Let's Play: The 7th Guest

A while back, Good Old Games (www.gog.com) had a really good sale and I picked up a few games cheap including The 7th Guest and its sequel The 11th Hour. I played these games a long time ago, probably in 1999 or 2000, and really enjoyed them. In fact, I still own the original copies of them, but they unfortunately do not play on modern versions of Windows. GOG's versions do.

The 7th Guest

As I was playing The 7th Guest, I decided to finally take the next step and start making videos for YouTube. Turns out, Windows 10 and the Xbox app have a built-in Game DVR which works really well and I was able to record my gameplay footage for this game. As time allowed over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I started recording footage of me playing through the game and uploaded them to YouTube.

Here's the playlist with all 6 episodes: View Playlist

I learned a whole lot about recording and uploading during the making of this short series and I've re-watched my own content and can see a difference myself from the first video to the last. While the voice audio is better in the later episodes, it still has some room for improvement. With this game, there is no volume controls on the audio, so I couldn't really turn the game volume down to balance the mic better.

I also learned that I shouldn't just wing the episodes and that I need to prepare a little better before I start recording. There's a few too many long, awkward pauses at times.

My next plan for recording is to do Minecraft videos, specifically give a video tour of my Hyrule project. Unfortunately, I can't get the Game DVR to record Minecraft at all, so I'm looking at alternatives that don't completely drain the resources on my laptop. I tried recording full-screen at 1080 resolution with another screen recording software, but it's extremely laggy. I'm playing around with lower resolutions to find one that works. Maybe at some point I can upgrade to a more powerful rig if I decide to pursue YouTube heavier than the occasional video.

Anyways, I hope you guys take the opportunity to view the initial videos and future videos and leave comments or feedback.

Thanks, and catch you next time,
 - Ebi

Minecraft: Hyrule Project Continues in the Dark World

Hey guys! In the last post, which was forever ago now, I mentioned a setback where my Hyrule save became corrupted and I lost a ton of work in my Link to the Past Project. Well, I've recovered from that setback and I have picked it up again and have gotten back to work on it! In fact, I found the old schematic file I created in mcedit to copy the Light World into the Dark World.With that gem located, I basically pasted it back over the corrupted Light World and within a few minutes, hours of work was recovered. I then did the same thing on the Dark World level and began the process of modifying light into dark.

I began working in the center of the map by removing Hyrule Castle and forming the footprint of the Pyramid. I next moved south and have completed everything from the edge of the Swamp east to the edge of the map including the frozen Lake Hylia. I've moved north from the corner and am currently working on the area around the first dungeon. I've been taking care of the small caves and buildings as I've gone, but haven't done anything with the actual dungeons yet.

Progress in the Dark World

I don't have a lot of screenshots for the work done so far as the screenshot above actually covers most of what has been completed. Plus, I've been experimenting with screen recording software and it is my hope to put some videos on YouTube later on and give you an actual tour of the world from start to finish.

That's all I've got for you this time. Catch you later!

~ Ebi

A Setback and a Sky Factory

I'm so bummed out. My hard drive crapped out on me a few days back and I lost quite a bit of information. The greatest loss was my Legend of Zelda Link to the Past Hyrule build. Luckily, I had made a backup at the beginning of February, so not all is lost. What I did end up losing was all the progress I made in the Dark World, as well as the last chunk of work in the Light World after the Lost Woods. Guess I need to make backups more frequently...

On the plus side, I've also discovered ATLauncher which gives you one click backups of your saves. I've loaded the backup I had there and updated the world to 1.9. Well, I've got some work to re-do. Glad I have the screenshots though. That should make reproducing it smoother.

Speaking of ATLauncher, I've fallen in love with Sky Factory 2. In my world, I've done so much and I'm producing a stupid amount of resources and it all started with a tree and a dirt block. So much fun figuring everything out. Challenge wise, I've completed the Wood, Stone, Farming, Exploration, and Machine Ages and am working on the Age of Power and Age of Dragons and looking towards the Age of Insanity. I actually have a 1k by 1k Ender Quarry running in the Deep Dark already. That took a while to place... Anyways, here's a peek into my world:

An overview of my base. Monster spawning area on lower right, house in the center, max size reactor framed out, tainted soil room on left. The only thing not shown is another building with 5 blaze spawners (it's behind me).

