Dark Souls II: Super housekeeping and a renewal of effort edition.

Remember when games would put out fansite press kits? I got this from their Facebook page.

So, I'm still not super sure what I want to do with this space. I do want to return to Shadowrun for the SNES, but I realize that there are newer games I want to play. With school and work the time I'm able to dedicate to this sort of sub hobby of my hobby is pretty limited, as evidenced by my lack of posts or streaming output. I had the idea of making a post on my initial impressions of the Xbox One and I had the idea of making a year end post, but I think the window has closed on the latter, and after I maybe capture some footage of me getting killed a lot in Titanfall I will probably return to the former idea, but currently the zeitgeist I'm following and vainly trying to be part of is Dark Souls II.

The format I've chosen so far is to stream some gameplay out live then archive it to the Youtubes then embed it here and post my thoughts on the game clip and game in question. I'm inspired to do this by my two favorite gaming sites Giant Bomb and the CRPG addict. In a way I'm trying to emulate both of them while trying to do my own thing. Probably succeeding at neither but there you have it. I suppose as this goes on and if I get any feedback I might find a direction.

The last little bit of housekeeping is that I'm going to try to make these blog posts closer to the actual times I make the videos I have a video or two that I've made for Shadowrun that I haven't made posts for. They're upcoming in 2050 don't worry. My problem is that I don't really take notes during these gameplay sessions (I'm pretty lousy at notes in classes that aren't pure lectures either). I might be better if I weren't live streaming all of them but trying to make the stream interesting with my rapier wit (I want to go there) but that is the most efficient way for me to create content.

Enough of me complaining, Dark Souls II is out and all of us who are going to play it are going to die quite a bit. Why did I choose this game to be my return to live streaming? Well I was mistaken in thinking that streaming a popular game might get some viewers. I now realize that all the popular streams are streaming the same game and I'm buried underneath people who have been doing this more than like once.  Whenever I tweet out I'm going live I usually get 2 viewers, I'm not sure if that is a function of my tweeting things out or if two people who just don't want to have anything to do with chat are watching my channel for a while after I log out, I'm guessing the former.

In any case, my plan going forward is to try to post a summary as close to the streaming date as possible as such here is my first foray into Dark Souls II.

Unfortunately I was using a new video capture device and computer and apperntly I hadn't set up the stream to correctly take audio info. There are a lot of bits where I try to do dumb things and make pithy comments that just look like me standing around, fortunately it's the tutorial area and just me fumbling my way through it and it should be largely ignored especially how many times I died. I'm also thankful you guys didn't see how I got the "This is Dark Souls" achievement. I'm slightly embarrassed/proud of how dumb I got that achievement.  I wanted to get through the character creation bit before I started streaming and I managed to die twice before that area. The first time I died I thought hey the pathway in front of me looks like the way they want me to go. It would be like a Souls game to put something in the opposite direction, so I went the other way, I went too far. My running the opposite direction took me off the side of a cliff and well I died, I didn't lose any souls but I did lose my chance for a perfect run (ha). The second time I died that wasn't chronicled was when I saw all the creatures running around before the house with all the creepy ladies in it, and they kept running away from me I thought it might be advantageous to kill one or two before I "started the game" or "praised the sun." Yea, they didn't feel like having any of that. They all quickly ganged up on me and I died but I did get the 30 or so souls back when I respawned, maybe you can farm that area, it's weird. I don't understand why it's there. I'm sure there is a reason if I started reading the internet would become apparent. So then we go into what I actually played through and that first section is going to be super boring, or at least it would be to me since I just go through the tutorial area a few times and try to crack a few jokes which don't get recorded because of some problem I had with the Elgato capture device I was using and the software, I tested my mic going into broadcasting and it seemed to work, with their software, and it captured gameplay and failures against those hippo looking monsters at the beginning of the game. But for some reason it catches a bit of my mic at points and I don't really understand what is going on with it, I'll discuss some of that at the end of this post. In the end I fought the hippo guys enough to understand I'm not supposed to kill them at that point in the game. I moved on and went to the starter/only "town in the game" which lead us to this clip. Which is just as if not more embarrassing as far as skill goes. That is my first foray into really gonna a lot. It does seem that my VO is pretty quiet vs Game Audio, next time I'll pump my mic back to where it was a the beginning of the stream.


 

Yea, I'm still trying to figure things out as streaming goes, A, that rapier wit I was talking about. I know I fall short a bunch of times. B, I'm going to boost the volume of my VO (read rapier wit) next time around. C, I'm not going to ingest a ton of fluids next time.

Lessons learned during part two of DS stuff first empty the bladder, I'm really sorry about that. Don't take sips of a soda durning the stream because that will cut it off early, I feel for Breaking Brad segments now.  This video kind of sucks because it shows me sucking it up against the same stupid semi boss several times if anyone has good suggestions on how to use my 3 leveling points I would be glad to hear them.