errantsignal

Blips Episode 1

Hey all!

Here's the first in my attempts to cover more obscure indie stuff.  Like I said in the video - this is mostly just qualified blind praise for games I enjoyed playing.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Let me know if it leans too hard into being an ad for these games, or if you'd rather see me cover one unknown game in depth instead of a series of games, or whatever.  I'm really new to this format of "hey here's a thing that's cool" and I don't want to oversell t...

Talkin' 'Bout tiny Games

Hey all! This month's thing is here and it's... weird!

Basically I've been itching to talk about a lot of small, unknown, or simply overlooked games for a while now (you may have seen me complain about the lack of a Videogame Schlock Discourse on Twitter or seen some of my streams where I focus on z-grade titles).

Well, here's a 10 minute long look at why it's hard to get coverage for those sorts of titles. None of it is particularly revelatory, but combining footage of games that...

What does it mean to Player Character?

Hey all,

Here's the draft for this month's video! Sorry it took two months to make, but it's almost 1.5x as long as normal, so hey!

Anyways, let me know what you think - my current plan is to maybe clean it up and refine some bits that I'm not super happy about and release it to the general public later on during the work week, so if you see anything that seems off/bad/etc, let me know!  In the mean time I'm just gonna clean up some wonky arguments and add some graphics that ...

No Charge This Month!

Hey folks!

Just a quick FYI: There won't be a charge this month, as I don't have anything ready to release.  Normally about this time I'm in the last throes of editing a thing together and getting it ready to ship, but I bit off a bit more than I could chew in a single month with the latest project and it's just not ready yet even if I pulled a few all-nighters or wanted to push it out a few days.  I'm looking at the nature of authorship of player characters and where the line...

Broken Reality, Vaporwave, and Irony

So... I step a bit outside my wheelhouse with this one, and while I tried to Do The Reading I'm still worried I'm going to be inundated with people saying that I either take vaporwave far too seriously or dismiss the entire thing as a joke too easily.  And I'm prepping emotionally for that, because I think it's sort of an inevitability that I get both given what I understand of the genre.

That said! This is video about Broken Reality, an imaginary virtual chatroom from (at least!) ...

DUSK

Happy New Year! Here's a (rough draft?) of the release of the next episode!

Thanksgiving Leftovers: Fallout 76

Fallout 76 is... maybe not great.  And you don't need me telling you it's not great, there's a whole swarm of angry internet people out there telling you (in extremely hyperbolic language) how it's the worst thing since the nuclear apocalypse.

I'm more curious in doing a bit of guesswork as to how we got here. The game's so buggy in its execution, so full of seemingly half-implemented content, and so conflicted in its own design goals that it feels like something *happened* to it.  T...

Thanksgiving Leftovers: Battlefield V

So if you've seen my tweets over the past... month or two, you probably know I've been itching to try out new formats for the show.  And if you've been paying attention to the release schedules for games, you also probably know that November is a bad time to plan to cover indie games if your free time playing games is also the time you use to capture footage for your webshow.  Consequently while I wanted to talk about indie games this month, that kiiiinda got derailed by the f...

Driving Games & Other Horrors

And we bring Halloween to a close with a big fun episode about a bunch of scary driving games!  Hooray!

I genuinely didn't mean for this to be A Theme but I was looking around at all the smaller indie games I wanted to highlight this year and realized that other than a few one off experiences like September, 1999 or The Outpost Nine, they all involved a driving mechanic of some sort.  And hey, I've heard of worse ideas for an internet video!

Plus it's a nice, easy watch for the...

We Know the Devil (All of the Spoilers)

Hey all!

Here's this month's second Halloweeny episode, We Know the Devil!  It's spoiler intense... like all the way, so maybe don't watch if you want to go in blind.

Sorry for the brief little post on this - I'm wrapping up the _third_ Halloween episode for this month, and it should be up tomorrow barring catastrophic failure of some kind!  Unlike this one, it's largely spoiler free and can be enjoyed by everyone!  It's also like 90% edited, so back to it!

As always...

