While by 2023, Paraspectre has become better known now for his Pokemon Trading Card Game challenges on Game Boy Color, and his Pokemon video game retrospectives, his channel started with a James Bond retrospective series. While it never gained much traction on YouTube, it’s a great and extremely underrated series.
Actually, Paraspectre’s channel name is a mash-up of Parsec (one of his favorite Pokemon) and Spectre (a fictional organization in the original James Bond novel series by Ian Fleming). So, it makes perfect sense that his channel would’ve started out with James Bond games. There’s a lot to learn from this series, and even if you’re not the biggest Bond fan, if you like video game history as much as I do, this whole series is worth bingeing.
And, of course, he talks a lot about the Nintendo 64 classic Goldeneye 007, but there’s so many more games in the Bond series I never even knew existed. Their quality, as licensed games go, is very mixed, but Paraspectre gives an in-depth look at each in a way no one else has for these games, going back to the very beginning with Atari and text-based adventures!
Here’s the complete playlist with 24 videos:
Paraspectre also started a Metroid retrospective, but that’s been put on hold to focus on his Pokemon “Paraspectives” going into every Pokemon game ever released outside of Japan. Heck, even being a Pokemon fan this long, I never knew much about a few of these. As great these Pokemon retrospectives are, they wouldn’t have existed without the James Bond retrospective series, which he “cut his teeth on” so to speak.
So, if you ever want to put together a retrospective series on something you enjoyed when you were younger, and there isn’t much on YouTube already about it, or you have something special to add, you should just make it. As it turns out, retrospectives are blowing up all over YouTube, especially when it comes to video games. Maybe I’ll even do my own retrospective video series in the future… who knows!
Currently, Paraspectre still has a full-time job and only does these on the side. He clearly has talent for these videos, and while some of his editing is a bit silly, that just adds to the charm of his videos for me. I really hope that his channel takes off in the next couple years, because I really enjoy his content and new videos are so infrequent due to the fact he’s doing this pretty much entirely as a passion project. Who doesn’t love a little passion project reviewing nostalgic properties?
What video games did you enjoy in your younger years? Would you ever create your own retrospective series for them?
