Game reviews

Why you should consider to seriously consider game reviews? Here is the matter.

Nowadays, in the field of videos on video games, the so-called LatsPlay began to dominate , and if in Russian, then the video walkthrough of games. The main reason for such an abundance of them lies on the surface, it is the simplicity of production, because the letsplayer does not have to deal with editing, the need to write a script and other difficulties necessary when creating a review. But simpler doesn’t always mean better, and in the case of letsplay, especially.

As my contribution to at least some change in the general direction in the field of Russian gaming video content, I decided to do a little training for beginners on how to start doing written blog-post detailed reviews of games, for console like Xbox and Playstation as well for Mobile esports games reviews.

How do I use to to set up for video screen, written and spoken GOOD game reviews?

Video game reviews

The first thing to do when preparing to create a video review is to sketch out a rough plot. To begin with, you should think about what advantages and disadvantages it is interesting to mention in your review for you personally. Yes, exactly which ones you are interested in, and not just dry facts about what level of graphics there is for a given period of time when it came out, etc. ( which is also naturally necessary ) After all, in fact, this is what distinguishes reviews from various authors, makes your review unique in a sense.

But here it will be important to note that it is also not worth overdoing, composing a very thick gag, or focusing all attention on only one component ( for example, as “grafon”) deliberately looking for the smallest shoals in it, while pretending that all other moments of the game are supposedly not important. As some well-known would-be surveyors do.

After the text has already been sketched, you can proceed directly to recording the gameplay of the game. This can be done in our time by several fairly popular programs ( in contrast to the very recent past, when almost absolutely everyone used Fraps for lack of really solid analogues ) But now this deficit, on the contrary, has been replaced by an abundance of programs of this kind, of which I will focus on the three most popular.

First of all, of course, the same Fraps .

–Its main advantage is the lowest compression of the picture during recording among competitors, that is, the video will practically one-to-one reflect the picture quality that you saw during recording.
– But hence its main drawback, the records have a very healthy weight of the file.
– Plus, in the future, there may be problems with codecs when trying to transfer the footage already directly into the video editor itself.
– Also among the shortcomings is a rather serious load on the hardware when recording, on medium PC configurations, which reduces the overall performance of the game.

And finally, by leaps and bounds, the increasingly

Popular ShadowPlay from #Nvidia. Everything is simple here, if you have a video card from nvidia not lower than GTX 650 , then without thinking, choose this option. For it has a number of significant advantages over its main competitors.
– The first and probably the most important of which is that the recording is carried out at the hardware level, which means that the game will practically not slow down even when recording sufficiently resource-intensive games.
– The video is saved in mp4 format , which makes the videos relatively lightweight but at the same time quite clear. In addition, the possibility of problems with codecs is minimized.
–Also, this program has the ability to record in the background, when you need to shoot not something specific, but, for example, successful moments of network battles in some BF3 . For this, you do not need to save a record of the entire game session and search for the necessary segments manually, but just press the save record key after, for example, an unexpected bright moment of the game has happened, which you will certainly want to share.
– In addition, there is even the ability to stream by pressing one button ( hello PS4 ) with the ability to display images in webcams in a convenient corner of the screen.

Regardless of which program you chose in the end, it is best to shoot a video in a higher resolution than you intend to save. For example, if you are going to render the final video review in 720p resolution , then it is better to record in 1080p , so that you can scale the picture focusing on a certain segment of the frame without losing the overall picture quality.

INTUITIVE PERMISSION TABLE

There are many different kinds of video editors, from very simple, little-functional, to professional ones, in which you can create effects almost from scratch. But since this training is done primarily for beginners, I will not consider AfterEffects, which is quite difficult to master, but will focus on the simpler but at the same time quite multifunctional Sony Vegas Pro. In this article, I will not focus on how to work in it, ha, instead of what, here is a link to a series of video lessons from the authors of the stopgame in which it describes in sufficient detail how to navigate in it and directly create the videos themselves:

My role is to show how to use it in the context of creating a video game review. (although according to the same scheme, in principle, you can review whatever your heart desires.)

So, after the plot is written and the suitable frames are filmed, you can proceed directly to the editing and voice recording itself. Why choose those videos that fit the first proposal – ( first paragraph ) of the text of the script and drag them to a strip of the video sequence, simultaneously cutting off all unnecessary While not try once to hone assembly before the final version, at this stage the main goal is only to make a rough sketch only already in video and not text format.

After taking this simple step, you can begin to read out the lines of the script, dividing them into sentences. At the same time, while recording a voice, you can immediately try to somehow beat the video sequence in it ( which many do not bother, but in vain ) and even correct the plot text if some interesting remark, addition or contextual joke, for example, is pecked along with the video sequence.

And in this way, translate the entire text of your script into an audio track, along the way adding intermediate suitable video inserts – transitions and, if necessary, contextual images or text over the video.

And the last but not unimportant stage is uploading to YouTube. 

At first glance, why bother there, pressed the button to download the video and everything is ready, and this is partly true, but there are small subtleties about which later.

Surely, when searching for a video on YouTube, they paid attention to the fact that some videos have a beautiful picture with a title and a successful captured frame from the video as a preview of the image, or even a third-party photo, and some, on the contrary, just show a random frame from the video, often very unfortunate and always without any added headers on top. ( IL0 )

The point here is that one author of the video has monetization enabled on the channel, while the other does not. Until recently, in order to be able to download those very previews of pictures for a video, it was necessary to become a YouTube partner (which is not so easy for a beginner).

CONCLUSION ON GAME REVIEWS

I hope this mini-training will help enthusiasts who want to watch and create interesting video content related to video games, and someday the Russian gaming sector of YouTube will be filled primarily with high-quality videos with editing and a plot, which they really worked on with soul and interest, and not with the same type of passages the same top games.