Unfair-Y Tales

Are you guys ready to talk about the future of my channel? I KNOW I AM. That being said, why don't I let you guys in on a project of mine that I've been cooking for quite a while!

Unfair-Y Tales
Status: Incubating -- Will begin sometime after March 4th

This is the first entry I'll be writing about a series that I haven't actually started yet, but there are actually quite a few of these I've got planned out. After I write the blog entries for them, so you can get a feel for them, I'll get to work on the series themselves! Think of these next few entries as the hype train pulling out of the station. TOOT TOOT!

You are probably confused by the title, first of all. That's actually to be expected. This series is not going to be about video games though. 

I know you're probably all like  But! Gimme a chance to explain! As many of you know, I have a girlfriend at the moment, and when this project was dreamed up, I hadn't actually met her family yet. Just about any person that knows me, knows that my family is made up of some of the most dysfunctional people that exist (Myself included). Though my girlfriend went to the same college as me, we didn't actually talk, and never really got to know each other at school. 'Cuz of that, she didn't know most of the stories that almost everyone else around me knew, stories like "There's no Time!" or "That one time I crapped my pants..." I figured that I could let her in on my stories, but also give her family a chance to understand a little bit of where I'm coming from, especially if I come off as a bit more than... eccentric.

The basic gist of these stories will be based on one simple fact. The first thing 99.9% of the people I know say when they meet my family is "How are you, you?" Well, that's actually a pretty easy question to answer. I take my family's actions as a handbook of sorts.  Whatever they do, I do the opposite. That is probably the correct course of action. I don't think that I'll confine this series to just my family, though most of my stories will be about them. A friend of mine gave me the idea to expand, so I might do just that.

Most people will probably be wondering why someone with a gaming channel would want to change up the pace so dramatically. If you know me, I thrive on CHAOS! Okay, that might be a little much, but, in all seriousness, I'm thinking that I can use these stories as a branching off point. It's been suggested to me that I try my hand as a comedian, because I have a knack for storytelling, and my stories almost always end up being inadvertently hilarious. I want to also let other people in on why I am the way I am, especially Liz, who I would like to help get a jump start on learning about me and why I do the things that I do. Lastly, to make it tripartite, it has been brought to my attention that I may in fact find telling the rest of you about my life somewhat cathartic, or even therapeutic. 

                                     Believe me, I could use all the therapy I can get.

Rushing Beat Shura/ルッシュングビート 修羅

I literally just realized as I started to write this blog entry, that I have in fact done a complete playthrough of more than one game. It wasn't just Saints Row the Third, but I have a complete playthrough of Rushing Beat Shura, and I guess to that extent, Knights & Dragons too (Though I think that the version I played was an early release or something, I don't think it's finished)! Anyway, back on topic...

Rushing Beat Shura/ルッシングビート　修羅

Status: On Hold-- Will probably play through Co-Op at some point

One of the things I did when I started to get serious, and also with the help of the legwork I had done in Otaku Hell, was after compiling a list of all the games I have, (THANK YOU BACKLOGGERY FOR HELPING ME DO THIS A LOT EASIER) I went and looked at what games I own that there is almost no footage of on YouTube. That might seem like somewhat vague criteria, so, for me personally, I decided that if a particular game has less than 100 videos in total, then there should probably be more footage of it up there! Not only that, but because I am able to film games that no one else can, it also provides me with a somewhat steady viewership. As of right now, the video that gets the most views for me is one of the games I chose in this manner, and it's of a Beats of Rage mod that there was I think... only one or two other videos of. If you're wondering, that video is Final Fight DC Stage 1 Cody and Haggar. 

Ahh, I'm getting off-topic again! BACK ON TRACK! There are tons and tons of people that do popular games like MineCraft, because they are popular, and hope to get views that way. It's hard when there are literally millions of other people doing the same exact thing to get noticed, so I decided to go about it the exact opposite way. I'd try to put up footage that people can only come to me for. Much easier to get noticed this way, and besides that I also get the chance to spread the word about series and just singular games that a lot of people have never had a chance to encounter before. I am a big fan of beat-em-ups in general, so a lot of the homebrew and lesser titles that I own are really fun for me to play, and it's even better that I get to share them with the audience too!

I might someday make a blog post about the considerable list of games I have that there is almost no footage of. Either that, or I may make public the sign-on sheet for them so that if it's possible, other people can join me in playing them. I have a pretty good sign-up sheet now, it's just that... as you know, many of my friends are hella lazy (I am too). As of right now though, I have quite a few people that signed on to help me with videos. Lots of familiar faces, like GrimJak, afightingpenguin, CrazyBacon, JackBauer, The Laundry King, and maybe even a few others! If I made it public, I feel like we could get a lot better camaraderie going with the audience, and it would help me to choose which games first to play. 

