YouTube Fan Funder and other news

If you frequent my channel a lot, you're going to have noticed there's a new little bar on the side! YouTube's finally gotten their Fan Funder feature into beta and you can display it on your channel. My original impression was a channel-centric Patreon type dealie, but it seems more along the lines of a personalized "THROW MONEY AT ME IF YOU LIKE ME" button. I am totally okay with that, if someone wants to help out! 
Speaking of people wanting to help out, I just wanted to give my buddy TheBurningPunch a shoutout. He's guest starred on my channel before, but we've never actually played a game together, and I feel like that's something that definitely needs to change, and the sooner the better!
Back on topic though, it seems like there are a few stipulations with the YouTube fan funder. You cannot receive less than a dollar from someone, or more than 500 dollars from the same person in a single day. There's also fees that YouTube takes out based on the donation amount too, so not all of your donation actually goes to the person you want to support. From what I could tell, it seems like the preferred payment method is Google Wallet (Which I personally didn't know existed until a few weeks ago...), but you should be able to use other forms of payment. Just thought I'd give you guys a heads up on what's goin on with that. If you want to see if your channel is able to opt-in to the beta, you can head to your YouTube Settings>View Additional Features.
Now, back to actual channel news, for both my YouTube and my Twitch this time, no less! I've been hatching new ideas for series in addition to what's going up on my channel in the near future. I'm working on the intro for Unfair-Y Tales so I can use it as the opener to all of the videos, which means you can expect the first episode to debut in January. To tide you over, why not sit back and enjoy A Dramatic Reading of a Yearbook Signing? This video serves as the pilot, and it's doing pretty well so far, so I'm excited both to work on and the response to the full series! I've got twenty episodes planned for the first season, but I have plenty more stories than that to tell! 
Tethrinblaze and I were joking about how I could make a compilation of all the times GrimJak has messed me/us up in games, and I decided that I probably will start a compilation series of just... Let's call them GrimJak-isms. I will make sure to at least get some work done before I start the daunting task of combing through my videos for all the occasions in which Grim has set me on fire, blown me up, and/or killed me/the rest of the team. 
In the near future, I'll have a new set of Victory/Defeat animations for SMITE, this time for the 13 Assassins in the game (NOT COUNTING AO KUANG, BECAUSE HE'S A GODDAMN MAGE, IT SAYS SO RIGHT NEXT TO HIS NAME). I also will do my best to finish off the DMTV Movelist series before I move on to any more tutorials. No more Rumble Fighter BM Tutorials, so I want to devote my... "helping" talents to something else productive! I also plan on getting back to finishing a lot of my older series. On top of that, if you've been paying attention to my channel, I've made a couple new playlists, and that was actually a hint that I plan on adding more videos like those (If you're wondering, those would be the Boss Battles and Beats of Rage Mods playlists)
If you've been to my Twitch Channel lately, you'll notice I updated/added to the list of games I will be streaming in the near future. Some of the games I chose are ones that I think will broaden my audience, while others are for practice. This may give you some clues as to what videos will be coming up on my channel in the near future, so stay tuned! 

Channel News 11/16/14

Sorry, I just couldn't come up with a clever title... What? I've been watching terrible kung fu movies from the 70s with titles like "Blazing Ninja Warrior vs. Warrior" and "Bionic Ninja" all day, you can't expect too much of my creative faculties right now...
HOWEVER, I was having a chat the other day about planning for the future of my content the other day, and I came up with the name of my Rogue Legacy series! It'll be called Rogue Legacy Heroes with Issues! Yay! I did something creative! 
In other channel news, my good buddy JackBauer has been watching a lot of Two Best Friends Play and suggested that we do some horror gaming. As you know though, I'm pretty much a gaming hipster. Since everyone started doing horror games to try and follow in PewD's footsteps, naturally I am against that kind of thing. I mean, there's also the fact that I just don't really play survival horror anymore. I had a... phase for a year or two, but I really haven't done much in the genre since. 
I'm talking about all of this because JackBauer suggested we play horror games together. He specifically suggested Silent Hill. I don't have any of the games in the series but... I do have the demo for the first game on PS1! Since JackBauer doesn't really do anything YouTube related anymore, he suggested we upload to mine.
So, you can expect the JackBauer Horror Special (Until he wins) up on my channel sometime in the near future! Maybe he'll get a regular spot guest starring on my channel in the future if this turns out to be something really interesting and fun. 

