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

As someone who has been following the dude's output since the mid 00s--he's been doing degrees of kayfabe for pretty much his whole career. He's even gone on at length publicly about how the first stuff that he wrote online was a troll to make fun of some self-serious person he knew on a game forum. For a while I was maybe unhealthily para-socially fascinated with the question of "how much of this is a bit?" I get the impression that there's less of the persona and more of the "authentic" guy in his current output, but it's also clear that he believes real, true authenticity on the internet isn't possible, and he has fun with that.

and that's THE STRAIGHT DOPE--stay tuned for my multi-hour video review of Tim's review

tim is very good at benjamin buttoning himself via jackets and hair. with these time powers, i believe he has played and read everything.

Will M was understandably mixing up stone cold steve Austin's catchphrase "that's the bottom line cause stone cold said so" and the rock's finishing move "rock bottom"

― ✖, Thursday, October 28, 2021 5:58 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i think this is 100% what i did to the point where i heard dwayne's voice in my head saying "that's the bottom line"

It's the fact that he claimed to play all these old console games that got me, at least some of them the first time. Unless he's generally freakishly good at platformers, a lot of those can take an eternity. Maybe he used an emulator and savestates, at least.

I was doing Austin's "What?" bit with Will but he punked out.

― maf you one two (maffew12), Thursday, October 28, 2021 7:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I JUST FORGOT TO CHECK BACK OK I GOT THE BIT

I SAAAAAID,,,,

huh

now that you're doing wrestling goofs u know i have to assume you're the maffew of botchamania

Oh you didn't know?!

Nah tho this is the only forum I've ever posted any amount on

comment from some dude on the Tokimeki Memorial review

While Tokimeki Memorial is one of the first and is definitely the most influential "genuine cyberpunk artifact" of a game, I'd say the LovePlus (ラブプラス) series go even farther - forcing the player to talk and sing into the microphone and evaluating their emotional investment through voice recognition technology and demanding the completion of daily and special limited events in *real-time*.
What, you aren't hardcore enough to have a "real" short conversation with your cyber girlfriend whispering into your Nintendo 3DS every morning at 08:00-09:00 in a convincingly caring tone? Well, tough shit - cos' she is going to dump you, game over. You are in class or at your workplace in real life? Nobody cares! Your girlfriend is calling on the Nintendo 3DS and you better pick up that call, or you are in serious trouble.
The rabbit hole of the madness of LovePlus+ is on its own level, honestly.

I've watched part 3 (what he liked) and bits of part 4 (what he didn't), and ... I feel kind of bad for this game. I'll never play it and don't want to play it, but it seems so rich and ambitious that (like Rogers) I can see its achievements and failures, existing sort of symbiotically, which if I were one of the programmers that slaved over it for so long would make me feel terrible. Like, all that hard work, all those ideas, all that effort, and it became an instant punchline, justified and not justified, for so many. And for many others probably remains so, despite (I assume) many patches.

I played through a couple endings. I enjoyed it.

I was shook by the Judy side quest/romance as much as tim and it’s ridiculously good (Judy is my ride-or-die forever partner in cyberpunk)

tried restarting the game this week and it’s wild how fleshed out (and yet vacant!!) the opening quests are. So much choreography but so little substance. Like there’s a little cutscene with an architectural flyby and synopsis of how you’ll infiltrate. Nothing like this happens at any point in the rest of the game! Or at least not as I remember.

LovePlus sounds wild. Anyone else catch the part of the new review where he says Tokimeki 2 is twice as good as the first? Hmmm

I'm finished all the parts now. Really fun. And he totally claimed to play all of those games in the out-of-TIMROGERS-character mode. And in the list of games he played through, he threw in "and 20 hours of Red Dead Redemption 2". I guess I believe him. The walk we see him take may be his first in quite some time.

So there is one open world game that he found surprisingly good and will talk about in detail later on. Wonder which.

I'm not sure I've beaten any of the GTA 3's... might have to pick up the "definitive edition" coming soon and maybe it'll be less forgiving wrt RC controlled helicopters.

