Ctrl Alt Deleted

Hey folks,
Sorry it's been so long.
I've been in a bit of a depressed state for the past few weeks after accidentally deleting the email draft that contained my next few blog entries (already complete), notes for a dozen more, and a big list of ideas to write about.

I will still continue writing here, just not with as much regularity as I've had for the last year.

Con Review: Megacon 2014

Fun Fact: The chair is also balancing on top of something...
Photo by Brittany C. Horne Photography!

About 95% of my time at Megacon this weekend was spent from behind the table of my band's merch booth but I still feel like I have quite a lot to share. Let's start with some stats: This year Megacon grew exponentially from a normal, state-sized convention to a nationally epic 85,000 person super-convention! There were countless guest artists, special guests (including Stan Lee), and vendors which occupied the Orange County Convention Center's South Concourse (a move from the smaller West Concourse). To clarify: the line to get in on Saturday was so incredibly large that people literally wrapped around the convention center (exceeding a half mile of total line, but more likely a literal full mile of line i'm told!), cell phone reception in areas of otherwise good reception slowed and ceased altogether due to the extra 85,000+ people, and the halls were literally packed so tightly that it was neigh impossible to walk through without constantly touching or bumping into someone. The costumes were amazing, the people were friendly, there were cool things in sight every step of the way, and Megacon was better than ever this year!

Waking up at 4am on Friday

My story begins on the Friday morning of the convention at about midnight, packing my car full of my band's merchandise. With the assistance from my good friend Peter I was able to pack the car with over 1000 cd's, shirts, hoodies, stickers, posters, and all of the other merchandise that a band would need. This weekend I would be representing my band, Random Encounter. I slept for about 4 hours, woke up around 4:40am on Friday, and drove to meet with our guitarist Konami to pick up a few hundred copies of an album he forgot to bring to the last band practice (or just didn't have room for). We met at a shady gas station at around 5:20am, exchanged packages, drove our separate ways, and by 7:30am I found myself at the Orange County Convention Center loading docks. Moose (our drummer) arrived at around 8:15, about the time the doors opened and exactly the same time I got my exhibitor badges from the loading gate. We loaded in, set up the booth, he headed out, and I took a few minutes to look around the convention center.

LIFE SIZED RANCOR!!!

The amount of traditional vendor booths this year felt about the same as last year, with some natural growth of course. This year saw the return of the giant collection of robots (Literally. R2-D2 style robots, Daleks, etc), a series of star wars set replicas including a Rancor, a giant Lego area, a significantly larger artist alley consisting of up-and-coming artists, a larger guest signing area, and wider alleys for people to walk through. In the final minutes of my only real free time to walk through the convention center (before I had to go back to the booth to relieve Moose, so he could go home) my eye caught sight of a print that looked remarkably like something Charles Vess would make. Since he more or less stopped making prints YEARS ago I was in disbelief and started talking with the couple that owned the booth/company known as Chimera Publishing. We talked for maybe 10 or 15 minutes about art and artists, having a really great time. I learned that the image I saw was indeed a Vess print, and that they also had another print of his as well. Lacking a last minute birthday gift for my girlfriend (a huge Vess fan) I got both and victoriously returned to my booth, comically enough numbered "666." I'm not superstitious, but the number certainly helped people remember which booth to find us at. It also got me a lot of advice from superstitious individuals.

The 8am line on Saturday was said to be a MILE long,
extending well outside the entrance!!!

The doors opened and a flood of people came in. Over the course of the morning I gradually positioned my chair precariously atop the band's merch tote box and played songs while people walked by. I talked with a bunch of people, made friends, made fans, and made people smile. I think that's what I enjoy most about conventions, making people smile. I gave out stickers to kids and played music based on what people were wearing (Doctor Who was huge this year). I talked to pretty much everyone who walked by my booth regardless of ethnicity, age, or attire, and I've found over the years that some of the most interesting and friendly people are those you never thought you'd want to talk to: gruff punk rockers, the extremely Satanically inclined, older folks walking by with scowls on their faces. I really like cheering people up, entertaining them, and it was a pleasure to be the first accordionist ever seen by many I talked to. I caught up with old friends, played music, chatted, and gave my sales pitch nonstop until the doors closed. By the end of the day I was completely exhausted and fell asleep in a room (at a friend's house) that I was later informed contained a half dozen decomposing rabbits.

Among my favorite costumes of the weekend...

Day 2 was similar to day 2. Waking up at 7am to insane traffic; a blur of a day playing music, meeting with people, and selling merch. I forgot the cash box half way through the drive to the convention center and had to go back for it, waking up everyone in the house on accident. At the convention I watched as a "very straight man" hit on a "very cute girl", only to realize when she opened her mouth that she wasn't a girl at all. As Forbes Magazine suggested in their article on Megacon, geeky things are now becoming mainstream and as those people who would not refer to themselves as geeky are gradually introduced into this new world things like this will become more commonplace and "normal" folks will gradually find themselves liking things that were formally thought of as being reserved for the extremely geeky like anime, comic books, and (if I have anything to do with it) video game music. The future looks fun!

