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Hello, it's the friday talkie. Things are going to be a little bit different
from usual, not a lot, just a tiny little bit and you will see how and why and what
and stuff, as I go along. First, difference, I'm gonna tell you what
I'm going to talk about, and I might even include links on here or I might not.
Ummm... What's that doing?
My camera's putting little funny icons on just there, and I don't know what they were
for. Um, anyway... yeah, so what am I going to
be talking about? First of all I'm going to do a response to
a video by thejoyofsticks, er, why do you play retro games?
I shall talk about that... and then I shall do a response to the GamerGeezer er, who asked
what is your gaming timeline? and by that he means what systems did you
have like in what order, and when and stuff like that.
Umm... and I'm going to close, probably not actually, but the, the next thing will be
um.. optimising your youtube channel. Ways of getting seen more, more subscribers,
more views, stuff like that. Potential methods for.... getting more out
of youtube, if you're a youtube video producer type person... like me.
Okay, so... that's the first difference this week, telling you what I'm doing before I
do it. There is a reason for this. I'll go into that
later. So... thejoyofsticks... stickhead... why do
you play retro games? Inititally, I thought this will be a really
quick and easy answer, and I can answer this in one sentence... and I realised actually
that's not true. And the answer isn't as simple as I'd initially
thought it was. Because the obvious answer is nostalgia. I
played these games when I was a teen or in my early twentys and stuff like that, and
I like to relive that experience, and the emotions that go with it.
That would be the obvious answer. But it's not strictly true.
It's absolutely not as simple as that with me.
Umm. The.... Because I'm a hardware collector,
now I buy the hardware, the retro hardware, because... uhhh....
because I know about them. Hahaha...
It all comes back to when I was a kid, in school, and here was this lad with all these
computer magazines saying ooh look at this machine here and this one he... and... I remember
them all, and I remember thinking when I was like sixteen or seventeen or maybe fiftteen,
something like that, when I grow up (still hasn't happened yet, I'm sure) gonna have
one of them, or all of them, or something. I'm gonna have the best computer and I want
one of these and All of these computers that I wanted, I'd
heard of them, I'd seen pictures of them, I was impressed by them, I wanted them, I
couldn't afford them. So donkeys years down the line, I find them
turning up at carboot sales, dirt cheap and later on ebay, initially dirt cheap. Um..
now they're getting really quite expensive. Umm... So, it's not really a nostalgia thing.
It's fulfilling a childhood wish, if you like. Umm.. I can so I do, though at the moment
I can't so I don't, but I've got most of what I wanted anyway, so it's alright.
But the actual playing of the games... there is... it's absolutely true, there is some
nostalgia in playing quite a lot of them. The ones that I played as a teen and a twentysomething
person. Umm... Atari 2600... there is a lot of nostalgia
in playing that. Some ZX81, there's... there is immense nostalgia...
but that's actually not... why I play retro games.
And there's the thing, I... I am a retro collector of hardware, but I'm not a retro collector
of gaming... It... it... I.. I.. quite frequently sort
of explain that there is a difference. I'm not a gaming collector.
I happen to have a large collection of games. But... they just accumulate as I buy the hardware.
I accumulate software. But I am buying the software not to collect
it, but to play it. But I'm not doing it because... I... I am
a retro gamer, but I'm not playing them because they're retro, and there's the thing.
It's probably inaccurate to describe me as a retro gamer.
Yeah, who'd have thunk that? If I sit and really think about it.
I'm not a retro gamer, I'm just a gamer. The thing is, if I sit and analyse how I think
about all of these games I've got... I look up there, I've got PS3, PS2, PS1, XBox 1,
DS, Mega Drive, 32X... y'know... tons of it... and I don't separate them. In my head... in
my mind tank, or my brain box... I have not got separate drawers. This is modern...
this is retro, and shuffle them about as they get older.
The hardware, I do. The games... are games and I'm a gamer.
And I don't sit there playing... I'm playing 32X... no... I'm playing C.. duhh...
god... engage brain... I'm playing Mega CD games at the moment, and
when I'm playing them, I'm not thinking... oh.. this is some classic retro gaming...
That's not what's going through my head. That's not what the experience is to me.
It's this is a great video game. Or.. this is not a very good video game.
It's just a video game. Doesn't matter what it's on.
Doesn't matter how old it is. Umm...
There isn't... In my head there is no difference. Some are older.
But it doesn't matter, it's either a good game, or it isn't a good game.
Umm... Some games don't age very well, and you look
at them and they're dated and they're not as good as you remember them.
But that probably comes from naivety at the time that you played them,
because in all honesty, if they're not a good game now, they weren't a good game then.
There will have been something that was new about them that impressed you at the time.
