode is a bit of an outlier, because I had to introduce a lot of concepts in some depth, set up surprises for later episodes, and talk about something other than video games. It ends up jumping all over the place but I'm still proud of the final product. The pacing suffered a little from the aforementioned but future episodes will be paced like the videos you're used to seeing from me.
*what's coming next*
This video took two months to put together, and it was pretty much two months solid. Future episodes won't take quite as long, but I am probably going to do a game review in between episodes as a palette cleanser. Editing together hundreds of clips from different videos takes a really long time compared to cutting together footage from a single game, and I had to do a ton of research for the script.
I have lots of scripts in the works, and the next video could be about Half-Life, the games Proteus and Oikospiel by David Kanaga, or Pay to Win E2 if I'm feeling it. Or something else, I'm not much of a planner!
Jimmy McGee
Jimmy McGee
I'm back! Shadow of the Erdtree video! In two hours! I wanted to stick to indies but didn't expect the Elden Ring DLC to be so refreshing. I am a long time fan of the FromSoft ARPGs, but this one was special. Not sure what's next but a certain sokoban game is high up on the list.
Shadow of the Erdtree is an interesting expansion, I couldn't hope to cover everything so the video is about a few of the DLC's great moments and a general shift I think is happening with the difficulty in these games.
It's been a while. After the D4 video I spent around a month and a half writing Pay to Win. Then my PC died right before Shadow of the Erdtree came out. Right after I fixed it I got a great deal on a new one, so lost some more time migrating things over. With the fresh start I finally abandoned Adobe Premiere for Resolve, which is way better. I managed to make the new video in 22 days, very fast by my standards.
Thanks for the kind comments and support, as always.
1 year ago | [YT] | 74
View 10 replies
Jimmy McGee
New video today! It's a critique of Diablo 4, just over two hours in length. I got the game on sale a few months ago and I thought it was interesting enough to dig into. I don't really play AAA games, but I'm a big fan of Diablo 1 and 2 so I though this would be a good opportunity to see how things have been going in the world of live services and trillion dollar budgets (NOT WELL). I had to fix some editing mistakes this afternoon, so the video is re-rendering. You can expect it in 2-3 hours.
I won't write 200 paragraphs this time around; I know what I'm going to work on next and--fingers crossed--it will not take as long as this D4 project did.
Thanks for the support, as always!
1 year ago | [YT] | 502
View 19 replies
Jimmy McGee
Hey, I'm back! New video today. It is about an underrated (imo) old shoot 'em up.
I took a needed break from the 'social' parts of the channel over the last month, but I was still working on projects. Going offline is nice! The subtitles will finally, _actually_ be up in a reasonable period of time, just need to reinstall some programs to get it done.
I'll look through my unfinished scripts in the next couple days and pick up one of the 500 games I've name-dropped in these posts ;) I've continued to work on Pay to Win 3 in the background, and it has crystallized into an outline that I'm very excited about. Once I finish a draft script I'll commit to working on it exclusively, but there's plenty of reading and writing left before then.
Thanks for the support as always!
1 year ago | [YT] | 304
View 26 replies
Jimmy McGee
I actually made a video in time for Christmas! It's about Age of Empires 2, which I played way too much this year.
Thank you so much for the support on the AI video. I was not expecting it to break through the way it did, and I appreciated all the kind emails (although I'm bad at replying in a timely manner, sorry). With that said, I'm going to stay true to the videos I like making, so the game reviews are not going away. I have a follow-up to the AI video mostly written but my interest in it is waning, if I finish it most of the runtime will be discussing the nature of art and creativity. Thanks to J. for the philosophy help. Now the ramble:
Writing about a strategy game was a new experience for me, it took two or three full rewrites to come up with a good script, and I feel like the final thing lands somewhere between tutorial and review. If it is not analytical enough for your taste I hope I at least managed "comfy". There always has to be a balance between introducing things and analyzing them, and AoE2 is both broad and deep so I ended up in the weeds on some subjects. Aaaanyway I hope you enjoy the video.
Due to the holiday I probably won't be in the comments for the next few days, and the subtitles will be delayed as well. This one came down to the wire, partly due to laziness. I can only make good videos if I put love into them, and it's in short supply sometimes. I am now yulepilled and santamaxxing so I was able to finish the project in the saint nick of time.
