Blog of the Green Mage

     So, yeah... finally got my massive update video up after, what... about a month and a half hiatus?  Sorry for the long and unforeseen delay; I really did expect to get back to making videos when I came back from my vacation over in LA (where I will note that I was only one of maybe three people in the entire state who was wearing a jacket), but this term of college kind of crept up on me and then bashed me over the head with piles and piles of homework, assignments, projects, and presentations.  I've barely had any time to myself this college term to do any of my hobbies: gaming, writing, video making, etc.  Thankfully, though, the terms slowly coming to a close, which means the work is subsiding slightly (still have several projects and presentations to work on, though), so at least I have a little more breathing room to get back to my loving hobbies.  Oh, how I've missed them.  Anyway, like I said back when I completed my Monster Hunter 3 Playthrough, I sat down and finally made this update video which, as I expected, was quite large and long, with me talking for nearly 15 minutes straight about what I plan on doing next and some changes I plan on trying to make.  Thankfully, Youtube increased the video length limit on all videos to 15 minutes now, which is a godsend (but would have been a preferable change at the BEGINNING of my MH3 playthrough... sheesh...), otherwise this video would of had to have been split into two separate videos, or I would have had to cut out large chunks of information to make the limit.  You can view the video above at your leisure, but this will also be a written explanation of what I go over in the video, as well as maybe go further into detail on some updates I may have otherwise skimmed over lightly.  Like the video, I expect this to be massively long, so hunker down, grab a cool drink, and let's get started.

     Best place to probably start with my updates is changes or videos concerning Monster Hunter 3.  I finished up my playthrough of the offline "campaign" not to long ago, back at the end of July, and since then, people have been asking me a lot of the same questions over and over again, many of which I have been keeping quiet on or avoiding for the time being because I wasn't all too sure myself what I was going to do about them.  Well, I've decided on quite a few things by now, so these common questions will finally be answered now.

     First Question:  Will you be doing the post-Ceadeus Quests (the quests that pop up after you complete the main portion of the offline campaign, aka beat the Ceadeus)?

     Answer: Yes, I will be doing some, if maybe not most, of the post-Ceadeus quests whenever I feel I have the time.  I don't, however, plan on doing all of them, just the ones I feel would make for interesting videos and commentaries worth the time for making them into videos.  I don't know when I will be uploading these; chances are good that these will be uploaded occasionally and in small bursts.  Don't expect them to be the very next batch of videos I upload.

     Second Question:  Now that you've done a playthrough of the offline mode, will you be doing a video playthrough of Monster Hunter's Online Mode as well?  Please say yes!

     Answer:  No.  Nice try, but I don't have that kind of time or patience to dedicate my channel to a MH3 online playthrough for god knows how long.  It took me three entire months just to finish the offline mode of MH3, and the vast majority of that time was actually spent making those videos, as in, editing, rendering, uploading, and commenting them for Youtube.  Taking that into consideration, MH3's online mode is much more extensive, including a ton more quests, several other events to complete, a myriad of arena battles, etc., all of which would probably take me half a year, if not longer, to complete in a solid playthrough (especially with the quality of videos I try to make).  Not only that, but attempting to team up with random people online that I don't even know means that much of that playthrough would be left out of my hands; I would need to  rely on the other hunters to pull their own weight as well, and hope that we don't epicly fail a quest and have to redo it all over again, taking up even more of my time.  A playthrough like that would be best done with friends who I know and can depend on, not only to help me with the quests, but also behave appropriately and maybe add helpful commentary.  This alone, however, would also take considerable time, as there are sure to be scheduling issues between the four of us as we try and find times where we can all play together at the same time and get the footage we need to make the playthrough.  I never had an intention of doing a full-blown online playthrough for Monster Hunter 3, as I wanted to go for a "Newbie's Entrance into the Monster Hunter Franchise" feel for my playthrough, not only showing off the game to other people without ruining the bigger picture of the game, but also to interest other like players who may be new to the series themselves.  If you want to see the online, buy the game and experience it for yourself;  otherwise, there's plenty of other gamers and LPers out there who are willing to dedicate their time to doing a playthrough of the online mode.

