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.

---

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 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

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!

Stream Update and May Event!

This is just a small update post to inform the good people about some updates to the Twitch channel!

One thing I have ignored completely since they launched are Twitch Channel Points.  If you aren't familiar they are points that accumulate while you watch a given channel.  The idea is that as you build them up you can use them to claim various rewards but apart from the default rewards that no one uses I had not set any up.

Well that's all changed now and you can use your channel points to do various things within the channel.  You can check them out yourself since it's all sort of standard stuff but the one I want to make a big deal of is the Points for Alzheimer's reward.  For 50,000 channel points I will drop what I'm doing an make a 2 Pound donation of my own money to the Alzheimer's Society right then and there.  The reason I've implemented this is so that people who might be unable to donate with their own cash can still find a way to support the charity directly with their viewership.  Of course, if you want to spend the points on the other options that's also cool but the option is now available!

Also, the mini-marathon for May will live on the 23rd/24th!  It'll be 2 8 hour streams of each segment.  Probably 4 hours each of requests and Cuphead on Saturday and 4 hours each of variety and NES challenge on Sunday!  If I can do it within the week leading up, I'll also offer some prizes but there's a chance I might not have time.  I am planning to do more consistent givaways though so watch this space for prizes in the near future.

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

Changing The Marathon System

I know I've announced it on Twitter and Facebook but I'm fairly certain I haven't made an official post about it on here.  On October 5th and 6th there will be a "24 hour" marathon of assorted PS1 games.  So look forward to that

But the main point of this post isn't to just to announce an upcoming stream event but to tell you all about how I'm modifying the system for these long 24 hour marathons.  I have a problem with these things where not only does it completely screw with my sleep schedule and day for a few days after they are finished but I find it incredibly hard to be stay entertaining for that entire period.

The Megaman marathon was the worst example of this.  Not only did I get tired and almost completely stopped commentating my progress through the games but I died about 100 times on a boss that should have, at most, maybe taken about 5 goes.

To avoid this the PS1 marathon and every marathon after this will be broken up into 2 big chunks over the weekend.  There will be 24 hours played within the weekend period but just not all at once.  This means that I can focus better and give a bit of a better performance.  Not only that but it means that with a bit of luck, we might actually get MORE than 24 hours out of each marathon.  For example if I do 12 hours on Saturday, but then chat is popping off and the game is really fun at the 12 hour mark on the Sunday then I'll just keep going, which means your charity donations are going to go just that little bit further.

Keep an eye on this space, I'll be posting some additional details about the PS1 marathon next week some 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!

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!

Closing Down The Facebook Page

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

Right now Identity Gaming has a number of social media accounts tied to it.  Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and as one guy doing this by myself that's a lot to manage.  So, I've made the decision to close down the Identity Gaming Facebook page.

There are two reasons for this decision

1) The quality of the page itself is garbage.  I've put basically no effort into the Facebook side of this website, I just sort of opened it at the start because I felt that I had to for some reason.  So if I'm not using it, there isn't really any point of it existing.

2) Facebook is cancer.  I follow a number of gaming groups on Facebook to browse through while I'm bored in the bathroom or on a train but almost every single Facebook gaming group is an absolute shit show filled with the absolute worst people.  Have you ever seen someone post a speedrun on a Facebook and then looked at the comments section?  The absolute biggest sacks of shit seem to frequent these pages and on the off chance that IG does grow bigger and get a bigger following, I do not want your average Facebook ruining my day.

For friends of mine who may be reading this, this does not mean I'm closing my personal account, I'm still going to pester you all with my links whenever I put out something new.  It also doesn't mean that Identity Gaming is in any danger of closing down either.  I'm just chopping off the worst part of it

The Vlog.....As a blog

I've hit another one of those points in my life where I've let the stream of content drop because of real life things.  I've been trying to do Sunday vlogs but last week and today I'm just far to exhausted to get in front of the camera and try and talk about bullshit so instead of doing nothing I'm just delivering the weekly vlog as a written post.

In terms of what I've been playing it's basically my stream rotation and a little bit of Apex Legends.  I've noticed that in Apex, when playing with with the rare Japanese players that actually have a mic, the idea of a not Japanese person playing on what they think is the "Japanese server" just blows their damn minds.  Every game I've had starts the exact same way with "oh my god a foreigner" followed by "Isn't this the Japanese server?"  They aren't being mean though so it's not exactly a problem.

