Ah, you know, it's like they say, "the years keep coming and they don't stop coming",
and here's come and gone yet another year, this one, the two thousand and eighteen for
any of y'all keeping count, and uh, I don't know I guess a few good games came out?
Lets uh, let's take a look at the best ones.
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "These are the top 8 games of 2018"
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Number 8, Hollow Knight."
Hollow Knight didn't technically come out this year, but this is the year I played it
so shut up.
Uh, it's pretty good, if uh, if you can get passed all the… the bugs [wheeze].
I don't actually really like or dislike metroidvanias, like, none has ever really
left a major impression on me.
I don't know.
But this one is cool cause, check this, you can let yourself die, then come back to where
you died, and then you can use your ghost as a platform to go somewhere higher.
That's pretty cool, not that, like, I ever did this at all, but it was nice to know you
could.
Uh, otherwise yeah it's just pretty good I guess.
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Number 7, Spider-Man."
Spiderman, spiderman, does whatever a spiderman can.
This isn't by far the only game that's come out this year with a photo mode, it's
been a really weird trend recently that I haven't understood.
That is until now because this is the first game that made me care about.
Like, I guess there's something to be said about the quantity and quality of a game's
content when it drives players to wanna take pictures of it.
The game is really good, and uh, it'd definitely make it way up higher on the list if it weren't
for one major game breaking issue.
So in the game sometimes there are points of interest that you need to activate with
a press of a button, and as you approach them a little icon appears hovering over them,
but right as you get close enough to interact, the indicator what looks like circle suddenly
transforms into a triangle, leading you to press the wrong button every single time.
Now yes, I'm playing this off for comedic effect but what isn't funny is when you
sit down and realize this is a triple A game, how the fuck did this make it out?
Fuck right outta here with this weak shit.
Spiderman?
Would'a been higher but WHOOPS pressed the wrong button, #7 only loser.
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Number 6, Splatoon 2's Octo Expansion, except for
the grinding levels."
Except for the grinding levels, Splatoon 2's Octo-expansion is the gnarliest of all gnarls.
It's got that fire hip-hop aesthetic, these popping and bumping tunes, this minimal story
that still manages to pull it all together and end with an impact, but most important
holy hell do these levels rock!
The levels starts even before it starts, you gotta pick a loadout for it, some giving you
more points at the end aka, they're difficulty levels, and then when you go in you have to
pay with an in-game currency to play the level, and you don't start with very much and you
don't get very much for clearing.
So it's like, you've alway got doom looming over you.
It motivates you to clutch your absolute hardest to every stage.
All the twists and turns, all the combat, all the puzzles, hell man there's just so
much in these stages I can't even describe it all.
It's funny I was playing this game around the same time I was working on that video
about Metal Gear Solid's VR Missions, and I was really thinking of trying to work in
there a bit about how Octo-Expansion honestly feels like more of a sequel to MGS's VR
stages than any other game in its own series, but hey, I guess it was worth saving for now
instead.
You have Splatoon 2 and you like yourself some good fucking level design, you owe it
to yourself to check this this out... except… except for the grinding levels jesus christ
how come sometimes you jump ya got no freaking forward momentum?
What's going on here?
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Number 5, Hamish Black."
Hey coming it at #5 it's ya man, Hamish Black.
Full disclosure, if you consider the combined packaged of Hambo and Nico a single title,
definitely would be game of the year.
[Nico]: "This is a dumb thing" [Hamish]: "Goddamnit"
Sadly, they're sold separately but hey, don't hate the player, hate the "writing-on"
game.
So I don't know into how much detail wanna go here, I mean, after all, my final Patreon
goal is to write a sociotechnical analysis of the man, but uh.
Look, Hamish is one of the purest-hearted game video bois you can meet, and he'll
be your dad if you let him.
What do I mean by that?
Look, man's got style, man's got grace, man's even got a really funny podcast he
runs with the aforementioned Nico Bleackley.
[Nico]: "I've been called a hipster in the past, accused!"
And the deal is, look, if you subscribe to Hambo's channel, Writing on Games, you'll
be satisfied enough.
You'll regularly be fed delicious pieces, sometimes on actively relevant games Hambo's
bustin' his ass on to get a word out to read ya in on, a word that ain't nobody
else in time for embargo lift's gonna have prepped in time.
Sometimes they're on the goldy oldies, hearing Hambo take a retrospective look-back at something
that happened some time ago, that hey, maybe you never thought about.
