This is spam I received on Vito's Verdict, an old blog I used to have. Nice try, Nydia!
This is a video I made a few hours ago. Seinfeld isn't happy about BioWare's "artistic integrity" defense regarding the ending to Mass Effect 3.
Inspired by MichelKobayashi's "His name was Marauder Shields." video, I preferred the belief that Marauder Shields was actually an ally trying to protect you from seeing Mass Effect 3's horrible ending. I made the video early this morning and posted it up on YouTube.
Japan Uncut is a supplemental side-series to Japan: The Series. These mostly unedited videos are either too long or too shaky to include in the numbered episodes and will be released in between them.
I'm currently working on Episode 02: Electric Town which is far more difficult to edit than Arrival was. There's so much I want to show, and putting it all together is harder than throwing together a train montage set to music. One of the places I want to show is my visit to Akihabara's SEGA GiGO arcade. You're not allowed to film inside there, so I kept the camera on and at my side which resulted in a lot of shaky, unusable footage not fit for an episode in the main series. I thought that some people might be interested in the sights and sounds of a place like this, however, so I decided to start this side-series to show off stuff like this. The first video in the series will be released later this week. It may be unwatchable for some, but hopefully implementing some image stabilization and such will help.
Today was the official launch day of the PlayStation Vita in the United States, and mine arrived earlier today from Amazon. I just got all the trophies in Welcome Park and now want to show off the wallpapers I'm using. All of these were obtained from either freevitathemes.com or from the Vita wallpaper thread on NeoGAF. They are displayed in the order that they're seen on the system. All screens were taken using the Vita itself.
My lock screen. Mass Effect 3!
The first screen I see after unlocking the Vita. This section is for things I use the most. Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII.
This section is also for things I use the most, but I didn't want to cover up Lightning's beautiful face. Old Snake from Metal Gear Solid 4.
For photos, videos, and music. Sackboy from LittleBigPlanet.
This last section is for things I will need to access the least. It's a design by NeoGAF member m0dus.
Hideo Kojima posted this on his Twitter account earlier this morning. It's a replica of the jacket Ryan Gosling wore in Drive. Hideo says Drive is one of the top three movies he's seen this year, along with War Horse and The Hunter.
I think he pulls it off!
Making Japan: Arrival was a lot of fun. It being the first video I've ever truly edited - meaning I'm excluding the two very, very minor things I've edited in the past using Windows Movie Maker - meant that I had to get a program capable of doing what I wanted to do and learn how to use it on my own. After browsing reviews, I settled on CyberLink PowerDirector 9. I went to The Pirate Bay and torrented a copy (I soon purchased a legal copy of CyberLink PowerDirector 10 to replace it, which is what produced the final video) and was impressed by how fast it loaded up and how easy it was to use. Having practically zero experience with this sort of thing, I was expecting it to be more difficult than it was to figure everything out.
I watched all the videos saved in the "July 15th" and "July 16th" folders and threw them into PowerDirector. Totaling a little over six gigabytes with a run time of 35 minutes, most of the videos consisted of shots outside the window on the Narita Express. While the landscape was beautiful, watching a video of it would only be interesting for so long. I knew I would have to make some drastic cuts and throw in some music to make it watchable. Not wanting to risk having my videos taken down by YouTube or anything, I would either need to use some royalty-free music or get permission from someone whose music would be a good fit. I've been following Hamst3r for a long time now (before The Giant Bomb Community Song, even) and had the idea of using his music for my travelogue since the trip. I didn't want to just be some guy asking for his permission, however, so my plan was to make the video as if he had said yes and send it to him privately. I went to his website and listened to a bunch of tracks, going mainly off of their titles, until I stumbled upon "At Last...". It was both a fitting title and theme for the video, so I downloaded it and added it to PowerDirector.
Now that the music and videos were in, it was just a matter of making everything fit. Being a huge fan of the work done by 2 Player Productions on Penny Arcade: The Series (and later Vantage Point Productions), I had wanted to edit everything in a similar vein before we even went on the trip. (Being a huge fan of Whiskey Media has influenced my thinking when it comes to video editing, as well.) That's easier said than done, however, especially since no shots were planned on the actual trip, and it was just me walking around with a video camera. One of the main influences I took from these guys was editing the progress of the trip to the beat of music; it's not a concept they invented by any means, but they're where I got it from. "At Last..." is only two minutes long, so this meant making further cuts to the footage of the train ride. I ended up having to be very selective with the shots I chose, especially since each one would only last a couple of seconds at most. Maybe after the series is done I'll upload the whole files for people interested in them, but I'm happy with the final sequence. Most of my time was spent stretching out the file editor and shaving milliseconds off different clips to make the scenes change on the beats. I've probably heard "At Last..." almost a hundred times now!
Making something of your own is just as much about avoiding the things you don't like as it is copying the things you do. One of the things I find most annoying when watching a YouTube video are long opening credits - the kind where there is one sentence per page followed by slow fade transitions, all before you ever see anything of the actual video. I've always been a big fan of just jumping right into the action, which is why Arrival starts in the middle of me playing Rastan. Anything that needs to be said can be said later in the video after something has happened, preferably with something going on in the background.
After stitching everything together, I added in the ending credits over the television scene. Though I will always credit the work of others at the end of my videos, future credit segments will be far shorter. I felt it was appropriate to give them more time in the opening and ending videos, however. With the video nearly finalized, I uploaded it to YouTube and marked it private, embedded it into a PM and sent it off to Hamst3r to ask for his permission; he quickly got back to me and said it was fine. This happened over three months ago, and since I decided I wanted to start the project in 2012, I had plenty of time to make whatever changes I wanted to before January.
