Plans For Identity Gaming 2022

 

It's mid-November at time of writing I've come to the grim realisation that I've barely posted anything here or on YouTube for MONTHS.  Here I've been posting once ever so often but YouTube has been particularly barren of content for maybe over a year.  So the purpose of this post is to layout a plan for the 3 main platforms that I use for this charity page and maybe then I'll stop procrastinating and not let things like this or the YouTube channel fall to the wayside.

The Blog

It's been sort of hard to give a shit about updating the blog over the last year or so.  My main method of content production for the charity effort has been through the Twitch stream and on there I'll discuss things that I'd usually write here but live and with a chat.  I don't need to write a piece about my thoughts on a game I've been playing here because while I'm chilling with chat I can just talk about it there and hear other peoples opinions on it in real time, which is much cooler.

But the blog is where this whole thing started so I don't just want to let it die, so starting from either this evening (I'm writing this around noon) or tomorrow evening I'm going to start using the blog space as a sort of "Game diary".  Just a place I come to every evening before bed to write out what I've been gaming on that day and how I felt about it or some quick thoughts about some piece of news I found or whatever.  A pure stream of conscienceness with no real rhyme or reason, just to give people a little insight into what I've been doing and what kind of game-related thoughts are flying around my dumb brain.

The YouTube Channel 

This is the one facet of Identity Gaming that's basically been dead for a long-ass time.  I used to upload off the cuff lets plays and I experimented with some kind of unscripted ramblings about various topics to not a lot of success.  I'm not usually one to care about subscriber counts and video view counts and I was happy to upload that kind of content to an minescule viewership just because it was fun to turn on my mic and ramble randomly about something while I played odd games that interested me.  Back then though, the YouTube channel was making a small amount of money.  I forget what the network was called but I was getting about $20-$40 a month which I would then funnel into the charity.  My low effort content was generating cash for the Alzheimer's Society and that felt good.

Then YouTube changed the rules to me needing 1000 subs, I lost monetization and, since the point of Identity Gaming is to raise money for a charity I let the YouTube side of things die almost completely, acting more of a sort of repository for when I did something cool on stream like a speedrun PB or my Cuphead 200% deathless run. 

But that's sort of defeatist isn't it?  I'm ignoring an entire avenue of potential charity raising just because I'm too lazy to put some effort into a video.  Well then I got to thinking, I hate the state of modern game reviews and I'm a big fan of YouTube made analytical content, so why don't I do that?  The YouTube channel going forward will be used for long form video essay type shit about games wot I love or games wot I hate.  I've already started working on recording and scripting for the first one and for the first time in a while I'm actually having fun producing for YouTube again.  Even if it gets 1 view, 1 like and my channel doesn't grow at all off the effort, it's better to at least try than to just let the channel die.

Twitch

I don't even need to say anything about Twitch really, do I?  Nothing is really going to change here.  More streams, more donation incentives, more prizes being added to the list via the streak system we have going.  Hopefully I can find a little bit more time to work on emotes, overlays and all sorts of other stuff to make the viewing experience overall better for you guys but generally speaking it's business as usual here.

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There's some other minor things like Twitter where I'm planning to stop doom-scrolling through bad takes written by IGN journos and being toxic and instead I can just fill my timeline with me just enjoying things that I'm playing or finding cool indie projects that I think are worth keeping and eye on.  There's also instagram which is about as equally dead as the YouTube at time of writing so maybe I can put more effort into posting some cool game stuff I find on my travels while drowning the image in hashtags.

I'm hoping we can meet some BIG goals next year both for the content and for the charity and I cannot thank you all enough for your continued support up to this point.

December Stream Clip Compilation

 

December Events and Incentive Changes

 

The year is coming to a close so its time to run down some events and updates for the blog and the stream

First thing I want to announce is that thanks to some extremely kind donations to the charity the Celeste 2  players 1 controller event has been met.  Things are still being planned but due to scheduling this is more than likely to become a bit that will be run at weekends once a month rather than just a one off marathon.  Once things have been finalized I'll be doing a separate post with more details.  

