Demon's Souls, amiright?
DAY 2: This is going to fast
I left this out of the first post because things were getting a little lengthy, but after three hours playing (still sick on the couch), I found that I remembered a whole lot more about this game than I thought. The roll move in DS as well as early game magic spells have gotten a rep in the community for being fairly overpowered, something later games have since addressed. But once I fit back into that old suit and began running through levels, this knowledge came right back to me like I was getting my ass to Mars. Enemies --nearly all humanoid-- in 1-1, can't handle the starting Soul Arrow spell that the royalty class comes packed with, so even though I slid right back into the old habits of melee attacking most things, when life was low and mobs got hairy, one-shotting enemies with low level sorcery almost made me feel guilty about how I was steamrolling this early level. Almost.
The royalty comes equipped with some weak armor to counterbalance the unfair offensive output, which means that I'll drop dead if a larger monster so much as gives me a funny look. But 1-1, the first level of the Boletarian Palace and the actual tutorial of the game, was easily overwhelmed with these weaksauce duds and the rush of old memories regarding the level layout. Enemies came and went, Red Eyed knights left alone and a noble NPC saved, and the first boss was stomped on with a handful of firebombs and some turpentine. Everything felt good and right.
Now was the time for follow through. Demon's Souls is a game that greatly benefits from a carefully formulated plan, and its discretely separated levels and the rewards/ hazards therein can be tackled in more advantages manners depending on what kind of character you want to build. Want to swing heavy weapons? Next stop: Stonefang Tunnel and their copious forging items. Feeling devout and miraculous? Better head over to the Shrine of Storms to bust out Saint Urbain and learn some higher-level prayers. Scheming that magic was my weapon of choice, I knew that I had to go through the Tower of Latria, affectionately known as 3-1, but the learned player needs not be so dogmatic; there are strong weapons strewn about a many environments that can give a big boost in the early game, it just takes a little forethought and a lot of guts to go get them. For me, then, running into the first section of the Shrine of Storms (4-1) was worth the trouble to grab a sword that scaled with my magic stats vs. the normal stuff that bumps in effectiveness via Strength or Dexterity. I felt that it was worthwhile to just tough it out and finish the level now that I was swinging a melee weapon that doubled my damage output, and then there I was. Two down.
The Tower of Latria was a pushover, then, irrespective how lost I get every time I play it. But the point wasn't to finish the level, it was to meet Sage Freke, a high-level magic instructor. But getting him out of the the level and back to my Nexus hub world meant that you've run the entirety of the level anyway, so killing the boss became an easy bit of side work. Three levels done. This is going easier than I thought.
Car doors closed. I could hear them through the thick brick walls of my house as the sound traveled past old windows that still need to be replaced, the thud of my wife's wide swing slamming the back passenger side shut with a toddler in her arm. I come to, the fugue of replaying this game snapping. Had I seen too much too soon? Am I going to destroy this game? Do I need to start thinking of another character (and maybe one named after a more poignant album title?)? I'll need to stop today, and this was as good a place as ever to do it. I probably wouldn't need to be so concerned, though.
We'll talk about that tomorrow.
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Friday, February 2, 2018
The Demon's Souls Farewell Tour DAY 1
So, the day after I announce to myself and the gaping black void that is the internet that I'll try to resurrect a February blog-a-day, I skip the first day. In fairness, I got sick yesterday and could only muster sitting on the couch for several hours before going to bed.
This is ironic, actually.
The real reason I'm doing this is because Demon's Souls --maybe the best video game of the last ten years-- will have its servers shut off on February 28. I have an intense personal connection to this game, and while it will still be playable in an offline capacity after the end of this month, it will be a different, almost hollow experience. Effectively, Demon's Souls will be a husk of its former self; it's ability to connect to other players for eerie, otherwordly multiplayer opportunities stripped away will lobotomize it. I have been contracted by USGamer.net (a website I contribute to and that you should read) to witness the surgery.
Like all articles I write on the internet for money, I began to have a small panic attack about it. I've written a lot about this game in the past as well as its successors, and a whole lot of other people have done the same. Demon's, and especially its follow up, Dark Souls, were born into a screaming YouTube age where whole careers have been made out of people dissecting them, and it's hard at this stage to have something new to add. I could rehash a terrible year of my life and how I used the game as a perverse coping mechanism, but that's already been done, too. But I have things in me about this video game that need to get out, even though I'm having a little trouble finding them at what is now its twilight.
I have concluded, then, that we're going to find them together.