Maybe a new graphical technique. Maybe it was a new genre.
Do you remember when there were new genres? I do.
Umm... A good game is always a good game.
It will never stop being a good game. A mediocre game that had an impressive something
about it... may have been impressive at the time but won't
be now, but if it doesn't impress now, it wasn't a good game.
Umm... That's my view.
There may be people who disagree, but... yeah. To me, I... retro... doesn't even come into
it. Err...
I'm a gamer. And when that game was made is absolutely
irrelevant. The game that keeps coming to mind every single
time is Defender. Defender to me is one of the perfect games
out there. It is one of the best games ever made... ever..
on any system. It's not my favourite, but...
It doesn't matter if you're like 200 years into the future, Defender will still be fantastic.
And the fact that it will be retro... it'll be uber retro... it'll be a bleedin' antique...
doesn't matter. It'll be, I dunno, when do things become ancient?
I dunno. But when it becomes ancient, It'll still be
a great video game. The fact that it's retro is irrelevant.
And that's kind of how I view video games. Why do you play retro games?
Because I like games, and a lot of games are retro.
I think that c... yeah..... It's not... It's kind of straightforward,
but when I actually come to think about it, I, I, I, found the answer was kind of unexpected.
Coz I though it's just a nostalgia thing, but it aint.
Um.. there is nostalgia for sure, but it's just...
good games are good. So I play them.
And it doesn't matter how old they are. Okay...
Good question. Link to um.. joyofsticks' original video down there.
Since we can't do video responses any more, Imean I don't think I did them very often
anyway, I would always do this, respond to it, and then link down there.
Go watch his video. Next... next one that I'm responding to is
from GamerGeezer. And he asked what is your gaming timeline?
I've answered this one or I've spoke about this more than once.
I am kind of repeating myself, these days, a bit, but I am aware that I have quite a
lot of viewers who maybe weren't here last time I spoke about this so, here we are.
My gaming timeline, and by that... what systems did you have, when?
What order did you get them in? I have a little bit of trouble with this,
sometimes, when I try to remember. But, here we go.
Very very first system I had was a Pong game. It was um..
Nah, you can't see it from there, down there... It was a Binatone pong system. It was the
Mk10. With the joystick instead of the... the..
paddle. Orange and like dark brown or grey or black
or charcoal colour. A load of games like pong, football, was there
sort of a basketball and a sort pf shooting game if you had a gun, which I didn't. But
you had a crosshair you could control with a joystick.
It was, it was pong, and you know... you knew what you were getting with it.
And it was quite fun. I've always considered pong to be a great
game. Umm...
I mean it's Uber-simple and I suppose it's kind of difficult because you need two people
to play it. If you didn't have someone to play with, you were screwed.
Umm.. Except for the shooting game, and that was
quite fun. So that was the first thing I had.
The second... Well, I, I...
Where is it? That!
Not this exact one... I... don't know if I lost it or, broke it, or I
think it suffered screen rot in the end. Umm...
Time Out: Toss Up. Which is Nintendo Ball.
And it even says on the back here, 1980.. ma... you won't be able to see that will you?
Maybe. Somewhere on here it says 1980 Made by Nintendo.
Honest. I was quite good at that.
Er.. it would, the score would go up to nine hundred and ninety nine, and then it stopped.
Or was it nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine?
Can't remember. But I, I was able to quite consistently take
it right to the end of the scoreboard thing, on difficult level and beat it.
Which was quite pleasing. I then had er....
Galaxy Invader 1000. and...
The following year, Astro Wars, which... anyone who's into table-top and handheld LED
type games will be familiar with them, they were fantastic in their own limited kind
of way. Astro Wars I still, I have the music in my
head, that it played when it like, started up. It was great.
Went through batteries like you wouldn't believe. And I didn't have a power supply thingie so
er... very often I couldn't play it coz I didn't
have any batteries. They were the big fat *** batteries as
well. Umm... next...
I struggle now. Was it an Atari 2600 or was is a Sinclair
ZX81? I... don't remember.
I, I, I can'thahaha...I really can't remember which I had first.
We'll go with the ZX81. Umm...
I think I got it in '82, it might have been '83.
Er... so we'll say I got them about the same time(ish), probably the same year.
Er.. I didn't have a tape recorder for it, so I couldn't load up any games.
I had to program them in myself, and as ZX81s do, it suffered memory wobble, so very often
I'd type in a game, get half way through, there'd be a little bit of movement, and the
16k Ram Pack would break connection. And the whole thing would like, crash... program
code all completely lost. And that was that.
The only game I remember being able to program into it that would work consistently because
it wasn't too big a piece of code was er... a .. canyon bomber kind of thing.