My chair only slipped once the entire weekend!

Cave Story: Download it for FREE NOW

Throughout the day I gradually got higher up on the chair, still recklessly balanced atop the tote, sold stuff with the help from a few friends like Peter Pepper, Kat, and Loki, and saw dozens of friends and fans from cons/shows past. Being my 4th year as a vendor at Megacon I've made quite a few friends and was pretty nostalgic at points through the weekend. There were more insane costumes, new friendly faces, and literally THOUSANDS of people walking by the booth every hour. At the end of the day my band played a show (the Ongaku Overdrive Megacon After Party) with Shammers, Sci Fried, and Marc with a C a few blocks away which I felt was a grand success. I slept on the sidewalk before the show started, was utterly exhausted before/after the show, and did my best to give a high energy performance and sing, despite having just played for maybe 8 hours a day for the past two days on no sleep. It was a great night and we didn't get to Moose's place to sleep until 2am, this time in the room NEXT TO the room with the decomposing rabbits.

Friendly faces at the rock show

I woke up on the morning of Day 3 feeling off. Undaunted, I got to the convention center by 8am, but I still felt sick, shaky, and tired. By the time the doors opened I phoned for backup and did my best to sell merch with Kat's help until Konami and Rook arrived. I played one final round of Ren and Stimpy's: Happy, Joy with a man dressed like Powdered Toast Man who stopped by the booth and was utterly exhausted. My bandmates took over the booth from there as I packed up and took the long walk back to my car. None of you will believe this, but I was able to spot Waldo again this year. I just wasn't fast enough to snap a good picture before he ran off and blended into the crowd. I was unable to find him again on my way back to the car. Traffic at 1pm was still pretty bad for Orlando traffic but it was nothing compared to the insanity of the Saturday crowd. 

Voltron anyone?

Megacon was an extremely fun time this year. It's grown a lot and and I feel I've personally grown with it. My only big regret this year is that I could not have been there longer but I am extremely grateful for all of the awesome people I was able to meet, and for having the ability to play a show within walking distance of the convention center this year! I'm already signed up for next year and can't wait. 

Who is awesome? This guy!

Feel free to share your stories from this weekend here or post pictures (or links to pictures/videos) in the comments section below!

Capturing Game Footage

Capturing "Footage"

I've been traveling a lot these past two weeks so I missed a post... However, I'm hoping to make up for this by offering a few extra video posts from time to time because I've started recording myself and myself playing video games! As boring as this sounds the process is actually made amusing thanks to the fact that I'm comically awful at games and the dialogue between myself and my girlfriend, StatzMeister. My interest in recording playthroughs started with the birth of Nanogamers, watching my friend Helios mow through the minions of darkness. It seemed like fun and capturing game footage didn't seem like it could possibly be difficult for me, because I've done my fair share of recording, short-films, and video-editing.

We started off by trying to capture footage of the game Thief on my Playstation 4. The PS4 has a built-in video-capture function, so I thought it would be pretty straight forward. Something like:

Step 1. Plug in a microphone.

Step 2. Push the capture button twice.

Step 3. Stop when you feel done and edit the video footage in the PS4's native video-editor.

However, the process described above does not function as advertised. 

First, it was a bit of a nightmare getting a quality PS4 headset that didn't turn our dialogue into a laughably jarbled recording. It took us some time to find a microphone that would capture both of our voices. However, despite this setback it turns out that the PS4's native capture button only captures footage in 10 or 15 minute increments. This would be acceptable except that there is no indication as to when it stops recording your footage(!), meaning that you just sort of have to set a 15 minute timer and remember to double-tap the capture button every time the timer goes off. The final straw in our PS4 came capturing adventure was when we discovered that you can only record 5 videos for a given game before the capture function stops working for that game (without any indication!). We've been unable to find a fix for this either, but some articles online have suggested that Sony intends to fix these issues in the future.

The upcoming game capture we're working on

Helios, an old and dear friend who is heading the Nanogamers movement, saw our frustration and kindly gave us a capturing device called the "Game Capture Pro HD." It comes with some very basic editing software and was extremely easy to set up. For a second night in a row StatzMeister and I sat down to play Thief 4 only to be thrwarted by the fact that the HDMI output of the PS4 is HDMI-P, meaning that it's protected, specifically preventing us from streaming/capturing footage on devices like the one i'd just purchased. A few Youtube videos offered fixes using a splitter, but ultimately we concluded that this was inaccurate. Again, Sony is expected to make a patch that fixes this in the future, but the future is vague and far away... 

