About The Critical Wranker
When you're a grumpy old wanker, and a serial game ranker, you become The Critical Wranker!

Okay, this is going to be a bit of a read, I figure if I'm going to tell you all about myself, may as well be as candid as possible, so here we go...

Welcome all, thank you for anyone that watches my videos. I'm a massive fan of gaming, especially retro games, and I'm enjoying covering all the great games I loved and finding new games I missed back in the day.

I have history in the gaming sphere, in the late 90's I started and ran one of the top Final Fantasy fan sites on the web, as geeky as that sounds, it used to get 10,000 unique views per day, which back then was a lot and we used to make a fair amount of money using one of the earliest iterations of AdSense. The site was eventually sold for a 5 figure sum (although after I left, leaving me with my dick in my hand).

I joined London Fire Brigade in the early 2000s but after 20 years of service, I got a life changing injury while on the job ending with my medical retirement. Making videos on YouTube has been so helpful to me, perhaps even life saving, especially when times got concerning. My family and I are in such a better and secure place now, and I will always be so appreciative a platform like YouTube exists. I know people take issue with the video sharing site, mainly due to censorship, but you would not believe how many people I have met, in a similar position whom have found refuge on the site.

I'm in a unique position where I never need nor want my channel to make any money and have no plans to ever monitise it with ads or sponsorships. As of writing this, I'm currently eligible for the first stage of monitisation which I have no intention applying for, nor will I be applying for full monitisation when I gain the 200 subscribers I currently need to reach 1k subs. The fun for me is in creating the videos, I literally just want the channel to be about publishing retro gaming videos for people to enjoy, trying to build a good retro community, and not shoving ads down your throat. Hopefully I can make videos you feel are worth watching, and get that sweet, sweet hit of nostalgia.

 

About My Content

As for my videos, they are all based around retro gaming, and I mainly make long form retrospectives and documentaries. These videos take quite a long time to make, certainly longer than I would like, but rest assured, I'm always working on something. Coming into YouTube in 2021 was quite late, it's very hard to cover anything that hasn't been previously covered to death, but my process is to only make videos on games of which I have never watched other creators videos. This does cut down the pool of games I can cover, but, for me, this is the only way I can make sure I create videos that are at least unique, and it's important to me that I don't rip other peoples work off, even if subconsciously.

Current series' I'm working on include;
• How Good Was It? (looking at and ranking critically acclaimed games)
• Review to a Kill (playing and ranking every James Bond game)
• And my most recent, and favourite series The Game Vault (longer form retrospectives on more obscure games).

My main inspirations are Ross of Accured Farms, Stuart Brown of Ahoy and Civvie 11 of Civvies Dungeon. While I try to make sure my videos are in entirely my own style, there is no doubt I have been influenced by these channels.

I am completely self taught in video creation, and while I had used Premiere and Macromedia Flash (the precursor for After Effects) back in the day, they are completely different programs these days and I had to re learn how to use them. I think you can actually see the progression of my abilities in my videos over time. I still have lots to learn, but enjoying the process. Recently, I have been trying to add CG elements in my videos, learning Blender to render 3D scenes.

I love hearing from the people whom watch my videos, I get some very complimentary comments and E-mails, but I'm also open to receiving constructive criticism. I have made multiple changes in my videos due to helpful constructive comments I received and I'm always open to listening to you all to improve my content. Feel free to contact me about anything, I love hearing from you all, you can simply say hi, tell me how my content is the best stuff you have ever watched... EVER, or just tell me how much I suck arse, it's all good. I don't use social media, but you can comment on my videos, or E-mail me at contact@criticalwranker.com. I will try my best to always reply.

 

Equipment and Software for Videos

• Avermedia 4K gamer
• Panasonic Lumix DC-FZ82DE-K
• Open Source Scan Converter
• Retrotink 5x
• Retrotink 4K
• RØDE NT1A
• Shure SM7B
• Focusrite Scarlett 2i2
• Cloud Lifter Pre-AMP
• OBS/REcentral
• Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Blender, Topaz Video Upscaler and Adobe Audition. I also use Comfy UI for AI based work as well as MangoRVC for AI voices and Foocus for AI images. I try to purely implement AI as a tool though, using it as little as possible.
• CorelPaint/Adobe Photoshop
• Too many retro consoles to list.

All my videos use real hardware for gameplay, of which I have modded to get the best RGB signal possible. I try to never use emulation, FPGA and I never install HDMI mods in my consoles. I also have many Everdrives and ODE's for playing games. The most used include the Mega Everdrive Pro, Everdrive 64 V3/X7, Turbo Everdrive Pro, FX PAK PRO, GDEMU, Xstation, Fenrir as well as many others. I also use many quality of life improvement products such as retrobit 2.4Ghz and Bluetooth controllers and various Memory Card Pro's. On top of that, I have some custom built retro PC's from various eras for capturing retro PC games.
 
 
z