And sometimes it'll be Hamish fucking Black just reflecting on certain components of the
industry he writes about, from his point of view, standing in the middle of sweaty crowds
of gamers at events, brain on.
And for most viewers, for me even for a while, that's more than enough.
He's real, he constantly makes clear that a lot of his takes come from his personal
experiences, he's personable and relatable and transparent as all hell, and that's
exactly what you want out of a games writer.
I mean, even though, let's be real, he'd have every right to be at this point, Hambo
doesn't come it slinging slash from atop some high horse.
He justifies everything he says, every conclusion he makes is the product of a thousand thoughts
juggled and juggled and juggled and that his video serve the purpose of showing us the
filtered view, the presentable version, the tip of the iceberg of.
The thing is, if you give yourself to him, he'll dish you out more.
Listening to him and Nico's podcast, the Writing on Games cast, gives you excellent
context weeks in advance to the final video projects he drops.
I don't know if he realizes it or not, but, like, listening to the podcast you'll hear
him express feelings about games or events that are still partly recognizable post-process
of making them points in a video.
It's like, sitting on a couch with a dude who's just shooting the shit with out about
a game, and then next week he comes back all suited up with a full on powerpoint deck of
focused slides and a conclusion, or a really personal expression, it's like, it's so
dope.
There's also the fact that you've got this whole, I don't know, I'm gonna call
it narrative, but you've got this narrative where this dude who never really asked for
much is now suddenly finding himself in the big leagues.
He's getting invited to press events as a personality, he's on busses chatting up
with voice actors from game's he's criticized, but like, he hasn't lost anything, he hasn't
changed, he's super humble but he's committing to that bit out of what seems like genuine
and honest curiosity.
It's like, we all get to experience this wild ride he's on through him because he's
not taking advantage of it or anything, he's just letting it happen because he wants to
know what comes next.
And it's like, I don't know man, it digs dude.
And on a personal note, as far as my experiences have gone with the, uh, video game, Hamish
Black, this year.
Like, okay, I won't bore y'all with the details cause every time I stream these days
it always devolves into me just sitting down and singing this tune with y'all over chat.But
I have what we'll call audience issues, and by what I mean is that my channel's
only growth comes from videos that attract the sorts of people who are the same sorts
of people who unsubscribe in mass every time I upload something new I've worked really
hard that's not like the sort of video that attracted them in the first place.
I know I've said before that I'm in this to have fun and that I'm basically completely
self-motivated, but uh, I kinda had to come to terms recently after being unable to put
my hands to writing for over a month straight that I was lying to myself.
At least, during that time, recently, it really felt like it was demotivating me.
And it's not that I'm bothered by the fact that I'm not growing, because technically
I am, but it's more I'm bothered that I could be and instead I keep having spongebob
fan sent to my doorstep who don't wanna hear any what I'm preaching these days.
Like, I feel like I'm being bullied by a video suggestion system beyond the scope of
my effect, and that, recently, made it really hard to get any work done.
But hey, if youtube's suggestion system is my bully, then Hamish is the bigger kid
on the playground what fucks bois up.
You won't believe what's, what's interrupting my vo right now.
It's literally, I'm gonna try to film it.
There's a tractor piling leaves up literally right outside the window, look at this.
Oh my fucking god they're still fucking with these leaves!
[shower curtain rustling]
Hamish is immensely generous and basically most of my positive growth this year has come
from a couple a shoutouts he made that he really didn't have to.
It really makes a difference, cause here he is, this dude who's assembling a crowd of
people who wanna listen to him, and here's a couple of us trying to rally up our own
around our messages, and Hamish is just like yo I got you guys, he just directs people
to us, to people like me and my friends, and it, it makes a big difference.
It makes as much… you know what? you know what?
Its very much like this fucking tractor right now, like, yo what the fuck!?
That's what this is all about!
Hold on I gotta film it!
See, see this truck right here, this tractor?
See how it's carrying all the leaves?
That's Hamish.
And see that truck?
That's its uh, it's, I can't focus on it, but, see that truck?
Yeah there's a truck.
So Hamish is this tractor holding all the leaves, and that
truck that currently only has a few littles leaves in it, that's me.
That's me and all my friends.
That's me and all my friends ok?
