I was planning on being more productive over the last few months, but it hasn't really worked out that way. I did resurrect Minecraft stuff and finish off Terraria, but that's pretty much all I've done since February. The reason for this is quite simply just because I honestly don't want to record FF7 stuff anymore, partially because of the hassle but mostly just because of how awkward of a game it is. It just feels like the game isn't quite a finished product, and more than that it just doesn't feel like it has aged well at all. The controls are just so clunky that it's very awkward to control and the textures are pretty rough at best. I know it's a PS1 era game so the graphics weren't really there at the time so I'm more lenient on that, but honestly every time I finish playing with it I just find it hard to want to go back to it again because of how awkward the controls feel.
I pretty much started my channel on 3 games, A Link to the Past, Minecraft, and Final Fantasy 4, and of all those series I feel that I really haven't done much justice to any of them outside of my revisiting to ALTTP and my Return to Minecraft Solo series. At this point in time I can say with certainty that the series I've had the most fun recording for were Final Fantasy 5 and 6, ALTTP, Chrono Trigger, and obviously Minecraft. The series that I've honestly had the least amount of fun recording at this point are Amnesia, the whole last sessions of FF4, and FF7. Honestly I had fun with FF7 when I first played through it without recording, but I was playing for 3+ hours at a time multiple times a day and I honestly just can't do that while recording because I can't really talk for more than maybe 2-3 hours straight and when I do I definitely notice that past 2 hours into recording my commentary pretty much falls apart slowly and I start getting into having 10-20 seconds of silence between sentences. With FF4 my main issue was just the whole end of the game is super hard without hours and hours of grinding and after grinding for an hour or two I just assumed I'd be good to go for the whole last segment and that came back to bite me in the ass super hard and made the whole last session a miserable hell. Amnesia was just one of those games I decided to do for fun for Halloween one year and the whole experiment just didn't really work out. I'm not really the kind of person who gets scared by stuff easily and on top of that I wasn't going into the game blind so I knew what to expect, and while the game did a good job of generating fear, I'm just not the type of person to overreact to stuff. On top of that, after taking a couple deaths I quickly realised there's literally nothing stopping you from just running to the objectives blindly and taking a few deaths along the way because you keep your inventory on death, the only thing that changes is the respawn points, which seem to be based on some kind of checkpoint system so I quickly learned how to completely abuse the system which pretty much took all of the tension out of the game for me. Not to mention all the recording issues I ended up having with the game including losing my commentary audio in two seperate recording sessions while playing the game.
So, what I'm basically trying to say is that I just don't think that FF7 is gonna continue on the channel, it's not the kind of series that I think lends itself to being recorded. It's more the kind of game that it's just better to play on your own time. The controls are just so awkward for me that I need to continuously re-adjust to them in between recording sessions and it really kills the enjoyment I get out of playing it. Not to mention there's whole sections of the game later on that last for literally hours at a time which would be a nightmare to record for and some of the sidequests take ridiculous amounts of menial work (specifically everything involving chocobo breeding). At the end of the day, I just don't want to deal with the hassle anymore considering I've already went through this once before and in my opinion the end payoff just isn't satisfying enough for me to do it again.
Bad news aside, I am hoping to start a whole new series on the channel for the first time in months, and this series will have a definite ending point. As I type, the first part of Dark Souls is being uploaded on the channel. Right now my setup for the game is plagued with problems involving the control scheme, but using what I do have available to work with I should be able to at least get through the whole gargoyles boss fight. My main issue is that I don't have a proper controller for the game, which I won't be able to remedy for a few days at least. My current controller is an old Logitech controller from 2004 that I got to play the PC version of DMC 3. Dark Souls can work with a controller, but it's programmed to work with Xbox controllers. The issue is that the game can read my controller, but certain buttons on my controller correspond to different numbers in the config file. As a result, Start and Select are swapped with L3 and R3 (making leaping attacks, kicks, and sprinting/jumping impossible). This isn't really that big of a deal for the early areas of the game which is why I'm able to at least probably get to the gargoyles. However when it comes to Blighttown and definitely Sen's Fortress and Anor Londo I will definitely need the ability to sprint and jump in order to advance. So basically I can only advance so far within the game before I run into an insurmountable obstacle to my progress. Some of my face buttons are also swapped (B seems to be swapped with Y on my controller) but that's not a huge deal. I can still open menu's and lock on to enemies but it's a bit awkward to do since my menu buttons are now L3 and R3 and my lock on is the start button. This'll all be fixed once I get a proper controller though so for now it's just a minor issue in the early game. I suppose I could try looking into changing config files for the game since there is no in game menu for changing controls on a controller, only for keyboard changes. That'd probably take a bit of looking though and I'd rather not risk messing something up so I'll just have to buy a controller for the game.
But yea in any case I suppose I should also announce that when I do finish Dark Souls I will be doing Dark Souls 2 on the channel at some point. I may play through it on my own time first though. Also these will not be blind playthroughs, just thought I should mention that.
So, what's going up on the channel in April? Asides from everything I just mentioned, I do have 3 more episodes of Pixelmon and at least 4 episodes of Random Mod Exploration recorded, the Pixelmon stuff is already ready to upload but the mod exploration stuff needs to be edited. I'm running out of stuff to do in Pixelmon outside of grinding and really the only things I have left to do in the series revolve entirely around me getting lucky and finding one of the bird shrines, or me getting lucky and having a Mew spawn in a jungle for me. Offscreen I also got a message saying a legendary spawned in an ocean biome, but I couldn't locate the legendary so I have no idea if Lugia or Kyogre are enabled to spawn. However this happened before I updated to the latest release of Pixelmon 3.0.4 which apparently removed Lugia spawning so who knows what I saw. There may have been a bug with Lugia where it may have spawned in without a texture or something which would explain why I couldn't find the legendary, but I don't know if that's the case. I should also mention that I'm adding a new mod to both my Minecraft series, the MapWriter mod. Basically it's just a minimap with waypoint options, which will be extremely useful for Pixelmon and also fun to have for my other series. I'm contemplating adding in Orespawn to my mod exploration series but I'm still unsure of whether I should do that at this time.
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