Nattering about video games

First of all: I reviewed Hoa when I first played it– spoiler alert, I really liked it– but I promised to link to the Let’s Play when it was up and I never did. So here it is; all five episodes are live so if you have some time to watch, feel free. Hit that subscribe button, too.

Second, it’s weird how this whole YouTube thing has affected the way I actually play video games. This is not at all surprising, but I find it interesting anyway. To be more specific: a game I did a Let’s Play series for just released some new (free) DLC, and I don’t know how to play it, if that makes any sense. Before, I’d just play it or not. Now, I’m going back and forth between doing regular episodes, a livestream where I just run through the whole thing, or– crazy, I know– possibly just playing it off-camera, y’know, like a normal person.

(Looks it up, discovers it requires a fresh playthrough to be done right, decides not to play at all)

Still, though.

In related news, I’m playing Far Cry 6 right now, and that’s set in the “real” world, so to speak, and so features licensed music whenever you enter a vehicle. I uploaded a bunch of new episodes yesterday and immediately got hit with a ton of more-or-less bullshit copyright claims, but the way YouTube arbitrates copyright claims puts all the power in the hands of the people claiming that you’re violating your copyright. Now, granted, I’m hundreds and hundreds of followers away from monetizing the channel and will probably lose interest well before it gets that big, but it annoys me that there could be a 13-second clip of a song that was licensed to the game in my video because I jumped into a car for a few seconds and because of that these folks feel like they’re entitled to all of the revenue that video might generate, as if those thirteen seconds are the fucking reason people are watching the half-hour video. It’s horseshit. I’ve turned off the radio option for any further episodes I record so this won’t be happening again, but I’m thinking about re-editing the videos that have claims on them just to pre-empt any future bullshit. The way I record preserves my commentary and the game audio in separate files, so it would take some time to do but in terms of the actual work involved it would be pretty trivial to snip the songs out. We’ll see if my appeals go through or not.

Bathroom work is proceeding apace. Not as exciting today as yesterday, but I’ll post pictures later anyway.