#… i saw some stuff from old western movies and also red dead redemption

[braisedhoney]

haw-yee or whatever! old west au except it’s just narry who got fixated on american western films and stole (what he thinks) is the aesthetic.

(plus narry if he really fully committed to the bit… lol. he looks so different with more hair.)

[greatwyrmgold]

Ten years of Noah Caldwell-Gervais

It's remarkable how little the video essays of Noah Caldwell-Gervais have changed over the last decade.

Obviously, there have been some changes.

When I went on a(nother) NCG binge last month, the only difference that stood out to me immediately was the audio—both that NCG has upgraded his recording equipment and that early NCG videos included audio from the background game clips, sometimes loud enough to drown out his commentary. It's a weird choice that I assume he made because he didn't want to speak over dead air and couldn't find any royalty-free music that fit the tone well enough; I'm glad he changed his mind.

When I started looking, I saw other little things. The pace of his dictation has slowed (I want to say by about a quarter?), making his feature-length diatribes easier to parse. Counter to this, his older videos would often play whole cutscenes to display his point. (Not just once in a blue moon, like with that RE5 scene; sometimes twice in a row, like in the AVP vs. AVP vs. ACM video.) While Caldwell-Gervais didn't delve into "traditional gamer complaints" about DLC and "lazy devs" and such very often, their density has decreased over time, as has his willingness to give questionable design decisions a pass for good intentions. Early NCG was less likely to research games he couldn't personally play (his CoD video from 2015 only mentions that he couldn't play CoD 3, for instance). The early videos also had an in-person introduction, while newer videos integrate the important parts of that introduction into the script.

And of course, Noah himself has changed over the past decade—it's been a busy ten years, his opinions about games, their place in the world, and that world have shifted in ways that influence his commentary.

But the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Caldwell-Gervais still writes long video essays about entire franchises, albeit now with confidence that his audience will watch a single video for 3-8 hours if he finds enough to say about a series.

He still weaves all those facts about the game in with what development details he can dig up and context from outside the video game subculture to frame his insights as narratives about the franchises and their creators.

He still talks about highbrow literature-class stuff like tone and theme, contrasted with an obvious love for the lowbrow thrills of shooty bang bang. He still accepts "dumb" games, criticizing them for being dumb only when it clashes with other elements/ambitions of the game. (Or when they really punch the boulder.)

With the exception of a few in-video callbacks, he still avoids in-jokes, irrelevant memes, and other elements which might make his work seem inaccessible to newcomers or dated to latecomers. He'll reference current events and recent releases from time to time, so the videos aren't really timeless, but they're not time-locked, either.

He still focuses on shooters and RPGs, with a strong interest in horror and occasional dips into story-dominated titles and the odd pure strategy game. (Also Western games, notable less for their prevalence in NCG's body of work and more for the fact that he's covered both Red Dead Redemption and Call of Juarez, darn near the only notable video game series set in the Old West.)

He still plays the action games with a level of skill that seems reasonable to me, but which comment section critics say is so abysmal that his opinions about action games shouldn't count (except where they agree with the critic's).

Caldwell-Gervais still references film and other media as comparisons to most games he covers. He still shows affinity for Americana, particularly the arid landscapes of the Southwest, and also Western movies.

He still has a largely positive outlook, focusing on games and series worth praising when he can and looking for the best aspects of even the worst games he covers. To this end, he still tries to find the game's level and meet it there. And yet, when a game fails on every level or aims well below its potential, he will still criticize it for those disappointments.

He still focuses on how the different elements of a game interact, prioritizing that over the sum of his parts. He still likes to point out when mechanics, aesthetics, themes, or plot points that work in one title undermine a very similar work—or contrarily, when things that sank one rescued another. It's all about context.

He's still relentlessly critical of corporate bullshit, whether that's publishers forcing Marketable™ elements into a context that doesn't artistically support them or executives maintaining and concealing an abusive work environment.

And of course, he still starts each video with a shot of some hand-written title card, set to thematically-appropriate music that almost certainly gets every video copyright claimed.

Some things are hard to quantify.

In an absolute sense, the filmography (youtography?) of the infamously hidebound Doug Walker has changed more over the years. But that's the kind of fact that conceals more than it reveals.

Walker adds new tools to his toolbelt and throws new ideas into his productions, but the fundamentals stay the same. He makes the same kinds of complaints, tells the same kinds of jokes, films the same kinds of shots. He doesn't try to improve his media literacy, or his writing, or his cinematography. Or his white-balancing.

Part of why Caldwell-Gervais's old videos hold up so much better than 2013 Walker videos (or 2022 ones) is that Caldwell-Gervais started at a much higher level of quality—fewer moving parts than even pre-Demo-Reel Nostalgia Critic, with every piece mastered. (Except audio.)

But part is that Caldwell-Gervais has improved, and not just with audio. I can't put my finger on it, but something about his writing has changed. His older videos feel more superficial, more focused on the games for their own sake and what works or doesn't work for a given genre or franchise. His newer ones feel like they're trying to be deeper, to go beyond individual video games and use them to say something about gaming as a whole, or even the world beyond.

And unlike Walker, NCG's efforts to Do More are backed by the skill, effort, and attention to detail needed to pull them off. I rewatch NCG's older videos out of a self-destructive sense of completionism, or a desire for familiar background noise. I rewatch his newer videos because they're interesting, even on subsequent rewatches.