Stumbling together through Unreal Tournament 3 - Part 1

[davidn]

I'm opening another Stumbling Through, which if all goes to plan, I'll do alongside a new Team Hatoful project! This one is a small change of pace from Super Metroid to a game about flying through space shooting each other with big guns - it's Unreal Tournament 3, and rakarr and I are going through the cooperative mode together. (It's still an old game, though - it came out six years ago. Frightening, isn't it?)

It's probably one of the very few cooperative videos around over the past six years because I didn't realize at first the Unreal Tournament 3 requires a degree in network engineering to get it to run - I was hunting through masses of config files to set it up how we needed it, and I install distributed medical software as part of my job so I'm used to doing that to set things up, but I forgot that... games aren't usually like that. Now I see why, despite being a great sequel to the UT99 at heart, the game never really took off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-TfGGzrnDw
Doing a cooperative play introduced its own unique editing challenges, and super-professionally, the style of this video changes halfway through - we didn't do this for every match, but going forward with the series, I'll be putting his view inset on my own where we have it. But at least here you can watch the completely unnecessary introduction, followed by us finding our feet against the computer-controlled tutorial-bot and later ally Jester.

Comments

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

It definitely has, and it's been very fun to boot. I would probably like to continue with people for a while before tackling my ambition of producing something solo, because it's much easier to work off others (with stand-up experience and rich accents) than it is to support a video all by yourself. And I'm not saying I don't think I can do it, just that, well, practice makes perfect. It's certainly a better route than just being too intimidated to try!

Besides, even if I accept my voice as heard outside my head won't bring a screeching halt to traffic, I'm still convinced - and there is actually some evidence for this - that some by some infernal trick of inflection I sound as dumb as a brick, and I'd like to get it together enough be able to adequately compensate for that. =D

I'm not fishing for a "No, you sound fine" or anything. I am actually pretty sure it's the case, and that it's something I need to be aware of so I can compensate for it. It might, of course, depend on the listener. Perhaps to a lot of people online I just sound generally Australian!

My boss used to think I was zoning out instead of listening to her, and at one time actually had the gall to ask me to repeat what she had said to me. Unfortunately I was too caught off guard to object on the basis that I wasn't, in fact, five years old, but it did at least teach me to pay more attention to my inflection and body language if I don't want to be misinterpreted.

On another note, every instance of killing myself or dying ignominiously was, of course, completely intentional and for the sake of showmanship.


(Reason for edited post: Obsessive-compulsive editing)

[davidn]

Ha, it's so weird thinking of myself as someone with stand-up experience, even if it is technically true :) Having someone else there definitely makes things easier and gives me more to talk about and respond to as well - though there are parts that you carry yourself! It took me a long time to be confident of my voice, and I hope that eventually you go through the same transformation that I did.

Even though I try to be conscious of accents, having a frequently confused one myself, I did think of you as having a generally Australian accent - is the Tasmanian one noticeably different from the mainland?

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

There are some different accents but it's not quite as diverse or as regional as in the UK. I haven't actually had a whole lot of experience with the mainland, but in my experience the accents don't differ greatly by area; it's more an individual or upbringing thing.

Except in Western Australia, where, in my transcription experience, 3/4 of the police officers all sound exactly identical and the other quarter are, bizarrely, Scottish.