The best of YouTube
10 clips you should see.
According to Peter Moore, Microsoft wants to create "a YouTube for videogames" by releasing a cut-down version of XNA to help independent game creators. Which is brilliant, obviously, because everyone knows it's better to play games than to watch movies. But it'll probably take a while before those bedroom coders get round to finishing off their games, so in the meantime, we thought we'd see if YouTube itself offered anything of interest to gamers. And whaddya know? It turns out it does! So here are the top ten gaming clips available to watch on YouTube. No doubt you'll disagree with some of the choices below. That's okay. Just post your own favourite clips in the Eurogamer forums...
10. Live action videogames: Salsa Street Fighter
You might be surprised at just how many clips of people enacting videogames there are on YouTube (or you might not - it takes all sorts, after all). They run the whole range of beat 'em ups, from King of Fighters to Street Fighter including real-life Yoga Flame. Or, more scarily, you can see grown men dressing up as elves and fairies. But perhaps the best piece of videogame enactment is this recreation of the, um, famous salsa dance-off between Ryu and Chun Li from Street Fighter. Warning: this clip contains mildly sexual poses (although you'll have to keep watching all the way to the end).
9. Hilarious videogame telly: Made in Wario
There's another sizeable category of clips to be found on YouTube: videogames on telly. Although this clip of Jackie Chan performing as half the cast of Street Fighter deserves a tenuous mention, the mainstay of this category is undoubtedly videogame commercials. These range from the banned to the oh-how-funny-it-was-in-the-old-days (you can shoot in four directions here! and there's dancing elves here! But the best of the bunch is the just-plain-charming Japanese advert for Made in Wario, It's almost as good as playing the game.
8. Online idiocy: World of Warcraft funeral ambushed
The massive success of World of Warcraft has taken the art of griefing to a whole new level. Described on the Microsoft website as "the internet equivalent of playground bullies" (in an article on child safety, no less), griefers set out to make things as unpleasant as possible for their fellow players. While this used to be limited to the odd bit of swearing or camping, griefers have had to evolve their game to beat the increasing vigilance of game developers. This clip is pretty typical of the modern-day griefer's art: the real-life death of a World of Warcraft player prompted some players to organise a temporary truce in order to hold an in-game funeral. It inspired some other players to raid the ambush and cause mayhem. Hilarious. Or not hilarious, depending on your point of view.
7. Bizarre bugs: Oblivion
Thanks to the rise and rise of the sprawling epic, videogame bugs and glitches have got more numerous and more elaborate over the years. Indeed, thanks to the likes of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (for giving us this, this, oh and this, this, and of course this) and the Grand Theft Auto series, it's impossible to pick a single best example.
6. In-game abuse: Oblivion dominoes
Honestly, who'd be a videogame developer? Imagine you worked for Oblivion creator, Bethesda, for example. What must it be like to put all that effort into creating a colossal, believable world, populated with entire nations of people and full of epic narratives and heroic quests? And then to find out that your players are more interested in playing dominoes? Yep, you can see gamers abusing the in-game editing tools to create a complex and elaborate test of the game's physics engine. At least the GTA lot are still interested in making explosions.
5. Speed runs: Morrowind
Still, at least there are some players who still play games in order to get from the start of the game to the end of it. In fact, some people are evidently so intent on getting to the finish that they hardly have time to play the game. Welcome to the wonderful world of the speedrun - an internet phenomenon that's so bona fide it's got its own Wikipedia entry. There are some excellent examples on YouTube, such as this chap who completes Halo's Silent Cartographer level by the skin of his teeth thanks to some serious pick-up abuse. Or there's the infamous Super Mario 64 speedrun, which exploits several glitches to complete the game with just 16 stars. But surely the most extreme speed run video on the whole of YouTube (even better than completing Fallout in less than ten minutes), is this one, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind being completed in just seven and a half minutes. Seven and a half. Minutes.