Fortunately the release of Dark Souls 2 on the X-Box 360 (which took a "mere" 4 hours to download) inspired us to think outside the box (rather, inside the x-box). Realizing that the Xbox 360 (and Xbox One) naturally supports game capturing we just needed to figure out a way to capture the audio of our talking. I rigged up a recording system entirely apart from the Game Capture Pro rig, and in a few short minutes we were off to a good start! The Game Capture Pro HD was pretty much as easy to use as advertised. Install, click, and go.

After recording enough content for two episodes in one sitting, the only thing left to do was sync the talk-audio with the video in the built-in editing software. I set the volume levels between the in game volume and the audio of us talking so one wouldn't overpower the other too much and it was pretty much ready to upload to youtube. This was a pretty interesting trail and error process and I'm happy to share it.

Game Review - Banjo Kazooie: 15 years later...

Back in 1998 I went on a road trip to Montana with my trusty giant (20 pound) 8'' screen TV, an N64, and a copy of Banjo Kazooie I was borrowing from a friend. During one of the more exciting journeys of my childhood I beat what I remember as being one of the best 3D adventure games ever made! If the save files from my friends' cartridges bear (no pun intended) any resemblance to my own skill at gaming, it probably took between 20-40 hours to get through the game with a 100% completion rate, completely unassisted by strategy guide or the internet (which wasn't a particularly useful thing at that time for walkthroughs). I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of Banjo Kazooie ever since and this weekend, a full 15 years later, I had a chance to pick it up, plug the very same N64 (complete with an expansion pack) into a 19'' flat screen, and use the same controller I used back in the day! I was extremely curious how good the game would still be and wondered with dread if perhaps I remembered Banjo Kazooie to be more fantastic than it actually was.

Cue the opening sequence. I was immediately pulled back in time through nostalgia wormhole by this insanely quirky game. Banjo smiles and laughs as if greeting an old friend, stares straight at you and knocks on the screen, shattering the 4th wall in the opening moments. As the cheesy music picks up, the new game starts, and Tootie is kidnapped, I couldn't stop thinking how hokey but strangely enjoyable the game already was. Perhaps it might just survive the test of time after all...

Plot

The plot is about as deep as one can expect from an All Ages game. You're a big brother bear named Banjo and your little sister bear, Tootie (named such because she plays the flute) is kidnapped by a witch named Gruntilda. Gruntilda wants to steal Tootie's youthful looks so you and your bird-friend, Kazooie (who lives in your backpack) need to rescue her so this doesn't happen.

Fearsome Foes!

Gameplay/Feel

The moment I had control over Banjo and Kazooie the muscle memories from years past told me to try all sorts of jumping moves that didn't seem to work. At first I thought that perhaps I was thinking of the controls for another game but after I talked to Bottles the Mole I quickly re-discovered that you need to learn all of the various moves throughout the course of playing the game by finding mole-hills and having brief yet comical exchanges with Bottles. A few such exchanges and two stages later I found my skills rivaling the apex of my childhood. I was able beat entire levels without dying and questioned if it was just an easy game by today's standards or if perhaps I was just really good at Banjo Kazooie. A few more stages, by Mad Monster Mansion, I discovered that the game has a fairly balanced difficulty curve and found myself genuinely challenged. Rare did a good job with balancing an ever-increasing difficulty without inducing crippling and entirely unenjoyable difficulty spikes found in games like Psychonauts.

The controls of Banjo Kazooe felt alright, even by today's standards. Banjo and Kazooie a fairly responsive and easy to control for the most part but it's sometimes tough to judge exactly where you are spatially, like when you're trying to jump from one floating object to another, or when your trying to judge the correct distance for an attack against a large enemy. It's often hard to judge how close/far you are from objects and creatures when swimming, flying, or even walking in some instances and I often found myself dancing around the pickup items. I think this can be attributed to lack of shading or shadow effects, which is something that can be blamed on the game's age.

Depth Perception Issues...

The Bad

There were only three things I outright disliked in Banjo Kazooie.
Swimming underwater felt slow, clunkly, and difficult to control, especially if you're not inclined towards Y-inversion. This made underwater item pickups frustrating because even if I knew what I wanted to do and how to do it I generally couldn't because of the lack of depth perception.

Another mechanic I really disliked was shooting eggs. I found it to be extremely difficult to aim eggs (a projectile you shoot) at distances greater than point blank. This was only mildly frustrating by comparison to swimming because in the few instances where you need to shoot eggs you are only required a lucky shot or three, and egg ammunition is plentiful.

I also noticed that there were a number of seemingly difficult-to-reach but utterly useless rooms you could reach that pertained to secrets that only affect the game's sequel(!), but that otherwise had no purpose. About half of the game's levels seemed to contain such a secret rooms and I found myself aggravated at the lack of in-game explanation, and the amount of time I spent scouring those empty rooms in confusion, looking for hidden notes or puzzle pieces that just weren't there.

