Archive for the ‘Atomic Mesa’ Category

Fighting Games, Life, and Video Games.

Thursday, March 20th, 2014

I haven’t updated here in forever, have I? I guess now is as good as a time as any.

I entered in the local BlazBlue tournament in January. There weren’t that many entrants, but I am happy I came in third place. I’m sure I could have performed a whole lot better if I really focused on working on new combos. The combos I have seem to be holding me through pretty well, but I feel like I’m genuinely limiting my ability if I don’t learn anything new. Those combos that are in muscle memory are pretty well rooted in muscle memory. I think I just need to do something more than what I already have.

Another thing I really need is matchup experience. I have a lot of experience playing against Tyler’s Kokonoe. I have a bit of experience playing against Estevan’s Valkenhayn. I understand how a lot of the other characters work. I have about as much matchup experience as I do from playing online in previous iterations of BlazBlue. When I rolled in to the tournament, I’ve only seen Azrael in play from videos and Score Attack. Not a whole lot of experience otherwise. I locked up pretty good playing against Chavelo’s Azrael. I feel like I would’ve done better if I had more matchup experience, but hindsight is always 20/20.

The Atomic Mesa household hasn’t been streaming a whole lot lately. We did try something different in the past few months, though: we streamed a Vanguard card game tournament. It was a lot of fun, even though we were lacking in streaming gear at the time. The players thought it was an amazing idea, and they all really wanted to play for the stream. We had advertising on the Cardfight! Vanguard Facebook, and we actually had people in the chat discussing what was going on in the game. It was pretty successful! It was a unique experience for us, and I think we’ll be better prepared for stuff like that in the future.

Tyler has been really busy building and modding fight sticks lately. He recently built a custom Melty Blood stick for himself that came out quite amazing. He designed the art himself, put the stick together, and he even put LEDs into the stick. He went through the effort of programming the LEDs, and it paid off. The stick is quite amazing.

Besides the stick he built, he is also building me my waifu (Kuroneko) stick! He has put in so much effort making it perfect, and I am blown away with what he’s done so far. He’s put the entire thing together save for the wiring (we’re still waiting on the wiring harness to come in). I’ll have to post pictures of it once it’s finished–the work he’s done has exceeded my expectations and then some.

I think I would be doing more with things, but having two jobs has been taking up a lot of my time. I work eight hours a day for my main job, then I go home and get things done around the house, then I go and squeeze in however many hours of work for my second job (depending on how much stuff they have for me at the time). I barely have enough time to squish in gaming, much less a social life. Oh, and add going to the gym on a regular basis in there, and… free time? What’s that? I don’t understand what free time is anymore. I like being busy, sure, but maybe this is a bit much.

On the bright side, I have really been using my handwritten journals lately. I haven’t missed a day since I started seriously writing in the daily ones in January. I’ve almost filled my general journal, too. I’m trying to write more, even if it is about stupid stuff. I feel rusty (since all I really work on is formatting and editing these days), but I think I will eventually get a handle on things again.

Welp. I think that was a good start. Now to actually see if I can keep up on this thing…

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Streaming, Video Games, Streaming Video Games…

Tuesday, January 7th, 2014

Things have been going well in the Team AtomicMESA household. Since we moved to our new place, we hadn’t really done much in the way of streaming. Guess what, though? We’re starting to get back into it on a more serious level. YAY! This is pretty exciting stuff.

Tyler has been doing a lot of research into what we need to kick up our streaming setup a couple notches. We did get ourselves a new capture card (the AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable), and we’re looking into headsets and a mixer. I definitely like the AVerMedia LGP much more than the Roxio Game Capture HD Pro that we were using before. We’re actually going to be streaming a Yu-Gi-Oh card game tournament next month, which will actually be pretty interesting. We’ve been testing our stream with the new BlazBlue: ChronoPhantasma, and it has been going pretty well. We’re also planning on streaming a DiveKick event at our house in the near future. Lots of fun stuff going on.

