The main reason for this is that the biggest problem I have always found is trying to find a programmer to work with. Due to my animation background, even though I could get the art assets produced but I was never to really get the games off the ground. The major reason of course was due to the absence of what I now realise is the indispensable man. The programmer. This might seam so obvious but it took me ages to work out the simplest rule.. it doesn’t matter how good your idea is if you can not implement it.

Anyway to that end I have decide to enrol in a degree with a major in programming. Learn this stuff for myself and hopefully allow some of my ideas to become something more than just well thought out.

I am attending Qantm Collage, a international school that is a off shoot of a international film and sound school. The Qantm variant is focused on animation, special effects, games and new media type stuff rather than sound and traditional visual mediums, like film and TV. Anyway I’ll be doing a Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment Majoring in Games Programming

So to that end and also form some urging form the teacher, as part of my communication portion of the degree, I have decide to resurrect this blog to record my progress though my degree and any other musings I may wish to offer.

See you guys around!

This one is a bit weird, and will sort of explain why I am not doing as many videos as I used to. Basically I am going to talk about something I find very interesting and that is the continuing growth of retro gaming, specifically adventure gaming.

This video is going to be like my retrospective video on the arcade era, as in in some ways it is just a video blog. Still I think there is some cool stuff in here and I feel the “article” came out pretty well. I am keen to hear your thoughts on this, as this is less a review and more a editorial or article you might get with a magazine.

Anyway, I’ll also be talking about retro gaming on modern hardware, like smart phones and pads. Demonstrating on my phone and pad the ScummVM and DosBox ports as well as even awesome Z-Machine emulator that is a shockingly fantastic way to play text adventures.

I’ll be showing off point and click adventures like Full Throttle, Discworld and Quest for Glory 4, as well as showing surprisingly great ports of text input adventures like Quest for Glory 2, Zork, Leather Bound Goddesses of Phobos and PlanetFall.

So I hope you like this vid and more “normal” stuff is planned and on the way. I would just like to take a sec to say thanks for all the comments on my vids and chan and all your support. I really appreciate it and hope to get more content to you guys as soon as I can.

Remember, Save often and Save Early
Happy Adventuring
–A4L

No… .. . I am not DEAD, No… .. . I have not abandoned this hobby, I am just very busy with work and family and haven’t had to time devote to this channel. I know this is something you have heard all before, but there it is.. this is a hobby, not a job.. new vids will come as I get around to it. I do have some plans for some big reviews, and they will be coming soon!!

To wet your appetite I have done a real quick tutorial to add to the others on my channel. This time I am covering how to install steam games at any location on your computer you wish. As any steam user will know steam forces you to install your games in a certain location. You may fill up your C Drive and not have room to install any new steam games, even though you have gigs of space on a different drive.

Well this tutorial will show you how you can install / move your steam games anywhere on your computer, so you are not restricted to installing them in the default location.

I hope you like this quick little video, and please be patient, I’ll be bringing you some new “real” content real soon!!

Happy Adventuring
–A4L

mklink /D “(Steam Directory)\steamapps\common\(Original Game Dir Name Created by Steam)” “(New Location)\(Game Dir Name of your Choice)”

A New Review!! I really should find a new name for my videos.. as a game review is pretty low down the list of things I would call my videos.. heh… Any suggestions?

Anyway.. this one is all about Portal 1 and 2. I hope you like it. As I am not limited to 10 mins a review anymore I noticed I am getting longer and longer .. this one is about 15mins.. I might have to do something to get this under control next time as my last review was also 15+ mins.

Anyway, I’ll be taking a break for a bit but have a few other games in my list I want to look at that are all back on the original topic.. pure adventure games. So stay tuned for that.

One last thing!!

I have 2 copies of Portal 1 to give away!! So anyone that can email me a short 1 paragraph explanation of what their favorite adventure game character is and why! I’ll select the 2 winners and send them a copy of Portal 1 to activate on steam, the 1st prize winner I will also do a video on their chosen game!!

Email – a4lcontact@gmail.com

Happy Adventuring!!
–A4L

This is a 2nd version of my portal review… with any luck the start of the video will not be all bugged out like last time….This means my viewcount was reset :( So add another 220 or so.. also I lost the comments.. feel free to comment again!!!

Here is my first review for a long time… I hope you like it. It is also my first review after being offered the YouTube partnership program… So I am no longer limited to 10 mins. This could be a bad thing.. heh.. oh well we will see what happens.

This is all about Space Quest 2: Vohaul’s Revenge. Though if you have seen my reviews before you might know I like to stray around the topic a bit to talk about some things I find to be very interesting things usually concerned with gaming history. Still it is sorta about space quest 2…. I mean I do mention it I am sure :)

Anyway … I have bee extremely busy with real life and just not being doing much on my review channel for so long but it was really cool to finally get this one out the door and I hope to get more to you soon.

Save Often and Save Early
A4L

I’m back with a new review and this time I am doing one of my all time favorites form the Sierra game library. Conquest of Longbow – The Legend of Robin Hood. This game is a true classic in every sense of the word. One of the last tittles form sierra before the switching to the more complex style of having audio speech This game is one of the last, and some would say the pinnacle of the dying breed of adventure games that had more incommon with books than films.

If you are interested in trying this amazing game it is one of the few titles that is legal abandonware. The game designer herself provides it (and its predecessor Conquest of Camelot) for free on her website. There is also a really neat installer for those of you that are not very technically savvy and have troubles with DosBox… Simply download the game from Cirsty Marx’s site and then unzip it into a directory, then download the installer from SierraHelp.com and place it in the same dir and run the exe.

So there is no reason not to try this classic game and experience one of the greatest love stories in adventure game history, though simply fantastic writing.

Have Fun and Happy Adventuring
-A4L

Hope you like it..