I actually have a concise list of the games I plan on filming in the near future, so I will probably be slow, unless I get a lot of requests. Though, since I have received relatively no interest regarding my Selected Genre Series, I probably have no reason to worry about getting to requests or anything of that nature slowly, hah. 

Oh right, I was supposed to talk about Rushing Beat Shura! Well, this is an old-school beat-em-up in the vein of Streets of Rage (ベアナックル　怒りの鉄拳 for you Japanese speakers out there) or Final Fight. The game was localized in the States and released as The Peace Keepers, but it underwent a ton of changes. I am not entirely sure exactly why I decided to choose this particular game to run through, perhaps because I figured it was short and I could get the whole thing out on a relatively small time frame. Going back to something I mentioned in the past, I think it's best when you don't have a devoted following to keep your LPs relatively short, probably finishing within 10-12 videos. Oddly enough, with the way campaigns are being done lately, this doesn't limit you as much as you would think. 

I played through the game by myself, but the game is co-op. There are also multiple paths, and depending on which you take, you can actually unlock other characters. I happened to get the robot, AKA Metal Frame, in my playthrough which made me REALLY happy. I think that sometime in the future, I may play this with a friend, and hopefully unlock and get to show you guys the characters I missed/didn't use in the playthrough I've already done. I also tried something a little different with the rendering in this Let's Play. I tried to pump it out in HD, and much to my chagrin, it didn't really come out looking as good as I had wanted. The first four videos in the series can be viewed in 1440p (That's stages 1-6). Unfortunately, getting them to pop out in that stunning HD quality makes the videos pretty narrow-looking. I'd personally rather they have been kinda fat, like normal. If you want a look at that HD beauty, you can view Part 1 (Stage 1) right here on the blog:

The last four videos I popped out at 720p, and they suffer from a lot less screen-smushing. You can view Part 5 (Stage 7) right here too:

There are lots of people on YouTube that care only whether or not the videos they're watching are in HD, but as most of you know, I could care less how pretty the videos are if they're entertaining. While it's nice and all that I could potentially pop out 1440p videos, I don't really see a need for it, especially not when the aspect ratio is gonna get all weird. The 720p videos also give me a border on the video, but I'm not gonna worry or obsess over it. It still came out lookin' pretty good for me. I believe they were rendered in HD through Windows Movie Maker, so that may have in fact had something to do with it. Other programs probably don't do as weird things to your video as WMM does, y'know, when it's not crashing or anything. 

If for some reason, you think it's better that I pop out more videos in 1440p, please lemme know your stance, and give a valid reason why, besides "OMFG IT'S SO PRETTY," as I don't really find that a serious stance at all. 

This was also one of the first times I really got to experiment with mid-roll ads. If you are a partner with a network, or just through YouTube itself (That means you're able to monetize your videos), and your video is more than 10 minutes long, you can choose to put ads not at just the beginning and the end of your video, but also in the middle, as long as the ad breaks are spaced at least 7 minutes apart. One of the suggestions about them is to place them at natural breaks in the video, so I try to use them only between stages. While it's kind of cool to have that kind of control over the ads that appear on your videos, I fear the abuse of it on long videos. A really prominent Dark Souls YouTuber, VaatiVidya, who I love to watch dearly, just discovered this feature it seems, and he placed an ad in the middle of his latest video for no apparent reason, when it already had an ad at the beginning, and that actually made me kind of upset. He already sort-of kind-of works for Namco Bandai's PR department now, and I feel he doesn't need to be annoying his viewers with more ads grabbing money.  

Let's go back to Rushing Beat Shura though! Instead of Co-Op, I might actually try the multiplayer vs mode. That might be really fun, at least for a little while! I enjoyed playing this, and I'm hoping to get at least a few more complete runs of games up on YouTube at some point. 

DMTV Movelist

Let's try to keep at least one thing I write short and sweet.

DMTV Movelist

Status: Ongoing-- The next video will be for Microman, Aska, Megatron & Bomberman

This playlist is a bit strange. It's sort of a next-best thing sort of dealie. I'm one of the only people that I know of that puts up videos of Dream Mix TV World Fighters (ドリームミックスTV ワールドファイターズ) for the Nintendo GameCube. It's kind of... a poor man's Super Smash Bros., but in some regards, it's actually a much better idea. Also the fact that it is from more than one universe is a precursor to the guest characters in Smash Bros. from other companies. DMTV is a crossover between Takara-Tomy, Hudson and Konami. 
The moves in the game are kind of weird because there's no smash attacks, but you have diagonal attacks, and not every character has the same amount of special moves-- some characters are just inherently more varied in their movesets than others. Take Tyson from Beyblade (木ノ宮タカオ) for example, he only has one special attack (Think character specific abilities in Smash Bros.: your B attacks). No matter what, he just throws Dragoon out. You can charge the attack, yes, but it's still just one attack. Then there is Manjimaru (卍丸), who has a stance change ability, giving him twice the total moves of the other characters in the game. 

