Ross Scott

The episode is edited, but Premiere is giving me a hell of a time about processing peak files before I can even render anything. I discovered a bug I wish I had discovered years ago, but it means this will definitely be late European time, maybe not USA time though.

Best I can tell, yes. I found a small patch of light discoloration on that wall that seemed to be the source of the problem that I've treated pretty thoroughly. I'll mention it more when I do the next videochat.

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » As a follow-up to the last update, I'm afraid I'm going to have to cancel (or at least postpone) the Zombie Panic session I was hoping to have. The reason is simply that I think I'm going to need all the time I can get in order to finish the next Game Dungeon and I'm concerned that will cut into things too much. This is a disappointment I know, but I would be more disappointed if I didn't have the next video out in time for Halloween. I'm still interested in having a session of it in the future, so maybe that can happen in November. While it of course fits the Halloween season the best, for me, any day is a good zombie invasion day. Anyway, the next update should be the Halloween episode! COMMENTS

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » I have some developments stacking up to the point where I thought I should maybe make an update: -I recently had a small crisis where the air quality became so bad in my apartment I had trouble breathing. It happened practically overnight, it seems to be the result of some sort of mildew growth. I cleaned the ENTIRE room, disassembled and moved out all the furniture, pulled up the carpet, pretty much went in full assault mode to sanitize everything. Currently, it seems to be solved, however it's possible it occurred due to some growth coming in from the outside of the walls of the apartment, I don't know yet. Either way, I can currently at least breathe well enough to complete the next video. -The problem above set me back quite a bit time-wise on the videos. Because of this, I'm afraid I'm only going to have one Game Dungeon out this year for Halloween, but it will be a longer one. I was hoping to have one additional one, but I figured better to have one good one than two unfinished ones and nothing to show for it. -I'm still making up for lost time, but I'm hoping to still have some sort of live event in Zombie Panic Source with fans for either this weekend or Halloween. Right now I don't want to commit to anything until I have a better sense of how far along I am on the next video, but check back on Friday or Saturday and I'll have an update on what's going on with that. COMMENTS

Did you email me also? I just sent a reply to that. Also, anyone who wants to investigate how to mod the game in order to support more players is welcome. If we could have even more than 32 players, it could get quite interesting.

Ugh, link fixed. The erroneous post was brought to you by the Windows function of copy / paste ONLY WORKING WHEN IT WANTS TO.

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » Here's the footage from the latest Planetside 2 session. Nothing too notable happened this time, I spent half the time discussing the possibility of playing Zombie Panic Source with people close to Halloween. I'll make a new post here when / if that gets underway. In the future, I may stop posting these Planetside sessions on the site itself since it's really just footage of me screwing around in a game, rather than an actual edited video meant to be more watchable, or answering questions people have from the videochat. I see this stuff as a way to do something with fans, but mostly throwaway material otherwise. I'll still keep posting all the sessions to the Accursed Farms Junk Youtube channel, but not make further announcements here unless something more major is going on (like we end up switching to Zombie Panic!). Anyway, work is continuing on the next Game Dungeon, more updates before Halloween! COMMENTS

Yeah, finding a job that doesn't make you want to throw yourself off a bridge is important in the long term. Also speaking of welding "Metal Dave" from the Go To Hell episode used to work as one and for a while he was worried he was going bald prematurely. After he quit the job, his hair started to grow back, turns out he was just slowly singeing off at work.

I don't know, for me Adlib was always just short of the kind of definition I wanted. MIDI is either pathetic or glorious, depending on how it's being rendered. I'm not against synth music by any means, I just feel like Ad-Lib never really had great tunes that would sound better with better defined instruments. I actually feel like Super Nintendo music had a lot of really excellent tracks where the rendition was good enough it didn't feel like it obviously needed better technology to throw at it.

