Ross Scott

Yes, so I get to keep more of $12 once a year than I do from $1 monthly. I didn't want to point that out in the video because I wanted to minimize the "look at all the ways you can pay me" infomercial crap. This was honestly a rough script for me to write since I was fighting a lot of my nature with it. Yeah, but wow, the timing sure worked in my favor. I'm not sure what people have in mind, but I think it would be pretty underwhelming. Not always, but a lot of the time it's mostly me going in with a list of notes of what kinds of shots I want to grab, screencapping them, then exiting and processing the clips for editing and repeating. Additionally, I try to free up all computer resources when recording higher resolution games to minimize the possibility of any stuttering. While I do have a multicore processor, I don't always have full faith in Windows' ability to manage things without any bottlenecking at all. That and I'm usually not giving any sort of performance while I'm doing this stuff, I'm typically trying to get the footage I need as fast I can and I don't think it would be very interesting to watch. Well I confess, even before the fundraiser, I've been holding out for Pascal next year. I usually only upgrade one part at a time and make it last as long as possible however. That and the Oculus Rift (or Vive, whichever ends up being better), since I look at that less as an upgrade and more of an escapism portal that I've been wanting for a decade or so. But yeah, I've actually never bought a full desktop system. I assembled my first one in high school (for $400 including monitor) and have only upgraded incrementally since. Even then, I never buy top-tier stuff since the premium is so high and it depreciates rapidly. I believe VoodooPC predates them.

Maybe, these both seem like things that sound easy in concept, but seem like they could get suspiciously longer. I tend to be more cautious the easier something to do is also, since I don't like the videos to dip below a certain quality level. Oh well thanks a bunch man. Again though, don't feel obligated if you're scraping by yourself. That's part of the reason I told everyone how much I make, so some people would certainly go "well damn, I'm making as much as that working the grill, I think I'll keep my money afterall". I don't want to exploit or deceive anyone. Besides, even if you never donate a dime, coming back after a long time to see more videos is always appreciated. No worries at all, it's not like I'm handing out donations myself. Again, I really look at the situation as me pressing my luck, so don't worry about it. No, it's all the same as far as I know. It might be less for directly from another Paypal account, but that's it. As for mod tracker, I talked about that in moon gaming actually, but edited it out since there was so much other stuff. Not that I know of, I think just cancel the old one and do a new one instead.

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » New video! This one probably isn't what a lot of you were hoping for, but I admit this is one aimed at a real minority of the audience. I tried to make it as enjoyable to watch as I could. The short version is this is a fundraiser video and I'll be happy for any donations I can get. There's no obligation to donate anything however, you'll still get all the videos. This is another experiment of mine to stay afloat, like many others. If you are interested in helping out though, the donation page has been updated to make it a little easier to use + now includes stat tracking! Donation Page I was originally going to use Patreon for this, but for reasons discussed in the video, I decided against it (them being hacked recently reinforced the decision). For those wondering, I'm unfortunatley going to be pretty empty-handed regarded prizes, although if there's something you really want that doesn't take a lot of time, I can consider it. It's mostly an issue of time more than anything else. If you've ever wanted to know what my financial or work situation has been over the years, it's all in the video. Something I was considering saying that's not it the video is if anyone has alternative solutions to my situation also, they're free to suggest them. I was a little hesitant about saying that on Youtube since a lot of suggestions might not be so practical ("You should live in a dog house, it's much less expensive, woof!"). One big news item in the video that's worth repeating is I plan to be setting up monthly live video chats in the near future, so anyone can communicate with me and I can let everyone know what's going on. Ideally, I'd like to start this sometime late October, but realistically, it may not happen until early November. I'll have details posted here once things are worked out. For the time being, next up, regardless of how the fundraiser goes, is going to be as many Game Dungeons as I can cram in for October. There will be a bit of a delay, but expect several for late October and of course, a Halloween episode. While the overall future of my videos is a little like the Magic 8 ball answer "reply hazy, try again later", for the time being, there's a bunch more coming! - - - ADHD version: Did you know Ross accepts money? Also he'll be doing live video chats in the future! COMMENTS

Okay things DID go wrong, it will probably be within another 24 hours. There's barely any from FM, it's very robotic to record. There are some from CP, I'll get around to releasing them at some point.