And see what Hamish is doing is he lifts, he takes all, he's like "you want these
leaves" and we're like "well I mean okay" and he's like "please, take them,
take them all, take them, please, you're my friends and I like you very much".
OOOOuf and he dumps them all over there.
Eh, uh, right there, like that, that's exactly what he does.
It's really, it's incredible symbolism.
You see, you see this little, this little loser tractor over here, this little tractor?
Over there there's Hamish, and there's this little tractor all alone.
It's just total lonely little tractor and it's got no real friends.
That's uh, that's TurboButton right there.
This year in particular was pretty bad for me, a couple of big name youtubers who'd
never made spongebob videos before decided this to, which meant hey I got a ton of traffic
in from those guys making spongebob relevant again.
So Hamish was like the counterbalance that kept things from tipping over.
And I only bring this up because I know he's gonna watch this, and I know that to him it's
selfless, it's thoughtless, he's just does things cause he wants to do them, and
he doesn't really get to see the impact of it and I kinda wanna share that with him,
and it's hard to do so without basically explaining it.
So uh, Hamish, thanks for fighting off these bullies dude, it uh, it really means a lot.
And uh, fuck it I'm gonna spoil the rest of the Game of the Year list here but there
ain't a human on this list passed this point, so uh, as far as people go, Hamish is Game
of the Year, so it give it to him ladies and gentlemen.
Um, but, not actual game of the year, sadly, he uh, he easily gets trumped and bumped by
our next entry, check it guys.
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Number 4, the Instant Pot."
The Instant Pot is a pressure cooker my dad got me for Christmas last year.
It was at the center of at least one stream that ended in the BK Joe disaster of freaking...
whatever, guys, listen, you can make fresh, piping hot applesauce in 5 minutes with this
thing.
Watch, I'm even gonna play the whole thing out, look.
Can Hamish do that?
No.
Can anyone is Scotland do that?
Nah, not a chance.
This machine is better than everyone in an entire country, sorry Hambo, but ya didn't
stand an apple of a chance.
Now on the topic of doing really important things really quickly, let's check out the
next entry on our Games of the Year list.
Ok, full, full disclosure, I know I said it's like two minutes, technically it is, I left
out some things, obviously.
Um, there was some setup time, cutting the apples notably, um putting them in, filling
it with a little bit of sugar and cinnamon.
Um, and also so the pressure cooker doesn't start right away, some people don't understand
that you you, it has to build pressure, uh, and then once its done building pressure,
then it cooks for 2 minutes, and then you, um, you leave it some time to let the uh,
the pressure release, you might have seen some steam, the camera doesn't really pick
it up very well, um.
And then after that you kinda gotta wait for it to cool down, but my camera right now says
35 minutes, a lot of that time was wasted.
Takes about, I wanna say 7 to 10 minutes to build up the pressure plus the uh, the, the
2 minutes to cook, you know what?
Very, very highballing estimate, lets say its uh, 15 minutes and you've got steaming
hot, steaming hot like so hot you can't even eat it right now.
I've brought it to a couple of parties, nothing slays people better then when you
have some ice cream to put on top cause then you can eat it cause then the temperature
is fine.
You can put it even in a paper bowl, oh.
It's unbelievable, you can just do this in the morning man.
Oh, it's way too hot.
Sometimes in the morning you have leftover fruit from the week you wanna get rid of,
you just chuck em in the thing and you just make like fruit stew, done!
Done!
Maybe you make some oatmeal on the side but you don't even have to man, you just have
like, pulverized, pressurized freaking fruit flesh.
Mmmh.
I'm gonna go actually edit this part of the video while I eat the rest of this.
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Number 3, Quitting a Job"
Last year you may remember that #3 on this list was "Getting a Job", I mean it was
the best collectathon in the year of the revival of collectathon platformers.
Well it turns out its success was short lived because it's sequel, #3 this year, "Quitting
a Job", totally diverges along every vector.
Genre, gameplay, story, everything is different, and as it turns out it's objectively better
than what came before it.
Listen, here's something I've learned.
Just because you're having fun, just because you like the people you work with, you feel
mostly respected and you mostly respect everyone else, it doesn't mean you owe anyone anything.
You should be able and allowed to recognize when you're getting the raw deal, and you
shouldn't have to wait over a year for the right deal to come following a promise.
I know a few people here are aspiring programmers, folks studying computer science and software
engineering.
I've talked to quite a few of you guys, trying to help with advice and whatever.
