Jeffool.com
type: channel
description: Because where else would I be?
date: 2023-12-04T03:28:30Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: The Broken Machinima.
items: Jeff Meets Video Games
items: Knocking the dust off. (And projects that fell apart.)
items: Ghosts of the Living Dead
items: Rockstar Stories – Leaving Money on the Table
items: Screenlook – MTV for games
items: I would watch a “Shadow of the Colossus” film. Here’s my pitch.
items: I want a new, good, wrestling game.
items: Portal Online
items: I love FTL

The Broken Machinima.
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2023-12-04T03:23:10Z
subject: Idea
subject: Project X
subject: Video
description: Quick edit: I know the title doesn’t work, but it works for me. Ahhh. Another failed effort, but never the last. I felt like typing a lot, and this video I made a few months ago is a good excuse. I wanted to make a machinima series (video series made within a game, usually recorded in real […]
encoded: Quick edit: I know the title doesn’t work, but it works for me. Ahhh. Another failed effort, but never the last. I felt like typing a lot, and this video I made a few months ago is a good excuse. I wanted to make a machinima series (video series made within a game, usually recorded in real time; think how “Red vs Blue” used Halo.) The idea was to use the DMZ mode in Warzone 2. I hope context isn’t necessary for basic gags, but of course things always work better with context, which if you’re bored, you can read about below, along with my initial plans and why they’ll never happen. The above video is basically four simple bits: • I open with a bit about a guy deep in thought, asking “what makes you tick?”. But it’s to a bomb. It’s a simple gag a pal put on Mastodon and I asked for permission to steal and make a video of. It’s funny, but put into action it feels like a great attempt to display high emotional intelligence in someone with low general intelligence. I actually thought this was a great summation of a character I wanted to do, and a great way to introduce them. The idea was a misguided “warrior poet” who often chooses the exact wrong approach. (They poet when they should warrior and vice-versa.) • Second, I regularly ran around in-game trying to interview people who could kill me at any moment. The vast majority of the time I was killed. But once I actually got someone to come completely out of their way into an in-game TV station and talk to me (well, to a friend posing as the interviewer,) on set. I actually have had several “successful” run-ins. I lost the best (a guy who instantly went into the character a perfect trust fund psychopath who chose to work as a merc for the thrill, and the ability to kill human beings with no recourse. He killed me when he decided the interview was over, even foreshadowing it properly, which was a very nice cherry on top.) Sadly, my recording software crashed and I didn’t realize as I had it running in the background. • “T…

Jeff Meets Video Games
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2022-05-23T05:21:33Z
subject: Real Life
subject: That Thing...
subject: Arcade
subject: Atari
subject: Atari 2600
subject: Dad
subject: Duck Hunt
subject: NES
subject: Nintendo
subject: Star Wars
subject: Sunland Visions
subject: Super Mario Brothers
subject: Zoids
description: I said I’d be using this more, and I still plan to. However, I’ve actually started journaling pretty often. It’s eating at some of the time I’d planned to spend writing for this thing. I’ve been journaling a lot about the given day and my thoughts on it, but also sometimes older memories. One that […]
encoded: I said I’d be using this more, and I still plan to. However, I’ve actually started journaling pretty often. It’s eating at some of the time I’d planned to spend writing for this thing. I’ve been journaling a lot about the given day and my thoughts on it, but also sometimes older memories. One that came to mind? “I’ve loved video games as long as I can remember.” That’s a pretty interesting phrase to me. I was born in 1980. I have memories of my life before video games. I may’ve known they existed to some degree, but I wasn’t enamored with them or holding in the high regard that I do now. But I remember when that changed. I was around the age of six or seven when I saw Super Mario Brothers on NES. My mind was blown. My story starts with my uncle in Japan who worked for Nintendo… Okay, actually it wasn’t an uncle. It was a close friend of my father named Mike who I called “Uncle Mike”. And he didn’t work for Nintendo. But he had been in the military, and was stationed in Japan. My memory tells me either he was stationed there in the early-to-mid 80’s, or knew so many people that he was still in touch with the culture to some degree, because as I remember it from talking to him as an older (but still young) kid, he was really impressed by the Famicom. So when Uncle Mike got back to the U.S., and got some spare money, (and actually found a NES,) he bought one. And at some point, he brought it over to our apartment, to show it to my dad. Now, I was born in 1980. And these two were in their mid-twenties at the time. They also had these huge robotic models of dinosaurs that walked around that kid-me thought was the most amazing thing. So, y’know, they liked cool things. (I just did a little searching and apparently those toys were called Zoids, and I distinctly recall at least the Bigasaurus and Garius, who had comically silly feet for a robot dinosaur so awesome. Of course, to seven-year-old-me, in 1987 or 1988, they were insanely complex, huge, and very cool.) And in ear…

