Ross Scott

Path of Exile, I can't wait for this one. It's free to play and I've liked everything I've seen about it so far. I was kind of disappointed by Diablo 2 and this game seems to have much more of the tone of the original. Also the skill tree I've seen for it is just staggering.

Never mind, looks like I'm just ignorant.

Well I like the "Machine" track from it, looks like it was one of those games that was out before MP3 usage was common as the music is at 22khz.

Well Clay got it, though I guess rock bottom counts as well, although I didn't even realize that myself.

Due to me doing multiple takes for every line, recovering from shouting, editing, and thinking up the script at the same time, if I'm working ALL day on FM, I can get about 3 - 3.5 minutes done for an FM episode. It's an awful ratio, but it really is that slow for me. As for behind the scenes, I don't have a video camera besides a webcam and that would be demanding on the system to the point of interfering with actual work on the episode. Also it might disillusion people seeing lots of footage of me since I currently don't look like Freeman at the moment, though I could if I cut my hair.

I don't know about MIT but many universities require you to learn at least 2 other languages in order to earn a PhD.

Mostly, I haven't really figured out how gradually I want it to be though.

Download 848x480 WMV (127MB) Well here continues the currently weekly march of Freeman's Mind. This pacing should be treated like an isotope, it's hard to say how long it will remain stable. I think this one may be a little bit below average. I tried going a slightly different direction with it to avoid making things feel too mundane, but I'm not sure it really had the effect I wanted. Bonus points if you can find the pun used in this episode, I'm guessing a lot of people will miss it. Since the last few uploads to Machinima.com have had the color and brightness distorted when they go on Youtube, this time I intentionally screwed up the picture in the OPPOSITE way to try and counteract what I'm guessing they were doing and it looks like it mostly worked. They're still uploading 640x360 content as 1280x720 however, so next episode I may just upscale the original 848x480 footage to 1280x720 so while it won't be HD quality, it will at least be sharper. I've seen many posts before asking me to use mods to improve the graphics for Half-Life Source, with this episode being a good spot in the series to change things. I've experimented with every mod I could find for it and they ALL had problems. Some shaders would be overblown and/or not transfer to Source recorder, some models would be missing textures or not behave when recorded in a demo, some textures would make some areas look much better, but stick out horrendously in others, and most of them change some of the original weapons. For all these reasons I'm not planning on using visual enhancement mods for the game. I doubt people were really watching a game this old for the eye candy anyway. Since I've increased the pacing of FM, I'm currently falling behind on Civil Protection, emails, subtitles, website improvements, and several other things. So if it looks like everything else is being neglected, it is, but not intentionally. I'll get caught up again at some point.

It's not going to get a continuous storyline for several reasons. First, it's very limiting in having to pick up exactly where the last episode left off. If I want to get into more exotic ideas or want to jump around in time, the format doesn't lend itself to that. Second, it requires viewers to have to watch the previous episodes in order to fully enjoy a new one. I prefer people with NO background on the series being able to watch any of the episodes and enjoy them. Finally, I think it's a little less predictable this way. You can't just skip ahead and watch the next episode and know what happened, it's self-contained. However, I have ideas for CP that would take a lot of time to play out and would be closer to movie-length, so while some episodes will be sketch comedy, I hope EVENTUALLY I'll be able to make ones with much more of a storyline to them.

It's irrelevant, Source recorder can output the footage from demos frame-by-frame. I record Freeman's Mind at 180fps with 4x4 Supersampling AA and that's NOT in real-time. Some of the Civil Protection episodes CRAWLED during filming. I just play it at lower settings and then at higher ones for demo playback. Also I have a Phenom II X3 720, 2GB of RAM, and a Geforce 9800 GTX that was donated to me by a viewer when my old card died. As for Black Mesa, I was kind of on the fence about it anyway for doing FM, I'll just keep moving with the original game.

Ah people can complain if they want as long as they're civil about it.

Sorry, I've been extremely busy, I ended up forgetting about it. It should be up now.

Download 672x384 WMV (77MB) Here's the "mystery episode" that was alluded to in the progress bar. I'm sure some of you predicted this, hopefully no one's expectations were ruined too badly. I thought about doing a training course episode before, but parts of it conflict with how I've been playing through the game, trying to make it seem more realistic. This episode is a compromise between not doing it and going through the whole thing. I've been informed after the fact that the creator of "Barney's Mind" did the exact same thing of showing the training course after being unconscious, but it was just a coincidence on my part. When I originally created Freeman's Mind I received a few emails from people who told me they were thinking of doing or had done the exact same thing, so I guess coincidences are inevitable. I'm going to try and keep up Freeman's Mind on a weekly rate for a while, but I eventually may slow it down some as I don't want to neglect Civil Protection either. In either event, I don't think I'll have situations again soon where I go months at a time without a release. At least not until FM is done anyway. EDIT: It looks like the video was darkened again for Youtube and uploaded at 1280x720 again, despite the source being requested at 640x360. Ah well, the downloadable copy will look correct once I encode it.

