Time to double down!

Holy shit guys and gals, I'm writing a blog entry! It's been what, something stupid like three months? Well, that just means I have something I actually want to talk to y'all about (Well, realistically I'm going to throw a block of text at you should you feel like reading it). Anyway, I've been talking to a few friends lately about the prospect of moving. The end goal since I got to this house has definitely been to move. That makes sense, doesn't it? I think that's everyone's goal when they live with their family. 
For some reason I have had this feeling that last year was going to be my last big birthday party, but I dunno anymore. Maybe that'll change. I did however have a conversation about the future of my YouTube stuff with a couple friends lately. One of the biggest problems I feel I will have once I move is being able to collaborate on videos. Large events are going to be even more of a pain than they already are (I'm talking stuff like Okamigakure Plays and our Tournaments). The first friend I talked to suggested I just make a new network. 
I don't mean partnership network here, obviously. In this case I'm talking about a friend/gaming network that I will have access to wherever I am. While that's not exactly impossible, it does take time, and that's going to put a damper on big events for my channels. Not only will it take time to get it going, but it's also going to take time to build up trust and influence among those people, especially without a venue that is accessible to many. I have to trust those people to use my stuff without breaking it, to invite them into my residence, that kind of thing. The other component, with the influence portion, is that they have to know (of) you in order to draw them into an event. When you're new to a network you generally don't have that kind of authority unless you're exceptionally charismatic (While I do have somewhat of a magnetic personality, it generally attracts far more trouble than its worth, ha).
Anyway, in order to alleviate some of the stressors that may arise in the future, I think it's time I doubled down while I have the chance, and thus, I'm going to attempt to run 2 tournaments a year! Since we always have a tournament at my birthday party when everyone is around, I figure 6 months apart is a pretty good breakdown of times, right? Thus, this month we'll be our first tournament for the year, and the game of choice? Oh, it's a fan and friend favorite, URBAN REIGN. 
I invite all of you, regardless of where you are geographically, to tune in to my Twitch Channel on March 25th @ 5 PM EST for a tournament of champions!
I've got an event posted on the Okamigakure facebook page, which you can view here to remember when the fun begins: Urban Reign Tournament

If you can't be with us in person, I hope you'll join us live on the internets! 

500 SUBS

HOLY CRAP GUYS N GALS. I THINK THAT THE IMPOSSIBLE JUST BECAME POSSIBLE.

No, but seriously. Thank you. Thank you all for sticking with me over the years, for being a friend, for hanging out. It means a hell of a lot to me. I had a... We'll say, rough time coming to grips over the years with being me, but now I know who I am and I'm glad that through the wonders of YouTube and the rest of the internet I've been able to share that with all the people that I've been able to over the years. Today has been a really swell day for me just being on the internets, but this achievement is the most amazing icing on the cake I've ever seen. 

While we're on the subject of this year and my channel, why don't I give you guys a heads up on what's coming down the pipeline? That's right, it's UPDAAAAAAAAAAAAATE TIME! It's everyone's favorite time, right??

Welp, Unfair-Y Tales is proceeding completely as planned for once, and I'm almost done with the outlines for all of the episodes this season. There's going to be even more stories left over for a season 4, but I think we all knew that was going to be the case. You don't just... turn off crazy, now do you? 

Tech-wise there's been a couple changes that I'm pretty sure you've been noticing if you've been keeping up lately. I finally have a hookup that lets me record console games without HDMI cables (oddly enough by adapting an HDMI connection, ha) RELIABLY. This means PREPARE TO BE INUNDATED WITH OLD SCHOOL GAMING GOODNESS. 

Actually, starting tomorrow on YouTube there will be an example of this! Tuesdays are my Let's Play/Longplay days and since JackBauer is away on vacation and he wouldn't sit his ass down at his computer, there's going to be a break in the Dungeon Defenders II Let's Play. I'll be filling that gap with some longplays in some games I've been meaning to show you guys for a while now, but I'm also 90% certain I'm going to make it so that there's double videos on most Tuesdays, with a multiplayer and a single player let's play/longplay! I think this will alleviate my need to always be on the rest of Okamigakure's back about sitting down to play something. Also, I have A LOT of games that I still want to play, and share with y'all! 

