KickBeat, WHY IS NO ONE PLAYING THIS?!

As most of you know, fighting games are my absolute favorite kind of game. In a close second would be both beat-em-ups and oddly enough, rhythm games. When I first heard of KickBeat, a game that combines both beat-em-up and rhythm into one game, I knew right from the start I was going to absolutely love it. Beyond just the genre-mashup there's actually a really good game under the hood as well!
I've been playing the steam edition and I just finished Mei's story and while I was a little upset by the fact that Lee and Mei have to play the same songs for their stories, this is actually the very first game I have ever played where it actually made sense as to why one character would be doing the exact same things as the other (I say other, but there are actually more playable characters, they just don't have stories ). Beyond that, it's one of the only games I've ever played where the girl isn't just some useless damsel in distress that the man has to save. 

Story spoilers will now ensue, so read on at your own discretion.

You play through Lee's story first, as he's The Chosen One. As TCO makes his way through the stages, you notice one of your fellow monks is following you around the world. By the end of the game, she's been captured and Lee actually trades her imprisonment for his own. Here's where things take a turn that I certainly wasn't expecting. You pick up Mei's story after Lee's imprisonment and you play through exactly what he did as Mei. At first this turned me off, but watching her story cutscenes, for the first time ever, redoing an entire game made sense! Mei is not TCO but she can learn exactly what Lee did during the story if she experiences the same things that he did. That seems like such a silly idea, but it actually WORKS. That's all a development team has to say and it makes sense! Most games just ignore the story altogether and let you play as someone else, which I find to be exceptionally lazy.

During Mei's story, you see how upset she is and has been that no one has ever let her walk the path she wants. The game actually brings up Mei's viewpoint when she was younger during a flashback what most players would assume is the reason for this, that she is a woman, and therefore isn't seen as being capable of what men can do. FOR ONCE, THIS AWFUL STEREOTYPE IS COMPLETELY DISMANTLED, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE PLAYER'S EYES. As a woman, she can do everything her male counterpart can do, she just has to be given the chance. Her grandfather lost her mother and didn't want to lose her too, so he was originally very wary about training her. During her story you get to know Mei a little better, and you can see that being feminine isn't a detriment for once, she's totally capable of doing everything Lee could do, heck she's even better at it than he is in some cases.
On top of the regular gameplay, KickBeat: Steam Edition has a really amazing feature wherein you can add ANY song in your computer's library to the game and then play it out. That feature alone should have been enough to warrant a purchase for most people. I grew up playing Stepmania and while I've always thought it would be amazing to make a simfile, me having absolutely no musical talent or insight has made that exceptionally difficult. With KickBeat however, almost all the work is done for me! The game is limitless, as long as you keep acquiring new music. How is that not a good investment, especially considering most people equate the price of a game to how many hours of enjoyment they'll get out of it nowadays?

I five starred every song included with the game on normal, and then I checked the leaderboards.

To my incredible surprise, I am now ranked #1 in the world in two of the game's songs. I'm in the top five score-wise in almost every single song included with the game. Cumulatively I'm sitting in the top 2k of players as well. That tells me two things; that no one is playing the game, and that no one that owns it is completing the game. I can't fathom why. I'm not saying the game is perfect, heck, it has a glitch that crashes it 100% of the time (If you turn button helpers on while they're off mid-song the game will crash when you unpause every time)! But nothing in life is perfect!
My only real gripes with the game so far are the final boss battle (Yes, the game does have boss battles). For some reason, compared to all the other battles, I CANNOT tell when you're about to be attacked. It's the only stage in the game that I NEED the button helpers to be on. The button helpers are designed for controller play, so they really confused me at the beginning, as I've been playing on keyboard this whole time. The other problem is keyboard-related but I've been working on ways around it. On the harder difficulties you often run into red enemies that come in sets of three at a time. Most computers don't accept three arrow key inputs at the same time because they assume you've made a mistake, so I either have to relearn to play the game with WSAD on my left hand or I'll learn to play with two hands in different spots. Maybe I'll pick up a controller, I dunno... 

IN ANY CASE... Why is no one playing this game?!  