*more forgiving. god help me

i'm also interested to know what his favorite open world game was

All the references to medical problems, I assume that is not him doing a bit.

I think the "I played through every single iteration of [game] AND THEN I replayed... AND THEN I played every possible influence... AND THEN I played all 500 hours of... AND THEN I read every single fan fiction... AND THEN" is definitely a complete bit. I believe he researched these things thoroughly which may have involved a lot of play time, but I don't necessarily believe any of these lists of content consumption claims are literally done as described. The relentlessness to making the "pile" sound as big as possible is a bit that is meant to be proportionate to the cartoonish depth of his dive into a subject, hence the intense delivery and review lengths as well (and everything else).

i want to believe

did he mention listening to the billy idol cyberpunk album?

I don't think so. And he would had if he was a dirty liar!

https://johnrieber.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/todd-rundgren-live-1994.jpg

watched this all the way through a week ago. if you haven't yet, i would recommend just doing that instead of picking and choosing. it works really well as a complete thing i think. even the 30-45 minute journey into jackets. i also think this is maybe the most essential essay/treatise about modern AAA video games and possibly about the game industry c.2021 as a whole, at least in a basic sense. puts into words a lot of things i've felt for a while.

Listened to a recent Insert Credit podcast episode and i think the open world game he loves is The Godfather. Unless the video contradicts this? I'm not rewatching.

pretty sure it's actually Days Gone and that is it plainly stated on a freeze frame somewhere in the 10 hours. He's also been mentioning it a bit on twitter, even just a couple minutes ago:

i'd say

* red dead redemption 2 (real good writing; quite slow though)
* assassin's creed valhalla (got a lot of vikings; however, it's a little too big)
* days gone (does a LOT of surprising / amazing mechanical things with its open world! however: yeah, it's a Zombie Game)

— tim rogers (@108) December 4, 2021

just lmao'd at this clip of the video in which i novelized the entirety of red dead redemption 1's plot. *the* best vid i made at kotaku. on the other hand, it didn't get a million hits. (it still hasn't cracked 100k!) they shoulda made me CEO for this tbh https://t.co/va3ngqoDnb pic.twitter.com/P23xpexCdS

— tim rogers (@108) December 15, 2021

So what's up with this guy?

I occasionally listen to the podcast he's on ("Insert Credit") and that's been business as usual. I just looked at his Twitter... I didn't realize he seems to have stopped posting as a new year's resolution.

I can see an April 25 Patreon update says "Season Two COMING QUITE SOON"... hmmmm

I haven’t joined for a long time but Tim has been doing Friday night twitch sessions

HELLO

I hope tim's collaborators have freed up and TRUCK HECK is becoming a reality

oh yeah the twitch. He's on there right now talking about shoes. Pretty indistinguishable from a new YouTube season.

https://t.co/mXk6jkS0IY pic.twitter.com/kdlaZhgE5Y

— tim rogers (@108) September 25, 2022

the prodigal Tim has returned

based on his absence from the insert credit podcast, i figured he was either wrapping up work on an action button review or having another of his health issues. from the sound of his voice in this review it seems like it was both

*sigh*

I don't hate Tim, I just wish he gave his work to someone else to deliver it. And to cut out some of the romantic melodramatic garbage always involved in his schtick. Is there anyone like this bloke but not annoying?

I hope he's been busy working on TRUCK HECK

the romantic melodramatic garbage

is a big part of the appeal, imo

There's nobody else quite like Tim out there, but I'd recommend Noah Caldwell-Gervais for a semi-similarly deep-divey and personal (though more focused) approach to games crit.

I say all this and then watch his FFVII YouTube video.....

He would be so good if he could somehow learn to contain his enormous ego. or at the very least, not romanticise it. Thanks for the rec, sadly Noah doesn't seem to cover the type of games I am interested in (which Tim does damnit).
Watching Tim feels like watching keeping up with the Kardashians. I know the vanity is bad for my own soul, yet the hate-watch drive (and genuinely interesting things to say about video games) says give me more.