As mentioned above, we did get ourselves a Japanese copy of BBCP. Let’s just say that I’m… adjusting. Since the transition from Lambda to Nu, I have been suffering through relearning my combos. Sure, some of my combos still manage to work. Due to the the whole mode shift thing with Nu, I still need to adapt to this drastic change.

Pros: I’m zoning more! I tended to confuse people with the fact that I was a real heavy rushdown Lambda player (yeah, I know, it doesn’t make ANY sense). If I hit you, I would break your face in pretty good. If you hit me, well… I’m flimsy. And without any real zoning, I tended to get hit a lot more than not getting hit. With Nu’s Dia form, I was able to utilize her zoning abilities a lot more. Especially with characters like Kokonoe, I was able to keep myself safe. It’s like, I know how to USE these tools, but now they really play to my advantage. Or I just use these tools now, haha.

Cons: Those muscle memory combos aren’t always going to work if I’m in the wrong form. And that does tend to happen. And then I start getting lazy. And sloppy. And let me tell you about all these dropped combos. I’m still adjusting to the reduced hitstop. Which is not bad, let me tell you. The older BB games let me get away with sloppy inputs. This one? Not so much. I like it, though.

Besides fighting games, my world revolves around my 3DS. Which is actually kind of sad, seeing as we have both a PS4 and an Xbox One in our possession. The problem here is the lack of games for either system that we really want to play. On the 3DS, I’ve got Senran Kagura, Pokemon Y, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. Hell, on the Vita I’ve been getting back into Persona 4 Golden. Even though this is my third playthrough of P4, I’m still enjoying it as much as I have the first two times. I mean, I did beat Dead Rising 3 on the One, but come on. The other consoles are really getting most of my love.

We’ve got a local fighting game tournament coming up this upcoming Saturday. Am I gonna enter? Probably. Am I going to do well? Who knows. I haven’t been practicing as much as Tyler has been (and his combos look way more solid than mine do). I guess we’ll see, though.

Woo! Lookit that. A sufficient update. I need to do this more often.

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Busy, Busy, Busy. Always Busy.

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

Goodness. I’ve wanted to post more, but I’ve been so busy with work and life.

There was a fighting game tournament in town recently, which was fun. I’m sure it would have been a lot more fun if I wasn’t as hung over as I was. The tournament made me realize that I need more practice. Have I been practicing since then? Not particularly, since I’ve been obsessively playing Borderlands 2. I really want to get back in to the swing of things, but it would help if I had more time.

I’ve been putting in late hours at works. I’ve had a lot of things to do there. I really do enjoy being a Technical Writer, especially for something I’m fascinated by like computer security. It’s hard to find time to do things when I have a full-time job, but it pays off. Literally.

There’s a lot of stuff planned for Atomic Mesa. I have some articles that I need to review, I need to actually post the article I wrote a while back, and my roommates and I are planning to do some Survival Horror streams in the spirit of the month of Halloween. I need to revamp the design of the website, too. Where in the world am I supposed to get all this time?

I should be posting something about my impressions of Borderlands 2 tonight. If I can get the time. ._.

Here’s to me getting back in to the swing of things.

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Posted in Atomic Mesa, Blogging, Fighting Games, Personal, Video Games | 2 Comments »

Adventures in WordPress

Monday, August 27th, 2012

Looks like I haven’t updated my blog in a little while.

There’s not all that much to report, really. I’ve been distracted from Persona 4 Arena (P4A) by a multitude of things such as Sleeping Dogs, Final Fantasy Theatrhythm, and In the Groove (ITG). I’m planning on running some combo practice today, and it’s possible that my roommate and I will be doing a P4A stream later tonight.

Anyways…

I decided to spruce up this blog a little bit more. Well, until I actually have the time to sit down and mess around with the settings. I changed the theme of the blog, and I took my introductory post and made it into a separate page. Woo! Look at that, progress!

I guess you can say I’m testing all these nifty features so that I can use the skills I get from here to further renovate the official project, Atomic Mesa. I don’t mind beating my own personal blog black and blue until I get things the way that I want them to be, but I want Atomic Mesa to look good once the official iteration gets rolling.

