Marathon Mayhem!

So as you may have noticed, the donation page is getting near its goal so in an attempt to get people to throw a few more pounds to the charity, I've added a few new marathon donation incentives. 

First, a complete list of donation incentives can be found here http://www.identitygaming.blogspot.jp/p/blog-page_4.html

The new donation incentives can be found at the bottom.  A whole bunch of retro gaming themed 24 hour marathons where I grab a system and playing nothing but that for a whole day.  The games haven't been decided so I'll be asking everyone for suggestions if and when they get met, donators will get more of a say in what games are picked so donate for those if you want to see some old school goodness.

Aside from the new incentives, don't forget all the old ones too!  Incentives for small series marathons of things like Resident Evil and Donkey Kong Country or longer series marathons of things like Megaman.  Also some crazy stuff like Guy game marathons and 2 Players 1 Controller with my buddy as well as other miscellaneous things!

If you wish to donate for any of these incentives hit that donate button on the right hand side of the page, donate a value and then leave the incentive you want your donation to go towards in the comment.  You do NOT need to donate the entire value of the incentive alone, so let's say an incentive is £50 you can have 5 people donate £10 for it to happen so even if you can only donate a little to the Alzheimer's Society then you can still get something for your money.

Finally, just to clarify, I don't see a penny of any money donated.  BTMyDonate is a UK service for charities and people doing fund raising to act as a tracker so people can make comments to their friends or people they know trying to do a project for a good cause.  I have never and will never ask for people to donate directly to my bank account, if you have enough money to do that then I'd rather it go to a good cause.

Thanks for the continued support!  Let's raise some dosh for Alzheimer's!!

New Prizes!

 OK I have some some SICK new prizes available for you to donate for provide by my good buddy.  Both prizes are hand painted pictures of awesome video game shit.  The first is the painting you see in the heading image.  In case anyone isn't familiar with what they are they are looking at, it's the Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2.

This painting is awesome so there's a minimum donation of £5 but I feel that's a small price to pay for the quality of this piece of art.

The next prize is this cool Final Fantasy 7 picture

As cool as it is, it's not quite Pyramid Head levels of awesome and the artist agrees that it's not quite on the same level so this one has no minimum donation..

So, all the prizes and how to be eligible to win them are displayed on the blogs prizes page!

http://www.identitygaming.blogspot.jp/p/prize-raffles.html

Just donate to the Alzheimer's Society with the comment "prize 1" for the Pyramid Head and "Prize 2" for the Final Fantasy 7 painting!

Here's the link for the donations if you need it, but it's always on the right hand side

https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/identitygaming2

Good luck!

Steam Region Locked Gifts?!!

So once again Steam manages to piss me off.  Now I know that this thing I'm about to get mad about probably has some kind of economic/business reason that I'm just too stupid to understand but that doesn't stop it from pissing me off any less!

So a few days ago I was streaming Silent Hill and one of my Stream regulars said that they wanted to donate to the charity.  However, he couldn't donate because BTMyDonate wouldn't take his card and he lives in Russia so getting money into the charity was proving to be quite a task for him.  So then he comes up with a great idea of gifting me a game from Steam and I put the money into the charity from my account equal to the value of the game.

So he gifts me the game on Steam and there's this big stupid fucking message on it says "This game can only be played in <bunch of countries in and around Russia>"  It then goes on to say that even if I accept the gift, I won't be able to play it unless I'm in one of the listed countries and if I try to get around this block with a VPN or some such crap then getting a ban from Steam would be quite possible.

FUCKING. BULLSHIT.

What the fuck is the goddamn problem?  All I'm downloading is the data for the game, why does Steam have to limit access to a title based on your fucking country?!  This is the beauty of the internet, that it doesn't matter where I am in the world, I can download a file or share a file with someone else.  If I have photos on Facebook I want to show my friends, then they can see them, you don't see social media platforms going "NOPE! YOUR FRIEND LIVES IN JAPAN SO YOU CAN'T SEE THAT SHIT!"

