About the Rambler

Most of you reading this probably discovered me because of my YouTube channel, which I started in January of 2019, but I've actually been writing game reviews under this alias on my blog for far longer than that, dating back to July 2011 -- 10 years ago to the day that I'm publishing this video. 

I started The Nocturnal Rambler in the summer of 2011 with no real goal in mind. I just wanted an avenue to practice writing and a place to document thoughts, opinions, and observations. The name, layout, and color scheme were all chosen and created before I'd posted a single article, and before I even realized that the blog would become entirely video game related. I probably should have seen that coming, since video games have always been a big part of my life and I've always had strong opinions about the games I play.

I grew up playing video games, starting with the original Game Boy and Super Nintendo during my childhood in the early 90s. My brother and I became Nintendo fans (and essentially a Nintendo household during the "console wars" of the 90s and early 2000s when Sega, Nintendo, Sony, and later Microsoft were all competing for valuable real estate in people's homes, back when kids could only convince their parents to buy one console). Though we later bought an old Sega Genesis and eventually a PlayStation 2, we were pretty loyal to the Nintendo brand and made the SNES, N64, and GameCube our primary gaming consoles. My favorite games of this era consisted mainly of staple Nintendo games like all the Mario, Zelda, StarFox, and Metroid games plus other random ones like Illusion of Gaia, Chrono Trigger, Star Wars Rogue Squadron, Perfect Dark, TimeSplitters, and so on.

We also owned a home computer system during all this time (I think it was an Intel 386, running DOS, and then we later upgraded to a Gateway with Windows 95 or 98, and then eventually XP), but it was never really meant to be a gaming system. Most of the games we had for it were educational kids' games (I most fondly remember the trilogy of Treasure Mountain, Treasure Cove, and Treasure Galaxy, but I still remember a whole plethora of other games from that era) and shareware games that we'd find in magazines or receive in the mail, the kind of thing where companies would send out free floppy discs or compact discs with the first few levels of a game and you'd have to call or mail the company to order the full game. I played the hell out of the shareware version of Doom, for instance, but never the full thing until much, much later. I also vividly remember the Games For Windows 95 Sampler, which featured an immersive, 3D space station you could explore and find random secrets, and select specific game samples to play from inside the game. We also played a lot of StarCraft, Lemmings, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Sim City, Duke Nukem, Chip's Challenge, Yoda Stories, and I think we might have also had a copy of Myst that I never got into, plus other games of course.

I was never really a PC gamer until about 2005, when I built my first gaming computer. Before that, it was mostly Nintendo. I had dabbled with PC games before, of course, but the thing that convinced me to make the switch was largely my experience with the Gothic games in 2003. I remember being at Best Buy looking for a new game to play, perusing through the PC section just wondering what types of games were out there, and stumbling upon some little, unknown game called Gothic, which promised to be an action-packed dark-fantasy adventure role-playing game with "over 100 hours of exciting gameplay." On a whim, I bought it, then played it, and fell in love with it. I went back to the store a couple months later and was shocked to see a sequel, Gothic 2, sitting there on the shelf, which I of course bought immediately, and wound up loving it possibly even more than the first one. Sadly, that was all the Gothic series had to offer at the time -- we wouldn't get Night of the Raven in the US until almost 2006 -- so I set out looking for other, similar types of games to play that would satisfy the same craving. With so many people online suggesting other computer games like The Elder Scrolls, Baldur's Gate, Wizardry 8, the Ultima series, and so on, I decided to save up my money to build my own gaming computer so that I could have more freedom to play these kinds of games.

Since then, I've been doing most of my gaming on PC, occasionally dipping into console territory on the various PlayStation iterations. My tastes have pretty much solidified into liking different types of role-playing games, survival-horror games, first-person shooters, and immersive-sims, and I especially like it when games mix those genres to create unique genre-defying experiences. System Shock 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, and Prey (2017) are some of my favorite games of all time because they take elements from all those different genres. Other games like Deus Ex, FEAR, and Fallout: New Vegas deserve similar mention as well, though they usually only blend two or three of those genres instead of all four. When it comes to first-person shooters, I tend to like it when they have something a little more going on that just shooting, like a fun narrative presentation or some type of weird gimmick; with RPGs, I tend to prefer ones that emphasize deeply nuanced mechanical systems and character-based decision-making; and I like horror games to have some form of meaningful gameplay besides just walking around while scary things happen at you like a glorified haunted house simulator. I've liked pretty much every immersive-sim I've ever played, so I'm apparently not very picky with those. 

By the time I started my blog in 2011, I'd had a lot of experience writing about games, by virtue of being active for years in various online communities and getting into long-winded discussions with people. With gaming being my favorite hobby for so much of my life it was only natural that I'd end up writing about games, even if that's not necessarily what I intended or expected to do with my blog. Even with all that experience, I have to admit that my writing and eye for critical analysis were still pretty rough around the edges in 2011. If you go back and read my earlier articles and compare them to my more recent ones, you'll se there's been a lot of evolution over the years as I've gotten better at making observations and articulating those thoughts and ideas. I'm sure there's still plenty more room for me to grow and evolve as a critic, but overall I'm pleased with where my writing is at presently.

I was originally not interested in creating video reviews, in part because I have a personal preference for the written format -- as a consumer, I usually find reading articles to be faster and easier than sitting through a video, though of course it all depends on the writer and the production of the video -- but also because I knew that turning my lengthy reviews into a video would be exponentially more time-consuming than just writing them. But after seven years of writing for my blog and not seeing much in the way of sustainable growth, traffic-wise, I started to feel like I needed to branch out to a new platform that would grant my work more exposure to a wider audience, and thus began my YouTube channel in January of 2019. After several months of experimentation, I got a better feel for my "screen voice" and how to edit video and realized that I actually enjoy making these videos more than just writing the reviews themselves, as there's a satisfyingly creative and, at times, artistic element to it. It's still an insane amount of work, of course, especially for someone who has to work a full time job and who has a life outside of making YouTube videos, thus leaving me with only a couple hours a day -- if that -- to work on these videos. 