DAY 1 (February 1, 2018):
It has been more than five years, or maybe more, since I've played this game, which is a realization that came to me early in the morning before I would have a chance to sit down and play it. To some, and definitely when I try to look back on it, five years is no time at all. In video game release terms, though, five years is more like ten. Three Dark Souls and a Bloodborne later, I was wondering yesterday morning how much I would recollect about DS. There was a time that I literally knew the game backward; I played it once this way just to see every level from every angle. But after doing the same with the first two Dark Souls games (plus, you know, playing other video games because that's my thing), I had both a lingering fear and childish delight that maybe I won't be coming back to it from scratch, but I won't recall as much as I would have a year or two or three ago.
So, I began to plan ahead, but without spending the morning looking through wikis or message boards. What build should I make for my character? Most playthroughs for me were hybrid melee concoctions, so should I branch out? What about an archer? A priest? Will I have enough time to finish the game in the month that I have with fewer and fewer hours in the day? I can't mess with that when I have a deadline looming. I decide to compromise, then: I only played a magic build once, but I'm too much of a chicken to start with the mage class. I chose to start with the royalty class (essentially, the game's only sort of "easy" mode).
This was only the first of many small-potatoes agonies, though. While it's the first time I've played the game in years, it will likely be the last time I play it ever. It needed to be momentous, almost monolithic. As the only game in the series that had gender-specific equipment, I wondered if I should make an avatar that resembled me physically --a bald, blue-eyed man with an athletic physique-- or should I take a more feminine course to enjoy the few advantages the game will offer me? Feeling the crunch of time as I nursed my illness on the couch, I chose the latter. But it got worse when I was instructed to choose my character's name, which gave me actual pause.
Choosing the name of an on-screen avatar is not the sort of thing to make a person pensively stare at a wall for close to ten minutes in total silence. Typically, it barely registers as an afterthought for me. I could go the wacky, funny route, my "Doc Brown"s and "Butfface Magoo"s running around and terrorizing hapless demons and crazed soldiers in the Boletarian Palace with reckless, fluid impunity. On the other hand, there have been times when I realize that names have been effectively meaningless as a practice. I am the title-free savior of this wretched Northern kingdom, strolling in and out of tunnels and mines dishing out the kind of No-Name justice that would make Clint Eastwood blush. But this time, this final stretch, needed to mean something. I need to capture that finality. I settle on "Dynamite Step," the title of the last Twilight Singer's record. She ventured into the colorless fog, and I played through the tutorial.
This is my fifth PlayStation 3, I think. Over the course of the last decade or so, these small supercomputers had a habit of dying in my home. This is something that has always bothered me, as you might guess. I tend to take care of my belongings, and I fucking babied these things over the years, but foul luck or cosmic injustice decided that they needed to die at my feet every other year or so. This meant that saved data is long gone for old characters (the first one died before my buying into PS+ and cloud saves), which meant that the game was going to force me through the tutorial, which can normally be skipped. I didn't mind, though. The mechanics of a Souls game is branded onto my inner being now, but I don't think I've gone through the trouble of letting the game teach me how it worked or watch the brief intro story sequence since my early days with it. It felt right to start from the beginning, this joke of an opening area. I even tried my hand at killing the Vanguard Demon at the end. That didn't turn out how I wanted, though, and I was really getting the sense that I was right to be concerned. Going through the game again after all of these was going to be a rough ride, and I would see that no matter how much I may have loved this game, and how much it helped me through the hard times, Demon's Souls knows no loyalty.
Turns out, I was wrong all along. We'll talk about that tomorrow.
This is ironic, actually.
The real reason I'm doing this is because Demon's Souls --maybe the best video game of the last ten years-- will have its servers shut off on February 28. I have an intense personal connection to this game, and while it will still be playable in an offline capacity after the end of this month, it will be a different, almost hollow experience. Effectively, Demon's Souls will be a husk of its former self; it's ability to connect to other players for eerie, otherwordly multiplayer opportunities stripped away will lobotomize it. I have been contracted by USGamer.net (a website I contribute to and that you should read) to witness the surgery.
Like all articles I write on the internet for money, I began to have a small panic attack about it. I've written a lot about this game in the past as well as its successors, and a whole lot of other people have done the same. Demon's, and especially its follow up, Dark Souls, were born into a screaming YouTube age where whole careers have been made out of people dissecting them, and it's hard at this stage to have something new to add. I could rehash a terrible year of my life and how I used the game as a perverse coping mechanism, but that's already been done, too. But I have things in me about this video game that need to get out, even though I'm having a little trouble finding them at what is now its twilight.