Well, now that I've been in the market, outta school, here's my advice for when
you get here.
Someone offers you a contingent contract position with a promise to make you permanent after
a few months?
I don't care if you're just starting your career and don't feel confident in yourself,
but turn it down.
If someone's not committed enough to fully hire you right off the bat, you shouldn't
be committed enough to accept they're offer.
Move on, keep applying, you'll find something better.
Otherwise you risk working and getting very comfortable and happy somewhere where nobody
is prioritizing your employment but is expecting you to be a little bellhop and you have to
end up taking your job security into your own hands and hey, yeah, eventually you'll
have to quit.
I mean, it's not like it's all that bad, you'll gain some great experience, you'll
have some fun, but ultimately it'll only be to help to fluff up your resume and make
you look better to the next guys.
Which hey, maybe you coulda tried starting at in the first place.
Look, make sure you're taken care of, don't let yourself get hassled too hard, not that
it exactly happened to me, but don't let anyone take advantage of you because you don't
know yet how valuable you are, and if nobody's looking after you and it's time to quit,
it's time to quit.
Hold yourself up, you'll be alright, it's just, if you grow to love the people you work
with, damn it can be tough to have to leave.
Anyways, sequel owns the prequel, enough said.
We're down to the line now, top 2 baby.
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Number 2, Having Friends"
Last year #2 was "Making Friends", a game with a few easily exploitable strategies that
could be used to progress through it pretty easily once you got passed its rather excessive
opening segment.
But that's what's great, the intro being so long is like a barrier to entry that keeps
in only the most dedicated players, and seeing as how some of it's chapters are co-op,
it guarantees that you'll always be matched with other interested players.
And this year that's where we're at.
Second place Game of the Year 2018 goes to "Having Friends".
Kevan, last year's Game of the Year, passed me forward this saying, "Commit to the Bit",
which living by for the past year has not only helped in making friends and but also
in keeping them and enriching my relationships with them.
In my school years I kinda dropped a lot of NOs.
People invited me somewhere to something, default response I'd just kick it in, NO.
And so what happened was people stopped inviting me to crap.
In my defense, for a while I lived in the sorta place that without a car wasn't really
the easiest to get around, you needed like a full week's notice just to plan how to
get to a friend's house.
And getting downtown, yeah it was mostly easy, but busses in my town ended earlier in the
night than the city, so I always had this curfew spotting me that caused me to bail
on a lot of invites.
So I'd kinda just end these early nights and study from home a lot.
Basically, my living situation and school workload didn't really accommodate the sort
of lifestyle I have now.
These days I've just been popping it, making friends, saying YES, ending up weird places
at weird times, talking to people for hours over a few drinks, changing plans last minute,
setting up plans last minute.
I'm living much more Ad Hoc than I ever have.
Living on-island definitely helps, but not being in school has had just as big of an
impact, not only in terms of the workload from actual professional job being less than
school projects, but in terms the sorts of friends I've been having and making.
So there's this observation from network studies that individuals in any sort of dynamic
graph will tend to be more closely connected to nodes that are more similar to them than
nodes that aren't.
This is called homophily, and one of its impacts is that where you'll find one entity of
some type, you'll likely find many more closeby.
Now there are a whole slew of reasons this happens which I won't go into, but this
why, for instance, many large cities have class and cultural divisions; you have your
rich westmounts, your unincorporated communities like chinatowns and little-italys, and why
a lot of people in specific highly focused university programs happen to have a lot in
common.
Now, not to trash my friends, they're all great, but finishing school getting really
close to the same few folks for so many years, I was worried that down the line my friendscrape
would remain a social enclave, that I'd be a software guy who's only friends were
other software guys.
Getting a Job last year helped because I went from sitting in auditoriums full of hundreds
of software engineering students to being one of two programmers in a marketing team.
So when I played last year's "Making Friends", I focused a lot on building friendships with
people from circles that I didn't have any experience with prior, and not in a malicious
or cold or bad-natured sort of way, but more in a sort of way that aligned more with "wanting
as many different kinds of people to have an impact on my life and help me shape it,
just as much as I'd like to help them and be a small part of their lives and maturity".
Doing this and allowing this to happen naturally for a while, this leveled up my character,
so to speak.
I mean this is a video game after all.
See, a big part of Having Friends, as I've hinted, is learning from them and their experiences,
and sharing your own with them.