I'm not sure I ever said Serious mode, but since people seem to be saying that, I should try and gauge just how doable that might be. Either way, I would have something spookier for Halloween. I'd love to have more Zombie Panic Source (especially in zps harvest), if anyone wanted to help set up a server for that. I'm not saying that the puzzle/game was well designed, taking it from the RGD it really isn't. I'm just saying that it isn't total insanity - it just has you in the role of an 8 to 3 demux. That makes me wonder if this game was designed by programmers for aspiring programmers, like a more primitive and visual TIS-1000, as the logic seems like moon logic at first. I knew it was made for a specific group in mind, but these type of things often come off as kinda pretentious to me though. "You don't know how to solve this? You are stupid, ha ha." It reminded me of those impossibly difficult Portal 2 mods, which focus more on insane reaction times or hidden mechanics you are supposed to look up by yourself, instead of having some actually good puzzles. I almost left in a line where I said one thing I hate the most about a puzzle game is when you figure out how to solve it, but the mechanics are so frustrating that you can't pull it off.

But see, a good puzzle would have THREE switches that I figure out is using binary (Rama has something like this). In Zack, I'm trapped and the ONLY thing I can do is hit a switch repeatedly. I literally have no other option of anything I can do.

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » New Game Dungeon, a week and a half late again! I'm honestly amazed with how long this one ended up being. I thought it would be about 10 minutes or less, but ended up a lot longer, though I think it was more tightly arranged than some other Game Dungeon episode. I'll have at least one more video for Halloween, hopefully more than one. I'm also considering doing something on twitch on the 30th if people are interested, though I'm still trying to figure out what (and only if I'll have free time). There definitely won't be as many Halloween videos as there were last year because I'll be busy with all kinds of things, but a lot more videos are coming in the future! COMMENTS

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » Here's the latest videochat, I had a few more announcements this time: -More Game Dungeons coming, one in the next few days, at least one more for Halloween, hopefully more than that. -The game The Crew (an open world driving game) is free to download and own permanently until October 11th. I encourage anyone interested to grab it and hopefully crack it in the long term, as I think this game is going to be killed within 4 years. -If you're a graphic designer interested in submitting layout ideas for the website redesign, go ahead and email me ([email protected]). -Alternately, if you have a legal background on consumer law for any European countries (or any other country that has relatively strong consumer laws), go ahead and email me also, as I'm trying to determine if the current practice of killing games that people have paid money for technically violates some laws in some countries. -Assuming I get done with the Game Dungeon episodes early, I'm considering doing something on Twitch for Halloween if anyone has any ideas. I think my mind may have been a bit scrambled for the rest of the video, but maybe not, I'll let you be the judge. COMMENTS

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » Well I was hoping to have a new Game Dungeon out today, but since that's not going to happen (it'll be a few more days), here's a much-delayed Dead Game News episode. This is essentially 3 months' worth of news, so I ended up trimming it down a bit. In the future, I may try to get some editing assistance to improve the quality a bit without having it eat into my time. Hopefully it will be a while before the next episode for the right reasons. Also as a reminder, the next fan videochat is tomorrow on October 1st, 4pm EST on twitch.tv/rossbroadcast, you still have a chance to submit questions here, or email me. COMMENTS

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » Here's the latest Planetside 2 footage, for those that are interested. We ended up conquering a continent this time, though it probably wasn't because of us. I'm still brainstorming ways to try and spice up the game in the future. I'd like to try and set up a mobile base, but that may take more coordination than we currently have. More real videos coming in the near future, hopefully one this month. COMMENTS

One thing I want to emphasize is civilization running on CHEAP oil. We're not going to "run out" of oil in our lifetimes. But once demand outpaces supply, it causes a negative feedback loop. High prices of oil drag down the economy, which in turn makes it harder to transition to something else. So even if we have more electric cars on the road, if the economy has become so depressed people can't afford them, that doesn't solve the problem either. While alternatives are conceivable, everything I've read says that it's highly unlikely we'll be able to have a smooth transition in time. In the USA especially, we're decades behind where we should be ideally. If we wait until prices are high enough to warrant further investment, then that's too late, we're already entering a second great depression. In game turns, it's like discovering in an RTS that you should have been upgrading your buildings and conducting research 15 minutes ago. I feel like you would have some points if only some workers were dressed like that, but figures like Elisa Cassan and Zhao Yun Ru throw it out the window. Even as fashions wax and wane, they haven't DRASTICALLY changed for televised news reporting since its conception, and for business executives in what, since the 1800s? When you look at it in perspective of everything else, I think it's more obvious that the game just doesn't care about the believability that much and simply wants to have a more expressive look. Which don't get me wrong, I'm not against that whatsoever, I just think they picked the wrong game for it.

