Annotated Update: I Swear This is Going to Happen

Aaaaaaand hello.

Just a few updates while things are moving along. Last week, I posted the intro video on YouTube. It's still a little rough and could probably use some polishing, but I needed the thing to see see some daylight for my own sake. It's been a few months since I started this whole thing in earnest, and it's discouraging not to have much to show for it after a long stretch. I mean, I'm certainly fine playing Castlevania games whenever I get a free moment, but after a while, it was starting to feel like I made this whole thing up as an excuse to sit around and play a bunch of Castlevania games (again, not the worst thing).

Now, I get that having this crudely edited video on the internet without context seems kind of dumb, so I've been working as quickly as I can to get an actual first video up by (hopefully) this weekend.

Of course, there have been snags:

First, I decided I was going to hook up that magically little Elgato to my PlayStation 2 to get Symphony footage from that. Nope. I'm running the PS2 off of component cables, which isn't normally a bad thing if we're trying to grab footage from, say Vice City, Stella Deus, or any other rando PS2 game. The problem is that the console downsizes the resolution automatically when you plug in a PSOne disk, which the component cables can't (or won't) properly send through the Elgato. Normal composite cables would do the trick, but A: I don't have them anymore, B: I want my PS2 games look as saucy as they can on the beautiful mountain of a TV it's hooked into, and C: there isn't a chance in hell that I would go looking for some at this point, especially if money is involved.

No problem! I have a PlayStation 3, which is spectacular in that all PS3s natively play PSOne games, and they naturally upscales them to wondrous effect. But this Elgato, though, was given to me second hand (read: bestowed upon me not unlike from on high. I can't complain) and without the appropriate PS3 cable. I tried just hooking in the PS2's component cables, but couldn't get them to properly work. I didn't want to do it, but I wound up nagging the guy that gave it to me to dig around his parents' house for the PS3 chord, because it would have cost close to another $20 with shipping to get a new one. Nuts to that.

This minor setback has been solved, thank goodness. The dude found the cable and dropped it off the other night, and the PS2 components would have worked fine if I would have just been smart enough to properly configure them, so the only real "problem" here was my own idiocy.

But let's keep that trend going for snag #2 --the voice recording. Over the weekend, I decided to record the VO for the first script, which covers the moment you turn the game on through the entrance to the Alchemy Laboratory (which is still pushing 15 minutes!). Now, I solved all of my dialog recording problems about two weeks ago, so I sat down, freewheeled an intro speech that will run like a teaser before each episode, and the pulled up the first script. There were a few stumbles, sure, but that could be easily edited out. But no, this whole thing needs to get recorded again after some extensive audio surgery last night. I suppose you could blame the vodka for this, but again the real problem here was me. (Lesson: only record your voice drunk for podcasts).

Snag #3 has to do with making a better title card and an appropriate background for the videos so you're not staring into the fringes of a black abyss while they're playing. I'll get to that later today on my way through snag #4...B roll...

...Which is the worst.

I knew it was going to be tedious, but that's part of what will hopefully make the whole thing special. I want to source video from other people as little as possible for this project, which means that I need to do a lot of side stuff in Symphony (and a few other games). And, by a lot, I mean a lot. Busting out of the castle. Showing off all of the weapons with special moves. Glitching into the grate right underneath the castle entrance (ok, that one might get pulled from someone else's YouTube). It's a big job.

But that's the point.

I swear to whatever god you may or may not believe in, I'm going to get a fucking video up this weekend.

Annotated Update

So, I made this big statement about this big plan and it's turned into a big, big job. But I saw that coming, so it's ok. Really, though, it's turned into just a little more work than I anticipated, but for the amount of work I thought it would be in the first place, a "little more" really just pushes this from a massive undertaking to a super massive undertaking.

You know what the problem is? Castlevania games, that's what. I thought I'd replay the ones that I know just to get a refresher and capture good footage from them. Then I figured that I'd play some of the ones I skipped to make sure I didn't miss anything that may have been referenced in Symphony. Then I realized that if that's going to be the case, I need to play everything from every platform that came out before 1997 just in case. The point of this whole exercise is to be thorough, so I, you know, need to be thorough.

On the plus side, a very generous friend of mine set me up with legit a copy of Sony Vegas, which is a very easy editing program to use, though it's a fairly old version of the software. After a little tinkering, I'm a lot more confident in my original vision for the videos with as little compromising as possible. But there have still been some hurdles. I'm struggling to use my rudimentary pixel art skill to make a title card for the whole thing based on the actual Symphony title screen (meaning GIMPed into the actual Symphony title screen). I took a good swing at it a week ago and it needs a whole lot more work than I've been able to put in so far, so if anything holds the whole endeavor back, it could be that.

Second, I'm doing all of this --all of the video capture, all of the editing, all of the sound recording, etc.-- on my laptop. It's only about a year old and has a nice amount of muscle to it, but this thing was not built for the task I'm asking it to perform. Do me a quick favor and silently pray for it's endurance over the next few months.

Update's over. Time to finally play Kid Dracula.