The video will explain everything. If nothing goes wrong, I should have it up within 24 hours.

Hell, that'll get fixed ASAP.

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » Goodies! In anticipation of the fundraiser campaign I should have coming out soon (expect a video + more info in 1-2 days), as a good faith gesture, I'm releasing all the stuff I've been meaning to for months! DOTA 2 VOICE PACK RELEASED! While my original plan was to sell this in the Steam store, I've decided to release all the files to the Freeman's Mind Announcer Pack I was working on for DOTA 2 for free. The reason I didn't follow this thing through was because midway through its production, Valve changed the rules, which made about half my lines unusable. This was a huge morale killer and by that time I was able to resume work on the videos again, so this pack remained in limbo for a while. Truth be told, I'd rather just make more videos than spend another month or two working on this again. Ironically, I'm not even that big a MOBA fan (though I do like RTSs and action RPGs individually), this was more of a fan request thing that never quite made it. Still, I put a whole bunch of effort into this and I'm sure you'll find some lines entertaining. DOTA 2 Freeman's Mind Announcer Pack (51MB) You're allowed to use these files for anything you want, under the following conditions: 1. Don't sell this as a voice pack. 2. If you make something substantial with this, please credit me (Ross Scott) for the lines if possible. While this pack is free, donations are still welcome! ALL WEBSITE LINKS UPDATED! Besides the DOTA 2 files, all the links to the videos on the site should now be updated, making it easy to find anything you may have missed. In the future I hope to have an overhaul of the site to make everything easier to access, but in the meantime, info on all the videos can be found here in the movies section. Additionally, all Freeman's Mind episodes are now available to download from the episode pages, and I've also updated the archive of all my isolated voice tracks for Freeman's Mind. You can download the updated pack HERE (680MB). That's it for now, the fundraising video is next, followed by as many Game Dungeons as I can get done for October! - - - ADHD version: Dota 2 files released! Freeman's Mind voice files + downloads released! Web links all updated! Ross is having a fundraising campaign soon, donations are appreciated! COMMENTS

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » New Game Dungeon! I think this might be the shortest one so far, but I promise I didn't skimp any on the quality. This game certainly had things to talk about. I originally was going to start working on the Patreon campaign next, but after the muddled reaction to Moon Gaming, I felt like I should get another Game Dungeon out first to let people know I wasn't abandoning other videos. On that note, I think I'm going to discontinue Moon Gaming as the response to it wasn't what I was hoping. While I think it has potential to be better, I don't think it would be a LOT better than what was already seen. Since that's been scrapped, after Patreon is set up, my new plan is to get as many Game Dungeons out for October as I can. I have a couple smaller episodes planned and at least one larger one for Halloween, but I'll just see what's doable. More stuff coming! COMMENTS

Well the overall feedback on this looks pretty clear. In honesty, I was pretty happy with how this came out, but it could be because I had someone else to comment also so I wasn't in a vacuum just spouting out my own thoughts. Apparently me spouting my own thoughts is enough however! For everyone talking about it improving, I can see it improving somewhat, but not a LOT. So in light of that, I think I'm going to discontinue the series. My new plans now are to get a Game Dungeon out ASAP (I have a short but good one in mind) to sort of make amends for everyone disappointed by this one, then I'll be working on Patreon. I'm still figuring out what I want to do for October, but in all likelihood it will be as many Game Dungeons as I can manage.

