UPDATE 3: Holy crap, remember when this was a thing I was doing?! I apologise for the delay everyone, this has been way too long coming but a merger at work and a pile of other stuff just completely screwed my time lately. I'm happy to report however that the Amnesia single session stream is a GO and will take place on Sunday, March 24th, starting at 3pm EST. I know this was the show a lot of people really wanted to see so I'm hoping this is enough notice for everyone. I also picked the late start time because aside from having belated birthday brunch with my girlfriend in the morning, I wanted to give everyone on the west coast an opportunity to tune in without having to get up early. This is going to be must-see TV everyone and though it will be archived for you to laugh at later, you'll have way more fun making fun of me in the chat so come one, come all!
I'm pleased to announce that I'll also be using this event to kick off my new YouTube show Retro Flashback. I've been working on this thing for a little while now and while it's still going to need a lot of refinements going forward, I think it's ready to launch. I'll be uploading the first episode the right before the show and forgive me but I'll be pimping it hard. I'm really excited to be doing it and I hope it's something people will find interesting and entertaining. I'm going to be adding a little additional stretch goal to this whole campaign related to this. Since Extra Life is now closed for 2012, there's no more donations to be had but since I'm launching this new show that day, I'm hoping maybe I can convince people to subscribe to it and ask their friends to subscribe if there's another potential suffering for me attached to it. I've got an idea brewing but I'll announce it when the show starts and post it here at the same time.
I hope a bunch of you are able to come watch. This is going to be quite the thing. I'm dreading it already.
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UPDATE 2: Sorry for being incognito for so long on this. December was an absolute madhouse at work and I was completely burnt out so I took my employer's holiday break to not do much. The next couple of months are shaping up to be pretty nuts too but I'm determined to flog myself for everyone's amusement with this Amnesia stream. What I'm waiting to hear on now is whether or not I can do it from home. I had to do the other streams at the office because my ISP wasn't able to offer better than 1MBps upload to me but thanks to some regulatory rulings in their favour, they're going to be able to do 4MBps at some point, I'm just not sure when yet. It would be way easier to do the stream from home so I'm hoping to hear on that soon. In any case, I hope to do the show by the end of February at the latest, if not this month. My hope is to give everyone here at least two weeks notice since I know a ton of people really want to see me suffer and I want to give everyone time to get a free afternoon in their calendars. Rest assured, this is still gonna' happen! More details when I know.
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UPDATE: I had already passed this stretch goal before my Dark Souls day but thanks to the epic awesomeness of a great many people, I crossed the second goal during that day as well! I'm still not sure when the Amnesia stream is going to happen yet as work might get nuts soon but for now, I can schedule the second stream for my single session, snark ridden playthrough of Duke Nukem Forever.
The live stream playthrough of Duke Nukem Forever will tentatively be Sunday, November 11th, starting at 10am EST.
This should also be quite the show as this is a game I was trying to avoid and I intend to take the piss out of it the entire time. A couple of programming notes: Firstly, I won't be playing any of the DLC. The base game will be painful enough for me.
Secondly, this game doesn't normally play nice with XSplit. Since no one's streaming it, they've never added proper support for it and I'm having to use a workaround where I feed the video to XSplit from another application. It's very touchy and the game video will often go black if I swap out of it, requiring me to restart the stream. I'm hoping to monitor the chat and such from my laptop so this won't be an issue but we may run into hitches from time to time.
Thirdly, November 11th is Remembrance Day in Canada (basically Veteran's Day to US folks). In keeping with our country's tradition, I will be pausing at 11:11am that morning for a minute of silence to honour our veterans. I won't stop the stream for this but just word up that it'll happen.
Lastly, I thought that people could only contribute to the campaign until the end of the main day but it turns out things are still going. So feel free to spam everyone you know to pitch in at my page if you want, though no more stretch goals are planned. I can only handle so much and I've gotta' save something for next year.
A couple of incredible stats: Thanks to all you amazing contributors, I've raised more than 94% of other participants and on their global leaderboard, I am 66 of 16,175 which is insane! As terrified as I am just thinking of doing the Amnesia stream, I think it's also going to be fun and I can't wait to give everyone some laughs. Can't wait to think of another idea for next year's campaign! See you next Saturday!
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Hey all! Forgive the spat of shameless self-promotion here but it's for sick kids so I hope you'll bear with me. Last year I participated in the Extra Life 24 hour charity gaming marathon for the first time. Thanks in no small part to the generosity of people here, I beat my goal by a considerable amount and I've got bigger ambitions for this year's event which will take place on October 20th.
Last year's event wasn't easy but it didn't end up being as tough as I thought it would be so I aim to up the challenge this year. How you ask? By devoting the entire 24 hours to a single game, one I've purposefully avoided and been content to watch others play. That game is Dark Souls. This type of game is not normally my thing at all but for the entire 24 hours, I will be digging into the PC version of it with both hands. I expect it to be both rewarding and hilariously aggravating. In the event of some kind of technical issue (which I mean, this is the Dark Souls PC port so who knows), I'll be switching to Evochron Mercenary as a backup.
On top of that, I'm also planning to live stream the entire thing! I've never done a live stream before and let me tell you, it's quite a rabbit hole to go down. I'm going to have to do it at my office where we have fibre because my upload speed at home is too slow to stream 720p. I'm hoping people might be able to chat/mock me through Twitch and maybe even Skype too but I'm not sure if that's going to work yet.
Lastly, in the hopes of raising even more money for the kids this year, I'm introducing stretch goals! If I hit two pre-defined targets of (I'll add more if people are insanely awesome and donate that much), I'll do separate live streams at later times of two other, very different games. At $1,000, I'll play Duke Nukem Forever front to back in one sitting. I've purposefully avoided this pile of burning garbage and even watching videos of it frustrates me. Beating the whole thing in one sitting should make for much entertaining snark.
At $2,000, I will single session Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Anyone who knows me knows I hate horror, be it movies, games or whatever. I'm a huge weak sauce when it comes to this stuff. How weak? DOOM 3 scared the crap out of me. Seriously. It will be torture for me to play through a game like this which even horror fanatics have a hard time getting through. Doing it in one sitting, live on video will be even more nuts. It could be one of the biggest challenges I'll face as someone who has been gaming for more than 25 years.
So there it is. I've upped the stakes for myself a lot this year but I'm also really stoked to do this again and I'm hoping to shatter last year's record and do some more good. You can donate directly from my page on the Extra Life site as well as track my progress. I know the GWJ Donation Drive just kicked off and there have been other important causes worthy of donation here lately. This isn't nearly as important as those but if you have a few bucks to spare, I'd really appreciate your support. Feel free to spam your friends, relatives and the Internet at large with word of this as well. I think it's going to be a fun time supporting a great cause. I'll see you on Twitch TV!
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