This is a social review post done when I should be doing technical articles, but I REALLY enjoy this YouTube channel and as this particular YouTuber is moving to running his channel full time it seemed like a good opportunity to do a review.
The channel is called @ChristopherOdd and it’s a ‘let’s play’ channel or ‘long play’ as I used to know them, in which someone plays full video games while narrating what they are doing, there are hundreds of them out there so what differentiates this one from others?
- Christopher Odds voice: His voice is far more like an audio book narrator than a gamer, he doesn’t get hysterical, he doesn’t make you wince, he doesn’t get over excited in a fake way (though he suffers badly from jump scares in horror games) it’s a pleasant dulcet tone to listen too, as someone that listens to a huge number of audio books I’ve come to really appreciate the quality of a narrator, and as far as I’m concerned Christopher Odd is the best narrator for games that I have currently met on any platform.
- Mental speed: I don’t know his age and I haven’t looked into it 1 but he’s about my mental speed, he solves problems at about the speed I do, I don’t want to jump up and down and yell for him to do things faster or slower, he just thinks at a nice pace and I feel after he has completed the game that I have seen all of that game and that it is as complete a play through as I would make.
- Being correct without being too correct: Christopher is constantly correcting himself while he’s playing, you can see from one video to another that he is learning and changing his opinions as things grow and change, Cultural slips are corrected, things said in the heat of the moment are amended instantly and this is at a time when his popularity is at about 300000 YouTube followers, a time when a lot of YouTubers think they can get away with saying offensive things without any backlash. It makes you think he is a good person in real life.
These and the choices of the games he plays result in a channel I can watch all day, a rarity in this day and age 🙂
But even if he is a joy to listen too, why would I want to watch a video of someone playing computer games? for me there are two reasons:
- He plays a series of games that I would never play!! I do not want to play Dark Souls, all the Dark Souls series are massively frustrating to play and that’s not something I am interesting in experiencing, but I am fascinated with their worlds and want to learn about them 2.
- He plays most of his games based on their story and that story is often better than a lot of TV series. To me watching him play is as enjoyable as a series, in fact more so because I can predict most elements of a TV story line (As can most people) but when watching a game there will be surprise elements based purely on his game play, over and above the story, the same cannot be said of TV.
All this has meant that I am now a Patron supporter of his channel and treat the news of him going full time with great delight, his channel is by far the one I watch the most and at the current quality I see no reason to change that in the future. 🙂
- it feels a bit stalkerish to start looking at peoples age and things like that[↵]
- After watching the play through I now feel invested in the game and From Software actually get money out of me when they normally wouldn’t as I have bought Dark Souls books and merchandise.[↵]