Load Last Save's 1st Anniversary

Here's to many more

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is a very special day here at Load Last Save. That’s right, it’s National Healthcare Decisions Day, the day where I decide that, for the good of my healthcare, I shouldn’t go for a third Mountain Dew.

It’s also the one year anniversary of Load Last Save. Technically, the first anniversary is on the 20^th, since that was when I uploaded my first review (Helldivers 2, a great game. Check out the review here), but that was before I had decided on the Wednesday schedule, so it was uploaded on a Saturday for some reason. Still, it marks one year of me polluting the Internet with my horrible takes on gaming.

In this article, I’ll be giving my thoughts on the wonders of creating “Content” on the Internet, some stray musings on finding an audience and I’ll also talk about my inspirations. Inspirations makes it sound very lofty and important, but by that I mean the people who have shaped how I view games and how I review them.

Most importantly, I want to thank anyone who has read this blog over the year, liked posts, commented or subscribed. It’s always fun and surprising finding out that there are others who, no only tolerate my content, but actively enjoy it.

Starting off with a quick history lesson on Load Last Save’s distant ancestors:

Who’s Responsible for Load Last Save?

You can blame me, Roger Renfro, for all the vitriol posted on this site, sure, but why am I like this? Who made me think “Yeah, I should post my ramblings on the web for others to see”? Good question, and I have the answers.

Learn To Counter:

If you were to do a DNA test on Load Last Save, this would be its direct ancestor. Learn To Counter is a blog that does long-form video game discussion, with jokes thrown in to keep the audience awake. I first discovered it back around 2012 or 2013, when a friend of mine sent me a link to it. It was well written, it had a good understanding of games on a mechanical level, and it had a lot of acerbic humor thrown in. It took constant jabs at large publishers, corporate games journalists and the commercialization of gaming as a whole. It was from the perspective of someone who loves games, and hated them at the same time. He just like me fr fr.

I kept reading the blog until around 2015, when I completely forgot about it. Then at some point in 2023, I remembered it, but couldn’t remember the name. I tried to look for it under its old name, The Gaming Ghetto, but it didn’t come up anywhere. I was at a loss. I wanted to read that blog again, I wanted more long-form text discussion on video games. Forums aren’t a thing anymore, 4chan’s /v/ is an unreadable cesspool of low-quality bait and idiot zoomers, and, thanks to how horrible advertising is on the Internet, I couldn’t find any game blogs to read. Then I thought that if I want to see more written video game content, and there isn’t any, maybe I should try making some myself, so I did. I wanted a McRib, but it was discontinued, so I made my own McRib. So if you want to blame anyone, blame Michael Lowell and Learn To Counter/The Gaming Ghetto, for telling me it’s okay to write long rants on games.

As of writing this, I went to the blog to see if it had updated (the last post was sometime around march of 2023, a few months before the birth of Load Last Save. Spooky.) and it just has a message that says “Site Update time! We’ll be back in a bit!”. Hopefully this means more articles are on their way.

Check them out if you want to see Load Last Save but better.

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw

I try not to directly imitate anyone. I want my writing to stand up on its own merit, but inspirations inevitably leak through. This is the case with Yahtzee. I’ve been watching his Zero Punctuation reviews since his Army of Two review back in 2008, so there’s always some subconscious influence. It’s to the point where if I come up with a funny line I have to double check if it’s one of my own or if I’m getting it from an episode of Zero Punctuation I saw a decade ago. I’ve found that I follow his paragraph format a lot, where you say things at the start then end the paragraph with an outrageous simile, like ending a dinner party by releasing a pack of rabid wolverines.

I like the way he can condense a review into a few minutes. It manages to convey a few key aspects of a game in a fun way. I do the opposite, so I can’t be accused of plagiarism on that end, but if you ever read one of my reviews and think “this guy obviously watches too much Zero Punctuation”, I’d take that as a compliment.