Your save file from the previous game gets carried over though, so the quality of that
learning turns out is actually dependent on your progress in the previous game.
And so while it might seem unfair to give the #2 Game of the Year spot to "Having
Friends" mostly for reasons having to do with my progress in the previous game, to
consider Having Friends the second best part of my life this year only because the friends
I made last year were so good, well, frankly I don't care, it's my list I can do what
I want.
Like any good game from a long-standing series, the best way to take it forward is to rely
on the best parts of its prequels and expand upon them, and clearly, Having Friends does.
Well deserved, the developers and everyone involved in its creation should be very proud
of themselves and I can't thank them enough.
They've allowed me to finally experience a lifestyle I've been missing out on for
way too long, they've helped me grow and mature in a direction I'm proud of and wouldn't
have without them, and they've allowed me the opportunity to, in turn, be trusted by
them and help just as they have me.
I've made some pretty good friends, I've had some pretty good friends.
Godspeed y'all, come back and visit some time.
But now, and on the subject of "visiting", the moment you guys have most certainly been
waiting for.
In a year of, eh, I don't know, some pretty ok games, one stood out.
One video gaming experience I had this year went above all the rest, went so far above
that there's nothing really to compare it against.
Almost unfairly I'd say, there's no way to properly measure this game, and that's
why it's gotta be the winner.
Without further ado, the Game of the Year 2018 is...
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Number 1, ShrekFest"
Shrekfest is a festival held every labor day weekend in Madison Wisconsin now for the last
5 years, and happily, I attended its fifth installment this year.
Now first, some mentions are in order, shout out to ya bois Matt aka MML's Commentaries
and Zac Frazier aka… uh, Zac Frazier.
Oh also Zac's friend John, he doesn't have a youtube channel so uh, he's definitely
the most well adjusted of the crew.
So ye, check em, definitely gonna be stealing some footage from em since this game was so
huge I could only capture a bit of gameplay myself, we'll see what's happening.
Now, here's the fucking thing about Shrekfest 2018 and in particular my experience there.
See, the whole way home, back to Montreal from freaking Madison Wisconsin, I knew I
had just participated in a moment of personal history, one of my own and no doubt for many
other attendees.
So the first thing I did when I got home was starting writing about while it was still
fresh in my mind.
I decided that night in the uber home that Shrekfest would be topping my Game of the
Year list, so I wanted to give as good a retelling of it as possible and my best recommendation
to you all.
I wrote an 11 page piece on my experience at Shrekfest 2018, but over those 6 and a
half thousand words something happened.
I began to overanalyze things, spend more time on the downs than the ups.
I mean, it's no secret, it's much easier to talk at length about flaws than it is a
working system, but in my writing I let it get to me.
I came out of writing about Shrekfest less satisfied with my spent time there than I
was on the plane rides home, and that was fucked.
So fuck that script, I'm not going to give you the history or the context of this game,
I'm not gonna tell you how the fest originally came to be or how we came to be there 5 years
later.
I'm just gonna give you the facts; that there is indeed a Shrek themed festival every
labor day weekend in Madison Wisconsin, I know some people still don't believe it
but it's true, and that three of us youtube video essay bois +1 managed to get there,
and that while nothing may have really gone according to plan, the three of us managed
to make it one of the best times ever, certainly worthy of the title of Game of the Year.
Based on previous years and marketing for the event, we had only a few expectations.
The public and free event would have contests of the roaring, costume, and onion eating
variety, there'd be live music covering most of the Shrek soundtrack, lots of sick
merch, lots of goofs, lots of gaffs, and of course the night would be topped off with
a screening in the park of the film Shrek itself, not to be confused with the monster.
[Shrek cover band]: "Disappointment haunted all my dreams"
There was also rumor on the facebook page for the event that there'd be a pub crawl
proceding all of this and we were definitely looking to get shreked that night so aaay.
I was also stoked at the chance to meet the 3Gi, a comedy troupe from Milwaukee who you
should remember from last year's Game of the Year list and some dudes I've been a fan
of for ages now.
I mentioned last year how when you order shirts from their website, they alway include a random
piece of trash or prop from one of their videos, and I've had in my posession for a few years
now this cutout paper they used for a practical transition effect one time, so coming to Shrekfest
I actually brought it with me hoping they'd find it cool that it made it all the way to
Canada and back, and I was gonna ask Grant to sign it, but, ouf, uh, here we go.