I have yet to look through more themes for this blog, but I think this one will do for now!

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Adventures into the World of Online Streaming

Monday, August 13th, 2012

As of Saturday, my friends and I now are well underway to getting our blog project set up. We purchased our domain name. set up a basic WordPress blog on the new site, and set up an email and social media for our project, too. I made everyone email addresses for the domain as well as accounts for the WordPress blog. It’s definitely a good place to start. A lot of work needs to be done, but I think just getting the project rolling is better than nothing.

One thing that our group has been excited about is setting up a Twitch.tv channel so that we can stream fighting games, Let’s Play footage, and other gaming related things. Tyler and I had been talking about getting an XSplit license for a while now, so we finally decided to break down and do it while we were on a roll with setting up our current project. XSplit is a streaming product that allows for multiple inputs, text overlays, and other nifty little features for when you’re streaming or recording video. This was definitely the kind of product we wanted to have if we were going to start streaming our Persona 4 Arena (P4A) games, besides all the other things listed above. I’ve heard good things from other people about XSplit, and it was also affordable for our group, too. So after we got all the blog stuff squared away, we wanted to see if we could get the whole streaming thing rolling. We already had got a lot of things done that day… what was a little more work?

Wow. What a mess of an adventure. It was all worth it, but man… it sure wasn’t easy.

Tyler went and purchased XSplit, and as soon as he sent his payment in… we weren’t able to access the website to download the software. Even though he rebooted his PC, the website still gave us errors that wouldn’t let us download the software. I was able to access the website on my MacBook Pro, but for some reason we weren’t able to pull anything up on his computer. Not exactly the best way to start things. Eventually, after a bit of waiting and running around and stressing out, we were able to download the software from the website..

After getting the software installed on Tyler’s computer, we wanted to run some basic tests to start getting stuff ready for streaming. He was able to get his PS3 connected to XSplit just fine. Our next goal was to see if we could get a webcam feed going as well. I already have an HD webcam, so I dug it out of my stuff. We plugged it in to his computer and…

…another headache.

For some reason, XSplit wasn’t recognizing my webcam as a camera. No matter what we did, we kept getting an error saying that there wasn’t a camera connected to the computer (even though it obviously was). Not only that, but when we were trying to get the webcam to work, XSplit kept crashing. Not only that, but once XSplit would crash, we weren’t able to force close the program. Tyler kept having to reboot his PC, and we still kept having the same issue.

This was looking more and more frustrating, and we all were starting to wonder if we just paid for something we wouldn’t really be able to use. Not a good feeling, let me tell you. It was entirely possible that we just had an incompatible setup, but we all didn’t want to think that.

After even more running around, we were able to get this issue resolved by downloading the drivers and software for the webcam (should have thought of this in the first place). We were able to get feed from both the PS3 and the webcam going on at the same time. Awesome. We connected the feed to the Twitch.tv account that we made, and then we started fine-tuning what will be our setup for the P4A streams we’ll do in the future.

It took a lot of work with Tyler fine-tuning the technical details of the stream (such as the bitrate) so that we would get the best quality stream with the least amount of lag. Not only that, but we were trying to find the best way to lay out the elements of the stream (webcam footage, game footage, and player name overlays). We were at it for a couple of hours, but eventually we found a decent setup that actually worked well enough for all of us.

We ended up having a livestream of us playing P4A, and we actually had a couple of viewers that weren’t just our own friends. We got the quality of the stream running at a satisfactory level, we had two webcams running at the same time (our final product will probably have three webcams running at the same time–a room cam and two individual player cams), and we were able to efficiently change player name overlays quite efficiently. Even though it took several hours to get an optimal setup, I think we managed quite well for our first stream test. For our first day, I was more than pleased with the results we managed to obtain.

The only issue that we’re working on fixing is audio from multiple inputs. I’m sure we’ll be able to do something about this in the near future.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this all turns out as we get better at what we do.

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