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here » EDIT: The reception to this video has been rockier than I was hoping and it definitely affects future plans. I want to get a better bearing on what people think of this. Please give some feedback below: [poll id=11] New series! Welcome to Moon Gaming, the only gaming show that takes place on the moon (I think)! I've been wanting to make this for a while now and while we ran into a lot of technical issues, I'm more or less pleased with how it came out. This series is going to be composed of "Let's Play" sessions. Normally I'm not very interested in "Let's Plays" myself, because it tends to be a lot of dead air or talking about nothing particularly interesting. Moon Gaming hopes to solve those problems by editing it down to just the stuff worth talking about. So even though this is technically a Let's Play, I guarantee every shot in here is one that I thought belonged. If anything, I may have been a little overzealous about this first episode and cut a little too much, but the playthrough ran on a lot longer than we intended. We originally planned for only one episode, but we had so much to talk about it ballooned into three. I think future episodes will go much more smoothly. I'm very optimistic about this series as the turnaround time is definitely faster than Game Dungeon, so it can hopefully buy myself some more time to work on the movie. In this inaugural episode, I'm joined by Tom White of the show Weird Video Games. I met him from being on TGWTG network and I generally recommend his videos; some of my favorites being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB8fWRD-p5c and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjsGXnTBvB8. Tom will be returning for future episodes and I have another guest lined up also. As for other videos, my next focus is going to be setting up a Patreon campaign, along with an accompanying video. If I'm lucky, I'll have another Moon Gaming episode for this month, but if not, expect several for October as this show format allows me to squeeze in more videos than I normally would be able to and I'd love to have more Halloween-themed ones. I'll try my best to have a Game Dungeon for October too. Busy! COMMENTS

I'm actually not sure if the knuckle joint always corresponds with completing the level, I just decided to assume that for the sake of the video.

I don't feel like retaking the test, but I've done these before and I'm INTJ. I'm borderline I/E, real high marks in NT and moderately low J.

I'm really not trying to bum people out with this stuff, it's more like I don't like how invisible it is. For #1, I can't say for certain, though with my own "escape from machinima" entries, that was really bad for me and everything on there (not counting my google speculation, since that was just speculating) was true. So it's VERY easy to imagine it getting as bad or worse in the actual industry. For #2 I'm kind of cynical so I don't think it can be changed through populist or democratic means. If I did, I would endorse boycotts, but there's a history of gaming boycotts not being effective at all. I guess the upside is not ALL games are like that, just higher profile ones it's more common. Yeah, just to be clear, there are WAY more serious issues going on globally than anything in the realm of gaming, but the more you question our most harmful practices, the more you have to question our whole system overall, which I think a lot of people aren't really willing to do mentally. I just figure gaming is an easier realm to tackle overall. Also for the record, anyone working on a game who deliberately pushes themselves I don't see as a problem, that's just their motivation. The problem is companies exploiting or demanding that type of behavior with EA Spouse crunch time hours, no overtime pay, routine layoffs, etc. Imagine if EA had to pay time and a half for every hour over 40 that a person spent on a game, it would drastically change their approach to things.

You know I found something that proves it was more than my imagination: Now this is only using anaglyph mode, but back when I had an s-3d setup, I was using page-flipped shutter glasses. Regardless, if you look at these, you can tell there's definitely a difference between the two. Unfortunately it's likely multiple settings are different, but just from that screenshot I think the TriDef one definitely looks better. The roof windows and general perspective just seems better somehow.

Sorry for the slow replies: I may be misunderstanding, but I've already tried this, it's not an ideal solution since some songs will get overrepresented. So if you have a song that's electronic AND metal, it appears twice as much on playlists. I ideally want every track to have an equal representation (within its own category). As for custom tags, I really think there's enough within ID3 to work with. I think it would only need 2 different fields max, maybe just one. No, I think that's a completely different thing. That just cleans up badly labelled or organized files. I'm talking about custom criteria for organizing soundtracks so that you can get similar sounding tracks on a playlist. Yes and no. First, while mood can be very subjective, I think tempo is absolutely crucial towards sorting tracks the way I'm envisioning. Mood or situation for listening could work, but the categories you list is part of the problem. You have things like "energetic" and "poignant" that aren't especially helpful for manual sorting. I want to boil these down into as few categories as possible (but still practical). When you have thousands of potential mood / style combinations like this, it makes manual sorting rather impractical. Besides, where's the benefit of labeling a track "aggressive" AND "angry"? This is way too much. I'm trying to find a system simple enough I can practically follow a flowchart as to how to sort the music and at the end the tracks basically sound similar for that category. Guys, here's the thing: If I know the CRITERIA for how to sort thing, then everything falls into place for me. This is a subjective thing and not everyone will have the same opinions, but the more feedback I get on this, the more I can figure out my own system that works. Lately, I've been trying to put some categories into different moods, and some based on situations where I might want the music. Here are a few examples of what I mean for soundtracks (this all assumes no lyrics): Racing - Rock: Music with a fast enough tempo to be suitable for a racing game with a rock / metal genre overall. Somewhat neutral in tone, without strong "strife" or "angst" overtones. Example: Frag: Music suitable for a deathmatch or fighting game with pretty constant action. A slower overall tempo than "racing" with more irregularity in the beat also suitable. Generally some variant of heavy metal. Example: Scary Calm: Music suitable for a horror game, but is generally just mild tension building rather than moods of intense suspense or fear. Example: Medieval Simming: Music suitable for some sort of medieval sim game. Generally calm pacing, with nothing too soothing or riveting, but has some instrument use or style that suggests a medieval environment. Example: Now the alternative to this would be to have some sort computer-assisted system that could spit out analytics or suggested organizational system that could be refined manually, but I don't know of anything like that. If I have to sort it all myself, the variables need to be as few as possible to still work. I'm anticipating a few dozen categories, but hopefully not much beyond that for soundtracks. Let me know if you have any feedback along these lines. I'd like to know how other people decide what sorts of songs go together (that's NOT based on artist / album).

