W.I.P. for April 19th - 25tth now up on YouTube

I'm still working through my audio issues but I was able to upload a video of short snippets of game play of what I've been playing this week.  These are games that don't warrant a whole video to themselves or games I was just messing around in.  Most of these are failed audio tests but I was able to save the video footage to compile a montage of sorts for you.  I'm hoping to have the audio problems fixed so the next video I post will have live commentary.  If I fail at that I don't know what I'll do with myself.

But on a positive note, I did learn a lot more on how to use my editing software.  It was difficult at first to mash up several different videos and find the good parts (or at least something usable).  I got a little better as I went along so much so that I think the next time will go much better.  That's something right?

This might sound crazy but one dream job I've always thought about is editing.  Editing commercials or movies.  I find it fascinating being able to manipulate people's emotions, whether to buy something or to get them to feel a particular emotion.  They say the best music in a motion picture is the ones that sway your emotions but you don't really hear it.  Meaning that the music plays in the movie and the audience gets carried away in an emotion but don't realize that the music is manipulating them.  Now that's power.  If I could ever figure out how to do that for a living I would.  But I think I'll just start with messing around on YouTube.

Failures, trails and space recovery

I haven’t been idle since my last post.  In fact I’ve been very busy.  I’m desperately trying to figure out why I’m having so many problems with the audio on my game captures.  I’ve recorded several videos and they’ve all failed in one way or another.  If not with the audio, than with the video.  I told you.  I don’t know what I’m doing. 

I messed with some things earlier today and captured another video but I haven’t watched it yet to see how things turned out.  I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to end up with a usable video before the end of the week.  My “one video a week” goal might be hard to get this week.  I think I might have to get my baby brother kaiakapero over to help me figure it out.  He got his degree in the technical side of broadcasting and that’s what he does for a living.  I’ve almost ran out of options and tapped out everything I know on how to fix things.  But at least I’m learning about stuff I never knew about.

But since I need to figure out what’s going on, I’ve been playing a bunch of different games for all these test sessions.  I didn’t want to keep playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga because I just might end up finishing the game before I figure out what I’m doing.  So I’ve picked other games that I can just mess around in.

One of the things I did to try and test things was open up some trail games that I have on my hard drive and play them.  I’ve played them once before and thought “I might want to buy this” but didn’t do so at the time because I didn’t have the money.  Those games have just been sitting on my hard drive taking up space and I still haven’t bought them yet.  So I decided to give them another go and see if I still like them.  If I did I would keep it and hopefully buy it the next time I have some extra money.  If not, I would delete the game and free up some badly needed space on my hard drive.

I think I played 3 of them.  And deleted them all.  That’s not to say they were bad games, just that I wasn’t as interested in playing them now as I was when I first downloaded the trial version.  Unfortunately none of those test videos were usable for my YouTube channel.  But the good news is that I did some more cleaning up of my hard drive and got back up to 30GB of free space.  I was down to 5GB before I started.  Damn you Games with Gold!

For some reason I seem to think that there is a limit on how large an external drive you can connect to your Xbox360; whether it be a thumb drive or something else.  I want to say the limit is 32GB, but I could be wrong.  Also, I think I heard/read somewhere that there is going to be an update soon to Xbox that will allow for larger external hard drives to be connected to an Xbox360.  I don’t remember where or when I heard/read that so I could be way off with that.  Maybe I dreamed about it.  Who knew that 500GBs (or whatever the slims are) wouldn’t be enough space for someone’s games.  I wonder how long it will take me to max out my hard drive on an Xbox One after I get one.

Phase Two has now begun.

Phase 2 has now begun.  Yep, I'm finally ready to introduce you to phase 2 of my world domination plan.  I mean gaming plan.  World domination is phase 3.

I now have a YouTube channel and I've posted my first video up on the site and you can go watch it and leave nasty comments  Hey, it's the internet, isn't that what people do nowadays.  

It's just an introduction video where I tell a little bit about myself and how I started gaming.  For those of you who already know me it's just a rehash of what you probably already know.  But if anyone new comes along I wanted them to get a sense of who I was.  Hopefully they'll like me anyway.

Getting this intro vid finished and up was a pain in the but.  The first one I captured didn't have the audio.  I tried doing a voice over after the fact but somehow that didn't work out right and got out of sync when I edited it.  The third attempt got the audio and video together but I accidentally had the game audio turned up and the chat audio turned down so you couldn't hear me say anything.  I muted the game audio and did a voice over recording on that vid and you can check out my channel to see how bad a job I did.

I don't have anyone to help me do this, or more importantly tell me what I'm doing wrong.  So it's me fumbling around trying to figure things out on my own.  I'm hoping I get better the more I do this.  I don't think I could get any worse.

I'll be putting up videos for the Xbox 360, PS3 and maybe some PC games.  I'm hoping to get an Xbox One sometime this summer.  I will definitely have one before Star Wars Battlefront comes out even if I have to start selling my internal organs to do so.

You can find my YouTube channel under Pengwenn.  My user name is Pengwenn . . . for everything.  Well, almost everything.  My Xbox, PSN, Steam, YouTube and Twitch (more on that later) user name is Pengwenn.  My twitter name is @PengwennGamer because someone had already taken Pengwenn.  How rude.