So last week the reason I didn't make a vlog is because I spent a weekend in Osaka and after all that walking around I barely had the energy to move, let alone record a video.  I was mainly there to visit my family who are doing some kind of cruise around Asia but we spent an extra day there to see some other friends and explore.  While I was exploring I came across a surprising number of little retro game arcades.  I put the pictures on Twitter (@Taurinensis) so go check them out there.  The one thing I quite like about Osaka is that everything is quite close together.  I can walk between retro arcades and they also aren't too far away from the main shopping areas so my wife can go off and do her thing while I'm getting a session in.  Nagoya has some cool retro game places too but they are in the middle of fucking NOWHERE.  I'd have to get a train and trek to one or rent a car or something which is WAY more effort than I really want to put in.

I also just had to take a trip to Silver Ball Planet, a really nice Pinball hall found in Osaka's "Ame-Mura" or America Town.  I've actually done a blog post on it previously so check it out

https://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2016/03/silver-ball-planet-osaka.html 

Finally, I've added Persona 5 Dancing Star Night to my collection and I also received Silent Hill: Book of Memories (yaaaay.....) free off PSN.  I'm also finally getting a new computer soon that isn't a complete toaster that struggles to run Chips Challenge so not only does this mean I'll be able to PC game properly once more, but I'll also be able to improve the content of the blog, YouTube channel and even the stream!

I'll try to stop being a bitch and keep the content coming a lot more consistently once more!  Thanks for the continued support!

The End of BT MyDonate

Today is a sad day indeed.  This morning I woke up and check my email and I find a message from BTMyDonate.  Usually this is a happy occasion because it means someone has donated to the charity but this time it was a message telling me that the BTMyDonate service was shutting down at the end of the June

Why is this such a big deal? you might ask.  Well, when the site first started I used a site called JustGiving and everything was fine until I discovered that JustGiving were scalping 10% of donations for their own coffers.  Now I don't hate or fault JustGiving for doing this, they do good things for the various charities and they have to keep their shit running somehow but personally, if someone donated £10 to the charity for a game or towards an incentive, I want that person to know that the ENTIRE £10 went to the Alzheimer's Society and not to me or to anyone else.

Now you can donate until the end of the June, so if you do stumble upon this page or read this article, why not hit that donation button in the top right of the blog page and maybe we could hit a goal on MyDonate page and start a new goal on whatever service I use next!

And yes, of course, just because BT MyDonate is going down doesn't mean that the charity effort dies with it.  I am currently in the process of scoping out new donation services to use in its place.  I'm actually looking for one that not only doesn't take a little money off the top, but also has the ability to donate using PayPal, since that's one thing that people have requested in the stream.  I've even considered talking to the charity directly to see if I can set up a kind of tracker with them but I don't know if I'll get anywhere with that. 

Once again, thanks for the continued support of me and the Alzheimer's Society, it really does mean a lot!  Don't forget to donate and if you can't do that, don't worry, just share some of the content with your friends because more readers/watchers means more potential donations to a good cause!

Identity Gaming 2019

Well holy shit it's already nearly the end of 2018.  It's been a bit of a shit year for the Identity Gaming blog and YouTube channel mainly due to a lot of personal shit happening involving me changing jobs twice but at least the Twitch stream is still going strong (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis, follow plz)

Anyway instead of dwelling on that negative nonsense let's just look forward to the coming year.  Here is some content that you can expect  to see throughout 2019.

More YouTube Stuff

The YouTube side of things has been a bit neglected so I'm going to put a bit more effort into that side of things.  I've actually had a Shovel Knight playthrough in the can for MONTHS but put off uploading it so I could do that stupid Lone Survivor playthrough in October.

Speaking of that, the 3 episodes of Lone Survivor have been deleted from the channel.  I wasn't happy with them and the glitched difficulty really fucked me off and made me not want to play it.  One day I'll do it again but for now I'm just fucking it off and focusing on other things. 

