Tag: site features

The Bargain Bin Streams Continue

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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.

Slow News Year

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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.

Kuoushi in 2023, a Year That Existed

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All in all, a good year for streams and Kuontent™ in general

Enjoy another Twitch recap.

I know things have been rather silent the past few weeks or so, but that’s mostly because I’ve been extraordinarily busy with work even on the weekends. Sucks, but it is what it is. Hoping to get back to streaming and finishing off False Skies soon enough.

But all that aside, it’s honestly been a good year for kuoushi streams. The best on the books since 2019, and I’m sure those of you out there still following along at home will agree. We finished up Homefront: The Revolution earlier in the year, killing all the Norks in existence because why not. All’s fair when it comes to defeating invaders or something. Then we powered through a bunch of smaller games like the best Jurassic Park game ever, Trespasser, followed by F.E.A.R. and all of its expansions to finish off that franchise, the first Turok remake for more dinosaurs, and we even visited a space station in Prey (2017).

After that we launched into a small series that I’ve taken to calling The Bargain Bin, which targets games with something like 100 reviews or so in Steam. So not the biggest games ever, but still a lot of fun to just give them their time.

We also played Dino Crisis 2 which was certainly a time. I might just like dinosaurs. We even played a big ol’ Doom TC WAD known as Ashes: Afterglow which was damn solid. Way bigger than I expected, and only a few little stumbling blocks. We even played that first Call of Juarez game to wrap up that series of games as well. And finally, as mentioned in the beginning of the post, we started up a small JRPG known as False Skies. It’s big. It’s neat. It has a lot of systems. And let’s just say I like it so far, and can’t wait to finish it.

And none of the above is mentioning that my archives of streams are now as complete as they can be. Every single stream that I have a video archive for on my hard drives is now available from the kuoushi archive. Most are available through YouTube at the moment, but I’ve also started getting my archives entirely self-hosted on my own PeerTube instance to cut YouTube out entirely. It’s honestly been going really well, but I still need to get more of the old streams uploaded there instead of YouTube. This mostly helps when YouTube would mute things or otherwise say my streams are unsavory. I’m also able to stream through PeerTube as well, plus I’m looking into getting that to be the main embed on the site here with a chat that doesn’t require logging in, similar to how the old site functioned. Still figuring that all out with my limited time, though.

All in all, a good year for streams and Kuontent™ in general, even if I mostly only streamed Friday and Saturday nights when I had time. I’m hoping to free up more time next year to stream here and there, though we’ll see how that goes.

Oh, and I’m also in the top 10% of Homefront: The Revolution streamers again this year.

I’ll see you guys in 2024.

Thanks for hanging around as always.

There is nothing to F.E.A.R. because F.E.A.R. is all done

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As is tradition, we finished streaming F.E.A.R. so now I’m posting about it. We even showed off a little bit of the fan-run multiplayer servers for the original game. So between this game finishing, and the earlier runs of F.E.A.R. 2 and F.3.A.R., we’re done. We’ve completed the franchise. There’s no more F.E.A.R. to be played. It’s nice to close out a franchise, even if we did play it backwards. Nothing wrong with that, though. We saved the best for last. Except for the part where we played the expansions that are just kind of mediocre beyond a few of the new weapons being pretty neat. Love me my brick laser.

So if you’re looking forward to checking out the F.E.A.R. streams, just head on over to the category page and start spinning them up. They’re all on PeerTube, so you get to enjoy our locally hosted, homegrown streams there.

Anyway, we’re playing Turok now. It’s going to be a chill time for another weekend or so of that before we pick the next proper game.

And speaking of PeerTube, I’ve got the live streaming working so if you’re wanting to just get my streams direct from the source, that’s now an option. I still need to get it properly embedded into the site here so it’s easier for you all to choose to watch it that way if you want. Basically I have to write a WordPress plugin to allow for embedding and swapping between the Twitch and PeerTube streams, and then maybe I’ll work on getting another nice chat embed going.

Lots of stuff to work on as always, but we’ll eventually get to the point where this site is totally cool again. Wait, no. It’s totally cool now. Yeah, that’s it.

Thanks as always everyone.

PeerTube? What’s that?

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Basically, I’ve done another very kuoushi thing and created my own PeerTube instance, which basically functions as a self-hosted YouTube. This means I’m going to go back through the archive and get all of it on there so I can fully ignore YouTube. Of course that means I’m using my own bandwidth to host videos with whatever downtimes come with that, but that’s okay. I like being the equivalent of an internet hermit up in the backwoods just doing my own thing. Plus, PeerTube allows…live streaming? I’m still getting that working, but apparently I can potentially even cut out Twitch. Not that I should, but it’ll be nice to offer an alternative stream for people who don’t want to deal with the ads or anything.

As far as what is currently on PeerTube? I’ve put the current set of F.E.A.R. streams on there if you’d like to test that out. It’s not as feature-rich as YouTube, but I can offer chapters for highlights, plus full resolution/240p transcodes in case someone doesn’t have decent enough bandwidth to stream well. It honestly seems like a really good solution for my little site so I don’t have to rely on external services.

Oh, and another fun feature of PeerTube, it’s federated with ActivityPub. Got yourself a Mastodon account? Go ahead and follow @kuoushi_stream to get updates whenever streams go live or new archives get published. You can, of course, just follow @kuoushi for that as well, but now you’ve got another way to follow me. All sorts of options to follow the cool kuoushi.

And a quick note on streams? We’re going to likely finish up F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate next week and start a new game. What game will it be? Who knows. I certainly won’t post about it until I post about being done with F.E.A.R. because I suck at promoting myself. Maybe that’s normal.

That’s all for now, thanks as always.

Highlights and site status? New stuff is weird

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Been doing a bit more work around the site and streams now that I have a bit more time to work on these things. We’ll be a real website with real streams and features soon enough. Because, you know, we aren’t yet for some reason?

So anyway, first up, I’ve set up a new status page to help visualize when the site is down. Check it out over at http://status.kuoushi.com, and you’ll see all of my cool recent downtimes. One of the unfortunate parts about self-hosting is that downtimes are a thing that’ll happen fairly frequently. Doing my best to minimize them, but if my router glitches while I’m asleep or out of the house, the site will just have to be down until I get home. It’s cheaper and easier for me to host everything here though, considering how much I’ve got going on. So, just bookmark or check the status page if you can’t load the site. Maybe I’ll add a thing to the status checker to see if my bot’s online too.

Next new thing I added is highlights. You know, like a normal streamer who actually highlights their own streams with clips and cool things that happened during the stream. This is a recent development so it’s not like these are covering the entire span of over a decade of streams or anything, but maybe I’ll work on that some day. But anyway, check out all the cool highlights from stuff like Trespasser and the final days of Homefront: The Revolution here, assuming you didn’t watch the streams themselves like some kind of bad viewer who spends their time doing things more important than hanging out with your old pal kuoushi.

That’s it for now. Thanks as always.