Or was it City Bomber? Where you got the plane, it goes along, and
you drop bombs and flatten the buildings, before you crash into them.
Only it was such a crap piece of code, that it didn't matter if you flew into the buildings.
I think it was a 1k game. I think that was it, that's why I could program it without
having the 16k ram pack in. So you could drop your bomb, and your bomb
would flatten the building, and that was cool, but if you didn't, and you flew into the building,
it didn't matter. You just ploughed straight through the building and you didn't die.
And your plane just carried on until you got to the bottom.
So that was really kind of crap. It wasn't really a game.
It was more of a graphical demo, in that there was no collision detection. Crap.
I did once get a, a tape to load up. I borrowed a friend's tape recorder, and the only game
I had for this ZX81 wasn't a game... It was a program called Biorhythms.
You can still come across it today on ebay and stuff like that.
And you put in your date of birth and it drew a graph, on the screen. Just a sine wave...
with like a a a thing at the bottom... a scale, for what date it was, or whatever.
And it would tell you well your biorhythm's on a high or on a low at that particular date.
It was rubbish! It was like, what is the point of this?
It serves no purpose because it's just *** anyway.
So that was my experience of the ZX81. I loved it, I did try to program it.
I, ss.. I, I've got two, and I really like them.
I like, I've got games for them now. Umm.. but back then y'know, it was... I was
just chuffed to have a computer. It goes back to the whole.. when I was a very
young kid, saying to my mother, when I grow up I'm going to have a computer, and my mum
saying no... only governments, universities and very big companies will ever have computers,
because they're very big and very expensive. And me thinking hmm. Coz I'd been watching
Star Trek, um.. and they had a talking computer, and I wanted one.
Yeah. And then I got a ZX81 and I, y'know, I remembered
it then, and I remember it now... what my mother said, and just thinking Huh! Shows
what you knew! So I was very pleased.
Real computer. mmm.
So, at around about the same time, I got a.. it was for christmas '83, I remember that
one very clearly... an Atari 2600.
It was the one that came bundled with Combat and Pac-Man.
Now... a lot of people at the time at least, said Combat was great. It was bundled with
it because it was a really good game. I never, ever agreed with that, and I still
don't agree with that. I think Combat is ***!
It's... it's the crappy game that they bundled with it because they couldn't sell it.
That's my view, plenty of people will disagree with that, I'm sure.
I just found it completely tedious. You couldn't play it unless you had someone
else to play against. Which quite often I didn't, so that made it
useless. Umm... here you were with a... a... video
games console that you could play video games against the console, and they give you something
that requires you to have another person there. What a load of ***!
And really it wasn't that much fun anyway because...
like with the planes... you went in a straight line...
your mate went in a straight line... you're just following each other...
and it takes one of you to turn round... for it to become a game.
Otherwise you're just chasing each other and you;re both out of each other's range...
and invariably the one who turns round is the one who gets shot.
So... it's kind of like when you were a kid and playing cowboys and indians or war, or
something... and you were like, *** ***, you're dead!
No I'm not, you missed me. It takes the co-operation of the other player.
They've got to agree to die. And that's what Combat's like.
Er... certainly the planes, and I found that crap.
It came with Pac-Man as well. Umm...
Described at the time as being an absolutely appalling umm...
version of Pac-Man, and I, yeah, if you wanted arcade perfect or even a representation of
the arcade game, it was crap. It was flickery as hell, but I kind of...
Yes, it is a *** poor conversion, but it's not actually a bad game.
Yeah, the ghosts flicker, but well... you could say they're ghosts, you can see through
them, and the flickering makes them see-through. Mmm...
That's a bit of a stretch, but y'know. And alright, the maze was absolutely nothing
like on the original game, but it didn't really matter.
It served a purpose. It made you weave around and y'know, that, there were ways to escape
or get cornered or whatever... You couldn't really get cornered, well yes
you could get cornered... whatever... anyway... So, alright it was a rough representation,
but it played well enough. Here was me, 14 years old, it was Combat or
Pac-Man... Pac-Man got played a lot.
I pushed it round the clock, albeit on easy level.
Coz you could make it as hard as you like. Umm...
I enjoyed it. Shocking, I know.
It's one of those... regarded as one of the worst games, one of the games that supposedly
brought on the er... um.. the big video-gaming crash of 80whatever
it was. Meh!
I, I found it alright. I played it.
I, I col.. I got quite a collection of 2600 games back in the day.
Maybe 30 of them? I had it for a few years.
Eventually sold it and later wished I hadn't, coz what I got for the stuff that...
I didn't actually sell the console, I sold the games.
What I got for them wouldn't have bought one new game, but it was because they were obsolete,
no-one wanted them any more. Bad move.
