No Streams for a Time
So about a month and two ago, kuoushi had the fun of timing a stroke. Sadly, not the fun one. I've been spending a lot of time working on getting my brains to work close to what they used to. You can imagine this will take a bit before I can give a time to go really streaming again yet. Plus, you know, my streams themselves won't be the same quality you've all been used to all of these years, so yeah no streams.
For a bit, anyway.
I'll do a bit more on some stuff working getting the other stuffs on the stream archives in the now. Will keep you know on the streams parts again later.
See you all again next time then.
New PeerTube version! (…so stuff will go wrong for a bit)
You may be wondering to yourself, "kuoushi, why do you need to make a full-blown news post for a new version of your self-hosted video archive stuff?" Well, let me tell you. The new version of PeerTube fixes an issue that we were apparently having with audio desync in basically every single video that I didn't notice because it only affected Chromium and Webkit browsers (which is the entire rest of the internet aside from Firefox users which explains how I didn't notice it earlier on). This is good news, right? It is.
The bad news, however, is that to fix it in all of my archives, I have to re-transcode every single video on my archive currently. That is going to take a while, and some archives will go up or down until that process completes. The positive, though, aside from everything being fixed, is that after that's all done, I'll go back to working on the archive and getting the rest of the missing streams off of YouTube and into there.
Basically, if you click an archive and it doesn't play, that's probably what's going on now.
Back on the topic of games, I've been slowly building out things on the site and deciding where things go. Things like The Bargain Bin stuff I've been working on. I've tossed all the complete archives for those streams into that category, and I'm also now including my Steam reviews of each game there. In the same vein, I've also resurrected the Steam Group's Curator page so that I can put all of this stuff in there too. Like and subscribe and all that other stuff people say. Honestly, it's just amusing for me to use all these things, even if no one pays much attention to them.
On the other good side of things, we've been finishing games! First up after we finished Gunman Chronicles, we moved on to a little free JRPG-inspired game by Scumhead known as Franzen. Longer than expected, and not without its rubbing points, but still a solid experience overall. You can read more from the review on the Complete Archive page, but I had fun per the usual.
We also (barely) finished playing through Ilum. It is an experience, I'll say that. Whether it's a good experience or not, well, that's up to you. Check the review out for that one on the Complete Archive page so you can see more about my thoughts on it. It's probably more fun to watch someone else suffer through, though. And, what an ending!
I guess I've also been making highlights again, but haven't decided how I want to include them on the site just yet. For now, they're only on Twitch.
But anyway, that's all I've got for today. We're currently going through Axe Cop, which is a lot of dumb fun so far. Tune in late nights on weekends to catch more of that, but we're likely in for a pretty long haul on that one. Maybe not as long as False Skies, but still a full-length JRPG kind of game.
Thanks for sticking around.
The Bargain Bin Streams Continue
If you haven't been keeping up with modern era kuoushi streams, you won't have noticed that I have been streaming a bunch of games with around 100 reviews or less on Steam. There are so many games released every year that some are absolutely going to fall through the cracks and get completely ignored by the world at large. Some are bound to be hidden gems, but most are just going to be unpolished in some are all aspects of things involved in gamedev. That's just the way it goes. Luckily, they're not expensive and can generally be streamed by me. Good for me, at least.
Most recently, we played through Pyramis and Digitizer. Both are largely made by solo devs, so that just means we're going to get some goofy fun, right? Well, anyway. Pyramis was kind of fun except that every time it had a chance to do something cool, it decided against it. You can find out more about my thoughts from my Steam review over here, but at suffice to say, at least the streams were fun? Well, I think they were, anyway.
Digitizer, on the other hand, was legitimately a fun thing for me to play. It did devolve into a lot of just driving around and being stupid, but that's where I shine. Right? It's an open-world game made by someone whose first language isn't English, fully voice acted. It's hard to describe it, but I get a robot wife at one point. If you want to know my real thoughts about it just go to the Steam Review, but the end note here is that I'm now the only person in the world aside from one other person (maybe the dev) who has played through a lot of the game's content. And now, you can experience it as well, without having to play! Good for you. Oh, and if you liked Digitizer, the same dev is making a new game that only got announced last month called Noga. Go wishlist it on Steam.
I did also go back and finish my lingering Gunman Chronicles streams from 2016, like I said I would eventually. So that game is closed out now, too. I always liked that game back when it actually came out, so it's nice to finally re-unite with my robot wife in that game as well. Wait, another robot wife? Shit. I might be outing myself here.
Complete Archives
Gunman Chronicles
Pyramis
Digitizer
Check out the complete archives if you just want to turn them on and brain off while the dulcet tones of kuoushi's stream of consciousness bring you safely to the ends of these games.
