Browse
Category
DiscussionsOff Topic

Developer Commentaries

Closed
McJobless

So, as training designer, I'm finding myself more and more interested in Developer Commentaries. They're hilarious, insightful and I can laugh at how bad some of them are at their own games :D

So, what's your favourite developer commentaries so far? Here's some of mine:

Useless Podcasts - Mike Stout and Tony Garcia, ex-Insomniac Games employees. They've finished R&C2 and R&C3, two of my absolutely favourite games of all time, and they're really hilarious. EXTREMELY insightful into all the trials and tribulations of the game development process, and they're pretty funny.
Conker King - Several developers from Rare (the good Rare, before Microsoft got them) who are super funny, playing through Conker's Bad Fur Day. There's quite a lot to learn. Be warned, their British accents and humour is quite thick at times (a lot more than I imagined).
Halo / Halo 2 - The guys at Bungie did some (shorter) commentaries on the original 2 Halo games, and these are pretty funny and interesting, especially to learn about the process of cutting content.

1 decade ago*

Comment has been collapsed.

6 Comments
Hym12

Not enough boobies

1 decade ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.
McJobless

Have you ever played Conker's Bad Fur Day?

EDIT: Apparently there was also some easter egg involving boobs in R&C2...

1 decade ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.
spacy1993

I have never listened to other game developer commentary except Valve games. As for in game direct commentary, i only know of Valve game products.

The rest is mostly from behind the scenes stuffs on Youtube.

If you are looking for good and insightful commentaries regard game industry, game developers and mechanism: Search for (PATV - Extra Credits show)[http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits]. Although they are small in game industry, their words got weight when it comes to developer philosophy and concept.

1 decade ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.
McJobless

My friend has tried many, many times to get me into Extra Credits. I will read the transcript of the episodes. I will read the original author's blogs and news articles. But I refuse for a number of reasons to listen to the guy who narrates his stuff in the high pitch voice.

I also found Gamstra really cool, since all the developers like to go there and discuss the industry.

1 decade ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Deleted

This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

1 decade ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.
crackerbear

All the main Valve games have probably the best and most consistent commentary, i.e. Half-Life 2 and the Episode sequels, also Portal 1 and Portal 2. The Portal games in particular are very good, there's one where they talk about how they the developers were amazed over the ingenuity of some of the game testers, how they overcame some of the puzzles they set in completely unexpected ways. They actually left in a few of the more "cheat" methods because of how amazing the work around to the puzzle was.

One of my favourites is The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, similar to Valve games, they did direct commentary, whereby you must play the game to hear each comment. The dev team, Starbreeze, seemed like fun guys and the thought process behind everything as well what they could and couldn't include in the game was interesting. One segment I remember was when they told Xzibit (who voices a character in the game) to scream in pain as if he'd been stabbed and he asked them whether or not to act like what it really sounds like in real life, or to do a Hollywood type scream.

Other than that, the recent Elder Scrolls games such as Oblivion and Skyrim (I think) have video commentaries outside of the game, likewise with Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Augmented Edition and Dishonored, these were all memorable to me or maybe I just watch the dev commentaries of games I enjoyed playing.

This post turned out longer than I expected. Oh well.

1 decade ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Closed 1 decade ago by McJobless.