I've since bough again off of ebay most of the games I had back then.
There are a couple that I haven't got. But I've got most of them.
Next... I got an Atari 600XL.
Same story with this as I had with the ZX81... I didn't have a tape recorder for it, because
you needed the special Atari tape recorder, so even if I could have got a normal tape
recorder, no... I could've got a normal tape recorder...
by that time I could've afforded one, it was 1986?
I had a bit of money. I was working, sort of...
In a pub, initially... anyway... um, but of course you had to have the proper
Atari tape recorder, and they were selling the 600XL off cheap in Boots... £30....
and so I was like, yeah gotta have one of them...
okay I haven't got a tape deck, but I can get the games on cartridge, can't I?
No. Couldn't. Couldn't get one.
Well, no... I had one, I had a football game, with it, and it was the only one I ever found
at that time on cartridge, coz everywhere had stopped stocking them.
No-where held the tape recorders any more. Several years later, Electronics Boutique
as it was then, had, they, they sold an Atari tape recorder, and I bought it.
And I got it home. And it had the wrong damned plug on it. It
was a European plug. It didn't occur to me that I could've got an adapter thing.
It was just like, what the hells's this two pinned bleedin' thing? Can't use that.
Took it back. Got a refund. It was fifty bloody quid for that tape recorder!
That's insane. Umm...
So I... didn't get to use it, back then. I mean it was kind of obsolete even then.
I didn't get to load any Atari games from tape until a couple of years ago when I got
me 65XE. I had that football game on cartridge which
I lent to a friend, and he never gave it back. ***!
After that, about six months later, I was working, I had a prop... it wasn't a proper
job, I was on the YTS. I was earning £27.50 a week.
Yeah! For full time work.
That was crap! Anyway... I, I saved up enough to buy an Acorn
Electron, £60... with a tape recorder in with it. Everything you needed, and the games,
that came with it... there was, I'm looking at them here...
Starship Command, Meteors, Hopper, Arcadians, Snapper...
umm.. y'know, pretty decent conversions of some
arcade games, and Starship Command was just awesome.
And the very next game I bought for it was Elite, because that was why I wanted an Electron...
it was for Elite. Umm...
I played that game for years! I don't exaggerate. Umm...
I mean there are games here that I've played for a long time...
Gran Turismo 2 and Gran Turismo 3, I played both of them for a very long time, like, every
day, for a long time. But Elite... I played....
from almost every day from 1986, to 19... probably 92.
Nah, would've been 91. 91 or... when I bought a Mega Drive... because
that was the next system I bought, was a Sega Mega Drive.
Umm.. I, I got quite a lot of games on that, and
I played more than I owned, because there were shops that... there was a shop...
you bought one, you bought your first game there, and then you could take it back and
swap it for a small fee, like a couple of pounds or something.
You could swap it and get another one. Or if you chose you could just keep one, and
buy another, and then swap that. It was pretty good.
And so I got through an awful lot of games on the Mega Drive then.
And about a year later, I got the SNES. And for a long time I was actually very disappointed
with the SNES. I knew it had got this really fancy mode 7.
I'd been reading about it in the magazines for ages, and wanting to, wanting to play
something that used these advanced graphics abilities.
And... the first game I got that did it was some kind of formula one racing game, like,
I, I can't remember what it was called. Was it F1 Heat?
Sommat like that. I don't remember. It was not very good.
Er... I got er... god.. what's that other one, that futuristic one that I have forgotten
the name of... that is very popular, and I wasn't really
into that either. And it wasn't until Mario Kart that I really
felt yes, this is a cool piece of kit, that really is impressive.
And then Street Fighter II came out, and that was, y'know... I was like, okay, this was
worth buying. Super Mario Kart, Street Fighter II, brilliant!
I think about it now and... games that I actually would want to play on
it now, there aren't many. Those two come to mind.
It's still my favourite version of Street Fighter, though I have better versions.
I mean arcade conversions or whatever, ports, on the PS2, that are pretty much arcade perfect.
Don't care! I like the SNES one.
Er.. my girlfriend at that time she used to play it as well, and we would use street fighter
II to decide who was going to do the washing up.
Coz we were pretty equally balanced. Umm...
I mean... a more reasonable way would've been just taking it in turns, but no, it was like,
Street Fighter to decide who was doing washing up, or cooking, or whatever.
It was fun. Er... short time after that, 90er.. '92no,
it would've been about '93, I got an Atari 600... no...
engage brain! An Amiga 600, Commodore Amiga 600, and this
was my first Commodore machine. For all that I am an Amiga fan, I'm not actually
a Commodore person at all. Umm..
I hadn't had a Commodore 64, I hadn't had a VIC-20, I, it , nothing... Commodore was
not a thing with me. It was Amiga.
