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Five hundred twenty-first entry - typical Friday night (Saturday morning?) alone
2013-04-06 02:13:21
Time - 12:47, Noise - Journey OST
Well, gee golly whiz, there must only be like three people on this site who use Magix. Guess I'll have to troubleshoot the problem myself.
And on that note, holy fuck, if you aren't using a cheaper program like Magix, where the hell are you people getting the hundreds of dollars for Vegas, Premiere, Final Cut, etc.? Share the wealth, please and thank you.
In other news, blasting through Tomb Raider to catch up to the part I need to record again didn't take too long. I only needed three sittings of dedicated play to get there. I find that I'm still dying a lot, though, even on Easy Mode. Part of that is a general lack of caution on my part (trying to Rambo my way through everything), but I'm finding that this game just has a lot of cheap shots.
I don't know. It's too combat heavy for my tastes. It's like the illegitimate child of Uncharted and Resident Evil 4. More platforming, less shooting, thanks. In the future, though, all playthroughs will be on Easy Mode. I don't feel bad in the slightest by saying that, either. This isn't the kind of game at which I excel and I'm not going to put myself through frustration when the experience as a whole will be the same.
Anyway, I have one more theory to try for getting the footage to work in Magix before I give up and go back to the other editing program (just for the Let's Play series), which I really didn't like and would greatly prefer not to use again. I would say "fuck technology," but let's face it: I'm too far gone with attachment. Me 'n my compy 2gether 4 ever. <3
See you, folks.
- Jen -
Five hundred twentieth entry - a little hang up
2013-03-30 23:53:30
Time - 10:51, Noise - blissfully silent
Magix users, HALP:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=112701
In other news, my life is a goddamn awful trainwreck.
Carry on, folks.
- Jen -
Five hundred nineteenth entry - "you mother-ranter" seems like a good insult
2013-03-24 14:44:21
Time - 12:42, Noise - mother ranting
Amount of Attention Paid to VCAs This Year
"Did Fay-Sa's video make it in the horror category? No? Fuck this shit."
/attention
In related AMV news, I think Ut video and I have come to a shaky truce. Since Magix still hates Lagarith with a burning passion - it gives weird frame-long video glitches a couple of times throughout an otherwise normal video and is constant with all versions of the program and codec - I have decided to give Ut another chance.
I can't do the Huffyuv thing anymore. It just eats up too much hard drive space. I have two terabytes between two drives, and they're almost all gone from video processing. (I'll get quite a bit back when I get off my ass and process these Let's Play videos, which I am doing slowly.)
Oh, so I played the Vergil's Downfall DLC for DmC Devil May Cry. It's, uh... not that good. Not terrible, but when you have to rehash a location from the game, and then make me replay that exact same level a few missions later... we have a problem.
The ad talked about new enemies, but those only number two (well, three if you count an uninspired boss), and the game is so proud of itself for one of them that you'll be fighting it in just about every skirmish. Most other battles are the same thing over and over, and Yamato just feels like you're doing the same combo over and over, regardless of what you're actually doing.
Vergil's DT is a little more useful than Dante's was, as it can be used for multiple purposes without entering DT - for example, the Spiral Swords move, which has good lasting power and recharges fairly quickly. However, don't expect to be dominating the game with Super Vergil, because DT doesn't have the stunlock-shit-in-the-air ability of Dante's version. The actual Devil Trigger move is not as good as far as I have seen, but I haven't used it much.
Most of the difficulty of the game comes from Vergil's inadequacies and not really from player error. His dodges seem slower and his attack animations are harder to break out of, meaning you can see a demon rearing up on you, smash the dodge button repeatedly, and Vergil will stupidly keep slashing his sword to the end of the combo instead of getting the hell out of there like you wanted him to. Most of the damage I took was from this, although the pattern of mindless button mashing that I got into as I lost interest in battles also caused quite a bit of pain.
Secrets are easy to find for the most part. I only needed to look up a few lost souls and health cross fragments. There are no extra unlockables as artwork goes and whatnot, although there are a few more trophies.
The stats menu clearly didn't get double checked before release, because it has some mistakes in it. Like me having obtained 20/19 health cross fragments, or having defeated the Mission 05 boss zero times, despite having beaten the scenario on five different difficulties. Also a trophy that the system said I got, but which doesn't appear as being completed in DmC's in-game listing. The environments are more glitchy overall if you get too close to piles of rubble, and enemies will sometimes hilariously get caught on them. You can tell that this was a rush job, and it was peppered with problems during production.
Oh, and lastly. The cutscenes. The goddamn, ugly, thoughtless cutscenes. Imagine bad comic book art. Now give it some form of bad animation. And there you have the main driving story scenes of the DLC. There are some short scenes rendered out during the missions, and those are okay, even though they clearly imported Dante's animations for a few things. However, I was unfortunately disappointed by the low quality of the scenes otherwise.
