December 19, 2009

Videos Temporarily Unavailable

Well, folks, it seems as though once again my publishing site of choice has abandoned me. First it was Stage6, which completely shut down in early 2008, which prompted me to create this blog in the first place. Now it's Vuze, which is no longer accepting user-generated content as of December 1, 2009. In fact, it appears that none of my videos are available from Vuze anymore, which is why all my links and embedded previews are now broken. I'm sorry it took me a while to figure out what was going on.

So now I must re-evaluate where I can host my videos. At this point, I may try to go back to Veoh, since a couple of my vids are already there. Or I may explore some other options like BlipTV. If other people know of some good sites that accept very long, HD videos (at least up to 3 hours and 4 GB in size), please leave a comment. One of the things I will miss about Vuze was the Peer-to-Peer aspect which allowed the videos to be downloaded quite rapidly compared to other sites.

I had planned to try to do some recording of new videos over the holidays, but I doubt that will happen now since I have to re-upload all the previous videos. Rest assured, I do plan to continue this project, at least through completion of WotG, even if it means hanging in there after FFXIV comes out. Thank you everyone for you patience and support through this disappointing time.

Oh, and thanks a lot, Vuze; you sure do know how to give people a Merry Christmas.....

June 14, 2009

Bastok Rank Missions

It's finally here: the video I personally never really wanted to take the time to do, but happens to be what many, many people have been asking for for quite some time. I've also always been a sucker for completeness... 

Even though I started out in Bastok when I first set foot in Vana'diel five years ago, I was largely disappointed with the story and characters overall, and it ended up being the last rank 10 I achieved. To me, it always felt somewhat disjointed, like a haphazard assortment of go here, kill this NM, retrieve that item. To this day I still don't really understand the last mission in relation to the rest of the story; I kind of think maybe it could have just ended after 9-1. In short, these missions lacked cohesion to me, and I guess that's why I never felt all that compelled to record the custscenes. But I will admit, now that it's done, that while I still remain unimpressed with the overall plot, there are some moments that are touching, and some I found quite humorous.

When I recorded the San d'Oria and Windurst missions, I largely omitted the parts having to do with the Shadow Lord and put that in a separate video. However, the Shadow Lord plays a much more integral relation to Galkan history, so I decided to include MOST (though not all) of those scenes in this video. I did still omit the portions of the Magicite missions having to do with Aldo, Verena, and Fickie, and I left out the one sceen with Ajido-Marujido in Castle Oztroja (which conversely was pretty integral to the Windurst plot). On the flip side, I took the liberty to add in a few scenes from the Dark Knight job quest and a small snippet from DRK AF, since these shed a little more light on Gumbah and Zeid.

The Bastok missions cover a wide variety of subjects, but if I had to pick an underlying theme, it would be about the legend of the Talkekeeper, set against a backdrop of racial tension between Humes and Galka.