#oneaday Day 162: Successful plans

I streamed yesterday, and my good pal Chris joined in. It was a successful stream — we both had a lot of fun. I haven’t figured out how to share my gameplay privately with Chris with audio, but he could at least watch what I was doing while we talked, and it’s so much easier to keep talking while playing when there’s someone else there to interact with.

During the stream, I concentrated on playing Toaplan games from the upcoming Toaplan Arcade 3 and 4 cartridges for Evercade. There are some real bangers among these, but as with most Toaplan games, they’re very hard! I reached an actual blockade in Dogyuun, which uses checkpoints, but we managed to clear the entirety of Fixeight and Snow Bros. 2 with judicious credit-feeding, both of which were a lot of fun.

I have the next couple of days off work so I think I’m going to take Sunday entirely for myself, perhaps to start having a look at 1000xRESIST, which a few people have recommended to me recently. I don’t really know much about this game, but what little I’ve seen certainly seems to be intriguing, so I’m looking forward to checking it out. It’s unfortunate there doesn’t appear to be a physical release at present, so I’m going to nab the Steam version; there are rumours that there might be a physical Switch version at some point, but nothing concrete as yet.

Anyway, things are OK right now. If you were wondering about progress on the whole “eating well” thing, I’m 11 pounds down on when I started, which is good… what was less good was the amount of weight I’d put on after our week’s holiday away, but at least that’s coming off again now! We’ve had a few days of feeling a bit “eh” about dieting this week, but we’re getting properly back into the swing of things on Monday. Sometimes you just need to get urges and cravings out of your system to continue being productive.

Oh, I know what else I need to do today. I need to write about Death Mark II, which I finished yesterday. More details will be forthcoming over on MoeGamer, but suffice to say for now that the entire Spirit Hunter series is absolutely magnificent, and anyone the slightest bit interested in top-quality, genuinely intelligent horror should definitely check all three games out. But like I say, I will talk more about the details over on MoeGamer.

In fact, I’m off to go do that right now. Ta-ta. If you missed the stream yesterday, here’s an archive for you to watch!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 161: Plans for Tomorrow

Tomorrow I’m going to do some streaming, as I have done the past few weeks. 8pm UK time, twitch.tv/pjedavison. Be there, or… don’t be there, I guess. But it’d be nice if you were.

Rather than grinding through another layer of Mon-Yu, though, I thought it’d be a nice opportunity to play some shoot ’em ups and, assuming his availability lasts, have a bit of a chat with my good friend Chris, who enjoys a good shoot ’em up. We haven’t had the opportunity to record a MoeGamer Podcast for a very long time, and while this isn’t quite the same thing, it’ll be fun to have a good chat. As an American, Chris is quite understandably a bit under the weather about… everything, so hopefully a bit of fun will take his mind off things for a couple of hours.

Anyway! I don’t have overly specific plans other than “play some fun stuff”, but I’m going to keep it limited to the Evercade Toaplan Arcade cartridges, of which there are now four. (Well, technically there will be four by the end of the year, but since I work for Blaze I have the last two already.) These are, for me, personal highlights of the complete Evercade library, and I’m thrilled to have worked on all of them.

The games are fantastic, and we were fortunate enough to have access to former Toaplan staffers such as Masahiro Yuge and Tatsuya Uemura to provide some additional commentary for the manuals. I even managed to get some commentary from Tim Follin for Toaplan Arcade 4, since that features the NES port of Sky Shark, which has a soundtrack by the great man himself — though he doesn’t think it’s his best work!

I’m not sure how well streaming copes with something as frenetic as a shoot ’em up, but it’ll be an interesting experiment regardless. Rationally speaking, if a stream can cope with modern 3D games such as first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, I’m sure it can cope with spaceships going boom.

Like I say, I haven’t decided specifically what I might play on stream as yet; I’ll just take things as they come. I’ll probably give the new collections some love, though, as they have a number of games that I think are particularly interesting and noteworthy. Toaplan Arcade 3, for example, has both Batsugun and Batsugun Special Version, which are spectacularly good games, but I want to give Vimana some love, too, as that’s one very few people have heard of and I really like it.

A word of caution: don’t come to this stream expecting high-level play, or anything other than very basic competence. I love shoot ’em ups, but I’m not super-good at them. This is probably because, like many things, I don’t put enough practice in to get good, which is where I think a stream like this might be fun. I can take some time to practice, chat, talk strategy and just generally shoot the breeze — and hopefully having an additional participant in the mix will present some fun topics of discussion. We’ll try not to rant too much about the state of the modern world.