If you're reading this you probably like my stuff, so please let me know if you are interested in coverage of popular games. I was considering Half-Life 1, and I played through the MGS series recently. If I don't have anything original to share about a topic, I usually won't make a video, but I fell in love with the controls in MGS2 and 3 so I'm thinking about it. If you've never partaken, Legally Acquire the new PC port of MGS3, it's a perfect holiday game.
Oh, and I am working on Pay to Win 3 while I do other things. So far I love the script. I've posted a couple demo sequences on my other channel, it's unlikely any of those will make it into the video but I like getting ideas out when I feel the urge.
Happy holidays!
1 year ago | [YT] | 232
View 25 replies
Jimmy McGee
Happy Friday! New video in half an hour. It's about the AI trend. From what I've seen, the real significance of machine learning has been ignored in commentaries about it, so I tried to connect the (popular) arguments about AI art to the scarier implications. Plenty of video game talk too, of course. I'm quite happy with it, and I hope you enjoy it. Subtitles will be available sometime tomorrow.
Thanks for the comments, as always. I have not been replying much lately but I check my comments and email most days.
I've been jumping between a few scripts, so this video took a long time. But my motivation has been great lately and I plan to keep it rolling. Since the Rusted Moss video I bought a domain and improved my website a bunch, I've been getting deeper into 3D modelling with Blender, and I've made more music for videos. Putting the time into learning this stuff is starting to pay dividends, it helps me make videos better and faster.
This is also _probably_ the last piece of groundwork I need to make the next Pay to Win video. That's on the far, far horizon, though.
**Music from the videos is finally available**
People have been asking for somewhere to listen to the music I make for videos. A lot of it is on my second channel but I just released it on Bandcamp as well. It's around 30 minutes of music that I made for videos or for fun. You can buy the album on Bandcamp for $3 CAD, or follow the MEGA link to get it for free owenc.bandcamp.com/album/jim-mcgee-pt-1.
**Serious stuff**
You may notice ads on my videos now, and I **did** put them there. I am not happy about it, but I can't really afford the amount of time that I put into my videos, and I want to continue giving subjects the level of attention they deserve. This is not a dig at you--people have been ridiculously generous with donations, they always make my day--but this is a small channel and ads are the least-bad way to monetize the videos. Please use AdBlock if you have it.
I spend a lot of time on decisions like this, so I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.
2 years ago | [YT] | 254
View 30 replies
Jimmy McGee
Hello! New video today. It's about Rusted Moss, a Metroidvania with a grappling hook. I wanted to take a break from the high-concept videos and just make a review of a cool game. My video doesn't follow the structure of the game perfectly, but I still went with the "guided tour" suffix for the clean naming scheme.
This video did not take three months to make, I started three new scripts, made some tools to speed up the writing process, and am trying to get on a schedule where I can upload more regularly. I put stuff on my second channel whenever I feel like it, if you want to see WIP videos or miscellaneous weirdness check that out.
I appreciate the positive reception to the copyright video, I want to make more of these small videos before committing to the next big Pay to Win thing.
That's all for now. Next video might be about the new Amnesia game, Noita, Age of Empires 2, or machine learning. Or one of the other hundred games I've talked about reviewing in other posts. I'm not going to review it but the System Shock remake is awesome.
Have a good weekend!
2 years ago | [YT] | 138
View 10 replies
Jimmy McGee
Surprise, new video! It's about digital copyright. I won't write a big essay this time, but this video serves two purposes: the obvious one--and my motivation for grinding to get it out quickly--is that the Internet Archive is one of the best places online. The other one is that digital copyright was a side topic I already wanted to cover in Pay to Win. Having a separate video about digital copyrights will keep the series a little more focused. Anyway, hope you like it! I recorded it the way I did to save editing time, and I'm pretty happy with how it came out.
2 years ago | [YT] | 171
View 8 replies
Jimmy McGee
New video today, if you didn't guess it's about Rain World: Downpour. It's my longest video by a decent margin, clocking in at ~2:13:00. I am still planning on doing a video about Dwarf Fortress, but I really wanted to talk about Downpour as close to release as possible. I thought this video would be done in February, then it doubled in length somehow. The person who wanted a montage in my last video will NOT be disappointed. Hope you all enjoy it!
--now for the blog post part--
The Downpour video feels like a chapter marker. This whole YouTube thing that has consumed my free time over the past two years started with Rain World, and I've known since I made that video that I would revisit it to play the more slugcats mod. More slugcats grew into Downpour. Rain World is still a breath of fresh air. There are few games that offer such total, fine-grained control over a character using only seven buttons, and in a time when gameplay is being diluted or automated away games like Downpour are important to the health of the medium.