So I got a 600. And about a year later I got a 1200, which
I proceeded to upgrade and upgrade and upgrade, and upgrade...
until... I ended up with... er...
This beastie here. Which is...
some of you will be familiar with. God.. get back...
where you were, you bloody camera. So yeah, that thing's got like, 32 megs of
RAM, er.. Zorro II bus board, scsi CD writer... re-writer in fact,
er... 68060 processor, all kinds of fancy gubbins.
There's um.. a Buddha and Catweasle card, I'm trying to remember what they do.
Extra IDE ports and stuff like that. It's got a IOblix card, for fast parallel,
or was it serial, whatever, it gave it quicker internet access and stuff.
It was a monster, for the time, and cost me a bloody fortune, over quite a few years.
I'm still paying the credit card bill. Yeah.
Umm.. So that was that.
And that was my main gaming machine, by the time I got that well expanded, that was what
I did most of my gaming on. But I did get a 32X.
In 1994. Because... Virtua Racing!
I mean, I only had three games on it. I had Virtua Racing, I had Sega's Star Wars Arcade,
and I had Doom. And that was all I could get for it. You just,
you couldn't find anything else. And my, um.. Virtua Racing cart was faulty
anyway. I, I took it back and got another one and it was...
bad batch. It worked, but it would crash.
There was something wrong with the edge connector doofers on it, and um, every so often it would
just crash. Loved it though, when it would work.
Woodwork? Hmm.
So yeah, I, I played 32X for a while and Amiga, until, what the hell year was it?
I don't r.. 90..? I can't remember the year, but I bought a PS1.
I'd been watching the Saturn and the PS1 and the 3DO and Jaguar come out and was sitting
on the fence for quite a while, not knowing which to buy,
coz I knew I could only afford one, at that time, and....
I read all the magazines or quite a few of them, and I realised okay the 3DO is failing.
It was too expensive, people didn't buy it, then the PS1 came out, and was cheaper and
more powerful, so 3DO were going to bring out the M2 and then they just collapsed.
That was quite disappointing, coz the M2 sounded interesting.
Saturn orig, initially it was like, there was a lot of enthusiasm and arcade perfect
ports of blah blah whatever Daytona and stuff... and then you see them and it's like, okay...
that's not really very good, is it? Jaguar had gone pretty much *** up by this
time, so it, it.... became obvious which was the one to buy,
and then I saw Ridge Racer running on it, and I was like okay I want that, because I
loved Ridge Racer in the arcades, and it looked pretty damned close to my eyes.
So I bought one, but to buy it, I had to sell my...
I sold my SNES, I sold all of my SNES games, I sold all of my Mega Drive games.
I kept the Mega Drive and the 32X, and the 32X games, because the shop would not...
while they would take the Mega Drive, they wouldn't take the 32X and I knew I couldn't
sell the 32X on it's own. It would be a piece of expensive hardware
that I'd be stuck with, that I couldn't do anything with, and so I was like, sod it,
I'll keep that then. And I kept the 32X games and just played those,
with no Mega Drive games. Bought a PS1, I got on the day, I got Ridge
Racer and Battle Arena Toshinden, and they were all I had for quite a while.
I absolutely played them to death. Umm..
And it was a while later that I bought Doom, which... it was a step up from Doom on the
32X. Er... It was full screen instead of er.. letterboxed,
and it had better sound. That baby crying thing was like really creepy.
But it, it was kind of a little bit, seen that, done that, but then I got um.. Jumping
Flash, and V Rally, oh, what else did I get? There, there were a few games hat I got that
were really quite impressive. And it wasn't, it was quite a while until
Gran Turismo came out, but when Gran Turismo came out I was in heaven!
Yeah, I, I had um... Need For Speed as well, which was disappointing after Need For Speed
on the 3DO. And coz I like racing games, I knew this thing's
capable of doing something really good, but I wanted something realistic(ish).
Um.. and then Gran Turismo came out, and that was it for me, it was like okay, things don't
get any better than this. This was it.
This was, this was the game I had been waiting for, for however long.
And I've been hooked on the series ever since. Totally, utterly.
So, stuck with the PS1 for a long while. I mean, I, I got it in, what, '96, '97, something
like that, I don't remember. And it was... oh, 2001?
2002? I can't remember exactly, when I got a PS2.
And... by this time the, the the Amiga was now, not really getting used.
I got a PC in about 2001. It was a second hand one, it wasn't especially
good. It had like a 300MHz Celeron, and I got it mainly for using on the internet.
But it did a bit of gaming. Wasn't very good. But the Amiga had taken a back seat.
And the PS2 was well, do you know what? I can't remember what games I got with my PS2.