I have concluded, then, that we're going to find them together.
DAY 1 (February 1, 2018):
It has been more than five years, or maybe more, since I've played this game, which is a realization that came to me early in the morning before I would have a chance to sit down and play it. To some, and definitely when I try to look back on it, five years is no time at all. In video game release terms, though, five years is more like ten. Three Dark Souls and a Bloodborne later, I was wondering yesterday morning how much I would recollect about DS. There was a time that I literally knew the game backward; I played it once this way just to see every level from every angle. But after doing the same with the first two Dark Souls games (plus, you know, playing other video games because that's my thing), I had both a lingering fear and childish delight that maybe I won't be coming back to it from scratch, but I won't recall as much as I would have a year or two or three ago.
So, I began to plan ahead, but without spending the morning looking through wikis or message boards. What build should I make for my character? Most playthroughs for me were hybrid melee concoctions, so should I branch out? What about an archer? A priest? Will I have enough time to finish the game in the month that I have with fewer and fewer hours in the day? I can't mess with that when I have a deadline looming. I decide to compromise, then: I only played a magic build once, but I'm too much of a chicken to start with the mage class. I chose to start with the royalty class (essentially, the game's only sort of "easy" mode).
This was only the first of many small-potatoes agonies, though. While it's the first time I've played the game in years, it will likely be the last time I play it ever. It needed to be momentous, almost monolithic. As the only game in the series that had gender-specific equipment, I wondered if I should make an avatar that resembled me physically --a bald, blue-eyed man with an athletic physique-- or should I take a more feminine course to enjoy the few advantages the game will offer me? Feeling the crunch of time as I nursed my illness on the couch, I chose the latter. But it got worse when I was instructed to choose my character's name, which gave me actual pause.
Choosing the name of an on-screen avatar is not the sort of thing to make a person pensively stare at a wall for close to ten minutes in total silence. Typically, it barely registers as an afterthought for me. I could go the wacky, funny route, my "Doc Brown"s and "Butfface Magoo"s running around and terrorizing hapless demons and crazed soldiers in the Boletarian Palace with reckless, fluid impunity. On the other hand, there have been times when I realize that names have been effectively meaningless as a practice. I am the title-free savior of this wretched Northern kingdom, strolling in and out of tunnels and mines dishing out the kind of No-Name justice that would make Clint Eastwood blush. But this time, this final stretch, needed to mean something. I need to capture that finality. I settle on "Dynamite Step," the title of the last Twilight Singer's record. She ventured into the colorless fog, and I played through the tutorial.
This is my fifth PlayStation 3, I think. Over the course of the last decade or so, these small supercomputers had a habit of dying in my home. This is something that has always bothered me, as you might guess. I tend to take care of my belongings, and I fucking babied these things over the years, but foul luck or cosmic injustice decided that they needed to die at my feet every other year or so. This meant that saved data is long gone for old characters (the first one died before my buying into PS+ and cloud saves), which meant that the game was going to force me through the tutorial, which can normally be skipped. I didn't mind, though. The mechanics of a Souls game is branded onto my inner being now, but I don't think I've gone through the trouble of letting the game teach me how it worked or watch the brief intro story sequence since my early days with it. It felt right to start from the beginning, this joke of an opening area. I even tried my hand at killing the Vanguard Demon at the end. That didn't turn out how I wanted, though, and I was really getting the sense that I was right to be concerned. Going through the game again after all of these was going to be a rough ride, and I would see that no matter how much I may have loved this game, and how much it helped me through the hard times, Demon's Souls knows no loyalty.
Turns out, I was wrong all along. We'll talk about that tomorrow.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
It's the End of January
Today is January 31. Not a remarkable day, really; it's the last day of the first month of the year, just about the end of the pro football season but before baseball, cold enough that I never want to go outside, and yet just close enough to spring that I can start lusting for warm weather. So, January 31 sucks.
In year's past, though, it was the day before the "blog a day" month. Back in the old days when blogs were still kind of a thing and websites gave their users tools to share their thoughts outside of simply comments and tweets (and, in a way, do some of their content-baking work for them), the 1up.com community universally agreed that February would be used for dumping out your brain on the internet every day. Like an unofficial NaNoWriMo for the nerd set, it was challenging enough that you needed to start getting creative with the work you were putting out there, but since it was the shortest month of the year, the commitment wasn't very overwhelming (even though we're only talking two or three extra days here). Of course, I never made it all the way through the month myself.