#100

Shoot off some confetti streamers or something, I made it to post #100! I'll admit if I didn't have all these requests I probably would have written a new entry a long time ago, but hey, we're here, we made it!
There will be actual content to this post, I swear. First of all, I want to thank everyone who has been sticking around since day one over here, however sparsely the updates have come. Now that that's out of the way, I want to let you guys in on some things!
I think it's out there now, but I've been working on a patreon campaign for quite some time. I actually had a speech lined up, and I grabbed a bunch of footage from my videos over the years that I intended to use, and then, something strange happened. The goals that I was going to use patreon to work towards suddenly started to be completed, most often not even of my own volition. Like this new monitor I'm writing this entry on, Nox bought a new one, and I got this one. It came at the perfect time too, since I needed to use my monitor to fix someone else's tower!
On a separate front of that same war, I've actually been trying to rebrand my channel with new artwork. My artist has been going through a rough patch, so that's on hold for a while. When I'm ready for the rebrand I think my patreon campaign will go live, whenever that happens to be.
100 posts later, I've also received a bit of validation in a rather strange and roundabout way. For those of you that don't know, Unfair-Y Tales was originally envisioned as a way for Liz (and her family) to get to know me and see what makes me the way I am. While neither of those things really happened, I met a friend of mine's mother for the first time the other day, and she told me she felt like she knew me just from watching Unfair-Y Tales. I'm obviously doing something right, now aren't I?!

The problem with video games as 'work'

As I've become more serious about what I do on YouTube and Twitch, I've been dealing with classifying my time with video games. It's been a long time since I've been able to say that I could absolutely lose myself in a video game. While I certainly do miss being able to do that, it hasn't diminished my fun or my love for games. On the other hand, with Twitch and YouTube taking up so much of my days, I can't really say that I play anything "just for fun" anymore. That is a major issue for me right now.
When you have to spend so much time getting footage or sharing a game with the audience, you really don't have that much time just to sit and enjoy an experience yourself. Everything starts to seem like its work instead of just a fun romp through a digital world. The only game I play "for fun" now is SMITE, and when you've got a backlog as big as I do of video games, playing a game that has no major goal to achieve seems like quite a timesink. I could be completing so many other games in the time I've spent sitting on SMITE.
Then again, that's also part of the problem, now isn't it? Not only do I constantly think of what I'm doing as work, I also think of games I might start playing in the future as work. I've been trying to not be so strictly adhered to the schedules I developed for myself to live my life by because... Let's face it, life's not about all the carefully laid plans you've set out. Is it truly living if you never let yourself experience something that hasn't been penciled in? As much as it pains my OCD to say so, I certainly don't think so. 
There's a balance in everything and I've got to find mine! All work and no play makes Okami a dull boy, and it's also pretty certain that I'll burn out if I keep things up like this...

My first day off in two weeks!

For the past two months, I have had to attend a funeral or a wake each and every week and it's been literally driving me crazy. Finally thought all the funerals were over, and then it turns out that my grandma is in the hospital. Come on sky wizard, give me a damn break! I've been so exhausted lately that I actually volunteered to nap at one point! If you know me, you would know that that means I was pretty damn tired.
Anyway, all of that appears to be behind me, so I can finally get back to work. You might have noticed quite a dip in my videos and all that recently, so now that I have hopefully at least one week to myself, I should be able to get back to work on projects that should have been completed a while ago. As of yesterday I was officially two weeks behind on work, and that's not a good place to be when you're trying to get your emotions back under control. 
In any case, Jedi Knight shouldn't have a missing week for my Tuesday Let's Plays (assuming tomorrow goes according to plan, anyway), and I've got a bunch more stuff coming down the pipeline! I'm really sorry that I haven't been giving my audience the attention they deserve, but I'm hoping to change that in the coming days.
Keymailer has been really nice to me lately, so you can definitely expect a few more My Two (S)cents and even the first On the Hunt in the near future! I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to work on things a little quicker, but don't worry, I'm still standing!