I think ... because they'd been out for a while, I couldn't afford one, I'd been doing
agency work for quite a while, and I was just skint, all the time.
Umm.. But eventually I think I got it when Gran
Turismo 3 came out. Um...
I got that, and I got... what's it called? Medal Of Honour... Front Line... yep.
I got that, and I cannot for the life of me remember what other PS2 games I got around
that time, when PS2 was new. I'm sitting here, I'm looking at my PS2 collection,
and it's big. There's a lot there, but I can't remember what I had back in the day, and what
I got since I've just been, accumulating stuff. What did I have when I was back in my flat?
Before I met Andrea. And I can't, I couldn't tell you.
I ain't got a clue.. hehehehe... I don't know what I used to play.
That's weird. Black. That was definitely one.
But was I here when I got that? Shadow Of The Colossus, I was definitely here.
Tourist Trophy, I got that one back then. Um.. Riding Spirits, I got that back then.
Ummmm... yeah, oh, Spyro, that was an early one. Spyro: Enter The Dragonfly. Love that.
Yeah. And then I got a PC.
Er, I'd been for quite a while using a laptop, which yeah, after the 300 Celeron, I bought
a laptop which was a 1.1MHZ AMD Athlon, and it wasn't very good at gaming, at all, I,
it just about managed to do Quake 3 Arena. And that was about the only game I played
on it. Then I got another PC, which was actually
probably a better PC than this thing I'm using now, in terms of gaming, coz I stuck a decent
graphics card in it. And I played Crysis... no... Far Cry, the
first Far Cry, and it was my first experience of what I would say at that time was next
gen gaming. It was streets ahead of what my PS2 could
do. It was not, it was not a million miles away from what you would expect of a PS3 game.
In fact it was probably about on a par with it. Maybe the framerate stuttered a bit here
and there, because it wasn't quite up to it on the hardware that I had, but y'know, it
weren't bad, I got that and this was when I realised first
person shooters... I like, a lot. Umm...
And then I got Far C... duh... no.. Half Life 2.
Fwwwwhhhhh.... I had never experienced a game like this,
I mean Far Cry was fun, and the areas were big, and it was action packed and the physics
were interesting, and it was quite an eye opener, and then...
Half Life 2 was just a whole order of bigger, more and sinister, the characterisations and
situations were so dark and sinister. Er..
It blew me away. I just thought this is awesome, and this is
what next gen gaming is all about. Next gen as it was then.
And then I, I played a few games on that, other games...
um.. then I got a PS3.
and... loved it, but it didn't blow me away. Because I'd been playing PC game.
SO like, the step up from Mega Drive to PS1... was impressive. In fact I didn't really go
from Mega Drive to PS1, I went from like 3D Amiga games, like Formula 1 Grand Prix, that
with an accelerator card and when you use F1Ed.. or F1GPEd to alter the framerate and
stuff... 3D was, I'd got me head around it. It wasn't
something that blew me away, but texture mapped 3D on the PS1, that... it was, it was still
a big leap. It was impressive.
Umm... But the leap from PS1 to PS2 was less... holy
crap... but still oh, this is cool. And then going from PS2 to PC, was like...
Far Cry and Half Life 2 were just staggering after playing PS2, it was just like bloody
hell, this is good. And then I started playing PS3 and what did
I have? What did I get?
Ohh... God...
What's that... whaaa.... It wasn't even very good games that I had,
to start off with. I've totally forgotten the name of it.
There was a driving game, where you sort if, it's all desert and muddy and off roady and
stuff, and I've forgotten what it's called and I never really liked it.
Totally forgotten what it's called. I haven't got it now.
Er.. What else d, I, I had two games, and I totally
forgotten what the other one was as well. Can't remember.
But I wasn't very impressed, for a while. It wasn't until Gran Turismo 5 came out that
I was like, yep, okay, this is cool. Umm...
And I got Ferrari Challenge, that was alright. Colin McRae Dirst, that was alright.
Ratchet and Clank didn't do it for me. Umm...
What's that other one? The one that was like a big deal and everyone made a fuss of an
I've forgot what it's called and I'm looking at them over here in case you're wondering
what the hell I'm looking at. Little Big Planet.
Yep. That didn't do it for me either.
There'd been massive hype about it and it's a creative game, and I am a creative person.
I thought yeah, make your own game. Real world kind of physics... great.
But it just didn't, didn't do it in any way whatsoever, so I was really disappointed.
And then, er... Call Of Duty arrived, and I was like..
Oooohhh, I like this. Um, just for the story modes,
I didn't do the online thing. Coz for online I was doing emm...
Warhawk. I really did get into Warhawk.
