So, I went and made a YouTube channel again for some reason or another and have uploaded a single video: A longplay of Machinarium. Completed in 1 sitting with no commentary or other fancy business, just straight gameplay. For reasons beyond my comprehension I recorded the 2hr, 23min video at 1080p leaving me with a 200GB video file though by some miracle I managed to shrink it down to a 981MB 720p file before uploading.

Bought the season on a whim, played a few hours of the free weekend on Steam. Here's a few words of what I think so far.

 

The Species:

Castithan- Though not very "Alien", the appearance and culture are intriguing to say the least.

Indogene- Terrible make-up and nothing particularly interesting about their behavior. Do not like.

Irathient- Good make-up, dig the red hair.

Human- I don't even want to know what sick mind thought up these abominations.

 

The Characters:

Nolan- A somewhat generic gunslinging rogue. I can see him being quite likeable once the writers give him a personality.

Irisa- Her writing and some of the scenarios she's put in are awkward, but the character has potential.

Kenya- Generic prostitute. Not very likeable.

Amanda- I don't like her lines, how she delivers them or really the character at all.

Datak- Probably the most interesting and sympathetic character of the bunch.

Stahma- She gives a Lady McBeth vibe. Good stuff there.

 

The Game:

There were 4 hours left of the free weekend and I tired of it in one. It may get better later on, though I can't imagine it being worth the tedium. GW2 was fantastic from the first. No excuses.

 

Conclusion:

The writing's kinda bad and the plots uninteresting, but it still manages to amuse from time to time. Up until episode 6 I wanted my money back though I'm warming up to it now. The game can go eat a pony as far as I'm concerned.

By now I've made it abundantly clear to myself that I can't design worth beans (beans, I tell you!). So instead, I made a purple square. I call it Squrple*. Brilliant.

.

.

.

.

.

*pronounced skwer-puhl

Squrple is a property of miriPlays and respective subsidiaries. By reading this post you relinquish the rights to your pets, your wife and any children she has now or will bear. miriPlays is not responsible for transportation of goods or any damage that takes place therein. Standard rates apply. 

Just got out of the hospital after an issue with medication. I'm still getting back in the swing of things and may stop by every now and then to blog or something.

Everything is going wrong. Won't be visiting GS as much and my YT channel is going dark until it's all worked out.

My logo is my desktop wallpaper

In my defense, it used to be solid gray and the logo was just to break up the... solid grayness.

Miri Plays a Game EP2: "We can rebuild him. We have the technology." It's pretty embarassing, really. Aside from me being my typical, innocent self, I apparently can't read worth beans.

For the "music videos", at least -I'm still working on a process for straight gameplay videos. It's a little long-winded and erratic.

TheIdea

First, I listen to a few songs until I get an image in my head, then I try to find a context for the image. For example, "First Night" Started at the 1:00 mark; the series of notes made me think of sunset for some reason. From there I had the idea of scenes of struggling during the night as the sun set, but after realizing that the portion of the song I wanted was 1:00 in, I needed to get some footage up to that point so I finally settled on depicting someone (my cocoapanda) starting out in Minecraft, gathering supplies and trying to survive the first night.

TheRecording

I record scenes out of order depending on what's easiest or what's clearer in my mind. This is made much easier by Minecraft's "time set" command, so I can record a day scene, a night scene, and another day scene without waiting around or feeling as though I'm on a time limit to do everything I need to do. A few quirks with doing it like this, though, I that you'll notice my tool durability is all over the place -in early scenes, they're worn and in later, they're untouched because I had recorded those first. At least I was able to keep a logical flow of what was in my inventory.

TheEditing

This is the hard part. On the first pass, I import the music and dozens of clips, put them in the timeline and try to figure out a good sequence of events (I may actually still be recording at this point) and cropping scenes to get a feel of how long they should be so that it's in time with the music. Second, I clear the timeline and try to stack up the clips with a reasonable length that stops at certain points in the song. Next I go back and add some transitions and crop the clips a bit so that it still syncs before adding filters and effects at key points. Finally, I export the video, re-import it and layer in a few more effects, though sometimes that needs to happen earlier in the process.

The whole process takes about 8-12 hours. Despite having all this worked out, I've yet to get it right once, be it my buggy preview window that makes timing transitions nigh impossible or like with "First Night" where I forgot to export and re-import at a certain point in the process so some of the filters weren't baked into the video and triggered when they shouldn't have. Because I forgot that step, it took only 6 hours, but if I had started over and done it right, it would have taken well over 12. That being said, I think I may give the "music videos" a break and see what I can do with the gameplay as the focus.

So, I'm a Google user because I like the way information is presented and I think the results are closer to what I'm looking for. I've tried Bing for a while in the past, but ended up going back to Google for the aforementioned reasons. But after seeing Bing's blind "taste test", I couldn't help but see if my preference of Google was just me imagining things. The results were rather telling:

In short, no.

EDIT: I did it again! Who learned me how to count?!

P.S. The competition involved making 5 searches and choosing between two anonymized lists of results for each based on which you preferred. (Emphasis: Only search results were compared)

Here it is. The editing's pretty sloppy, but I think it's pretty good considering the preview window was glitchy.