The Future

Hey everyone it's Mike! :)

I haven't done one of these update posts about what to expect from us in a while. So I'll do that now. This is what I hope to accomplish so don't quote me on any of it.

First and foremost, I plan on spending my next couple paychecks on computer upgrades. I need basically a new everything. At the moment I plan on purchasing a new motherboard, RAM and video card. I'll probably have to upgrade my power supply to power it all and I'll probably get a new processor to replace this 2.3ghz one I got. The motherboard I have my eyes on supports 16gb of RAM which would be a HUGE upgrade from always having at most 2gb. The video card I want to get is the ATI Radeon 6770 which is almost 6 generations better than my current ATI Radeon X1950 Pro. Hopefully once all that is upgraded I'll be able to put the graphics up for my videos and record even smoother.

Now for game news, starting with Half-Life 2. I really want to finish the entire walkthrough for the game this summer. The only thing holding me back is rendering and upload times. The editing software I used for over a year for all my gaming videos, Camtasia Studio, has recently decided to not render my videos past 7% so I've had to resort to Sony Vegas. Using Vegas to render all 3 parts of level 4 will take me about 7 hours, 3.5 of those hours being spent on part 1 alone. Then, obviously, the files will be over 1GB in size so that's another 3 hours of uploading each. So I'm looking for a fix for Camtasia or a substitute because I'm not wasting an entire day just to render and upload.

For Counter-Strike Source I'm still trying to get gameplays. A decent amount of people have requested dust2_unlimited but I cant' find any servers that aren't deathmatch so I might have to just put another DM video out. I'm also going to be trying to get all the mod-type requests out of the way just because I don't play any of those game types and those are relatively easy to obtain footage for.

I really want to get back in to the Left 4 Dead 2 Mutation videos. I haven't bothered checking if Vigil has a video for the current Hunting Party or whatever mutation but the next mutation, whatever it is, Vigil will hopefully do a gameplay for it if we haven't already. In addition to that you got the new DLC being released at some point which will definitely offer some more gameplay from L4D2, even if it is a rehash of the Cold Stream level that would no longer be in beta.

The Portal 2 walkthroughs are something I'm going to be helping out with. I'm just waiting for Tha1337ness to post part 2/2 of level 3 I think so I can start uploading because I think it would be weird if I uploaded a few levels then part 2 from a few levels ago is uploaded. At the moment I have Chapter 4 rendered out and ready to upload. I had Chapter 5 ready to render but I accidentally deleted the footage so I'll have to go and replay it but that won't be too bad since I'm always down for Portal. The co-op is something else we want to do as well. Sw1tch and Tha1337ness might do live commentaries as they play through the co-op missions and/or I might go play co-op with a good random and get some footage and do a walkthrough.

I don't play Black Ops that much at all despite the fact that a part of me wants to get gameplay for it. There's so many Black Ops requests it's just ridiculous. Tha1337ness has been going for your requests more than I have and I think he might have 1 or 2 games. As for me, I have a video I got a while back doing a requested setup and I need to commentate it with the person who requested it but I just need to find the time to do that. I feel bad because I told him to answer me before like June 20th if he was interested, then I added him on Skype and haven't even said anything since then. :/

I needed to clear up some hard drive space so I uninstalled Day of Defeat: Source so for the time being that is in the inactive games list.
Alliance of Valiant Arms is probably going to end up in the same boat. I want to try and get another gameplay before I uninstall it just because a decent amount of people wanted to see more gameplay after my review-type video I posted on it.

When Team Fortress 2 became free, I decided to re-install it and see if I liked it any more than the last time I had played it and I did. I've been playing a lot of it lately, sniper on 2fort only. I plan on getting some gameplay but whenever I try to record in console the game gets very laggy. I haven't tried recording as I play but my guess is it will be too choppy by the time Fraps takes a cut of my FPS.

The only other things I have to say are that I'm looking for other games to play and possibly post gameplay on so we have fresh/new stuff on Vigil. In addition to that, I plan on buying an HD-PVR at some point this year once I have bought all my computer upgrades and a new TV so I can start recording stuff off my XBox. It would probably only ever be single player stuff since I'm awful at multiplayer games on XBox.

Thanks for reading and I'll talk to you all later!