Tedious

While studying for an exam I don't particularly care about, I got bored enough to start reading one of the documents I need for the test out loud. This did not end well. Or turned out better than expected. I'll let you decide.

FaceDesk

Meanwhile in Dungeon Siege land...

Still working on Broken World. I've been busy with driver's ed, school, work and being lazy lately, so I'm having trouble finding a good time to just sit and record what I want. I also need a time period where people aren't constantly interrupting me every five seconds so my videos don't get chopped up into tiny segments. I may just be bitter about another, unrelated recording. Just a wee bit. I also have a ton of Left 4 Dead 2 videos lined up for upload once I'm done Broken World. This will give me a chance to prepare for Dungeon Siege 3 (mostly mentally as I'm sure my mind won't come out of this LP completely intact) and give me a chance to experiment with the audio a bit. I want to learn more video editing tricks as well, so I may be experimenting with Vegas and look at some new tutorials.

Happy Apocalypse!

THE END IS NIGH

If I survive this one, I can officially say that I've survived about 4 or 5 apocalypses. Man I must be Superwoman or something.

So while all this BS dies down I'll be uploading the next few segments of Broken World. I also have about 10 hours worth of Left 4 Dead 2 videos that I played with my brother (lamax42) that I plan on uploading in the near future as well.

I'm not going to get Broken World done by the 25th unfortunately, but I will try my hardest to keep uploading videos in a timely manner. In the meantime, here's some screenshots I found on my hard drive. Enjoy:

What the What?

This has been an interesting weekend. To start off with, my beloved laptop, Gary, aged 5 and a half, tragically died of a fried hard drive on Friday evening. He had just finished allowing me to play an exciting game of Age of Empires III when he suddenly came down with the Blue Screen of Death. Never have I seen BSOD like this as white lines shot through the blue and random text and numbers flashed rapidly. I tried to save him, but unfortunately, through repeated tries at booting, he would not respond. If he fails to boot from an external hard drive, Gary will be laid to rest in the local Staples recycling bin sometime in the near future.

In all seriousness though, I'm going to try and save my laptop, as it has sentimental value, but I think Gary is way past his prime. It's almost not worth saving, though, I really lament the loss. It was me first personal computer (having used a family computer the years before) and it got me through most of my university career. I wrote 175 pages of WMRR on it, stayed on all through the night as I wrote my papers at the last minute, traveled with me to places including London, Lake Winnipeg, Hawaii and Florida, uploaded all of my videos diligently while I slept, helped me play hundreds of hours of games, and helped me to produce my very first videos. Gary will be missed. <3


In other news, I have been working on making Murphy a high-use computer. Before I mostly used him to play games and encode video, but now he will be taking on many other roles. In the meantime, I will be borrowing a laptop to use for my writing and school work. I am just glad I didn't start Broken World on Gary, which I was debating doing on Murphy anyways. That sounds...awkwardly sexual.

Speaking of Broken World, I have installed it on Murphy and am now ready to start the LP. I will be doing some sound tests in the next couple of days here, and will probably start the LP on the 11th (which is the last day of my exams). The game was...strange to install though. I installed DS2 with no trouble, but when I went to install Broken World, the installer froze, which then proceeded to freeze windows explorer. Pissed off (and quite tired as I have been working all weekend) I waited about five minutes before forcing a restart. I tried again when it had booted up again and the same thing happened. Fed up I figured I would just work on it tomorrow after I got home and just ignored the failing programs to talk on msn before I went to bed.

Suddenly, after about 10 minutes, Broken World just decided to...work, and it installed in about 30 seconds after I put in the CD key (which I had to dig around for as it was on the booklet...and the booklet was not in the case). Then about 8 windows popped up from when I was trying to get ANYTHING to work in windows explorer. Whatever. Broken World is installed and it works.

Guess this is what happens when you call your computer Murphy.

Finally, as Gary died and I don't have a recent enough back-up, I will be playing a new set of characters for Broken World. I kind of wanted to do it that way anyways. We shall make this silly.

