Streaming, Zombies, and Naughty Words

So I missed last week’s what’s new post. There have been some fairly significant changes in my life recently, so I blame that (and snow, dammit Snow).

This guy sucks.

Recently, my friend and I have been getting serious about streaming fighting games. You can see some videos of the Pittsburgh fighting game scene here and the stream here. We’re doing it right now under the name of CMUken.

Since we have all this stuff though, we asked ourselves: “why not stream outside of CMUken”? For instance, since animu fighters rarely get streamed at tournaments, maybe we could offer our services to them. With that sentiment, Team 2A was born.

So to commemorate the formation of our fighting game streaming team, we decided to… play and stream us playing House of the Dead: Overkill Extended Cut on PS3.

This muthafuckin' game.

Yeah… it made more sense to us at the time.

Were I to describe House of the Dead: Overkill with a quote from the game, it would be this:

“You are one fucked up fuck, you know that? That’s offensive shit you’re playing there.”

The game is amazing. It’s pretty much Grindhouse films x House of the Dead. Then again, there’s almost no way a game with zombies, Samuel L. Jackson (Snakes on a Plane version of course), and strippers could possibly be bad. You play Agent G (a rookie agent) and Issac Washington (Samuel L Jackson) as they buddy cop their way through hordes of mutha-fuckin-zombies.

The game itself is pretty fun as a rails shooter with hordes of zombies to shoot that has interesting scoring/combo mechanics. But more importantly, there’s just something about the presentation, writing, and visual design that makes this game awesome. It’s a well-executed parody of a whole bunch of things that somehow manages to actually be clever instead of bashing you with the “hey check it out, this is supposed to be funny!” hammer. But really, the game is muthafuckin’ hilarious.

Check out us playing it at the Team 2A channel on twitch.tv.

Let’s talk a bit about our streaming setup. Since we stream fighting games, we need something to capture video from consoles. For a while we were using the Avermedia HD DVR, which isn’t bad, but having to screen capture something in order to stream it is a pain. Luckily, we have access to the very finicky Blackmagic Shuttle and more importantly, a laptop that is compatible with it. It’s a huge improvement both in quality and convenience over the HD DVR (and the similar Happauge HD PVR).

Since the PS3 has HDCP (which is terrible and only serves to make things difficult for streamers like us) over HDMI, we needed to stream using component. In order to reduce the chance of input lag (we do (usually) play fighting games after all), we used a powered distribution amplifier to split the signal. We use the CE Labs AV400COMP and don’t have any complaints.

Since we’re poverty (at the moment), we used Rock Band USB microphones which are surprisingly decent in order to record our own voices (so you can hear us banter while shooting zombies). The quality isn’t optimal but it seems to work alright. Though, if you watch our stream, you’ll notice that the game sound and our voices are not well balanced at all. This is where mixers come in. (more about that some other day)

To put it all together, we use XSplit, which is really convenient for this kind of streaming. Having something that has support for multiple scenes (which we use a lot for things like ranbats), integration with popular streaming sites like twitch.tv, and is also really easy to setup and use is nice.

At some point later I’d like to experiment more with streaming, but in the meantime, keep an eye out for CMUken and Team 2A as we stream us shooting zombies fighting games.