Still though, I have many a game that I can make a play through for that isn't a glitchy piece of shit AND there are plans for all sorts of fancy new series to upload.  I do want to expand on some of my previous, untouched things such as the thing where I talked about Japan exclusive arcade games or my series highlighting free shit for you to enjoy.  I'm also going to start a hall of fame/hall of shame so when people ask me questions like "Hey what's your favorite game" or "what do you think of X" I can just link them a video instead of having to tell people for the 95 billionth time that my favorite game is Panzer Dragoon Sa......I mean Bad Rats.

I'm also going to try my hand at some semi serious vlogging as I try to document my entire year in a weekly video that I'll upload every Sunday.  I'll talk about shit I'm playing, give site updates if there are any and if I come across and video game news that I feel is worth touching on I'll comment on that too.  I'm doing this 50% because I'm a self important little prick that craves that e-attention and 50% because when I think back to 2018 I can't seem to remember anything that I played other than Dragon Quest 11.  That either means that 2018 was a shit year for games (not true) or I'm just a forgetful idiot (more than likely true) so please join me through my 2019 journey. 

The Wheel of NES

I fucking love Wheel Decide, it's like my favorite website.  My other favorite thing ever is to set myself stupid challenges that I'll probably never finish but I like to think that maybe one day I won't be such a quitter so here I go doing something publicly so maybe the potential jeering and disrespect at my failure will make me not just give up as soon as I get bored.

So I've made a wheel on Wheel Decide of 100 NES games.  I'm going to play them all on stream (link above, don't forget to follow) and see how long it takes me to finish all of them.  I built the list by googling "best 100 NES games", using most of those and then taking some titles from the Angry Video Game Nerd playlist and throwing them in there so that maybe I can entertain some of you with my suffering.  Although Silver Surfer is in there and despite what that guy said about it, that game is awesome and if you think it's bad then you're just wrong. 

The Year Of Spookyness

So my favorite holiday season is Halloween.  I'm in love the the genre of horror as a whole and every year I plan all these great things to do for IG for Halloween and then I get busy or I go to Halloween parties and get drunk and subsequently hungover and none of this stuff ever happens.  So because I'm absolutely sick of that shit I'm just dedicating the entirety of 2019 to the horror genre. 

Expect to see a lot of horror related content in the coming 12 months be it about books, movies, games, whatever, if it's horror, I'm blogging about it.

Finally, despite all these cool plans for streams, videos, posts etc. don't forget that I'm still doing this all for charity so if you enjoy the content please throw a donation or two to the Alzheimer's Society charity.  It would be awesome if we could hit the current goal this year and maybe get a nice ways into the next one.  I'm planning to overhaul the incentives page so sit tight and some cool things might happen with that soon too.

Happy new year!

Happy New Year! An Update

Well at time of writing it's New Years Eve but I'm going to be out partying when it actually ticks over so I'm making the post now.

First I want to extend all the usual thanks for the continued support and even bigger thanks to everyone who donated over the course of 2017.  Of course, going into 2018 I hope we can raise even more money for the charity and improve the site considerably.

As for blog news going into the year we have the 2players 1controller mini marathon coming up on the 7th of January and hopefully I'll be able to find time in February for the Crash series marathon.  I'm actually hoping to do a marathon at least once a month from January, if not 24 hour some kind of 12 hour general gaming stream where maybe people can donate for what's played.

Also the Advance Wars playthrough will be continued at some point but the guy I'm recording it with got married and moved house so he's been busy as fuck.  Anyway we're hoping to jump back into the battlefield sometime early January.  I of course have a number of playthroughs planned for my solo efforts AND there will be a streamed playthrough of Haunting Grounds (Demento) which was donated for by a friend of mine during my birthday.

So watch this space and keep supporting the site and the Alzheimer's Society!

YouTube Month Is Coming

Well this is going to be a very short post just to let you all know that next month (August) will be YouTube month! 

Basically this means that every day in August I'll be posting some kind of video every day so if you haven't already subscribed then make sure you do to catch it all!

Just a fair warning though, I am going to Rome for a few days and I'm hoping to line up content and post it from the Hotel Wifi when I'm there but I don't know how reliable that will end up being so if there is a few days with no content I'll try to make up for it!

If there's any playthroughs you'd like to see done then also don't forget that you can donate for them, just leave the game title in your comment and I'll do my best to get a series done for it!