After playing through 15 additional years of platformers and adventure games it also felt like there should have been a ledge-climbing mechanic in Banjo Kazooie, which my brain subconsciously noticed was missing. You can jump into ledges, you can jump over ledges, and you can climb trees, but you can't attach yourself to a ledge and climb up it (or drop from it). Mario 64 (a console release title) featured this mechanic so I don't think it was a system limitation.

"Freedom"

Between the quirky but expansive level design, Mumbo Jumbo's ability to turn you into various magical "creatures", and the ability to fly gained early on in the game there really isn't much of the game that feels unexplored if you attempt a 100% completion playthrough. Before the days where games pointed you in a direction with a giant arrow, a minimap with a giant marker, and a HuD that obscured 25% of your screen, there were games like Banjo Kazooie that told you "there are 10 puzzle pieces, 100 notes, and a few Jinjo's hidden in each level. Good luck finding all that, get lost in any direction you'd like, and have fun!" There was a sense of true exploration throughout each level and I was really glad to reexperience that. It's surprisingly fresh when not 8 hours before I was playing an unnamed modern game where giant looming markers and flashing lights show you where to go on a screen obscured by HuD, or in other games where the level design is so bad that you literally need to follow the mini-map for guidance and just ignore what you actually see on the game's main screen. Banjo Kazooie inspires a sense of excitement when you're exploring the levels by not force-feeding you directions and allows you the freedom of multiple paths... which ultimately lead to the paths you didn't take but it's the illusion of freedom that this game gets right and the cheery sense of achievement you feel when you complete each level with 100% efficiency. The game also throws some silly things things at you like Gruntilda's sister, who tells you all sorts of silly facts about the witch, like the name of her band in highschool.

Kazooie eats those...

Art/Music

The art direction is toonish and despite the issues with depth perception that I mentioned earlier the game's graphics were revolutionary for its time and withstand the test of time as far as I'm concerned. They're not bad and they'd be considered stylistic if you saw them in a new release. At worst, they're about on the same level as the games Nintendo is still releasing on the 3DS.

In terms of music I feel that the soundtrack to Banjo Kazooie was well done. The arrangements are simple, a little hokey perhaps, but the songs constantly change and evolve as you're interacting with the environment. Each stage has a distinct song and within each stage exists several renditions of that song affected by your physical location within the world. Are you walking into a dark and creepy cave? The music for the level will seamlessly become a slightly more creepy version of the same song played on a digital xylophone. This feels fairly advanced for its time and is still an example of what solid interactive audio design can be.

Breaking the 4th Wall

Closing Thoughts

Banjo Kazooie has survived the test of time and in my opinion will always be a solid classic that future gamers can enjoy and seasoned ones can return to time and time again. I can see myself returning to play it in the future, which is rare, though I still have yet to try out the sequel: Banjo Tooie.

Interview: JT Murhpy - VGM Internet Radio Personality

On April 3rd, 2013 I tried to interview one of my favorite people in the Video Game Music (VGM) scene, the brilliant host of my formerly favorite weekly-ish show/podcast, JT Murphy. His show, the Blue Shell Manifesto show had just taken an indefinite hiatus at the time of the original interview.

Almost a full year later, I was able to catch up with JT to complete the interview.

JT has been a podcaster, a chat moderator, a radio host, and is currently a Program Director for 8bitX.
www.8bitx.com

How did Blue Shell Manifesto come to life?

I first became aware of the VGM community when I arrived at MAGFest 7 in 2009, on the invitation of an old elementary school friend. The entire thing- the 24-hour game room, the bands, the dealers, everything- gave me an overwhelming urge to do something to contribute. I came up with various ideas for a video game music podcast over the next year, but it wasn't until summer 2010 when I finally had the opportunity to make it happen. 

At that time, the Connecticut School of Broadcasting (fresh off of being closed) was purchased by its original founder, and opened again announced it would be founding a student-run station on Live365, All Noise Radio. I seized the opportunity as soon as I'd heard about it, and by August of that year I had begun my first foray into content creation, regular editions of what was then "WNES Videogame Radio" (much like Kirby, the name was a placeholder that stuck).

The next few years would be tumultuous. I had some major victories (talking to Jon St. Jon and the MAGFest crew, talking to fighting game pros at the Marvel vs. Capcom 3 opening), but also numerous delays. It was always the delays that got to me. I had to take several weeks off at a time to work on career stuff, revamp some show parts, or just recover from burnout. I'll just mention here that one such delay led to the show's most dramatic revamp, shifting the focus to news and editorials, and working with a new name.