In this regard, the game is not really balanced, but the way that you, for lack of a better term, we'll refer to it as 'take damage' in the game, is the same for every character. When you are hit, you lose hearts, that other players can grab to keep themselves alive. After 2-3 hits, no matter what, your character will be knocked down. This works in pretty much any case except for Licca-chan's (リカちゃん) heart steal ability, which doesn't actually hit you, just steals hearts. Anyway, I'm telling you so much about the way the game plays because of how this series has played out. 

Originally I got a request to do a combo video in this game, but it's basically impossible specifically because of the way you take damage that I have just described. You can't really do anything special because moves cannot be canceled and after two or three hits, your character will fall down. So the next best thing I could think of was to make a couple videos with the movelists. I've gotten quite a few requests in this game in the past, so I figured it would only be natural for me to teach other prospective players how to play as well. 

I won't post any of the videos from this series on this post because since they are sort-of a request, I have already posted some and will continue to post more in the future in my About Requests entry. The person who gave me this request is actually an ex-member of TeamRushdown, and although PlutoKnight and I no longer talk, I will continue to finish this series. It doesn't get a lot of views, but it's only fair I do what I set out to do, right?

Survival Mode

Let's take a look-see at my one somewhat impromptu playlist.

Survival Mode

Status: Ongoing -- I need to add more videos to this playlist

Honestly, I never intended most of the videos on this playlist to be together, but.. They just sort of fit. Being that I started out as a fighting game channel, and then added beat-em-ups to my regular roster, it actually makes quite a bit of sense that at some point I would be playing survival mode. 

In MUGEN, playing survival is actually a really good way to show off a character. You could play through arcade mode, or whatever your regular progressive mode is called, but in my opinion survival is better. You're just stuck with a single character (Or co-op survival, so there's more than one player) and thrown into more and more difficult battles, so you have to rise to the challenge. If you wanna survive, you'll have to learn as you go. Admittedly, this also makes for good videos in my case. I have to adapt and get better so that my opponents can't stop me, and I get to showcase a particular character. I think that's where most of the survival videos in MUGEN on my channel actually came from, I just wanted to introduce my friends and my audience to a new character, and what about them I found interesting and/or cool. 

The video with the most views in this playlist is the Asakura Ryouko [朝倉涼子] Survival run:

One of the absolute best things about MUGEN is that you can bring in characters from any universe and basically you get a chance to have the battles you've always dreamt about. MUGEN is basically any (fighting) gamer's wet dream. Even if you don't like fighting games, it's still a pretty novel concept for non-gamers to watch the battles play out. As you can see from the title, it's got a particular formatting that I've tried to keep throughout all of my videos. I've mentioned before that you should be inspiring confidence in your audience, and that scheduling is one way to do that. Another way is oddly enough, uniformity. As I go through my videos and edit the metadata on them, I've been changing the titles so that all of my videos follow a particular format. First of all, this makes them easier to find, but it also makes it easier for the audience to pick and choose which videos they want to see better, instead of clicking just to see what it actually is. 

Also, remember how I said that you can use more tags if you vary your language? It also works in titles, actually, it might be a lot better if you try to provide dual-language titles. If you're a fan of anime or gaming in general, you will know that a lot of the time when a series gets localized, a lot changes, even names of the major characters. Therefore, it makes sense to help all the people looking for a video like yours to find it, so a good idea is to add a character's name in all the major languages it usually appears. To that end, I generally use both the English name of a character and the Japanese name. Don't forget about your metadata people!

Oh, yeah, but, back on track. Playlists help group similar content together, and help to kind of... spread views out among a particular set of videos. Though while not really evident here, since the videos in this playlist have view counts kind of all over the place, if the videos are together on a playlist, and someone happens to look at the playlist, they will definitely be more likely to watch videos with similar content if they liked the first one. Plus, even though this started with MUGEN, I've been able to bring in other games (AND I PLAN ON BRINGING IN EVEN MORE IN THE FUTURE, MWAHAHAHA) like Urban Reign, for example. By putting these videos together on the playlist, the fans of one just might be inclined to develop a new interest in the others. 

Survival mode makes for good videos because not only does it force you to learn and apply what you know on the spot in varying degrees but... It's also a chance to show off. Let's be serious, the average person generally wants to watch (gaming) footage of people that are better than them. If you can do what you're watching, then you'd be doing it instead of watching it, right? Seems simple enough.  

Rumble Fighter Adventure/Boss Mode Tutorials

So, let's take a look at my first tutorial series! 

