Mustache You A Question
June 27th, 2012

Posted by Matt

Well, it’s Wednesday as I’m writing this blog post, and that means I didn’t manage to get it online quite as quickly as I would have liked. Let me assure you though that it had nothing at all to do with being hung up on Reddit yesterday afternoon.

commodoreHUSTLE: Mustache You A Question
Unskippable: White Knight Chronicles II, Part 2
Checkpoint: Til Ring Out Do Us Part
Feed Dump: Spears & Spume
Loading Time: CPC Golf
GPLP: Cursed Crusade (PT8)

Like most of our commodoreHUSLE episodes, this one holds a grain of truth – or rather two grains of truth, as there are concurrent story-lines occurring in this episode. The first is that James looks badass in a moustache. This comes up basically every time James plays any character that needs one. A good Burt Reynolds style soup strainer gives James an air of authority that he just doesn’t exude when his face goes bald.

The other major story-line in this episode as to do with the crew being unable to concentrate on filming because we’re looking at Reddit on our phones. This is basically a real thing that happens. It’s not even actually a joke. I think the writing of this episode may have been an attempt at catharsis. Of course, then we went to film this the day after we all got hooked on NimbleBit’s new game Pocket Planes, and- let’s just say, in basically every scene where I’m playing with my phone, I’m actually just playing with my phone.

I was method acting or something.

One last announcement before I sign off: on July 6th at 6PM Pacific, LoadingReadyRun will be participating in the XBox Live “Game With Fame” event promoting the launch of Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013. Details can be found here. We had a blast when we did this for Duels 2012, so we do hope you’ll come out and play with us again!

Cheers!

GearsGear
June 19th, 2012

Posted by Matt

Our update this week features a character you may recall from another of our series. No longer is Mark Sauceman a lowly ENN contributor. Today he has officially been granted his very own show!

LoadingReadyRun: GearsGear
Unskippable: White Knight Chronicles II, Part 1
Checkpoint: Season 2, Ep. 7 – UFC Extremely Disputed
Feed Dump: Guessing Games
Loading Time: Find Free Locations
GPLP: Cursed Crusade (PT7)

Filmed on Friday (with a few pick-ups on Saturday), GearsGear was one of two videos shot this weekend. I can’t talk about the other one yet (you’ll see it next Monday though!), but rest assured that the amount of filming we undertook this past weekend has us actually starting to put together a video backlog again! We haven’t had one of those in quite a while, so it’ll be good to be back on top.

Of course, by the time we’ve got that backlog built we’ll be back into PAX and Desert Bus season, and we’ll burn right back through it all, but hey, that’s what it’s for right?

‘Til next week, cheers!

How to Find Free Wi-Fi
June 13th, 2012

Posted by Matt

A slightly delayed update this week, but it’s here! all our videos for the week of Monday the 11th are now online!

LoadingReadyRun: How to Find Free Wifi
Unskippable: Dragon’s Dogma
Checkpoint: E3 Throwdown
Feed Dump: Child Protective Services
Loading Time: Inside Feed Dump
GPLP: Cursed Crusade (PT6)

The reason that our update was delayed this week is that we (specifically Graham, Kathleen, James, and I) spent most of Monday travelling back to Canada from California, and much of today recovering by sleeping ’til 2:00 (or working, depending on who you ask). Why were we in California you might ask? Well, because LoadingreadyRun participated in the Child’s Play Invitational Golf Tournament at scenic Angeles National Golf Course in Burbank, CA. Thanks to the generosity and support of our friend Steven Dengler (who you may recall played no small role in the the success of Desert Bus 5) team LRR busted out our golf clubs and represented Dracogen across 18 beautiful holes. And we didn’t even place last!

All in all, this year’s tournament raised more than $25,000 for Child’s Play, and fun times were had by all. We hope we’ll be able to join the fun again next year!

Cheers!

Find My Friends
June 5th, 2012

Posted by Matt

Our video for the week is online, and in keeping with the press conferences that were ongoing for much of the day today (thanks to E3) it introduces some great new apps that you may find extremely useful to install on your iOS device.

LoadingReadyRun: Find My Friends
Unskippable: Godfather 2
Checkpoint: Infinite Lawsuit
Feed Dump: The Salty Watermelon
Loading Time: Friends and Foes
GPLP: Cursed Crusade (PT4, PT5)

As occasionally happens, I had nothing to do with any part of the filming or production of this video. Thankfully, Paul was kind enough to pass along some thoughts about the thought process for this one, so I’m going to let him take it from here. Paul?

Since the entire crew has iPhones, Find My Friends has actually been quite useful to our production schedule. We will often be scheduled to meet up at the office and be waiting around for the last person and Find My Friends allows us to call them and say “Why are you still at your house when you were supposed to be here HALF AN HOUR AGO?”. There is no doubt that it definitely raises some privacy concerns, though, and that is what made me want to write this video. Also I love the idea that Apple is devoting ridiculous amounts of engineering to solving minor social faux pas.

We actually shot the “Bob from Apple” bits and the intro with Jer and Tally more then 2 months ago, but with various conventions and other commitments, we did not have the time to do the needed post production with the CGI stick figures and fancy interface mockups until this week. As I was writing the script, I had a general idea of what I wanted to graphics to look like, but I wasn’t really sure how complicated they should be. The actual direction in the script is “illustration of how the app works, either with a live action reenactment or with futuristic cg sick figures”, and I think Graham nailed the futuristic cg stick figures part.

If you want the apps shown in this video for your iPhone or iPad, go to these pages and bookmark them to your home screen:

Find My Friends (Who are Doing it)

Messages (Only From People I Like)

Game Center (Without Everyone Who is Better than Me)

I made these pages so that we could show a real iPhone with the apps. We didn’t end up using them in that form (we used the large versions of the icons instead), but maybe someone will enjoy having them. They won’t actually work as apps, of course, but you can fool your friends into thinking that you are on the cutting edge of Apple product development.

Cheers!