For $8.99, it's not the worst thing you could buy, and if you really loved DmC, it's probably worth it. Nostalgia is what drove me, yearnings for the Vergil of olden times.... that, and a great irritation at how much of a useless twat he was during the main game, and so I wanted to see him actually fighting for once.
I also downloaded the Bloody Palace (free of charge), as well as a costume pack for Dante (why not). Barring some other unexpected release, I think that will close my time with this game for a while. It's not nearly so replayable as the old games, but it was a decent action game, and it deserved most of the praise that it got, although definitely not all of it.
So anyway, sorry to type your eyes out (at least, that seems like a reasonable way of saying "talked your ear off" in internet-ese). I gotta go get ready for work.
See you, folks.
- Jen
PS: I kind of want to make a DmC video, but the actual cutscenes surprisingly don't have that much going on during them, so I don't know. Also, I don't particularly have a song in mind yet. -
Five hundred eighteenth entry - secretly wishing I was dating Code so I could make him do my taxes
2013-03-08 22:34:40
Time - 9:17, Noise - some OC remixes
I'd even exchange it for sexual favors, promise.
In other news, I bought Magix Movie Edit Pro 14. It was cheap as fuck (due to being old as fuck) for a program that I know I love, so it was a good buy. Now let's see how much I actually use it. It will definitely take over as my editor for the Let's Plays that I was doing, but although I have had a great many ideas for AMVs, I rarely have much motivation to do them. My ideas are getting bigger than my skill set, honestly.
I also bought (and here, "bought" means, "gift-carded the hell out of that shit") Tomb Raider and The Orange Box. I first played Portal on the Xbox 360, and eventually lost access to it, so I'm finally restoring my membership to the cool people club by snagging the PS3 version for permanent keeping. I have it on Steam, too, but since my camera doesn't move properly on the gamepad (with no fix, I might add), I doubt I'll be playing it. I refuse to adapt to keyboard gaming; I just don't like it.
Today was the monthly (or bi-monthly, depending upon how secure my bank account is feeling) grocery shopping trip. A little over two hundred dollars, with an extra bit of money shoved into some makeup. I bought a lipstick for ninety-three cents, and replacements for my liquid liner and mascara, both of which I'd been using for several years (WAY beyond their expiration).
Most of this girliness is in preparation for my golden birthday in May. I've never celebrated or had a party for anything in my life, and gosh darn it, I'm gonna look fabulous and be festive as fuck. It happens to be right after ACen, a point of annoyance for my aforementioned bank account, but hey, it's ALWAYS going to be after ACen. I'm not going to sacrifice a celebration every year for that.
Anyway, the offer's on the table, Code. Just sayin', bro. o3o
Happy AMV-ing to you all, and happy gaming to me. See you, folks.
- Jen -
Five hundred seventeenth entry - very quiet
2013-02-12 01:34:20
Time - 12:03, Noise - Foo Fighters - "Best of You"
On Valentine's Day, it will have been four years since I last received an opinion on one of my videos. I don't have any particular positive or negative feelings about that. I just found it interesting. Incidentally, the opinion was on "Abandoned," saying that the user loved the video and would update the opinion later, which clearly didn't happen. That's happened a couple of times, actually. I probably deserve it, having done it myself to others at least two or three times.
I honestly want to make a video for ACen this year, but I'd be using (non-Final Fantasy) videogame footage, and I know that probably won't make the cut, then. It's not that I think they discriminate against games, but rather that games are naturally one step removed from anime, and so it's less likely to see them in the competition. I doubt a manga music video would have as good of a chance of making the cut, either.
But then, this is mostly conjecture. I haven't actually been to ACen's contest in a few years. If any VGMVs have won a category in the past years, do tell me.
I'm sort of getting ahead of myself, though. I need to get an editing program with which I am comfortable first. I should just give up and get a version of Magix off of Amazon. If I can spend forty bucks on two pairs of khakis for work and thirty on sushi for dinner, then I think I can manage twenty to forty on a video editor.
Well, that's it. I'm holding myself to it now. By the end of the week, I need to make a decision on what I'm buying.
And speaking of editing, if you want to see my ever-changing hair styling and stumbling through DmC Devil May Cry, check out my Let's Play channel on YouTube. (Yes, that was a shameless plug.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/SakuraSamaelLetsPlay
YT fucked up my formatting for the first four videos, but I "fixed" it for everything after that. I'll stick with that format for this LP (for consistency's sake), and do something a little less ugly (read: widescreen without bars of any kind) next time around. I still might re-upload the old videos in a corrected format. They just take eons to render.
Much love, .org. See you, folks.
- Jen
PS: my mother has been oddly quiet with her money-managing stupidity as of late, and so I have saved up a fair amount of money, which is why I don't feel too bad about the occasional splurge. I got a cake batter shake from Coldstone last night. FUCKIN' YUM.
JOURNAL: dj_ultima_the_great (Jen )
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