Knocking the dust off. (And projects that fell apart.)
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2021-10-19T05:46:04Z
subject: Video
subject: Art
subject: idea
subject: movie
subject: Music
subject: Project X
subject: Wrestling
subject: Writing
description: I think it’s time to start doing this more often. More personally, probably, so also probably less interesting to people in general. So if anyone still reads this, feel free to unsubscribe. One thing to do, however, is link a few tiny projects that I’ve worked on. Some succeeded, some did not, and that’s okay. […]
encoded: I think it’s time to start doing this more often. More personally, probably, so also probably less interesting to people in general. So if anyone still reads this, feel free to unsubscribe. One thing to do, however, is link a few tiny projects that I’ve worked on. Some succeeded, some did not, and that’s okay. This will basically be a longer format of the pinned tweet from my Twitter account. The last mentioned was in my prior post, Ghosts of the Living Dead, a legal fanedit. Before that I’d mentioned I’d messed around with ScreenLook, which I did a few times in effort to see how much work it would be. Turns out a lot. The response ratio to emails sent to independent creators was abysmal. Finding and emailing enough creators to fill a 30m block was pretty time intensive for someone with a job. Then when my job picked up, I put it on the backburner, from which it has yet to return. And that was 2016ish, I believe. Crate Hunters In May of 2019 I’ve took at stab at a more traditional “gamer video” with Crate Hunters. In the game PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds, teams of players compete against others. Occasionally a crate full of nice gear and good weapons will fall from the sky into the map at a random location. Securing these crates are intended to give you a leg up. Especially a good helmet. With a few wins under our belts, my brother and cousin, with whom I often do most of my online gaming, decided that chasing these crates were “spicier” than competing in a typical way. I recorded a game in which after a certain point we decided to go for every crate we saw, and though only I could record my perspective, I decided to take a shot at adding a tiny bit of production (read: color-coded-to-each-player words on the screen and throw in a cheap gag or two,) to make it a little flashier. I also played around with a few potential openings. The song, which is great, is ANGEL FACE (2) by the Van Buren Brothers. It wasn’t included in the above video because this video was inten…

Ghosts of the Living Dead
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2017-03-20T05:00:20Z
subject: Art
subject: Free
subject: movie
subject: Music
subject: zombies
description: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is a classic, defining an iconic monster in our culture, and with it a genre: the zombie story. Also, it’s in the public domain. Anyone can copy it, distribute it, and use it to make new works. Several years ago Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV, a collection […]
encoded: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is a classic, defining an iconic monster in our culture, and with it a genre: the zombie story. Also, it’s in the public domain. Anyone can copy it, distribute it, and use it to make new works. Several years ago Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV, a collection of music largely devoid of vocals. It was released under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA). I’ve re-scored the film with this album, and removed 36 minutes of footage, in a one hour fanedit that I’m calling Ghosts of the Living Dead. Purposefully made using legally distributable media, you are free to download and distribute this as you see fit as no money is made. Some notes on YouTube storage: A company named “SND” claims to own Night of the Living Dead in France. As no one owns the copyright, I don’t see how anyone could sublicense/sell the copyright in France, so I’m disputing this copyright claim on YouTube. While copyright claims are made to the music (by Audiam, on behalf of The Null Corporation/Trent Reznor), they do not block my usage of the content anywhere. As I have not monetized my YouTube upload, it should perfectly fulfill the CC license requirements under which the audio was released. But due to this claim, I’m unable to properly mark the audio as a Creative Common work on YouTube. I guess YouTube doesn’t think something can be copyrighted and available under a CC license. The idea for this? Years ago I actively watched many fanedits, and among them was the fantastic Conan: Man of War from someone called “The Man Behind the Mask”. It was Conan with almost all of the audio from the film removed, and scored with the metal band Manowar. It was pretty crazy, but pretty damn great. I not only enjoyed watching it, I subsequently enjoyed having it on in the background; the perfect idle viewing when I was doing something else. Kickass music and a fun film synced wonderfully. What’s not to love?

