Hi. I’ve been gone for a week because I’ve been on vacation, but I might be able to upload a video. No promises. I’ll keep this short.
Currently off camera I’m playing Dragon Warrior 3 for GBC. Fun RPG that reminds me of earthbound or dragon quest. That’s really all I wanted to say. More RPG games may come in the way future of my channel. For now Oracle.
It's Monday!
Yesterday was the two finals for the Copa America and Euro Cup. Spain wins the cup, and of course Argentina wins the cup. (That Copa America game was a shit show, haha 😬) Soccer done.
Today I'm planning on recording some more Oracle of Ages and finally uploading that Mother 3 part. Those are 100% certain. I may or may not record Yoshi's Island depending on how busy I am. I am praying that my video doesn't desync with the audio like the last Oracle part. Near the middle of the video, the game audio wasn't synced with my voice or the video, so it makes no sense and is extremely hard to watch. I honestly thought that part was solid too, with no lag or screw ups. Oh well.
I'm also thinking about uploading a new game, preferably Arn's Winter Quest by Toby Fox. It's one of the strangest hacks I've seen on EarthBound and it's kinda crazy it was made by the guy who made Undertale. It's rarely ever talked about or remembered (only by EB fans), but I thought it'd be fun to revisit Toby's creations from '06.
That's it.
Today is the day of the Copa America and UEFA Euro Championship final. Argentina vs. Colombia and Spain vs. England.
Anyways, soccer aside, I'm planning on uploading some more Oracle of Ages soon. I've been on vacation and have not been able to record, so that's why there hasn't been a video in a few days. I have another Mother 3 part already finished but I haven't gotten around to uploading it. As for Yoshi's Island hack, IDK when I'll play that again. I have been mostly focusing on completing Oracle of Ages (it's taken me almost 5 damn months at this point). As I said before, the Yoshi hack is incredibly hard and takes a while to complete even just one level. I will try to record it sometime before the end of summer.
The video quality lately has been pretty shitty, and I blame that on my shitty tools. First of all, I'm using a pretty lousy emulator to play Oracle of Ages. WebRcade is just obsolete now. It was useless for PC users because they could just download a better emulator alternative like RetroArch or OpenEmu (which has a fuckton more features). Plus, now that Apple has been allowing emulators on their App Store, WebRcade is no longer needed on mobile devices either. WebRcade on your phone isn't great either, since you absolutely needed to connect a bluetooth controller in order to play. Stupid. Was it really that hard to just program some damn virtual buttons? That's like exclusively what I use when playing on my phone. Nobody is gonna wanna pull out a big ass controller or backbone controller when they're playing for 2 minutes waiting in a line. So, now that it's not useful on phones or PC's, it's basically kinda meh. The need to contain all your back ups and save states in a dropbox account is also annoying. If you don't, you could easily lose all your game progress because it's stored in your IndexedDB. Because the focus of webRcade is "cloud based", you technically could play all your games on various devices and have the same backups, but that means it has to pull from that Dropbox account every fucking time you load a new game, save state, or load state. That's why you see it load EVERY TIME I MAKE A SAVE STATE in Oracle of Ages. I know WebRcade was made with love for retro games and out of passion for the people who play them (it's free), but it needs an update or something.
If I'm complaining about it, why am I using it? Because I'm a dumbass. I originally found WebRcade and thought the idea of it was neat and that the interface and editing of your "feed" was simple. I ended up making my own feed with a bunch of games. Admittedly, it is a stylish way to pick a game to play. I also liked how it supported a lot of different systems, and that most of them ran fairly well on my chromebook. I used it for a bit, and then figured I'd start the let's play of Oracle using it. What a fool. I really want to change emulators now, but I have found that no emulator accepts the exported save file I've retrieved from digging deep in the dropbox folder. Garbage. I even used the same emulator that the one in WebRcade is based off of: VBA - GBC.
The emulator overall is just missing a lot of things and is kinda a drag to use. You want a good "browser based emulator"? Try Emulator JS. I'll list the good things about WebRcade first:
- Runs most games on most systems surprisingly well, even if you have a slow computer
- The Feeds look pretty good once you add all the boxart and descriptions
- Easy to customize your own feed to how you want
- You can share your feed to all devices to experience the same thing, as well as have all your backups on all devices through dropbox
Now, the bad things:
- Cannot be used offline (as far as I'm aware)
- Requires external controllers or keyboard when playing games
- Dropbox link is required, and makes loading and saving very slow
- Missing key features like fast forward, shaders, cheats, etc.
- Only accepts certain file types for some ROMS (namely CHD for all the cd ones)
- If you aren't using dropbox, you must manually put a link to all your games from an external source. (good luck doing this for thousands of games lol)
That last one is why it's "cloud based". In summary, if you want to play emulators using your browser, (which is what I must do since I do not have a PC) use Emulator JS or something like that.
On top of having to deal with WebRcade, the videos are also shitty because my chromebook is shitty. It constantly lags when I try to record and can barely handle editing the video together. The game audio is often not in sync with my voice because it just shifts when I'm recording for some reason, and I cannot fix that.
To end this really long post, I'm sorry the videos haven't been the best. I'll try to fix them as I go on and I will continue to upload regardless. Before they were honestly okay, so I don't know what happened. My computer is slowly dying on me I guess.
Today I remembered that Google has their own blogging service (Blogger) where you can post and edit blogs of your own for free! It reminds me of Miiverse.... with only one person posting on it. I've always loved the idea of blogs, and reading through them is just so interesting. Whether it's the casual conversational tone, the amusing stories, or the pictures, the charm is always there.
I figured I would make my own blog to go along with my YouTube channel as sort of another form of communication besides videos. The ability to post longer and text-based things will be new and different. (I know there are posts you can make on YouTube, but Blogger is better for longer things and it keeps it organized) I may post updates, game info, or just random rants.
If I don't end up abandoning this, then it could be a really neat compliment to my channel.
You will always be able to comment, and I probably will respond to them as well.
Look for a new post soon, probably tomorrow.