Guitar Hero + Rock Band

This is just my opinion, but for me, Bioshock was one of the most disappointing games I've ever played. Not BAD, but disappointing. It was disappointing for me on two levels. One, I saw the early beta or alpha tests of it (which incidentally had better graphics than the final version, but that's besides the point) along with commentary all the way through explaining what the player should expect from the game. It made it sound like there was this incredible semi-linear world that you could influence and make decisions that would affect the society of it. From a story, gameplay, and interaction perspective it sounded like some sort of hybrid between Deus Ex, Arx Fatalis, and maybe Gothic. I could be wrong, but I think remember them talking about a real moral grey area in the game. It obviously didn't turn out like this at all. In addition to being totally linear and not really having any choice on how you shape the society, the "grey area" was whether or not you should kill crying little girls or not. Yeah, that's deep. So it was disappointing in raising my expectations and is another reason I try to avoid all hype with a game or movie nowadays. The second way it was disappointing was that it mimicked System Shock 2 to an audacious degree. I remember thinking "are they seriously going to have the EXACT SAME plot twist from SS2 of having the announcer be the bad guy after all? Ah. Yes, they are... wow Bioshock." In addition to mimicking it, it felt much less cohesive. Ghosts felt simply thrown in just because SS2 had them, splicers are the new hybrids, big daddies are the new rumblers. Nurses are the new midwives, medical bay and botany levels are still present etc. The motives of the characters seemed much less believable. The voice acting didn't sound as natural. It wasn't nearly as scary as SS2. So much of it felt like it was simply trying to copy SS2 in a different setting than to make something that made more a little more sense. In my opinion, SS2 is a superior game to Bioshock in every single way except graphics. Finally, as for the Objectivism overtones, I think the waters got too muddied for me looking at everything else to get much value from that. Also it doesn't help that I think Objectivism is such an obviously flawed school of philosophy for applying it to most of reality. Showing its shortcomings to me feels like an expose as to why Santa Claus can't be found at the north pole. I think it only makes sense for especially competitive entrepreneurs or people or people trying to fast track in the business world. For everyone else it isn't really a practical or sustainable viewpoint and certainly isn't how I think of most of the world. I've tried reading Atlas Shrugged, but had to give up after about 80 pages because I found the dialogue downright painful to read (the rest seemed okay, but the dialogue killed it for me). Anyway, sorry if I'm torpedoing your thread, I just felt compelled to rant on Bioshock. I haven't played Bioshock 2. EDIT: To its credit, the intro to Bioshock was literally my favorite part of the game. I loved the plane crash and the discovery of the lighthouse and the sense of initial mystery created from it.

Yeah the mouse before my last was very similar to this, it had an excellent shape.

I'm with you 100%, though every time I stall FM to work on something else, this is the kind of vibe I pick up:

Hey everyone, here's a link to a group Q&A session I did a week or two ago with people creating "mind" series for other games with mostly silent protagonists, of which there are many. I was invited to it directly after the caboos15 interview and since "The Tunnel" has been completed for a while now, I don't mind doing PR stuff again. It's a long discussion session and I don't remember everything that was said while recording or before/after, but you're welcome to check it out: MP3 download I believe there were supposed to be up to 7 other people, but not everyone showed up. It's almost 2 hours long, so I don't recommend listening to this unless you have time to kill. It did cover some topics not discussed in other interviews I've done, but it might bore people who don't work with the Source engine at some points also. In the future I plan to make a separate section on the site for all interviews conducted so far, but that's still on the "to do" list.

A friend of mine managed to cram SDRAM into a motherboard, despite it being idiotproof. I'm not sure how he managed to get it to fit, I guess he broke off the dividers on the board. When he turned it on, it started smoking, didn't exactly boot after that.

Regular population growth is way more of a threat to civilization than cloning, I'll move this to the serious topic section.

Pretty nice shape, don't like how there's no thumb buttons though.

I tried it already, not only did it make things look overblown, but it's moot point since none of the effects will carry over when I record the footage. I use the source recorder so I can record frame by frame and add in motion blur, and it completely ignores these effects. I also tried some of the textures and model packs out there. In some cases they look much better, in other cases, they make things look worse and less cohesive than the original game, plus I've seen missing textures and errors in animation when recording some models in demos.