Lethal League Tournament

September 22nd is our next tournament, and this time around it's LETHAL LEAGUE! I plan on having a singles and a doubles tournament, but we'll see how many people actually want to play... I feel like since this isn't a fighting game more people will be willing to join, but we shall see~

Tournament Rules

Free for All (Singles)

• Stocks: 7
• Ball Tagging: On
• Timer: 10 Minutes
• Minimum Ball Speed: 8
• Regular Ball

Team Battle (Doubles)

• Stocks: 10
• Ball Tagging: On
• Timer: 10 Minutes
• Minimum Ball Speed: 8
• Regular Ball

Very important note: ALL characters are selectable, even Doombox. In order to select Doombox, you must select characters in this order: Sonata>Raptor>Switch>Candyman>Raptor>Dice>Latch. If done correctly, your selected character icon will become the "?" and you'll get Doombox when the match starts! 

I'm looking forward to smacking some balls around with all the attendees! Come join us on my Twitch channel on Saturday for what I hope will be a GREAT time!

The #GreatNerfWar

Hey there guys n gals! I've got information on something a lil' bit different for y'all this time around. If you've been keeping up with my second YouTube channel, I've been posting a lot of Blaster Unboxings and Reviews and you might be wondering why. Well, the answer to that is that I'm trying to familiarize myself with all the weapons that will be available in my arsenal to myself and all the other participants at The #GreatNerfWar! 

I've been talking about it a lil' bit here and there, but we've decided on a date, August 19th, and so far it looks like we'll have at least 12 participants. I think that's pretty good for a first time event, don't you think? We intend to record in some way, shape or form, so there will definitely be at least SOME kind of footage available to you. I expect to have all my unboxings done by then and then we'll just jump into the fun. There will be some familiar faces out there on the field, but probably also a bunch of new people you've never seen before on either of my channels! I'm really excited for this to go down! We're looking at six different gametypes for our little war just to spruce things up, rather than just straight sudden death elimination

• Elimination (3-7)
• 3 lives, 7 second count back in
• If hit, count out loud 7 Mississippi with your gun raised in the air (You can look for ammo/reload as long as you continue counting aloud)
• Yell "CLEAR" when your time is up and you're coming back in
• Victory Condition: One team remaining OR last man standing (if FFA)

• Carpe Testiculum
• Get all of your opponent's balls into your team's bucket
• Two ball buckets, one in either team's base are filled with the same number of balls
• When in possession of a ball, it MUST remain in your hand(s), you CANNOT fire any blasters while holding the ball
• You can block enemy fire and tap enemy players with the ball to take them out however
• When hit, you must return to your team's spawn (infinite respawn)
• If holding a ball and hit, you must leave the ball EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE and then head back to your spawn
• Victory Condition: All the balls in one goal/More balls in one goal if game is called early

• Shooting Gallery
• Uses X Shot Cans
• Each can in a six stack is worth one point
• Fully assembled standing cans worth one point, two points if you can get them to break apart
• Will have a limited number of shots per player (lower number if played on teams)
• Victory Condition: Highest Point Total

• Team Freeze Tag
• Freeze opponents by shooting them
• Unfreeze teammates by physical touch
• Conga line rule is in effect, if you're touching someone while they are (re)frozen you are also frozen
• Victory Condition: Freeze enemy team

• Blob
• Every time you shoot another player, they join your blob (do your best to move as one)
• Free for All (NO TEAMS INITIALLY)
• Victory Condition: Consume all other players

• VIP
• Protect your team's VIP from the enemy team (VIPs have a crown to set them apart)
• VIP only allowed to carry Barrel Breaker TK-3 (3 shot revolver, but you must reset the barrel manually) - CANNOT RELOAD/CANNOT UPGRADE
• Shoot enemy team to knock them out, Non-VIPs have infinite respawn, but MUST travel back to spawn if hit
• Victory Condition: TAKE OUT THE ENEMY VIP

And that's all I've got for now on The #GreatNerfWar. After I'm done editing footage and other such stuff from it, I'm going to set about re-releasing Unfair-Y Tales Season 2 on my second channel. I'm thinking about finally releasing my patreon as well after that, but we'll see. It's actually for the most part complete, I just wanted to re-do all my art and branding and that never came about... 

It's update time again!

I totally apologize for not utilizing my blog all that often. I've even started to post semi-regularly over on tumblr (though admittedly, it's just reposts from my vlog channel on YouTube). 