Long story short, I'm going to give it the old college try again starting tomorrow. I haven't really gotten a chance to write on this blog for a while, and I basically pivoted what I was doing over the last year and a half to the Annotated Symphony of the Night project, so even the stuff I was writing was devoted to a specific thing. I miss it, I suppose. Writing took something of a back seat since starting the video stuff, even though there was still script writing to take care of and various freelance projects that come and go. Writing for myself, though, wasn't even on the radar. I think the February tradition of a blog a day is inherently pure and good insomuch that writing for yourself is the same, so let's give it another shot this year.
Plus, I have a freelance piece on deadline for the beginning of March, and this will get me back into fighting shape. Fair warning, the next month will probably all be centered around a few central themes, so it might not be as freewheeling. I think you'll like it, though.
In year's past, though, it was the day before the "blog a day" month. Back in the old days when blogs were still kind of a thing and websites gave their users tools to share their thoughts outside of simply comments and tweets (and, in a way, do some of their content-baking work for them), the 1up.com community universally agreed that February would be used for dumping out your brain on the internet every day. Like an unofficial NaNoWriMo for the nerd set, it was challenging enough that you needed to start getting creative with the work you were putting out there, but since it was the shortest month of the year, the commitment wasn't very overwhelming (even though we're only talking two or three extra days here). Of course, I never made it all the way through the month myself.
Long story short, I'm going to give it the old college try again starting tomorrow. I haven't really gotten a chance to write on this blog for a while, and I basically pivoted what I was doing over the last year and a half to the Annotated Symphony of the Night project, so even the stuff I was writing was devoted to a specific thing. I miss it, I suppose. Writing took something of a back seat since starting the video stuff, even though there was still script writing to take care of and various freelance projects that come and go. Writing for myself, though, wasn't even on the radar. I think the February tradition of a blog a day is inherently pure and good insomuch that writing for yourself is the same, so let's give it another shot this year.
Plus, I have a freelance piece on deadline for the beginning of March, and this will get me back into fighting shape. Fair warning, the next month will probably all be centered around a few central themes, so it might not be as freewheeling. I think you'll like it, though.
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Monday, October 16, 2017
Annotated Appendix: Finale
So here we are.
For the final episode, I actually had much grander plans for how the last few minutes would play: a montage of Richter Mode with the "thank you!" voice over. But, oddly, I had tons of time between the endings playing out and I Am The Wind's interminable running length. In an effort to keep this episode to a respectable running time, I thought the montage would be overkill, so I scrapped it in favor of tightening things up. See? You guys told me that you didn't like silence, so I kept it to a minimum.
It tugs at me, though, that the finale of the video series winds up with I Am the Wind, but it just doesn't make sense to elongate the episode. Sorry if you may have found it slightly anticlimactic, but I hope you understand the reasoning now. If anything, this is the only episode where I wished I had more to talk about. Maybe it was just the grieving process for it ending starting to take hold or something, but I really wracked my brain (and my notes) to include anything else I possibly could, but everything left was stuff obviously read in-game (like how large the dev team was, which is clearly indicated in the credits that you would be watching).
And there we have it. One major project in the books. To answer some questions that I've gotten about this all happened, here's...
How Some of the Sausage Was Made, Part 1
The voice recording was done with a Blue Snowball microphone. I have a friend that freelances as a voice actor and some other pals that podcast, and they unanimously recommended it to me for the quality it delivers at the price it sells for. It really did a hell of a job for a USB mic, and I can't say enough good things about it. I'm sure I could have done more research and found something better, but I'm not an audio engineer, so it was perfect for me.
I recorded all of the voice overs using Audacity, which is a freeware program that anybody can download and use. At first, I found it kind of obtuse, but since I wasn't really doing anything super fancy with it other than recording, editing, and then exporting into .mp3 format, it did the job. I would generally write a script first and then edit it a bit (not a lot, which is a flaw of mine that other editors probably hate about me) before launching into the recording, and then I would edit the recording immediately after. The recording process probably took a little over an hour per episode based on how many mistakes I made that needed to be corrected. I'm not a professional narrator or anything, but I've taken a handful of acting classes when I was in college (English majors could do that as electives, you see), and recalled some of the golden rules when I needed them most. The best, in this case was "slow down," because, like everyone else, the faster you do things the more likely they are to turn out rough, and this includes reading a script that you wrote yourself.
