Hey everyone, just a quick update with what’s going on. I’m working on multiple different projects, I hope to have a couple come out this month. The first will definitely be the next Game Dungeon. I hope to have it done in the next few days, it’s become more involved and I can say that it’s going to be a very special episode in terms of the content.

In other news, I wouldn’t mind some advice from people in the following areas:

CAMERA MICROPHONES:
I’ve come to the conclusion that I could likely use a separate microphone when recording on camera than the one I use when I’m recording normal audio. I really am not an expert on microphones, so advice here would be appreciated. I’m thinking I’ll want a lavalier mic, but I have no idea what are the good models or where the best cutoff point is in terms of price v. quality, so if you’re familiar with this, go ahead and contact me.

REMOTE RETRO GAMING:
For some future videos, I’m trying to set up game sessions on older games (particularly DOS ones) where I can take turns with another person in playing a single player game, except over the internet. My distance from the USA means that no solution will be flawless, so there will of course be some lag, but I’m hoping it could be low enough for less-demanding action games. Many remote desktop solutions are in appropriate for this sort of thing, since they’re not focused on gaming, so the wrong data gets priority. And the ones that are focused on gaming are mostly focused on modern games, where the overhead might be much larger than what I’m looking for (a 320x200 screen). Seeing as how GPUs can do video encoding on the fly, this SHOULD be possible, but I’m unaware of any software that does it. So far I’ve tried the trial version of Kainy (which was borderline playable), and I’ve heard of Splashtop, although that doesn’t have a functional demo for internet use. If anyone has advice for software or wants to try and hack DOSbox or something to make this possible, please contact me at [email protected].

That’s about it, more videos coming this month!

New episode! This is of a more common game, but I promise it has some surprises in the video, even for me. I burned myself out somewhat making this one, but I was planning to try and change gears for April anyway. Believe it or not, I never got a true break after completing Freeman’s Mind, it was pretty much just catching up on everything else I neglected. I wanted to give the Game Dungeon kind of a kick start coming into this year, but future episodes likely won’t be as rapid fire as they’ve been lately.

In any event, once I catch up on the most time critical stuff, I plan on taking a break for a few days. I don’t normally have the equivalent of a weekend, I generally just feel guilty for days I’m not working on something. I eventually would like to have more of a work / not-work balance, but we’ll see how realistic that is until the movie gets made. I don’t want to give any definite plans for this month, but I do intend to work on more videos and hopefully have some more experimental ones come out either this month or the next. I still have plenty of ideas brewing, it’s just a matter of juggling everything.

Also at the time of this post, this JUST went up, so it may be low resolution for a while.

More Game Dungeon! Here’s a game I knew I would have to cover at some point. It’s a shorter episode, but it’s for a shorter game, I’m still pleased with how it came out. I want to say this episode is almost half-educational; my mind kept sparking while playing for changes or additions this game needed for better accuracy. If after watching this video, you find that it changes your life, please let me know a few years down the line.

This is just a quick update as I found out a side project I was involved with is being released tomorrow. Several months back I was asked to voice part of a commentary track for a community-made patch to Half-Life 2 giving it a graphics and bug fix overhaul. I haven’t tried any of it myself, but from what I can tell, it just seems to make everything more polished:

Link to the update

Anyway, I had no involvement with writing the commentary track, I only voiced the parts I was asked to. So even though this is Half-Life, don’t expect Freeman’s Mind-style commentary, it’s very much documentary-style. For one line, I actually remember informing the creator that Strife did some of the things he wrote about in Half-Life a few years prior. Anyway, it sounds like this will be the definitive version of the game if you want to check it out.

On another note, check back soon for more videos!

Here’s another video that I thought would be something quick to get out, but ended up ballooning into a project that took as much time as a full length Game Dungeon. In any event, I’m pretty happy with how this came out. This easily has some of the most variety of my videos; you can almost think of it as 25 tiny bite-sized Game Dungeon episodes.

This is a “top video” list, but I tried to keep it interesting throughout. I would say more, but I kind of covered all the biggest points I wanted to in the video itself. While I normally like to avoid dated videos, I felt this one was a little different since I cover so many games even if someone looks at it years from now, there’s plenty of good games listed here some might not know about, so it should still have good information for anyone who stumbles upon it. I also feel like this video kind of “exonerates” me from having to talk about new games in the future, since you couldn’t ask for more new game coverage from me than this. If you watch this, you’ll know about as much as I do.

Also this was my first attempt at using a green screen. It’s about as good as I can hope for given my equipment and setup. I actually ended up lowering the resolution of the background a little bit to closer match the picture quality of my camera. I’m still experimenting, but if I have to make another video where I’m standing in front of the camera talking about something, I’ll definitely want to do more game backgrounds like this to make it a little more interesting visually.

Anyway, I’m keeping busy, you can expect another video out this month!

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ADHD version: See the new games Ross wants to play the most!