I subscribe to a lot of gaming channels on YouTube. Some of these channels are generalist, some of them are content creators for specific games and some are just dudes who love deep diving into specific topics or areas of game design.
One channel that I’ve been enjoying in particular is Josh Strife Plays, and in particular his series on older games where he poses the very simple, but often overlooked, question of ‘was this game good?’. Most recently he’s launched a 63 minute-long retrospective of the third-person stealth shooter, Syphon Filter.
In my long list of things to try if you’re bored of gaming sits ‘watch someone passionate about gaming’ and this chap is the perfect representation of that. Beyond that, he goes into depth about some of the game’s more interesting (or divisive) mechanics and the impact that those design decisions had on how the game feels to play.
I loved Syphon Filter when it was first released in 1999, and this video has shown me how much of it has clearly stuck in my memory. Regardless of whether this is something you played or not, I’d recommend giving it a watch.