So yeah. That’s the plan for tomorrow. I’ll be going ahead with the stream regardless of whether Chris is available (but he’s said he should be) so please do stop by for a bit if you feel like it! See you then!

#oneaday Day 148: Stream Success

I done a stream! It went pretty well, and I enjoyed myself. Even had a few people chatting along. If you want to catch up on it, here it is archived on my YouTube channel:

As you can hopefully see from the thumbnail, we were playing the delightfully named Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armour – You May Be Defeated But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. This is a dungeon crawler by Experience, makers of, among other things, the Spirit Hunter horror adventures I’ve been playing recently.

I obviously talk more about the game in the stream itself, but my first impressions after a 3-hour session are very positive. It’s really interesting how Experience manage to make what is ostensibly the same kind of game feel cool and different between all their different titles. Mon-Yu is pitched as an entry-level dungeon crawler, but there are plenty of interesting little wrinkles for genre veterans, such as being level capped on each dungeon, meaning you have to figure out how to deal with the bosses without just outlevelling them.

There’s also an interesting equipment system, where equipment gains experience as you use it alongside the characters. Equipment has a “rank” which determines how much it can level up, so sometimes you have to make a decision between keeping your upgraded items or taking a temporary hit to your effectiveness while you power up something with a higher cap.

There’s also a really great “rapid battle” system, where if you know what you’re doing you can get all your characters to auto-attack or repeat their last actions without having to wait for all the animations and log entries to appear on screen. Combine this with the fact that the game has no random encounters — and by its level-capped structure, it discourages grinding to a certain extent — and you have a really interesting take on what has, over the course of the last few years, become one of my favourite subgenres.

Anyway, it’s half past two in the morning now because I made a video about sauce after finishing the stream. Watch out for that on my channel later next week. For now, I must sleep!

#oneaday Day 147: Saturday Night is for Streaming

Well, it is this week, anyway. Andie is going out for a friend’s birthday in the evening, so I thought I might take the opportunity to do a bit of streaming. You, dear reader, are welcome to stop by. Here’s my Twitch channel. I’ll be streaming from about 8pm UK time, all being well, and the duration will depend on how much fun I’m having and whether anyone is actually chatting. I plan to go for at least an hour or two, though.

The game I’ve picked to stream is one I deliberately haven’t started yet. It’s Experience’s dungeon crawler Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters and Gain Strong Weapons and Armor. You May Be Defeated, but Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be a Day When the Heroes Defeat the Devil King. I have picked this for several reasons:

I like Experience games.
I like dungeon crawlers.
It has a silly name.
As I understand it, it’s a fairly light and breezy take on the dungeon crawler, so it should be eminently suitable for chatting while playing.

Now I’m sure anyone who is all about “optimising” their Twitch experience would recommend I play something people have actually heard of. But if you’ve ever paid my YouTube channel a visit you will know that I don’t really give a shit about baiting the algorithm and getting huge viewing figures.

In fact, as I’ve discussed previously, I actually don’t like it when a video does well, because after you crash through a certain number of views, people start to get a bit more mean and I’m not a big fan of that. So I’d rather just host a nice little comfortable stream for friends to drop in on as they see fit — and perhaps a few newcomers can pop along and learn a bit about a game they haven’t seen before alongside me.

Streaming is something that, I know, you have to work hard at in order to get anywhere. To be honest, I’m not so fussed about trying to “make partner” or “go affiliate” or whatever — the thing that appeals to me about streaming more than anything else right now is the prospect of potentially making some human connections with people. I have been so bereft of good company beyond my wife and cats in recent years that I want to try various means of potentially meeting new folks. And streaming would seem like a potentially solid means of discovering people with similar interests that I might get along with.

I know that won’t happen immediately. I’m fine with that. I’ve recorded lots of Let’s Plays for YouTube, so I am intimately familiar with how to talk rubbish entirely to myself while playing a video game. But if some good conversation happens to come about? So much the better. We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, tomorrow evening, 8pm UK time. I’ll let you work out what that is in your region. Let’s hunt some monsters and have a good time!

#oneaday Day 106: Best laid plans

Well, I streamed for a bit! But I didn’t do UFO 50 in the end. I wasn’t satisfied with how it was performing while running at the same time as OBS, so rather than faff around attempting to optimise stuff, I decided to stream some Evercade stuff instead — specifically Thalamus Collection 1.

I enjoyed the stream. I kept things simple and just played some games. A few people showed up, including some real people as well as some bots (who were swiftly blocked) and we all had a good time. I’m keen to do some more.