If you follow me on Twitch, I've started to move down the list of games in that table I've had up on the channel for like 3+ years! Right now I'm working on X-Men Legends II so if you want to join me there, I'd very much appreciate your help! The table on Twitch is set up in a "I'll be let's playing all or part of this game>i want to stream gameplay of this game" fashion. So while I'm currently doing a let's play, the next game will just be some footage, hopefully single and multiplayer! In addition, I'll certainly be streaming Skylanders here and there, as well as Battleborn (HELL YEAH, WINTER UPDATE).

That's all the important news I've got for you today, so stay tuned for the next milestone! 

This year's tournament

This year's birthday party tournament ended up going waaaaay differently than I had originally anticipated. I picked a simple game (It was Super Mario War in case any of you guys n gals missed it) that was four players and I thought it would be easy-peasy. The tournaments always take up a lot of time and it's incredibly difficult for us to rearrange the brackets for people that show up in the middle. Usually these issues can be dealt with in a timely fashion but this year they weren't... It ended up taking something absurd like 2 hours just to get the brackets down and they weren't even right at the end. 

Everyone seemed to show up real late this year (Even though I generally compensate by telling people to come 2-3 hours before I actually want them here, a lot of people showed up after the tournament was even supposed to start. I either need to get more timely friends or make the tournaments later in the future... I honestly expected more people to want to join the tournament from the get-go but we had a lower number of entrants than I think we ever have had before? You'd think the simpler and more recognizable the game the more people would want to join, right? Apparently not. 

In any case, the ten matches (THERE WERE JUST SUPPOSED TO BE THREE MATCHES THIS YEAR, EASY-PEASY) from the Super Mario War tournament should be highlighted and up and running on my YouTube channel this Friday (9/30). I'm going to have to either run more tournaments so that I can get a better feel for what's going on and streamline the process, or get people to tell me beforehand if they're going to play or not, so we can do the brackets earlier. Either way, I did have fun, and for the first time I think, ever? I won my own tournament (Even though, y'know, I shouldn't have been in the finals anyway... hahahaha)!

Battlefield 1 Beta

Hey there guys and gals! I know it has been SO long since I last left you guys a message here, but I've finally got something I want to talk to you about!

For those of you that aren't in the know, the Battlefield 1 beta dropped recently and I decided I would be taking a gander at it, much like most of my game-playing brethren. To be honest, I've always been a bigger fan of the Battlefield games than the Call of Duty series. I figured this game, with a new environment, would be excellent for me to try out, and for the most part I'd been quite stoked about finally get to play. Unfortunately after a couple hours with it, I think I've already decided that I won't be snagging this game on release. 

That isn't to say it's a bad game, because it's not, and I'm sure many of you out there are enjoying yourselves with it. The issue I found with it after spending some time with it was that while the game is impressive, what with the destruction and the different weapon and vehicle types, and the sheer number of players... The experience has not been enjoyable. First of all, they don't explain ANYTHING to you. You gotta figure it out as you go, and while that may seem to some of you to be a method of leveling the playing field, it's a bad idea from a game design standpoint. It took me THREE games to figure out how to leave a vehicle I was in because I had already pressed EVERY SINGLE BUTTON. Then all of a sudden it occurred to me that maybe I've got to try holding down a button. I also could swear that they added the button prompts in to opening doors and shutters and driving vehicles halfway through the beta. That just seems like poor planning to me, but whatever.