As I'm sure you can all infer, I run this channel (and my blog before that) as a side project during my own free time. For nearly eight years out of college I worked as a professional musician, performing in theme parks, local theaters, and various random side gigs, but in the last few years I've switched over to more steady work in home improvement, primarily remodeling kitchens and bathrooms and flipping houses. I still try to take musical side gigs whenever I can, but with the COVID-19 pandemic basically shutting down the entire live entertainment industry, gigs have been few and far between for the last year-and-a-half. Besides that, I'm also an avid board gamer, and since 2014 have been amassing a larger and larger collection than my rickety shelves can handle. 

I try to post reviews as often as I can, but it really depends on my work schedule and the game(s) I'm playing. Some projects demand a lot of over-time and weekend work to finish on-time, and likewise, if I'm playing a long game then it might take a couple months just to finish it, plus another month (or more) to write the review and edit the video. And unlike a lot of mainstream review sites, I like to actually complete games before writing a review so that you know my opinion is fully formed based on the entirety of the product, not just first impressions being extrapolated over the rest of the game. I also like to take my time playing games, experiencing them to their fullest and simply trying to enjoy them as a regular gamer, rather than a reviewer rushing to meet a deadline or trying to pump out as much content as possible. When writing my reviews, I also spend a lot of time deliberating with myself, going back and forth examining things from different perspectives so that I can try to have a more comprehensive and balanced evaluation of a game's various strengths and weaknesses beyond just my own personal impressions. As a consequence of my thoroughness, my reviews tend to be longer than average and go into more detail than some other reviews; while I don't upload very frequently, I try to make up for it with overall quality, both in my editing production and the critical assessments I offer. 

All reviews are, ultimately, a matter of subjective opinion; people like (or are more tolerant of) different kinds of things in games, and an individual's past experiences can have a big influence on how they perceive subsequent experiences. Give two people the same game and they can walk away with vastly different experiences just because of who they are as gamers, based on what they've played (and liked) previously. Video games are an artform, after all, and as we all know, art is subjective and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some things in video games can, however, be analyzed from a more objective perspective. If a gameplay mechanism doesn't work as it's intended, for example, then it is objectively flawed. Other more technical aspects like level design, quest design, pathfinding, audio mixing, game balance, simulated systems (like the emergent application of physics in the gameplay), and so on, can all be said to be objectively "good" or "bad," even if subjective opinion may sway one's personal preferences a certain way when considering these aspects. While some people incorrectly insist that all reviews be 100% objective fact, you really can't objectify "fun." Thus, per my own estimation, a good review should strive to balance subjective opinion with objective analysis.

I'm certainly subject to my own biases and preferences, but I try to support my subjective opinions with objective reasoning. In other words, I put a lot of thought into why a game makes me feel a certain way, using evidence from the core gameplay design and execution, and I try to explain it in such a way that those who haven't played the game or who don't share my own opinion can understand where I'm coming from and why I think that way. My goal is to do a good enough job arguing my case that, even if you disagree with my opinions, you can at least understand my point of view and see some validity in my claims, based on the reasonings provided. That's not always how it turns out, of course -- I'm not perfect, and I'm by no means the absolute authority on video games -- but I feel like my reviews are usually pretty level-headed and reasonable, even when I'm effusing immaculate praise or scornful derision on a game.

I hope you find my reviews valuable and insightful; although I do get some personal satisfaction out of making these videos, I also do it to provide a service for others, because I feel like I can offer a somewhat unique perspective that isn't widely represented among game reviewers. I know I'm not the most eloquent or profound reviewer out there, but I truly aspire for my work to be a step above the majority of what you can find elsewhere, and I take a lot of pride in my work. After 10 years of writing in-depth game reviews, I've managed to continually improve as a writer and as a critic, and I'm fairly pleased with where my work is at currently. I'd certainly like to be able to focus more on reviewing games and getting content out more frequently, but that's really dependent on how popular my channel gets -- which honestly, as of right now, is nowhere near as successful as I'd like it to be for how much time and effort I put into making these videos, and considering the overall quality level I believe my work demonstrates. But there's always opportunity for more growth and hopefully one day I'll be able to make this more of a full-time endeavor. On that note, I'd like to thank those of you who're already subscribers, and I'd like to give a special thank you to those of you who've been following me from the early days on my blog, where it all started 10 years ago. 

To conclude this spiel, I'd like to encourage you to check out my Patreon page, where I post monthly updates on what I'm working on, complete with early impressions and analysis of the games I'm playing, plus early looks at my review scripts and videos before they go public, and polls where you can vote on what games I'll review next. I also sometimes post shorter videos, and other random thoughts or compositions there. Besides granting you access to more of my work, it also helps me to be able to run this channel -- the more patronage I get, the more I can justify taking time off from work to focus on reviewing games and making these videos, thus allowing me to produce more content at a quicker pace. After doing this for 10 years, starting with my blog, I feel I've demonstrated a high level of dedication to the craft with consistent output, but I'm limited by how much I can actually do with this channel right now, with it being essentially just a hobby I work on in my spare time, of which I don't have much, but with your support I can focus on making this more of a full-time (or at least part-time) endeavor, which would benefit not only me, but you, my viewers, as well. Once again, I'd like to thank you for your consideration, and I hope some of you will consider signing up. Thanks for watching everyone, and here's hoping for another 10 years of The Nocturnal Rambler.