Dan Bell was mentioned earlier, and similarly another abandoned location exploration group called The Proper People were linked in some Imgur Youtube Recommendation thing a few months ago and since then I’ve become absolutely hooked on their stuff. I must’ve sat and watched like, half of their entire channel in a day once. Good eps to check out: Abandoned Japanese Theme Park, Abandoned Renfaire, Abandoned Prison, Abandoned Mine. They also did a team-up with Dan Bell for Halloween.
Ross’s Game Dungeon from Accursed Farms has become a really good “video game video review” show for me. Ross has a knack for picking out some really weird, esoteric stuff. Lots of games I’ve never even heard of, dredged up from the depths of old DOS catalogs and such. Rama, Construction Bob Goes To Hell, Spiderbot, Contraption Zack, etc. His reviews tend to be pretty long, and almost crossover in to Let’s Play territory sometimes, where it’s less analysis and more commentary and reaction. Pretty funny, though.
People may know Blame Society Films for their old web series “Chad Vader” (which landed co-creator Matt Sloane the life long job as Disney’s official Darth Vader impersonator voice when they can’t get James Earl Jones), but I really got in to them for their “Beer & Boardgames” show. That’s actually grown a little stale for me, but their movie review show, Welcome to the Basement, is the reason I stay subscribed. It’s a couple of film school nerds talking about old movies, but it’s generally pretty fascinating.
Engineer Guy was a great channel for explaining how all kinds of interesting things worked, but the upload schedule is sporadic because I guess he also writes books and gives lectures and whatever else that isn’t spending hours putting together a Youtube show.
Errant Signal is one of the leading channels in the newest wave of game analysis and he always has something interesting to say about games that I’ve usually never thought of before. Along similar (but also completely different) lines, we have Game Maker’s Toolkit, which usually does its best to reverse-engineer a game’s design and explain why it does what it does, and how it does it. And, of course, if we’re talking analysis, you can’t forget Extra Credits.
If you’re looking for more documentary-style coverage of video games, The Gaming Historian and Ahoy should have you covered. Both are amazingly informative and incredibly thorough, though it should be noted that Ahoy seems to primarily focus on shooters and british games. But his Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake videos are not to be missed. The Gaming Historian features a much wider breadth of coverage – everything from the Super Mario Bros. movie to the creation of the ESRB. He had a fantastic video on how Nintendo came to own the Seattle Mariners, but the MLB forced it down for using baseball footage.
Steering things back towards movies, I can’t end this post without mentioning No Small Parts. This is a show helmed by Brandon Hardesty that exclusively focuses on lesser-known character actors, paying tribute to actors that many may not even know by name. It is always incredibly fascinating and often very intimate, and he’s been getting enough coverage lately that IMDB has begun sponsoring specific episodes for their site. This is one of those things where I make time to watch it the instant a new episode is released.
I could probably keep going, but I’ll end it here for now.
s for violence and such.