I haven’t yet decided how this is going to fit in with everything else I do, but I think I might want to try and do something at least semi-regular. If I can set aside an evening in the week as “stream night” I think that might be good — streaming in the evening means that I should be able to get people from multiple time zones. I have viewers on YouTube from both sides of the pond, so that’s always been a consideration.

Right now, Tuesday nights are out because that’s Slimming World night, and Wednesday should probably be kept free because I often go into the office on Wednesdays and get back late.

Thursday might be good. It’s midweek, and it’s not an obvious night when people want to go out and do stuff like on a Friday. So I think I might try and make a go of it on Thursdays, focusing on retro stuff.

We’ll see. Next week is a busy one as I’m heading to the office for one of those aforementioned trips, but I think it might be fun to get this sort of thing started.

And getting started is one of the hardest bits, I guess!

#oneaday Day 103: A solution?

Following yesterday’s ponderings, something blindingly obvious occurred to me earlier: there’s quite a simple solution to what I was contemplating, and that is to actually finally start doing some streaming.

I’ve tried streaming a couple of times and not had a terrible time doing it, but I fell off from doing it because I didn’t really set aside a specific time to do it and haven’t (yet) put in the work to try and get any sort of “community” going. To be honest, it’s that “work” part that kind of puts me off a bit; one of the nice things about YouTube is that I’ve been able to just sort of do it slowly and gradually build up an audience naturally without having to faff about promoting myself or whatnot.

Twitch is a platform that is still quite alien to me. There’s a lot I don’t like about it. It’s noisy and filled with distracting features that don’t play nice with my autistic brain. I feel certain portions of the Twitch audience have unreasonable expectations of what a streamer can be expected to do to keep them “entertained”. And I’ve seen far, far too many people burn themselves out because they “needed” to get Partner, or Affiliate, or whatever their monetisation program is called.

But at the same time, I kind of like the idea of having a platform where I might be able to make some new friends, chatting about the stuff I love. If I do decide to kick off some streaming, I’ll almost certainly keep it retro-focused — at least partly because in my study, which is the place that is really “set up” for streaming, I don’t have either a gaming PC or a current-gen console — but I think there’s plenty of potential to cover things there, between Evercade, the various mini systems I have (Atari 8-bit, Amiga, C64 and, later this year, Spectrum) and, of course, the gigantic Launchbox library I have on a 5TB hard drive.

It’s kind of a scary prospect, though. Even more so than YouTube, Twitch is “putting yourself out there” and inviting comment from any old random who happens to stop by. I should probably comfort myself with the fact that the kind of people I wouldn’t want to engage with probably wouldn’t be watching retro gaming streams, anyway — but it’s still somewhat nerve-wracking.

Perhaps I’ll give it a go this weekend as a sort of trial run. My wife is going into town with a friend for a bit, so maybe I’ll take the opportunity to try some bits and pieces out back then. If you’d like to stop by, here’s my Twitch page. No promises, but I have mentally “pencilled this in” for this Saturday, and we’ll see how it goes.

2029: Our Video Future

I’ve been playing a bit more with making some videos using the PlayStation 4 and its ShareFactory software. As it turns out, today I actually hit the upper limit of how many clips of commentary it’s possible to add to a single project; apparently I need to record narration all in one go, then split it up later if necessary rather than recording in small chunks!

This was today’s project:

Sword Art Online Re:Hollow Fragment is a really good game that I’m enjoying a whole lot, and making a video about it seemed like a good idea, because a lot of people who haven’t taken a chance on it and just started playing it really don’t know anything about it at all. My good friend Chris Caskie, for example, specifically thanked me for showing all the different parts of the game across the course of my six-minute video, since gameplay footage he’d seen in the past had only ever shown a tiny (and, from the sounds of things, boring) excerpt of what’s actually on offer.

I think I’ve found a format I like working in, too: I never felt quite comfortable doing “Let’s Plays” or recording live reactions as if I was streaming a game. At least part of this, I feel, is due to the fact that, as a viewer, I don’t really have much interest in Let’s Plays and streaming, because I’d much rather play a game than watch someone else play it. What I do appreciate, however, is the opportunity to see a game in action, find out a bit about it and perhaps a touch of personal opinion as to whether or not it’s worth exploring. I am also uninclined to spend 20 minutes watching someone go through options menus and whatnot; short and relatively snappy is the key, summarising everything I might want to know about the game without rambling on and on about it for too long.

