Home Page Forums MAME MAME MAME - A 2022 Retrospective

Finally managed to get my second video done, and in "only" 2 months this time...

[video:youtube][/video]

Awesome video! Very well edited and presented.

The shaders looked great, the title cards do a good job breaking up the chapters without staying around too long, and the random little graphics (the Falcos, LOL) were great. The before-and-after shots were nice too. The one weirdness I saw is that the Spectrum 8 Series III Mac stuff trailed off a bit awkwardly. I'd have bumped the narration of each feature to correspond to when it was shown instead of just listing them all and then showing them all. But this is a massive polish upgrade from the Polygonet video, which was already great.

When it comes to the SuperMac cards, I was very much in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation: The narration was full of spots where I could reasonably slice sentences and separate them in time, but if I'm saying three sentences that are all related, my tone of voice tends to join them together. It sounds super weird to add 5-10 seconds in between each sentence like that.

I did something like that in Polygonet when I was listing off some of Konami's notable games, and it was very obvious that I had listed them off in a single sentence and then inserted gaps.

A lot of those hinky little problems arise because I tend write the script, record the vox, then build the video up around it. I wasn't expecting the SuperMac footage to be as long as it was, and that's even with the before/after for spec8s3 and specpdq sped up to 300%.

The funny thing to me is that I tend to find the Polygonet video to be the more well-done one - I didn't have the energy to re-record a line where I said "2005" instead of "2015", I missed inserting the title text layer for Valkyrie no Densetsu, and in general the content is dry as a bone. It was a struggle to find very many gags to throw in, but I still managed.

I'm still waiting a few days to see if anyone catches a couple of them, so far nobody's mentioned a couple of my favorites.

Was calling the guy with a mustache but no beard "beard guy" a gag? :-)

No, that was straight-up me not accurately remembering the exact image when I was writing the script.

I really do appreciate seeing before/after videos, as I often don’t see all the improvements in action even if I’m having to choose some of them to call out every month. I watch the Bob Zed videos as well to see what stuff looks like. I didn’t find it dry at all – I struggle trying to ensure the executive summaries for release announcements aren’t overly dry. (Yeah, I know I saw quite a few things featured in this particular video, as I was either involved in implementing them, or went looking for them to help out with ideas for the video.)

After watching it again, the only real niggle for me is that the title cards kind of obscure the visibly changed part of the video for Dragon Breed (the status bar at the bottom of the screen) and CEC I (the IME control line, also at the bottom of the screen). Like everyone else, I liked the two Falcos, and Stephen Wilber jumping over the robots is so representative of the cheesiness of Time Traveler. I liked the little jokes, “…the machine’ll end up playing you…” etc.

Yes, in retrospect I most likely should have done for Dragon Breed and CEC I what I did for Top Roller; if you compare Top Roller to Field Combat, you'll notice that I boosted the lower chyrons upward in order to not obscure the status bar, which is where the fix was.

By this past Monday, I just wanted to get the damn thing out of the door, and it still ended up dragging for another 24 hours past that point.

I get the feeling one of the gags is the selection of "background" music playing behind a particular segment, but I haven't put my finger on one yet .

Really really nice video. It instills a sense of progress for *both* casual users and nerds alike.

Only somewhat.