State of the Skeleton 8/15-8/19: Ouya Video Game Nerd

Hello Skele-friends!

Sorry we weren’t able to get the State of the Skeleton out last week.

Grace has been struggling a lot lately. It’s nothing serious but she is seeing a specialist later this week and hopefully will be “in the system” and hopefully won’t have to wait several months for follow-ups (hopefully). And then I had family visiting who came over one evening and then needed a ride to the airport another evening. It's always nice to see family but no matter how hard you try it always affects the work week, doesn’t it?

But we did have a pretty productive week! Of course we recorded our Podcast on Monday, but outside of that, we’re in the middle of the best part of the creative process, just researching and scheming. The Crash Nitro Kart 3D video is currently being worked on (expecting a draft later this week) and while that’s going on, we have some time with nothing directly in front of us. Grace spent basically the whole week cataloging all the Ouya we have available to us, playing games, and capturing footage. We have over 100 games! Need to know if we’re sitting on some rare, delisted garbo or not! Grace has also been working with our frequent collaborator Cass on reworking the exhaustive breakdown she wrote for her blog, Bad Game Hall of Fame. Cass helped with the writing and research on N-Gage and Zeebo videos (just to name a few), and she happened to have already written about the Ouya, so it just made sense to have her on board with our Ouya project. Grace was also working on a Doom 3DO story that, we found out this weekend, was scooped by people actually close to that project. We’ll maybe have more to say about that later?

I, on the other hand, had a lot of fun bicycling between multiple projects! Crash Nitro 3D ballooned into a huge project and it was the only thing I was really able to work on for weeks. I much prefer having two projects at once, working on one before lunch and the other, further-along-project after lunch. But I actually found myself juggling three videos - Doom PS1, every Zeebo game review, a little HVGN 15th Anniversary project. The Zeebo game review video is going to be a huge project and the Doom PS1 is not. It’s just about the last Doom ports video we have left and since it’s my personal favorite version of Doom, working on it has been just about the opposite of work. Zeebo PW is also gonna be fun, but it’s been too many giant videos this year so far, I need something smaller to work on in tandem.

My 15th year anniversary of making youtube videos is a week from when I’m writing this, August 29th. The HVGN project has so far been more about compiling and collecting all my old HVGN stuff. One of my old harddrives is failing, but the old DVD files are safe thankfully. This has been an after-hours project for me. I’m not even sure if there’s going to be a huge interest in my “cringe years”, typically when we throw it back to my pre-SSFF days, it under performs. But this is just a personal thing I’ve been thinking about doing for a while now.

And that was basically our week last week! And then I played a ton of Dragon Quest 11 this weekend, and Grace played a ton of Cult of the Lamb! And then I took her out to dinner at a little Thai restaurant by the beach because it’s Birthday! But that’s it for now, we’ll be back with another update this Friday!

Stay Powerful,
Uncle Derek