Speaking of my second channel, instead of just reuploading Unfair-Y Tales there I took the channel in a bit of a new direction in preparation for the #GreatNerfWar that's looming on the horizon (DATE TBD). I've begun Unboxing and Reviewing Dart Blasters on that channel! If that's what you're into, feel free to come on over and hang out! I've got one uploading as I write this entry and I've got one more to do, unless I can snag myself a Zuru X Shot Turbo Advance. That's realistically the only other blaster I want to get my hands on at the moment. Maybe that will change in time. I also have a strong feeling that most people are gonna be like "Yeah, you can keep my blasters" after the war and I'm gonna have a buttload of blasters at the end that I never intended to buy for myself hahahaha. 

Anyway, now that you know what's been going down on my second channel, let's talk about my main channel! The let's play I've been working on most recently has been Dragonball FighterZ, but hopefully I'm nearing the end of that. After that's done I'll be moving on to the next Let's Play, which actually happens to be a request, and it's Psychonauts from my buddy Tethrinblaze. Many many people over the years have told me that I NEED to play Psychonauts, but I'm finally getting around to it now. I sincerely hope I have a better time with that than I have so far with DBFZ's Story Mode. The arcs have just been altogether too long for a fighting game and it's honestly made the game into a boring slog. On top of that the final arc has you stuck with just Android 16 + Android 18 for hours and hours and that honestly ruined any desire I had to play. In addition to the next Let's Play, I fully intend to work on more MUGEN Movelists (Spoiler alert, the final Capcom character I'll be doing is Gene from God Hand!), and I want to finish off my Why I love Titanfall 2 series. I still have enough footage for probably 2-3 more videos, and I'm planning on doing a bit of a giveaway during the last video, so stay tuned for that! I'll be putting a bit more work into finishing off older series (I plan on completing the rest of my Hardcore runs in Battleborn, now that I have another crew to play with) and then I'm going to make sure that I start some new ones up. I know I say this a lot, but I'd also really enjoy getting to jump into some more of the games I've gotten from keymailer. I might even get to jump on some more My Two (S)cents and/or On The Hunt videos!

Speaking of games from Keymailer... I've been playing a lot of ShellShock Live on my Twitch Channel lately and that's left an AWFUL taste in my mouth. It's the only game on Steam I've left a negative review for. I just can't recommend any game where the only way to win the campaign is purely by luck (Which as everyone knows, would be just about a Sisyphean task for me, I'm no Domino, I assure you). I started something tonight that I have been debating on doing for a while and I intend to continue. I've started a personal quest to platinum all of the Skylanders games! Inbetween full Let's Plays I figure it'd be great to take a break and just jump back into something that I know I'm going to enjoy (however frustrating it might end up being). Right now I have two trophies left to obtain before the platinum in the first game, Spyro's Adventure. I have to buy ALL the upgrades for one Skylander (I'm using my Series 2 Double Trouble for this, as I apparently had never upgraded him), and then I've got to defeat the final boss without switching Skylanders. I suspect that's going to take many many many tries but I'm DEFINITELY gonna do it. As most of you know the next Let's Play I've got planned for Twitch is Gundam 0079: Rise from the Ashes on the Dreamcast. I had previously streamed the game one time. This drew the biggest crowd I'd ever had on my channel simultaneously and then the power went out in my house. I haven't played since, but in that one night of playing I finally understood how the game works (It's quite different gameplay wise from the VS series or even Zeonic Front -- a game that I absolutely adore, by the way). I think that would be a great thing for me to finish off, both from a gameplay and audience standpoint. And then once I've beaten that I'll do my best to platinum Skylanders: Giants, which is most likely the most difficult Skylanders game of them all! If you want to tune in to either of those, I stream on Tuesdays and Thursdays @ 8 PM, and then I pick one day over the weekend to stream as well. You'll always know when I'm about to stream (or if I'm taking the day off!) if you follow me on Twitter!

So yeah, that's what's going on on my various channels! I hope that I've got content coming that people continue enjoying to watch, because I don't really see myself stopping any time soon!

March 24th Justice League vs Street Fighter Tournament

Hey there guys n gals! Been a while since I posted on the blog, but here's the rundown for the rules of the upcoming Okamigakure hosted tournament, which will be held on Saturday, March 24th!

Tournament Rules

• Options: 100% Life, Time Limit of 99, Normal Game Speed
• Sets: For the first time we're going to be doing sets instead of just regular matches, best 3 out of 5 (as it is possible when you get a good combo going to pretty much full-combo somebody in JLvsSF and there is no way to change the number of rounds in a match). 
• Character Selections: For the purpose of this tournament, only ONE character will be banned, and that is Parallax. 
• Changing Characters: You ARE allowed to change characters both during and between sets. You CANNOT quit a match to change your character however.  
• Specialty Controllers: I will be running the game off the computer that we are NOT streaming on as well so we should be able to test and see what other controllers work in case people want to bring their own. I know that all wired 360 controllers work in MUGEN, but the others will probably need to be tested. This being said, players WILL be allowed to customize their buttons before each of their sets, as I suspect people will be using different controllers to suit their needs. 

