Audio Equipment, Challenges, and Even More Naughty Words

Let’s start things off. Everybody should hurry up and go buy Fortune Summoners, Carpe Fulgur’s latest localization on Steam right now. It’s a fast-paced hack-and-slash action RPG where you control 3 magical girls at the same time (technically 2 magical girls and 1 sword girl). Why wouldn’t you buy it?

Just look at it.

Done? Good.

This week will be an extension of the last week’s post on zombies and streaming. Last week, I got my hands on some serious audio equipment and I daresay it has leveled up our streaming game quite a bit.

Something like that.

If you watched our House of the Dead: Overkill Extended Cut stream last week, you’ll notice that the audio was poorly balanced, with the game audio drowning out our insightful commentary on the role of zombies as they pertain to the metaphor of Corporate America.

With our new equipment, we are now able to record and mix audio before it gets sent to the stream. Specifically, we now have a Yamaha MG102C mixer and Audio Technica M4000S microphones to play with.

Normal microphones as opposed to headsets give you better sound quality at the cost of convenience. If the commentator/player isn’t speaking directly into the mic, then the sound quality plummets pretty quickly with distance. On the other hand, nice microphones are a whole lot cheaper (I bought 3 mics for 60 whereas 1 broadcasting headset would run me 200).

We did two things to test this new stuff out. At CMUken, we started doing CMUken Challenges, where a player calls out or challenges another player beforehand. Then we set up and announce the match and stream and commentate on it. Last week, at our first Challenge, I called out my fellow CMUken founder SuperScience (because he’s a punk) in the hypest of fighting games: Jackie Chan in the Fists of Fire.

Who's game is it? Jackie Chan's game.

You can see it on our stream here and our YouTube channel here. You can see on these videos how much commentating we do during the match, yet both the game audio and commentators are audible. You can also see, especially in the SolidOutlaw vs SuperScience challenge, that when we get too excited we quickly forget about mic and mouth placement (in this case, we’re way too close).

We also tested this out by running through the Director’s Cut campaign of House of the Dead: Overkill Extended Cut. You can see us play at the Team2A stream. If you ever plan on playing this game, I have one word for you: muthafuckin’ zombies. If you want actual gameplay advice, I have another word: automatic shotguns. (Yes, both of those are 1 word, lookitup) Best gun in the game, hands down. Our run was made so much easier by simply using that gun.

I promise some day we’ll actually stream fighting games.

Some day.