thread of tim rogers content (do not read if you hate tim rogers)

the incomparable tim rogers has been a full-time contributor to kotaku since last year. I have loved tim rogers' writing, but it's possible that talking-fast-over-a-video is him at his finest. here's a thread for tim rogers content past present and future!

this week he did a video review of Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition which makes me…kinda want this bugfuck game…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep5SWvImTRU

mostly for my own future reference, here's a wayback machine link to action button dot net, which is currently missing with a message that says "relax, it's coming back", featuring his 18,000 word review of Final Fantasy XIII which I think is a high point.

I'm guessing you dont mean this guy!

http://artslab.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Tim_Rogers_1.jpg

I don’t.

no, that's him

i fondly remember his long, digressive "reviews" of earthbound, chrono trigger and super mario bros 3 being really important to my own writing at a certain time in my life, and i'm sad to find out the website is down now so i can't spend 2 hours reading all three again!

i like his videos way more than his written stuff

the part of the hyrule warriors video starting around 13:30 where he tries to explain the appeal of musuo games is wonderful

I have a mixed opinion of Rogers as writer. He has some annoying tendencies for sure, but his perspective and his style feel so unique and inimitable. I like his absurdist wordplay. I like his overall design philosophy. I could do without about half of his loopy digressions on his travels and lifestyle...at the same time, a large part of his appeal (for me) is the way his writing is always crammed-to-bursting with vivid and unnecessary detail. I'd be lying if I said his stuff didn't influence me, though if you asked me to define said influence, I'm not sure I could. Anyway, his God Hand review is pretty funny.

rereading the FFXII review last night, there was a lot of 2010 bro-type/edgelordy language and imagery that he's mercifully moved on from.

I've met him irl a few times. he's relatively nice but does not stop talking

xp yeah, I was reading that and "blade raped" made me cringe. Glad he has matured a bit.

yeah i've met him at pax a couple times since my friend did the music for his game - he's basically the same person you see in his videos, it's not a put-on

recently ive been listening to the Violence Island podcast:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151130033625/http://earthblows.com/

it's a battle royal of random characters. interestingly the one they taped in October 2014 "Must See Killing Spree" begins with a fight between Dick Solomon and Dr. Huxtable himself, and Tim Rogers wastes no time saying that there are some deep, dark "grandmother terrifying" things about Cosby. he never comes out and says what he was accused of but it's clear he saw/heard the Hannibal act from the same month and he took that stuff seriously. just kind of interesting, i was listening to that and had to look up that it was 4 years ago. an entirely different world.

as for his personality, he doesn't seem all that different from music hipsters i've talked with. then again hipsters hate nothing more than their own kind.

this is the best and worst of tim rogers, al in 5 minutes

https://jalopnik.com/should-you-honk-at-people-in-anger-a-cargument-1826083140

imwo honks are the only non-violent way to communicate to other cars. someone needs to invent smart honks that figure out if you are trying to merge lanes or whatever and produces a tone the other car understands and can communicate to the driver.

Tim Rogers reported from E3. Videos are up from the booths of the major publishers. There's also this video. https://kotaku.com/the-weirdest-things-we-found-at-e3-2018-1826928317

Good stuff from Tim recently: Judge Eyes demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je7hYYjr9Mk

Eyebrow-raisey Shadow of the Tomb Raider preview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8lgFc6vFyU

Affectionate DQXI review

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4iTbUGItU0s

Oops forgot to remove the m on that last one, here’s the embed for those who prefer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iTbUGItU0s

let's see if tim can sell me on forza horizon 4, a candidate for my biannual Fancy Graphics Game Impulse Purchase

I like his series about translating Final Fantasy VII, funny and informative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZefYEaNUJ7w

Tim made me want Forza Horizon and it’s not a thing I should want.

Tim plays, screams at Mega Man 11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7GR5GQy9XU

I can't tell if I prefer exasperated Tim or chill Tim

the two types of tim rogers content i love are his scripted review vids that all take poetic turns in the 2nd half (e.g. hyrule warriors, forza horizon 4) and his on-site vids from E3/conventions

Tim and I have the same Game of the Year

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru3yZzhhnS8

Does not disappoint.

This also reminds me that I need to 1) go back and beat Celeste & 2) pick up Obra Dinn ASAP

those two are tied for my goty

i downloaded obra dinn the other day and i'm trying to con my partner into trying it out with me tonight!

and rogers' #1 same as mine too. it was a good year for games!

kinda sold on this guy

Obra Dinn is awesome btw, and i don't think i will ever come close to figuring out the fates of everyone

I’m going to sit on my hands on that one for a while owing to my Switch Only policy but I’ll stop waiting in a year or so. I loved Papers Please, what a game.

