It Is Finished

Last night I accomplished the impossible.

I have finally, after over a year of anguish playing off and on, finished Sonic 2006. I have a lot of editing ahead of me, but I can safely say I will never have to touch the game itself again.

Unless there's interesting science to perform of course.

I won't have a final death count for awhile, but I have 67GB of video on my hard drive and approx 52.5 hours logged towards it.

Of that I want to say a good 5 hours was logged each to the Beach at the start and 5 hours to Kingdom Valley at the end. 3 or 4 was spent on Shadow's Desert level alone.

I'll have better stats once I go through it all, but this game...this game has taken a significant chunk of my 2017 year.

The point is, it's over.

Now people want me to do Sonic Boom, which I thankfully do not own a console for. I am safe for now.

The next Sonic game I will likely delve into is Shadow the Hedgehog, which is at least playable if not the corniest, most-cringe inducing Sonic game (aside from Sonic 2006) that I am aware of. It will not take me 52 hours to complete.

Happy Bioshock

Happy Christmas to whoever celebrates that and happy whatever to those who don't.

As my gift this year, I am releasing the hard labour of my last couple weeks (aka the rest of Bioshock Infinite). It's scheduled to release over the next couple days so it's not COMPLETELY spam. So, enjoy something that should have been finished 3+ years ago.

Yes Mesk. I'm actually done Bioshock Infinite.

And yes, I know you don't believe me.

We finally started getting a large snowfall. It's been strangely warm brown/grey wasteland for the last 2 or 3 weeks. Feels like mid-April vs December. Now it's freezing and I almost forgot to take a pop out of my car. Already had one of those explode in there this year back during Extra Life.

I'll be mostly at home until the new year, so I plan to keep working through my backlog.

Vintage LP

I'm currently in the process of editing and encoding some old video footage. Like, really old. I have about 2 and a half hours of this left.

I have a plan for the DLC for this particular LP. The DLC portions themselves were way more messed up audio/video wise that the original game.

Overall, the lesson here is to wait until the entire LP is complete before starting to post it to YouTube. Otherwise people are left waiting for years for something that likely won't get done fast, or will never get done at all (see Dark Souls, Saint's Row, Gauntlet, etc.).

There are a number of dead LPs on my hard drives that never even made it to YouTube. I may upload them as Patreon playlist bs, even though I doubt anything will come of that/I don't approve of the changes they made to the payment process. It's still possible to pledge what you want, but you have to math something fierce.

Either way, my free time is being split into three places: maintaining the scraps of a social life I still have (including going out and playing D&D), finishing LPs (including yet-to-be recorded footage with Shauna, and Mesk/HKS), and personal writing projects.

My priority is video if I can manage it though. I'm trying really hard to have a chunk of content ready for people's holidays in case they're interested in watching my drivel. The uploads have been really hap-hazard and broken this year as well so...there's that to make up for.

Toasted Profiles

So I'm playing Diablo 3 again after something like 7 years of not touching it. Mesk and HKS are running through it with me on a fairly high difficulty, so naturally HKS is the only one doing any real damage and I'm dying in hundreds of hilarious ways. Regardless, we're still in Act 1 and I'm something like level 40 and still doing minimal damage to enemies that have literally millions of hitpoints in health. Looking forward to when I post that to all the comments concerning why we're playing on that difficulty, why I picked that character and those abilities etc.

The thing that really gets my goat concerning Diablo 3 is that it's responsible for toasting my MeGUI encoder profile settings again. I started up the game and HKS and I were waiting for Mesk, so I decided to do a recording test because I screwed up so many of the Divinity recordings by NOT checking the mic was working properly and balanced. So I minimized the game, noting that things were acting a little weird, and checked the file. It was fine, so I re-opened the game and was just met with a frozen menu screen. It remained frozen for about 2 minutes so I figured the game crashed.

I pull up task manager and try to kill the process. It gives me a vague dialogue about the game, then the application is removed from the task bar.

But it's still in task manager and I can't relaunch the game. I try to kill the Blizzard launcher + the game which was still apparently running and I get an error saying that I can't do that because I "don't have permission." Like hell I don't.

So I continue to try and force it, and eventually everything just dies and all I have is HKS and Mesk talking to me on two black screens. I can't talk to them at all, so after a minute of trying a bunch of things to recover I just hard reset the entire machine to finally end it all.

I have NEVER had an application do this to my computer or outright deny me the ability to end a program by saying I don't have permission. I'm not even entirely sure how a MENU screen in a so-called Triple-A game caused this by minimizing the application.

At the time I had Sony Vegas and MeGUI running because I had been doing video work (not to mention a bunch of tabs in my browser I was still working with). I didn't reopen these immediately as I was trying to get back into the game and get it to work.

Eventually I launched the game again and had it work for a few hours. I died to skeletons a bunch of times, ran out of hard drive space and called it a day. At this point I decided to encode the video I had edited and prepped. I open up Vegas fine, but when I got to open MeGUI I get met with 200 SEPARATE ERRORS that I had to manually click through as every single one of my presets and profiles and previous jobs were corrupted and toasted. Apparently hard resetting the computer killed them all.

So now I have to hunt down my back up of the profiles and get MeGUI completely configured again to my settings.

Thanks Blizzard.