I Blame Zack

I don’t watch most game-related videos. To be honest, I find most of them supremely boring. The majority of them are exactly what you’d expect to get from a video-maker whose true interest is gaming, not the making of videos. I.e., the focus is on nigh-meaningless (or at least fairly uninteresting) numbers flying across the screen, or showing off some supposedly ‘uber’ character, rather than on making a good video. However, there are three very notable exceptions to this that I can easily think of.

I don’t even play Guild Wars. But dang, Zack’s videos are good enough that I love them anyway! I’ve never pretended to have any skill whatsoever at reviewing anything related to movies or music; I tried it once or twice and quickly realized I should never do that again. But since this isn’t the reviews blog anyway, here’s my attempt at explaining what makes Zack’s videos so different from most of the ones out there.

For one, he has a perfect sense of editing. The movements utterly match the music. This is far and away one of the top reasons I love his videos.

One of the reasons I think his GW videos work particularly well is that the GW emotes are entertainingly spastic, particularly in contrast to the fancy outfits the characters wear, which inherently makes the videos funny to watch.

Zack also picks catchy songs that work well with video game emotes, and then he’s smart enough to stick with those emotes. So many fan-made videos end up as a bunch of ‘talking heads,’ where they somehow try to make it look like the characters present in the videos are speaking things from the songs for five minutes, and frankly that’s boring and dull.

Not that Zack is the only good game-based video maker out there, of course; of particular note is spiffworld, who makes fantastic Warcraft videos based on Jonathan Coulton’s music. If you prefer spastic and hilarious Zack is the better choice; if you like entertaining stories set to original music, spiffworld/Coulton is great:

And finally, no such list would be complete without Cranius’ inimitable “Big Blue Dress”. While it does have a bit of the “heavy on the numbers” problem, that takes a back seat to the more fun stuff. Keep an eye out for the gnome backup singers, and remember: a man who’s truly skilled can look quite good in Twill!