That might be the problem then. I only went to normal 3D theaters. Literally the whole time I was watching Avatar I was thinking it needed more depth (except for the scene with the alien pollen or whatever it was). I liked the transparencies from the glass, but it was still too flat. Always. Oh I will, I'm just waiting for the first generation consumer versions. If I thought DK2 was as good as it was going to get, I would have one by now.

Well like I said on the video, I know I'm on the extremist end. I think killing any game intentionally is unacceptable. I see a longer lifespan as just a stay of execution. Besides, that only allows reverse engineering if there's enough programming masterminds interested in the game to do so. It does nothing for less-popular ones. I think anyone who wants to keep some sort of media preserved should at least have the opportunity to do so. I mean hell, I have couple soundtracks I'm not sure many others on the planet have. That's because there wasn't a parent company intentionally corrupting the music file that I saved after a length of time. I would argue it's very debatable if it's against their business model or even hurts profits. Having old games still in play can keep a franchise relevant and still profits. Even for the games that are meant to be directly replaced, they could just withdraw support and still not outright kill the game. So if a game goes from requiring a central server with lots of social media features / full support to having only private servers with no official support at all, the game has arguably lost value. But they can KEEP SELLING IT and potentially draw people towards the latest game in the franchise which has full support. I guarantee you whatever they're doing EA is making NO money on Battleforge currently. We're just arguing semantics now. For my purposes, planned obsolescence has a very specific meaning, which is that is artificially designed to no longer function properly after a certain length of time. This aspect you're mentioning is sort of a subset of that, where it's simply DIFFICULT to use the product in the future or it's less relevant. For sake of clarification, I'm referring to situations where it is IMPOSSIBLE to use. Betamax tapes and 8-track players are now obsolete. It's still POSSIBLE to use them though if you can hunt them down and get them working. Maybe they're not obsolete for your purposes, like if there's a specific movie or music on that format that you can't obtain in another way. When I'm arguing against planned obsolescence, I'm talking about situations where it is impossible to keep them going, by design, and an artificial one at that. I hope that clears up any confusion. Good, it's a fool's errand on my part trying to raise awareness, but I at least want SOME people to realize what's at the end of the rainbow of online-only games. As for Guild Wars, you're probably safe since I think that game would have the "critical mass" to get an emulator functioning if it died. As for The Sims, you're probably aware that EA has had and killed The Sims Online also.