The Angry Video Game Nerd

I try not to do the angry gamer shtick, but anyone who makes game content after the year 2002 has some Nerd DNA in them. Sure, there have been angry reviewers since the dawn of time. The first thing anyone does when they find a terrible game is to show it to someone else and tell them how shitty it is, but he popularized it. He opened the floodgates for anyone to do it, and popularized the whole genre of talking about something bad just to rag on it.

I don’t like to review bad games just to say how much they suck. I have reviewed a few stinkers, but they’re from the perspective of a disappointed buyer. When I played Gungrave GORE, I genuinely wanted to like it, but the more I played it the less I liked it. Instead of uninstalling the game, I decided to get a review out of it, too, for fun. I admit I did review Final Fight: Streetwise just to make fun of it. That game deserved it. I’ve been watching him since 2006. I’ve unironically used phrases like “diarrhea dial” in real life. I still say “what were they thinking!?” in his cadence.

I don’t write like The Nerd, but it’d be impossible to say his work hasn’t affected me in some way. Anyone who makes gaming content owes it to him, and to say otherwise would be a shitload of fuck.

I also got the skits thing from him, which is why the review for Slay The Spire is like a news report, and the one for Urban Reign is like a detective story. That one is also because I just wanted to make references to Red Harvest for some reason.

Seanbaby

Going further back into the evolutionary line, before the primordial soup of the Angry Nintendo Nerd, we have Seanbaby, the single-celled organism that spawned this whole thing. He’s been writing since the early days of the web, and his work was even published in magazines. His style has had much more of a direct influence on how I write. I don’t try to sound as angry as The Nerd, and I don’t want to rip-off Zero Punctuation, but I have consciously channeled Seanbaby in some reviews. The unhinged rant in the Robotron X section of this review was me trying to do a Seanbaby, using his trademark of suddenly chaining together entire paragraphs of jokes.

The entire Listicles section of this site is directly inspired by the old Cracked.com listicles, which he had a hand in.

More Modern Inspirations/People I Recommend

I didn’t stop consuming content in 2009. I still watch other reviewers and people who talk about games. These are other content creators I like, and they have different aspects of Load Last Save. They’ve also shaped how I write. They’re also people I recommend, so if you want more game-related content, you can check them out. They’re mostly YouTubers.

The Gaming Brit Show

I first found The Gaming Brit Show through his review of Killer is Dead. He reviews a lot of action games; things like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden. His reviews are always informative, well-paced and entertaining. He has a good balance of jokes to information and understands the games he covers. Good stuff

His Ninja Gaiden 2 review is great. It does a good job of showing what makes the game good while also conveying how insane it is. If I ever review Ninja Gaiden 2, I’d have to be very careful not to lift anything from this video.

In his remakes are cringe video, he expresses a lot of the frustrations I have with remakes and the futility of railing against them. Culture is cyclical, and the one we have now is tightening the coil into shorter and shorter cycles, and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it except ignore them. It sounds bleak, but it’s the healthiest attitude you can have with this sort of thing.

Seer

Take some ball jokes, combine them with genuine insight, throw in some Angry Video Game Nerd and mix it all up with a few cans of Monster and you get Seer. He focuses on ARPGs (games like Diablo and Path of Exile, where you fight skeletons and get loot), a genre I’m not too familiar with, but he manages to explain them in a way that anyone can understand what’s going on, while also giving some good technical information about the games. He also has a really low-brow sense of humor, with a ton of dumb dick jokes, which I find funny because I’m a man-child. His reviews make me want to add more jokes into mine, and I’ve also borrowed his quick, self-deprecating style here and there. Highly recommended if you think Load Last Save could use a few more peepee jokes. His editing is really nice, too.

His Titan Quest review convinced me to get the game, even if I had never really dabbled in this genre. His constant praising of the game along with the descriptions he gives of the game’s systems makes it sound very appealing. I’ve played it for a bit, and found it surprisingly fun. His joke about “Bonkerifirus” is the kind of thing that will have me giggling like an idiot for an entire day.

