Batman: Arkham City – DEBUG MODE

After two years, I’m finally continuing this series. Candidly, what took so long was forcing myself to write it. This was really difficult for me compared to the first. Arkham City is great – it’s the best in the series – but a lot of that greatness is improvement on the solid foundation laid down by the previous game. Iteration is less exciting to talk about than revolution.

I had intended to get this up for the game’s 10th anniversary but it took much longer and became much longer than I had anticipated. I thought, since I initially didn’t have much to write about, that it would be shorter than the first video but somehow it ballooned into the longest yet for the channel.

I hope I’ve done the game some justice here. Everyone knows it’s good, but it deserves appreciation a little deeper than that.

I will be doing Arkham Origins. Originally I was only going to cover the Rocksteady games, but on replaying them all I reconsidered. Since this one took so long, I’m not going directly into production on the next one. But I definitely intend to finish the series before the 10th anniversary of Arkham Knight – and even of Origins. Since there’s a new Rocksteady game out next year and a new Bat-family game, it would probably be a good idea to get the series wrapped sooner than later. We’ll see.

The Triumph of Hitman 3 – DEBUG MODE

I had fully intended for my next Debug Mode video to be the start of new series that I was fairly excited about. Then computer troubles struck and corrupted the footage I’d recorded for that game. That really took the wind out of my sails.

I intend to get back to that previous project, but in order to work on something completely different, I decided to do a quick video on Hitman 3, 2021’s first big release. A “quick” video soon bloomed into a month-long production. The final video is a celebration of the whole World of Assassination trilogy. If you’ve seen my best-of videos for 2016 or 2018, then you’ve heard me championing these games before. They really are pretty special but it’s a little hard to showcase them in a video like this. I think you really need to see someone play the game in realtime or try it for yourself.

Games of 2020 – DEBUG MODE

I almost passed on making a year-end wrap up video since I already covered several of the year’s big games in previous videos. But I do like this format even if nobody really watches. It’s a good way to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short time.

I actually made more Debug Mode videos this year than ever before… which is still not saying all that much. YouTube isn’t my job and it’s far from my only interest. Creating videos I can feel okay about putting out into the world is hard and very time-consuming. And although I keep entertaining the notion of doing shorter, more-focused videos that are a bit easier to produce, that hasn’t really worked out so far.

From what I understand, the almighty YouTube algorithm wants me to upload a 10 minute video every day. I don’t care who you are – there’s no way you can do that and not have the content suffer or lose your mind or both. Increasingly, I feel sorry for the people who are in that position. It’s often not about making consistently good stuff – but just about making stuff consistently.

Anyway, thanks for watching if indeed you do. Let’s all hope for a happy new year.