I played that a lot. It was my, if I wanted to play online, I played
Warhawk, and that was that. And it wasn't until I got Battlefield 3, that
I stopped playing Warhawk, like pretty much every day.
These days what am I playing? Grand Theft Auto 5. That's, that's the only
thing that I've put in there in the past few weeks.
Thank you John. Still loving it. Umm...
So that, that is my er... my gaming timeline, if you like, er..
during all of that, obviously I have accumulated a large amount of retro systems, but they,
the, they', all of these others ones are ones that I've collected as part of a collection,
with the intention of collecting. Yes, I play them, largely though just for
making videos at the moment. It's like when you're doing a video a day,
that takes a bit of time, you don't have time for that much gaming, and when I am gaming,
I'm mostly doing it on a modern system. Mostly.
Though when I have one out, like I've got the er... down there, I've got the Mega Drive
Mk2 with the Mega CD Mk2 and a 32X plugged into it, so that's getting a bit of playing
in between making videos and playing Grand Theft Auto.
Yeah. Think that answers that.
Original video by GamerGeezer, link down there. Okay...
Next bit. Er..
Optimisation of your youtube channel. SEO. Search Engine Optimisation, they call it,
in some areas. But I mean are you optimising for search engines
or just for youtube? As some of you will know, I've made changes
over the months, yeas, whatever... to try and get more subscribers, get more
views, there are things you can do. Like um..
They rec.. it, it is sometimes recommended that you have an intro.
You know, very brief, that explains what your channel's about, maybe appeals to newcomers.
There is the outro, where, well.. call to, what do they call it? Call to action.
Ask people to subscribe, ask people to hit the like button, things like that.
I have done these things, um, do a promo video. I've done one of those.
And I, I spoke about these things at the time when I've done them, and ...
it... I did them as an experiment really, to see, did they make a difference, and I
was asked a few months ago, and I can't remember who it was who asked me,
so now you've been doing these things for a few months, have they made any difference?
And it was a good question, and I didn't actually get round to answering it, at the time.
Because I'd just been away for quite a long while, hadn't made any videos for a while.
So I couldn't tell had all these changes made any difference?
Now that I have been making videos again for a while I can answer the question, and the
answer is... they made no difference whatsoever.
But I have to qualify that statement, because youtube changed the way they work, over time.
They changed the way your channel is promoted, or not.
Where your videos appear in the sidebar of other people's videos, or not.
Everything's changed. Whether you even appear in people's subscription
box. Youtube is mot consistent. It changes a lot.
I had a period a few months ago where I was getting really good view, and lots of subscribers.
They were coming in well, I don't get millions... I never have, I was getting about 10 a day
for a while, which was quite nice. Um, currently I'm getting about 3 a day, which
is not so good. But... the thing is, doing all of these things
only goes so far. Umm..
You can encourage people to do things, you can make it as easy as you possibly can for
people to see your videos, like with playlists. All that kind of thing.
Organise your channel, do all the.. as much linkage as you can, here there and everywhere,
promote your own stuff, within your own channel. But all of these things will only go so far,
because it depends on how good is your content? How appealing is your personality?
And I come to the conclusion that my channel is only as appealing as it is.
This is how well I'm doing, and it's not going to change.
There is going to be no sudden fame over night, and it doesn't really matter what I do.
It doesn't hurt to do all of those things. But I haven't found they make a difference
one way or another. And I'm fine with that.
This, y'know, I do what I do, and I know it's not... it's appealing to a good number of
people, like nine thousand and something is a very nice number and I'm very happy with
it. I want more.
I will always want more. I'm a greedy ***.
What can I say? But y'know, I certainly can't complain.
But anyway... er... I have been unm... I've been watching a channel...
and I'm gonna , god, I can't remember what it is...
gimme a moment. Actually, two channels.
There is umm... two channels... videoc.. I'll link down there...
Video Creators and ReelSEO. They, they're just full of advice, things
that you can do to try and get more views, get more traffic, get more subscribers, and
I've been watching them. Umm..
And they're very good, and I, y'know, if you're trying to get somewhere with your youtube
channel, I do recommend having a look at them. They er...
I've learned a few things. Now...
One thing that I am going to be trying, and in fact I started trying it yesterday...
lukemorse noticed it... he's the only person who noticed it and commented on it...
Captions. Closed Captions.
You see the little CC thing down there... or down there...
or wherever it is. Umm..
You may or may not be aware that you can have automated closed captions where youtube's
speech to text voice recognition thingamyjig will try and interpret what it is you're saying
and will put subtitles on your screen and it you've ever watched them, you will know
that they're they have very good comedy value, because they're so completely wrong, and sometimes
very very funny. Umm..
But you can type your own. There's a feature on like in the enhancements bit on your video
management doofah whatsit where... your video editing page on youtube.