He also has a great review of Pokemon Puzzle League/Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack. This review, like all his others, is a mess of ha ha funny jokes and information. While watching it, I noticed something: That guy’s really good at Panel de Pon. I sent it to a friend of mine who knows the game and he said “That guy’s really good at Panel de Pon”. I like it when the reviewer demonstrates mastery of what he’s reviewing. If they can combine it with dumb jokes, I consider that a win-win.

The Electric Underground

This channel focuses more on discussing the type of game I like: arcade games and action games. There are also a lot of videos on more general game concepts, explaining the need for difficulty and such. I’ve always liked the kind of games he covers: short, difficult and gameplay-heavy. He also takes jabs at modern game design and sell-out journalists. The only nitpick I have with him is that he tends to be a bit too nice when doing this. Maybe he thinks he needs to balance out his unpopular opinions with some sweetness. He’s more straightforward and informative, not many jokes.

He has a video on the beginner bias in game critique. He expresses his frustrations with corporate game reviewers, and how they don’t know what they’re talking about, because they suck at games. He doesn’t say it like that, he’s more tactful about it, but I agree with his thesis and points. I plan on writing an article detailing why I have so much beef with mainstream games journalism, and this video outlines a lot of the same gripes I have.

He also did a good video showing the pros of “linear” design, and why it’s better to have a more focused, refined experience instead of a padded mess with fake choices.

A video of his that I vehemently disagree with is his review of Gungrave GORE. I like his other stuff, but he’s just wrong with this one. We can throw hands over this.

BogHog

In the same cinematic universe as The Electric Underground is developer Boghog. He posts his detailed thoughts on game design on his Patreon. You don’t need to pay to read them, and they offer great insights on aspects of games not many people think about. I’ve used his posts as reference material when reviewing specific aspects of games, such as enemy behavior or combat design. Informative, very few jokes.

He has a great write-up showing how a subtle change in something seemingly inconsequential like the range of an attack can have reverberating impact on other aspects of a game.

He also makes videos every now and then. This one does a great job of explaining the concept of crowd control; how it works, what it’s for and how to do it right.

These creators post their work online because they like doing it. They work on something and put it out there for others to enjoy. I don’t think Ben Croshaw knew that, when he was making Zero Punctuation, it’d be seen by a 15 year old Roger Renfro and forever alter his vocabulary. Seer never made a video thinking “I hope someone watches my videos and it makes them want to add more dick jokes into their blog posts”. They just did their thing, and now I’m biting their style- I mean- getting inspiration from them.

This could be you, too! Post your stuff online, and maybe some day, in a few years, someone will make videos or write content thanks to you. If that doesn’t give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Unless they name you in their manifesto. That would be the bad ending.

Writing for yourself

Making this blog is a lot of fun for me. The value I get from it is entertainment: I entertain myself by coming up with long reviews on irrelevant games, and then hopefully a reader gets some entertainment by reading them.

The thing at the forefront of my mind when writing these screeds is “Write for yourself”. Mostly because I’m a raging narcissist, but also because writing for free on the Internet is not very rewarding in a monetary sense, hence the term “writing for free”. If I’m going to spend several hours a week playing and reviewing games, I’ll do it on my own terms, and that’s how you should do it, too. If you want to create something to post online, you should make what you want to see, even if you’re not sure it will appeal to anyone else. Your target audience is yourself.

This sounds extremely self-centered, but it’s the best way to start doing anything creative like this. If you’re working for someone else, you should tailor your output to match their vision, but if you’re doing something with no real reward at the end of it, for no one but yourself, then the thing itself should be the reward. Making “Content” should be the end, not the means.

Advertising

Now that you have your niche little product, you want to get it out there and into people’s hands. How do you do that? Well, that’s something I’d like to know as well. Advertising your work on the Internet is a layer of Hell that I don’t wish on anyone. Okay, maybe on one or two people.