Detention

Happy Halloween Month!  We're kicking things off with a game I was debating about whether to do for this month, mostly because it's gotten extensive coverage throughout the YouTube-o-sphere.

But once I played it I had such a good time with it that I couldn't really not talk about it.  It's really quite good (aside from one really iffy angle that I talk about in the video).  It's a horror game, sure, but it's got way more on its mind than shouting "Boo!"  And the way it tell...

Lucah: Born of a Dream

This month's video is up! It talks about a game that deals obliquely with some heavy subjects (yay?), but also is really fun to play (yay!).

Talkin' about indie games is kinda hard.  I know my normal schtick is to do deep reads of games, but it's hard to do that with smaller titles - so few people have played them that I'm hesitant to engage in full-on spoiler discussions and deep dives, but at the same time I'm really not a fan of falling into more review-y language about how great a gam...

Prey: Mooncrash

Hey all,

*whistles* This one's coming in just under the cutoff for the month.  I blame August ending on a Friday.  Regardless: Prey Mooncrash!  It's a game!  Well, it's DLC, but hey! It's a thing! And I'm gonna talk about it for 20 minutes!

The TL;DR of the video is that Mooncrash takes a genre known for creative, expressive problem solving and uses Roguelite mechanics to turn it in to a game that forces creative problem solving by putting you up aga...

Jurassic World Evolution (After a lot of Prattle)

Here is the first of what *might* be two Jurassic Park videos, depending on the reception this one gets!

This video is... perhaps a little nerd-wanky, but it's been a little while since I've let my obnoxious pedant freak flag fly.  Still, it was fun to put together and touch on a novel, a film, _and_ a game all in one video.  It was kind of interesting dealing with the challenges of each - videogames have that awkward systems breakdown thing where I never know how much to explain how...

Secret Little Haven (Spoilers)

Hey all!  This month's video is up - and this time it's a visual novel about being a Very Online Teenager in 1999!  It's also a game about self-discovery and queer youth.  It's pretty neat, especially if you remember going online as a kid pretty much anywhere from 1995-2010.  Then smart phones and WiFi came and pretty much the whole world changed.  C'est la vie.

Anyways, next up on the docket is a video about Jurassic Park.  Kinda sorta Jurassic World: Evolution, ...

No Charge This Month!

Hey all,

The short version: I’m turning off donations for this month, and you shouldn’t be charged by my account for the end of May/beginning of June cycle.  Nothing serious, just a lot of life stuff has happened and while I’m working on a video right this moment it won’t make the deadline for this month even in rough draft format.  I’m not comfortable collecting on a month where nothing was made.

The long version: I’m working on a ...

Far Cry 5 And the Art of Saying Nothing

Hey all,

This month's video is up!  This time I'm looking at Far Cry 5, because complaining about big budget games being bad at tackling their subject matter is more or less my wheelhouse.

Enjoy!

Iconoclasts (Spoilers)

Hey all!  In this video we're looking at Iconoclasts - a 2D metroidvania game that was a long time coming.  It's the result of just one person's work: Joakim Sandberg AKA Konjak.  And it's pretty neat!  I was torn on looking at the thematics of this game and it's long and fascinating history, and kind of ended up splitting the difference.

Anyways, let me know what you think!

Oh, and if you haven't been in the Discord: I'm working on something of a new series that (ass...

Anachronox (Moderate Spoilers)

Sorry for the delay, but February's episode is here!

Some thoughts on this one: I remain uncomfortable with how much covering game history involves covering auteurs/creative movers & shakers vs. the people who had boots on the ground.  Anachronox may well be Tom Hall's baby, but it's weird how, as we progress past about 2004 or so, the idea of auteurs stays but the size of the projects balloon well beyond what can easily be traced or attributed to one person.  I guess I just wish...

February Video Update

Hey all!

So just a update on the next episode: despite my best efforts it looks like it's gonna miss the cutoff for February (curse you, arbitrarily shortest month!).  That's the bad news.

The good news is it's only gonna miss the cutoff by a few days.  I already have plenty-o-footage captured and a script and I just need to put the whole shebang together! We're in the editing process now!  So February's episode will still be up soon!  Just... not in Febr...

Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (Spoilers?)

Hey! I just released January's video about a game where you climb a trash mountain with a hammer!  We talk about failure in games, pain and frustration as aesthetic goals, and also I mention Final Fantasy 7 so people can tell me it isn't Aeris, it's Aerith!  Look for those in the comments below the video!

Anyways, I had to drastically rewrite the script in the middle of production because I originally wrote this as an examination of difficulty but slowly realized that's not really wh...

The Shrouded Isle

Hey all,

Here's a video on The Shrouded Isle, a game about running a cult at the end of the world.  Also a game about choosing who lives and who dies!  And a game about finding out about your neighbors.  All in one!

The Obligatory Patreon Fee Post

Hey all,

So, let's talk about that there Patreon pledge fee.  Sorry if this is the 48424th e-mail you've gotten about this (and really, I'm also sorry if this is the first time you're hearing about this).  I'm also gonna use numbers, because I'm a nerd, so uh, be aware: there's some math ahead.

For the uninitiated, Patreon has changed their fee structure.  In the old system, p...

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Spoilers)

Yikes, this one kind of spiraled out of control and somehow became my longest episode ever.  Didn't plan on that, I just sort of had poor self-control with regard to editing this month.

Anyways! Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is a really well written game full of well realized characters (even if BJ is the only one really given an opportunity to grow or have much depth).  Much like Mafia 3, I think it falls into this weird category of AAA game that is very, *very* much story driven,...

Stories Untold

Hey all!

This year's Halloweeny spookytime episode is now up!  This time we're taking a look at Stories Untold, an episodic adventure game that tries to be both a horror anthology series and a throwback to 80's horror in the vein of Stranger Things or It Follows.  It's a pretty neat Halloweeny time title, and pretty easy to get into - at a breezy 3-4 hours it's a nice treat with a few tricks up its sleeve.

Prey (Spoilers)

Hey all!

This month I took a look at Prey.  On one hand, I really dig its immersive sim gameplay and thematic goals.  On the other, the end kind of sucks the wind of the rest of the game's sails.  It's a game about identity and reality and how we define ourselves in relationship to the world around us, as well as some metatextual commentary about games and how pretend identities play into those concepts... but it's also sort of only about that in fits and spurts, and never decid...

Tacoma

Hey!  Sorry this is coming a bit late in the day - I actually destroyed my phone by accident last week, got a new phone (and thus a new number) and had unfortunately turned on two factor authentication just days before hand, so it took a support call to unlock my Patreon account.

Anyways! It's fixed now, and this time we're taking a look at Tacoma.  It is a game about being in space!  And also a game about labor!  And also a game about people being people!  And it's go...

Gotland Game Conference Speech

This isn't a new ES episode (I'm working on that now!) but this is what I went away in June all the way out to Sweden to do!  I'm a little awkward - this is my first public speaking gig - but it's a decent remix of the video I did on violence a few years back, re-framed as a piece on computational platforms as shaping the games that run on them.

Also, I'd highly recommend some of the other videos on the channel - the other speakers there were great, and other YouTubers like George Weidmen...

Deus Ex (Spoilers)

The Summer of 0451 continues with Deus Ex!

This episode ended up a bit... unwieldy.  I really wanted to tap in how the game has changed in ways both good and bad since its release in 2000.  At the same time, it's a game I've been wanting to cover in the abstract since I started this show, and I think I may have jam-packed a few too many digressions in there - I think this is the longest single episode I've ever done!

A Brief History And Look At 0451

Finally! This took a lot of footage capture (there's bits from Thief, Thief 2, Dishonored, Knife of Dunwall, Dishonored 2, System Shock, System Shock 2, Ultima Underworld, Firewatch, Neon Struct, Gone Home, Deus Ex, and more in here!) and went through a number of rewrites.  But it's here!

And since this doesn't manage to delve quite as deeply into the individual games as I would have liked (and since the overall conclusions I can draw from looking at the lineage of 0451 games is a little ...