Next is the main December event which I am planning for the 19th which I'm dubbing The December Derust.  I've not really been doing any speedruns of any game for a long time so I thought in the coming year I'd like to get a bit more into it again.  So for the December long stream I will run through all of my current speed games AND one extra game which I've been meaning to learn for a while in order to set some new splits.  There's quite an array of games in my speed list so I'm sure there will be something for you to check out at some point no matter what

 I'm also changing the way the incentives page works from now on.  This is due to the fact that I'm funneling money from Twitch bits and subs into the charity so I'm now using an "incentive score" system.  This means that from now, there will only be 1 incentive at a time, with a fairly high "score" that you have to meet in order to make it happen.  To add points to the score you can do things like cheer bits in the stream, sub in the stream or donate directly to the charity, here's how it works.

100 Twitch bits = 1 point (I'll keep track, and add a point for every cumulative 100)

1 Twitch sub = 5 points (10 tier 2, 25 tier 3)

Just Giving Direct Donation = Donation value x2 (e.g donate $10 = 20 incentive score)

This way, people can still cheer and donate for things like wheel spins, game requests or any other stream specific things while at the same time helping to reach a goal for a fun event.  Incentives that currently have money put into them will be started at their current value, so the progress you already made won't go to waste!

I will also be adding some new prizes to the wheel of prizes in the coming few days so keep an eye on that page to see what's up for grabs

The 2020 Horror Game Gauntlet

 

For October this year I'm doing something a little insane.  I'm planning to try and finish 31 games before the end of October on Stream.  Last night we decided the play order so I'm making this post for people to be able to see what's done and what's coming.  The games are as follows 

1. Cry of Fear

2. Mad Father

3. Sanitarium 

4. White Day 

5. Distraint 

6. Illbleed 

7. Tamashii 

8. FNAF2

9. Resident Evil Gaiden

10. Clock Tower 3 

11. Man of Medan 

12. Metro Last Light 

13. SOMA

14. Days Gone 

15. Mizurna Falls 

16. Outlast 2 

17. Pathalogic HD 

18. Call of Cthulu 

19. Little Nightmares 

20. Dead Space 

21. Galerians 

22. Yuppy Psycho 

23. Inside 

24. Enemy Zero 

25. Slenderman: The Arrival 

26. System Shock 2 

27. Penumbra Overture 

28. Nosferatu 

29. Bendy and the Ink Machine 

30. Alien Isolation 

31. Detention 

Follow me on Twitch and lets get spooky! 

October Horror Challenge and 500 Follower Special!

 There are two big events coming to the stream in October and I'll be outlining them in this post

The first is the October Horror Game Challenge.  This involves me making a list of 31 horror games and then attempting to finish all of them before the end of the month.  I'm currently making the list and we will be deciding the play order for these games on September 27th 

The list for these games isn't complete at time of writing this article so feel free to DM me on twitter or twitch if you have suggestions for cool horror games.  If you suggest a game and I don't pick it then fear not, because you can always request it through the usual channels for the stream OR if it's interesting enough I might just decide to play it for myself during a chill stream.

The second big event is a 24 hour marathon of the above horror game challenge during October that will take place on the 17th (subject to change).  This is to celebrate the 500 follower mark for the Twitch channel!  This is a huge mile stone and I'm supremely grateful to all of the people who have watched/followed/supported the stream during all this time.  I feel super lucky to have a community of genuinely interesting and funny people to talk to while I stream and I hope you will all continue to support me and the charity while we creep towards the next milestone of 1000.

Book the dates in your calendar and come join me next month because things are about to get SPOOKAY 

Its Giveaway Time!

Are you ready for some giveaways?  I sure as hell am!

The grand prize that I am offering at this moment in time is the above Final Fantasy 14 wristwatch!  I won it using my raw skill and willpower at a claw machine a while ago and I screwed the box a little bit when I removed the plastic ring the claw grabbed on to but the watch itself is unused!

So how do you go about winning this highly coveted collectors item?  Through watching my stream at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis! That's how!

I have set up a prize wheel that I will spin under certain conditions and if you are lucky enough then you can have a chance at winning this illustrious watch.  To play, all you have to do is make a 2GPB donation to the charity directly or cheer for 200 bits during the stream and we will spin the wheel!  You can also sub to my channel for 2! Yes 2! spins of the wheel.  Money made from the twitch channel will be funneled into either the charity directly or to improving the content.

"But Tau, I can't donate or cheer OR sub! What can I do?!"

