I've always said that I would like to do more for Charity, I was just never sure how. I am not exactly great at running, and I am already known at work for wearing colourful shirts and ties so that wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary. I was walking past a bus stop one day around a month ago and I saw "Stand Up To Cancer" which I know is Channel 4's annual event - and at the bottom it said "Game On". I thought that sounded interesting, and had a little Google and there it was - my niche in charity fun raising. Playing video games!
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So I spitballed a couple of ideas, and settled on doing a 24 hour marathon, playing through the Dark Souls series and Pokemon Omega Ruby with a friend, hopefully ending on Bloodborne. This then developed into a 24 hour live stream in the shed/cabin in the back garden as to not disturb anyone. First we had to get the miracle of the internet into the shed, which at first seemed quite simple, we had a 30ft ethernet cable which reached from the shed nearly all the way to the back of the house. Got another 30ft cable which went behind the fireplace, behind the TV, under the trim of the new wooden floor, behind the fish tanks, out the window and under the lip of the door... 10ft short of meeting the other cable. Fortunately a neighbour had some old cabling an another extender - which is surprisingly hard to find in shops - to bridge the last little gap. And then to the speed test... I wasn't holding much hope for the connection, with two extenders and around 75ft of cabling - but to my surprise we got a solid ~35mb download and more importantly, ~6mb upload.
Now the next question was how to stream, fortunately there were a couple of options available straight from the Xbox itself eliminating the need for a capture card to spontaneously melt in the middle of the stream. My initial instinct was Twitch, probably the largest and most popular streaming platform out there at the moment - but it was awful. Even on the highest quality, the stream was poor and broke up and usually very far behind. Next, I tried Mixer which is Microsofts own solution which used to be called "Beam". It was near perfect, streamed in 1080p, with less than a seconds delay (sometimes) - and I must say I am hooked on it now. If you are like me, just wanting to stream casually in the evening after work, give it a try. It integrates straight from the dashboard and you can login on a PC to amend the more intricate settings, and even set it to keep hold of your streams for 14 days. You also get experience and sparks for streaming/watching to show your experience which makes it all the more fun for me especially as I like to collect achievements. Only downside is I turned this option on about 10 minutes into testing the stream on the day so it didn't save the 24 hour stream... But there is an hour long video on there right now of me playing XCOM2 in a very sleep deprived state:
www.mixer.com/iMaticus
We planned to stream from midday on the Saturday through to midday on the Sunday, and a little more if we felt like we could handle. Instead, we spent the first hour and a half ironing out some technical difficulties and sorting out a pile of videos (yes, videos...) for the Kinect so the angle wasn't so unflattering. We also decided, for whatever reason, to put some challenges in place to make it harder - because what you need to do is make Dark Souls harder.
We decided to make it so we had to clear all bosses in the game, starting as the deprived character set so we didn't get any starting armour and a particularly mediocre weapon and also using a random number generator to select which levels to increase. Great fun! No, no it really wasn't. We were hoping to spend around six hours to clear the first game, but when we realised that we weren't making any progress fast after about... Five hours - we scrapped the idea. Bar forgetting about some bosses and the crazy difficulty spike from getting loads of useless stat increases, we just weren't progressing. And whilst there wasn't an audience for most of the stream, we did want to get through and onto a different game just to keep ourselves entertained. After that, we made some real progress, and cleared the game in 14 hours which all in all isn't a terrible time - unless you're trying to clear four games in 24 hours.
We moved onto Dark Souls 2 - which was exciting and sad all at the same time. We had been very much enjoying watching the Mixer overlay in the top right corner which was slowly ticking up the minutes of the stream and ended up on about 880-900 minutes including the testing before we officially started. When we switched game, it unfortunately took the stream down as Dark Souls was backwards compatible so the timer started again. We decided just to play through, and see how far we could get with remaining ~10 hours - turns out we got about half way through. I honestly forgot the difference in magnitude the second game went to, with many paths and extra optional content for you pick and choose between. It also didn't help that I forgot to pick up the Duke's Dear Freja boss soul to open the Shrine of Winter - despite ending up about 200,000 souls short of the 1,000,000 secondary requirement to open the door. All in all, it was very fun to share the experience and play the character with someone else, and equally watching each other fail - even us seasoned 'pros' have derp moments after half a day of play!