He just needs someone over his shoulder asking "uhhh, hey Tim, does this part of your content do anything for the viewer except try to manipulate them into thinking you God's gift to this barren earth? No? Is it perhaps entirely self-indulgent? Yes?".

the gonzo style is part of the appeal imo, though it was maybe better in small doses when he was doing 20 min videos for kotaku instead of these 3-6 hour monstrosities

enormous ego
try to manipulate them into thinking you God's gift to this barren earth?

i don't get any of this from his work and i would like to politely remind you to re-read the subtitle of this thread. to quote the man himself, "buddy, you think i LIKE the sound of my own voice?" he's clearly on the spectrum and what i see is his flawed-but-functional social coping strategy.

there is no one else on earth making scripted, maximalist brain puke video game criticism videos and for that reason i'm glad he went independent so he can go as far as his health will allow. though i do fear that his eventual dark souls review will end up like SMiLE or hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73hip3pz0Xs

i don't get any of this from his work and i would like to politely remind you to re-read the subtitle of this thread. to quote the man himself, "buddy, you think i LIKE the sound of my own voice?" he's clearly on the spectrum and what i see is his flawed-but-functional social coping strategy.

and if the tim rogers i'm defending there is just a carefully constructed fictional persona, then he's a very talented artist and should keep on doing what he's doing

i see a lot of criticism like HP's on reddit whenever he's posted there and i really just don't see it. in nearly every review, the egotistical autobiographical stuff is clearly done in service of his main points or in contextualizing the game itself. granted i'm only maybe 25% through the new review, but every piece of biographical information so far has been included for sake of the game itself. i don't think any of it is there to give me an appreciation of tim rogers' life. i've said before that i'm pretty sure a lot of it is straight up kayfabe anyway.

the only review i can think of where he was actually writing about himself for the sake of writing about himself was very long written review of FFVI.

regardless, i don't think the way that he uses his personal life in his reviews is in any way unique except that he's doing it to talk about video games rather than novels, travels, food, whatever, and that he's doing it on youtube rather than in writing.

i do think that his personality and sense of humor is what drives a lot of interest in his videos but when's that ever been a problem with criticism?

there are a lot of people on the internet who have glommed onto a variation of the tall poppy syndrome where anyone who acts as a distinct individual (read: not anonymous) or has actual subject area knowledge is somehow showing off or violating a social contract. there’s definitely a strong contingent in the video game fan space (and Reddit) that have that tendency

Tim’s video persona feels like more of a bit to me, where he does have extensive knowledge but he couches it in this over the top dramatic reading that sounds like a cross between a retro newscaster and an enthusiastic high school drama kid who plays every character the same way in an “acting voice”

It’s not always my thing, but I appreciate his work and seriously hope he remembers to take breaks from video games occasionally

that is to say, I don’t think it’s ego-driven in a bad way, and presenting things you’re knowledgeable about in videos you worked hard on should give you a little ego boost in a healthy way

in a way i feel similarly about tim rogers and battlestar galactica (2004 tv version): there is a whole bunch of it, waaay too much of it. you don't need all of it. some of it is purely filler. but damn, when it is good it is GOOD

tbf some of the tangents are about his understanding that he is a weird, obsessive dude and I get more of a sense of self-deprecation from some of those admissions

Looking forward to the new video and hope he's back on Insert Credit soon. The stand-ins have been good but I do miss having him there claiming he's recently played any and every game ever mentioned.

Reduced to a redditor, ouch.

The potential of him being on the spectrum reminds me to be kind. If that is the case (I’m not sure, has it been stated?) then yeah, what he is doing is a good thing.
I have all the time in the world for stories of saving up one’s part time income and sneaking to the video game store to buy a game in the 80’s outside the view of your female workmate. I cringe when I have to hear him say “I don’t like myself” halfway through a 3hr video essay. His personal stuff is brilliant when it relates, vry off putting when it’s braggadocious like “I played FFVII 16 times in the past two years” repeated x8 in a single video. If the bragging is a bit, I guess I just don’t get it.

All said, his content outside of my complaints is so good I am watching him regardless

that's the worst example of a brag I've ever heard.

I'm an hour in, fun so far. as a former Japan liver </brag> the Why Did You Come to Japan bit was really cute.

I’ll leave