If you do YouTube, you have a good chance of being noticed. YouTube has a massive user base, and their algorithm is decent at recommending things, as long as you have an account. If you use YouTube casually or without logging in, you’ll be recommended some of the worst, bottom of the barrel slop ever created. If you post consistently, you’ll eventually get picked up by the algorithm and sent to a few people. You won’t make it onto the front page, but that shouldn’t be your goal, unless you want to make horrible slop content aimed at troglodytes.

If you’re writing, your options are severely limited. First, you have the obvious barrier of words. Too many words make brain hurt, reading boring, reading what me do in school, me no want read. Despite the fact that we’re constantly glued to screens displaying text, people don’t really read. You’ll have way more success producing video content. Especially for video games. Why did I decide to write about video games instead of starting a YouTube channel? Is it because I’m dumb? Yes, partially, but mostly because of what I mentioned earlier: You are your target audience. I wanted to see more long-form writing on videogames, so I created it.

How about advertising your writing on Reddit? There’s a subreddit for everything! There’s one for writing, one for blogging, and even one for substack! That’s where you should go to grow an audience, right? You’d think that the link aggregator would be a good place to aggregate your links, but it turns out that every single subreddit has strict rules against self-advertising. Sure, if they didn’t, the site would be full of people going “Please read my stuff! Please!” and begging for attention. That would get annoying quickly, and it would compromise the site’s integrity. If it was full of self-published ads, it couldn’t serve you paid-for ads and the same reposted memes over and over again, so Reddit is a no-go.

If you can’t reach the mental titans over at Reddit, maybe you can use X (formerly known as Twitter) to advertise. There are millions of people there, and you can get the word out instantly!

First off, people is a generous term here. The site is 99% bots, and the rest of the actual humans there could barely be classified as people.

Twitter is, and has always been, an open sewer, even before Musk took over. I have used it for various projects in the past and have found zero success with it every single time. It’s like screaming into an empty room. I’d have more success advertising Load Last Save if I stood in the middle of a mall food court and started yelling THIS WEEK I REVIEWED HOT SHOTS GOLF FORE. HOT SHOTS GOLF FORE, ON THE PLAYSTATION TWO. READ THE REVIEW AT LOAD LAST SAVE. There I’d get the attention of a mall cop or two, and I’d be sure I’m interacting with a real human being.

Even if we ignore the various goblins, ghouls and imps that inhabit Twitter, the site itself is a technical mess. Unless you already have an established audience, you’re not going to find anyone there. Their algorithm is horrendous. If you commit a crime, the best place to hide would be Twitter, because no one would be able to find you, even if they’re specifically looking for you.

The ratios on Twitter are horrible, too. Not the zoomer ratios, like when someone responds to a post, but the views to subscription ratios. From my experience, for every 200 views you get, you get 1 like. Every 100 or so likes is a follow. If you want to monetize your followers, you’d need over 10,000 followers, because around 1 out of every 10,000 followers interacts with you in a meaningful way.

How do you get all that visibility? By having a large audience. How do you build a large audience on Twitter? You don’t. You bring one into Twitter. How do you build a large audience outside of Twitter? You advertise. Where? On Twitter.
That’s the Catch-22 of making content online. You need to have an audience to build an audience. That’s why I insist on making things you want to make. If you think your ten hour video on Totally Spies is too weird and no one will watch it, you’d be right, but even if it wasn’t weird, no one would watch it either.

What about writing on Substack? Substack has a pretty alright algorithm. The user base is low. There are a few massive blogs that get a ton of subscribers, but those are the rare exceptions. Everyone else is just doing their own thing and making micro-communities. It’s an alright place. It’ll probably be ruined in a few years, just like every other website is. Can’t have anything good anymore. The Internet died in 2007, and I will not accept any arguments to the contrary. This is my blog and I get to make as many baseless claims as I want.

To summarize, my advice to aspiring content creators is to just do it. Think of the things you like to watch/read. The YouTubers you follow, or the Substack creators you read. They’re people like you, they like to make things, and you like their work. If they never made anything, you wouldn’t know about them. Same thing with what you want to make. If you don’t make it, no one will watch it. If you make the kind of thing you want to see, you can always find comfort in the fact that at least one person likes your work: you. Which sounds incredibly self-centered, but if you’re going to start making stuff for free, the least you could get out of it is some enjoyment for yourself.