You can... it's quite clever, and I ought to,,, I should turn the camera around and
show you, but I'm too damned lazy. You can have your video playing in a little
window there, and you've got a box to the right of it and as the video plays, you type
what it is that you're, you hear, the words that are being spoken. You type them up, and
as you type, it pauses, so it's like... listen a bit, type, and listen a bit more, type...
it works. It's great.
And I did it on yesterdays um.. Mickey Mania video.
If you wanna see what it is I'm talking about, watch that video, click the closed captions
link, and it will put subtitles on. Initially it starts out out of sync because
I screwed it up, but it gets into sync, and you'll see.
I will be doing it with this video. This will have been up several hours before the captions
go live, because it will take me a bloody long while to type them all.
You type them manually and it's like, I'm not... I'm an alright typist, but I can do
fast, or I can do accurate, and I can't do both.
So it'll take me a while. And why the hell would I do this? Would be
a very good question. There are two reasons.
One is.... it makes it accessible for deaf people. Hard of hearing? Whatever.
Or, or.. people who aren't English who English isn't their first language.
I mean, I've got an accent and a half I'm sure, umm... maybe not as difficult as some
certain northern accents haha, even though I live in sort of north midlands,
if you like. Umm, but I know that for some non-english
people, my accent will be quite difficult to understand.
But where it might be difficult to understand an english accent, to read it is another matter,
so it makes it accessible to for people whose first language isn't english. It makes it
accessible for deaf people. And that's one good reason to do it. Accessibility.
But there's another very very good reason to do it, and that is google.
Because, google how it sees these videos.. it... it will look at the incoming links to
the video, who's clicked .. I dunno if it, it doesn't
look at thumbs up, it looks at plus's on Google Plus.
Umm... It looks at incoming links, stuff like that.
The title, the text, the tags less so. And y'know... the video is searchable, but
you can give it a mass more information, by filling in the captions.
It doesn't know... google doesn't know what you're saying. It doesn't really know what
you're video is about, beyond what your title and your info below says.
It doesn't know a whole lot about it. But if you type up everything you've said
in that video, it's got a whole mass of stuff to go on.
Now it's not going to add, say I'm doing a video titled, I don't know.... well, we'll
just call it, umm.. Mickey Mania on the Mega CD.
I, I did the captions on that, and those captions won't give it any extra weight for anyone
searching for Mickey Mania on the Mega CD. Maybe a tiny fraction, but it's not gonna
push me to the top of any search list. But it gives it a whole lot of other stuff
that isn't in the title, or the info bar for it to go on, lots of other words that it might
pick up on. Like you might search for ***, or something
like that, and it might rank there. It's all about appearing in more searches
on google. Friday Talkie... Umm, I, it's not... it, just
go to my titles and data and y'know, info in the info box, friday talkie, google isn't
going to pick up on a lot, normally. I talk for a very long while and it knows
very little about what I'm talking about. Where if I do the captions, it's got a mass
of information, it will know exactly what I'm talking about and the idea being...
I'm probably not going to rank very highly in google searches... not google, in, in youtube
searches, any more than I do now, but google searchges.. yeah, it's, it's giving it something
to get it's teeth into. Will it have any affect?
Don't know. I have watched conversations on the subject
and opinions are split. Er.. I haven't had experience on it, so I
don't know yet. But I'm gonna do it for this video, and I think this video will be a good
one to judge, does it work or not? A friday talkie, a typical friday talkie on
my channel, will get between 11 and 13 hundred views, over the course of about a week, a
week and a half. So, come back to this video in two weeks time
and have a look see how many views it's had. If it's had more than 1300, safe to say that
adding captions works. Umm...
Will it be worthwhile? Well how many more views would you like?
I don't know. I mean, it's gonna take me a good two or three hours to type up everything
that I've just said, so y'know, I would want another 500 views for it to be worth all of
that effort. But we'll see.
I don't know what it's going to do, but it will be interesting to find out.
There you go. That's that.
Have I got anything else to talk about? No.
Umm... So, what's coming up?
Hmm. More of the same!
I, actually, I want to vary it a bit. I did notice this week, I, y'know, I've been
doing Mega CD game after Mega CD game, and I threw in one Saturn game, and it got more
views, a good couple of hundred more. So I guess maybe people are getting a bit
bored with the Mega CD? I don't know. Er, so I need to mix it up a little bit and
put some other stuff in there, but I don't know what yet.
Other than that, more of the same. Er, nothing special planned. Just gameplay
videos and me talking nonsense, whilst playing badly. Yeah.
Think that's everything. I'm gonna shut up now, because I've got far
too much to type already. So er, thank you for watching.
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