Going back into Rain World feels like a relief after playing pretty much anything else. While many games feel like the player is piloting a machine, Rain World's connection between player and character is totally frictionless. It is a miracle.
-
I was surprised at how generally well-received the last Pay to Win video was, especially with the Mario bashing. The subject matter of the video meant a lot to me, and before release I wasn't sure if it was going to be the best video I've made or the worst. In retrospect, it's very good, but there are some mistakes, some unclear writing, and some fat that I should have cut. The video assumes you already know the "orthodox" history of games in some depth, which may have led to confusion when I'm throwing around tons of names and companies. I wanted the video to be a little bit confusing but I think the level of detail obscured my actual argument at times.
That doesn't mean I'm going to quit taking detours to talk about integrated circuits that I enjoy, just that I want to find a way to combine all of these things into the main argument of the series. Future Pay to Win videos will feature control theory and cybernetics, so I'm hoping the talk about Pong's logic design can turn into foreshadowing instead of just a fun (for me) digression.
My responses to the criticism I received might have seemed combative, but I do take legitimate criticism seriously and I will address some of it (indirectly) in future videos. YouTube comments are not a great way to talk to people, and I'm sorry if I was rude or dismissive to anyone. YouTube also usually refuses to show me any comment threads I've replied to, which does not help matters.
This is just a roundabout way to say what I always say: thanks for the kind comments.
Have a good weekend!
2 years ago | [YT] | 184
View 18 replies
Jimmy McGee
Hi! New video coming some time today, if YouTube cooperates. It's an hour and a half long and pretty dense, you'll see why it took so long to finish I think.
Spoilers: It's the next Pay to Win video, and it's a history following games from the first pinball machines up to the release of the SNES. I'm trying to take a fresh look at the classics, and relate the early history of games back to machine gambling and forward to the game design of today. The role of video games as a scapegoat, and their place in society is also a big focus. It's kind of all over the place to be honest but that's to be expected when a project goes on for two months longer than you thought it would. I am still very happy with the final product.
This video, like the previous one, is kind of a building block, and the next two (three? twenty?) Pay to Win videos will be about bringing all of the threads from episodes 1 and 2 together through the story of microtransactions/lootboxes/etc.
---
I need a break from Pay to Win though, so I think the next video will be about Dwarf Fortress, one of my favourite games that finally got a YouTube-video-friendly graphics pack for its Steam release. I will have to assess how burned out I am before I promise anything though, I played a ton of DF as soon as it came out so I might need a break to ensure that video is as good as I want it to be.
Thanks as always for the kind comments. Merry Christmas if you celebrate, happy holidays if you don't.
2 years ago | [YT] | 107
View 15 replies
Jimmy McGee
New video coming out... NOW! Maybe a bit of a surprise topic, but I hope you like it. Thank you all for the kind, insightful comments as always. Everybody who asked for recommendations or donated over the last little while has done a great service to my ego :)
But seriously, thanks so much.
*what is this new series about*
I kept it very general in the video, so here's the fuller version of what Pay to Win is about. It will be a series of videos about the relationship between games and money. I want to get into how financial incentives affect the way video games are designed on a very granular level, and how these design choices fit into a greater history.
I want these videos to feel like a collection of short game reviews that support an overarching theme. As we get further into it, there are lots of crazy stories to tell, lots of weird games to show off, and improved writing and performances from me.
The whole Pay to Win idea started with a connection I noticed between Diablo Immortal and crypto games, and that's where I want to end up, tracing these design ideas and incentives from gambling to arcades to home consoles to online games to DLC and so on.
The first episode is a bit of an outlier, because I had to introduce a lot of concepts in some depth, set up surprises for later episodes, and talk about something other than video games. It ends up jumping all over the place but I'm still proud of the final product. The pacing suffered a little from the aforementioned but future episodes will be paced like the videos you're used to seeing from me.
*what's coming next*
This video took two months to put together, and it was pretty much two months solid. Future episodes won't take quite as long, but I am probably going to do a game review in between episodes as a palette cleanser. Editing together hundreds of clips from different videos takes a really long time compared to cutting together footage from a single game, and I had to do a ton of research for the script.
I have lots of scripts in the works, and the next video could be about Half-Life, the games Proteus and Oikospiel by David Kanaga, or Pay to Win E2 if I'm feeling it. Or something else, I'm not much of a planner!
3 years ago | [YT] | 124
View 9 replies
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