Affilates and Ad Revenue

So if you've been looking at the YouTube content, reading this blog or as of yesterday, watching the Twitch stream, you may have noticed that a lot of it is registered under various affiliate programs and has adverts and stuff on them.  Considering that this is first and foremost a charity site, I can see why some people might raise an eyebrow at the idea of me putting ads on things and making some money.

Well initially with the blog page and YouTube the logic was that these will generate some revenue without actually costing the viewer anything.  You click an article or watch a YouTube video and the less than a cent value of what it's worth just gets shoved into some account somewhere that will build up over time.  I then thought that I'd use that passive money to do things like upgrade the website, make the quality of the stream better, do more events, offer more charity raffle prizes to the readers/viewers etc etc.

However the reason I'm doing this post is because last night I found out I was eligible for the Twitch version of all this, thinking it would be a similar deal, only to find out that it works via something that's known as "Twitch bits".  This involves buying "bits" from twitch and then using those bits to "cheer" for a streamer when you are in their chat and I think 1 bit is equal to one cent and once you accrue $100 you can pay out to your bank or PayPal or whatever.

Let me make something very clear.  When I set up this website I set it up with the intention of raising money for the Alzheimer's Society and of course that is still the main goal.  My problem with the Twitch affiliate service is that it's not passive like a YouTube ad and incurs a cost to you, the viewer.  So what I want to stress is that if you have a choice between buying twitch bits or throwing a few dollars/pounds into the charity, please please PLEASE for the love of everything holy pick the charity.

As far as improving the site/stream and stuff like that is concerned, I will be doing that ANYWAY from my job money, ad revenue or none.  Please do NOT spend any of your own money to support me directly fucking EVER.  Always prioritize the charity, no matter what.  Do however keep supporting the various content and spreading the word so that there can maybe be more people who would be up for donating to the society.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support

What Happened To Silent Hill?

If you were following the stream schedule you may have noticed that April was supposed to be the month where I was doing Silent Hill 2 "speed" runs.  If you were following the stream then you may have been disappointed because not a lot of Silent Hill 2 actually happened in the end.

Well there was a number of reasons for this.  First, I'm playing on original hardware and my knowledge of doing this is basically zero so setting it up again after months of not doing it turned out to be a lot harder than I expected.  Plus April was a pretty crazy month with Hanami (drinking in a park while looking at Sakura trees), work stress just generally tiring me out and an old friend coming to visit which has been the focus of my last few weekends. 

However these are just excuses and I feel bad about not delivering on a decent amount of SH2 attempts so instead of boring you with details, I'll just make up for it.  May was supposed to be a month of Ys1 however I know not many people know what the game is and a lot of people kind of don't like watching it.  I'm not going to cancel Ys month on the stream but I will be trying to alternate between a Ys run and an SH2 run each evening to make up for the lack of SH2 in April.

The remainder of April will be spent hammering out Final Fantasy 9 because I've been playing that shit for ages and I'm only on Disc 3.  So the next few days will be focused on that and then it'll be back to nightly runs!

Of course, I won't be able to stream every day of the month but I'll try my very best to cram in as much as I possibly can.  If I'm not streaming and you want to know why, Twitter is a good place to find out how I'm wasting my time doing things that are not streaming, so follow there for updates (@Taurinensis)

Thanks for the understanding and continued support!

Don't Worry I'm Not Dead

You may have noticed recently that written posts have become a little few and far between.  Considering that written content used to come daily I thought I should address why things have sort of ground to a halt.

Work is the biggest offender since getting home at 8:30-9pm  and then having to do a bunch of shit makes finding time to write posts hard but also I'm a lazy piece of shit who tends to collapse into bed for a pre stream nap.  Going is also a big thing where I'll intend to go and have a few drinks with a buddy come home write and then maybe stream a little and then what happens is I stay out until 5am and then I'm just flat out too tired the next day because of my own stupidity.

Still, not all content because of bullshit and my social life has halted, if you're not following the stream then you should go and do that because I'm trying to stream daily during the week.  As I type this post multiple parts of the Gauntlet playthough are being processed so they can be uploaded in the coming week and I'm hopefully going to have time to backlog a bunch of posts to upload in the next few days.

There's also a new YouTube feature that I'm working on so hopefully that'll see the light of day some time soon and of course there's always the stream which I'm trying to do as often as possible so be sure to follow there for the most stuff.

As always thanks for the continued support and hopefully things will be a little more frequent from now