Even leaving out the stuff as regards my DDR adventure yesterday, this was a pretty eventful week for me site-wise.
First, on the music front, I’ve been messing around with my new drum machine I got for Christmas, and the next song I upload will be the first using it. I have a basic knowledge of how to work it now, I think, although to be honest, it sounds a little too much like me playing drums. The buttons on it are weight-sensitive–in other words, the harder you press, the louder the drum sound–and I have yet to really get the hang of that, so the volume of the drums in the song varies pretty wildly at points. Oh well, as long as I fix it up for the album, this will be a fascinating document of me learning as I go.
In site news, you’ll notice a new section on the sidebar, “Emptyeye Elsewhere on the Web”. It’s a list of my profiles and speedruns on various sites I frequent. I figure that with the LJ and MySpace in particular I direct them to here a lot (Almost exclusively, in fact), so I figured I’d go the other way this time and see what came of it.
Speedrun wise, my Astyanax run continues to sit in the SDA queue. If you know the game, and you’ve been around SDA, let Mike at SDA know that you can verify that I’m not a dirty cheater–the quicker it gets verified, the quicker it can be viewed by the masses. I’m also considering recording audio commentary over all of the runs I currently have on SDA, which is apparently five of them (Two Battletoads runs, plus one each for Rygar, The Magic of Scheherazade and Willow). It seems that I have a few people who would watch them if I could avoid simply repeating my text commentary, and as one person said, “it is always handy to have multiple potential sources from which to watch [speedruns].” There is some element of self-interest there too, as it may give more people who watch speedruns a reason to go to my site and check out the music, etc, which works out well for me. Tomorrow sometime I’ll probably try to record just an audio track for my Rygar run and upload just that. That way, people who have the run (Like, um, me) already will just download a relatively small audio file and, if the whole thing turns out to bomb, it won’t be a huge investment of time on my part (Except for the “Uses Warps” Battletoads run, this is my shortest). If it does work out, then I’ll do the work to integrate the audio with the video and do commentaries for my longer runs. Being bitten by the Let’s Play bug, I may start doing some of those too. Those are just normal playthroughs of a game with commentary. I’m not exactly sure what games I’d do these on, though Power Blade is one candidate. If you have any other ideas, feel free to suggest them.
Until next time…
-EE
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I actually like the commentary for speed runs– I even thought of doing a “no damage, no special weapons” run for Castlevania with voice overs ( I actually recorded the playthrough, which was “pure” all the way up to Dracula’s second form where I finally got hit!)
Awesome news, I’m always a sucker for audio commentary!
DeceasedCrab on Youtube/Somethingawful already did a Power Blade LP, and it’s usually considered bad form to repeat a game. Power Blade 2 is still out there, though! =P
Actually, I think you could offer up your commentaries for everything you’ve run except Battletoads as LPs. Nobody has done those games yet IIRC, and there have been a few skill-oriented LPs in the past.
Thanks again,
Josh.
Well drat, I just saw that your Rygar commentary was recorded as a separate MP3.
For the above idea to work, I think you would have to open your run in the media player and record that window while talking.
And yes, even though you’re performing commentary after the fact, it can still qualify as an LP. Diabetus did this with his LPs of Battlemaniacs, Little Nemo, Captain Novolin, and probably others I’m forgetting.
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@ James: Yeah, a couple people have actually said as much, that more speedrunners should do audio commentaries for their runs. The thing is that doing a useful running commentary (In my case, the two criteria for this would be “not just repeating my text commentary” [Which is going to be very difficult for anything other than Rygar, as I went into an obsessive level of detail in the text commentaries for pretty much everything else] and “doesn’t just say things like ‘and here I’m going to the next objective…and here I’m killing an enemy..'”) is actually really hard to do! In the case of Rygar, I think I did a pretty okay job of it, as I discussed the NTSC/PAL differences in the game plus its “can you go to the last level” programming, neither of which I discussed in the text commentary.
@RashReflection: Anything I can do to avoid calling down the wrath of SomethingAwful on my head is good. :P It appears DC did indeed do an LP of Power Blade, so that’s out for now. I’ve never actually played Power Blade II, though I did read about it in an old Nintendo Power…that could be interesting I suppose. I have a number of old obscure games I could do too, if one of them strikes my fancy.
As for the commentary being a separate MP3, as I mentioned, for now I did it mainly because this commentary was a sort of pilot for the idea; if this one is bad, any longer ones are certainly going to be even worse, so if it bombs, at least I haven’t invested major time in long commentaries and learning how to integrate the audio with the video and the like.
As far as recording the audio separately, I think there is a way to integrate it with the existing video (Besides “capture the window with the run in something like CamStudio and talk over it as you watch it”), but it isn’t exactly easy, hence why I’m waiting to see if people like this commentary before I invest the time and such to do more of them. I do plan to do probably two versions of the commentary per speedrun; the full start-to-finish commentary, plus some shorter versions for breaking up the run and putting it on YouTube or somesuch (Whether I’ll call them Let’s Plays or just something like “Game X speedrun/walkthrough with commentary” is yet to be seen).
So with that, I should probably make a post here advertising the Rygar commentary, eh? Guess I’ll do that now…
http://www.indecision2008.com/blog.jhtml?c=vc&videoId=148738
you might like this. I found it kinda randomly, and here I’ll put the link.