Ryan Bloom
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Let me ask you something
🕑 Added 2023-09-22 05:59:33 +0000 UTCSo over a year ago now when I decided to try focusing more on Youtube, one of the things I was weighing was revamping my old "Every Sonic Game Rated" list from Giantbomb. Since then, Tier videos have kind of become a hot commodity on top of that.
And I keep rolling it around in my brain, thinking about it from time to time, and I've even done some preliminary organizational work on it. But before I allow myself to truly dive in, I'd like to get your thoughts on some things about it.
The general idea would be to take that old list, but reframe it. A lot of that list was written from the perspective of trying to recommend games to people who don't necessarily have familiarity with Sonic, but in the video series I'd focus more on my personal feelings.
I think when I originally mentioned it somewhere (Twitter?) I framed it as like SomeCallMeJohnny's review marathons, where he goes through every game in an entire franchise, but it would be me covering every Sonic game ever made.
Instead of these long 45-70 minute videos, I'd want to keep them sort of short. The sweet spot to me would be 20 minutes. I tend to go for long periods of time on history and context, but maybe I'd minimize that here and focus specifically on gameplay/etc. and how that makes me feel.
Because this is going to be a lot of videos. And I'd want to make them easier on my end to produce. Something simple and breezy to fill time between the big video essays.
The structure I was thinking of doing to keep things moving would be to put multiple games/rankings into the bottom-tier videos so we don't dwell so long on being negative about bad stuff, and as we move up the list, to better games where I have more things to say, we start focusing on one game per video.
In other words, we go linearly, from worst to best. Videos would focus on what number in the list we were in, with the surprise being which games took that number. Excitement would build as we get closer to the top ten, then the top five, then one final video for the top three games (that way there's still a mystery and we're not left knowing what #1 is before the video even releases).
But then I started thinking: what if I shuffled it? What if the surprise was seeing where the game lands on the list? As in, you see I'm talking about a game as part of the list, and it's not until the very end you find out where it landed? I could spend longer on each game, even bad games. While it'd be nice to talk positively about Sonic games, I don't know if that's entirely necessary for the bad ones? Like I could find 20 minutes of words to say about Sonic Eraser, certainly, but does the world really need that?
But then what does the world need? A lot of the popular rating/list videos use Tiermaker and burn through everything all in one go. I could do something super simple like that and just pump out a two hour video with little-to-no editing, but I don't think that's where my strengths lie.
Doing them at random/shuffled would also make it less awkward for the inevitable moment where I insert newer games into the list posthumously. (e.g. "Sonic Superstars 2 is our new number 11" etc.)
What sounds most interesting to you guys? I'm still working myself up to whether or not I even want to do this, but I am gradually readying myself to pull the pin some day, and this is one more nudge that helps me get to the point where I start writing scripts and seeing what's truly viable.
Comments
Ryan Bloom
That's not quite what I envisioned, no. The number would be burned into the video. Though I suppose, if it was in, say, a playlist, still just say "this is our new number (xyz)" in the video somewhere.
Melco Driggs
I say linear, that way if you don't actually say the ranking number in each video you can re-title the prior videos to reflect the current ranking. Would still be a pain to re-title a bunch of them even when we don't get a new low-ranking entry, but I feel it offers some slight future-proofing.