By early 2012, WNES had been picked up by 8bitX, and I was in the middle of transitioning a pre-produced show to a live weekly broadcast. While I was in the process of updating my tech and my audio to do I eventually decided to take this opportunity to re-brand as well. "WNES" was sort of a placeholder, plus there actually is a station with those call letters. It's a tiny thing out in Kentucky which just rebroadcasts ESPN Radio to the area but I've been paying attention to the radio business to know how swiftly and dramatically that sort of thing can change.

So I named my show "The Blue Shell Manifesto." It was a phrase I had come up with the previous September when talking about Fox News' predictable backlash to a game mentioning climate change, and also marked a greater emphasis on interviews and commentary on my end.

Briefly describe the amount of work that goes into producing a single show... How much planning is involved on pre-production? What sort of things are you doing as you're live on the air? Also, what sort of work goes into post production before you post each episode?

The average show, one without any new segments or major interviews, takes about ten hours from start to finish: 

•         Five hours for topic research, show layout, and other preparations, 
•          Half an hour to assemble the actual playlist and set up equipment, 
•          Two hours of performance, 
•          And another two and a half hours to annotate the songs and segments, save the podcast and post it online. 

Post-production normally consisted of just scanning the finished recording for any drops or skips in songs and eliminating any excess quiet bits. It's the note-taking that was the most time-consuming part.

If you were a listener, what do you think you would like most about your show?

It's tough for me to say. I've done this for so long that it's hard to look at it from the outside. However, people really seem to like my interviews a good deal, so I'll go with that.

I got to talk to a lot of great people through the course of working on my own program including brentalfloss, Jon St. John, Nicole Dieker of Hello, The Future, Order of Tyr, Kirby's Dream Band, the Megas, and of course, you and Juja. In fact while I enjoy pontificating sometimes, I feel as if I do my best work in the midst of a conversation. Some of the best moments on my show came from having two or more guests on and just letting them play off one another, like my E3 and MAGFest extravaganzas. This knowledge actually factored into my decision to get out of a weekly show.

What did you enjoy most about the show from a creative perspective?

The parts of my shows that I'm proudest of are actually my custom audio parts: the sweepers, the commercials, the intros, all that stuff. They're what set me apart from the rest, and help make a one-person show actually feasible. I love taking assorted sounds, quotes, and music cues and building them into effective imaging. Actually hunting down the pieces is a chore, but when I have them it's a joy to put them together, and it's by far my best quality as a producer.

What did you dislike most about the show, the creative process, or what you feel you could have been doing differently?

I've always had ideas beyond my abilities and on numerous occasions I've had to make do without needed updates, or really old imaging simply because I ran out of time. Worse yet, I've had to cancel whole shows due to an excess of outside responsibilities or too much burnout. Aside from the things I mentioned earlier, the weekly show was hindered and ultimately ended by the strain of doing the entire thing by myself: the show prep, the song selection, the assembly, the chat interaction, and then the editing, posting, and annotation of the show in a timely fashion. I have designs on getting back into it, but not until I've found people to help with these things, or ways to automate or cut back on some of the processes. 

Where did you learn your seamless audio-editing DJ wizardry?

Lots of practice, but there's one place that taught me better than any other. I was an assistant producer at Wired 96.5-FM in Philadelphia for a few years and one of my chief responsibilities was adding station sweepers (the bits of audio mentioning the station name, vital in the days when Arbitron relied on handwritten journals for ratings) to our weekend DJ mixes. I did that every single weekend for well over a year, and it trained my sense of rhythm and timing to what it is now. Also, while I did board-operating work for DJs doing on-location work, I got good at "hitting post": having the DJ's speech stop right at the moment a song's vocals begin.

How did you find new content every week? Also, how did you pick which content you found that you would use?

My content came from a variety of sites: Destructoid, Joystiq, the Verge (and then Polygon), and the like. I specifically chose stories based on how much insight I could put into them, any sort of perspective or new research or anything that built upon the original story. This is why my story selection was weighted towards fighting games and SNES classics, among other things. Just reading the story out loud would be a waste of both my time and the listener's.

Do you listen to radio? Podcasts? If so, what do you like and dislike about the ones you listen to?  Also, what are things that you listen for or notice (in a radio show/podcast) as a professional that you didn't before you knew more about production?

I still listen to the sports radio stations here in Philadelphia (WIP and the Fanatic), as well as rock station WMMR. Local sports radio is one of the best places you can find real listener interaction and WMMR, aside from being the only staffed rock station left in the market (Radio 104.5 is all outsourced, to the best of my knowledge), has a few people I draw inspiration from including Pierre Robert and Jacky Bam Bam, the latter being one of the few overnight DJs left in the business.

As for podcasts, I don't listen to as many as I should but that will be changing soon, as I'll be scouting for a ton of new shows to add to 8bitX over the next few months. Right now I tune in to Roundtable Wrestling Radio every Monday night, and catch the Black Tribbles wherever possible, as well as DJ Cutman's This Week In Chiptune and Cyril's Silly Show.