I don't see this as any more effective or less impossible than simply making a law that holds the company financially liable for discontinuing a product that people have paid for. I mean here are the issues I see with what you're advocating: 1. (except for the rare cases like Molyneux's game) No company is going to ADMIT they intend on shutting the server down. On the contrary, if it's making LOTS of money, they have incentive to keep it going, not kill it. The company can't predict exactly how successful it will be, thus, they can't predict its lifespan. Look at Tabula Rasa or Hellgate London. Each of those only made it 1.5 years before it was shut down. 2. We're already doing this in a way, and it's clearly not effective. All these games (for ones that were sold in retail anyway) say on the box "this game requires an online connection." Since this practice is only INCREASING, that's not enough. 3. Gamers have demonstrated they're willing to take abuse after abuse if the game they're playing is good enough. What if, against odds, your labeling law was passed and all online-only games state "This game is only guaranteed to function for 1.5 years" on the box, then gamers STILL buy it at about the same rate they do now? It would legitimize this practice, which again, is a nightmare scenario for me. Consumer laws are not unheard of. If the industry recognizes a practice is harmful enough, laws can be made to prevent it. While I don't see mandatory refunds as the only option, I believe there needs to be SOMETHING to give games a fighting chance to survive. I would even consider something as nebulous as "company is required to make a 'best effort' to allow the game to run without their servers in the event they shut them down, or face anti-consumer charges and pay corresponding fines" You might see that as an excuse to worm out of it, but something like that would be a MASSIVE improvement to what we have now. They could release partial source code, a patched client, the point is, they would be required to do SOMETHING. The way it stands now, they not only kill the game outright, but literally do NOTHING to try and make sure paying customers can still use the product. Now every company will have a different definition of "best effort", but I think the law can be pretty clear that doing NOTHING is not a "best effort". Again, that's not planned obsolescence, that's just phasing the product out. If you make a product you know you're going to discontinue, that has nothing to do necessarily with planned obsolescence. Look at videocards or CPUs. If I buy a computer parts that's 5 years old, the company probably isn't manufacturing those anymore, they've been phased out as they're now making more powerful ones. This doesn't mean the part I buy is DESIGNED TO DIE. I could buy that part and it could serve me as advertised for 30 years. Planned obsolescence would be if the car or computer part was specifically engineered so that it would fall apart after 5 years, without fail. Printers are a good example of this. All the parts could be in perfect working order, but the software will activate a killswitch after x years, so that the printer will no longer work and you're forced to buy a new one. You may have some confusion on terms. "Planned obsolescence" does NOT mean a product is outdated or been replaced by newer ones (that can be a side effect of planned obsolescence, but it's not the definition). It means it was designed to die after a certain period of time and weakened artificially. Ha, I would argue BOTH are true. The tendencies are sociopathic AND they don't know how / care they're affecting people on the ground. Like you said, they don't care about the product. That's why ideally the noise on this practice would be so loud even management would hear it, but I don't think that's going to be the case. Online-only games CAN stop piracy dead in their tracks if done right. I'm pretty sure Battleforge had a 0% piracy rate, that's a claim not many companies can make. They can also reduce hacking and allow control of the economy with stores or auction houses, that sort of thing. As for first BIG successes with online-only, it varies. I could be off, but here are some I know of: First big MMO to use online only: Everquest 1999, though World of Warcraft 2004 became much, much bigger. First big non-subscription multiplayer game to require a central server: Halo on Xbox, 2001 First big single-player game to (artificially) require an online connection: Half-Life 2, 2004 First big single-player game to (artificially) require an always-online connection: Assassin's Creed 2, 2009 First big online-only game to make large use of microtransactions: Farmville, 2009 First big single-player game to REALLY require online-only connection: Diablo 3, 2011 I would also give an honorable mention to Modern Warfare 2 since I heard it bucked the trend of previous games in requiring a central server as opposed to allowing private ones. These aren't the first games to execute this stuff, but they are the big ones I'm aware of.

See, again, I don't think this argument holds up. When Battleforge died, EA had NOTHING to fill in the gap. They cancelled another RTS they were working on and I'm not aware of one they've created since. I mean this is a line I left out of the review, but we don't even know if Battleforge was still making a profit or not. It certainly had a lot of die hard fans when they killed it. All we know is it wasn't making ENORMOUS profits, which is typically how EA's management mentality works. Even then, I don't think this justifies the practice. It would be like destroying all copies of 1987 Robocop because 2014 Robocop had been released. Each game is a unique artistic experience, not something like a retooled screwdriver. In this case, instead of trying to maintain a smaller, but loyal demographic, EA was basically herding its RTS fans towards their competition, away from them. Cases like these are extremely rare and I consider them more performance art pieces rather than a common practice. I'd be willing to take a bet that 99% of developers who put time into a game that had been killed would want future people to be able to see their work if they wanted to. Again, this is basically performance art. There was no artistic vision in making Battleforge (or the vast majority of games) die. If it had still been raking in enormous profits, they would never have killed it. Sorry for the troll accusation, it just felt you were conflating something dying off naturally with forcibly destroying something. In the case of games, that's a completely false analogy and it feels like an unsupported rationalization for a practice that just shouldn't be happening. I feel like you've been making a strawman argument by trying to merge the two concepts. But as you've described it, that's not planned obsolescence, that's cycling out an inferior product. Again, this feels like a strawman argument, it's trying to equate two different concepts. If EA had simply retired Battleforge, but old players could continue playing it, I never would have made this video.

