Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines - Atop the Fourth Wall

Channel:

Linkara-AtopTheFourthWall

Subscribers:

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Published on May 21, 2016 12:00:00 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nde6uRpbKc

Game:

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004)

Duration: 32:37

113,592 views

2,744

Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara does another Patreon-sponsored review - another one involving vampires, but a video game this time!

http://atopthefourthwall.com

Originally uploaded April 6th, 2015.

ORIGINAL INFO: The gripping story of how a purple guy did all the work for everybody else and was rewarded for it with the need to drink people’s blood.

RUMINATIONS: So a friend of mine got her hands on a Patreon spot and commissioned this one. We briefly did a World of Darkness RPG together with a few others, but honestly it was hard for me to get invested in it. Part of it was that clearly she and the others wanted me to play myself, which I’m sometimes okay with when I’m playing a video game alone and want to project myself into something, but I’ve never been comfortable with that for a tabletop RPG. So yeah, I wasn’t really as into it and eventually it fell apart, buuut she felt like commissioning this just for funzies. I was also annoyed that I didn’t really get to play what I WANTED to play as – a ghost – and had to be involved in a bunch of vampire politic stuff that I just didn’t care about, which of course translates into how I played the game.

This was a fun episode to do, frankly. While the annoying thing about game reviews is that you have 30+ hours of footage you have to sift through to get to the clips you want, if you do things mostly in order you’ll be able to zip through it faster than the comic review, where you have to arrange how the panels will move. Still, the game gave me plenty of material to work with, from wonky graphics to dialogue I could make fun of, to just deliberately funny things put in by the game devs. The fake commercials were always a highlight. The problem is that game reviews are a HUGE timesink. I arranged this episode so that I could try to put it together within two weeks since I would need that amount of time just to play it, but that was still barely enough. After a later game review that came out in 2016, I’ve instituted a new policy where I’ll only do game reviews if they’re 30 hours or less, with exceptions only being made if I’m familiar with the game already. Admittedly, game reviews have only happened twice (three times if you count a visual novel), but I anticipate more in the future. And I’m certainly not against doing more, especially since it might be fun to do a proper review of a Pokémon game or something, although a patron has expressed a desire to see me review the PC version of Star Trek 25th Anniversary, which I would LOVE to do since I had so much with that as a kid.

The Count Jackula appearance was not originally intended when I started writing. I wanted a Maven appearance simply because sometimes Channel Awesome fans have this thing where they want us to stick to our own “niches” for our shows and vampire material was Elisa’s territory, so if I was going to review something outside my expertise but vampire-focused, an appearance by her would be mandatory. However, Elisa also has been on hiatus since she had Baby Grey… although this episode also proved that Baby Grey is super-popular among my fans and they want more of him. But anyway, once Jackula heard I was doing the review, he requested to make a cameo, so I threw that appearance together. It especially gave me a chance to do something that became a kinda-sorta running joke at this point: mistaking people for Beth Elderkin, one of the hosts of Shark Jumping. There’s no real reason for it, I just like saying her name. Jackula threw in the bit with Horror Guru that I included in the stinger and, of course, you should check out his work.

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