^same

good list. hollow knight s/b #1 tho

He even says there's nothing wrong with it and struggles to find a complaint (too dark to play on the NYC subway, lol), so at the least it should be higher!

Sheesh it’s not like a scientific ranking.

I agree with him though: Hollow Knight is very good and Celeste is the best platforming video game and basically a perfect realization of what video games are good at

Hollow Knight is also a 2017 game

hollow knight is low b/c he played it last year jeez yall didn't listen to all 44 minutes did you xp

year of impact

PCs are powerpoint

of course I paid attention to all 44 minutes, and I might do it over again!

it's possible that talking-fast-over-a-video is him at his finest.

This is a terrible thing to say about anyone, but having a look at the Shadow of the Tomb Raider video you might have it right.

The sheer amount of video editing he must do for these is pretty intense

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y48DgYY6GVA

shooting zombies is the vegetarian version of murder

his story about jonathan blow (#4, braid) is interesting and kind of sad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqnAx3gx99w

this is one franchise I just solidly dng

I’ll leave

lol cmon. Is that a brag for serious gamers? I dunno. I've never played a Final Fantasy. I should try and get through his review of the remake sometime.

The Doom and Pacman and Tokimeki reviews hooked me. I've always been curious about the omglol Weird Japan! magazine kind of coverage of things we never used to get "over here" and thought that section of this video was well done.

Seems the Boku fan translation isn't out yet.

when you’re a game reviewer/creator, saying you played a game that many times is like “bragging” you worked two weeks of 70 hour shifts and you don’t get paid overtime, imo

he LOVES talking about how much he overworks himself!

tim 'paid tha cost to be da boss' rogers

I find his epic essays a little too much to take (literally; they're really long!) but I've got to admit they accomplish something novel, even necessary, in a way. Video games make a bazillion dollars a year, and young people in particular spend a bazillion hours a year just *watching* people play video games. Yet there's not a lot of long form discussion/dissection of video games anywhere, afaict, not really, which is remarkable, given their prominence in pop culture. So if he wants to spend six hours crafting a take on a game, making the case for why something so niche or cult or overlooked deserves your attention, I say bring it on.

I mean, it's wild, a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 can make almost a billion dollars in a weekend, and yet it's nowhere close to a household name property, imo, not in the same way, say, Star Wars or Marvel is. For sure people will pay attention to the Last of Us show, but many of them will have no idea about the game beyond that there even is a game, let alone a game whose merits someone like Rogers could intelligently, intricately discuss for five hours or whatever it was without so much as dipping into the plot, iirc.

One thing I hope we all can agree on is that he should*absolutely* keep writing hallucinatory ad copy for hbomberguy to read

I decided not to play all of those Contrail games.
I mean actually, I had actually played __all__ of them, years ago,
over the years, it was -- it gave me maybe the very first instance
of going to Wikipedia to look for a list of something, and, realizing
I had engaged with literally everyone on the list.

that was a very Tim moment

it's just one tim moment after another, i love it

when tim rogers does that low, gravelly voice, he's starting to sound uncomfortably like Alex Jones

that naniwa express album the cool guy at work recommended to tim is pretty sick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAxyYtpazmw

someone took the trouble of listing his favourite albums that he flashed on the screen over like 2 seconds in the Tokimeki video. Some great stuff:
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/pedrochambs/tim-rogers-ten-favorite-albums-of-all-time/

ha! I literally did the same thing freeze-framing it myself. guess I should have just done a google search instead.

of course, I still haven't actually listened to the records I'm not already familiar with. one day!

oh I love that Starbow record, a scifi idol concept album by Hosono that was a huuuuge flop

amazed there is a clip of Starbow on TV, only seen photos before!
the concept was that they were genderless aliens so were dressed and sang somewhat androgynously, early 80s Japan were having none of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FzW4xGQT_s

yep, that's a favorite of mine as well.

the taeko ohnuki is also quite good, a highlight in a large catalog filled with cool records.

Finished the Boku video (who else made it?)

He mentioned again his habit of listening to a new album *every* day. Mightn't be a stretch to many on ILM but I know I wouldn't get much out of trying that. It's probably a decent relief from his memory issues, of course detailed again as he goes home to Kansas for the first time in 30 years...

I never got the sense he was bragging about anything. I hope for him that he even is just pretty OK with himself. There's a lot of talking about himself of course. The thesis he rolls around to at around the 5 hour mark is all we can learn from well-imparted nostalgia. "I love everyone and you can too". I'd be more inclined to call this "nostalgia" simply "memories" or "experience", but I can see if he's drawing a distinction from how he can remember the exact date he last went to a certain food court.

