I'm interested to find out what "path" everyone picked. Personally I watched the Graphics and Discourse segments. I thought it was interesting. Yes I get that writing a long ass post about a long ass video about a long ass game is like, 3 levels of stupid, please be nice lmao
I think it's extremely cool to make a critique of a game that features a lot of player choice itself hinge on some viewer choice. For me, I don't really care about the plot of the game, but I did want to hear what he thought about the endless pursuit of better graphics, and how he feels about The Discourse, so I picked those two. I thought he had some interesting things to say about crunch (basically, he talks about crunching on the video about a game infamous in part on its crunch, and how it affected him, which was interesting). I liked the idea in the wrap-up video that Cyberpunk as this giant game trying to be every other game kind of mirrors his own personal mid-life crisis where he tries to do brain dump everything instead of picking the stuff he really, really cares about and polishing the hell out of it was smart and really self-aware. I liked hearing what he had to say about open world games, the hype train, glitch compilations, analytics and youtube views, and his vintage stock car t-shirt. I thought Videoball was kind of disappointing.
I get that at some level, a 4 hour review of a game would be pretty excessive. But I want to push back on the "it's too long" crowd a little bit because I feel like that's not really the point, because it's kind of an art piece (or...choose your own adventure essay?) than a review in the traditional sense. if nothing else, I think Tim Rogers at least does the "ultra review" thing better than anyone else, and at least in this series he gets into the merits and costs of trying to do fucking everything in a single piece of media. He's a smart guy! Also, people here used to go apeshit for the 25 hour GOTY podcasts. Maybe it's less that the Action Button videos are too long, and more than you just like GB hosts and GOTY discussions more? That's fine, but don't pretend the length is itself intrinsically unacceptable.
Look, if you want a tightly edited review telling you if the game is "worth playing" or not, Tim Rogers is not your guy. But we're all here because we listen to weekly2+ hour discussions about games, and I mean, if you added up all the time the crew talked about Cyberpunk I'm sure it would go for over two hours at least. So the idea that someone couldn't possibly have a bunch to say about the game, and the stuff around the game is kind of silly I think. I mean, one of my favorite articles ever written is this 22,000 word history of a failed world wide web competitor. Sometimes it takes a lot of words to get your thoughts out on something.
I also kind of get the "too long" crowd, I don't watch twitch because it feels like I'm getting this completely unedited thing that just goes way too long, so I guess nobody's immune from feeling that way about something.
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