I just finished a cool new design and I couldn't decide which I variation I liked more, so I uploaded both!

Check these out on my TeePublic merch store: http://tee.pub/lic/zvZBrspe6WM

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I recently watched one of the new videos from Brick Technology and it made me think it could make a good blog post. I’ve been slowly finding cool YouTube channels through social media over the years and adding them to my colossal subscription list. (Last time I brought up all my subscriptions, the webpage locked up, and I had to search up the channel I wanted to unsubscribe to.) Anyway, I rounded up all the YouTube channels I enjoy that primarily deal with LEGO as a medium for your enjoyment.

Behold:

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Brick Technology

Brick Technology focuses on the Technic variety of Lego. The typical video poses an engineering challenge to which the host will develop a solution only to ratchet up the difficulty of the challenge and do it all over again. The videos have snappy editing and a bit of humor. Plus, the occasional inquisitive cat will pop in to investigate.

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JD Brick Productions

JD Brick Productions does amazing stop motion historical war videos. Their content ranges many wars going back to the revolutionary war. Many of the recent videos have a behind-the-scenes video that shows off the cool tricks they used to make the video look good.

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Official MDUN Archive

There’s probably an interesting story behind this YouTube channel. It appears to be a new channel with an old channels content dumped into it. MDUN stands for My Different User Name.

But that’s not important. What is, is that they create highly detailed firearms out of Lego, with an emphasis on replicating the design over function. But most of these lego firearms still have details like removable magazines, fire mode selectors, sights and scopes.

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King of Dams

King of Dams is pretty formulaic, but it’s worth some silly fun once in a while. Each video features a Lego scene of some kind built on top of sand. Water fills in and waves begin to pulse, then you sit back and watch the ensuing chaos.

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Point and click adventure games (or adventure gamer for short), are a type of interactive story whose primary gameplay loop is collecting items while you explore environments and then utilizing the items and clues you’ve found to solve puzzles in order to progress.

The things I love about adventure games:

• An interesting story and characters in many genres, with or without a dash of humor.
• Collecting everything not nailed down and figuring out how it can be used to my advantage.
• Solving its puzzles and progressing deeper into the story. (Especially if it makes me feel like a smarty.)
• It’s rare but some adventure games have gimmicks to shake up the standard gameplay. Whether it be splitting the story between multiple characters, the use of alternate dimensions or time travel.
• Typically low effort and stakes gameplay. Many adventure games won’t allow the characters to die or the player to become hopelessly stuck and there’s no need for fast twitch gamer skills.

And the things that bug me about adventure games:

• Sometimes you just have to stop playing and come back with fresh eyes or look online for hints.
• Some games will drop obtuse or nonsense puzzles in your lap, which leads to bouncing everything you’ve collected up to that point against it to see if something works.
• Waving the mouse around to find a tiny object that’s hard to see.
• Entrances to areas that are hard to notice which cause a lot of needless wandering.

My first adventure game was The Secret of Monkey Island, the demo specifically. I can’t even remember how I got it. It would be years before I discovered dial-up internet. It was probably on a PC Gamer demo disk. Somehow I wound up with demos for The Secret of Monkey Island, Loom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade before I actually bought any adventure games.

Then one day I had tagged along shopping, and I checked out the electronics department at Fred Meyer and found a bargain. A display of LucasArts Adventure classic collection, on sale no less. I had kind of missed the boat on LucasArts games, but I caught up when they started releasing collections of games. The LucasArts Classic collection contained not only The Secret of Monkey Island, Loom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade but also Zak Mckracken and the Alien Mindbenders and Maniac Mansion. Another important thing the collection came with was a hint book that essentially told you how to finish the games as though it were telling a story. Having a hint book pre-internet was great because, as a kid, I probably would have gotten frustrated and gave up at some point.

Most of the time I can’t answer the question which is your favorite such-and-such because too many options come to mind. But this is a case where I can easily drop an answer: The Curse of Monkey Island. LucasArts games had just upgraded their art style from pixilated sprites to higher def hand drawn art. It was the perfect game for me. The humor, music, voice acting, animation and silly puzzles were great and I would go on to replay it many times since.

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Unfortunately, adventure games were never big business. If not for indie game devs, this genre would have gone extinct. The biggest recent examples I can think of are:

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And here’s some of the lesser known Adventure games I really enjoyed lately:

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