Now when it came down to it, Shrekfest failed to deliver on most of those back-of-the-box
promises.
As far as expectations go, all us gang missed out on all but two of the contests and kinda
the pub crawl.
See, shortly after being interviewed by youtube channel TheDeShrektives on some live stream
and then entering a dance pit for about two songs, the sky just opened up and let it pour
on us.
Recent floods in the area left the venue was ill-prepared to handle this many people inside
its little shelter, so this ass, who coincidentally was also an ass, got up and told us all that
we were officially rained out and the fest would continue at a bar in town called HopCat,
going as far as to start a chant to make sure we all knew what was up.
[crowd chanting]: "HOPCAT HOPCAT HOPCAT HOPCAT HOPCAT HOPCAT HOPCAT WOOOO!"
So the three of us figured hey let's head there early and beat the crowd.
We ended up hitching a ride with a man who we're convinced is actually Shrek.
He and his wife offered us a ride in their van and we immediately accepted.
These guys were absolutely dedicated.
This by the way is the same dude you've probably seen from this viral image going
around of a shrek being stopped by cops, got to talk to him quite a bit over the ride to
the bar, turns out that they were here on a late honeymoon they never took following
their marriage which was actually conducted in a real swamp.
I'm not gonna drop this dude's personal facebook pictures and stuff in here, but trust
me, I've seen evidence, these dudes were the ultimate Shrek-heads.
So anyways to make a long story much shorter than what it actually was and to cut out a
lot of legitimate frustration, what ends up happening is we show up to this bar and they
tell us to leave because whoops, turns out there was no official deal between them and
Shrekfest to host us and even if there had been, there's sure as hell wasn't any
place left seeing as how not only was this weekend host to Shrekfest, but it was moving
weekend for all the college kids coming back AND Metallica was in town kicking off a tour.
So the whole town was littered with like, young students and old white-haired white
dudes.
Onion's chance in a swamp we'd be making it into any bar as a group of a few hundred.
Not only that, but the organizers of Shrekfest start streaming the onion eating contest live
to facebook now, still happening back at the same park under the tiny shelter that we were
told to leave, and we're missing it.
Basically what it felt like was they'd directed a bunch of people away to thin out the crowd
enough so that they could all fit under the little roof they had, and hey I guess it worked.
They never told us to come back, never told us where to finally go, the facebook event
was flooded with message from people looking for direction from the organizers who just
weren't helping.
So after a good long while of bumming around downtown Madison and reading posts from other
stragglers who left the park when they were told and left the bar when they couldn't
get in, we had an idea.
We were feeling down because we were missing out on something, we had all come a really
long way to be here and now it was just kind of ogre.
But, that's exactly how everyone else was feeling.
If only, say, there was something else to do, maybe all us stragglers could band together
and still make a night out of this.
So that's exactly what we did.
The four of us started responding to people on facebook with unanswered requests to the
organizers for instructions on where to go next, and we started just telling them to
meet us as the bar.
Once we'd assembled a pretty decent crowd we took a picture, which sadly doesn't do
it justice as most folks were standing on a sidewalk out of frame but whatever, we posted
this to the page telling people what was up, and that hey, maybe the official event was
a bust but there was a sizeable amount of people down to hang out anyways at this bar.
So we all went back to the bar, one by one, and made our own reservations, we slowly but
surely filled the place up.
And the more of us there were the more confidence other lost shrek folk had to trek out and
join us.
[Zac]: "Matt, explain exactly what's happening."
[Matt]: "Okay.
Denis is taking charge of Shrekfest right now.
It got, it got rained out, and then they were saying go to HopCat but HopCat doesn't know
anything about Shrekfest.
So now, we waited outside, and now we're just getting everyone to make table reservations
and just come on.
And now he's trying to get them to seat everyone in the same spot."
[Denis]: "I gotta do it!
I gotta do it!"
[Zac]: "You're the savior, thank you."
[Denis]: "Ye, we're gonna try our fucking best."
We got to just hang out for a good few hours with a ton of folks, talk about who were were,
how far we'd traveled, why we were there.
This is where we met these dudes, and this dude, and this dude, who won the onion eating
contest by the way after finishing three fucking onions cause he tied twice, dude looked like
he wanted to die right there.
And of course, these dudes, we actually hung out with them for most of the rest of the
night, even chilled in Matt and Zac's hotel room for a bit since it turned out we were
all bunking under the same roof.
