Update on upcoming videos, and audio from one of them! (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Just figured it had been a little while since I'd posted here to keep you all abreast of channel happenings. 

In short, I'm working on a lot of stuff right now. The audio above is the voiceover for a script I made that's kind of about a lot of things—started off as a means of doing bite-sized coverage of multiple games I've been wanting to talk about but struggling to find the time, and then kinda morphed into a video about not only why we feel the need to finish games, but the nature of covering them and how that can affect one's enjoyment of them. One of those fun projects that you have an idea for but shifts around as you make it. 

I talk about Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy 16, Street Fighter 6 and the remaster of We Love Katamari—no spoilers for any of them. The video portion will be coming soon (unsure yet whether I want to keep it exclusive to patrons or post it on the main channel) but the audio is here for you now if you want a podcast-style experience. This post isn't going to be charged!

As for stuff in the pipeline, I have a big video about a Very Cool Thing I Can't Talk About Yet going up very soon, which I'm working on alongside a much larger project. Indeed, after the Armoured Core video was so rewarding, I decided to continue that format for another series that, coincidentally, also happens to abbreviate to AC.

That's right, The Ace Combat Series: A (Relative) Newcomer's Journey is in the works! The reason I put "(Relative)" in the title is because I have actually played a couple of the games—namely, I played the hell out of the first game as a kid (the one titled Air Combat) and I actually reviewed 7 back at that game's release. Since that review I'd found myself fascinated that the fairly straight-ahead Top Gun-esque arcade action of the first game had apparently spiralled into this whole narrative universe with lore stretching back to the 1100s, so I'm using this project as an excuse to try and fill in those blanks—going through every main entry and charting its evolution both mechanically and narratively. 

It's a very exciting project that's been a lot of fun to work on so far (god what a great series), but as you can imagine, it's going to be a pretty beefy video at the end of all this—potentially eclipsing even the Armoured Core video in sheer length. I'm not even through all the games yet and just the notes I have alone are rivalling the full Armoured Core script in word count. So yeah, aiming for early next month with that one. Hope you're as excited as I am.

On top of that, I have actually been revisiting a bunch of older projects in various stages of completion, and finding that a lot of them just needed me to take a bit of a break from them to come back with fresh eyes. Sleeping Dogs, Mad Max, HBO The Last of Us, etc., are all closer to completion than I thought, so expect some fun stuff there in the coming weeks. 

So yeah, thanks for indulging me on this little update. I feel bad not posting regularly, but this year in particular has involved a bit of stepping back and figuring out what I find fun and rewarding about the videos and trying to really hone in on that. These bigger projects aren't going to replace the shorter videos, but they are proving to be a lot of fun, and I'm finding I can actually work on them pretty sustainably as opposed to feeling like I need to keep whipping up shorter videos constantly. 

Your support is what allows me to keep doing this and I seriously cannot thank you enough for that. The channel just hit its 8th birthday the other week, and 6 of those years I've been doing this full time thanks to you. That means more to me than you can possibly know. Lot of cool stuff coming soon and I hope you're as excited as I am. Enjoy! 

Thanks again,

Hamish

Writing on Games