     HOWEVER, this does NOT mean that I will NOT be putting up any more videos of online quests.  As many MH3 players know, there are still three more boss monsters that are online-specific, as in you can only face off against them in the online mode, and I do intend to eventually make videos of me doing these quests and fighting these monsters.  I have actually already taken on the Jhen Moran a while back, so I might be able to possibly upload the quest videos against him sometime soon;  the other two boss monsters will just have to wait until whenever I actually get around to battling them online.  Those may not be the only videos I will be uploading, though;  if there are any normal quests or maybe even Event quests (quests which change on a week-by-week basis) that I find interesting or something interesting happens in, then you may find that I will occasionally upload some of those videos onto my channel at random times.

The Post-Ceadeus quests and the online videos probably won't be what I'll be putting up next, though, since there's some things that take priority over Monster Hunter at the moment, but I'll get into that here in a bit.

     Third Question:  Hey, I'm a big fan of yours, and was wondering if you would like to play online with me in MH3?

     Answer: This has been a very, very common question people have been asking me ever since I began my MH3 playthrough.  People have left this in comments, sent me PMs, or left these kind of requests on my channel;  my answer, however, has always been the same: "Sorry, but I am not taking requests at the moment to play online in Monster Hunter 3 with my viewers/subscribers, as I want to focus on finishing up my offline playthrough of the game and getting those videos up on Youtube as quickly and efficiently as possible."  I did say, however, that when my playthrough was done and over with, I would begin playing online with my viewers and subscribers in a special/different way than they might be expecting, and now that I am indeed done with my playthrough, here is what I plan on doing.  I've received a lot of requests to play online with people, and while going online randomly and trying to play with anyone who comes at me might sound easy, I don't really get on MH3's online too much (I'm a gamer, and there's other games calling my name, too, ya know...), so what I'm going to do is I'm going to begin streaming myself playing video games live on the Internet on certain days.

     If you don't know what "Live Streaming" is, it is where you can watch me playing a game live on the Internet in real time, and you can not only chat with other people in a chat room, but you can also be able to chat with me (I can view the chatroom), asking me questions, making comments, and maybe even getting the chance to play online with me, not just in Monster Hunter 3, but in several other games, like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, Mario Kart Wii, several PC games which I own, and maybe even some XBOX 360 games which I have (just got the system not too long ago, so multiplayer games on that at the moment are quite few).  Starting up my own gaming stream and streaming and talking with my subs has been in the works for quite a while, and was originally supposed to be my 500-subscriber special, but time issues and conflicts kind of pushed that back by quite a bit, seeing how I now have over 800 subscribers right now.  Still going to begin streaming sometime soon, though, and it will count for my 500-subscriber special, so don't worry; I still have a few other things planned to  maybedo for my 1000-subscriber special when we get there.  I'm currently working on toying around with different streaming settings/sites, so I don't know exactly when my first stream will be, but I think I have the basic gist of it by now, and will hopefully be streaming sometime soon.  My first (official) stream will probably mostly focus on playing MH3 online with people, as I have the most requests to play that with people at the moment;  if I decide to make this streaming a weekly or ever other week affair (college schedule rules all, at the moment...  -.-;), I will pretty much play whatever games I feel like playing, so there's a multitude of games you might drop in to watch or even play with me whenever I stream.

     Fourth Question:  Now that you are done with your Monster Hunter 3 Playthrough, what do you plan on doing next?  What is your next playthrough going to be on?

     Answer: Right now, my top and main priority is to go back and finish up my Red Steel 2 Playthrough, which I began nearly a month before Monster Hunter 3 came out.  Some people might remember that I ran into a lot of trouble trying to get those videos up onto Youtube;  apparently, Ubisoft took issue with me trying to upload those videos, and Youtube's copyright system automatically blocked a large majority of my videos worldwide so no one could view them.  If you want to view the video where I talk about it, you can view it by clicking here, but to make a long story short, I instead began uploading my RS2 Playthrough videos over on Viddler as a kind of workaround so that people were able to watch them.  I made some decent progress in that playthrough, with an estimation of about 60% of the game completed.  As they were kind of out of the way for my viewers, though, and Monster Hunter 3 came out long before I could even finish the game, let alone get the rest of the videos up, I decided to put the RS2 playthrough on hold until a later time where I could get back to working on it, and turned my attention to doing a playthrough of MH3.  Now I plan on finally returning back to RS2 and not only finish up what I started, but do an entire reboot of that playthrough.