The "processing" level. Just finished this up last night. It takes End Stone and Cobble Stone and grinds it down to Crushed End Stone, Gravel, Sand and Dust. Those are sieved down to produce Crushed Ores which get auto-hammered to Pulverized Ores which get auto-hammered to Powdered Ores which then get smelted into ingots. Very efficient and produces a ton of stuff.

A peek into my base. Nothing special, but it's "home". LOVE the Ultimate Furnace from Magical Crops.

Minecraft - Link to the Past Lost Woods

This post will finally finish off the tour of the Light World in my Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past Hyrule Build.

This makes the 11th post in my series of this project spanning 3 years (with massive gaps in between). To help you get caught up, here is the history:

• Project Start (Hyrule Castle) - March 2013
• Eastern Palace - August 2013
• Sewers and Sanctuary - September 2013
• Death Mountain / Tower of Hera - December 2013
• Zora's Domain / Lake Hylia - April 2014
• Swamp / Misc Updates - November 2014
• Wooded Area (Flute Boy's Grotto) - November 2014
• Desert Palace - December 2014
• General Progress Update - February 2016
• Kakariko Village - February 2016
• Lost Woods / Finishing Touches (this post) - February 2016

Now that that's over with, lets wrap this thing up and officially call the project "half complete".

Minecraft - Link to the Past Kakariko Village

Since my last post a few days ago, I've completed the entire Light World! Everything is built and in place from every tree, bush, cave, and building. The only things that remain are aesthetic touches like what you are able to see from certain viewpoints. The prime example is being on top of Death Mountain and looking around the world, you can see past the "boundaries" of the map to the blank outside world. I'm working on creating natural looking structures (mountains, fields, etc) outside that to blend it out and/or hide it. I'm really putting a lot of effort into making the world feel "real".

But for now, I'm going to leave you with two more posts. The first one, this one, will give a tour of Kakariko Village. The next post to follow will cover the Lost Woods and remaining areas as well as a few of the finishing touches I've done on the Light World. So without further ado, I present my take on Kakariko Village.

The southern end of town.

We'll start at the south and make out way north. One of the biggest challenges with the entire world is the elevations. Taking a 2D game into 3D has been a huge challenge and I've done my best to make the elevation differences work. For this area, I wound up dropping the entire space down into a valley just so I could create the ramps back up into the main village. I believe it worked well enough.

A game of chance perhaps?

House of the quarreling brothers.

Race to the Heart Piece.

Some light reading in the library.

Moving up into the village, lets start at the Blacksmith's House. I had to be extra careful around this house to insulate it because of the lava in their furnace. I think it turned out great and I like using cobwebs as smoke coming from the chimney.

The Blacksmiths' House.

The Blacksmiths' House.

And of course, the caves under their house are there complete with the shrine to "curse" your magic.

Moving into the village itself, I spent a lot of time detailing it out as much as possible. In one of my earlier posts, I said I had to "stretch" the world to fit the full-size castle in place. For Kakariko, that greatly worked to my advantage. Where I normally did the world in as close to a 1:1 ratio as possible, the village itself is 2:1. This allowed all the houses to be decorated internally in a way that fits their size without making them feel cramped. I really like how this scale turned out. Looking inside the tavern (below) is a prime example of the amount of detail I was able to achieve.

The Tavern and surrounding space.

Inside the Tavern.

Grass filled yard.

The cave in the northwest.

Inside the northwest cave.

So there you have it, my rendition of Kakariko. I didn't post a screenshot inside every house, but you can get the idea from the ones I did post. Next time, we'll move on into the Lost Woods.

Minecraft - Hyrule from Link to the Past Update

It's been almost 3 years since I started my Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Hyrule Build in Minecraft. I pretty much stopped working on it for a very long time, but recently have picked it back up again to try and finish it. Quite a bit of the places around the Light World have been updated or modified slightly since I originally started as my methods and design ideas have changed over time. Plus, when 1.8 came out, I gained a whole new set of blocks to play with that made a lot of areas just look better.

