We video now!

Hello, dearest Patrons!

You might have noticed a bunch of videos appearing on my YouTube channel and on the Hub Pages for games on MoeGamer recently. This is because I finally bit the bullet and invested in a video capture device — specifically the Elgato Game Capture HD, which I found a good deal on a refurbished package of.

I've been having great fun over the past couple of days recording videos from various sources (primarily obscure PS2 games) and uploading them, but there's a little more to what I'm doing here, too.

Simply put, I've come to believe that video content is an important part of what I want to achieve with MoeGamer as a whole. And by "video content" I don't necessarily mean pieces with me commentating over game footage, or me speaking directly to camera — though I'm not ruling either of those out — but definitely simple gameplay footage of the games I'm talking about, so people can see and hear how these games look, sound and play.

MoeGamer's "mission" of sorts as expanded as my enthusiasm for the overall project has grown — and the support from generous people such as yourselves has grown with it — into a game database of sorts. What I'd like it to do is highlight interesting, unusual, overlooked and underappreciated games from throughout the ages, either those created in Japan and nearby Asian territories, or heavily inspired by the Asian way of development.

Part of that mission involves archiving material about these games. The first (and to me, most important) step in all that consists of my writeups, which explore the history and context of the games as well as their mechanical, narrative and aesthetic aspects. But for a fully rounded picture of what makes a game tick, you need other supporting material, too: screenshots, videos, audio files and perhaps even, at some point, scans of manuals and additional physical content.

Looking around, this would seem to be something that is particularly important to those platforms for which emulation has never quite taken off, thereby making it quite difficult to capture footage without investing in additional hardware. For some of the games I've covered — or plan to cover, as in the case of Crimson Tears seen in the attached video — there is very little or even no footage online, and that's a real shame.

So I'm doing my bit! Expect more and more videos when I have time over the course of the coming weeks and months; at the very least, I'd like to have at least one gameplay video for each month's Cover Game going forward, and ideally one for each Hub Page. Capturing these videos is proving to be an enjoyable process, so I'm very glad I invested in the Elgato. Who knows, I might even develop the confidence to do some streaming sometime… perhaps for this year's Extra Life? We'll see!

Anyhow. Once again, thanks for all your support; your Patreon donations were one of the things that helped make this new aspect to MoeGamer's mission happen, so I'm extremely grateful. I hope you'll continue to enjoy my content, and please, as always, feel free to share anything you find particularly interesting or noteworthy!