We decided to also play Pokemon Omega Ruby, so we can split our play time between the two so we weren't twiddling our thumbs for half an hour whilst we swapped turns. We managed to clear this in 23 hours under a set of Wonder Trade challenge rules - we're pretty sure we could have beaten this quicker but we were spending too much time guiding and admiring our failures on Dark Souls! The Wonder Trade rules are as follows...
www.mixer.com/iMaticus
We planned to stream from midday on the Saturday through to midday on the Sunday, and a little more if we felt like we could handle. Instead, we spent the first hour and a half ironing out some technical difficulties and sorting out a pile of videos (yes, videos...) for the Kinect so the angle wasn't so unflattering. We also decided, for whatever reason, to put some challenges in place to make it harder - because what you need to do is make Dark Souls harder.
We decided to make it so we had to clear all bosses in the game, starting as the deprived character set so we didn't get any starting armour and a particularly mediocre weapon and also using a random number generator to select which levels to increase. Great fun! No, no it really wasn't. We were hoping to spend around six hours to clear the first game, but when we realised that we weren't making any progress fast after about... Five hours - we scrapped the idea. Bar forgetting about some bosses and the crazy difficulty spike from getting loads of useless stat increases, we just weren't progressing. And whilst there wasn't an audience for most of the stream, we did want to get through and onto a different game just to keep ourselves entertained. After that, we made some real progress, and cleared the game in 14 hours which all in all isn't a terrible time - unless you're trying to clear four games in 24 hours.
We moved onto Dark Souls 2 - which was exciting and sad all at the same time. We had been very much enjoying watching the Mixer overlay in the top right corner which was slowly ticking up the minutes of the stream and ended up on about 880-900 minutes including the testing before we officially started. When we switched game, it unfortunately took the stream down as Dark Souls was backwards compatible so the timer started again. We decided just to play through, and see how far we could get with remaining ~10 hours - turns out we got about half way through. I honestly forgot the difference in magnitude the second game went to, with many paths and extra optional content for you pick and choose between. It also didn't help that I forgot to pick up the Duke's Dear Freja boss soul to open the Shrine of Winter - despite ending up about 200,000 souls short of the 1,000,000 secondary requirement to open the door. All in all, it was very fun to share the experience and play the character with someone else, and equally watching each other fail - even us seasoned 'pros' have derp moments after half a day of play!
We decided to also play Pokemon Omega Ruby, so we can split our play time between the two so we weren't twiddling our thumbs for half an hour whilst we swapped turns. We managed to clear this in 23 hours under a set of Wonder Trade challenge rules - we're pretty sure we could have beaten this quicker but we were spending too much time guiding and admiring our failures on Dark Souls! The Wonder Trade rules are as follows...
- You must catch five Pokemon as soon as possible, to increase your party to six including the starter
- Wonder Trade all six Pokemon - this becomes your team for the rest of the game (we also decided to have no duplicates from the Wonder Trade - there were Poochyena's flying around like no ones business!)
- You may have as many HM slaves as required to utility - they cannot battle for you
I must say - this was really fun. It has also rekindled by enjoyment of playing the games. I was always so apprehensive to play again, because I had cleared the game and you can't have more than one save. I decided to do go for it anyway, because I hadn't played it in over a year - and now I want to try some different challenges like a Nuzlock. It was interesting because it removes your choice and need to farm levels for that new Pokemon you finally made enough progress to catch. We completed the elite four/champion battle on our second attempt and got to use some Pokemon that would otherwise sit in our boxes for the sake of catching them. Below is how our team turned out...
We didn't have bad coverage, but we both got quite excited receiving a Ghastly until we realised we couldn't evolve him past Haunter because we couldn't trade...
Also - I made the above on the following website, which was really nice to use apart from there being no search feature which seems like a bit of an oversight:
All in all, we hit our target (at the point of writing this post...) of £250. We were very happy to hit the target and for it to go to such a good cause. Hopefully this has sparked some new things for me to do as well, and I hope to do some more stuff for charity in the future.
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