2 games down, MANY MORE to go!

As of Tuesday (11/12/14), I have a second full-game playthrough up on my channel! Liz and I actually completed a game as part of Couples' Co-Op! Ibb & Obb, to be specific. This is pretty much uncharted territory for me, since as most of you know, I get bored incredibly easily. We stuck through it, even through intense frustration, and I think we're both the better for it! Though Liz could still use a little jumping practice. In any case, I think this is going to set a precedent for me. I've actually had something go right for once, and I'm excited about it!
If you were wondering, the first game I played all the way through was Rushing Beat Shura/ルッシングビート修羅. Technically the first complete Let's Play on my channel should have been Saints Row the Third, but I actually finished that on my Twitch channel. At some point I will export the final three streams to YouTube and it will be complete, but for now I've just got the two Let's Plays. I hope these two will serve as the first of many, since that's what I'm planning on!
The next game I'll be playing all the way through is something I started a couple months ago; Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. When I started it, Ibb & Obb was still going and I realized it was eating up too much of my upload schedule to run two LPs at once. I decided I'd instead go for one at a time. I'll be starting up MN again in December, and once I'm done with that, we'll see what comes up next. 
The plans are still on for Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as part of Couples' Co-Op, but I think I may be waiting for a bit before we start up another cooperative game. I'd like to get a little bit of Couples' Versus and Couples' Competition going before we start anything new. 
There's also a LP of Magicka in multiplayer, but that might be a ways away, and the T'ai Fu: Wrath of the Tiger let's play that I've had planned forever as well. I'm going to try and make sure that my LPs do not occur on the same console in succession, so we'll see how far that gets me, hah. While maybe not Let's Plays per se, I'd also like to do runs in Super Amazing Wagon Adventure and some runs of Rogue Legacy using heroes with disabilities, I think that'd be really fun to play and at least somewhat interesting to watch! 
So yeah, that's what I've got planned for the near future!

Change isn't necessarily good

As most of you know, when college started for me, like... way back in '07, I pretty much dropped off YouTube. I uploaded sparsely if at all, and I stopped replying to comments and messages and all that jazz. I turned my back on the community I had spent pretty much a whole year building, and I know that was a mistake.
I've been doing quite a bit of YouTube related research lately, and I have noticed something about the channels that I enjoy watching-- at least in regards to ones that are largely popular. The gaming channels I frequent, stuff like STER_, Jerma and of course, my all time favorite YouTuber, Robbaz, all have something in common. It's the fact that regardless of what they do or put up, there's a game or two that they always return to. Inbetween random uploads they always go back to something. 
I haven't been a fan of STER_ or Jerma for that long, but from what I can tell, they've always been releasing Team Fortress 2 content. That's their fallback. When I started to watch Robbaz, he was big into Battlefield so he'd go back to that after an upload or two. After a while though, he branched out, and now he works on multiple game series. 
That's something that I don't have anymore, my fallback game was M.U.G.E.N and I've been pretty neglectful of that... I haven't really stuck to anything since me and Liz started Couples' Co-Op and I realize that's one of the many places I went wrong. 
I've been deliberating whether or not M.U.G.E.N can still be my fallback. I'm not sure about that, but... I would definitely like to put up more beat-em-up and fighting game footage for you guys! My uploads have been hella erratic lately, but what can I say? I get bored REALLY easily.