Giveaway/Contest

If you saw the original post/invite on our Facebook page (WHY AREN'T YOU FOLLOWING THERE ANYWAY, HUH?!) or the announcement video on my YouTube channel, you'd know that in addition to the winner receiving a prize, there is also a chance for anyone watching/participating to win a prize as well (believe me, I have tons of things to give out). The contest/giveaway works like this: If you can guess after the first round of matches which characters will be CHOSEN (not what character wins or the players that make it to the finals) in the final match, you have a chance to win a prize! For those in attendance of the tournament, you'll have your pick between a poster/pack or comic book/pack OR a code from my giveaway codelist. If you're out there watching the stream from Twitch (It will be under the category Retro, since JLvsSF is homebrew and there's no category for it) you'll be eligible for one item from the giveaway codelist. 

Now, the cool thing about this tournament is that for the first time, the audience chose it! I might put up another poll for all of the March tournaments in the future and let you guys decide on them, because that was actually kind of cool, hahaha. The other super cool part about this is that the game is F2P, so if any of the participants would like to get a feel for the characters they're more than welcome to download the game before the tournament from Zvitor's homepage or the GameJolt page. Even though the GameJolt page says the current version is 1.0, I'm pretty sure both versions will get you 1.01 which is what we will be playing for the tournament.


P.S. I'm currently going through controllers to see which will work and which will not in case someone wants to bring a stick. I'll be compiling a list of the controllers that will work down here in case of specialty controllers.

• All wired PlayStation 1 and 2 controllers (with adapters - I have multiple)
• All wired Xbox 360 Controllers
• All wireless Xbox 360 Controllers (Own a 360 Wireless Adapter)
• Wireless Dualshock 4 (with 8bitdo Wireless USB adapter - Only one device at a time)
• Wii U Pro Controller (with 8bitdo Wireless USB - Only one device at a time)
• Wireless DualShock 3 (with 8bitdo Wireless USB - Only one device at a time)
• All wired PlayStation 3 controllers (with MayFlash Universal Adapter Ultimate - Only one device at a time)

If you wish to play a non-regular pad, I own a generic Arcade Fighter PS3 stick, the PS3 Versus Fighting Pad and a PS2 Street Fighter 15th Anniversary Chun-Li controller. If you want to bring your own, you're more than welcome to!

Social Media Changes

Jumping right in, first big change is obviously going to be the addition of my second channel. I'm going to be uploading Unfair-Y Tales there every Sunday until we're all caught up and then I'm going to be adding new episodes (Season 4+, starting with episode 61!) on the new channel. The new channel doesn't have a really cool name yet or any kind of branding atm but you can find it here. I'm going to keep up the regular schedule I've been using over the past year on the main channel, and if you don't know it I'm going to give you a rundown right here:

• Sunday: Unboxings (related to video games)
• Monday: Tutorials, guides, On the Hunts and My Two (S)cents
• Tuesday: Let's plays
• Wednesday: Twitch highlights 
• Thursday: General gaming/requests
• Friday: Series
• Saturday: Fighting games and beat 'em ups

You'll notice that vlogs is now missing from the Sunday lineup because all vlogs will go up whenever on the new second channel! I'm not going to schedule them because I honestly have enough to do already, but if I've got something to share and it has to do with IRL stuff, it's going to pop up on the new channel. Be sure to sub to the new channel if you want to hear what's going on in my life!

Speaking of schedules, I've finally come up with a semi-legit schedule for Twitch streaming. If you want to tune in to my Twitch channel, I'll be streaming from now on at 8 PM Eastern Time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I plan on these being streams of the games from the box on the twitch channel about what games I'm going to be streaming next, and then at least once over the weekend (you can follow my Twitter to know when), I'll be doing a longer stream that might not necessarily involve the same games that I'm streaming on Tuesday and Thursday! I got a suggestion from a friend to remake the offline channel art that I use on Twitch and I'll be doing just that when I've got photoshop again to reflect the new streaming setup! I'll also be adding the other links there too.

The only other thing I'm changing up is that I'm going to be adding the games I am currently in progress of and the ones that I am streaming/YouTubing currently (if they're not complete yet) on my backloggery. This way you guys will know what games I'm currently working on, but also what I happen to be playing in the background, if that happens to interest you! Previously I had listed games on my backloggery as "Now Playing" if they were games that I had booted up at least twice during a week. That became a bit of a nuisance to take care of, so I decided to change things up and also give you guys a bit of a better insight into what I'm up to! 

