Well kids, the wait is finally just about over. SOULCALIBUR V officially hits stores tomorrow, so it’s time to go out, grab a copy, and start practicing. Well, almost. For those of you not living near incompetent Wal-Marts or shady mom & pop establishments willing to break street date, you still have an absolutely grueling few hours remaining before SC5 is in your hot little hands.
Believe me, I sympathize. Whether you’re purely hyped or filled with questions and doubts, the last little bit before you can have the game and make your own judgments on it are absolute torture. Of course, there’s an upside here. What’s that, you ask? It’s simple: those of you out there who don’t have the game—the vast majority of you—are my captive audience. Given both that fact and the equally pertinent one that I’ve now had a chance to go through the game in semi-detail, this week I’ll be playing reporter.
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.
It has been a tumultuous week here at the Hate Speech offices, beginning with Idlemind’s abduction by an insidious cabal of communist sympathizers looking to undermine the work we’ve been doing here in the name of freedom. That’s my pet theory, at least. When last I saw him, I was lugging cases of whiskey and assorted pharmaceuticals past his desk and back to mine.
“What the hell is all that?” he asked.
“Dude, there’s the Calibur party in SF tonight. Pregame.”
I don’t remember my first tournament. I can deduce a few things about it, however: it was sometime in 2002, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I probably went out like a scrub. My second tournament sticks more clearly in my mind. A veteran local loudmouth didn’t take me seriously enough, and I pulled out a completely unexpected win.
Of course, I then proceeded to get rolled, but the one and only Michael Jackson bought me a buffet pass at Golden Corral as my own little consolation prize. I didn’t need all-you-can-eat fried chicken and mashed potatoes to keep me interested, though — I was already hooked.
Last Saturday began quite typically for me. I passed most of the day in a park near my apartment, enjoying the mild northern California winter and altogether being excruciatingly wholesome. It was not to last, however. My usual routine of smelling flowers, writing poetry, and being kind to animals was cut short by the arrival of Namco Bandai’s FilthieRich. He approached me, introduced himself, and asked me one fateful question: “Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?”
I awoke hours later in what can only be described as a lair. The space was dark and cramped, its walls and floor adorned with blinking lights, dangling electrodes, whirring machinery. Someone had stolen my shoes. Just as I felt fear couldn’t tighten its grip on my heart any more viciously, Rich appeared once again from the shadows obscuring the far end of my cell. “Hey, wanna play some Soul Calibur 5?” he asked.....
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.
Welcome back to another standard edition of Hate Speech, what is fast becoming the source for fuzzy wuzzy let’s-hold-hands-around-the-campfire communitarian schlock. It’s not that I want to be a positive person—I don’t. My tiny, black heart pumps nothing but the condensed syrup of scorn and loathing which sustains me, but these are unusual times. We’re a month and some change away from SC5’s release, and I’m seeing arguments which are as counterproductive as they are wholly unnecessary, so today we’ll be discussing a few more community/demographic issues and hopefully putting everything to bed.
For those of you out there who didn’t catch it, there was briefly a thread in the SC5 forum regarding Famitsu’s Algol and Edgemaster character reveals. The sight of Algol’s majestic nakedness (he looks awesome, don’t you dare argue the point) sent everyone into a predictable frenzy; tempers became short, perceptions of reality began distorting, and several people started actually taking Vincent seriously. These are all dire omens, indeed...
