Basement Brothers - Retro gaming youtubers that actually have something new to tell you

BillionBisonBucks

BillionBisonBucks

Soon will be worth five billion pounds
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kiwifarms.net
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Aug 2, 2016
If you're a mildly curious game player, you'll eventually become aware of a variety of elder systems that were explicitly japan-only. MSX, Sharp X68000, and the PC-88/98, among others. They were foundational to gaming as a concept, and are largely inaccessible to anyone without fairly advanced skill in japanese. Wouldn't it be nice if some absolute grognard with that skill served as your tour guide to stuff you've only vaguely heard of and interplay you weren't aware of?


Man, I was so backwards on Hydlide. I had it in my head it was a Ys clone, not the progenitor of the form. This is only the most recent example, but this dude is regularly schooling me on the ancient lore of the very dawn of gaming as an industry in japan.


If you played the first Metal Gear Solid, you're at least tangentially aware of Policenauts. Here's all the context you're missing - And it just goes on. If you consider yourself at all interested in the development of gaming as a business and an art, this channel is a potent insight into how that happened. The other brother is a big Neo Geo fan and occasionally posts videos about what's going on with that system. I'm less interested in that, personally, but still find those videos interesting enough to be worth a watch. The MVS will probably be an active platform after I'm dead and gone.

also maybe everyone can be a bit less salty and witch-hunty then the civvie thread, maybe? please?
 
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I watch his videos, I really like the insight of early Japanese (and to the extend European) computer games since I have no firsthand experience but have second hand experience through ports on US released platforms.

Also I don't have the time to learn a foreign language or some grindy bs RPG so it's fun watching someone summarize it for me.
 
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I found these guys channel out when I got stuck playing the scheme(good game if your into metroid-likes). Definitely a gem among most retro youtubers. Most of the other ones never really delve past your typical sega/nintendo systems and only mention these other systems as passing trivia. On the topic of more obscure retro youtubers. RndStranger is one that I find alright, nowhere near as indepth as the basement brothers, but I enjoyed his overviews of super cassette vision and FDS games.
 
They are well worth watching. Now we need their European counterpart for their computers.
 
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Best youtube channel in the current year that still updates.

I'll admit though I have a bad tendency to only watch the PC gaming episodes... as it seems so does everyone here as nobody before me even acknowledged the Neo-Geo episodes.
 
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I genuinely wish youtubers would fuck off with overdramatizing running an older machine. Like no shit its not the same as your smartphone.
They make playing an N64 sound like operating a space shuttle. Like Nigger, did we play the same console or are you just that retarded?

So sick of these yuppie patreon grifters shitting up youtube.
 
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Dewierra Mist said:
I genuinely wish youtubers would fuck off with overdramatizing running an older machine. Like no shit its not the same as your smartphone.
They make playing an N64 sound like operating a space shuttle. Like Nigger, did we play the same console or are you just that retarded?

So sick of these yuppie patreon grifters shitting up youtube.
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The best way to treat it is like Ross from Accursed Farms, with every old game being in the mode of "fuck windows compatibility issues, let's pras this shit works".

Anyways alright channel to listen in the background.
 
Dewierra Mist said:
I genuinely wish youtubers would fuck off with overdramatizing running an older machine. Like no shit its not the same as your smartphone.
They make playing an N64 sound like operating a space shuttle. Like Nigger, did we play the same console or are you just that retarded?

So sick of these yuppie patreon grifters shitting up youtube.
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To be honest though.. in this case it makes sense. Old PCs were quirky little fucks, and it could actually be interesting knowing what "the experience" was like for a person legitimately using one, especially in a day and age where we get to skip most of that crap because of either emulation or else fan-made fixes.

I agree doing it for something like the N64--which was literally just "put in the cartridge and hit the power switch"--is kinda dumb. But for a home computer where the booting method wasn't always straightforward or immediately obvious, it makes sense.

Heck in this case it might be useful even if you are using an emulator. There's a lot that's been brought up that would have legit tripped up most old PC users if not given the heads up--like that they use the yen symbol in place of backslash, or that the C drive isn't necessarily the main hard drive.
 
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skykiii said:
To be honest though.. in this case it makes sense. Old PCs were quirky little fucks, and it could actually be interesting knowing what "the experience" was like for a person legitimately using one, especially in a day and age where we get to skip most of that crap because of either emulation or else fan-made fixes.

