Reading List April 2020 (Patreon)

Hello folks! It's been a quiet week, I know, but here's First Five's first ever reading list with a whole armada of recommendations to hold you over until my next video goes live! Hope you all enjoy.

Second Opinions

Whenever I finish a review, I usually end up watching a few other reviews or other related content afterwards. Here’s some of the best stuff other people have had to say about the games I’ve been talking about lately!

Civvie11’s Pro Doom series: I stumbled on Civvie11 while I was making the GTDM Doom video that came out a few weeks back, and he’s got a full series covering the entire Doom franchise almost level by level, including a Doom Eternal video I haven’t gotten to yet because I still have to finish the actual game.

Errant Signal’s Children of Doom: Speaking of solid Doom coverage, Errant Signal just started a series dubbed Children of Doom! The idea is that he’s tracing the genealogy of fps games, going year by year hitting up the biggest titles, how they work, and how they relate to each other. The link's to the first episode, but he's got two out, so give it a look!

Noah-Caldwell Gervais’ How Does Doom: Eternal Compare to Previous Dooms? Noah does some of the best longform work on youtube, and I was pleasantly surprised to see his deep dive into Doom Eternal and Doom 64, which highlights a lot of what makes each game tick.

Heather Alexandra's Doom Eternal: The Kotaku Review: Heather Alexandra’s one of my favorite mainstream games journalists, and her review of Doom Eternal is easily one of the best I’ve seen. It hits many of the same points I gestured at in my own review, while also examining them more deeply. It’s a must-read.

Alice Bell's Wot I Think: In Other Waters: RPS has kept a closer eye on In Other Waters than any other publication, and it all culminated in a glowing review that highlighted the best of what the game has to offer.

A twitter thread about siphonophores: Ever heard of a siphonophore? I hadn’t, either, until I serendipitously stumbled upon this twitter thread. We recently discovered one of the largest of its kind, and if you take a look at it, it bears some striking resemblance to one of the creatures you’ll discover in the deep sea beyond the dropoff in In Other Waters. The game’s main selling point is its realistic, believable ecologies, so seeing its ideas in the flesh in our own ocean is pretty cool!

Raycevick's So I've Finally Played… Resident Evil 2 (Remake): I haven’t had much opportunity to look at other people’s work covering Res-E 3, but I did recently catch Raycevick’s coverage of Resident Evil 2, the latest of a whole pile of stuff I’ve watched and read on RE3 remake’s predecessor that help inform my understanding of where the series is at right now.

The Issue of Our Time

Look, I get it. Coronavirus isn’t fun. Everyone’s stuck in their homes, lot of people are losing their jobs or falling ill, and a lot of people are scared right now. This may not be a topic people really want to marinate in, but it is spawning a lot of really good discussion, some of which I’d like to highlight.

Mikey’s You Can Help! First, something positive. Mikey Neumann of Movies with Mikey fame put out a brief little video talking about how you — yes, you! — can help people in this crisis, even if you’re not a medical professional.

Writing on Games’ How Difficult Games Can Help with Difficult Times: I strongly identify with Hamish Black’s argument in this video. I’ve always struggled to appreciate “relaxing” games. For me, it’s the games that can fully occupy my brain that provide the greatest escape and leave me feeling the most reenergized, and Hamish makes a compelling argument as to how they’ve been helping him, too.

Folding Ideas’ I Can’t Stop Watching Contagion: Dan Olsen is no stranger to putting out sharp, incisive commentary while talking about movies, and his most recent video is perhaps the most powerful piece I’ve seen discussing the coronavirus.

Web DM’s Diseases: WebDM basically makes podcast type content talking about how they run D&D campaigns. Every week, they pick a topic ranging from more concrete stuff like exploring a specific school of magic to more abstract topics like different styles of DMing. And entirely through coincidental timing, they had gotten a request a few weeks ago to give their usual treatment to how DMs can use diseases as a tool in D&D! So if recent events have inspired you to run a Neverwinter Nights-style plague, here are some tips.

Best of April Fools

Of course, the other big event this month is April Fools! And I already sifted through all the cringe-inducing stuff and found a few gems if you want to enjoy them after the fact.

Razbuten’s What Baking is Like for Someone Who Doesn't Bake: Razbuten’s got a great series called Gaming for a Non-Gamer, where he watches his wife (aka The Lady He Lives With) learn how to play video games and analyzes how their design helps or hinders her attempts to wrap her head around the medium. For April Fools, however, they flipped the script, and now it’s Raz’s turn to try out one of his wife’s hobbies!

FamilyJules’ Pizza Theme - Spiderman 2 Everybody loves Funiculi, Funicula, whether they know it as that or just the pizza theme from Spiderman 2. And FamilyJules spent April 1st making a music video around the song’s meme status. Welcome to the pizza dimension.

BitFinity's Bohemian WAApsody I’m not sure it counts as an april fools joke since every season is Waluigi time, but BitFinity dropped a “Waluigi cover” of a beloved classic. It’s absolute insanity and it’s beautiful.

Other Work

Select Screen's Subs vs. Dubs:  Friend of the channel Select Screen got out a new video after a ton of work tackling the age-old anime argument: do you prefer subs or dubs? He does a little more than try to parse the argument, however, by spending the lion's share of the runtime exploring why both versions of the same dialogue can end up so drastically different to spawn a debate in the first place.

Patricia Hernandez’s Fire Emblem's Manuela Is a Messy Woman, and It's Inspirational: Patricia Hernandez wrote a loving ode to Manuela, one of the extensive cast of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and I wish I could see any character in this game the way Patricia does Manuela. The article pulls on virtually every conversation she has in the game with characters of every house across multiple playthroughs, and it paints a far realer and more compelling picture of a character you never get to see just casually playing through the game once.

Rotem Rusak's The Disappointing Rejection of Found Family in Avengers Endgame  I really liked Avengers Endgame, but this brief thematic dive presents a point about how the series has entirely moved away from many of its core elements over the course of the past almost decade of films.

Fanfare’s The Upside-Down Music of Ariana Grande: Formerly Game Score Fanfare, Mathew Dyason has spent the past two months absolutely killing it with an expanded look at music as a whole instead of just looking at video games. He put out a big video about female composers in games and recently had an april fools video talking about Brian David Gilbert’s Perfect Pokerap that would’ve been my pick if not for my favorite thing he’s done lately: a video following Ariana Grande’s career through her last few albums and highlighting the themes of her recent work.

HeavyEyed's How We Talk About Games: HeavyEyed brought in a whole pile of other video essayists to discuss how we talk about and analyze games, as well as how we consume that media criticism. A series of interviews and personal anecdotes, it’s an interesting meta look at how and why media criticism has changed over the past few decades.

Red Angel’s I Love It Anyways: Little Dragon Cafe: Red Angel recently started a new review series where she looks at...questionable games that she happens to have fallen in love with, anyway. They might not be GOTY material, but she’ll still tell you why they’ve got a place in her heart!