Jason Axelrod

Its been exactly a month since Soulcalibur V was released in America. Up until now, Dampierre has only been available as a pre-order bonus from BestBuy. Well later tonight, the final round of announced DLC will become available on both PSN and XBL; with it comes the Dampierre unlock code!

Previously, Dampierre had been banned from tournaments since he was not readily available to all players. How could you legalize a character that not everybody could use or practice against? Well now, since he is available to everyone with an internet connection (which you need to receive patches anyways), he is officially being declared legal for tournament play per the Official 8WAYRUN.com Sanctioned Ruleset.

Don't have Soulcalibur V yet? First, whats wrong with you? It is by far the best fighting game on the market today. Secondly, you're in luck! Amazon.com is now offering a special discount of $20 off the game. Who knows how long the sale will last, so get on it while you can. Click the image link below to go directly to the sale.

As some of you probably know by now, I've all but abandoned Wirecast in favor of XSplit as my primary streaming program. While yes, XSplit has far less features than Wirecast, it just does so many things right that I felt compelled to use it. Unfortunately, with all the things it does right, there is one thing it does wrong.

That of course would be the title card system. Sure, Wirecast's title system wasn't that simple, but once you set your XML files up correctly, it was very easy to update and adjust as needed. XSplit made it easier to set up your title cards, but in turn, its very cumbersome to update and change your titles. The built-in title plugin for XSplit is a complete catastrophe. So in an effort to make it easier for myself, I've written a program to handle title updates...

Now that SC5 has been released, we are going to probably have a lot of new users... especially today. In the Soulcalibur community, we have not had a major community website survive during the launch of a core title; even Shoryuken couldn't stay up during the launch of SF4. I've been optimizing our scripts for the past half a year in order to prepare for today. We'll see how it goes.

Moving on, with the new game and new players, there is bound to be a lot of new information. If you're a new player: welcome, we are glad to have you! Make sure you head to our New Player Arena and make a thread to introduce yourself. If you're a veteran, be sure to say hello to our new members; direct them to the right areas, and for the love of all things Soulcalibur, stop being a bunch of whiny little bitches! I hope to see you all attending tournaments in the upcoming year.

I'm not going to pretend in this post that I'm anything more than a scrub in Soulcalibur; whether I was good at one time or another is irrelevant. This month, for the first time ever, I find myself in a leadership position in the community during the launch of a major revision to the Soulcalibur series... And of course, as with anything I do, its not without some drama.

But drama is not foreign to our community; in fact, it probably goes hand-in-hand. In addition to that, to outsiders it looks as if our community is "quick to ban". Now, Soulcalibur V is about to launch and we find ourselves already being forced to make decisions relevant to bans. So before I go into my decisions for SC5, I'm going to do my best to recall a history of banning within the Soulcalibur community.

The raffle is now over! Congratulations to the winners, you have been emailed!

I would like to put together a 24/7 live stream for SC5, the same way SRK has their 24/7 channel. Unfortunately to do this, I'm going to have to set up another streaming setup at my house. So in order to make sure I have enough funds for this I'm going to have a donation drive/raffle.

MarkMan from MadCatz has graciously gifted us a pair of these new sticks. So what I'm doing is, starting right now until next month, everyone who donates $5 will be entered into the raffle for one of these sticks. You are free to donate more and buy additional raffle entries at $5 each. The MSRP of these sticks is $159.99, so this is your chance to get one for cheap.

Soulcalibur V comes out on January 31! A week before the special occasion, Namco Bandai will be hosting a open-door pre-release party in the hometown of their US headquarters, San Francisco. As I said, its an open door event; but because of size of the venue, they will start closing the doors when they reach capacity.

So if you find yourself bored on a Tuesday night in San Francisco; you should stop on by. Attendees will be some of the first to get their hands on exclusive Soulcalibur swag, and get the chance to meet the people responsible Soulcalibur V. Myself and Malice will also be in attendance!

And now we finally get to the meat of the matter. In truth, everything I explained so far is simple; how to record your games in part 1, and then how to add commentary in part 2. This is all simple stuff, even part 3. Streaming is easy: its easy to do things right, and at the same time its easy to do things wrong.

As I've stated previously, I have been releasing videos online for almost a decade now. Back when I started, bandwidth and space wasn't nearly as fast and abundant. So you had to learn "tricks"; things like "b-frames", "QP", "trellis" or "umh/esa/tesa" became the norm. Ever wonder how fansubbers release episodes in high quality with low file sizes? Sadly, most of these techniques can't be used in the world of streaming; but much of the knowledge can still be put into practice.