What changed from the original idea of Blue Shell Manifesto to its execution, to the season-based approach episodes, to it ultimately its end?

The season approach was a way for me to try and handle the weekly workload without overwhelming myself, but that didn't quite work out either. I still found myself struggling with weeks where I didn't have the time or effort to put on a program that would meet my standards. But that was only one of the reasons I ended the show and moved on from the name.

I lost a lot of interest in being known as a commentator when the obsession with social justice started. It's one thing to get behind the cause of getting more women in game development and organized competition, I'm all for that. I also don't have a problem with Anita Sarkeesian, I find her arguments to be pretty simplistic but she's not actually threatening anything or saying anything out of line. But the other extreme, the "OMG GAMERS ARE NECKBEARD SEXISTS" backlash makes any worthwhile criticism about gender roles in games extremely difficult and not falling in line with that is, at this time, a surefire way to not have a job talking about video games. The current state of gender discussion in the games media doesn't help anyone. It's just about beating other people over the head with gender politics. It's about attacking symptoms instead of looking for cures. Attempting to disagree with that on a weekly basis was just more pressure than I could handle at the time.

The other [contributing factor] was that this summer, Nintendo's baffling contempt for its fans was at an all-time high. They were already going after YouTube producers' revenue for using even brief clips of footage but then they actually tried to cancel the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament at EVO 2013, a tournament that Melee fans had raised over $200,000 in donations to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation just to make happen. I was paying attention to that drama from day one and Nintendo going to war with its own fans over it was such a pedantic abuse of power that I may never forgive them for it. So, there went the "Blue Shell" name. No sense in participating in the future of fan interaction with a reference to a company that so desperately wants to stay in the past.

Where are you currently working on and where do you see yourself going?

Right now, I'm actually on a brief hiatus as I reorganize, find a better job, and prepare myself to handle 8bitX's increasing profile and listener base. To be frank, we've outgrown ourselves and everyone's looking for ways to expand this thing to handle the impressive goodwill and notoriety we've gained from the last two MAGFests. Once I'm settled, my biggest project will be finding something to run the music stream other than a jerry-rigged Voscast AutoDJ, something that will make for easier updates and promotion. From there I want to get back to doing my own show with a greater emphasis on the things I like, instead of the things I don't. I'm not in this to make enemies or stir up controversy. There are people in the games media, your Jim Sterlings, your Yahtzees, your TotalBiscuits, who can do so elegantly in a way that tears down other peoples' bullshit with little collateral damage but I don't have that kind of cool. I get excited about things. I have all the emotional subtlety of a Meat Loaf/Kanye duet. Sure, I still want to rant about anti-games like All the Bravest, or undeniable embarrassments like Duke Nukem Forever, because comical overreaction is fun, but the internet is crammed full of anger as it is. If all I have to offer is more of that, what's the point of me?

Switching gears...

Do you see a future in CD's or are they going the way of the VHS?  What about Vinyl?

Vinyl came back because people discovered that it could double as a musical instrument and that it's more physically durable than its successors. I only ever buy CDs as a hard archive for digital music, and I don't think physical media in general is long for the marketplace.

What are some of your favorite video games?

Modern: Borderlands 2, Team Fortress 2, and The Binding Of Isaac.
Retro: Super Dodge Ball, WWF No Mercy, and Katamari Damacy (yes, I'm counting 12 years as "retro")

What's the most recent game you've played that left an impression with you?

Naturally The Stanley Parable. I don't think it's as revolutionary as others think but it's a great exploration of the trappings of games and a study in how on a game's engine (in this case, Half-Life 2's) can be modified to deliver an entirely divergent experience.

Do you have a favorite band or musician?

Not really one favorite, but a few I'd like to comment on:
brentalfloss- It's good that he's getting into original game composition, but he still hasn't reached the peak of his talent yet. He's going to be creating amazing things all his life.
The Megas- This band is the reason I got involved in this whole business. Get Equipped opened my eyes and it's only a shame that there's so much time between their releases.
Mega Ran- I couldn't think of a better ambassador for this thing we call "video game culture".
This Place Is Haunted- There's lots of VGM cover bands out there, and good ones, too, but these guys are one of the originals, and one of the best.
DJ Cutman- I love that I'm getting to watch this guy build an empire for himself from scratch.

Finally, what's the best way for people to enjoy your current projects?
Right now, there's not that much of a current project to speak of, but stay tuned to 8bitx.com, and follow their Twitch channel at twitch.tv/8bitx.

Creative Update: February 2014

The last few months have been busy at best and I've accomplished much. While I have a few Video Game reviews I could post this week, with the start of the new year a quasi self-reflective post on things I'm working on seems healthy.