Amazon Associates

Quick blog post, seriously guys. 
I've been an Amazon Associate, which means I have a referral code for Amazon that gets me referral fees for people I send there to buy stuff. I've been a member for about a year, and I've been having a ton of problems with it. I know tons of people don't have any issues with it, but naturally I seem to have run into all of them, hah. 
Anyway, the first five orders, from the first month or so I became an associate went through fine, but since then, I've had something like 60 orders made with my ID and not a single one has been credited to me, and I'm fed up with it.
I e-mailed Amazon, and the response they gave back to me said they checked and all the orders they looked at are ineligible, and probably all of them in total are ineligible, but they can't look at all of them or provide me any information as to why. They also said basically the only reason someone should be using your code is if they came across it at random and wanted to use it out of curiosity. 
Basically what they're going for is a way to weasel out of giving me something like 3-5% of the profit they make off a single item. You're Amazon.com! FFS, cut a guy some slack! You rake in BILLIONS of dollars a year and you can't give me 3% back on not even 10 of those sales? 
I'm writing this to say that I'm going to be removing the Amazon links from this blog, my twitch channel and my YouTube page, and referring you guys elsewhere when applicable from now on. You can't even close your associates ID yourself, you have to talk to Amazon about it. I'll be happy to send someone a bunch of capital letters at this point. It'll be swell. 

NYCC '14 Pictures

This year's NYCC was actually kind of slow. This was the first year that I ever finished doing everything I wanted to do before the show was over, so there was no rushing, pretty much at all. Liz and Kenbei and I actually just sat around and talked for a couple hours on Saturday and Sunday... I didn't take that many pictures, but I figured I would share with you guys what I did take! We're going to have a video up on my channel this Sunday about our NYCC experiences, so I'm not going to blog very much about that, but I wanted to share with you some pictures I took! I spent most of my time with Liz and Kenbei, as James(GrimJak) and Dan(The Laundry King) were off doing other stuff, so we all probably have different pictures. I know this year everyone took pictures of what they wanted to see, as opposed to everyone taking the same pictures.

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, ENJOY! (You can click any of the pictures for a full-size edition)

The largest booth, WETA, had a sleepy Smaug!

The Teen Titans in their Go! incarnation were blown up outside for the whole weekend

Mega Bloks had a huge display this year, they had a Mechwarrior and an Assassin from AC.

Scale model of Serenity

Dat Aqualad tho

Last year was Supes' 75th anniversary, this year was Bats'.

You can't really see it, but she had these terrifyingly blue contacts on... Definitely the best lasso I saw though.

This assassin had his poses down-pat

While not specifically related to NYCC, there was a Walker hand counting down to the return of TWD. Lost a finger each day until Sunday-- REALLY COOL

The only new Casey Jones we saw, and I don't think anyone could have topped this! Kid's a genius-- and a really nice person too. 

Kenbei spent the entire weekend trying to find a Vegeta. Followed these guys around for like an hour until we could get a photo op, hah.