Some Actual Advice

• Consistency is key: Pick a schedule and stick to it. It’s easier to structure things around a set deadline. I could be once a day, once a week or even once a month, just make sure you do it. That way people know when to expect new content.

• Don’t give up: Give it at least a year. You won’t find much success in such a small period of time, but you’ll know if you want to stick with it. If you find it’s not for you, find out why. Is it because you don’t like doing it anymore? If so, you can do something else. Why waste your time doing something you don’t enjoy? If it’s because you’re not getting any fulfilment from it, try changing things up. A sharp change in direction might seem drastic, but if it’s what you want, you should go for it.

• Try different things: Try out variations on one thing. Experiment a lot in the early days. Try to find what your audience likes, but most importantly, what you like.

• It’s hard to get attention: Not many people are going to know about you, unless you have some overnight success. Unlikely, but it could happen. Keep going and build your backlog, so when new people find you, they have a lot to catch up on.

• Remove Reddit and Twitter: I know you don’t have the ability to do this, but if someone could get rid of those two sites, that’d be great. I could go on a whole ‘nother 3,000 word essay on why I think Reddit killed the Internet, but I won’t do it here. Twitter didn’t kill the Internet, but it’s a horrible disease spreading from its corpse. Hell, burn the entire thing down. Return to web 1.0. Put Discord on that hitlist, too.

• Wait, this was supposed to be about advice: Uh… follow your heart?

Conclusion

I recommend Load Last Save. It’s the best long-form gaming blog on substack. I like reading Load Last Save with a can of Mountain Dew in hand. I like the jokes and the games. Roger is very smart and handsome and he can lift very heavy things easily. I am a gamer, and I give Load Last Save my approval.

I also recommend making stuff and putting it out there. Sure, the Internet is a swirling void of pain and torment, full of ads, bots and porn, but if you find joy in creating stuff, go ahead and post it for others to see. It might seem scary at first, but it’s worth it. ONLY if you enjoy the process. Remember, it has to be the end in itself, not the means. Write what you want to read, make the kind of videos you want to watch, make the art you like looking at. You’re doing it for yourself, and you’re your most consistent audience. It sounds narcissistic, but it’s true. When you post on the Internet, you’re screaming into an empty room, so make sure that when it echoes back, you hear something you like.

The true secret to escape the Matrix is to realize that no one cares about you. There’s so much junk out there that you can post cringe, and no one will bat an eye. This might sound like a riff on the most confusing motivational speech of all time, but it’s true: No one cares. You are nobody. You’re not even important enough to be cringe.

We’re being watched 24/7 in the digital panopticon, but no one really cares. No one is going to pay attention to what you do, so you should do it.

Most people have a fear of public speaking, I don’t. You know why? Because when I was in middle school, I had to give a huge presentation at a conference. It was some extracurricular thing for overachieving nerds. There were around one hundred people there, ready to tear me apart. I was wearing a little button-up shirt with a tie, shaking in my $20 slacks. I couldn’t go up there with everyone watching! What was I going to do? Then I noticed something. While I was sitting there, five other kids had gone up and done their presentation, and I didn’t hear a single word of it. I looked over the audience and no one was paying attention. No one’s watching. No one’s going to be watching me, so why should I worry? I can only be cringe if I’m perceived. I got up there and gave my presentation to a hundred people who weren’t really there. Forget pretending the audience is in their underwear, pretend the audience isn’t there, because it isn’t.

If anything, it’s a good way to combat the never ending storm of absolute slop brainrot content that gets poured onto the Internet on a daily basis.

I’d like to thank all my readers, subscribers and anyone else who has checked out this little blog. I will continue to do this for the foreseeable future. As long as there are games to play, I’m going to be overly opinionated about them, and as long as I have thousands of words to say about a game no one cares about, I’ll keep posting them.

GAME ON!