But that's one of the reasons Shrekfest had to be game of the year this year.
There's definitely something to be said about the quality of a game that fails so
hard to meet the expectations its set for itself but still has strong enough interconnected
systems to allow for player driven emergent gameplay scenarios so open-ended that players
can actually design their own games within it.
Shrekfest is a game where the right players with the right motivation can fuck off with
the broken main quest and fumble together their own levels for themselves and other
players to play, all to everyone's benefit.
You thought Breadth of the Wild was were things were at?
Ouf, get outta my swamp.
Over breakfast the next day the four of us kinda brought up how wild it was that, like,
if it weren't for us being there, that wouldn't have happened.
We were the right people and we were enough people on our own to convince people it was
worth hanging out with us.
We were a gang of four, already a party, we had a neat story about how we all met online
that people dug, and of course I was fully decked out repping my home and native land
of Canada so it was an consistently effective ice-breaker.
There were definitely a lot of people who's nights would've ended short if it weren't
for us, and that made us really happy.
It was dope, we got a real big crew, we chanted shrek, we made some noise.
[us chanting]: "SHREK SHREK SHREK SHREK"
It was hours until the actual organizers made it back to their own party, but at this point
it wasn't really their party, it was kind of ours.
Our collective desire to crawl pubs outmatched any loyalty we felt for the hour or two we
got to spend at the actual fest before we were told to leave.
But anyways, we met a lot of really cool people.
[pubcrawlers singing]: "You'll never know if you don't go!
You'll never shine if you don't glow!
SHREK!
Hey now!
You're an all-star!
Get your game on!
Go!
Play!
Hey now!
You're a rockstar!
Get the show on!
Get paid!
And all that glitters is gold!
Only shooting stars break the mold!"
Surprisingly to me at least, turned out most folks really weren't there for the Shrek
crap at all, if fans of anything, most were actually just fans of 3Gi.
Nobody else there could really pinpoint an exact reason as to why there were there, I
mean, neither could I really.
After totally commandeering the party, hitting up a few bars and getting to know some people
better though, I kinda realized what it was for most people.
Nobody was there because they actually cared that much about Shrek, I'm almost convinced
nobody on earth is truly a fan of Shrek.
That's why when asked at the fest about it, people overreact, clearly exaggerate their
appreciation for it.
So here's the thing, Shrekfest isn't actually about being a fan of Shrek, and even though
it looks like I'm headed that way it's not even about being a fan of pretending to
be a fan of Shrek.
No, Shrekfest is a festival for goofy-ass people to hang out with other goofy-ass people,
and the barrier to entry being pretending to be a superfan of anything is just like
a giant filter to keep in only the dopest folks.
Shrekfest has nothing to do with Shrek and everything to do with the sorts of people
who would go to something called Shrekfest, if that makes any sense.
It's about knowing the sort of person you are and knowing you'll find others like
you there.
Here's one of my craziest stories from the fest.
So, last year BobbyBroccoli won game of the year, and his life motto he left me with was
"Commit to the Bit", yada yada I've been living it by it for quite a while now
and reciting it to anyone who asks why I do certain things I do.
You could imagine, I gave it as a reason to quite a few people at the fest.
[Deshrektive]: "What's your real stated reason for being out here today?
Do you, do you worship at the altar of shrek, or is it a more casual sorta thing?"
[Denis]: "Commit to the bit dude."
So we're at our second bar and I'm talking to this girl who turned out was in this inflatable
shrek outfit, she kinda became our mascot for the pub crawl definitely left an impression
on us all.
So she's telling me about how her and her girlfriend are larpers and they made fun of
some dude's ogre costume at a convention one time, and then he told them about shrekfest
and whatever, so I asked her, like, why she took it so far.
Like, most people there were there goofing, but fully embodying the life of the party,
she was taking it to the next level so I asked her why.
And then she just goes to me "you know man, just commit to the bit", and that kinda
stopped me dead in my tracks.
I mean, I had a few drinks in me at this point so I just kinda asked her "wait, have we
been speaking before this" and she's like "no why?" and I'm like "are you sure
I didn't tell you about commit to the bit?" and she's like "nah, I've been saying
that for years, I live by it" and I was just like "whohohoooa" and I told her
the whole story about commit to the bit and everything, but what I think the Bud Lights
I had in me were preventing me from realizing at that exact moment was that this is what
Shrekfest is about.