Why is there any region locking on PC games AT ALL?!  Or any games at all in this day and age for that matter....

So the next day he comes in the stream and he's like "Yo! Why does my donation say £19?!" at which point I start to fucking panic because I thought I undercut the guy.  But no, turns out I went WAYYYY over what he paid.  So for me the game costs £19 but for him it's 450 rubles which is equal to £4.50.

OH, SO THERE IT FUCKING IS!  I guess the reason they region lock the gifts is so that people with Russian buddies like me can't just get round all the jacked up prices and get easy cheap shit, right?  Well that's still bullshit because why does it cost so much for me and so little for him?!  Why not bring the price down for us, or up for him?  Like is 450 rubles a ton of money or something?  I mean the way he was talking about it it's not that much so what the fuck?!

But whatever, let's just say I don't understand, but the way he got the game to me in the end was through Good Old Games

Now the game is a bit less there, it's more like £16 but for him it's STILL £4 fucking 50p.  But you know what? I can't even be mad at this change in price because GoG doesn't fucking region lock their gifts.  He gifted me the game and it went into my account just fine with no problems and then I used the Steam price listing for his donation.

All in all I'm not really that angry because I got a game, he payed next to nothing for it and £19 went to the Alzheimer's Society but I'm hoping that someone out there can explain this shit to me because right now it seems like top grade, pure gold bullshit.

Cooking With Tau Episode 1: Chips (Fries)

You wanna learn how to make healthy chips to go with your gaming sessions?!  Well watch the above video and find out!

The donation for the next episode will be made available on the side bar so get your donations in for the next recipe!

Tau Plays Discworld Part 1

A new Playthrough donated for by you guys!  Big shout outs to Monty for the £50 donation to make this happen!

Spicy Silent Hill

The footage for the hot pepper donation incentive!  Enjoy!

'Tis the season to meet charity goals!

Merry Christmas one and all!

What an appropriate time for this to happen!  The first £1000 goal for identity gaming has been met!  Granted the final donation was made from my Daikatana fail donation except if someone hadn't donated for that marathon in the first place, we'd still be down £25 right now, so for the first time me sucking at something has actually worked out better.

I just want to take a moment to thank EVERYBODY who has donated so far.  If you were just enjoying the content or donated during a marathon, every penny counts and it means a great deal to me so once again thank you so much for all the donations and support for the blog.

So what happens now? Now that £1000 has been raised we just stop there? WRONG!  All it means is that the value has been doubled!  That's right, this time round we're shooting for £2000, so that means more content, more marathons, more streaming and hopefully more donations!

The link for the new donation page can be found here
https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/identitygaming2

So please direct all your future donations to that page!

Now I have to go cook all day and celebrate Christmas and stuff so once again, thank you everyone for all the support and I hope you keep on supporting me.  Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

A Big Donation Push

Begging for donations is not something I like to do.  This blog is about video games mainly and sometimes it's about stuff I do in Japan.  Between all the fun time gaming goodness and ranting about industry bullshit, it's very easy to forget what the goal of this blog was in the first place even if it is written on the side bar.

That's right, just over a year ago I think I started this blog with the goal of raising money for the Alzheimer's Society, donated by people who enjoy the content and want to raise money for a good cause. 

Right now, through the posts, YouTube content and Stream effort, the donations have reached a pretty staggering £726 ($1175) but a quick look at the donation page says that the goal is £1000.  We're so close to that first (yes, first) £1000 goal that I can smell the Alzheimer's being cured from all the way in my apartment in Japan.

So yeah, right now, I'm begging for donations.   On my knees begging you to donate even a little something to the Alzheimer's Society and hopefully we can meet that goal before the end of December!