Big Plans

I'm officially finished my Dungeon Siege 2 LP and am almost ready to start Broken World. I may still add Dungeon Siege 2 videos in the future (ie quests I've missed or need other characters for, and the secret quest), but I have no idea when I'll do that. As for Broken World, I plan to start the game early December and then really get into it by December 12 (day after my final exams). I will not have any time to make videos between now and the 26th though, because I have a 15 page paper due next week that I haven't started and a few assignments that I need 100% on because of my...less than adequate midterm mark...

In the meantime, I have something entirely random, but super fun to post while you wait for the new videos. I mainly played the game to test out recording and audio on the computer I'll be using from now on for LPs (well...apart from Broken World maybe...haven't decided yet). The audio...was tricky. My voice ended up drowned out in a lot of segments, so I apologise for the bad audio. I may consider recording audio separately (ie not with FRAPS), but I'm worried about audio syncing as a friend of mine has had countless issues with that in his LPs in the past. In addition, I'm not an expert at this. I still have a lot to learn to make these videos higher quality.

By the New Year, I'd like to begin Dungeon Siege 3 (which is what I'm doing most the tests for) and start thinking about what sort of series I could LP next. I did Dungeon Siege because a) I love the games and b) because I've had a degree of past experience with them. Nothing like looking like a total spaz in front of an audience, which has happened in failed videos. Regardless, I may just play a few random games as I have a ton on Steam that I've purchased on sales...and the after-Christmas sales (boxing day/week for us Canadian and British folk), I may have more.

Anyway, stay tuned, I got a lot of inanity coming your way.

First Impressions of Sassy Creed 3

So, for the first time in my life I got a limited edition of a game. The swag for Assassin's Creed 3 was pretty sweet, but I'm praying that the game will be worth it. I was a little sceptical about the whole American Revolution setting...mainly because it's been done so many times. Granted, it's one of the major events of the period, especially in North America, and the majority of the target audience wouldn't care about say...Canadian events or anything, but still, I have my doubts. I'm always looking for something new on the playing field, so I pray that the game will deliver more than it has given me so far.

I'm a history major and so I've studied a lot of these events in school. Mainly, I have been studying history of Aboriginals and Metis in North America (Canada mostly, but I have knowledge of American groups as well). I am eager to see how "accurate" the game is in tone, setting, and interactions between people. I was extremely excited to see that the main Assassin for the game is going to be a Native American, but so far all I have been playing is some random British noble. I'd love to say he was foppish, but he's not really. Just something about his personality rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it was the first assassination and his reaction to the little boy that saw him. That was fucking creepy. Then the other characters so far are either unlikable or bland. The Brit grew on me by the end of my playing session last night, but so far I'm hoping that the other character arrives soon. I think I know where the story is going with this, but I'll have to wait and see.

The interface is awful. The best interface the game has offered so far has been in Assassin's Creed 2. From there it has gotten progressively worse. While in Brotherhood and Revelations I understand that there were more tools, weapons and functions to incorporate, it just got messy. I do not like what they've done for this game so far. One major fault is the guns. I got so frustrated last night because the player can't just autolock on a target the same way. Now British McAssassin must lock-on, which only improves accuracy and zooms in a little, then the player has to move to aim. It took me WAY too long to figure out how to blow up some god-damned barrels, right after it took me WAY too long to figure out how to switch weapons. I had to put up with British McAssassin pulling his sword out and flailing around like a moron for minutes on end while I just raged. There was another part where I had an ally following me and was supposed to make him hide so the guards wouldn't detect us. I got fed up with trying to target hiding places for him so I decided to experiment a little. I decided to just avoid the guards on my own, leaving my ally to flail around the guards and rooftops on his own. He wasn't detected, even when he walked right in front of the guards.

In addition, I couldn't figure out how to open "e-mails" that the player gets and I couldn't access game information (as in the info the player is given to give historical background or character profiles) until I was off the bloody ship. Half the time I was wondering what the hell I was supposed to be doing or pressing because the "tutorial" dialogues in the corner of the screen only appear for a few seconds, then they never appear again. Thank God I played the other games so I had an idea of how to play despite the new commands and features the developers put into the game. I cringe to think of what newcomers to the series will have to go through.