Rockstar Stories – Leaving Money on the Table
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2016-10-03T12:53:32Z
subject: 2016
subject: Armchair Quarterback
subject: Development
subject: game
subject: Game Industry
subject: Gaming's future
subject: Idea
subject: Grand Theft Auto
subject: Rockstar
description: Rockstar Stories – How Rockstar Games is Leaving Money on the Table Rockstar Stories – My Suggestion Rockstar Foster Their Next Generation of Talent with an Open Storefront for Content http://jeffool.com Rockstar Stories – My Suggestion Rockstar Foster Their Next Generation of Talent and Make Tons of Money Doing It http://jeffool.com Rockstar hasn’t released any […]
encoded: Rockstar Stories – How Rockstar Games is Leaving Money on the Table Rockstar Stories – My Suggestion Rockstar Foster Their Next Generation of Talent with an Open Storefront for Content http://jeffool.com Rockstar Stories – My Suggestion Rockstar Foster Their Next Generation of Talent and Make Tons of Money Doing It http://jeffool.com Rockstar hasn’t released any single player DLC for their 2013 game Grand Theft Auto V. What they have released is tons of free content for it’s multiplayer component, Grand Theft Auto Online, and offered in-game currency for real money. Apparently it’s sold gangbusters. Every time news hits about GTAO there’s always complaints “I wish they’d release single player content” or “They said they would release more heists!” (They haven’t.) So, I’d like to pitch an idea for a lot more, widely varied, single player content. Allow me to dream for a moment. I’d like to see Rockstar open a new studio largely staffed of fresh hires to bolster their future games. People looking to get into the industry, for that first job. The kind of people who want to apply, but don’t have the experience to get the type of jobs that are actually advertised. Start them off with jobs scripting single player DLC content in Rockstar’s open world games. You want your A team on your A job. Rockstar’s teams all have excellent content creators who create, often, very compelling and interesting quests that work on several levels, both offering fun gameplay and compelling main quests. I imagine (maybe wrongly?) that a second team, still of top level quality, is tasked with the non-essential quests, offering wonderful atmosphere and characters to fill out the greater world. For brevity’s sake only, let’s call them the B team. But what about the minor leagues? I’m confident Rockstar can create a studio chiefly staffed of entry level developers, all tasked with learning and using the tools to put written missions into action. This farm league of content will obviously need scr…

Screenlook – MTV for games
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2016-08-14T05:05:11Z
subject: Idea
subject: Project X
subject: screenlook
description: So I’ve decided to create a 24/7 “MTV for video games”. It’s called Screenlook, and it will be a 24/7 stream of smaller, indie, and amateur game videos, trailers, and things. I’ve also reached out to one person about even featuring a very short review that was creatively done. (My point being I’m open to […]
encoded: So I’ve decided to create a 24/7 “MTV for video games”. It’s called Screenlook, and it will be a 24/7 stream of smaller, indie, and amateur game videos, trailers, and things. I’ve also reached out to one person about even featuring a very short review that was creatively done. (My point being I’m open to content.) I’ve created a few volumes to show the idea. I’ll be looking into the 24/7 aspect soon. While not a direct comparison, the inspiration comes from my love of the old G4 show Cinematech, and how it made phenomenal “background TV” when getting things done. I want to make a channel you can turn to when you don’t know what you want to play, and you can find something. Steam Queues or browsing itch.io show a ton of varying options. But Steam often shows you clones of games you have, and with itch there’s tons to wade through before you find what you want. I’m just trying to make a new avenue for discovery for smaller games. I WILL be monetizing the channel. Be that on YouTube or Twitch or wherever else I find to air the show. If you want in on it, feel free to follow the Twitch, which will alert you to when it goes live: http://twitch.tv/screenlook And the YouTube, which enough subscriptions will get me a custom URL (YouTube doesn’t give everyone a URL now, due to name hoarding.) That’s at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa0Smevh5EBqREP7hGWlWqg And you can always follow on Twitter, for the very rare tweet. http://twitter.com/_screenlook And if you’ve got an opinion about it, or know of a game I should include, email or tweet me. For a better idea, here’s a volume that would air, in loop with other similar volumes:

I would watch a “Shadow of the Colossus” film. Here’s my pitch.
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2016-07-25T12:55:20Z
subject: Art
subject: Free
subject: Idea
subject: movie
subject: film
subject: idea
subject: pitch
subject: Shadow of the Colossus
description: This post was initially written on May 27th, 2012. I’m sure that’s when the news broke that Shadow of the Colossus had been optioned for a film. Obviously that didn’t happen. But for no real reason other than to put something here, I’m going to revise it once tonight and press “Publish”. The only way […]
encoded: This post was initially written on May 27th, 2012. I’m sure that’s when the news broke that Shadow of the Colossus had been optioned for a film. Obviously that didn’t happen. But for no real reason other than to put something here, I’m going to revise it once tonight and press “Publish”. The only way I care to see it working is with little speaking for the majority of the film. And I don’t mean this will become Quest for Fire, or even Once Upon A Time in the West. Having long stretches with little speaking totally worked for Cast Away, and that was a $90 million Hollywood film with Tom Hanks. (And in revision, how great was Mad Max: Fury Road? It cost $150 million.) What’s important is how the visual storytelling and the tone are handled, and to that end, I know exactly who I want to take this endeavor with. I want to see (at least the non-action scenes) it directed by Andrew Dominik, with cinematography by Roger Deakins. The two previously worked together on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. If you haven’t seen it, that movie IS the very concept of amazing cinematography encapsulated in celluloid. Their work, what they got from those actors and the world they were in, made the moments without words some of the best in that film. Hell, the film even made a narrator work exceptionally well (though, I wouldn’t want that here.) Admittedly, I can’t say how they’d handle a CG-extravaganza with certainty, I don’t have many reservations. That said, also, you’d have to cut down the number of colossi, obviously. No more than four. Sure, we could do a montage, but no one wants that. Though I suppose you could put more on the “Insanely Long Director’s Experience” version, if they’re feeling ballsy, and want to create the lore of, say, Apocalypse Now. (There’s a poor quality workprint that rabid fans watch that has 87 minutes of footage that wasn’t even included in Apocalypse Now Redux, totaling almost 5 hours!) But at that rate, do a TV show, right? T…

I want a new, good, wrestling game.
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2015-03-24T17:40:19Z
subject: Armchair Quarterback
subject: game
subject: Gaming's future
subject: Idea
subject: Uncategorized
description: tl;dr in bold. I don’t remember what started it, but I’ve been thinking about wrestling games a lot lately. It started before I even saw the highly entertaining video from Max Landis, rebutting the bewilderment of people who don’t enjoy wrestling, citing wrestling isn’t real. I haven’t watched wrestling in over a decade. But wresting […]
encoded: tl;dr in bold. I don’t remember what started it, but I’ve been thinking about wrestling games a lot lately. It started before I even saw the highly entertaining video from Max Landis, rebutting the bewilderment of people who don’t enjoy wrestling, citing wrestling isn’t real. I haven’t watched wrestling in over a decade. But wresting video games? From Nintendo Pro Wrestling, to WWF No Mercy for the Nintendo 64, they were fun, especially with friends. And especially in later games when you could team up with your favorite wrestlers to wreak havoc on other players. But after a few duds, I stopped playing them. From the reviews I’ve found of recent wrestling games they haven’t progressed as I would’ve imagined. It’s important to note that wrestling games have one are in which they’e always reigned supreme – character creation. From early N64 games allowing combining of different wrestler’s body parts and palette-swapping, to more modern wrestling games giving in-depth cutomization and flair other games only dream of. Many of them even allow general move sets and highly specialized moves (akin to Mortal Kombat’s finishing moves.) But the fighting isn’t the most important part. The character drama and plots, the key parts Max Landis touched on, have not been made more interactive. From the reviews I see of recent wrestling games their “career campaigns” have become heavily scripted, giving a near-linear story experience, scaled back from previous games. We’re in the time of Shadow of Mordor; games should at least have a fraction of the procedural storytelling found in an Elder Scrolls games. What, you want to complain about dealing with data? Crusader Kings 2 has a huge amount of data. Thousands of NPCs have constantly evolving opinions on each other and the player based on several metrics and attributes. That game is often played at several-updates per second, with major changes happening in any update. And the players are rarely of any of those opinions, much less the …