Shrekfest is the sort of party that's able to bring people who live by the same motto
together, and that's fucking unbelievably dope dude.
So uh, that's really that.
That was Shrekfest, Game of the Year 2018, the most memorable time I've had this year,
a pure time with cool friends, an awesome game that allowed us to immerse ourselves
in so completely as to become it and transform ourselves and it into our own image, an image
of a party with a lot of fun.
Also, the looks on all those old white haired white dudes' faces when they came back after
the Metallica concert and we'd already loaded Smash Mouth and Hallelujah into all the fucking
jukeboxes as many times as we could ahahaha holy fucking shit.
So, Shrekfest 2019, you gonna be there?
Cause I'll be there.
Matt's gonna be there.
Zac's gonna be there.
I hope Jon's there.
Hamish, Nico, you guys gonna be there?
You better be there.
Shrekfest, uh, here's the deal.
So this is what we're doing, we are turning Shrekfest into the anual video essay community
meet-up.
If you're a video essay family member, uh, come to Shrekfest.
Listen, every labor day weekend, you know you have it off, you come to Shrekfest, we're
gonna do it, we're, look!
We're just, that's what it is!
We're looking for an excuse to meet each other, fucking Madison freaking Wisconsin,
labor day weekend, every year, its guaranteed.
Um.
Yeah.
So, let's do it.
Maybe it'll be game of the year next year, who freaking knows, whooohooooooooaaa.
[Zac]: "Is that… is that Matt?"
[Matt]: "It is!"
[Zac]: "Oh my god!"
[Matt]: "Oh my god!
Whaa..."
[Zac]: "Whe!"
[Matt]: "I'm, I'm meeting you for the first time and have never met you before,
and definitely did not get a car ride from you at all."
[Zac]: "Nonono, wait" [Matt]: "Hoh!"
[Zac]: "Who is?"
[Matt]: "Who is that?
I thought he was on your shirt."
[Zac]: "Oh!"
[Matt]: "Hahaheeehehahaha" [Zac]: "No it was no, it was no one.
Oh wait.
Is that Mario?"
[Matt]: "Dadadatdada" [Denis]: "Hey guys it's me, the HatWearingGamer!"
[Matt]: "HAHAHA" [Denis]: "Hey how you guys doing?"
[Matt]: "Oh my god, nice shirt."
[Denis]: "Thank you, how you doing?"
And last but not least, uh, we gotta one more thing because, so many good games, gotta highlight
a bad game.
It's the all time worst game of 2018 is…
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Hamish Black is the worst game of the year for deleting
his twitter account"
Yeah so you know, as it turns out, you know, maybe even a game that is already nominated
can also be a bad, the worst game.
Listen, Hamish, you were a very good game this year, a very good game, but, uh, you
made one critical mistake and you deleted your twitter account and now you can't even
come up, do all these antics and stuff.
I'm just delaying a little bit.
Why?
Maybe you've noticed there's a change of setting here, I'm back at my, I'm back
in my mother's house, I'm in my mother's basement right now, uh, here to record, there's
a microphone set up, maybe you think there's a little bit something fishy going on.
Let's be real, you know what's happening.
I'm here at my mother's because I need to make some fucking noise Hamish.
I'm gonna a Hamish Black a Hamish heart-attack.
[woman I paid on fiverr's voice]: "Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition it's actually
poopoo"
Actually no the real worst game of this year is Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition.
It's such a freaking disappointment on every level!
Like, who is this game for?
Who is it for?
Whooooo?
Whooooo wants this?
It's so fucking baaaad.
Like, okay look its really cool, its really cool that they were able to do this and it
really speaks a lot to the quality of the software they did, everything I've said
about this game in the past still applies and this only brings that, it brings my arguments
even to a better, arg, uh, state of argumentation, but listen!
It's fucking ridiculous!
Oh my god I can't.
I really can't, I was like, su, I was like aaaahh bee play it, pffffft, listen!
This game is, this game is poopoo caca dude.
This game is, is diarrhea.
This game, ooooooouuuu.
This game makes a monkey cry into a banana.
This game makes me want to qwaaaaaa bambambaaba.
This gaaaaame is, uh, dude it's so freaking bad.
Hello Hamish Black, hold onto your bowbags you stinky boi.
Smelly daddy.
My name has been KingK and I certainly hope you have some well deserved fun today.
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