#action button

[metrizans]

boy, that steak has seen better days [x]

[callmearcturus]

This mic drop moment is still incredible.

[stoic--rose]

im about 85% of the way through tim rogers' new video about la noire, and i gotta say, the two and a half years its taken for this video to come out hasnt really felt worth it. it feels like just a play by play of everything that happens in the game, instead of the usual emotional journey that these videos put you through. no personal anecdotes or unique commentary to be seen, just describing story beats in a hardboiled detective persona. i hate to say it, but the 9 hour "review" of la noire done entirely in character of a 1950s detective hasnt really done it for me. i kept hoping he'd eventually break character and start doing the video in his usual style, but that was 7 hours ago and it still hasnt happened. there have been a few running jokes that make me laugh, namely the windcatcher bit and the dramatic flash everytime something slightly dramatic happens, but other than that its kind of been a slog. which sucks!! i love tim rogers' work, and i was so fkn excited to see a new video of his after all this time!! in fact, this is the FIRST new video hes uploaded since i found his videos in october of 2022, so i went in with the most optimistic view a girl can have. alas, it was not meant to be. hopefully the next video is a bit more traditional (and doesnt take 2.5 years to make)

[bloomburnweepwilt]

Tim Rogers, and the lil doggie that takes over your brain with its cuteness

[vidreview]

some thoughts on Action Button Reviews

[originally posted december 22nd 2023]

ANONYMOUS ASK: Not a recommendation because I know you've already seen it, but I remember you (this being like a year ago) calling Tim Rogers' action button reviews boku no natsuyasami something along the lines of "a triumphant demonstration of what's possible in the video essay medium". I was wondering if you could elaborate, provided it hasn't been too long. I recognise I'm blasting you from the past here lol. It was one of the few hours-long video essays that I didn't mind sitting through, though I'm still not sure it quite justifies its length. Tim's delivery helps significantly there, in a way that reminds me of Caleb Gamman's casual/improvised-feeling but thoroughly scripted shtick.

oh i still think Tim Rogers is hands down the best in the biz. i've watched the Action Button reviews multiple times, i've got a davinci resolve project with all his videos in, studied them under a microscope and taken lots of notes. i think his work absolutely does justify the length, because rather than trying to say Everything There Is To Say about a game, he instead focuses on digging into the game's relationship with his own hyperspecific subjectivity. i don't know how else to describe the Action Button reviews except as literary media criticism, using incredibly in-depth analysis as a jumping off point for discussing how these games shape us and the culture, the role they occupy at various stages of our life, and how who we are at any given moment is just as important to our opinion of a game as the game itself. sooner or later i want to do a full-on VIDREV on his stuff, probably in video essay form, but consider this a first draft overview of why i find his work so special.

there's little things. despite the length of his videos, he never fails to get to The Point (his term for the thesis statement) within five minutes of starting the essay proper. he is a talented and quick-witted tour guide, funny and clever and philosophically ponderous all at once. his work is clearly designed to reward multiple viewings, yet never fails to feel complete on a first watch. he writes with a precision of language that'll knock your socks off if you let it, especially if you're willing to go with him on his seemingly non sequitur tangents. but it goes a lot deeper than that.

i just don't think anyone else is putting nearly as much time, effort, and thought into the moment to moment particulate matter of his video essays than Tim Rogers. there are a ton of little mistakes that quite a few essayists make as a result of only doing one or two complete editing passes, or otherwise not sitting down and watching their video start to finish at multiple points in post-production. things like bad audio mixing, cut-off breaths and sounds that ought to be removed, stray frames from footage creating accidental jump cuts, flubbed line deliveries, misaligned overlay elements, sloppy compositing, the list goes on. it's no great sin to make these mistakes, mind-- no one's being commissioned, most essayists aren't professional editors, there's no quality control or review board or institutional best practices. it's the difference between giving the kitchen a quick once over with a rag and getting on your hands and knees to scrub every stain with a toothbrush. most people don't have the time it takes to do the latter, aren't getting paid enough, and the returns on putting the effort in are impossible to measure and therefore, practically speaking, nonexistent.

but as someone who tries to put that kind of work in (not always successfully), i can always tell when another essayist has done the same. longform video essays in aggregate tend to be messy, under-structured, rambling; they often arise out of an essayist's desire to say everything they could possibly say on a subject. not only is this an impossible task, it makes for a pretty dull viewing experience to boot. what i find so impressive about Tim Rogers' work is that despite their length, his videos are relentlessly structured. the attention to fine details in the moment-to-moment edit across the whole runtime is astonishing; that the script itself is so internally integrated never fails to make me furious (with professional envy). he always has a lot to say, not all of which is strictly speaking essential to the analysis, but nothing ever feels so indulgent that it drags the rest of the essay down in my estimation. he often repeats information, but he does so very strategically and in a way that's meant to help the viewer follow a thread from start to finish. i also think his presentation style goes a long way towards hiding how much effort he puts in, how relentlessly curated these things actually are in spite of their length. he's talked extensively about how much he cuts from these videos (most prominently is story 5 from the Cyberpunk 2077 review, which went from over an hour in length at first draft to, eventually, just over a minute), how he watches them back over and over and constantly makes fine adjustments. that work won't be apparent to everyone watching, but it's exceedingly apparent to me.