Well that would be a workaround, although you would think the subsidiary would inherit the debts owed by the child company. Regardless, I'm sure lawmakers could come up with something more bulletproof if the incentive was there to fix it by those with influence. See I don't accept this at all and see it as a false comparison. An obscure game becoming extinct because of lack of attention or interest, that's a natural death. Sometimes it's a tragedy, sometimes its value is quite questionable. That lies in due dilegence of the consumers or players, not on the creator. They created the game, then released it. I don't see any further responsibilities being required of them. What I'm talking about is night and day compared to that. It was killed BY DESIGN. So from Day 1 it was on life support with no backup plan whatsoever. It's a deliberate death that nobody involved wanted. The players sure as hell don't want this, the developers don't, and management almost certainly doesn't care in the first place. It's something that shouldn't be happening. In these cases, the company is FORCING the responsibility to keep it alive on themselves, then is utterly negligent. You say "some people abuse it", the VAST MAJORITY of games with online-only requirements go down this way. It's the standard, not the exception. I think this is a completely disengenous example that borders on trolling. Food rots naturally. Games don't die naturally, they have to be specifically designed that way AND be enforced to prevent them from being restored (afterall, the company could just release the server software as-is). It's deliberate as can be. The comparison should be made to books, music, and movies. We're still hearing about The Odyssey thousands of years after the fact because it's a good story worth hearing. Games are akin to this, not fruit. I'm not aware of any parallel to this in media outside of performance art (which are often designed to shock anyway). I'm not aware of any good use of this practice, maybe you know one I haven't thought of. Food doesn't really qualify, we don't design food to spoil, it happens naturally. Yeah I get what you're saying now, people who play games aren't exactly a collective. I dislike that mentality of focusing on something because it's new as opposed to trying to see if it has some lasting merit, it feels very hollow. Game Dungeon is absolutely devoted to games that manage to retain something worth looking at (good or bad) even after time has passed. Guys, I think you're obfuscating the real distinction here: This is being destroyed BY DESIGN. If a painting is destroyed, it's due to lack of diligence, or an accident. It's not because the painter secretly built in a timed explosive upon its creation. The average person is absolutely powerless to prevent it. I am not advocating everything needs to be preserved, that's not really practical. I'm saying we shouldn't be designing art for profit that is ARTIFICIALLY destined for death. To me that's all the difference in the world. Battleforge obviously had a devote fanbase wanting (and still wanting) to play it and now it's dead because a company that was paid money deliberately killed it. Comparing that to a game that gets lost to time and people forget about isn't the same thing at all. I was just trying to keep this contained to gaming. There are much larger issues going on in the world of course, but I can't think of one in the realm of gaming. I mean you say an existential problem, but this literally didn't use to exist. If you go back far enough, videogames were never made to die intentionally. This is not a necessary state of things tied to the existence of man. I think existentialism only comes in where if you realize that if we're allowing this to happen, other safeguards in society must be failing prior this.

The stuff flying at my face is just a highlight. The idea is I want the depth so high I can get lost and feel like I'm actually there. With toned down 3D I don't get that at all, I'd rather just have it flat then. It's just as much a blessing as a curse. Afterall, way more games are geared for 2D rather than 3D. My issue with the 3DS is the screen just seems too small for me to get that "other world" feeling. I'm sure the 3D depth was pretty good, but it's kind of like a pocket hologram; neat, but not exactly a life changing perception. It sounds like you got more out of it though.