Only a few changes occurred between then and the video's release, most of them minor. I edited the opening paragraphs and added in the kanji ("Japan") under the late title card (I love late title cards). I also took out the "Special Thanks" section I had at the end of the credits, which listed Whiskey Media, Penny Arcade, 2 Player Productions, and Vantage Point Productions. I chose to remove this part to avoid confusion, as they had nothing to do with the video and may not want to be associated with it. The only major change was the final part of the video, the one that plays after the episode information pops up. Before, it was bit more ominous, with the camera slowly zooming in on one of the televisions in the Narita Express while an accident report for another train line shows up and the video then cutting to black. Then I had the idea of doing what I've seen the likes of Freddie Wong and Corridor Digital do (even Egoraptor does it now) and added in clickable annotations at the very end. I already had the perfect shot - the one where I scrolled through all the games on the Global Arcade Classics machine - so I took some screens of the Giant Bomb blogs I wrote along with the list of episodes and overlayed them on the sides of the arcade cabinet. Since the Arrival blog couldn't be finished until the video was uploaded, I posted an unfinished version on Giant Bomb, taking a screenshot and quickly deleting it. This was all before I found out you couldn't place external links in YouTube videos, so I ended up just adding an "All links in description." speech bubble. I also added a Subscribe button at the bottom and decided to take a screenshot from one of the videos I would be using for Episode 02 to later turn in to a link for the next video. I made sure annotations would only come up at the very end since I personally hate having to turn them off every time I play a video after one pops up.
The video was then complete. After asking a few members to watch it to ensure there weren't any issues with it (online playback was choppy on my computer), I soon finished the blog post and released the video to the public on January 12th.
Three more things:
1. Someone asked why everything looked blue. This was because for the first bit of the trip I hadn't realized the video camera was set to "Tungsten". Whoops!
2. In the introductory blog post I said I wanted to edit and show everything in chronological order. I already broke this rule with the first video, as the superfast train sequence after the tunnel actually happened before the tunnel. It was the only bit of footage I had that fit with that point in the music!
3. This is one of my favorite Penny Arcade episodes. It has thus far been impossible for me to watch it without at least one tear!
Here's Japan: Arrival. Episode 02 will be released in February! -
The first Game Giveaway was hosted on January 16th, 2011, in the Off-Topic forum. On July 1st, almost six months later, I wrote an in-depth blog post about the origin of the contest and provided some stats. I said pretty much everything I wanted to say back then, so this post will be far shorter.
First, let's start with the old stats that I wrote at the beginning of the aforementioned post:
Now, the new stats as of The Giant Bomb Community Game Giveaway #100:
The look of the contests haven't changed much since contest #23. The only major changes that have happened have been the name change from Vito's Game Giveaway to The Giant Bomb Community Game Giveaway (at contest #55) and the new banner (at contest #58 and done by Deusx), both of which are a result of my username change from my Internet pseudonym of 10 years (Vito Raliffe) to my real-life name of 23 years (CharlesAlanRatliff). As I mentioned in a previous post, the change was also because the community had donated far more than I by that point, so it didn't make sense for my name to be in the title.
As far as special events go, the most notable ones would be contest #50 where there were 15 winners to celebrate The Big Live Live Show, and contest #62 which marked the start of the contests happening daily (or near daily). The latter was originally as a celebration of Christmas and also because I had so many damn donations. The daily contests ran from December 1st to January 16th, which was both the one-year anniversary celebration and the 100th contest in total. The only reason they've returned to their weekly format since then is due to the amount of time it takes to do them every day. I wish to focus that time on other projects for now, though I'm sure daily contests will return sometime in the future.
Big thanks to everyone who's donated; we wouldn't even be close to contest #100 if it weren't for you! As always, their names can be found here and here.
The last two lines I wrote six months ago were
And seriously, you guys? With the way things are going, I fully expect Vito's Game Giveaway to run a whole year straight.
If you ask me, I think that's pretty fucking cool.
And that's exactly what happened. Here's to another year!
Here are the banners used December 1st through December 31st. The first banner was done by Deusx with c0l0nelp0c0rn1 adding the Santa hat for me. This was only used on December 1st for contest #62 before Deusx sent me his version in time for contest #63, which can be seen below.
I was going through old files on my computer and came across some pictures I had taken when I reached a certain number of Gamerscore. This first one was taken when I reached 20,000 Gamerscore on December 21st, 2008. I had played various Xbox Live Arcade titles in an attempt to get the number just right -
I was REALLY in to Left 4 Dead.
783 days (or 2 years, 1 month, and 22 days) later on February 11th, 2011, I reached 45,000 Gamerscore. I don't remember why I took a picture of this, but I figure it's because I landed on a nice, even number.
Rocking my Limbo avatar awards.
It was 246 days later on October 14th, 2011, that I reached 50,000 Gamerscore. I had originally planned to get it with my brother while playing Gears of War 3, but my score reached 49,990 on October 7th, and it wouldn't have been possible to land on 50,000 if we kept playing. I somehow reached 49,995 (I can't figure out how) and tried playing Comix Zone and Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting to get the last of the points, but needed something faster that wouldn't push me over 50,000. I then looked at Game Room's achievements and remembered that I never changed a theme in my arcade for 5 points. My brother disapproved of my method and thought it was cheap, but achievements are achievements, and I needed that perfect string of zeros.
Wait for it...
Uh-huh...
Yes!
That's right, I bought a Batman costume and Towelie prop. Worth it! Here's him stealing my Cheesy Poofs.
Our gamerpics match up rather nicely.
