Patreon Newsletter - June 2016 (Patreon)

Hello! Your support is incredibly generous as ever. Thank you so much. I achieved so much this month because of you.

 

Post Script

Three videos this month!

Hitman, and the Art of Repetition

Hitman 2016 is the first Hitman game I had played and, as I've said on Patreon in the past, I found it quite odd. But the Sapienza episode had me absolutely hooked and made realise what makes this game so great. Now I just had to explain it.

(Side note: I played Hitman: Blood Money during the research for the episode, to make sure I wasn't praising a game that was way less interesting than its predecessor. Looking at the two, I think Hitman 2016 is better than BM in a lot of ways)

The episode took some time to come together. I focused a lot of effort on trying to explain a single run-through of a Hitman mission in full detail - and came up with a visual style to covey that - but in the end I decided it just wasn't necessary and it distracted from everything else.

Anyway, I'm glad I stuck with it (and rewrote the whole script at one point) because I'm pleased with the final product and it's had a lot of views. Hooray!

What Mirror's Edge Should Have Learned from Burnout Paradise

This wasn't a planned video. I just felt like I had a lot to say on the topic of Catalyst's open world. As I was playing I thought about other games that have done open worlds better and thought about games like Crackdown, Crazy Taxi, and Burnout Paradise.

These Deep Dive episodes are basically my take on a review. I'll take a controversial piece of design - like Star Fox Zero's controls - then go deep, trying to take a balanced view of what went right, what went wrong, the context for the design choice, etc. Try and provide something more analytical to backup the general reviews. I like that structure.

This video was pretty easy to make and came together nicely. I'm learning a lot about motion graphics so something quite tricky - like the Metacritic bubbles for the two games - that would have taken forever when I first started, are quite effortless now. And some of the more stylish editing - like how Faith rolls from Mirror's Edge 1 into Mirror's Edge Catalyst was as easy as putting two clips next to each other.

I've attached my notes for this episode. It's basically just a bullet point list of my argument, which is then turned into a script.

Boss Keys - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

I'm really pleased with the reaction to this video. It's a bit more dry and analytical, I thought, than my usual bitesize and flashy stuff but people dug it so that's awesome.

The video actually started out as a 30 minute long dungeon-by-dungeon analysis. I even recorded that enormous script and it took hours. But I realised that I was repeating myself a lot and that the conclusion I had written was more interesting and succinct than the rest of the script - so I blew that up to a proper thing and made that instead.

To conduct the analysis I played through every dungeon (and everything in between - but I did the bare minimum required in the overworld to get from dungeon to dungeon), with a map by my side. I then marked out keys and locked doors, critical paths, other interesting info, and what not.

For some dungeons I played through them fresh, without a map, first to see what they felt like playing them fresh (I haven't played LTTP for about 5 years). Then went back and played again, this time for notes.

I've actually now finished Link's Awakening and Ocarina of Time, and am working on videos for those. I'm surprised by how much things changed in both games. I think the resulting videos will be really interesting.

Sneak Peek

Dunno!

I've been talking about doing videos on Downwell and interesting takes on health, and they'll both happen. But I think I'm gonna take the rest of the month to play some games, read some stuff, and think about what I really want to do next.

So watch this space.

Mark's Month

It was E3 this month. It was weird in a lot of ways. As I said in the newsletter, the proximity to the massacre in Florida made the show quite uncomfortable at times. Not least because a papier-mâché giraffe took a knee to conduct a moment of silence with a girl dressed as a sexy candy cane.

Aside from that, I just found the show kinda dull to start with. EA is making nothing but Star Wars games for next 80 years. Microsoft announced a new console and then made it obsolete within an hour. Ubisoft's show was somehow more bloated and strung out than a Ubisoft game.

But Sony's conference got me. It was classy. It had honest-to-God-revelations. They showed a trailer and then just moved on. It was short. Oh god it was short. I smiled, I gasped, I wanted to buy things. It reminded me what E3 was supposed to be about. Yay video games!

I'm sure Nintendo's thing was good too but I chose not to watch it for fear of spoiling the Zelda experience. However... I am going to be playing Breath of the Wild on Tuesday so... whoops.

This month I mostly played Mirror's Edge Catalyst, that demo for Resident Evil 7 (not sure about that one. Aren't there like a thousand games on Steam Greenlight exactly like this?), Quantum Break (hated it). Weird month for games.

If you wonder what sort of work I do when I'm not making videos, this month I wrote a big piece for EDGE Magazine about PICO-8, which is a piece of software where you can play and make games with a very strict set of retro-style limitations.

That was fun to do. I've done 3 or 4 articles for EDGE now, which is crazy as it was my favourite games magazine growing up.

Looking forward: Well before the end of the month I want to play Inside (the new game from Limbo developer Playdead) on Wednesday, and I definitely want to check out Mighty Number 9 now it's finally out in Europe - just to see what all the fuss is about.

And in July... well, Insomniac's got that underwater Metroidvania Song of the Deep which looks right up my alley. But otherwise it's a quiet one. Fine by me - gives me a chance to revisit some older stuff before No Man's Sky, Abzû, and Deus Ex in August.

I'm also going to Develop in Brighton next month to check out some new indie games.