Hey! (Patreon)

Sup!

Just wanted to drop by and give y'all an update. 'Cause you know, that's like what I do here on Patreon, and stuff.

I'm happy to tell you that I've officially started writing the Breath of the Wild review! ...Wait, had I started last time? Did I say all that already? I don't know, whatever.

I've been busting my bottom trying to get ahead over this last few weeks for various reasons. For one, netting extra time would have meant more time for Super Mario Odyssey if I'd gotten an early copy, though that's looking less and less likely every day... Good news is though, I've been putting some of that extra time toward the review. I've completed the first draft of "The Magic of Discovery" (tentative title) and I'm nearly done with "Presentation and Sound" (tentative title). And boy howdy, I hope people do end up wanting to hear me prattle on about the game for ages. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to come up with enough material to fill out the different categories, and maybe I'll hit some trouble with some of the others, but there are no problems in that department with these two; they are LONG. It's hard to tell just by looking at the words, but I'm thinking fifteen minutes each at least so far. It feels really good to get it started though, and when I get enough of it down I can finally start shooting them. Just got to keep pushing and we'll get there...

So Arlopalooza happened! There's not much I can say about it that you can't glean from the video, but it was insanely fun. I didn't get to play nearly as many games as I was hoping, but it was still great just chilling with fans and taking pictures and answering questions. Ultimately even between the Indiegogo and merch sales I didn't make enough money to break even on renting the venue, so unfortunately I'll have to charge if we do this again next year. I don't know how much it will be yet, but it won't be prohibitively expensive, I can tell you that. But hey, that's a topic for another year I suppose!

So right now I'm nearly done with one last Super Mario Odyssey video before the game launches, and it will be posted this Friday. It's sort of a followup to "Mario Odyssey Looks So Good It Hurts," talking about the hype I'm seeing for it online and some other stuff. Then (assuming that my fears are correct, and I'm not getting an early copy) I'll do a first impressions video the day the game comes out. After that it will be a race to play the game and get my review out there.

Normally when I'm trying to review a game I find it impossible to do all the playing and reviewing within one week, so when I start to realize I'm not going to hit my deadline, I work on another video to put out in the meantime. This, of course, just pushes the review further and further from launch day, which is something we saw with both my Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Splatoon 2 reviews, each of which were exceptionally late in coming. So this time, now that I've gotten ahead thanks to my Mario Odyssey and Arlopalooza videos each taking a relatively short time to produce, I can spend this extra time making a video to release one week after launch in case I haven't finished the review yet. Unfortunately the sooner the review comes after that the more "extra" time gets eaten up, because the one-a-week thing will still be a requirement, but hey, it's better than being super late or missing the deadline.

Right now it's looking like that placeholder video will be about amiibo. That's right, I'm finally going to breach the unpleasant subject of how Nintendo's handling amiibo, and it will be my first critical video in a while. It won't just be going on about how Nintendo stinks or whatever--it will mostly talk about how they're missing out on establishing a bigger platform. It's still in the planning stages, but we'll see how it ultimately comes out when I write it.

And that's what's planned for the next few weeks at least. I know sometime in the next few days I want to do an Arlocast. Last time I talked about only doing blogs and casts when I can get to them, but ever since saying that and making my pledge total public again I've been losing pledges left and right, so I guess I do need to try to be at least a little more engaging. There's a lot to talk about though, so when I get a chance to go in and record it should be a nice meaty episode.

That's about it, though! Thanks so much to all my new patrons since last time! You're BEAUTIFUL.

See you next time!