I agree doing it for something like the N64--which was literally just "put in the cartridge and hit the power switch"--is kinda dumb. But for a home computer where the booting method wasn't always straightforward or immediately obvious, it makes sense.

Heck in this case it might be useful even if you are using an emulator. There's a lot that's been brought up that would have legit tripped up most old PC users if not given the heads up--like that they use the yen symbol in place of backslash, or that the C drive isn't necessarily the main hard drive.
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It does make sense to explain how different older machines are to people who are curious. A lot of actual programmers did get around to making fixes and compatibility patches for a lot of older titles that are as plug and play as it gets. They also consistently did a better job through their sheer passion than any of the remaster/remake crap you'll see AAA studios charging full price for that add more bugs than they fix and half of the "improvements" like a higher framerate end up breaking the game for no technical reason.

This channel in particular isn't that bad, but seeing all this clickbait garbage shitting up my recommended feed with hundreds of thousands to millions of views on any given day is so annoying. I don't know if he even made a video on the N64, but that was just a hypothetical example of the average clickbait I encounter that's themed around retro games.
 
Watching more of the content. It's very informative but really anemic with the delivery. If the dude talked about those games in 10% the interest Steve1989 talks about MREs it would be a lot more fun to listen to.

It's sad how standardized gaming has become throughout the years. The pre PS2 era in particularly had a lot of good ideas, even if faulty execution. Take his last review with Western themed RPG, last games that had this were Shadow Hearts 3 and Wild Arms on the PS2.

I would argue modern indie RPGMaker shit looks worse than 30 year old games due to using basic cinematics and HUD to do the heavy lifting in showing characters. Chrono Trigger looked good because of phenomenal sprite work.

Also fucking amazing how old Falcom is.
 
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wtfNeedSignUp said:
Also fucking amazing how old Falcom is.
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It's always a little amusing to me when one of my online friends sees that a company was around in the eighties.

One issue that comes up though is sometimes they think companies are the same then as they were now. So I've had kids want to avoid Contra because its Konami and I have to tell them "no back then Konami was actually good." Similar thing happens with Electronic Arts.

Maniacal Foreigner said:
First content creator I see talking about Rayxanber, very based.
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More things in life aught to be called "Autass."
 
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skykiii said:
One issue that comes up though is sometimes they think companies are the same then as they were now. So I've had kids want to avoid Contra because its Konami and I have to tell them "no back then Konami was actually good." Similar thing happens with Electronic Arts.
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Gaming is filled with those ships of theseus. Though with EA they were always assholes, just in the past they actually published good games.
 
skykiii said:
Similar thing happens with Electronic Arts.
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Or Activision. It's insane how different Activision was in the Atari days. Sega is another fun one. Not because of how different they were, but because they were originally an American slot machine company founded in Honolulu, Hawaii back in the early 1940's. This company was around before Pearl Harbor happened. They became a Japanese company after being bought out in the 80's.
 
This is one of my favorite channels nowadays. Guy has a relaxing voice too. It makes me wish we'd get these games ported in collections to Switch or Steam.

BillionBisonBucks said:
also maybe everyone can be a bit less salty and witch-hunty then the civvie thread, maybe? please?
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What's this referring to?
 
SSj_Ness (Yiffed) said:
This is one of my favorite channels nowadays. Guy has a relaxing voice too. It makes me wish we'd get these games ported in collections to Switch or Steam.
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So here's a sad thing: A lot of the games this dude has reviewed are available on the Switch, possibly PC too--search "Eggconsole," which is a line of re-releases of Japanese PC games... it's basically sort of like Arcade Archives, just for PC games.

One catch though.... another similarity to Arcade Archives is that the actual game roms are not altered, at all. Meaning yes, almost every game this guy reviewed is on the Switch... on the other hand, hope you know Japanese!

wtfNeedSignUp said:
The fact those games and disks still exist is a marvel of engineering and Japanese autism to not let the past die.
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That's an autism I wish more people had. It's nice that Japan has it, as for awhile Japan always struck me as a place that was glad to throw away things as soon as something hot and new came around--it was one reason I stopped watching anime.

America has a shit permutation of it. Instead of letting the past die, we'll try to outright retcon it and pretend it was something it wasn't.
 
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