If you have a soft spot for Foamy the Squirrel styled rantings and happen to be a gamer as well, surely Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s reviews hitting the nets were the equivalent of Jesus Christ arriving with homemade sin-erasing cookies. Finally, a reviewer that speaks his mind(other than us, of course!)Some readers were critical, however, saying all Croshaw really does is rant. Whatever your opinion, Boing Boing’s recent interview with him may provide further insight.
Here’s a bit more on how Ben creates his magic:
Yahtzee: I usually take a few days to play through the game and I’ll usually finish it, or get as far as I can before I feel I can formulate an opinion. After that I’ll devote a day to writing the script. I don’t take notes, but I’ll usually latch onto maybe 4 or 5 points and get a paragraph or two out of each. I generally compare the text to older reviews then to make sure I’ve written enough. Then comes making the images, which usually takes me 2 or 3 days. I used to record the speech first, but I found that I’d sometimes want to make changes to the script while making the images, especially if I wanted to reword a phrase that I found too hard to visualise. Once the images are done, recording the narration and stringing it all together in Windows Movie Maker is the easy part.
Croshaw is also quite frank about his pleasure with the feature’s success, saying:
The Escapist were the first ( to contact me about work.) They’re good people and I am treated well with a big sack of money at the start of every month. The success has been pretty surprising, and I’m also doing my best to exploit it as best I can; I’ve gotten two free trips abroad so far and been making decent headway on my main ambition to be a professional game designer.
I’d like a big sack of money, too. I need to think of something unique to do that doesn’t involve taking off my clothes so someone will throw one at me. Maybe I could become the number one authority on real life chocobo breeding? Except I’d need a background in science and knowledge of how to alter the animal genome. Sigh. Forget it.
[Via Boing Boing]