All in all, I think I'm starting off 2018 right and I hope to continue that feeling and trend far into the future! Thanks for sticking with me this long and hopefully you'll all be around in the future too!  

End of 2017 and BEYOND

Hey there guys and gals! It has been... Okay, it's been months since I last updated this blog but now's as good a time as any right?

A lot has changed since I was last around here, I got a regular job, I stopped uploading every single day to YouTube, I basically stopped streaming on Twitch... A LOT has changed. I originally intended to go with a vlog to detail all of these changes, but with the regular job, I basically have no daylight during the week to work on any vlogs. I'm not as comfortable at work yet as I'd like, so maybe at some point I'll film a little bit of a vlog here or there. Maybe I can do some car vlogs too, since my commute is about an hour... Anyway, that stuff just isn't here or there, so let's get back on track!

The real job has really gotten in the way of me uploading a video every single day (except Sundays, most of the time), but I realized quite a while ago that the every-day schedule just isn't something that's sustainable. I had intended to try and go about this for the whole year, but I could tell that this wasn't really helping me that much. Sure it brought in some new blood to the channel, but most of them did not stay for very long as my content was just ALL over the place. I had done research previously to find that variety channels thrive on multiple concurrent let's plays or infrequent, but very high-quality, highly edited videos. I mean, the stress alone from just trying to upload every day was also getting to me, so it's probably good that something came along in my life that forced me to stop that. We all know I would have been too stubborn to stop otherwise, haha. 

In regards to Twitch, the first couple weeks that I was getting used to my new work schedule were EXCEPTIONALLY busy and I ended up just not having ANY free time after work at all. On top of that, I got another update from Elgato for Game Capture HD that basically ruined my HD60. If I ran it through GCHD it would ruin any captures and the video files would be corrupt so they were all unusable. If I ran it through OBS I'd get an hour or so of video and then it would just fizzle and crap out (However while recording Zombie Vikings with Lea/Orange I've discovered that might just be an issue in general with OBS at this point...). I went the distance and downloaded OBS Studio (FINALLY), but I've found that if you used the HD60 as a source your CPU would jump up... If you actually turned the thing on my CPU would shoot up past 100 and my computer would lock up and eventually crash. I have since found that this is a known issue with the HD60 family of capture cards and it's because of the Creators Update. Apparently the Creators Update wrecked the HD60 family of cards and they fixed it post update. I had tried to install the CU twice before and it basically made my whole system unusable so I was completely out of luck on that front, and since the game I was streaming at the time was a PS1 game, I was just too fed up to continue trying to stream. 

Well, I got the Creators Update for the THIRD time the other day and I think it's fixed my HD60 problem. My CPU hasn't run up crazy high and I was able to run through a single test recording off my PS4 in GCHD properly without any corruption/pixelation. It took me FOUR HOURS to fix my sound, in essence I had to install the known wrong driver for my system sounds, and then install a newer version of the drivers that came with my system ON TOP of the wrong drivers to get my sound to function the same way that it used to. It was a crazy four hours and I was pissed off the whole time, but I got my computer working in a reasonable manner. Now that I have OBS Studio I'm going to start new series recording with it and Game Capture HD (if it is in fact usable again) and I'll do my best to phase out regular OBS. I might not totally phase out OBS though, it seems like OBS Studio doesn't properly record videos for games that stretch when they go full-screen so I may be keeping regular OBS around anyway. I have my alerts running in both OBS Studio and GCHD at this point though, so that will bring a bit more interactivity to my channel in the future. 

In regards to scheduling for the channel, I'm going to work first on finishing off series, and then I'll work mostly on series, as opposed to one-off videos for YouTube. I may have a metric butt-ton of games, but coming up with which one I want to record for each day was driving me crazy. Don't get me wrong, I fully intend to work on one-offs in the future, but constantly trying to make sure there's an upload every day is definitely not going to be a priority for me anymore. In the case of Twitch, I think I'll be changing my stream schedule in the coming days from every other day to Tuesday and Thursday at 8, and then one long stream on the weekend, either Saturday or Sunday. Please continue to follow me on twitter for updates on when I'm streaming/if I will be that day. If my elgato is up and running I'll be going back to streaming Ball Breakers on Tuesday/Thursday and when Alisa is available, Portal 2's single player campaign until that is complete (should be soon though, I put in a good 5-6 hours last week!) on the weekend. 