I'll just give some quick points to this: -I get into the atmosphere of a game I play. If something throws me off, that affects my enjoyment of the game. Tinting it all one color halfway ruins the game for me. Almost every game I've seen do this universally I think looks very bad. So you can reason with me all day, it doesn't matter if I immediately hate what I'm looking at when I play the game. -Besides detracting from my enjoyment, I see tinting largely as both ugly and lazy. I feel if you want to create a mood in the game, do it with the LIGHTING. HR did this also, but I suspect they modified the base textures themselves in addition to that, which is almost a roundabout way to achieve tinting (which they also did). For example, Silent Hill 2 uses fog and overcast lighting to achieve a dreary effect and it looks pretty good. Tinting the whole screen is just a sloppy way of achieving a certain mood unless the director really knows what they're doing. -Scale matters. This is a mainstream 30 hour game, I'm bombarded by yellow the entire time. If this was a short indie game with stylized graphics, I wouldn't be so hard on it. -Once again, this is a prequel to an established game. Deus Ex had no universal tinting. IW went kind of overboard with teal lighting and I though it looked a little ugly for it. This is turning that upside down, and it makes me increasingly critical of it. I feel like if you really want to do something original, it should be something original, not deforming established IP unless it was obviously broken in the first place. -We'll just have to agree to disagree that making your entire game tinted a specific color adheres to an artistic vision. I think it's the art director being full of themselves and trying to find a way to stand out, not because of some actual clever perception. Honestly, while I wasn't crazed about the green tinting either, I can respect The Matrix's use of is, because it's only done inside the matrix. So it's a clever way of communicating it's a separate reality, whereas outside things look normal. Sure, the art director SAYS yellow is meant to symbolize the golden age, but those are just words. I can say the polygon edges in DX symbolizes the rough nature of humanity; there's nothing inherently true about it. And this comes at the expense of having to stare at bombarded yellow for 30 hours. There's no contrast to this where HR is only yellow for SOME parts. There's no scene in this game that is not yellow. It's all yellow, just varying degrees. I honestly think this is garbage, but hey, art is subjective. Point is, I'm of course not against variation, but I hated how it was handled in this case. Pray tell, since you liked it, what would Human Revolution have to have done in order for the yellow effect to be OVERUSED? Well once you get past the 70s alarmism, the predictions for conventional oil have been pretty spot on for the past couple decades. Once you move to unconventional oils, the price rises substantially. As the price of oil rises, it starts to drag down the economy after a point. Now I've heard some optimistic views that electric cars will pick up the slack, but most projections I've seen show it not happening nearly fast enough to meet the demand for a drop in CHEAP oil. I would compare it to geologists getting earthquake prediction dates wrong 5 times in a row in one area, then getting one right (in the same area). Predicting exact dates is difficult, but looking at enormous trends can tell you a lot about where we might be headed. It's not that I DISLIKE it, I'm comparing it to Invisible War's, which I said was pleasant. HR feels like a pure halfway point between Invisible War and Tron Legacy. Tron Legacy has some obviously distinct themes. Human Revolution "fades" almost EVERYTHING. I don't know what the appropriate term is, but instead of the music sounding like you can hear every subtlely, something is done so that it sounds like it's in the next room and less defined (maybe a music major knows what I'm talking about). It's not BAD, but I don't find that especially memorable. I think part of the deal is I've seen people PRAISE the soundtrack up and down, and in my eyes, it's not THAT different than Invisible War's, except for a couple tracks. I feel like Tron Legacy's soundtrack was similar, but was much more distinctive and pronounced than this.