The real issue I've got with it is something that Mack from Worthabuy had pointed out in his video, and that is the simple fact that the people that have been playing longer than you ALL have an unfair advantage against you. You get warbonds, which function as a form of currency for the game periodically as you play and level up, and supposedly you can use these to upgrade your equipment. The game drops hints that you can go to your "customize" screen to do this, but I have as of yet not discovered where this fabled screen is hiding. There's no matchmaking in the beta, and I honestly doubt that there will be any in the full game, so like Titanfall, expect to just be dumped in your first game against someone who has hundreds of hours under their belt. 

I'm not saying that you don't kill people, but beyond the scouts and their rifles, pretty much anyone who has upgraded their guns in any of the other classes (assault, medic, support) will beat you, stuck with the starter guns for your class in a fight. If I get killed by someone in the same class as me, they almost never have the same gun as me. It would be fine to me if there was still some kind of skill left in the game, but on multiple occasions I've unloaded entire clips of BOTH my primary and secondary weapon into an opponent, only to have them clip me in the toe once with an upgraded pistol and drop me instantly. That kind of gameplay... Just isn't fun.
There's also some balancing issues that need to be worked out. If you're not assault and you run into a vehicle, well... Kiss your ass goodbye. I understand that the classes are all supposed to be good at something, but to have absolutely NOTHING in your arsenal useful against an oncoming vehicle seems pretty silly. In a game that's got such neat destructibility features, why is it that we can't pop tires or rip a tread or something of that nature? I highly doubt someone who wasn't specifically prepared to take out tanks in actual wartime scenarios couldn't figure out something to do to help defend themselves.
But yeah, there's another AAA title that I'm just not interested in. 

Request etiquette

As most of you know, or if maybe you don't, I take requests. Recently, there's been a crazy influx of requests for Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Marvel vs Capcom 2. For scale, I've currently got 13 requests from the same person, and this is after I've already done at least 8 of that person's requests. That's not the only person giving me requests for these two games, but two people in particular are getting especially indignant about me completing them.
I upload videos to YouTube on a schedule, and in the current schedule, there's really only two days a week that I would put up videos for these two games: Thursdays (for anything) and Saturdays for fighting games/beat-em-ups. Pretty much every Saturday and some Thursdays for the past three months I've been uploading requests. They're not always for these two games, but on every single video, at least two of these requesters have been like "BUT WHERE'S MY VIDEO!?!" One of them even went so far as to threaten to unsub me the other night.
Just think about that. Think about how ridiculous that is. You go onto someone else's channel, and you ask them to do something for you, and then you become absolutely indignant that it hasn't been done quickly enough. I actually had to virtually sit one of them down the other day and explain to them that the only person whose channel they're going to have control over when it comes to content; when it's released and when it's worked on is themselves. That, in and of itself should be intuitive, it should be inherent knowledge. But it is apparently not...
This is not the first time I've dealt with volume when it comes to requests. A friend of my channel, NewUche, he would give me 100 requests at a time for MUGEN. Same thing happened with Spongerific. Yet neither of these people ever got mad that I didn't do EVERY SINGLE REQUEST RIGHT THAT SECOND. I've devoted the last three months' Saturdays and sometimes Thursdays to requests. The fact is, it's my channel, and should I want to upload something of my own choosing, that choice is mine to make, not anyone else's. You can't possibly think that you can guilt me into only providing content for you, when it's my channel. 
Two of the people putting in requests have actually told me things like "You're going to upload my requests on such and such day, at such and such time." However nicely I could reply, the answer was always "no," yet neither of them seem to get it. I honestly never thought I'd be making a blog entry about request etiquette, but this is what we've come to. 
I've currently got two series running on my channel. My Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy Let's Play and Unfair-Y Tales. I work on those first during the week, and whatever time I have left, I make content for the remaining days. Those two series are my priority. Having to explain that I'm simply not going to devote ALL the remaining free time I have to playing a game or two that I don't regularly play is just silly. It should never have had to come to this in the first place. 
I just... I want people to know that making content for the masses takes time, it takes effort. You need to understand that that one person that's actually creating the content is the one that's going to decide what the content actually takes the form of. No one else can decide that. 

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?!