#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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#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!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#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!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#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!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#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!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

1662: Moving Pictures

Call me a traditionalist, out of date, out of touch, whatever you like, but I'm really not a fan of the current obsession with video as the be-all and end-all of publishing things online.

I have numerous feelings about this, not least of which is the fact that as a former member of the gaming press, it smarts to see my particular skillset — writing compelling words about my specialist subjects — being sidelined in favour of video, but as a consumer of online content, it also frustrates me immensely, too.

Put simply, I like to read. I prefer to read. If I see an interesting-sounding link on social media, I'll read it if it's text, but if it's video I will, nine times out of ten, not watch it. And this is true whether I'm sitting at my computer or browsing on phone or tablet — though it's particularly true when I'm browsing on a mobile device, since due to patchy network reception and exorbitant data charges, watching video on the go is often, to say the least, a somewhat subpar experience. Text is much more desirable in these circumstances. (This is to say nothing of live broadcasts, which are even less desirable than video on demand to me.)

There are types of content where it's simply easier to refer to text, too. Take game guides or tutorials in general, for example; while video can show you the things the creator is trying to teach you in context, it's difficult to refer back to specific points or cross-reference things, whereas this is a snap to do with text. Again, if I'm using a mobile device to browse this information, I much prefer having the information open in front of me to keep referring back to, rather than watching a video and having to take as much in as possible, perhaps over the course of several viewings. It just doesn't seem like a very efficient means of delivering information — particularly when that information is complicated.

This isn't to say video can't work, of course. Video is a great means of delivering educational content that you passively absorb rather than actively refer to while working on something. Crash Course on YouTube, which my friends Mark and Lynette introduced me to recently, is a good example of this.

And video is great for comedy, when said comedy has been written to be performed in the form of video. Glove and Boots is my current favourite example of this:

I just get a bit annoyed when people make sweeping declarations about video being "the future" of online content, as if those of us who still like to read words on a page rather than watch and listen are somehow irrelevant. Like so many other things, there are plenty of different tastes out there, and lots of different ways of doing things. Rather than only pursuing one to the exclusion of all others, let's accept that fact: continue to provide relevant, interesting content to all people and all tastes, not just the fashionable, young market who, at this point, are obsessed with video. My individual opinion may not matter all that much, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person out there who will close a tab without checking out an "awesome" link if the link turns out to be just another video.

1518: New Media

I've been contemplating the ways that people "consume" (ugh, I hate that word, but it seems to be the one in use most frequently these days) content online, and trying to determine a way it could be applied to our currently-stalled podcast over at The Squadron of Shame.

The Squadron of Shame SquadCast certainly worked extremely well for the episodes we did it for, but it did often end up being a little more demanding on the editing time than I would have liked, particularly as we're all amateurs making use of not-brilliant equipment that often results in things like background hum, echo and other annoying flaws that are difficult to edit out. Much of my editing time was often spent manually trimming out echoes and funny noises, and in the case of a 2-3 hour episode — which most of our episodes tended to be — it would take the majority of the day to do this.

One of the things I'm wondering right now is how relevant the podcast format still is. Obviously I know that there's enough of a market for sites like Giant Bomb to keep making one every week, and for established podcasting personalities like Garnett Lee to be able to start a new show and have people follow him to see what he's up to. But I'm also conscious of the rise of alternative means of "consuming" (blech) content in the last couple of years, with YouTube being one particularly disruptive influence, and live broadcasts such as Twitch streaming and Google Hangouts being another.

Awareness of these alternative forms of media has made me ponder whether the standard podcast format is absolutely the best possible thing for the SquadCast going forward, or whether it's worth contemplating an alternative means of presentation (with an accompanying means of archiving/downloading where necessary.)

The SquadCast has always been a "book group" style of discussion surrounding a game or gaming-related topic, and it's worked well for us in the past. But gaming is also an inherently visual medium, which makes me wonder whether some form of video presentation might be worth experimenting with, perhaps combined with live broadcasting.

Another reason I bring this up is that Skype, which we have previously used to talk to one another and record the discussions we have, has become a largely unworkable mess ever since Microsoft bought it, making it impossible for me to "archive" the complete conversation just in case someone's individual recording fails to work properly. I haven't needed this facility on many occasions, but on the couple where someone's recording was destroyed by Audacity's frequent crashes, having that backup facility was a godsend. With the way Skype works now, though — you can't run it in more than one user account on a Mac at once, which is what I used to do — working this way is impossible without an unnecessarily convoluted setup involving more than one computer.

What I've been pondering is making use of something like Google Hangouts, which allows for a number of features that would seem ideal for a discussion about games. It allows participants to converse via either audio or video chat, and it also allows for the footage of the participants to be intercut with other things such as videos from YouTube and the like. For example, while discussing a particularly interesting scene in a game, making use of Google Hangouts would allow you to find that scene on YouTube and then broadcast it to the people watching the Hangout, which strikes me as an eminently good idea. Presumably it would also allow for playing footage while the conversation continues over the top, which is a little more interesting than just gazing at a bunch of talking heads for a few hours.

Google Hangouts can also be easily archived to YouTube, and then one of the many YouTube-to-MP3 converters out there can be used to archive an offline version of the discussion's audio, which can subsequently be released as a standard podcast for those who wish to continue listening in that way. It'll be rawer due to the lack of editing and its inherently live nature, but I've often felt when I edit a show that I was making the job a lot more difficult and time-consuming than it really needed to be.

Anyway. I'm just thinking out loud here. Interested to know your thoughts, though, particularly if you've been either a listener or a participant in the SquadCast at any point in the past. (Those who are neither, you can educate yourself thanks to our archives here.)