Photo by Tiffany Mueller

Random Encounter has evolved so much in the last two months that it's barely recognizable to me as being the same individuals or even an offshoot of the band I started so many years ago. I'm extremely proud of my bandmates as Rook has taken to professional bass lessons (far surpassing any skill I once may have had on the instrument), Kit got a huge promotion at work (I'm really proud of him) and has significantly increased in his recording abilities, Konami has really picked up a lot of the "band leadership/motivator" role & writes/arranges with me, and Moose is rapidly improving as a drummer, far surpassing the physical limitations of what he once thought was possible. We've become extremely organized... for us... We have some extreme goals for 2014 we intend to accomplish which I can't really share for awhile but we have some really exciting upcoming shows across the state, and at the shows we've played so far we've been very in-sync with one another to the point where I feel extremely comfortable in our performances... Something I never feel as a solo performer, and don't feel performing with other musicians. Sure everyone in the band (but me) is catching a variation of the MAG-flu, but all in all this will be a great year for Random Encounter, though I don't expect we'll have anything to show the public for our efforts for quite some time beyond live shows.

Careless Juja is also chugging along nicely. We're well into production of the Layton album and while many would find 4 hour recording sessions stressful, I really enjoy them in this creative outlet. Where Random Encounter is something that HAS to sound professional, I am not under the same self-imposed stress with CJ and can experiment as much or as little as I want to. To explain, I'm not particularly concerned if I don't become popular here so the only person I have to really please is myself (and Juja). My goal with CJ is to record music I want to hear, the way I want to hear it and I get that other people might not be interested, which allows me to try new things which I ultimately allow me to really grow as a recording musician. Most of the tricks I used for LMTYAS were things I discovered on accident while recording stuff for CJ. As CJ, when it stops being fun I stop recording, and when I run out of ideas I do something else. Juja's much the same way, we like the same things for the most part, and though we have a specific goal in mind that would seem taxing, recording what's left of 34 tracks in three weeks, I'm glad that we'll soon have a quality product of our musical friendship that we can share with the world.

Early Character Concept

The Liberty comic book series has seen its greatest developmental growth over the last two months than it's seen in the six months prior. There have been a lot of changes, so I'll start from the beginning... The comic book story takes place hundreds of years after the planet "Atrius" was colonized. Adam (the co-creator) and I sort of set an arbitrary marker for the "present" as being "roughly 600 or 800 years", what we thought was enough time passing to justify the social changes that would be required to make our story believable, but we didn't really have any idea or framework for the events that took place between the "present" (year 713) and the initial colonization of the planet. To fix this, and also to clearly compile a list of all government organizations that would be required to make the totalitarian Inner City function (with their respective job functions, key personnel, and jurisdictions) I put together a book called A Citizen's Guide to Atrius. The intent of the book was to paint an outline to the city's events and a (now very colorful) history over the course of 50 pages while giving bios for key figured, places of interest and the like, without giving so much detail as to make writing future books or comics about those events seem excessive. It's sort of like how I read the Wikipedia entry for the Crucible and was still captivated when watching it performed at a local theater, being genuinely surprised with the outcome of the trial despite knowing how it was supposed to end. The Citizen's Guide is effectively written (taking up most of my December), being edited by someone with a working knowledge of the Chicago NB format. The illustrations for the book should be done sometime in March and if there's enough interest we might do a limited self-publishing run, but I'm skeptical anyone will want a background book to a story that hasn't been published.

Recent Character Concept by Adam

With the sudden existence of a detailed history we had a make a large number of revisions to the comic book script to ensure that continuity existed between the history book and the script itself. As we've not published anything we're thankfully free to make revisions unlike authors like Tolkien (who i'm told desperately wanted to go back and rewrite the Hobbit), or Lucas (who everyone was angry at for revising the cannon of the expanded universe) which took the bulk of my January to accomplish. While I was working on this Adam developed a line of "standard issue" firearms for the Inner City, departmental color schemes, and a general color scheme for the comic, settling on an uncommon color scheme we think will be most visible on a comic book store shelf. We also added a dedicated cover artist for the entire series to our creative team, which we're really happy about. In the short-term we are also working with concept artists to create a unique sense of fashion in the world, a designer to create logos for each governmental division/department, and an archaeological illustrator (my girlfriend) to create a legit archaeological illustration of one of the city's key buildings, as well as an awesome 3d rendering. We're also working with someone who designs advertisements and logos as their full-time job to create a title for the series. I'm finding each of these individual processes to be fascinating, and working with professionals in each of their respective fields has been quite an experience. I hope to share some aspects of the creative process in the coming months but for now it's a bit too early to really get into.

On a final comical note, we had a rough revelation last week whereby we concluded that the amazing back-story we'd written for one of the main characters (which is periodically referenced throughout the script) could have never taken place within the confines of our world's history. Instead of rewriting what he have, we sadly concluded that it's all true... in that character's head and that s/he's simply delusional.

