The Cafe of Madness

[davidn]

I am ever hopeful that the effects left in the wake of this game will eventually wear off, but last night I saw Fatboy Slim riding a huge inflatable octopus that had swallowed a bus, looking like he was piloting some sort of horrific land-stalking war robot from the distant future. So I think I have some time left to go before pulling myself free of the abyss yet.

Given that as a starting point - have another episode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyiekqZQylo

We were really getting comfortable with the game's mood here and all of us have some fantastic improvisations in this episode, whether accidental or deliberate - it's my favourite one out of the collection yet! Selected highlights, as much as I can highlight anything in this without colouring the whole video in noxious yellow:

0:22 Let's go to Japan!
0:52 Ravenworks causes producer breakdown #1
1:07 Birdwatching
1:22 Casting decision
2:53 I am called...!
3:30 Humans in a bird cafe
3:46 Do not tempt, annoy or provoke this game
4:04 800 vitality!
5:50 Moving in
7:20 Sophisticated as hell
7:50 Sad beaks
8:30 Ryouta's exit
9:10 Sensational arrival of the Texas accent
9:40 Not that kind of restaurant
10:45 Assessment of the Texas accent
11:00 I can die happy
11:25 The inevitable and the reaction
12:50 Punkgeon confrontation
14:35 Ostracized? What?
14:55 Hunter-gatherer instincts
15:45 Self-censoring punkgeons
16:35 Speak softly and...
17:15 Into the sunset!
18:10 Glued to a lorry
19:25 Cultural note
19:55 A violin
20:45 Luca Turilli lyrics

Mutations in the cast list, in order of insanity:

ravenworks: Anghel and the Punkgeons (or Bebop from the Ninja Turtles)
its_a_trap: Our increasingly extraordinary narrator Teo, Azami
kjorteo: Rabu the Texan budgerigar
davidn: Video producer in charge of going mad, Dapper bird with awfully long Japanese name
xaq: Ryouta and additional comments!

Comments

[kjorteo]

The Kenzaborou rename has to be one of the best decision this team has yet made (and, with the exception of letting me anywhere near the Rabu voice, we've made quite a lot of outstanding ones...!) I swear, something about Kaye's bashful submissive Teo voice asking "Mister McBeaks...?" just got me every single time.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

As much as I enjoyed singing, I'd have to say the Punkgeon scene was definitely my favorite. Raven's follow-up on my ad lib was just too perfect.

[premchaia_pre4]

I observe! *puts on wide-brimmed hat and headbobs at Rabu*

Those names aren't as long as they look; Japanese has very restrictive phonology and so the moraic tempo can be pretty fast. But you knew that.

Also xaq needs to stop clipping, but you knew that too.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

I need to do what now? (Sorry, the only thing that term brings to mind is "going outside the map of an FPS." )

[premchaia_pre4]

Clipping! Raising gain and raising Cain, sustaining sound beyond bound of the jacks; it comes back and attacks those who hear it, they fear being nipped by clips eclipsing the True Time-Domain Turning of burning Fourier components, waves shaved 'til they bleed and make eardrums recede and recoil and boil, no toil can reform the cuttings of bits, the stuttering twits of Language Lost to Liminal Loudness Levels…

Which is to say, stop overloading your microphone input overloading ravenworks's microphone input using your mystic powers (whether this actually happens there or at the sound card or somewhere later in the processing chain I can't readily know, especially since I don't know eir hardware and software setup). Usually this means there's a maladjusted volume control somewhere. There should be software meters available to tell where the limit is being hit. You can determine which parts are clipping very easily if you listen to the relevant bits of the audio in the videos davidn's been putting up.

(Bwahahahaha, no one will notice me retroactively correcting things!)

[premchaia_pre4]

Except that I now think I may have mixed you up with ravenworks, in which case never mind. I can't tell you people apart!

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay.

Well, the easiest way to tell us apart is that Raven's mic makes his voice a bit clearer than mine. The easiest point to demonstrate that is the "Ostracized? What?" The "What? WHAT?! You little..." bit is Ravenworks, the "No, seriously, what does that mean?" is me.


EDIT: Listening to that section again (because it cracks me up so much), I can kinda understand the mix-up.

[kjorteo]

What really threw me off for a while there is that you each have two characters, and you each voice your two characters distinctly from each other but similarly to one of the other person's characters. Specifically, I actually thought you were Okosan and Anghel and Raven was Ryouta and Yuuya for a while, there, because your Ryouta sounds a lot more like his Yuuya than it does your Okosan (and his Anghel sounds more like your Okosan than it does his Yuuya.)

Agreed that he should probably look into the clipping/max volume issues if he's going to keep playing Anghel, though.

[davidn]

I honestly didn't even notice a problem apart from on that very first Anghel line - where all our eardrums took a while to recover! Throughout the rest of the video I thought it was fine...

To answer... something somewhere in this thread, the only thing I really do in these videos is go through, make sure the audio and video are synchronized and take out any breathing noises if they mask other people's lines (I think that everyone else is filtered by Google Hangouts, my microphone channel is the one that I need to alter the most... unless it's actually just my microphone, and I subject you to all of that during the meeting). I only have two audio channels, though, "me" and "everyone else and the game music", which makes any corrective alterations to anyone else... well, impossible, at my end.

[davidn]

Nine syllables is still quite long for a name no matter how fast you can fire them off!

I did not notice any particular clipping issues from Xaq.

[premchaia_pre4]

I shouldn't be trying to tell you folks apart when I'm half-asleep! The problem is that that's most of the time. I think I meant ravenworks.

I also get loopy and make bad decisions.

[kjorteo]

His name is Dapperkeet McBeaks! You can't stop us.

[premchaia_pre4]

McBeaks Dapperkeet it is, then.

[kjorteo]

... Yes. Yes, that it is.