So that’s the format I’ve adopted in my last couple of videos. I feel it works well; I’ve been pleased with the result (though not so much with the sound quality; I need to 1) adjust the sound levels between the game footage and my commentary recording and 2) invest in or find a pop filter for my headset microphone, which is otherwise proving to be pretty good for this) and I actually find myself going back and watching the videos I’ve recorded again; considering a few years back (prior to the first time I went on a podcast) I absolutely loathed and detested the sound of my own voice and would rather have stuck my head into a woodchipper than listened to myself, this is Progress of sorts, I guess.

I think the fact I’m enjoying making these videos — and that I can do so quite quickly — is important though. I will always be someone who enjoys writing about games first and foremost, and that’s what the magazine project I’m currently working on is all about. For a basic “review” of sorts, however — which is effectively what I’m doing with these videos, or at the very least providing some first impressions after a few hours of play — video seems to be an eminently suitable medium, perhaps even better than dry written words on a page.

Perhaps I’ll even be able to make some money off this sort of thing eventually, though I’m realistic here; my viewing stats have broken three figures on, I think, just one of my videos posted to date, with the others having anywhere between 10 and 70 views. That’s not at a point where it’s worth putting ads on my videos as yet, though that said I haven’t really made a huge effort to try and promote what I’m doing; I’m just putting it out there to see what people think.

If nothing else, it’s something to do on empty, tedious days, and I’m having a whole lot of those at the moment.

1856: Streaming from Every Orifice

I decided to fiddle around with the “ShadowPlay” feature on my graphics card tonight. This is a feature of more recent nVidia cards that takes some of the strain off the main computer when either recording or streaming video of games. I hadn’t tried it at all before, owing to the fact that I’ve never really had occasion to, but I decided to give it a try with Final Fantasy XIV this evening just as an experiment.

I’m impressed! There was absolutely no impact on the game’s smoothness whatsoever, and the footage that was being streamed to Twitch (only at 480p and 30fps for this initial experiment) looked nice, clear and stutter-free. The ShadowPlay software also provides the facility to stream your voice through your microphone at the same time as the game audio, too, so talky types can speak all over the top of their favourite games like “proper” streamers do.

I’m slightly coming around to the idea of streaming, since a significant number of people seem to think that so far as video games are concerned, streaming and YouTube are the way forward, while traditional “print” (i.e. text-based) journalism and reportage is dying out. Certainly with the recent folding of Joystiq, one of the most long-running blog-style games sites, it seems that there are tough times ahead for the games press. I still doubt it will die out completely — and, moreover, I still vastly prefer reading a well-written article to watching a video in most cases — but it’s probably worth embracing these newer things that don’t seem to be going away any time soon rather than plugging my ears and going “la la la la la”.

While I have a bit of time on my hands, then, it would seem prudent to use some of this time to experiment a bit. (I hasten to add to those concerned for my employment status that I have also been writing to various places in search of work, so please don’t think I’m sitting on my arse playing games all day!) I’ve tried my hand at some sort of vaguely Let’s Play-ish videos before, focusing on bullet hell shooters, but perhaps I should have another go. Arguably even more so than games writing, it’s extremely difficult to get established in the fields of either streaming or YouTubing, but I certainly have the skills to do both and, on the off-chance things happen to go well, there’s the potential to make some money there.

I’m under no illusions, though; this is very unlikely, and pretty much reserved for the already well-established personalities like PewDiePie, Boogie2988, TotalBiscuit and their ilk. Still, it just takes a few people talking about you — and the production of decent content, of course — to start the ball rolling on something potentially bigger, and it can’t hurt to give it a try. In fact, it might even be quite fun. There are, I feel, some obvious gaps in the market so far as streaming and YouTubing are concerned, much as there are in the games press, so that’s probably the place to start; let’s explore it and see what happens.

1789: Broadcasting Live

In case you weren’t aware — and indeed cared — the latest beta version of the Steam client software features broadcast functionality, which means that anyone else out there who is also running a copy of Steam’s beta version (or possibly via the Web too; I haven’t tried yet) can drop in and start watching the game you’re playing at a moment’s notice.

This is noteworthy for one important reason: you don’t have to set anything up. It’s just there. It just, seemingly, works. And, unlike other, dedicated streaming solutions like Twitch and Hitbox, Steam’s streaming is intelligent, only actually actively broadcasting when someone shows up and clicks the “Watch Game” button. This means that you can enjoy full performance when no-one is watching — streaming can cause a slight hit to graphics performance in some games — but seamlessly start sharing what you’re playing with friends without having to do anything, and without compromising the experience with tiny windows, huge chatboxes and all manner of other rubbish.