I'm also thinking of starting a secondary channel on YouTube. A lot of my content lately has been dismissed as monetizable by the adpocalypse regulations and I realize that having ALL of my content on one channel hurts it more than it helps. People expecting to see video games aren't really happy to see the vlogs (nor do they care), and vice-versa. I'm considering at this point starting up a secondary channel specifically for real-life stuff and keeping my original channel there for video games. If you're wondering what that means, well... It means Unfair-Y Tales would be moving over to the new channel. Since I'm going to have a lot of trouble recording for Unfair-Y Tales in the near future, I'm considering starting the new channel off by uploading the existing Unfair-Y Tales episodes there one by one to get it started, and then from then on upload them there alone, one by one when they are ready to go. I'd also keep vlogs related specifically to video games on the Kage_Okami channel, while moving the personal ones over to the new vlog channel. I actually already have a second channel that is personally branded because it's tied to my gmail account so starting it up wouldn't really be a problem, it's just the branding and all that. 

Speaking of branding, I'm currently in the works for a new icon for the clan, so that'll help when we do Okamigakure Plays videos, and also it'll help with my business cards and all that jazz. I made business cards for eBay a little bit ago and then I realized I should have them for YouTube stuff too, in case I'm doing a vlog out or talking to people at a convention. I'd rather they have the info for my online persona than like... My actual address, y'know what I mean? I was supposed to be getting all new branding for my YouTube channel as a whole, but at this point, I'll settle for just the clan stuff getting better. It also helps that my current job has some ties to the gaming market, so I think having content creation-related cards will be beneficial to me in the future as well! Also, speaking of that, since I'm done experimenting with the style of my first channel, maybe it's finally time for me to finish up the patreon I've had sitting around waiting for the new branding and release it to the public? We'll see how that goes, but for now, I just wanna say thanks for everyone sticking with me over the years, and that I'm looking forward to continuing to provide content for everybody in the future! 

P.S. Thanks for reading this big huge post if you got all the way down here!

Hero of the Hill Tournament

My birthday party is approaching pretty quickly, and there's still a lot of stuff I need to get done before the fun really begins, but I thought I'd get the tournament rules out of the way pretty early. I've got a cheat sheet with the controls ready and waiting to go which will be available to all of the combatants once the tournament begins, but let's hash out the actual rules here!

Within Disney Infinity 3.0's Marvel Battlegrounds playset there are a couple of different modes, you've got your typical deathmatch scenario, a strange 1v3 mode, and then Hero of the Hill (A.K.A. King of the Hill). I've spent some time playing all of the modes, but I've come to find that Hero of the Hill is definitely the most fun of them all to play as a group, so that's what we'll be doing. 

The matches will be four player free-for-all brawls (THAT MEANS NO TEAMS). Since you don't actually need to use the figures (though they must all be placed on the portal beforehand), you needn't worry about racing to get to a character first come first serve. You can all pick the same character if you really wanted to, so that's not a worry. I will say that since your actual character's color doesn't change based on your team color, if there are duplicate character picks, and alternate costumes are available (So far we've got ones unlocked for: Falcon, Cap, Hulk, Iron Man, Iron Fist, & Spider-Man -- I'll have finished unlocking all the things you can in the game by the time the tournament rolls around, so there will probably be more!) please choose an alternate costume so as not to confuse the other players. No characters are banned but take note that each and every character has one thing special about them that differentiates them from the others (Think of it like a passive bonus). Each player is allowed one practice round to get a feel for a character and to check their passive bonus. This means PER PLAYER, as opposed to per character. SORRY BUT YOU'RE ONLY GOING TO GET ONE CHANCE, so make it count.

As far as the rules go, we're going to be going for 50 points (because if you get in ahead of the others on 20 it sometimes seems like you can win instantly, which SUCKS), 5 min timer (yes, you can get 50 points within a 5 min limit), health modifiers of 100% (DON'T EVEN TRY AND CHEAT BY GIVING YOURSELVES A HANDICAP) and a damage modifier of 200% (We want the brawls to be fast and you to weigh taking a beating!). There will be NO power discs in play, because well, I don't own any of them that pertain to this play set, hahaha. 

I'll be posting the rules up on white board posters like I usually do in case some combatants don't intend to read this blog post, as well as the brackets. As always, there will be prizes for the winner (from my lot of prizes or my digital code listings, winner's choice), and the rest of you all out there in internet land are free to join in on the excitement via the tournament's livestream over on my Twitch Channel! I'm not sure of the time just yet, but there will definitely be twitter notifications and a post or two on the Okamigakure Facebook page, so be sure to follow me/us on these three outlets for updates, and to join in on the fun come tournament day (which, btw is Sept. 23rd)!