Well fear not young one because there is one other way to play!  By watching the channel when I am live you will accumulate Twitch Points.  For the low-low price of 5000 points you can spin the wheel for absolutely free!  So potentially, just by watching the stream, you can have a chance at winning the grand prize!

But this isn't the only thing available on the wheel! Here is a list of things you can land on when you spin

1) The Grand Prize (will change as people win)
2) A Free Game Request: You can make a request for the Tuesday segment FOR FREE!
3) A charity donation in your name: I will donate 2GPB to the charity of my own money, win yourself that sweet good deed for the day
4) A free channel point reward: Want a song request? want me to speak Japanese? curb my potty mouth? well you can if you land on that space (excludes donation and game request)
5) Absolutely nothing: Better luck next time!

Follow the stream to play and follow me on twitter @Taurinensis to know when I'm going live!

Good luck!

A Slight Change of Pace

This is just a short update post regarding a little switch up to the stream for the next few weeks.

As you may be aware, between donation requests, challenge runs and the retro wheel there is a lot going on with the stream right now.  In order to make a decent amount of progress all at once with these segments, the stream schedule will be changed so that I'll be dedicating an entire week to a specific segment.  So for a while, the schedule will look like this

April 28 to 30- Dragon Quest 5
May 5-7 Cuphead challenges
May 14-16- NES 100 game challenge

I am also hoping that the marathon this month can fall on the 18th.  I'm sort of hoping that maybe this whole Corona Virus situation will just magically be resolved by then and we can proceed with the second half of Megaman 2P1C but I have another idea ready for the more likely outcome of everything still being closed and locked down.  I will announce that a little closer to the time after seeing what happens.

Don't forget to follow at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Plans For 2020

Since my New Year Holiday at work ended and I'm back to the old grind stone I thought I'd take the time to let you fine people know some plans for Identity Gaming in 2020.

The Stream

Nothing huge really happening to the stream but  I'm hoping to do a marathon at least once a month this year.  What the marathon IS will be dependent on if anything gets donated for but if there are no completed goals I'll probably just do long versions of the current stream rotation.  In case you don't know what that is it's

Variety Stream
NES Challenge
Donation Requests
Speedruns/Variety
Challenges

Speaking of challenges hopefully we'll make short work of FF7 No Materia and I think before the years end I'd like to accomplish FFX Single Character, A souls game deathless and MAYBE depending on how well I can do the previous two, Undertale hitless? We'll see how that goes, maybe I'm being too ambitious there.

The Blog

The blogs been sort of sporadic and inactive since most of my efforts have gone into the stream.  I want to balance things a bit more and get a more consistent posting schedule.  Also I want to add more donation incentives and maybe start doing some actual giveaways to further incentivize charity donations.  I've been toying with the idea of moving from Blogger to a different service but this is a pretty good (and most importantly, free) way to write my silly articles.

YouTube Channel

Completely neglected for a long time now and I want to fix that.  I've got some ideas for play throughs and some other types of video but first I need to organize the channel and cut some of the crap that I uploaded in the sites very early days.  Don't forget if you donate for a playthrough and you'd rather have it for YT rather than done live, just specify that in the donation comment and I'll do it.

Expect maybe some video essay type stuff, some more Japanese arcade coverage and maybe even a hall of fame/shame type show if I ever get time to script anything.

Of course this is all just a rough idea of what I WANT to do in the coming year, I'm sure things will change or I'll have inspiration for more ideas and challenges in the near future.  Of course, on top of all this if we could smash those charity goals that would be even more awesome but just having your support for the above is more than enough <3

2020, lets go!

Stream Update! Challenges Approaching

Right now, the current stream schedule rotation is as follows

Variety Day
NES 100 Game Challenge
Donation Request Day
Shmups and Speedruns

and now we're adding one more, a Challenge Day.  Recently I've been watching a lot of videos on YouTube of people doing 0 hit runs of the Dark Souls games.  That means going through the entire game without taking a single hit from a single enemy.  These guys are so good at what they do I've even seed a guy who goes by the name SquillaKilla on YouTube and Twitch beat Dark Souls 1,2 and 3 back to back without taking a single hit.

I've decided it would be cool if I could push myself to do this kind of thing so as a result I'm starting a challenge day segment on my stream.  Of course, I'm not daft enough to think I could do something like DS No Hit right out of the gate, I haven't played any of the Souls games for about a year now so instead we'll be kicking off with Final Fantasy 7 No Materia to ease us in.