Phase One complete (sort of)

I have a two phase plan of what I want my gaming life to be.  I've been window shopping for just the right equipment for phase one and I've finally done something about it.

So I took my tax refund money and bought a laptop and TV this weekend (along with another item which you'll find out about later).  I was able to walk out with the laptop but I had to order the TV.  It should come in on Thursday.  I'm thinking of taking Friday off so I can stay home and play games on the new TV to see if it makes a difference.

While I know I could have probably gotten a better desktop computer for the same price as my laptop it would actually cost more in the end because I would have to buy a new monitor as well.  I'm still using a 17" fat monitor for my current system.  At least with buying a laptop the "monitor" is included.

I ended up getting a Lenovo i7 processor with 8GB RAM + 2GB video memory and 1T hd.  I know there's better laptops out there, but that was the best I could afford.  It's also a touch screen and the screen can flip around too, but I don't think I'll use that function.  I got a 55" Vizio smart TV which I can't wait to get.  I could hook up my laptop to the TV and play PC games on a very big screen.  I can't wait to give it a shot.

It's Windows 8.1 and it's taken some getting use to it.  I'm still having problems trying to find everything I'm looking for but I'm learning.  I didn't have any problems getting it connected to my home network but I had big problems getting it connected to the internet.  I was almost about to give up and call my brother dain to come over and help, but I thought I would give it one more try.  I got everything to work and I was able to get the virus software and Office 365 installed.  I then spent a lot of time remove programs that it came with that I don't want.  You would not believe all the stuff that was one there.

I really wish I could tell you about the other thing that I bought, but unfortunately I want to have a big reveal with that one and I'm not quite ready to say anything on that just yet.  Maybe by this weekend.

Even though I know I didn't get the best or latest stuff I do still feel like I've taken a huge step forward in joining the modern world.  So, I didn't get a 4k TV or a supped up computer.  At least I no longer have to use a computer that can barely run Windows XP (which is no longer supported) or take up to 30 minutes to boot up and start everything.  I'm not late to the game because I've been nostalgic for the good old days of cassette tapes and VHS movies.  I'm late because I haven't had the money to join the 21st century of electronics.  Now if only I had the money to do something about my phone.

More Achievements for me

So I pulled Borderlands 2 out of the tub on Monday and picked up an achievement.  I even played it Tuesday as well, just for fun.  But I wasn’t really in the mood so I didn’t keep it up. 

On Wednesday I decided to pull another game out of the tub and this time I picked Scene It? Box Office Smash!  I was okay with that choice as long as I could find where I put the special controllers for the game.  Yes, I know I could use the standard Xbox controller but those special controllers make it more fun.  It took awhile before I found them and then I figured I should probably get some batteries because who knows how long ago I used them and if the batteries were still good.   Turns out they were.

I had to disconnect my Xbox controller and just use the game controller otherwise it was thinking there were 2 players in the game.  I wasn’t sure if I could navigate the menus with the special controllers but it wasn’t that bad.  I wondered if there was a way to play a regular game with those controllers.  I figure it would have to be a platformer or puzzle type game.  There just isn’t any fine tuning to the movement with those buzzers.

After I got the controller issue figure out, I started a game.  Just a short game; nothing too fancy.  And at the end of the game I got an achievement.  Whoo Hoo!!!  I played another short game and picked up 3 more achievements.  So . . . I played a third game, but sadly I didn’t get any more achievements.  I think I was close to getting one but just missed out on it.

I tired finding an online match but nobody seemed to be playing this game besides me.  Oh well.  I didn’t think I would get those online achievements anyway.

Well, so far I’m 2 for 2 in playing games out of the tub and getting achievements for them.  I’ve picked up almost 100 gamer score in 3 days so getting to 30,000 is very doable.  I’m sitting at 27,662 right now so I only have to get 2,338 more.  I’m sure if I keep this up I might cross 30,000 long before the end of the year.

I figure this success rate isn’t going to last.  I’m going to run in to a game that’s going to take a lot more work to unlock an achievement than what these last two games have done.  Like, I’m on disk 2 for Blue Dragon but I haven’t unlocked an achievement in a very long time.  Maybe that means I’m close, but I really don’t think so.  Most of the achievements in that game seem to be for completing things or maxing things out.  I figure those achievements will pop up closer to the end of the game.

Instead of dipping in to the tub again today I might try playing some Gears of War Judgment.  It’s the free Games with Gold for the first part of April and I downloaded to the game last night.  My Gears of War games are some of my most completed games for achievements.  I’ve got 77%, 93%, 81% and 35% in them (in release order).  Judgment is the lone 35% completion in that group.  I should really try to make that more acceptable since I love the Gears of War franchise, even if I didn’t like how Judgment told its story.  So maybe I’ll stick with that game for awhile and see what achievements I can earn there.

I also added Terraria to my list of Xbox Live Arcade titles.  It was also a Games with Gold freebie.  I had the trail version and played it briefly.  It’s one that I considered buying if/when I had the money and/or time to play it.  At least now I didn’t have to buy it and I can spend my money on other things.  I wonder how easy it is to get achievements in that game.