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What is the YesMode Blog?
YesMode's main website and base of operations on the internet.
>VISIT THE YESMODE BLOG<
yesmodegames.blogspot.com
What do you need to know about the YesMode Blog?
By early 2016 Magma Blast was released, but I felt that as a company YesMode was lacking a strong online presence. YesMode needed to be more than just a Twitter news feed for Magma games, it had to give people reasons to pay attention. It had to proclaim it's mission statement, build POSITIVE games to nurture POSITIVE attitudes, in the loudest, most engaging and most ENJOYABLE way it could. Only then would YesMode grow as a company.
If people play games for fun, I told myself, make YesMode the most fun thing to follow on the internet. Promote YesMode as gaming's most positive place, but make YesMode FUN first and foremost.
The first step was improving YesMode's Twitter page (@YesModeGames until 2018, then @YesModeLena, which I have since deleted). At this point, I was mired in throat problems and unable to make Pokémon Anime Podcasts, so I began exploring non-vocal ways to make fun web content, specifically content that was better tweeted. Since my followers were mostly retro-game fans, I wrote, for a test, reviews of retro games as a series of tweets. Retro reviews were hardly an original concept though, I thought. My reviews would need a unique premise to stand out with; a premise that reinforced YesMode's spirit of assessing positive and negative behaviour in games.
I test-wrote a second batch of tweet reviews, this time asking if these games were a positive or negative influence. These reviews WERE more unique than the first batch, but the games I covered, Zelda: Link To The Past and Super Mario Bros, didn't make for interesting review material. It felt like these games had been given enough of a platform for discussion already. If I had review-material as unique as my influence-rating review-premise, I would TRULY stand out as a reviewer.
Everyone KNOWS Mario though, I thought. What could I review that was retro, Mario-related AND obscure?
The answer was the Super Mario Bros Super Show: a cartoon I used to watch at age seven!
I sat and watched the cartoon on YouTube wondering what the HELL I was doing as a child watching this madness. That's when I stopped asking "is this a good influence?" and began asking "was this a good influence on ME as a child? Would I have let child-me watch this knowing what I know now?"
These questions were the premise for YesMode's Retro Junk Reviews - The material? Any game-related media I was exposed to as a child!
>READ AT THE YESMODE BLOG<
RETRO JUNK REVIEW OF NINTENDO MAGAZINE: N64 LAUNCH ISSUE (2016)
>READ AT THE YESMODE BLOG<
RETRO JUNK REVIEW OF THE SUPER MARIO BROS SUPER SHOW (2016)
>READ AT THE YESMODE BLOG<
RETRO JUNK REVIEW OF THE NINTENDO POWER YOSHI'S ISLAND PLAYER'S GUIDE (2016)
>READ AT THE YESMODE BLOG<
RETRO JUNK REVIEW OF THE POKEMON 2BA MASTER CD (2018)
I wrote my Retro Junk Reviews as a weekly routine on YesMode Twitter and the profile became MUCH more fun to follow as a result. The problem with Twitter though was that it existed in the absolute present. Once you tweeted something, it was forgotten about within the hour. I needed an eye-catching, easy-to-browse way to archive what I tweeted, since scrolling backwards through someone's past-tweets is a LABORIOUS experience. With that, I started the YesMode Blog!
Why stop YesMode's Blog at stockpiling Retro Junk Reviews though? The Blog was, in essence, my new YouTube channel, so it needed as much fun content as Noakes Network used to have. YouTube had, incredibly, gotten worse with it's algorithms and management since 2014, so I saw no gain in creating a YesMode channel. Plus, due to my voice problems, I couldn't make effective video content like, for example, a Magma Blast Let's Play, but even if I could, I wondered if there were more interesting things I could create via the medium of blog.
As an online commodity, Magma Blast needed to expand beyond just the game. I wanted Magma as a figure to be who people thought about when they were in a good mood. I brainstormed the most effective ways to use the YesMode Blog to augment this expansion. My result was Magma Blast: The Comic!
Since I had the Super Mario Bros Super Show on the brain, I saw value in a Magma Blast cartoon that would mock the concept of the videogame cartoon tie-in. I had many ideas for what this cartoon's story could be, but the final concept grew out of my frustrated efforts to sell Magma Blast to Super-Nintendo fans, only to be told that they didn't really want a new game made in the spirit of Super Nintendo; what they in fact wanted were just re-makes of Super Nintendo games on new machines. Groan.
I imagined Magma being overlooked by the most painfully obscure mascots of retro games and couldn't help but laugh. Soon enough, the idea came together of Magma working crummy jobs in the universes of second-rate games, trying with no success to promote herself as a mascot. The opportunities for satire this concept would grant were too alluring to pass up. Magma would be the face of a fun game AND a fun cartoon that people would keep engaging with long after they finished the game. Magma Blast: The Comic was just what Magma needed to grow as YesMode's figurehead.
>VIEW AT THE YESMODE BLOG<
MAGMA BLAST: THE COMIC - PART 1
MAGMA BLAST: THE COMIC - PART 2
The picture-by-picture format used in Magma Blast: The Comic was my conscious move to separate the YesMode Blog from every other website. It was arresting, visually-stunning, and a breath of fresh air from YouTube videos. I used this format as fully as I could across the Blog.
The YesMode Blog housed the Retro Junk Reviews, Magma Blast: The Comic and vibrant picture-by-picture articles like "How Games Can Make You Less Of A Jerk," giving YesMode a much clearer identity of FUN PLACE on the internet, and far more reason for gamers to pay attention.
>VIEW AT THE YESMODE BLOG<
HOW GAMES CAN MAKE YOU LESS OF A JERK
YesMode's initial income came from my selling Magma Blast at sellfy.com. It didn't cost me any money to use Sellfy for selling games until 2017, when the site began charging the seller month-to-month. As I could no longer afford to use Sellfy, I began developing a YesMode Patreon campaign.
What made sense moving forward was to build a game from scratch tailored specifically to a Patreon business model. With that, I took a brief hiatus from YesMode Blog activities to focus my full attention on YesMode's next big development, Fake Fights!
Blogging is something I'll probably keep doing with or without money, but I'M ALWAYS GONNA ASK FOR MONEY! So please go to patreon.com/lenaray - That's...
...and donate to let me know my blogs are worth something!
Any questions, confusion or compliments about the YesMode Blog? Leave a comment below!
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QUICK GUIDE TO MY GAME WORK - PART 5: FAKE FIGHTS
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QUICK GUIDE TO MY PODCAST WORK - PART 2: POKEMON ANIME PODCAST
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