YouTube will be a staggeringly confusing place.

YouTube has previously used automated content matching to snag clips and audio from copyrighted sources. Now, the technology appears to have advanced so far that they can identify clips from video games.

I checked my old video clips, and sure enough, they snagged a clip from Bayonetta and noticed that it was copyrighted by Sega. So far, no flurries of identification from Bethesda and Bungie/343i, seeing most of the vids are from The Elder Scrolls and Halo. I’ve got one Minecraft video up there, which I probably won’t need to worry about too much. If 343i will ever start claiming Halo clips, there will be a fierce battle ahead when some record labels are claiming the soundtrack. From game video maker’s point of view, I’d just love to grab popcorn here and see how they sort their own frigging mess first.

It is, however, very surprising that the biggest proponent of this scheme is Nintendo.

Some time ago, I was playing Halo 4 and suffering from an enormous bout of seasonal depression.

The game tried its damnest to cheer up my geeky heart.

Last week, I was off Xbox Live. I was depressed. I wanted my head to clear up. I wanted to leave people alone and not bug them again.

I’m not sure if it did me good or bad. On the plus side, I made progress on other things. But on the other hand, I just thought that people were going ahead without me and I’m left here on my own.

But at least I wasn’t entirely off the grid what comes to gaming.

Just a quick followup to the article about building game collection software and all of the headaches associated with that.

I was kind of concerned about how well LibreOffice Base handled the stuff. I was especially concerned how LO kept crashing all the time when using the database document, but then I realised LO was crashing all the time anyway. =) But I found out that actually exporting the data from HSQLDB is very easy:

SCRIPT 'whateverfile.sql';

…so I just tinkered a little bit with the format, and slurped the bastard in a PostgreSQL database. And then I started writing a front-end in Ruby on Rails. My first Rails experience was pre-1.0 and I hadn’t really touced Rails since early 2.x days, so this was, at first, an experience in pain. Then I just sort of shrugged and went “hey, this isn’t that different, actually, it just has some trendy shit. JavaScript compilers? To hell with that.”

But after a few hours of tinkering I had a fully working database again. I had even renamed some badly named columns and added a few interesting features, like “last edited” timestamp and Markdown formatting for game notes. In the terminology used by the Rails creator, this warrants a hearty “Whoops!”.

Anyway, the game database software isn’t really in any condition to run on the Internet yet. It’s basically just a quick port of the single-user application. You fire up the Rails server and can see all the stuff in the database and create, edit and delete records. No user authentication, no security model to speak of.

And all that stuff is coming eventually. It’s not really that difficult to add.

But unlike the LibreOffice prototype, whose design is kinda difficult to share, the source code for this application is actually available already. I’m calling it GameSharder. Just be really, really careful about using this on production use, because there’s bound to be stupidity in it after just a single work day of developent. I’ll make sure the data migrations keep working forward, though.

Over the Easter holiday, I was fiddling around with my first computer: Spectravideo SV-318.

Riiiiight! Time to continue!

“Er, what?” you may ask.

Time to continue long-suspended projects.

Four Halo 4 video clips! I think I’ll just publish these instead of adding them to the eternal project to create a frigging montage. =)

Well, that went quick. I was about to write a Pre-final Report on Tomb Raider, but as it turns out, the game was done faster than expected.

So, I had played about two hours of Doom 3: BFG Edition on Xbox 360. I decided to continue the game a little bit.

I had restarted Doom 3 several times on Linux. I can’t remember where I was.

Waltzed a little bit forward. Ran into a scientist guy I had no recollection of, because he gives a little bit goofy thanks when I save him.

Pretty sure I don’t remember any jumping puzzles or conveyour belt bullshit.

The first boss appeared.

“Yup”, thought I, “I’ve definitely not seen this one.”

I have no idea how to handle boss fights in this game, since I’ve never gotten into one. Decided to let the shotgun sing.

“Yup. Definitely not seen this one before.”

Killed it on the first try.

“Didn’t have any strategy in mind, but guess this is a typical Doom boss.”

…

A question arises: Why the hell did I think Doom 3 is a hard game?

I was hard pressed to get even this far on PC. Nowadays, getting this far was easy. I don’t really think I’ve gotten significantly better on playing Doom 3.

Playing Doom 3 on PC has, however, had all these little snags. Long loading times. Not much framerate at times.

Most importantly, my monitor was pretty dark and I just couldn’t see a damn thing even if I cranked gamma way up and tweaked the brightness levers to eleven. There was a small note with the PC version that Doom 3 is best played in middle of the night, and I really liked playing the thing in the middle of the night just so I could see anything on the screen. A used monitor I carried in from the recycling centre helped quite a lot - the picture is much brighter.

Maybe it’s just that much of a joy to play the game on a system that doesn’t really have any of these little snags, I wonder?

Or, the Narrator Figure WWWWolf Does Screencaps and Narrates.

Halo Waypoint still doesn’t have any method of extracting screenshots, so here’s some of my blurry attempts at getting screenshots out of the game using a video capture card. The results are somewhat variable.