Generally, after editing the sound, I would walk my laptop over to my PlayStation 3 and jump right into the game footage capture, which was done using an Elgato Game Capture HD and Elgato's capture software. This was generously loaned to me by a friend, and not a moment too soon. At first, as I was trying to do this whole thing on a budget and decided to simply emulate everything. The problem is that I'm using a laptop that's a little more than three years old now, and wasn't even close to top of the line when I bought it. Though I was still using a disk to play Symphony using ePSXe, the frame rate would drop at very inconvenient times, and after doing a test run of the game, I just knew in my guts that it would be compromised if I did the final videos this way. Thanks to the good will of a good pal, the Symphony footage in the series was taken off of a PS3.
Everything else you see is emulated, though. Even though I own all of these game in one form or another (except one of them. No, I won't tell you which) (ok, it's Kid Dracula) (Kid Dracula sucks), I didn't have the Elgato handy during the early research period, and found it best to just download roms off of the internet. At first, though, I still didn't have a clear idea how to capture the footage. After a little research, I settled on FRAPS, which is a free software specifically for game capture, but a small fee gives you a few extra bells and whistles, as well as the removal of a FRAPS watermark on every video. It may sound kind of snobby, but having a billboard for computer programs all over most of my videos was not something I was happy about, so I spent the $37 on the full version of the program.
This is where things get stupid, though. When the laptop was new, it was loaded with the horrendous Windows 8 with the promise of a free update to 10 sooner than later. Since I never wanted to deal with 8, I never did a lot of experimenting with it, and when 10 finally came, I had no idea that the on board Xbox software had native video capturing, so most of the older games and side bits of Symphony were captured using that when I finally realized it was there. FRAPS was still useful, though, as some things didn't play nicely with the Xbox software, so the money was still well spent.
Lucky for me, though, I never throw anything out, and boxes full of old-ish stuff really helped me save a bunch of cash on this. A few years ago, a friend of mine gave me his old PlayStation 2 (I had traded up for a backward compatible PS3 when they were new. When it died a noble death, I was stuck with a mountain of unplayable PS2 games for years), but with a busted controller. I went ahead and hunted down an OEM PS2 controller, and just happened to have a USB adapter for it that I had bought on a work trip to Cincinnati when I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII on my work laptop (maybe around 2008? I can't remember). As my wife and I are people with thousands of compact disks sitting digitized on a hard drive, we looked slightly ahead and bought a 1TB external drive to back everything up a few years ago, and this is where all of the captured video was stored.
All of the video editing was done using Sony Vegas Pro 11, which is now a pretty old version of the program. This was also gifted to me by the friend with the Elgato, and it took some work to get it to do what I envisioned with this series. The learning curve was steep, but not as bad as it would have been without YouTube and the ocean of tutorials on it. I've come to find later that while SVP may not be as ubiquitous in the editing community as the Adobe suite of products, it worked great. I've also found that it's very affordable for what it can do (at least, for what I used it for), so it gets the thumbs up from me.
Finally, yes, I was using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas just after my 18th birthday. It will never leave my possession if I'm still of sound mind.
Tomorrow, I'll post what is a photographic tour of how this all came together.
Thanks again for watching!
For the final episode, I actually had much grander plans for how the last few minutes would play: a montage of Richter Mode with the "thank you!" voice over. But, oddly, I had tons of time between the endings playing out and I Am The Wind's interminable running length. In an effort to keep this episode to a respectable running time, I thought the montage would be overkill, so I scrapped it in favor of tightening things up. See? You guys told me that you didn't like silence, so I kept it to a minimum.
It tugs at me, though, that the finale of the video series winds up with I Am the Wind, but it just doesn't make sense to elongate the episode. Sorry if you may have found it slightly anticlimactic, but I hope you understand the reasoning now. If anything, this is the only episode where I wished I had more to talk about. Maybe it was just the grieving process for it ending starting to take hold or something, but I really wracked my brain (and my notes) to include anything else I possibly could, but everything left was stuff obviously read in-game (like how large the dev team was, which is clearly indicated in the credits that you would be watching).
And there we have it. One major project in the books. To answer some questions that I've gotten about this all happened, here's...
How Some of the Sausage Was Made, Part 1
The voice recording was done with a Blue Snowball microphone. I have a friend that freelances as a voice actor and some other pals that podcast, and they unanimously recommended it to me for the quality it delivers at the price it sells for. It really did a hell of a job for a USB mic, and I can't say enough good things about it. I'm sure I could have done more research and found something better, but I'm not an audio engineer, so it was perfect for me.