Part 1
This tutorial covers the basics of using FRAPS to record gamevideos. It also goes though the setup for allowing the recording of in game audio, or no game audio but record microphone input for live commentary, and how to set up the system for recording of in game audio and your microphone at the same time for live commentary.

Part 2
This tutorial will go into how to use AviDmux to encode your large FRAPS recordings into manageable and uploadable high quality lossless video files. It covers, Stitching multiple FRAPS recordings together, encoding options for uploading to YouTube and the use of AviDmux for resizing and colour grading and other filters.

Part 3
This tutorial continues with some recording options as well as begins to talk about Audio Mixing. It covers splitting a large file into 10 minute sections ready for upload to YouTube. The use of AviDmux’s batch system for quing multiple video encoding jobs so you can go to sleep while your computer encodes, demonstrating the contrast filter as well as starting to explain a slightly different encoding options needed to make sound mixing more efficient.

Part 4
This video is the final video in my tutorial series. It talks about how to mix CD Quality audio tracks or commentary recorded after the fact directly into your video so you hear it and the original game audio. This covers the use of AviDmux’s copy function to transfer video or audio data in and out of files in a lossles way that requires no encoding, How to use FooBar2000 to rip audio CDs into wav files. How to use Audacity to record game commentary after the fact. load game audio and a CD track, or commentary and then mix them so both are clear and audible. Also I quickly over view some effects in audacity like fad in and out to give your audio a nicer feeling and remove harsh “cut offs” in the audio. Finally I show you how to use AviDmux to inject the new mixed audio into your encoded files with out the need to re-encode your video data. This is my last tutorial.. probably ever.. I think it was a bit of a failed experiment.. it ended up being nearly 40 mins long!! Anyway.. back to reviews .. expect an update soon.

Well I know I said I would take a beak form these videos for a while but a mate suggested I played the Penumbra series and after a short while I knew I wanted to do a review on it. Then I heard that Frictional Games was about to release their new title Amnesia: The Dark Descent, like next month or something, so I quickly pumped this out.

Penumbra is a strange mix of genres and while the game resembles a survival horror it is much more in tune with older first person adventure games than games like Clock Tower or Dead Space. The game plays exactly like Zork Nemesis. You basically walk around in first person, exploring and solving puzzles, mainly item and object puzzles, though there is a few code puzzles. The big difference though from Zork or Myst or w/e is that as you walk you are simply terrified. I mean this game is really scary. There is little, and depending on your play style zero combat, so this defiantly isn’t an action game But a big part of the game is focused on exploration of the spooky environment. So unlike traditional first person adventures the simple act of walking about is part of the gameplay design. Meaning that the puzzles, though a big part of it, are not as dense or complex as some tradition adventures due to the game needing to keep a strict eye on pacing. You see to keep us scared the game needs to constantly give us new areas to explore, it is the unknown that keeps us on the edge of our seat. So the pacing and puzzle density is also a bit different to what you may be used to. While this feels different to a classic adventure, it is a very unique game and if you are interested in a adventure style type game, but with a very well done survival horror twist, topped with a really unique and extremely good interface design then I would strongly suggest checking this one out.

Well that is it! I tried something new with this one… normally when i do a vid I just babble into the mic and then cut video to it, but this time I wrote it out first. I think it is a mixed success. While i seamed to get a lot more information into it, witch was the goal, I think it lost some of the “casual feeling” that the ad-libbing had. Also as it was a contained written “article” so I found editing it to fit the time was extremely hard, as removing any one bit would make the preceding or following section not make sense. So I ended up having to speak a little fast and my words kinda run together. So while this is pretty dense in information it is a bit formal and just lacks a bit of personality. I think this could be just practice… so we will see if I get better at this way of doing things

(PS – Tubezen has disabled direct linking to download YouTube videos. So all my old direct mp4 download links do not work anymore. If you wish to keep any of my vids I recommend using the FIREFOX browser and simply installing the free plugin “Easy Youtube Downloader” You can then at a click of a button save any res version of the video on youtub e or grab a mp3 at a click of a button)

Ok well this is for Star Trek BORG a FMV interactive star trek episode and a sorely under rated game imo. This is an old game from 1996 and was pretty hard for me to track down. I am still looking for a “in good nick” version of its predecessor Star Trek: Klingon.

This game was a real pain to get running. I had to end up running it in a 95 virtualization. This was when applications came in both dos and windows, and Microsoft “encouraged” developers to check the OS before launching the games. If 95 is not detected, the game will not load, a really bad move and the bain of us retro gamers. There is a patch (Google: Star trek Borg patch) that gets it to run in XP, and I hear vista and win7.. but only in a 32bit environment. It will not run in 64bit windows at all, and for some reason my 32 bit XP virtualization wouldn’t display, the videos played but appeared as black. Anyway.. I had to set up a 95 virtualization and that was a bit harder than you might think.. Still I got it working and it is well worth the effort if you are a trek fan, or just interested in FMV game in general.

Anyway, while this game is terrific and I really enjoyed it. I would only really advise it for Star Trek fans (like me!) and anyone interested in the lost and, imo, ever under-valued and potentially amazing game type that is FMV.

I hope you like the video
Happy Adventuring

YouTube Direct Link MP4 – download
YouTube Direct Link HD MP4 – download

This video came about as I am really busy at the moment, and whenever I’m busy I end up playing lots of mame. These recordings are of my playthough of Ghouls ‘n Ghosts (world). I used the xtra lives DIP switch as well. (4 instead of  2 extra lives. Also I am not super hardcore and had to resort to using save states on level 4).

Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is one of my fav classic arcade games and I hope you like this video.

I’ll get back to adventures for the next one I promise.

YouTube Direct Link MP4 – download
YouTube Direct Link 720p MP4 – download