The Light World as it currently stands.

My last status post was almost a year ago and I covered the Desert Palace. Since then, as you can see in the screenshot above, I have moved north from there and finished Kakariko Village and the Lost Woods. All that is left in the Light World is the strip from the wood cutter's hut down to the blacksmith's house and the Light World will be complete according to the original layout. I still have some aesthetic cleanup to do around Death Mountain and Zora's Domain to blend or create the background and try to make it appear more natural.

When I started doing this, I didn't have the most powerful computer and my render distances were low. On newer hardware with a high distance, the flaws around the edges show a lot more, so I have a little cleanup work do do now.

Once the Light World is complete, the plan is to put MCEdit to the test and see if I can copy/paste the entire map into the Dark World below. As I explained in my first post, I created a custom super flat map that consists of two "worlds" on top of each other. The Dark World is the first 150 blocks and the Light World is the second 150 blocks.

I'm in the process of taking more screen shots, so look for detailed updates on Kakariko and the Lost Woods soon.

Download Link?
I've had several people ask for a download link. I do eventually plan on doing just that and releasing it to the wild, but for now, I want to keep it until it's finished. Since the Dark World mirrors the Light World in so many ways, creating it should not take nearly as long to complete as it will mostly be "done" as soon as I paste it in and switch the grass to Mycelium.

Goodbye Old School Consoles - Round 3

Another round of games to sell has come and gone with most of the eBay auctions ending this weekend. This one, as expected, proved the most personally difficult so far as it contains many of my most memorable and favorites games. Round 3 was the Nintendo 64.

One thing I will say, however, is that this is not a complete sell-off of everything like the NES and SNES games were. I plan on keeping my N64 with some of my most-favorite games as I have a couple of friends who are interested in getting together and playing some of the old games. But still, I had the most amount of games from this generation than any other and the majority of them could go.

The complete collection of games that I'm selling.

The above image is of all the games I am selling. There were a few that I only sold because I have the same game on a later version. I have the HD version of Banjo Kazooie and Tooie on the Xbox 360 and I have Diddy Kong Racing on the Nintendo DS. Beyond that, the Turok games were the ones I debated about the most. These games were a lot of fun to play back in the day and have actually aged pretty well when I was play testing them to make sure they still worked. There is also Conker's Bad Fur Day and the only reason I'm selling this game is because I somehow wound up with two copies of it. I'm keeping the copy that has my completed game on it and selling this one.

So, what do my 'customers' consider the gem of the batch? Believe it or not, it's Mario Party 3. This one game sold for more than I ever expected it to. In fact, it's sold for more than any other game so far from any console. When I saw that, I was genuinely shocked. The only game I have left that stands a chance of topping it is Bad Fur Day (which ends this evening and is currently only $13 behind what Mario Party sold for).

Moving forward beyond this point, it's a lot of miscellaneous games from pretty much everything. I've got a good stack of PS2 games which I'm only selling because I have the HD version on PS3. I have a couple of PS3 games, some Gamecube games, a good stack of PC games and other various gaming items. I've looked into the value of what I have and I can say the highlights of my collection have already been sold. The newer stuff isn't worth as much as the older, but I also don't feel like holding onto them for another 15 years to see if their value goes up.

Looking past the actual games, I'll be moving into my collection of Nintendo Power magazines. I started subscribing near the beginning of the SNES era and stopped when the Wii was at it's peak. It's a lot of magazines that, like these old games, are just sitting there taking up space in my shed.

Thanks for reading and I'll catch you next time.
 

• Banjo Kazooie
• Banjo Tooie
• Diddy Kong Racing
• Cruis'n USA
• Mario Party 3
• Turok Dinosaur Hunter
• Turok 2 Seeds of Evil
• Turok 3 Shadow of Oblivion
• Turok Rage Wars
• Star Wars: Shadow of the Empire
• Forsaken 64
• Pilotwings 64
• Shadowgate 64
• Shadow Man
• Conker's Bad Fur Day
• Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
• NFL Blitz 2000
• Dr. Mario 64
• Body Harvest
• Wipeout
• Hybrid Heaven
• Mission Impossible
• Nuclear Strike 64