Even though I'm begging I'm not expect to get donations for nothing.  If you look a little to the right hand side of the blog, then you may see a new text box that reads "Donation Incentives".  Most of these pertain to the stream so if you want to know when I'm streaming I suggest following me on Twitter @Taurinensis

However, all charity money is good charity money, so if you would like to see something streamed or something done for the YouTube channel or even just something you want me to write about feel free to request it!  Just type out your request with your donation, or send me an email with the name you used to donate with with your request.  Generally speaking, a donation of £10 will get me to play or stream most things as long as they aren't god awful sacks of crap.  If I feel your donation is too small for something then it won't be ignored, it'll become a donation incentive and then you can convince all your friends to make up the extra! 

But I'm a nice guy for the most part, I took on a Daikatana run for £10, so yeah.

So please, share this link with any gaming friends you have, or even anyone who just wants to help get rid of Alzheimer's Disease.  Let's hit that goal and move on to bigger, badder and better goals!

24 Hour Stream Marathon Results!

Well goddamn I actually pulled it off thanks to the support of all my friends and family that watched the stream and kept me from getting bored with Final Fantasy 2/3 got to its most grindy.  After that I thought I'd share some results.

In terms of game progress, Final Fantasy 2 was completed and I made quite a bit of headway into a fan translated version of the Famicom version of Final Fantasy 3.  Also, the donation incentive for me to sing 1000 words was met by a single person and the Cait Sith being killed may as well have been met by many others.

Speaking of donations, last time I checked my donation page, people from that marathon had donated about £183 to the Alzheimers Soceity.  This is absolutely amazing for a first time marathon and I can't thank all the donators and supports enough and I can only hope that you'll keep supporting Identity Gaming and my silly marathon ideas.

Despite that thing making me pretty tired by the end, I do intend to do another one, but next time it'll be for Final Fantasy 7.  When I start playing that game, there will be a 24 hour Stream and we'll see if we can get through the main plot in a single session, so keep an eye out for that.

Finally, there are a couple of highlight videos that me and a buddy are working on getting on the YouTube channel, so if you missed the extremely stupid accidental warp or the dungeon clutch of HOBoi, then you'll have a chance to see them soon I hope.

Once again thanks, and keep watching!

Charity Donations Hit £200!

So thanks to you fine people, £200 has been raised for the Alzheimer's Society!  That's double what it was last time I posted a little thank you message to the donators!

I'll post another one once it doubles again, so keep them rolling in.  A donation of any value makes me really happy so even if it's only something small like £1, do it anyway because if everyone gave just £1 we'd probably be even nearer our first target.

It's a shame I don't really have anything I can do right now to incentivise donations, but if you want to see a specific Youtube playthrough, or you want a certain game on the stream, send in a donation and make your request in the comment, I'll do my best to get it done.

Don't forget the link to donate! www.justgiving.com/identitygaming

Thanks again! 

A little reminder

So it's Friday night, I've come home late and had to walk through the rain, I'm going to chill out and put more Panzer Dragoon together to be uploaded tomorrow hopefully, in the mean time I thought I'd put up a little reminded about why I'm really doing this blog.

As much as I enjoy writing about video games, the inspiration to do this whole thing came from me wanting to raise money for the Alzheimer's Society, so I'm just putting it out there that if you are enjoying the stuff that gets posted here, please please please donate something, anything, it would mean a lot to me.

 Of course, I'm not going to be all bitter if you don't but it doesn't hurt to ask.  I won't beg for donations very often but with all the super fun video game stuff being written and posted, it's easy to forget about that little link on the side.

If you would like to donate something, I'll put the link in this post, but it will ALWAYS be on that side bar if your feeling generous.

Thanks very much guys!

www.justgiving.com/identitygaming

Making Progress

Well I checked the donation page when I woke up today to realise, we have hit £100!  Sure, it's only 10% of my target and it doesn't sound like a lot in the long run, but considering I'm just a two-bit blog and I don't really have a huge readership, I think £100 is pretty good!

Of course though, it's not me who's been donating anything, so I'd like to thank everyone who has donated so far, I can't thank you enough.

We still have a long way to go though, so if you are enjoying the content on this blog, please throw a little money to the Alzheimer's society.  It doesn't matter how big or small, let's just try to eradicate this horrible disease