I've made a little list of things I want to try and do that includes things such as Dark Souls no hit runs and single character runs of certain RPGs but I'm also open to suggestions, so if you know challenging ways in which to play a certain game, write a comment or hit me up on twitter and I may add your suggestions to the list.  There are some INSANE challenges that I've been made aware of such as Final Fantasy 7 solo character initial equipment which I will be incorporating as donation incentives so make sure you throw some money at the charity if you really want to make me suffer.

Don't forget to follow on Twitch so you don't miss anything
www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Undertale Marathon Incoming

This will be a nice short post today because I'm basically just announcing another event!

On September 15th me and my good friend Pithoui will be streaming an Undertale marathon.  This however will not be a 24 hour marathon like usual, instead we will be playing the games 3 endings (Neutral, Genocide, Pacifist) back to back and we won't be stopping until they are done.

That's all there is to it, so save the date and come join us for a bad time!

A Brand New Donation Tracker!

At the end of last month BTMyDonate closed it doors and stopped accepting charity donations.  It's a shame but we had a good run with them and we raised a good bit of money with them as the tracker.  However I needed a new tracker and it has now been set up!  At time of writing the links on the blog and on the Twitch page have been updated but I still need to go through my YouTube channel and update the links on all my videos, which may take a hot minute to say the least.

If you've been here since the start you'll know that I actually started with Just Giving and then moved over to BTMyDonate after I heard that JG were skimming 10% of donations off the top in order to keep their site running.  I'm not throwing any shade at them for doing that, they need money to keep their shit going and they provide a good service but it didn't sit right with me.  If you donated 10 pounds to the Alzheimer's Society, I wanted you to be sure that 10 pounds was going to it.

There are 3 main reasons I've picked just giving and they are as follows

1) On the official website for the Alzheimer's Society they suggest to use Just Giving if you are doing fundraising for them.

2) Just Giving allows donations to be made via PayPal.  I've had a number of people who I don't know ask to make a donation but couldn't because they didn't have or couldn't use a credit card.  Now that PayPal is an option, hopefully this opens the gates for more potential donors.

3) Just Giving now ask you if you want to give an additional sum of money to support them AS WELL AS the charity.  For example if you donate 10 bucks, they will ask you if you mind putting an extra 1 buck on the top of that which will help run their service.  There is also no complaints if you opt to send 0 to them and only give to the charity itself.

So with this switch over hopefully we'll see a lot more money going into the charity.  Just a reminder to, if you donate through just giving I DO NOT SEE A SINGLE PENNY OF YOUR MONEY, it will all go directly to the charity.  It won't come anywhere near me.  You can still donate to me via Twitch bits, subs or directly via my personal PayPal, which I will use to improve content which will hopefully have the knock on effect of getting even MORE donators but if you have to make a choice please pick the charity EVERY TIME.  I'm improving this place slowly by myself anyway, I don't really need it.

Thank you for continued support and happy donating!

Megaman Marathon Roundup

So I took my time to recover and now I'm back in business with our usual stuff.  I've noticed actually that thanks to things being a little hectic recently there's huge gaps between me posting any kind of content so hopefully, in the second half of the year, I'll be a bit more consistent.  

Anyway, the 24 hour Megaman Mega-Marathon was completed.  I haven't added up all the donations properly (I just have them listed individually, don't worry) and I suck at math but I'm pretty sure around 400 GPB, including the initial donation incentive, was raised over the course of the marathon.  As always, BIG thanks to anyone who donated to the cause, it's always nice to see the support for me and the charity that these marathons tend to generate.  

The games that were finished during the marathon were classic 1-4 and Megaman X 1-4.  I had memories of the X games being a lot easier but they absolutely kicked my ass sideways and took me way longer to finish that I imagined.  X4 especially has a particularly horrible final boss fight but I'm going to make my excuses and say that it was fatigue from playing for so long and not just that I'm shit (spoilers: I'm shit).

I do have a little confession though for anyone who missed the marathon live which is I didn't actually finish and entire 24 hours.  It was only off by about an hour and a half but I still feel pretty bad.  By the end of the marathon I had a killer headache and I felt really quite ill, I think brought on by a combination of an extremely busy work event that involved 3 days of straight drinking and Nagoya now having the muggiest, most horrible humid weather ever.  