Game Review: Fallout

This Christmas break I heard that GOG.com was having a sale whereby the entire classic Fallout series was available for free! Having never actually played the original Fallout I happily "purchased", downloaded, and installed it. About 20 hours of play later I'm through the game and have the following to report.

Bar Fight!

Plot: (Spoiler free) You are a key citizen of an underground vault who's looking for replacement water-generating machine parts in a post apocalyptic 1950's California. The plot is a bit more complex than that but the real plot of the game is about how you experience the journey, exploring and interacting with the few towns and settlements that survived the nuclear holocaust. You can join or fight raiders, mutants, cartels, cults, unmask schemes, investigate rumors, and do most of the things that you would expect from a quality classic RPG of this era.

"Freedom": This is one of the oldest RPG's I've played that I felt offered real freedom of choice, specifically in dialogue and the way you interact with the world. You really can be good or evil, rude, or polite to the people you encounter and there are almost always multiple solutions to the problems presented to you in the game. Unlike action adventures like Diablo (which I enjoy for different reasons), I feel that the Fallout series helped set the standards I hold for the "freedom" I expect from a non-dungeon-crawl RPG and the original Fallout is no exception. Fallout requires you to use your brain and actually plan what you're going to do next at times. As a scavenger with a limited weight capacity, do you want to pick up gear that's more useful or more valuable? Can you really afford to waste the last of your rifle rounds in this fight or will you risk close combat? Do you want to target the enemy's leg, preventing them from following you, or their arm, preventing them from holding their weapon? Do you really have the time to be helping out this time while your family is dying of thirst? Fallout also features dozens of variables that will effect its ending.

A Direct hit with the Rocket Launcher!

Gameplay: While I enjoy turn based RPGs, the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, and the VATS targeting system it was difficult for me to enjoy Fallout 1 at times because it felt watered down from the future versions of the system which I've become accustomed. Understanding that this is the 1.0 of a game system that's evolved quite a lot, there are significantly less perks available, the scarcity of ammunition more or less invisibly guides you into a specific type of character build/evolution, leveling up feels sort of useless after awhile, and there really aren't many ways to improve your base statistics, but it's still a fairly fun system. However, Fallout is very glitchy in terms of quest acceptance/resolution. For instance, at the end of the game I had no less than 5 fairly big plot-points that I was entirely unable to resolve due to the fact that I'd played the missions in the wrong order, or was entirely unable to interact with a character (through dialogue) properly due to poor programming, or unable to beat a character in a game of chess because of additional poor programming (don't even try, it's a glitch!). Considering that the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system was created from scratch in mid game development after a disagreement with the creators of the GURPS system (who felt that the Fallout world was too dark) I feel like the programmers did what they could with their limited resources and still made a fun game.

Feel: I did a bit of research before writing this and was still unable to conclude if the GOG edition of Fallout was censored or not. I felt that the because Fallout was only a third as dark as its predecessor, Fallout 2 it was either an issue of post-release censorship (AKA GOG cut content) or perhaps the creators of the game felt it wasn't dark enough and compensated in the sequel. If there were any children characters in the original Fallout game they don't appear in the GOG version, so perhaps that can be some form of measurement if anyone reading this has played the original and can clarify... Possible censorship aside Fallout feels a lot like Fallout 3 in terms of story, world, and characters in that it's quirky, exciting, and adventurous. That is to say it feels like a different kind of fantasy RPG of its era, like Baulder's Gate or Arcanum. There isn't any of the sexual stuff or child-killing prevalent in Fallout 2 but drugs and their respective abusers are still present in small numbers. If you like Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog this game is perfect for you.

In-Game Map of Vault 13

Art/Music: The graphics for Fallout are what I think of as characteristic of the first classic age of PC-RPG's. The few 3D renderings in use for the game's 4 or 5 cinematic, or in conversations with key characters, are obviously dated but they're indicative of the best that 1997 had to offer. In terms of music I felt that the soundtrack, though not entirely memorable, matched the mood the game was trying to convey and created the right atmosphere. Where the game really shines in many places though is surprisingly in its voice acting. It boasts a talented cast, my favorite of which is the classic RPG narrator of the era, the voice I automatically associate with Baulder's Gate, Jim Cummings.

You can get permanent party members
but they don't talk much more than this...

Closing Thoughts: The aforementioned quest-based issues: not being able to help the very people I needed to tell something to or not being able to interact with them at all after I'd completed a key mission were frustrating and made me feel less of a connection to the characters and their world. This hurt my opinion of a game I otherwise enjoyed and caused me to halfheartedly rush through the game's final few quests just so I could experience the final really enjoyable things the game had in store at the very end (which were totally worth it!). For all my gripes I felt that Fallout was still an enjoyable experience overall and one I'd easy recommend to people before moving on to the greatly improved sequels: Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Fallout 3, and New Vegas.