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!
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.
So, I’m currently no closer to getting a job or some paying work (actually that’s not quite true; I did apply for two jobs today, both of which can potentially be done from home, so there’s that) but I actually feel like I’ve had a reasonably pleasant day. If only every day could be like today and still furnish me with a steady income, that would be just lovely.
So what did I do today? Well, I played my new piano a bit — I dug out a Mozart sonata I haven’t played for literally years and took the first movement for a spin; it wasn’t perfect, but I was surprised how much of it I remembered in detail — then applied for the aforementioned jobs and made a couple more videos. Again, said videos are experimental, somewhat rough-and-ready affairs, but I’m starting to get a feel for how it all works, and actually finding myself rather enthusiastic about producing them.
First up was a quick look at Mode 7’s future sports game Frozen Cortex (formerly Frozen Endzone), which came out today on Steam after a period in Early Access.
Mic level ended up a bit high on this one, so the sound was a bit distorted, but at least you can hear me. (This is partly due to the fact that due to Frozen Cortex not using a “true” fullscreen mode and instead using a borderless window, I had to record using OBS rather than ShadowPlay, and haven’t quite found the optimum levels for the former yet.) It’s also marginally embarrassing to have video evidence of quite how incompetent I am at strategy games (that first conceded point where he just runs all the way down the side of the field because I was too dumb to notice there were no obstacles there… man) but I suppose messing things up makes for slightly more entertaining watching… perhaps? I don’t know. Either way, it was nice to be able to get something immediately relevant out of the door.
Next up was a different type of experiment, this time with “pre-scripting” a video rather than delivering it off-the-cuff as I have been doing with the previous ones. Taking one of my articles on MoeGamer as a basis, I decided to record a video about the visual novel Kana: Little Sister, which is shortly getting an enhanced rerelease.
This took a bit longer to assemble as there wasn’t any “game footage” per se — visual novels are tricky to make videos about as a result — and consequently I had to use the in-game artwork to put together a slideshow to accompany my narration. I then put some of the game’s soundtrack in the background, and the result is what you see above. I’m quite pleased with the result; while just pretty much reading an article isn’t necessarily the ideal format for Web video — particularly with shorter pieces — with a long-form piece like this it happened to work reasonably well. That and visual novels — particularly those with complex or challenging stories like Kana: Little Sister — are eminently suitable for in-depth exploration, commentary and criticism.
These videos may not go anywhere — and I haven’t turned on ads/monetisation for them yet, as they don’t have anywhere near enough views to warrant that — but if nothing else, producing these (and being able to do so quickly) is another string to my bow, and my YouTube channel will gradually become something of a portfolio that I can show off to people, perhaps even demonstrating the improvements I’ve made over time.
If you enjoy the videos, do please feel free to share them around a bit. I’ve only had a handful of views on each so far and it would be nice to know a few more people have seen them. Viewing figures aren’t hugely important to me at the moment, but it’d be nice to see a bit of growth over time to see if there’s any potential worth exploring here.
Now I’m off to bed; Criminal Girls awaits, but I’ll save discussion of that for another day!
(Aside: just realised this is probably the only post on the Internet today that mentions Frozen Cortex and Kana: Little Sister within a couple of paragraphs of each other. Never say I don’t push a few boundaries!)
It’s been a curious few days for some people and things that are very dear to me. First up, you may have read my impassioned mourning of the apparent loss of Good Old Games the other day. Turns out that, as some suspected all along, the site was simply coming out of beta and relaunching. Not only that, but awesome WRPG Baldur’s Gate is coming to the site, with more to follow. This, hopefully, means that Planescape: Torment can’t be far behind. Because the one loaning incident I regret more than anything else is loaning that game to someone and never getting it back. I’m not even sure I know who borrowed it. So if you have my copy of Planescape: Torment, please return it to me. Or at least buy me a copy on GOG if/when it appears.
So that was sad and became happy, although some are still ranting and raving about GOG’s handling of the situation. Okay, it perhaps wasn’t the best PR stunt ever (some blaming that famous Polish sense of humour) but it got people talking about GOG, and it turns out that what they were planning was actually awesome. This isn’t the place for that debate, though.
The really bad news, though, is that the gaming site I’ve written daily news for and called home since March of this year, Kombo.com, is folding. This is terribly sad news as the team at Kombo are some truly talented people who worked their hardest to provide awesome content every day, whether it was opinionated twists on news coverage or original content.
Former Assistant Director of Reviews Matt Green sums the situation up over at his blog, so pay it a visit and feel free to offer commiserations either there or indeed here. I sincerely hope that everyone who was involved with Kombo lands on their feet and gets the awesome writing gig (with appropriately awesome pay) that they deserve. Note: This includes me. So if you know anywhere who needs an awesome writer who is also British (which apparently adds +1000 awesome points) then let me know. You can feel free to point them to this site—I have links to samples of my work on the menu bar above—or to http://pjedi.co.uk/links, which also has said links.
So, with that said, I think it’s time for a little light relief. The Internet provides many means of light relief, not all of which are appropriate for public consumption. (Hey, what you look at in your own time is your business. You pervert.)
By far my favourite means of light relief that the Internet provides is cat, monkey and/or dog videos, however, so I shall now share a few of my favourites. Thanks in part to Alex Connolly and Chris Person for having a link war on my Facebook profile earlier.
May I firstly present to you, courtesy of Dave Gorman on Twitter, an elephant playing darts:
Followed by the charmingly literal “A Monkey Washing A Cat.”
And then… er… this.
How about THIS?!
Andross’s enemy is my enemy!
And finishing with indisputably the best cat video on the Internet.
I thank you. For those who have had a nightmarish, difficult or stressful few days, I sincerely hope the sight of the above has cheered you, if only slightly. May tomorrow be a better day.