     What exactly does that mean?  Well, as some of you may have noticed, while I was working through MH3, I began to test out and teach myself some new editing techniques, such as speeding up and slowing down the video, adding transitions, adding different sound effects and music types, adding my own form of annotations, and most importantly, improving my video quality drastically.  I plan on going back to all of my RS2 videos, both public and private, and re-editing the heck out of them; there's a lot more I can add to them now than I could when I first began the playthrough, especially in the form of comments, as Viddler's comment system isn't as intuitive as Youtube's, meaning I originally lost a lot of my charm in those videos.

     Speaking of Viddler, I also plan on expanding my videos outside of Youtube, so (hopefully) beginning with my Red Steel 2 Playthrough, you will also be able to view my videos on Blip.tv, as well as maybe Viddler and DailyMotion for future playthroughs.  I'm not too sure about those last two just yet, though, as the quality of my videos means that they are quite huge in size, and Viddler's and DailyMotion's file size limits are questionably too small for most of my videos at the moment.  But I definitely will be trying to get videos up onto Blip.tv consistently alongside my usual Youtube channel, meaning that some of the Blip.tv audience can view my videos as well.  Plus, I like Blip's video embeds better than Youtube's for some reason, so you'll see me using those more often from now on.

     I don't expect it to take me as long as usual to complete my Red Steel 2 Playthrough, seeing how nearly 60% of the game has already been beaten and made into videos already.  From there, once I'm done with my RS2 Playthrough, this is where my updates begin to become a bit more vague and unclear, as I'm not sure what order things will happen in.  I already have two more playthroughs planned out for me to do once I am finished with RS2, although it is possible that one of them may not happen.  It is a playthrough of a really old PC game, one of the first ones I ever played and probably one not many of you have heard about.  Right now, it's giving me a lot of difficulties, as it does not seem to want to cooperate with my current operating systems.  I have been working on it diligently, though, and am awfully close to getting it to run properly, so there is still a chance that I may be able to do a playthrough of that game, but there's also still that chance that I won't be able to.  =(  As for the other game, it came out about six months ago, maybe a little longer, so there shouldn't be any problems with me doing a playthrough on that game.  And yes, I am keeping the game titles under wraps for the time being, because I can.  =P

     Aside from those two future playthroughs, I also have some "Game Specials" I plan on doing.  These are technically just some of the extra videos I said I would do after completing my first two playthroughs (Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories), but never actually got around to doing.  For Operation Flashpoint, I said that I would make some extra videos for the game's singleplayer standalone skirmish missions that came with the game as well as in updates from Codemasters after the game's release.  For Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, I said that I would make a video or two showing off some of the things I missed during my blind runthrough of the game, as well as some of the differences and changes between my first and second playthrough of the game, since it changes depending on how the game perceives your playing style or based on some of the decisions you make throughout the game.  I am not sure when exactly I will be uploading these videos; the most logical thing to do would be to upload a Game Special, Playthrough, Game Special, and Playthrough, or vice versa.  I could, however, also upload one of these Game Specials onto Youtube while I'm off doing my RS2 Playthrough on Viddler and Blip.tv, since I won't have much to put up on Youtube at the moment any way.  As always, I'm just going to go with the flow and take things as they come, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

     While I'm undergoing the process of making all of these changes and making transitions from one playthrough/project to the next, you will see me occasionally upload some random gameplay videos on different games, especially when I have nothing else to upload.  This should lessen any more "video droughts," like the one I just came out of, in the future, as gameplay videos do not require as much time and effort to edit and make.  These videos will simply be kind of like entertaining filler, just to hold you guys over while I set up and prepare for whatever it is I plan on doing next.  Some examples of videos I might upload include Super mario Galaxy 2, Red Dead Redemption, Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, Mafia II, other newly released games I get, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.  Lots and lots of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

     So, that's pretty much all of the updates I wanted to inform you guys about.  I will continue to update and post to my blog to keeps you guys side-by-side with me as I make these changes and progress on with my playthroughs.  As a side note, I also plan on making some changes to this blog when I get the chance to fiddle around with different settings and tweaks, so you can expect to see some interesting add-ons/changes to the blog in the future.  It's pretty basic as it stands, and it gets the job done, but a little home-improvement never hurt anybody, right?  If you read all of this, congrats; I commend you for your speed-reading and/or endurance.  Like I expected, this turned out to be pretty long...