This however is not an excuse, so to make up for the lost time I will be adding a "Megaman day" to the stream rotation.  This will involve playing every single Megaman game that exists that I didn't play during the marathon, so this will be a feature that will stick around for a while.  Some people donated for me to play Megaman Battle Network over my choice of Megaman Command Mission for the RPG in the marathons final few hours so that will be the first game to get streamed and then we'll go from there.

There's another event in the works so stay tuned for more extended gaming goodness in the near future! 

Megman Mega-Marathon Incoming

This will be a short announcement post just to let you guys know about another donation incentive that got met!

The Megaman marathon was finally met last Friday and I know I'm a little late to update it but I'm still working out possible dates to have the marathon on.  Basically I'm going to play through as many Megaman games as I can for 24 hours.  I imagine I'd start with MM Classic and then move into the X Games and probably end with something like Command Mission as I start to get sleepy near the end but we'll see how it goes.  

Watch this space for dates and further information!  

New Stream Schedule

Right, bit of a short post this time round but I'm changing up my stream schedule a little bit.

As of today, the only days for a guaranteed stream will be Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  There MIGHT be streams on the other days of the week but don't expect them to happen too often.

There's a number of reasons for this.  First and most importantly when it comes to the site is that I feel like the blog and the YouTube channel have kind of been sidelined in favor of me streaming almost every day.  It would be nice to take some pressure off myself (purely self inflicted pressure) and have time to write more posts here or actually create some content for the YouTube channel that aren't just off the cuff game play commentaries.

The other reasons are more personal but include stuff like wanting to work on other personal projects, spending time with my family and trying to make a schedule in such a way that accounts for doing bullshit overtime at work.

The rotation of whatever day, NES Wheel, donation games and speedruns will not change, just the frequency at which these are happening.  Hopefully I'll have some time to make more improvements to the stream as well.  I got a new computer that's absolutely bestial and I'm clearly not using it to its full potential.

So again, thanks for the support, hope you keep watching and supporting the rest of the content, hopefully I'll have some exciting things to put out soon!

2019 Vlog March 17th

Gun Nac 1cc [Stream Highlight]

New Megaman 4 PB (44:53) [Twitch Link]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/295441429

I don't know how to embed video lol

2P1C Video Footage

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/256470707

I don't know how to embed the highlight from Twitch onto the blog page, so here is a link.

2P1C Roundup

Well it took a LONG ass time to get done due to massive scheduling issues but 2P1C has finally been completed! 

First of all, big thanks to my friend and local bartender HoodedPithoui for being my other half for the event and letting me use his bar to host it in.  Also big thanks to everyone who watched and donated before, during and after the event, you guys are amazing. 

During the event we played through Metal Slug X, Megaman 4 and Streets of Rage 2 and surprisingly it was actually quite easy.  Metal Slug posed the most problems in terms of death count but you just spawn where you die so we purposefully picked that game as a sort of warm up.  Megaman 4 was the game I had the most worries about since there's a lot of precision jumping and tough boss fights but I speedrun that game and Pithoui is pretty well versed in it so despite my concerns we absolutely smashed it.  The game that Pithoui was worried about was Streets of Rage 2 since a game over in that game actually means start again from stage 1.  We emulated so that we could use Save States as a sort of charity incentive (500yen each to save, 100 to load) and despite us making a couple of states at various points, we actually beat the game on a single continue.

As a bonus we played Super Mario World too which was a REAL challenge.  Being able to sync up for things like flying proved to be difficult and at that point in the evening we'd had a couple of drinks so to top it all off we (or at least I) wasn't as alert as usual.

Still, we finished the main event in 4 and a half hours which was really cool and it was a great atmosphere both in the bar and on the Twitch chat.  There will be a VOD of the whole event being uploaded to YouTube at some point, I'll get round to doing that ASAP so watch the blog page if you're interested in seeing our struggle

Penance Battle

Well here it is finally, the stream highlight of the Penance video!

The fight itself isn't actually all that hard but it's incredibly grindy and I made life harder for myself by giving up the grind halfway through the process.

The idea is that you're supposed to have 99,999HP and when you have HP like that, Auto-Regen will deal with any damage you take from his attacks.  However I got sick of grinding and went in there with like 25,000ish health which made things a little difficult.  But he went down in the end so it's all good!  Don't forget to check out the stream for the X-2 playthrough!