Update #39 - Finally a Proper Post Again (Patreon)

Afternoon everyone!

I can't tell you how nice it feels to be able to write one of these from my desktop and not the laggy Patreon mobile app. It's hard to believe it's been near two months since I did this last.

Anyways, I'll start with some of the Pathologic post-video news. First of all congratulations to Supreme Being Todd Howard for winning the giveaway copy of Pathologic 2. While I hope he enjoys it, I'm also hoping a lot more people have been enjoying the game over the weekend. In the video I recommended the game, even going so far as to say "you might want to buy it to support the developers even if this probably won't make any charts". Well it did make charts, briefly appearing on the bottom of the front page of Steam top sellers, and jumping around the top 10 best sellers on GOG for a few days after the video came out, rising as high as number 5. So a big thanks to everyone for giving the weird Russian depression/agony simulator a try! It was definitely surreal to go from a mostly "avoid unless you're ready to be bored a lot" stance on the first game to a complete 180 with the sequel.

As for me, I'm definitely not 100% better with my spine though my ear infection stuff is thankfully over. It's still going to be a month or two until I'm completely better on that front, and I still can't sit up straight for very long. A lot of time in July I planned to be hammering on Elite Dangerous has been lost to me being semi-comatose during that period. So after the very late Pathologic 2 video my options were to either go full throttle on Elite Dangerous again which could be another month or so until another video, or to make 2-3 videos on smaller games in the meanwhile while also recording Elite Dangerous and finally focusing fully on it when I have all the footage. I've opted to go for the latter, and the curse of the Elite Dangerous continues to befall me.

The next video is going to be on the much requested console game Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. It was on every game platform except for the PC, and each had their pros and cons between the versions. After testing a few out I've opted to go for emulating the game through Dolphin for recording purposes, though it'll also be using a graphics/texture pack that updates the visuals with assets from the Xbox version (including button prompts for the controller). These assets came from an anonymous developer who was also probably annoyed with the lack of a "definitive" version, though it's hard to say for sure if even now this is the best choice. Emulation still has the occasional slowdown when things get really busy, but I've managed to tweak it enough to get close to the ideal. There are also a few sound issues, though these are also present on the native game rather than something that came from emulation. I might see if those have a chance of being fixed up too, but I find trying to fix up sound a hell of a lot harder than graphical stuff so I have my doubts. We'll see.

The videos after also won't be a huge recording/editing process like Pathologic was (until Elite Dangerous is FINALLY getting going), especially since I did some recording of a few of them long ago and got some assets like animations ready to go. It'll be fun to reveal a few of the things I had slow cooking over the past year!

Thanks so much for your support, truly, from the bottom of my heart. Last month was hard, but things should be getting easier again!