I recorded all of the voice overs using Audacity, which is a freeware program that anybody can download and use. At first, I found it kind of obtuse, but since I wasn't really doing anything super fancy with it other than recording, editing, and then exporting into .mp3 format, it did the job. I would generally write a script first and then edit it a bit (not a lot, which is a flaw of mine that other editors probably hate about me) before launching into the recording, and then I would edit the recording immediately after. The recording process probably took a little over an hour per episode based on how many mistakes I made that needed to be corrected. I'm not a professional narrator or anything, but I've taken a handful of acting classes when I was in college (English majors could do that as electives, you see), and recalled some of the golden rules when I needed them most. The best, in this case was "slow down," because, like everyone else, the faster you do things the more likely they are to turn out rough, and this includes reading a script that you wrote yourself.
Generally, after editing the sound, I would walk my laptop over to my PlayStation 3 and jump right into the game footage capture, which was done using an Elgato Game Capture HD and Elgato's capture software. This was generously loaned to me by a friend, and not a moment too soon. At first, as I was trying to do this whole thing on a budget and decided to simply emulate everything. The problem is that I'm using a laptop that's a little more than three years old now, and wasn't even close to top of the line when I bought it. Though I was still using a disk to play Symphony using ePSXe, the frame rate would drop at very inconvenient times, and after doing a test run of the game, I just knew in my guts that it would be compromised if I did the final videos this way. Thanks to the good will of a good pal, the Symphony footage in the series was taken off of a PS3.
Everything else you see is emulated, though. Even though I own all of these game in one form or another (except one of them. No, I won't tell you which) (ok, it's Kid Dracula) (Kid Dracula sucks), I didn't have the Elgato handy during the early research period, and found it best to just download roms off of the internet. At first, though, I still didn't have a clear idea how to capture the footage. After a little research, I settled on FRAPS, which is a free software specifically for game capture, but a small fee gives you a few extra bells and whistles, as well as the removal of a FRAPS watermark on every video. It may sound kind of snobby, but having a billboard for computer programs all over most of my videos was not something I was happy about, so I spent the $37 on the full version of the program.
This is where things get stupid, though. When the laptop was new, it was loaded with the horrendous Windows 8 with the promise of a free update to 10 sooner than later. Since I never wanted to deal with 8, I never did a lot of experimenting with it, and when 10 finally came, I had no idea that the on board Xbox software had native video capturing, so most of the older games and side bits of Symphony were captured using that when I finally realized it was there. FRAPS was still useful, though, as some things didn't play nicely with the Xbox software, so the money was still well spent.
Lucky for me, though, I never throw anything out, and boxes full of old-ish stuff really helped me save a bunch of cash on this. A few years ago, a friend of mine gave me his old PlayStation 2 (I had traded up for a backward compatible PS3 when they were new. When it died a noble death, I was stuck with a mountain of unplayable PS2 games for years), but with a busted controller. I went ahead and hunted down an OEM PS2 controller, and just happened to have a USB adapter for it that I had bought on a work trip to Cincinnati when I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII on my work laptop (maybe around 2008? I can't remember). As my wife and I are people with thousands of compact disks sitting digitized on a hard drive, we looked slightly ahead and bought a 1TB external drive to back everything up a few years ago, and this is where all of the captured video was stored.
All of the video editing was done using Sony Vegas Pro 11, which is now a pretty old version of the program. This was also gifted to me by the friend with the Elgato, and it took some work to get it to do what I envisioned with this series. The learning curve was steep, but not as bad as it would have been without YouTube and the ocean of tutorials on it. I've come to find later that while SVP may not be as ubiquitous in the editing community as the Adobe suite of products, it worked great. I've also found that it's very affordable for what it can do (at least, for what I used it for), so it gets the thumbs up from me.
Finally, yes, I was using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas just after my 18th birthday. It will never leave my possession if I'm still of sound mind.
Tomorrow, I'll post what is a photographic tour of how this all came together.
Thanks again for watching!
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Annotated Appendix: The Cave and Floating Catacombs
Close to the end, now. We're almost there!
Unlike this Appendix entry, I thought this episode would be a challenge to make, but it came out pretty quickly. EXCEPT when I did a test run of the areas and saved the game without recording anything. Yes, boneheaded move, and yes, it happened before. I had a backup run at what I thought was the same spot, but found that I needed to bum rush a good chunk of the game to get back to the point of recording. So, if any of you detect something off about the weapon loadout, HP count, and conspicuously absent number of relics that briefly appear on the list, this is why. A little bit of sausage-making for you. I was even still equipped with the Spike Breaker armor, which you can clearly see when I fly through the specific room in the FC, much to my own surprise (and delight because I would have probably been killed).