and then there's the cherry on top of it all, which is the fact that the Action Button reviews are constructed as being part of "seasons" that have a planned thematic throughline. taken as a whole, season 1 is a completely unique work of literary metacritical nonfiction, a series of six reviews (Final Fantasy VII Remake -> The Last of Us -> DOOM -> Pac-Man -> Tokimeki Memorial -> Cyberpunk 2077) that use specific games to talk about trends in game design, trends in gamer culture, the history of games development, all through an astonishingly earnest and open autobiographical document of Tim Rogers' own professional and personal life, which is given particular weight by his astonishing capacity for near perfect recall from early childhood. they are the clear result of a life spent thinking about and writing about and talking about games in between all the rest of his life, neither of which was ever truly separate. i know i'm throwing around a lot of superlatives here, but i really do adore these essays. i think a lot of folks doing longform games reviews try to achieve a sort of technical objectivity, limiting the scope of their analysis to strictly what's in the game (and often only that which involves numbers, leaving any narrative or thematic components to a brief aside at the very end). the Action Button method should fall into that category, and yet Rogers himself uses its technical objectivity as an anchor around which flows an endless and unquantifiable ocean of subjectivity, where game mechanics and thematic elements mix forever. each subsequent review drops a new anchor, and thus begins to compose a map whose purpose is as much a matter of self-reflection as it is pure education or analysis.

but i really do think it's with the first (and so far only) episode of season 2, his review of Boku no Natsuyasumi, that you can really see the cunning of what he's been up to all along. i often find myself thinking about his reflections on returning to Kansas ("it took me back to a place i had never never been"), on why people rewatch movies and replay games ("our memory only records the cold parts"), on the futility of trying to recapture the past ("places don't remember us"), on the screaming terror of our own looming mortality ("meanwhile our shattering animals"). i just know those quotes off the top of my head, man, that's how deep in it i am. the Boku no Natsuyasumi review is a masterpiece, and the ways it breaks from the style and approach of season 1's reviews only strengthens the choices he made in season 1, because suddenly we realize that they were choices. that's the artfulness of this series, in my opinion: it starts as, seemingly, a relatively bog-standard "i'm going to review some video games and make some jokes and tell some stories along the way" type joint, but slowly reveals to you essay by essay just how little of this project was automatic, unconsidered, arbitrary, and that its aims were never so miniscule as "tell you why a video game is good". there are themes running throughout the entire series, repeated phrases and ideas, theories of mind and play that build in the subtext, accruing like memories, subtly building mass until you look back and realize that what seemed like a random selection of topics was, in truth, premeditated with a conspiracist's attention to detail.

and yet despite all this high-minded gobbledygook, these videos are relentlessly watchable and entertaining. i don't always agree with his takes (i was particularly frustrated that his exploration of "every cyberpunk game" omitted the flood of relevant titles that came the indie sphere over the last decade, like Cloudpunk and Read Only Memories), but they're not the kinds of disagreements that would make me sour on his work overall, and anyway the experience is so much more valuable than something as rote and immaterial as an opinion. there's so much more i could say (and inevitably will say, someday), but there you go, that's a rough gloss on what i like about the Action Button reviews.

[mysterysystems]

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

[s-------i-------g]

I feel like there should be Action Button YouTube poops but I haven't seen any.

"I'm Tit Ross and this is Ass Butt," things of this nature

[skadream]

the only person who is allowed to make 10 hour video essays on a media property is tim rogers and i stand by this

[scumpsmallbrain]

Action Button Reviews Wordle

[chickenfeety]

"She called me Bubbus" and "Charles Entertainment Cheese" have got to be my favorite video essay lines I repeat way too often.

[questioningespecialy]

SiCKtM: the horrors of time travel

post migrated to pillowfort (May 2024) archive: dashboard | blog

[removed non-image content for reasons]

[zse4]

There's a joke to be made here

[stoic--rose]

[breakingarrows]

[lord-radish]

Also I've been watching a lot of YouTube while I play games lately. I finished a 12 hour video about every single season of the American version of Survivor earlier this week, and I just finished a six hour long video about a Japanese video game called Boku no Natsuyasumi:

And I have to say, this video is a masterpiece.

The cover art in the thumbnail is a fake interpretation of what the art might have looked like if the game was localised to America. The actual game is set in the Japanese countryside over the entire month of August in 1975, where the main character is staying with his aunt and uncle while his parents prepare for the birth of their second child. It never left Japan, and its presentation makes it next to impossible to localise.

I don't want to spoil too much of the video or its premise, but I do want to talk about a couple of anecdotes from the video.

The guy in the video, Tim Rogers, worked at Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan circa 2005-ish. Boku no Natsuyasumi was getting a PSP remaster, and a cool coworker of his urged him to try the game out. His section manager overheard the conversation and the coworker mentioned the game, and the section manager gave Tim an uncomfortable look and told him not to play the game.

The video discusses nostalgia and how it can be successfully transfered across cultural boundaries. It's not your nostalgia, but enough reverence and craft can communicate a foreign yearning for the past even if your personal nostalgic past is very different. Nostalgia is a state of mind that everyone experiences; a Japanese person can enjoy Stand By Me, and by that token, an American (or Australian, in my case) person can enjoy Boku no Natsuyasumi.

The video has a heavy emphasis of sunflowers from beginning to end, stemming from an iconic scene in the game with a field full of sunflowers. Tim's home state of Kansas is mentioned, as is his time living in Tokyo, playing Boku no Natsuyasumi over a weekend while his girlfriend was visiting family.

By the end of the video, the emotion is palpable and it's really fucking hard not to cry.

It's a masterful, dense, soothing and informative six hours. But it's six hours of YouTube gamer video essay content. The runtime is obv. a huge hurdle, but it's genuinely a masterpiece and it goes places that might be a little too real. It's truly outstanding.

[shiorifujisaki]

If you think about it Tumblr is a game where you can talk to these creatures