More bumps in the road

Well, if you know me, you know it's absolutely impossible for me to get through anything smoothly. I've just now discovered as I sat down to finally work on the first On the Hunt and this month's Okamigakure Plays that the audio codec I had enabled in OBS when I recorded is not compatible with my version of PowerDirector. I'm going to attempt to re-render both videos and see if the new videos are... watchable in the most basic sense of the word. If it's not that good quality-wise, I'm going to forego the audio in the first On The Hunt video and just put an audio track over the video. That was actually my original intention, but I really do like the music in Between Me and the Night, when it exists anyway.
The other video however, since it's an Okamigakure plays video, absolutely needs to have the audio of all of us going nuts while we play, so I definitely will need to re-render the video no matter the consequences. I've actually filmed next month's Okamigakure plays video as well, since I'd been planning to use that game for this month's, but something (seemingly) easier came up. Either way, you guys should be seeing Okamigakure plays either a little later in this week, or next week! 
My new Let's Play on YouTube has begun, and while I have more videos in it ready to go, I have been trying to deal with Okamigakure Plays and On the Hunt so I haven't had a chance to render and upload the videos. You'll definitely see another one by Tuesday, however! 
For those of you that don't know, I've been working on coming up with a Patreon, and while it's not ready yet, a lot of the pieces of the puzzle have been coming together recently and for that I'm actually really proud of myself. There have been very few times in my life that I can say I was confident, but with that starting to be an every day occurrence, I think I'm also finally ready to reach out and ask for help. I'll keep you posted on that. 
The other thing I've been meaning to let you guys know about is Unfair-Y Tales' Season 2 opener, The Laundry King. The actual person The Laundry King, is pretty... well, let's say unreliable. I actually need him to come over and help me film something for the season opener and he's been... unreachable most recently. In any case, he's officially signed on and now he just needs to get his ass over here. You guys know me, nothing goes as planned in my life, so why should YouTube-ing be any different?

Whistle while you work!

Hey there guys and gals! It's been a little while since I last posted here on the blog, but I'd like to catch y'all up on what's been going on on the YouTube/Twitch front!
The first On the Hunt video is well on its way to completion. I have all the footage I need, but now I need to figure out what I'm going to be saying and exactly which footage I'm going to be using. Once that's done I've actually got another giveaway coming, and it'll be tied to a breakdown of the system in Hi-Rez's new game Paladins. There's so much about the inner system of the game that they just haven't explained, it took pretty much a whole day of fiddling around to figure some of the systems out, and I haven't seen too many videos that just sit there and explain things to you. Let's be honest, those are the kind of videos that I'm best at, so why not?
After the longplay that you guys will be seeing this week on Tuesday (heads up, it's The House of the Dead IV  ), I'll be starting a new Let's Play on the YouTubs that I'll be seeing to the end for once! I also went and purchased a composite>HDMI device so even though my laptop is currently out of commission, I should be able to record old school games again via Game Capture HD! This will actually simplify things on a lot of fronts, and it will actually make my console game videos a bit more standardized, since they'll all be recorded the same way. That's actually really great, you guys won't have to worry too much about the wildly differing qualities on my videos if this works out! 
I've also been on a bit of a Skylander spending spree, so you can expect some new Skylander Path Guides videos in the near future as well! I finally snagged a Nightfall, Splat and a Scratch, and that just got the ball rolling on all the figures I've wanted for quite a while. 
Moreso than any of this news, just remember that there's new and exciting things coming to my channels, so stay tuned!  

First looks and impressions videos

In terms of confidence building and also varying degrees of success, the last week or so has been something amazing for me. I've been gearing up to ring in the new year with quite a few changes coming to my channels. I think I've also suddenly become a bit more visible to everyone on the internets. I don't know how or why this came about, but I am definitely happy about it! 
I was recently referred to a site called Keymailer by my good friend BurningPunch and it actually is working out in my favor. I have a bunch of new games to make videos on and I'm working on the first of (at this moment) four at this very moment. I need to reconfigure my OBS to make sure I can get these videos recorded and held to a proper standard of quality, so bare with me until I've got the formats for everything set! That being said, these four games are going to be used to start up two new series for my channel, stuff I probably should have been already working on, but I don't know, I never felt my opinion was all that warranted in the community (This has never stopped me from giving it though, haha). 
The two new series will be called On the Hunt and My Two (S)cents. On The Hunt (thanks for the title, Teth!) will be a series where I take a look at Early Access games that I play/have been asked to play and I'll let you know if I think these games are worth keeping a close eye on or not. My Two (S)cents will be more of a general opinion/review type show. I generally try to stay away from early access games, but there are just so very many of them out there. It's basically a genre in and of itself at this point, and far too many games are overlooked for no other reason than they are early access. I don't think I'll be giving a score for the games I feature in either of these series, but I will give you my personal opinion. I hope that's enough to help you decide whether or not you'll give the games I feature a shot!