Something I forgot to mention: Most Symphony players know this pretty well, but I neglected to point out that by skipping the Death scene and hanging on to the Alucard Shield, the game is shattered the moment you find the Shield Rod. I didn't mention it in the last video, and I didn't bring it up in this one. There. Mea culpa.
Ok, let's talk about the Galamoth fight for a bit. Someone called out in the comments that I did it in a "broken" manner by showing off the use of the Beryl Circlet, the teleport strikes, and the Alucard Shield/ Rod combo all in succession. I suppose that this is a fair point, but I don't think that there's a "right" way of handling this battle as Galamoth is a pretty hard boss and has a stupid amount of hit points. Sure, I suppose you can attack him little and then turn into Mist to avoid the lightning attacks, as was mentioned in the video, but we don't have time to do it that way with his HP count slowly whittling away. Honestly, I thought just going to town on him with the Beryl Circlet equipped would have been enough, but the clock was ticking so I threw in both other methods to get things over with instead of showing side videos of me just steamrolling him, which was the original plan. Incidentally, the first time I killed Galamoth 20 years ago was with teleport strikes and the Osafune Katana. I had the timing down to frames of animation, and in the right mode, could kill him without losing a single point of damage. But that was a long time ago. I never even heard of the Shield Rod combo until I was in my third year of college almost 3 years later, and didn't know about the hidden room with the Beryl Circlet until probably close to the same time. See? Without ubiquitous internet, we just had to fend for ourselves.
Of course, there are also videos floating around YouTube that prove that he can be hit stunned by getting to the ledge behind him and smacking him in the face. I have never tested this myself, but if I can get to it in the next few days, this might be thrown into the final video.
Here's something: Upon re-watching it, I'm also noticing that a speech impediment has formed when I speak quickly. It's weird because I'm a guy that used to basically talk for a living, and I do so relatively fast. I like getting in front of people and rambling, and had a pretty articulate delivery. As I've gotten a little older, though, I'm noticing that I'm starting to stumble with that delivery and mumble a little bit, and these videos have really confirmed this. Probably more than you wanted to know, but these Appendices are just as much for me as they are for you.
So one more to go. Just to temper your expectations now, the next episode should be on the shorter side from the where I'm sitting at the moment. I know that we're at the end, but obviously, there aren't any more new environments to deal with, so there's certainly less to show. That won't mean that it's only going to be the final boss fight and that's it, though, so please look forward to it.
Thanks again for watching.
Unlike this Appendix entry, I thought this episode would be a challenge to make, but it came out pretty quickly. EXCEPT when I did a test run of the areas and saved the game without recording anything. Yes, boneheaded move, and yes, it happened before. I had a backup run at what I thought was the same spot, but found that I needed to bum rush a good chunk of the game to get back to the point of recording. So, if any of you detect something off about the weapon loadout, HP count, and conspicuously absent number of relics that briefly appear on the list, this is why. A little bit of sausage-making for you. I was even still equipped with the Spike Breaker armor, which you can clearly see when I fly through the specific room in the FC, much to my own surprise (and delight because I would have probably been killed).
Something I forgot to mention: Most Symphony players know this pretty well, but I neglected to point out that by skipping the Death scene and hanging on to the Alucard Shield, the game is shattered the moment you find the Shield Rod. I didn't mention it in the last video, and I didn't bring it up in this one. There. Mea culpa.
Ok, let's talk about the Galamoth fight for a bit. Someone called out in the comments that I did it in a "broken" manner by showing off the use of the Beryl Circlet, the teleport strikes, and the Alucard Shield/ Rod combo all in succession. I suppose that this is a fair point, but I don't think that there's a "right" way of handling this battle as Galamoth is a pretty hard boss and has a stupid amount of hit points. Sure, I suppose you can attack him little and then turn into Mist to avoid the lightning attacks, as was mentioned in the video, but we don't have time to do it that way with his HP count slowly whittling away. Honestly, I thought just going to town on him with the Beryl Circlet equipped would have been enough, but the clock was ticking so I threw in both other methods to get things over with instead of showing side videos of me just steamrolling him, which was the original plan. Incidentally, the first time I killed Galamoth 20 years ago was with teleport strikes and the Osafune Katana. I had the timing down to frames of animation, and in the right mode, could kill him without losing a single point of damage. But that was a long time ago. I never even heard of the Shield Rod combo until I was in my third year of college almost 3 years later, and didn't know about the hidden room with the Beryl Circlet until probably close to the same time. See? Without ubiquitous internet, we just had to fend for ourselves.
Of course, there are also videos floating around YouTube that prove that he can be hit stunned by getting to the ledge behind him and smacking him in the face. I have never tested this myself, but if I can get to it in the next few days, this might be thrown into the final video.
