Category: Articles

Articles about game design, games journalism, the games industry or maybe just games. Chill takes over hot takes, every time.

What I use to record Let’s Play videos and Livestreams

I get asked what tools I while recording use a lot, so I thought I’d toss it all into a nice detailed page to point to. Here you’ll find all the software, hardware and what not I record or livestream with, all of which I personally recommend.

I don’t have any special training, so why some of these tools may not be the absolute best in the biz, they work, they’re easy enough for an untrained spikeball to use and they’re either reasonably priced or free.

I’ll update this whenever new software enters my permanent rotation. Yes Amazon links in this post may be affiliate links. No you do not pay more by visiting an affiliate link.

Last updated 2017-1-30.

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An Objective Undertale Review

(There are some very vague, very technical, very Objective™ spoilers for Undertale below. You probably won’t get the joke if you haven’t beaten Undertale at least once anyway.)

Undertale is a 122.52 MB single player game with “partial” controller support described as an “RPG Game”. The game is rendered at 640×480 pixels like a 30 year old CRT television though almost all ingame art is actually made at a resolution well below 480p. Most enemies are black and white in combat with extremely limited animation. The color pallette is similarly limited, probably 32 colors or less on most screens. The game only uses three buttons and arrow keys.

An objective sample of Undertale's art.
An objective sample of Undertale’s art.

The game has three endings. Two endings can be achieved at level 1, while the other ending requires more time grinding than playing the game. The “hardest” boss in the entire game has only 1 HP and their attacks can only deal 1 HP in return. The strongest equipment in the game is literally useless. Several fights cannot be lost.

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Getting in Gear

I’ve been trying to figure out just what I’m doing with my channel/website/content in general for a while now, and I’ve finally settled on a few things I think I can make work. The last couple weeks I’ve been working on a lot of that and trying to streamline some processes, and I hope it’s starting to show.

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Steam Controller First Impressions

I got one of the first batch of Steam Controllers this Friday and I’ve had an…Interesting™ time with it. I played it with 17 games of various genres to try it out and I’ve got a lot of things to say about it, at the least. You can find my specific experiences with the games at the bottom after the conclusion.

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Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer Mini-Review

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you might not know I’m a pretty huge Animal Crossing fan. Being able to design my home is pretty much the main driving force behind most of my actions in Animal Crossing, so I was quite excited to see them break out a whole game around designing homes.

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer has gotten a lot of “who asked for this” replies from the peanut gallery but I’ve always been pretty excited and I was very relieved to find out that yes, it’s pretty darn fun!

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Youtube Gaming Review

Youtube got a brand new Gaming focused UI this week, let’s see how it stacks up against Youtube itself and rival Twitch.

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Backwards compatibility in the digital age

Backwards compatibility has had a weird history. The PS2 is probably the first “major” device to offer it, mostly being a thing sported by minor revisions of specific PC/console gaming systems like the PC Engine (and generally PC games have BC though each Windows version jump is a bit of a question mark).

Since Backwards Compatibility never really became a 100% expected feature of consoles, a lot of “no one even uses that” talk came out when it was announced the PS4 and Xbox One would completely lack any form of Backwards Compatibility–and in Sony/MS’s defense, the architecture mismatch is a pretty big deal so it’s not quite a minor deal. Continue reading “Backwards compatibility in the digital age”

On pace and walking simulators

pace
noun
1. a rate of movement, especially in stepping, walking, etc.: to walk at a brisk pace of five miles an hour.

2. a rate of activity, progress, growth, performance, etc.; tempo.

(Dictionary.com)

While playing TIMEframe I found myself thinking–isn’t this a bit slow? As a “walking simulator” (forgive my use of the term, I don’t mean it derogatorily), TIMEframe’s primary input is, yes, walking. And I began to notice something about the genre: they really all are quite slow–very much walking sims and not running sims.

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Omega Quintet Review

Omega Quintet: I am the alpha and the  *ω*

Editor’s note: I’ll be comparing this game to Hyperdimension Neptunia a lot. Both are silly JRPGs by Compile Heart, so if you’re interested in one you’re probably interested in the other, but more importantly Omega Quintet is also based on a moderately modified Neptunia engine.

Editor’s second note: I do not actually have an editor.

All in all, Omega Quintet is pretty much what you expect for better or worse. Fairly low budget, the story is focused on humor rather than complexity or intrigue, graphics aren’t impressive, but the one thing that really stands out is the gameplay, specifically the combat.
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Senran Kagura Estival Versus Import Review

I wouldn’t normally import a game almost certain to get localized, but I went and made an exception here as I had to have the chibi figures the game comes with. So I thought I’d make a review, note I’m reviewing this as someone who can’t read, write or understand a lick of Japanese.

If you’re unfamiliar with Senran Kagura, there may be evil sinful M rated boobies in the following digital pages, so kindly flee in horror if that is a problem.

All of this review is written from the perspective of the PS4 version of Senran Kagura Estival Versus and assumes you’ve played Shinovi Versus (it’s basically required playing first). I can’t say much about the vita version–it’s still in it’s wrapping and will probably remain that way. I have heard the Vita version has assorted minor problems, framerate dips, 30 FPS to start with, some bugs not present in the PS4 version (at least, I never saw them), and I assume the load times are far higher–they range from instant to ~5 seconds to load a cutscene/level on PS4.

Update

The game has received a lot of patches adding a lot of extra missions, 10 DLC characters (3 are free) and a new cooperative multiplayer mode of some sort. The game has even more content than when I wrote this post, but nothing below is particularly invalided by the updates. I’ll make a separate post when I review the US version, which should ship with all the new content I believe.

Also, the game’s now available for order in the US (affiliate link). Note that there’s only one physical version, and the digital copies will be $10 cheaper and come without the physical art book/OST of course.

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