Lastly, this game is SUPER buggy (though I shouldn't be surprised...the game uses Havoc). The other games had minor problems, but so far in the 30-40 minutes I have played so far, I have seen horses standing on the sides of  walls (as in they are VERTICAL to the player), floating guns, broken lip movements in cut scenes, mugs flying out of people's hands to rocket into the ceiling and curbs of the street launching British McAssassin up a couple feet. While this all highly entertaining, it is really off-putting. I can't get into the story when conversations involve characters staring creepily, speaking without moving their lips or other parts of their faces. I can accomplish the same level of immersion by playing with two plastic dolls.

Because of these elements, I have a bad first impression of the game. It doesn't do everything wrong however. For instance, I really like the way eavesdropping missions are handled. Pickpocketing got an upgrade from just ramming into people as the player passes them. Now the player must actively work around guards and sneak up from behind to pick pockets. Lockpicking was an interesting, but completely unnecessary (and a little annoying) aspect that the developers added. I appreciate the attempt to bring more skills an assassin would have into the game though. The small details are interesting too, such as the random (if sometimes boring) conversations you can have with various people and the little events that occur in the background (such as stealing fruit or someone getting tackled).

As for combat, I'd say it's about as good as the other games in terms of the melee. I saw little difference If anything, I thought it was a little more difficult as there weren't as many parry or deflect kills that Brotherhood and Revelations were notorious for. Though, I was disappointed that I couldn't pick up a broom I found and beat people with it. As for the guns and ranged...well I've already raged about that. Oh except the reload times. That was frustrating. Yeah, I get it's historically accurate and guns at that time actually took that long to reload, but this slows the game down too much. I'm glad that the enemy's aim is shit, otherwise Id be dead before I got halfway through reloading. I sincerely hope that better guns in the game have shorter reload times.
 
The freerunning is as awesome as ever. I forgot all the problems when I finally got on the roof and ran around dodging soldiers and leaping between houses. Running on the roofs also make A LOT of noise, which I find hilarious because I just imagine the people inside wondering what the hell all the thumping noises are. I haven't bothered to go after the pages yet as they always disappear before I can figure out a) what's going on, and b) where the hell the pages are. 

Also, you can pet dogs, cats and sheepies. I haven't tried to pet anything else yet, but I hope that the player encounters other, maybe wilder, animals. I would love to try and pet a bear. Regardless, I thought that was a cute little addition. I just hope British McAssassin can't get tapeworm...

Future Recording Plans

Man I watched Iron Man and now I have about 3 parodies of the theme song stuck in my head...

So I thought about recording quite a bit and I've decided that I would like to continue making Let's Plays, starting with finishing Dungeon Siege 2 of course. I will do Broken World and Dungeon Siege 3 before I move on to other series, but I'm not sure what I'd like to do yet. I'm thinking it's between Half Life, Torchlight (Blind) and Diablo 1. I'm leaning mostly towards Torchlight because I haven't done a completely blind LP. I'm not counting Legends of Aranna, Broken World or Dungeon Keeper 1 (another YouTube account) because each one of those was done with a great deal of knowledge of the game beforehand or I had played a bit. All I know about Torchlight is it's a lot like Diablo (which makes sense because it's made by the same people who worked on the first two Diablo games). Regardless, if there are any suggestions on what I should do or which games to look at next, I'm all ears. There's always new ways for me to fail at gaming!

Anyway, recording and video editing can be a lot of work, but I enjoy it and I need an excuse not to do my work at school...I mean...

BATMAN

I'm back, and I have stuff recorded...I just have to extract my desktop from beneath layers of paper, sawdust and shit from my closet. In the meantime, I was sent this:

WHEEEEEE

Made me laugh and pretty much outlines the majority of the plot holes I picked out myself.

Act 3 will be started tonight in all likelihood.