Here's something: Upon re-watching it, I'm also noticing that a speech impediment has formed when I speak quickly. It's weird because I'm a guy that used to basically talk for a living, and I do so relatively fast. I like getting in front of people and rambling, and had a pretty articulate delivery. As I've gotten a little older, though, I'm noticing that I'm starting to stumble with that delivery and mumble a little bit, and these videos have really confirmed this. Probably more than you wanted to know, but these Appendices are just as much for me as they are for you.
So one more to go. Just to temper your expectations now, the next episode should be on the shorter side from the where I'm sitting at the moment. I know that we're at the end, but obviously, there aren't any more new environments to deal with, so there's certainly less to show. That won't mean that it's only going to be the final boss fight and that's it, though, so please look forward to it.
Thanks again for watching.
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Annotated Appendix: The Reverse Caverns
Yes, indeed, this is the episode I dreaded making most.
As you'll see in this week's video, there just isn't that much to say about the Reverse (Reverce?) Caverns, and the slow travel and tedious mapping makes for a real slog. Since I've been cobbling together two or three sections of the Inverted Castle, each new episode has been about 20-25 minutes long, and that's kind of lengthy. Knowing that it would take me at least that long to get through this area, though, meant for this section to have it's own unique show, and one that you may find ...uh... kind of boring.
But stick around to the end! All of the really interesting bits are packed into the back half, including two things that I probably should have mentioned: the fact that by skipping the Death encounter at the beginning of the game means that you can essentially break it the moment you acquire the Shield Rod (since you already have the Alucard Shield), and that the wooden bridge that covers the entrance to the Cave magically reappeared at the end of the episode. Thankfully, by leaving the screen and coming back it once again evaporated, but this is a glitch that I had never seen before, and in no way can I recreate it. Since there are several sources on the internet where Iga claims the game is practically held together by Scotch tape and hope, I'm not super shocked to see something like this, but I probably should have busted out the microphone and called it out. Aaaah well.
The good news is that, surprise, this video showed up only a little more than a week or so since the last one. Let's call that a nice side effect of just not having that much going on in this one, but that might be a little reprieve compared to the next two, which should be packed. And yes, there will be two more. I've just decided before writing this that finishing the game in the next episode might be a little too much, and I can use the final battle with Dracula and the credits sequence as a sort of final appendix for stuff that didn't fit anywhere else, like the multiple endings. I know I've said this plenty of times, but I'm writing this on October 3rd, and though there's no specific date that we can refer back to as the actual release of the game in the US, we're in the advent of its 20th anniversary, and that's the end goal. Keep my rickety old laptop and I in your thoughts over the next few weeks.
Thanks again for watching, and enjoy the new video (please).
As you'll see in this week's video, there just isn't that much to say about the Reverse (Reverce?) Caverns, and the slow travel and tedious mapping makes for a real slog. Since I've been cobbling together two or three sections of the Inverted Castle, each new episode has been about 20-25 minutes long, and that's kind of lengthy. Knowing that it would take me at least that long to get through this area, though, meant for this section to have it's own unique show, and one that you may find ...uh... kind of boring.
But stick around to the end! All of the really interesting bits are packed into the back half, including two things that I probably should have mentioned: the fact that by skipping the Death encounter at the beginning of the game means that you can essentially break it the moment you acquire the Shield Rod (since you already have the Alucard Shield), and that the wooden bridge that covers the entrance to the Cave magically reappeared at the end of the episode. Thankfully, by leaving the screen and coming back it once again evaporated, but this is a glitch that I had never seen before, and in no way can I recreate it. Since there are several sources on the internet where Iga claims the game is practically held together by Scotch tape and hope, I'm not super shocked to see something like this, but I probably should have busted out the microphone and called it out. Aaaah well.
The good news is that, surprise, this video showed up only a little more than a week or so since the last one. Let's call that a nice side effect of just not having that much going on in this one, but that might be a little reprieve compared to the next two, which should be packed. And yes, there will be two more. I've just decided before writing this that finishing the game in the next episode might be a little too much, and I can use the final battle with Dracula and the credits sequence as a sort of final appendix for stuff that didn't fit anywhere else, like the multiple endings. I know I've said this plenty of times, but I'm writing this on October 3rd, and though there's no specific date that we can refer back to as the actual release of the game in the US, we're in the advent of its 20th anniversary, and that's the end goal. Keep my rickety old laptop and I in your thoughts over the next few weeks.
Thanks again for watching, and enjoy the new video (please).
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