--
The guy working on the game translation is still at it:

I'm currently taking some time off Twitter, but rest assured, I'm working on the thing y'all are excited for! 🦋
I do check my DMs still, so you can reach me there if you have questions or comments!

— Samuel 💻✨ Messner (@obskyr) September 27, 2022

(who else made it?)

i'm somewhere in the third hour! taking it in chunks. in typical fashion, by the time i was in the second hour i was trying (and failing) to download an emulated version of the first game on psx

i didn't know anything at all about boku no natsuyasumi. i want to play!

I'm trying to convince a Japanese friend who loves the games to try getting through the video.

Karl once the translation is out I will commit to help you get it running on a computer

:) thanks maffew! i have openemu (mac running 12.5) but downloaded a file from a sketchy rom place, and the file failed to open. but honestly i've never had any luck with psx emulation, or really anything that for disc-based systems.

you can and you will

oh hell yeah!

it's gonna be a boku no natsuyasumi winter

Without even crossing the equator. They said it couldn't be done

have you played one of them before?

Nope. Had heard about the series from Ray Barnholt's enthusiasm for it over the years. It's sweet that he appears in the video.

*shot of ray barnholt*

"HI TIM!"

add me to the list of folks who wanna try a fanlation. looks great!

i got it running on openemu, there's a gamefaqs guide that explains what the buttons do but you're on your own dialogue-wise. very attractive game tho

The tricky thing with a lot of systems from this point is having BIOS files to get anything to run.

And then patching a rom will be another little pain.

To be clear, my Japanese is crap. I was over there two years. Can still read kana pretty quick, but most Chinese characters..fuhgeddaboutit

I was aware of this guy but never took a full dive until I watched his full Doom video earlier tonight. And it was kinda wild how the arc of my opinion of him while watching matched the arc of this thread that I read immediately afterwards.

Our greatest critic of the medium at work today

Tim is definitely an arc

I drive a lot and have been listening to a ton of Insert Credit recently. For Tim, solely, I’m finding. Guy is sharp and funny. I’m still not sure where he belongs in the bullshitter to savant spectrum, but enjoyable either way.

Brandon S. is fucking insufferable though. “So my number one game of the year is Super Fart Tensei 3. I don’t know, it’s kinda like Sonic Mania. It’s the most Dreamcast game of the year. Like the jumping feels pretty good, the running feels OK. But yeah, it’s bad and super janky. Hehehe. But kind of interesting. I played it for 12 minutes. Hehe. Yeah, that’s my number one.”

I want to shove him down a toilet.

you shoving him dowm a toilet is his game of the year, though

lol. At times you can practically hear the others biting their tongues with some of the dumb shit Tim and Brandon say. Best thing about that show.

xp lmao

It is true, the interplay between them all is what keeps me coming back. It would be too much if it was all Tim. But I do skip the episodes he’s not in.

Jaffe is a great host who knows how and when to interject. Frank is kind of a bore, but I like the museum/history stuff and his barely concealed contempt for most of what Brandon says is really funny. It’s a good sitcom.

That all sounds so great, will listen

Sort of really love how Frank seems to barely have played any games mentioned. I have to be in the mood for Brandon but the recent Tim/Brandon only episode was really, really strong.

I listened to a bit of that end of the year ep, and yeah, Rogers is fast and funny and less affected than his long videos. The other guys, don't know anything about them or why they are in the orbit of this video game savant. The one guy talked about giving "Elden Ring" maybe an hour before giving up, which seems ... short.

Well, Brandon is the co-founder of Insert Credit, which was Tim's first writing gig back in the early 00s. Those guys have been co-conspirators for decades. Not sure where Frank comes in, but I think the work he and Kelsey Lewin are doing with the Videogame History Foundation is super cool. I agree with y'all that Brandon's opinions can be baffling/obnoxious, there was a segment on this week's ep where he was trying to bash the Criterion Channel for being "pretentious;" Tim wasn't having it.

oh dear god this new episode. oh god.

Read that and thought there was a new Action Button review for a second. On Tim's current schedule we're not due another for around...five months or so?

just tim timming all over the latest podcast, in post. use caution if you like tim rogers.

i will probably finish it. it's just so ludicrous. Frank's audio is missing, and so he fills in the spaces in the conversation from his famously great memory.

Loved that episode and all the credit in the world to editor esper for making it even slightly comprehensible

Yahueh!

This sounds amusing, looking forward to it.

Brandon's upcoming game "Demonschool" has a demo on Steam if the urge strikes you. Looks pretty neat... a retro tactics game with some Persona flavor

I played a little of the demo, it's cool. The combat system is neat, the art & music is beautiful. Every character seems to talk like Brandon, though.

I mean this without any disrespect, it’s great whatever way, but Frank’s podcast Video Game History Hour is fantastic to fall asleep to.