Trap Team Impressions

This won't be a review, since I'm only halfway done with the story, or, at least, thereabouts, but I'd just like to say some stuff that's been on my mind.
I went to midnight launch with Liz for Skylanders trap team and we got quite a haul, which you can view here. That video was about the toys, so now let's talk about the game itself!
First of all, WELCOME BACK Toys for Bob! It's good to have you guys back. That being said, this game, pretty much right off the bat, feels like it should have been the sequel to Giants. Although there are characters from Swap Force, it feels like the old Skylanders games did, and IMHO, that's a great thing. I don't think it's as hard as Giants was (IMO, Giants is the toughest game in the series), but it's still leagues away from Swap Force's difficulty. 
The backgrounds and the setting are all completely fleshed out, which is something I'm glad about. They've FINALLY allowed us to choose to jump off cliffs, and this even sometimes leads to hidden areas. You'd think I was suicidal the way I leap off cliffs now! It doesn't even do damage to you, which makes me feel a bit sad about it. If you're in an arena match and you get knocked off it will deal damage, however. 
Unlike Swap Force, the Giants have a purpose again, they can do basically everything that they could in Giants, though their jobs are less frequent. They can once again lift giant boulders and break bomb doors without a bomb. The best part about the giants in Trap Team is that THEY ACTUALLY FIT ON THE STAGE AGAIN. The new team, the Trap Masters, are about 3/4 the size of the Giants so it makes sense. It seems like they actually playtested them before they released the game, unlike Swap Force, where the giants served really no purpose at all and often caused the game to wig out since they didn't really fit anywhere. They had giant chests though, which have been replaced in Trap Team by villain chests, but they're basically exactly the same except for the symbol on the front. In Swap Force it was Tree Rex and now it's Kaos.
The new gimmick for this game is the traps, and while I love that they've come up with the idea to reverse the formula, where you capture the characters and then play with them, some of them appear to be a little lackluster. Not all of the trappable villains have three attacks (actually, I think that most of them have 2), and some really don't make all that much sense to me in their elements. There's also not the same amount of villains for each element. The fact that they talk to you and comment on what's going on from inside their traps (The speaker in the portal, actually), is a really nice touch that helps with the immersion. 
I said in the video that minis/sidekicks have no special purpose, but there is actually a section in the Academy (your new hub world) with tiny paths just for them. I'm not sure if it happens anywhere else, but on the Mystic Mill stage, one of the villains, the Shrednaught, has areas that only he can access in his evolved form, which is actually a really nice touch, it makes it seem like the villains have some purpose once they're with you, besides dealing TONS of damage. The cores themselves don't seem to have any sort of special purpose anymore though, since elemental gates can now only be opened by Trap Masters. Everyone else has something special to do though. 
The minigames now have some meat to them as well, there's a new version of Skystones, that sort of functions like somewhat of a mash up of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon cards, and it usually turns out to be really fun. The more villains you trap, the more cards you get for the game, so capturing villains serves more than one purpose. The Skaletones showdown is a kind of... Rock Band-lite rhythm game that is personalized to your skylander OR villain, where they sing along to music of varying styles with another NPC singing lead. The four difficulty levels mean that everyone has a chance to try this out. The expert levels are actually REALLY challenging and remind me of Amplitude/FreQuency on the PS2.
The traps are actually really interesting themselves, since there are all different sculpts, but it's not really necessary to have more than one of any element's traps, beyond the sake of having them. I also learned that the 'evolved' status of a villain is held on the trap itself, not by the game, so you'll have to do the villain quests over and over if you intend to buy more traps, which is kind of unfortunate... You might be wondering what villain quests are? Well, they're what replaced the missing heroic quests. Each villain has a quest somewhere on a stage, that can range from just talking to an NPC to playing Angry Birds with a sheep cannon. I heard a lot of players whining that there are no more heroic challenges for them to help up the stats of skylanders they like, but I don't have a problem with this. There also appear to be more traps than there should be, since there are 5 or 6 sculpts for each element, but some elements *cough* MAGIC *cough* only have three trappable villains.
The Arena is back, but each set of 3 waves has a different goal, and none of them are just "HIT THESE GUYS HARD." You don't have to follow the gimmick of the map, as it won't kill you outright if you ignore it, but you needn't usually rely on the gimmick of the map to get by. Player vs Player though, is completely gone and sort-of replaced with the Kaos Doom Challenge, which is sort of like if Skylanders was played like Dungeon Defenders. You can build towers and you have a box to protect. While I miss SkyGoals a lot, since it wasn't even in Swap Force, there are allusions to it in the arena challenges. One of the 3 round matches involves you carrying the ball from SkyGoals and it powering you, or any other carrier up. 
The co-op is actually the only real problem I've had. The tether keeping you and your partner together is REALLY short this time around, and it leads to some unfortunate respawn chains, especially when a bounce pad is involved. The game itself seems to be more glitchy than ever before. I've been stuck in the floor multiple times, my cutscenes often hang for absurd amounts of time, and there's even a weird glitch that happens in co-op every once in a while where none of your buttons do anything. You cannot attack, but you can walk, while the other player has no issues. I've also noticed that about 20% of the time I move something off the portal, the game does not recognize that anything has been moved for a minute or so. Unfortunately, it seems like the portal is just slower to recognize and activate items in general this time around. Some of the items have had their effects changed, so maybe it's trying to figure that kind of stuff out?
I think that's about it for my impressions, this post is long enough already! 

DO ANY OF YOU GUYS HAVE ANYTHING TO ADD/ASK?