raycevick

Raycevick's Recommendations: Disco 4 :: Part I

HEALTH's been releasing "Disco" albums for years, since their debut in-fact. However, the first chapter in their 4th entry is quite different. The songs featured here aren't just remixes by other artists or HEALTH themselves, but full collaborations with a wide selection of musicians.

Names I'm familiar with such as Perturbator, and a whole host of ones I've never heard, but are intrigued by such as The Soft Moon. There's even ones I don't normally care for such as Ghostemane, that neve...

Second Chances

Deus Ex is a video-game I still think about to this day. It's world, music, voice acting (granted, that last one's often for silly reasons). However, I wouldn't give it any thought at all, had I quit on my first playthrough... or second... or third.

Deus Ex is a video-game I love, yet, probably attempted to get into a total of eight times before everything finally clicked. That's a lot of times...

Q&A: January 6th, 2020

Hammiam Asks
How did being a tester for EA change your mindset towards gaming against being an average consumer?

It taught me consumers and creators actually agree on a lot more than I think either of them believes. It's understandable to view the Gaming Industry through a glass ceiling as so much of that is imposed by leaders of companies inside it. Development cycles are kept private, blacklisting is rampant, and hierarchies silence people.

However, ...

Raycevick's Recommendations: DIRT 3

It's easy to assume with racing games, that they improve in a completely linear fashion. When your genre isn't founded upon story, characters, or complex level design, what is there to improve but the feel and look of the game?

But having booted up DIRT 3 recently shows that outlook doesn't apply. To me (while going to other entries for specifics like Dirt Rally) DIRT 3 is easily the most complete game in the series. It's got a little bit of everything, and does all of it extremely well...

2020

Randomly Mine, much like the channel I run, is supposed to be about games. For the opening day of this New Year however, I think we can make an exception.

I think Youtubers in particular have a unique view of 2020, because (at least for those whose content doesn't rely on live action), it's one of the only careers unaffected by the pandemic. Rising cases didn't risk Steam keys. You didn't need to wear a mask to start Adobe. And if anything, attention was easier to come by due to more pe...

Q&A: December 30th, 2020

OzarkTempses Asks
What do you think is the place of already existing (from albums, single and such) songs on the OST of a game as opposed to a wholly original soundtrack?

This turned out to be a surprisingly tough questions. Mainly because, I don't take issue with games that only use them to immerse people via things like Radio Stations in open worlds. I do however think there's more opportunity to use licensed songs deliberately to enhance sequences and mak...

Status Report - December 29th, 2020

Hey everybody!

We're approaching the new year and while cliché to say, it has been a tough one. I've come from it not knowing exactly what the future will entail for the channel, but I have various goals, specifically more structure and more Years Later videos, the next of which is being made right now.

I've completed the game already and are currently on course to do another playthrough, as well as begin the research process. Writing's only barely started however, I spent the Ch...

Raycevick's Recommendations: Blue Stahli - Quartz & Copper

For those that don't know, Blue Stahli was one of the many artists I discovered on FiXT ages ago, but he suddenly left the record label a couple months back and has had to go indie since.

I didn't realize looking up Blue Stahli on Spotify would cause such mixed emotions, but none of that conflict has to do with the man's music. Quartz & Copper are wonderfully produced albums, with their own texture, flavor, and pacing, that's making the man's trilogy venture make complete sense, and...

EA vs Take Two

For those unaware, long time racing producer Codemasters was recently on the acquisition table with Take Two Interactive. It seemed to be a done deal when all of a sudden, EA falcon punched Codemasters' executives with an even fatter cheque of $1.2 billion dollars.

To say I was displeased with this news is putting it lightly. Codemasters, while far from perfect, are essentially, the only compan...

Q&A: December 23rd, 2020

Juhana Asks
You asked us to kill you. What would be your preferred method?

Bauman Asks
I think you mentioned that you did beta testing for a Lethal League game in the JSR video.  You come off as rather well versed in game design too, so I was wondering, what does your "game industry history" look like?

I accidentally gave that...

Raycevick's Recommendations: Teardown

I've said previously that Early Access games aren't typically recommended by me, but 2020 really changed that with Prodeus, and Teardown. This destruction puzzler is a game I followed since its prototype video aired, and the game managed to live up to all that build up.

The destruction technology is truly something to behold. It'll make your computer sweat, and your eyes pop, when spamming pipe bombs to bring the framerate to its knees.

More than that however, it's just a really c...

"RPG"

In days of yore, the term "RPG" came with it a very specific image. Isometric, D&D rule inspired combat, traditionally fantasy, dense statistics, rows of hotkeys holding special powers, heaps and heaps of text about characters, lore, and quests.

This was during the late 90s and early 2000s. Even innovators like Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall or Ultima Underworld, don't confuse themselves with other first-person games of the time like Wolfenstein, DOOM, or Duke Nukem. They're heavy in ...

Q&A: October 16th, 2020

Brandon Asks
Do you think CDPR and Naughty Dog are getting easy passes by some people, be it industry figures and just random types of gamers, for their reported terrible work environments and/or terribly optimized buggy release (this half applies most to CDPR) versus other companies that are always marked as an easy bad guy (EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Bethesda) even if sometimes these studios do great work in some major way?  Essentially, is nuance dead or is the AAA s...