Rumble Fighter Boss Mode Tutorials

Status: Ongoing -- Next tutorial up will be Abandoned Mine

I have thought about being a teacher for quite some time. Oddly enough, that has a tendency to show when I play video games. I also seem to grasp concepts at least somewhat quicker than the average person, and I get a kick out of explaining what I've learned to other people! My friend Cam of Team Rushdown (Also available on Twitch!) decided we should work together on stuff, since I was [at the time] the most knowledgeable person he knew in terms of boss mode and he is the most knowledgeable person, and probably the best fighting gamer in general I have ever encountered. He started making scroll tutorials and I got lazy... But I helped when I could! Then... OGPlanet had a video contest, and I saw my chance!

Actually, I decided that I might as well release the one I was already working on at a time when a lot of people would watch it. I never actually expected to get anywhere with it in the contest, but I actually made it to the finals. Everyone else had made a music video, and then there was me, with a tutorial on the first stage. FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE:

Got my in-game guild to help on most of the subsequent videos, and even on this one too! And when possible, I call on Cam's help, because even though he knows absolutely EVERYTHING about the scrolls he's using, he's also just really good in general in boss mode too! Really, he's just an all-around amazing gamer.  

What's interesting about this series is that I got to learn the ins and outs of Ulead through this series. You can tell as I go along in the series that I'm learning more and more things. I tried to keep it on schedule, of one tutorial a month, but... It just wasn't possible at the time. I still am not sure if I could steadily pump out one of these a month, with the time that goes into them, and the footage editing and all that jazz. I also haven't played Rumble Fighter in... something like six months, so that also poses kind of a hindrance to what I'm doing. Fear not though, I will in fact finish this series.

The plan for the tutorials is to go through all of them on Normal, just like I have been doing so far. After that I'll be moving on to Hard Difficulty, and only basically filling you in on what's changed. I mean, after I've gone through everything in the normal tutorials, it won't be hard to add on to what I've done. 

Also, at some point (Probably when I'm done with everything on normal), I would like to try something with annotations that I've seen before and really thought was great. I'll probably take a short video of the stage select screen, and then add annotations to each of the images of the stages so you can choose what stage you want to learn about by clicking on the corresponding link to a video. Maybe when I move onto the Hard and Hell difficulties I'll split the annotation windows up into difficulties as well. I think the idea of having interactive videos is really great. Annotations can really change your content around, and draw people in. They're also quite polarizing, unfortunately. A lot of people don't like to see too many additions to a video when they believe they're not absolutely necessary, and thus many people just automatically turn off their annotations. 

What's neat about annotations, is that you can use them to add things to a video to revise things that have changed, or if you make a mistake, like with spelling for example, you can always cover it up with an annotation. In that regard, they're kind of like band-aids for your videos. If any of you have ever edited a video, you'll know it's incredibly time-consuming... On top of that, if you make a mistake, for the most part you can't just edit it out, you have to get new footage, which can also be quite a hassle, especially for people like me. My setup requires actual setting up before it's ready to be used. 

As it stands right now, I've got the first six stages on normal covered. Al Hata (N) is right above here on the blog! Then there's Dark Monastery (N) and Sanctum -AKA Sanctuary- (N).

I got to use the annotations feature for something kind of neat, at least IMHO with Sanctum. When I finished the video originally, it was actually too large for me to upload to YouTube, so I had to split it into two parts. I tried to separate it naturally into the Left and Right paths and then the boss, so I used a pause annotation and then link annotations. The plan I have for the select screen will kind of function in the same manner, but I'll be using Spotlight Annotation (Like when I link to a player's Channel by highlighting their name/healthbar) instead, so you can just click where you normally would if you wanted to go to that stage! This was a test of the pause annotation, and I think it's actually worked out pretty well for me. 

Next up were Locke's Refuge (N) and Dragon's Lair (N). Then I got to Vladimir's Castle... This posed a huge problem for me, since if you've ever played Vlad's Castle, you'd know that it's actually three normal boss stages in one. It takes a LONG time to complete, and the three stages are almost totally different from one another. I broke it down into three parts. The Minion Breakdown and the Boss Breakdown actually pale in comparison both in views and in length to the longest video of the three, which might actually be my longest normal video on all of YouTube-- besides my first YouTube Stream. The longest video, and most watched of the three is the stage breakdown. 

  

I got to explain all the traps and obstacles in this one, and that's why it took so long... I also learned a lot of things about the levels in the process. Stuff that I had randomly glossed over while playing, but realized when I took a closer look. It seems that when making a tutorial, you get to learn things too! Or, at least, you'll be able to notice things that you knew, but didn't realize you knew. That's also something that you should be doing as a teacher too. Maybe... It's better to say that's one of the perks?