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.

Myst 3 Released

Not that it's huge interest, but Myst 3 is fully uploaded with edited descriptions and can be found on the channel page under the puzzle games section at the bottom.

Or just...follow this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6zNFlKs3yU&list=PLrqm7hgIicW4opSGLL1WoBPBQ1XoCIKFl

Also started Myst 5 and...I'm uh...not impressed so far, which is really surprising. Going to change some settings and see if it helps some but, yeah. I feel like by going full 3D they uh...kind of dropped the ball a bit. Also I want to punch everyone in the face and there's weird tablets that make me draw with a mouse and I felt like I was playing Dungeon Keeper 2 at first. Captain goggles won't leave me alone and that's part of what made the Myst games so good. There was an underlying feeling of tension and being completely, utterly alone to figure out all the puzzles. Here's there's just an obnoxious guy who follows me around saying he'll give me help and then just beams up to the Starship Enterprise whenever he feels like he's being cryptic.

Also they screwed up a small piece of the story and it bugs me.

At the end of Myst, Atrius is like, thanks for your help but I can't send you home (but have fun poking around a deserted island!). Then in Riven Atrius says that if I help him bring his wife back, then he can potentially get me home (and at the end I may or may not have gotten there?). Then in Myst 5, Yeesha states in her emo journal that I "returned to help save her mother" and I most certainly did not. I was already there and I agreed to do it partially cause I believed I could get home at the end.

Sheesh.

Will keep with it cause...I want to finish the series, but really...

Settled-Ish

I am so close to finishing Sonic 2006, but I rage quit because Silver's part of the final shin-dig makes me slowly die inside.

Also I'm moved into the new place now. There's lots of issues like the shower head needing to be replaced (it was just...drifting to the side when you use it), the bathtub fixed or replaced (it's an old jet tub and shoots out black stuff when you try and use the jets), light fixtures need to be fixed/replaced (the bulbs were all burnt out and like, broke when attempting to replace) and the faucet leaked. Other than that, it's pretty good.

At least the floor is in now.

Video work is slow again due to being too exhausted after moving things, unpacking and trying to fix. Also started a new contracting job, which I'm trying to figure out a comfortable working schedule for.

In either case, uploading has resumed as of today.

I'll try to go through the Extra Life footage and post the good parts soon. Sonic 2006 was part of that sooooo we'll see.

I Have Ink on My Hands

And my pen still isn't working.

Tonight is my last night living in my current residence. While I really like the new place and I'm excited to have the extra space, I feel a little sad sitting in a mostly empty room in a house I likely won't see again. I mostly liked this house and it's given me some great stories, even if they were annoying at the time.

Goodbye streetracers, swing lady, teens getting high in the park, people pooping in cars, people breaking into sheds, people peeping through windows, random cats that arrive and sit on me, Pokemon Go gym, trucks that speed through the dirt alleyway and crash into recycling bins, aggressive borking dogs on the corner and people driving the wrong way down the narrow one-way street after hitting the curb and making their tire explode.

At least no one pooped on my garage (happened to my boss last week).

Anyway...moving to a theoretically quieter neighbourhood. Only concern I have there is there's a good number of old people that might get weird about stuff, but we'll see. Already know that neighbours are watching since I got locked out of the house due to flooring people locking the wrong lock (don't have a key for the one lock) and I tried all the keys given to me like three times and tried them at the back door and then tried to force the doorknob and realizing someone was watching me and then leaving cause I didn't want to explain everything to the police.

This has since been fixed and the doorknob changed, but not before I had to get my grandpa's driver's licence, which was in my grandma's purse for some reason and a permission note from him to open the place...

Sigh.

Video work will continue when I'm settled. For now, been working on releasing Myst 3 (unreleased videos in public playlist on channel), not that people are all that interested in it.