This, to me, is the optimum solution for streaming — at least for me. It wouldn’t work particularly well for professional streamers or those who run to more of a schedule, but for more casual players who simply want to use streaming as a means of showing other people what a game is like, it’s absolutely ideal. I mean it when I said there was absolutely no setting up required, too: no buggering around with encoding, no worrying about bitrates, no creating application sessions or whatever. It just, as they say, works.

I’m still not the sort of person who will sit down and watch a scheduled stream of someone else playing a game — I’d much rather spend my time playing games myself — but that’s not really what Steam’s broadcasting system is for. Instead, as I noted above, its ideal functionality is for demonstrating games to one another, and pleasingly, it works with anything you run through the Steam client, not just games sold via Steam’s storefront. In other words, any game that you’ve added to Steam via the “Add Non-Steam Game…” option in the menu — and which supports the Steam overlay, allowing you access to your friends list and chat functionality in-game — can be easily broadcasted using the new functionality.

But don’t worry; if you’re concerned about your lack of skills being shown off to the world and everyone showing up to laugh at you, you do have control over who can watch you. The first time someone requests to watch your game, you have several options — broadcast openly to anyone who wants to watch; broadcast to friends; or don’t broadcast at all.

So far the only thing missing from the functionality seems to be some sort of record or archive function, though with the system’s seemingly intended use as described above, I’m not sure we’ll get that. I’m not too worried, though; I doubt there are many people who would want to watch three hours of prerecorded video of me grinding for my Relic Nexus weapon in Final Fantasy XIV — though there may be some people who have seen me playing it and are interested in taking a look for a few minutes just to see how it plays, as my friend Bowley did this evening.

I’m quietly impressed with the system, then; it’ll be interesting to see how much it gets used once it rolls out into the Steam client proper.

1315: Twitchy

I’m still thoroughly baffled by the phenomena that are Let’s Play videos and livestreaming of video games.

In the latter case, I sort of get why it would be useful for e-sports — it allows audiences to watch matchups between skilled players, just like real-world sports — but in the former case… hmm.

The argument tends to run that Let’s Play videos and livestreaming allow people to get a feel for games they might not have tried. And that’s a fair point, with one fairly major-ish issue: the popular Let’s Play and livestream feeds are all for the same games all the time… and they’re popular games that people already know all about. (“Hey guys, DarkPhantom123 here; welcome to part 527 of my Let’s Play Minecraft video!”)

The current trend is for people to post videos of them taking on Spelunky’s Daily Challenge, a randomly-generated level that is the same for all players worldwide. This can occasionally be amusing, but when there are hundreds of people all posting these same videos, I have to confess I find myself feeling like I’d just rather play the game for myself. Perhaps you can learn something from watching someone else’s run, but in my experience, most of these videos tend to be characterised by blind luck and fluke, with genuine skill only entering the picture relatively occasionally. It might just be the people I’ve watched videos of though.

The thing that strikes me the most about all this, though, is that it feels like such a massive waste of time. I love games; they’re my go-to form of entertainment, and I’m fortunate enough to be able to call playing the games I like my job, too. However much I love games, though, whenever I look at, say, the Twitch front page, I feel no desire whatsoever to watch other people playing games; I would rather just get on and play myself. I have lots of games I want to play; it simply, as I say, feels like a massive waste of time to watch other people doing so, particularly when a lot of these streams appear to be nothing more than vanity projects.

I clicked on a few streams on Twitch the other day out of curiosity and felt no desire to keep watching. The first was a guy playing Blizzard’s new World of Warcraft-themed card game Hearthstone, and featured a picture-in-picture webcam view of him playing — hardly the most interesting thing to watch, since he wasn’t talking or looking at the camera; all you saw was him looking engrossed in the game. The second was someone playing the free-to-play MMO Ragnarok Online 2, which featured some dreadful backing music and footage of someone apparently just running around doing random solo quests. Again, why would I watch that? Particularly when Ragnarok Online 2 is free-to-play, even, meaning that if I was genuinely curious about it I could just, you know, download it and actually try it out for myself?

Perhaps this is a generation gap thing; maybe I’m just too old to understand why people would want to treat games as a spectator sport when they’re not designed to be — e-sports excluded, obviously. If I have some free time to devote to games, I want to spend it playing games, not watching other people doing so. Other people apparently disagree, and that’s cool — I just wish I understood the phenomenon a bit better. Can anyone explain it to me?