Let's Play - Singularity

Best looking video we have done yet.

In retrospect I guess I should have tested recording conditions in my new house before Mat and I jumped into this game. Luckily, everything seemed to work out.

Namhae Part II

Hi everyone! Sorry for being so late on my posts. I'm taking a course on teaching ESL. For each module I have to read a bunch of things, watch some videos, take a test, and then write an essay. I try to do this every week, so it keeps me pretty busy. Anyway, here is the next part of my Namhae series.

Part II

The following day proved to be even more eventful than the previous one. We had set aside this day to visit two spots: a Buddhist temple high on a mountain and a small village next to the sea. My friend Anthony had been to the latter place before and he was eager to show it to me. But first off, we decided to see the temple. So we got in our car and off we went.

Buddhist temples are usually found around mountains, either at their foot or anywhere along the slope. (I used to think they were always at the top, but I have seen just as many at the bottom of a mountain as at the top. Many of them seem to be on or near a mountain, though.) This place of worship (and meditation, I guess) was at the very top of a very high mountain. Now, normally one would have to hike to the top, a pilgrimage of sorts which ultimately ends with the splendor and peace of the temple surrounding you. But we had a car so we drove up instead.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t drive ALL the way up to the top. They made us park about a mile or so from our destination and we had to walk the rest of the way. It was a little cool out when we made the walk. (Not cold by any stretch, but cool.) The sky was a dark gray and mist covered most of the landscape, which hardly mattered because a mass of trees covered both sides of the road, obscuring whatever view we might have had.

Then we started to climb. Not a sharp climb, but a slow, gradual swell that went on for about a hundred yards. Upon reaching the top of this gentle slope, we discovered a break in the trees to our right, and beheld this view of the land below us.

Unfortunately, the mist kept on rolling in at times, obscuring our view. However, when it abated slightly we were offered a wonderful view of the island below, including the bay we saw the previous day while drinking coffee.

(The dark green areas in the picture are trees. The light green areas are rice fields.)

After enjoying this wonderful location for several minutes, we continued down the path that would ultimately lead us to the temple. It wasn’t too long before we ran into an open area. The dirt road we were on gave way to a well-paved area made up of cut stone. There was a gift shop to one side in this area, which I entered to buy a little Buddhist bracelet for myself (and which I later gave to my brother. I mean, why would a devout Catholic wear a Buddhist bracelet?) The side opposite the gift shop was completely clear, and offered a wondrous view down the mountain…or would have if not for the thick fog. (Seriously, I could not see a foot forward, even leaning over the safety rail a bit. Just a wall of grayish-white.)

Once we finished looking around this area, we headed to the side opposite from where we had entered. There we found a set of stones stairs leading down, which we followed.

The way down the stairs was beautiful. The side to our left was covered in trees, with a bamboo fence keeping the growth off of the stairs. The side to our right was pretty much a wall of rock with some trees here and there. It was very nice to walk down. (And obviously fairly new. I figured that they got enough tourists visiting the temple to be able to afford to keep everything in pretty good shape.)

After continuing down the stairs for a little ways, we finally reached the temple. And I have to say that it was well worth the trip.




The large carved out stone in the center of the picture was a water fountain. We used blue scoopers to get ourselves a nice refreshing drink before exploring the place more fully.

The temple grounds were made up of several buildings, an open area, and the monks’ sleeping areas (which were up the mountain a little bit and we were not allowed to enter.) The buildings were all near the entrance we had come in and they appeared to all be places where people worshipped. They were old but in good shape; it was obvious that they were well taken care of. We actually arrived in the middle of …I guess “service” is the best word I can think of for it. Many people were meditating while a monk sang and drummed on something.

Since we did not want to interrupt anything, we decided to move over to one side, where there was an open area filled with gravel and various statues. But before we got there, we found something that all of us found quite amusing.

I suppose even monks need to make telephone calls from time to time. It was still funny to see something like this in a temple on top of a mountain, though. We dubbed the site “Buddha’s Phone Booth” and moved along.

Past this point and up a few stairs was the open area I mentioned earlier. The area had a drop off on the far side of the stairs. I can only imagine what view it might have given in good weather. We ended up looking around here for quite a bit.

On top of the big rock to the left of the entrance were many prayer beads and a few plastic figures of monks. I understood the significance of the rosaries, but I still don’t know why the little cartoonish figurines were there, nor who put them there. I guess it could have been the monks, but I wondered why they would put things like that there instead of something a little more pious, especially in an area used for prayer and meditation.

We looked around a little more after leaving this area, but didn’t do or see anything worth noting, really. I can tell you that monks apparently like cats, because there were fair amounts roaming about, always keeping their distance from us. We tried to coax a few to come closer, but didn’t have much luck.

After (unsuccessfully) trying to play with the cats, we decided to go back down the mountain. But before we did that, we had to go back up those stairs. Along the way up, I took one more picture worth talking about.

I had noticed this coming down the stairs, but took further note of it on the way back up. The wall of rock to one side of the stairs did not go straight up and down. It slanted a little up, and there were little ledges in it all over the place. On top of that, pieces of the wall had broken off in many places, leaving big slabs of rock lying on the ground. On many of these ledges and rocks we could see little pile of stones which were obviously meticulously placed. I asked my friend Anthony what these were, and he explained it to me. Apparently, those piles of stones were put there by people going to the temple. It was a meditation exercise. Practitioners would take some rocks and focus on building these little towers with them. They would build one as high as they could and then stop if it began to fall over. After they were finished, the little piles were left there. I suppose they would get knocked over eventually, but no human hands seemed to touch them after they were finished. I found that very interesting.

