YouTuber Review: Northernlion

I thought I'd review another YouTuber we've been watching a bit lately as a family.  His name is Ryan Letourneau, he lives in Vancouver, and his "YouTube Name" is Northernlion.  His channel features some games you might not want smaller kids to watch (such as The Binding of Isaac) but there's plenty of content that's good for the whole family.  He's very relaxing, I could probably listen to him doing anything, maybe even commentating on watching paint dry.  We will probably never find out if this is true.  But hey.

His language has a little blasphemy (if I'm asterisking vowels again there might be some "*h my G*ds"), but on the whole he's clean.  Which makes me happy.  I don't like swearing even if it's just me watching.  Seems unnecessary...

Northernlion has 817K subscribers and he's been YouTubing since 2006.  He's married to another YouTuber, Kate LovelyMomo.  His most watched videos, with 2.2M and 1.6M views respectively, are episode 1 of "The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth" and episode 1 of "The Binding of Isaac". 

Now as I said earlier, though his presentation may be family friendly, the games he plays are not necessarily family friendly.  So do be careful and think about this when choosing what to watch.  The Binding of Isaac is a 16 rated game for violence and bad language, but that doesn't really give an insight into the generally horrible nature of the thing...

At the moment he's playing Darks Souls II (PEGI-16), Call of Duty: Warzone  (PEGI-18), Super Mega Baseball 3 (PEGI-3), Landlord's Super, Monster Train, Mini Golf Club, The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ (PEGI-16) and Geoguessr.  We mainly watch him play Geoguessr, where he chats with his friend Sinvicta whilst playing.  They have played 126 games of Geoguessr against each other..!!  They're not talking about anything in particular, they're just chatting.  :-)

We've watched him play Monster Train too, which is a deck-building game a bit like Slay the Spire.  Dad has started playing this, so I guess it must be fun!  If you like that sort of thing.

We did watch one episode of Landlord's Super, which is one of the most bizarre games I've watched anyone play on YouTube.  Mainly because it's a strange 1980s simulation set in Britain.  Ryan's reading of text written in dialect is pretty hilarious.  But the thing that has been bothering me about it is this phone box.  (Stick with me.)

1980s phonebox?

The KX100 phone box was introduced in 1985 to replace the iconic red phone boxes.  The earliest kiosks had smoked glass and the old "T" logo printed on them, and the door had a coloured moulded plastic panel, bright yellow or bright green for Phonecard variants.  This clearly isn't what we are seeing here.  What we are seeing here is a 1991 revamp of the KX100, with an italicised serif font reading "Telephone" and a red moulded plastic panel and handle.  It seems unlikely that a countryside phone box would have been replaced to a KX100 anyway, I suspect that it would have remained an old style red booth.  So this phone box is WRONG!!!  I'm sure they will correct this terrible error before the game comes out of Early Access.  I certainly hope so!!!!!

Original 1980s phone box and 1991 revamp

Er, hmm, anyway... the inaccuracy of the phone booth used is largely irrelevant here.  You should watch his videos.  He's good.  :-)