Site News
Unrelated to the above, or vaguely related since it's all about my site or whatever, but I have been also working on the site itself and some background bot things over the past few days that I'm pleased is now all working. You might notice that the front page of kuoushi.com no longer has a Twitch embed, and it's now something called PeerTube with a special chat box. That's right, chat is back, and it works just as you'd expect. You can choose any name you want on it and be anonymous, or you can even make an account on kuoushi.com, then tie your kuoushi.com account to the chat channel so you don't have to worry about always typing in your name and things. It's all pretty neat and works kind of (?) seamlessly. This chat is also relayed back to Discord and Twitch, so kuoushi won't be missing any of your messages on stream.
Speaking of the chat relay, I've basically ripped that out of my bot and put it into a much more stable piece of software called Matterbridge. It may not be very interesting to most people, but it does seem to just work. So if ever my bot goes down, the relay will almost always be up with very little chance of it crashing anymore. That's nice for me, at least. I think it's neat.
Some future stuff that I plan on getting going at some point is allowing for the stream embed to swap between PeerTube and Twitch, and also allow for friend streams to be embedded there as well like Highwang, Gerk, or Teepers. They won't have a PeerTube channel most likely, but the site will still hopefully be able to announce that they're streaming in the future. Oh, and me as well. I want things to load automatically like they used to back in the day, so I have some work cut out for me there. Eventually, just like everything else.
Site's in a nice place, though. I'm happy with where it's at again. PeerTube transfer has stalled out a bit, but it'll pick back up again eventually.
And I think that's the main bit of news I have for now.
What game are we playing next?
I don't have polls on the site anymore, but I'm likely going to choose from one of the following games. The others may or may not follow.
Comedy Option
Daikatana
Bargain Bin Options
Curse: The Eye of Isis
Surfasarus
Franzen
Ilum
Throw stuff at me in the comments if you care one way or the other, but I'll figure out how well they stream then pick one for maybe next weekend.
That's it! Thanks for sticking around and see you all next time.
We completing games around here
How many variations of that particular phrase am I going to use for a title? I don't know, maybe one. Maybe more. I'm not going back to check. Too busy totally streaming all the time, more than once a month. Wait, shit.
Anyway, on topic, we did beat False Skies last month. It's not a 100% clear or anything, but I did do quite a lot of the available content in the game. There's still new game+ and maybe 20 more hours of game to play if I want to, but I'll leave that for my own private playing time that I totally do. Why? Because I streamed it for almost 44 hours. It's a good game, that's about all I'll say here. You can read my review on Steam (mark it as helpful!) or listen to the end of the last stream to get my thoughts a bit more directly. Make sure you check out the complete archive for the game if you haven't started watching it yet. It's good.
And wait, what's this? Baw gawd it's Deadpool with a metal chair because apparently I went back to it and finished it off! Enough wrestling talk. No one does that anymore. But yeah, the last time I streamed this game was back in 2016, the world was different back then. I still streamed vaguely regularly. That was the main difference. But then life happened, and all of a sudden I ended up with a Steam Deck this year so I installed Deadpool on that and slowly worked my way back to recreating my save file as exactly as possible over a couple of weeks since I don't have a lot of time, and then I streamed it and beat it in an hour and a half and here we are. It's a game that exists, that much is true. Fun enough for what it is with a decent amount of Deadpool antics. Too bad you can't buy it anymore. Here's my complete archive if you wanted to start from the beginning, and then here's just the last episode if you totally remember all of the streams from 2016 and just want to end the story.
The PeerTube archive transfer is also coming along. I made it back almost all the way through 2012, but it's going to be slow going because those early years are the most full of streams. Like Suikoden II which I just finished making available through PeerTube, with its near 46 hours of gameplay (even though it's missing a stream). It actually beats out False Skies for overall duration which is pretty impressive (for both of those games). But I'll keep plugging along here and soon the archive will be complete again. Then maybe I'll add call-ins. Maybe.
So there's your update for the month. I'm still here. Things are always happening, just not always super visible.
Thanks for sticking around!
Slow News Year
So while I may not have been streaming too much lately due to overwhelming work and potentially life, I have still been working on things like transferring all of my archive over to my PeerTube instance. I'm still quite fond of PeerTube and everything that it brings. One of those things I've figured out is that I can directly embed playlists into my site.
So, while I've been transferring archives (we've made it back into 2013!), I've also been creating some complete archives that can just play through the entirety of a given game without needing too much user interaction or page reloads on the viewer's part. They're pretty neat, and honestly probably the better way to consume that Kuolity Kontent™ that you so crave. There's also the added bonus of me getting to see how long I spent on each game in total, which is Fun™.
Unsure how long it will take to get everything over to PeerTube, but it'll be worth it once it's all there. Maybe we'll even get a cool new stream embed on the site one of these days that uses PeerTube. Who knows. I have a lot of ideas and no real follow through. Such is life.
See you guys in future streams.