After we got off the mountain, we went back to my friend’s house, where we had lunch and rested for a little while. Then we headed out for our next destination: a small village next to the sea. Out of all the places I visited on this trip, this one was the most beautiful.

And you’ll hear all about it next time, so be sure to check in again!

PS: I'll post the next chapter of this as quickly as I can, but it will probably take a while with my classes and all. Please be patient!

Darkness 2 Demo

720p! To keep the files clean and wonderful, I had to split it into three parts to keep them under the YouTube file size limit. Everything looks great, but I am not sure how well the sound sync was in part 2.

The demo is pretty fun too. It looks like a nice step up from the first game and the level up system is making excited. I will pick it up once it is at $30 to $40.

I can't wait for the move to be over and we can get back to making LP videos.

New Video!

I can grantee that you will have as much fun watching this video as you will playing this demo. Somehow, this is not a bad thing.

Thanks to a mistake the video is only in 480p. Future videos will be in 720p.

HD PVR - The Passion

Here is Pat's interesting story dealing with his new HD PVR.

1. Settings on the Xbox 360

I was really excited about finally getting an HD TV and the PVR. So much so, that I just plugged in both and starting capturing footage like a fool. As you can see, this footage looks like crap, is in 4:3 and there is a terrible sound delay. I am sure most people know this by now, but if you plug a 360 in an HD TV, you have to manually set what resolution you want the system to run at.

I set the 360 to 1080p, but things when crazy on the TV. Lowering down to 720p fixed the video issue.

2. Sound still f'ed

The footage is clean. So clean that I want to eat off of it.

Anyway, the sound was still an issue. My first idea was to see if I could adjust the sound in post, but the .mp4 files created by the HD PVR were treated as corrupt files by Corel X4. I have edited plenty of .mp4 files in that program before so I was rather pissed off about this new challenge.

My new theory was to try and dump the .mp4 files into my laptop's Windows 7 based Movie Maker. I convert the raw .avi created by our EASY CAP in Movie Maker so I hoped it would work the same magic here. It worked, but I am not going to post that footage. It was in 4:3 and looked like crap.

I only had one more idea...

3. Well that worked


I used the capture program that came with the HD PVR to produce a .avi version of the capture footage. My hope was that this new file would be in HD and would work with Corel X4. 1.5 GBs later and it turns out I have a beautiful file that opens in Corel and does not have the sync issues.

You can hear/see it fix the issue during the silent moment at the start of the video.

Get ready for some awesome HD content from the CLBL in the weeks/days to come!

Let's Play - Year One in Review - Part 1

During a moment of illness in the hours before seeing Thor in 3D, Pat and Mat decided to start doing Let's Play videos. Actually, back then the idea was to do a series called "Beating Our Childhood" with bag full of very good and very bad SNES games. The basic idea was that we would play a random game until we beat it or it beat us. It was a fun idea...

Unfortunately, the capture device we had at the time couldn't handle footage from the SNES. In a nutshell, the SNES isn't in 4:3 device and its bizarre aspect ratio was poison. We could have quit. We almost did.

Then we plugged in the Dreamcast, booted up NesterDC and loaded Mega Man 1.

Rockman? I guess no one is going to think we were using a real NES. This was bad news because one of our main goals was to capture footage off a real console. At least the Dreamcast is real.

Rockman was a real lesson for us and in retrospect it seems really silly that we thought anyone would watch 3 failure episodes in a row. Editing is our friend and Fire Man is bullshit.

Want another fun fact? It took almost an hour to kill Doctor Wily. We almost gave up.

We weren't so lucky with our 2nd game and 1st failure, Castlevania.

We couldn't beat Death. Well, Mat beat death, but it happened weeks later and the camera wasn't recording the correct console. Castlevania is our white whale and I promise that we will kill it one of these days.

Castlevania was when we got our first comment. Someone thought we were funny.

Mega Man II was a different story. We butchered that game. Well, Mat killed that game.

Pat did kill a dragon and this rare one sided LP created our new set of rules about when we pass the controller. Too bad this new rule wasn't really needed.

We may have started Rock Man III: The Battles of Senior Mega Man with arrogance, but we ended it as broken men. That game beat the crap out of us and gave birth to the "music over sped up failed gameplay" thing that we do so well.

This was also the last game before our original capture device turned on us and started producing busted footage. Top Man kept us safe!!!!

Our other White Whale, the Whiter Whale was Faxanadu. The footage was clean, but this game was stopped by multiple issues.

The first time was stupid. We didn't record the audio. We have a pile of audio of us talking between takes. The second attempt went great, but we broke the damn game. No joke, Pat suggested how to break it and then he broke it. What an impulsive asshole.

Who knows when our heroes will return?

Come back next time for More Mega Mans, Fighting Games and a Double Deadly Failure...

Let's Play Mega Man X2

Here is the playlist embed for the Mega Man X2 LP. New episode everyday.

Episode #1 - Posted 01/04/2012 - Watch Now

Episode #2 - Posted 01/05/2012 - Watch Now

Episode #3 - Posted 01/06/2012 - Watch Now
Episode #4 - Posted 01/08/2012 - Watch Now
Episode #5 - Posted 01/09/2012 - Watch Now
Bonus - Coming Soon!
Episode #6 - To be filmed