Portal Online
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2015-03-09T13:18:21Z
subject: Armchair Quarterback
subject: game
subject: Idea
description: The tl;dr of what I want in a new Portal game can best be summed up by reading the lines in bold. If you’re bored, have a read! Today HTC announced they’d partnered with Valve for the Vive headset (part of HTC’s “re” product line, so, re:Vive). Obviously the thoughts quickly turn to software for […]
encoded: The tl;dr of what I want in a new Portal game can best be summed up by reading the lines in bold. If you’re bored, have a read! Today HTC announced they’d partnered with Valve for the Vive headset (part of HTC’s “re” product line, so, re:Vive). Obviously the thoughts quickly turn to software for it. With Valve being the partner, Portal came up in a post I was reading. (Imagine sailing through the air in first person.) It always felt like Portal 2’s online component didn’t take off like Valve wanted, so, let me pitch a Portal 3, or at least a Portal Online. The chief decision in my choices is that it should be a game with continued updates, like DOTA2, CSGO, and TF2. And even better would be allowing it to rely on community support for content, but still allow financial opportunities for the developer that seem fair to players. The important part? Each server is a testing facility. The person who runs the server (herein owners) should get a large series of options to better fine tune the experience for players. And this will present financial opportunities for Valve AND for the community members that contribute to the game. Also important is offering several non-required elements for players to improve their experience. Let’s look at those items first. 1. Maps – Highly rated maps should be vetted for inclusion on the marketplace if the creator wants. A very small minimum price should be required. ($0.25?) This pays for the evaluation of maps, as well as hosting, and should benefit the map maker. However, server owners should be able to run maps from outside of the marketplace, just without a logo of approval in server lists. 2. Player components – Players need to be differentiated. Playing as the people unfrozen at the end of Portal 2, suits and colors are a solid start, but offering new purchases (maybe play as robots, especially if done in components) could do well. Components, suits, colors, sounds, and mini-actions are never integral, but can be used as random dr…

I love FTL
type: item
creator: Jeffool
date: 2012-10-27T03:59:16Z
subject: game
subject: review
subject: FTL
description: I’m unemployed. I refuse to spend money on games while this is the case. Hearing that, a friend stepped up and bought me a game he was loving, FTL. I can’t thank him enough, because it’s awesome. Does FTL make you a space-faring bringer of death, or a kamikaze pilot flying a rickety death trap? […]
encoded: I’m unemployed. I refuse to spend money on games while this is the case. Hearing that, a friend stepped up and bought me a game he was loving, FTL. I can’t thank him enough, because it’s awesome. Does FTL make you a space-faring bringer of death, or a kamikaze pilot flying a rickety death trap? Yes. Is it worth playing? Absolutely. Dying hasn’t been this fun since Dwarf Fortress. Killing hasn’t been this surgical since Fallout 3’s VATS system, this easy since you first picked up the BFG, or this difficult since you spec’d completely opposite the way you should have for a RPG boss fight. Each play has the potential to serve up a wildly different game due to the game’s elements being so randomly generated, that each play will bring many stories of harrowing success and escape, telling friends how you barely did this, and almost got killed while doing that, and each story will almost certainly punctuated by the full stop of your death. It’s billed as a “a spaceship simulation real-time rogue-like”, but what does that mean? Let’s start with the basics. The Salad (Before the game.) In Subset Games’ FTL (yes, it means Faster Than Light,) you fight for the Federation against rebel forces and other nefarious tropes amassing weapons and crew for the big showdown. This is done by plotting your own course through eight sectors full of nodes as a wave of enemies chase you. Each node providing an event. Events range from battle, a social opportunity, an environmental threat, a store, to empty space. Sometimes you’ll even get combination of those things, or they’re made more intricate as the game reacts to your crew, your ship upgrades, or some of the (simple) quest lines you’ve previously opened. As if those combinations didn’t offer enough replay, the nodes of each sector, and the available paths between sectors, are generated freshly with each play through. Each event allows a chance to gain resources along the way. The Potatoes (The good.) Ship management shines. It’s what ev…