So after an extended hiatus, I’m back for more Video Game Deathmatch and it’s good to be back. I spent the time away resting, working, spending time with my family, putting in a lot of time on Game Pass, seeing my sister get married, and working a little extra.
I originally planned to return in May but I was hitting a wall with my first planned episode back. It had been written and recorded months ago, but I couldn’t get my head around it. I felt like I needed more time to work on it, maybe re-record it even, which was going to set things back. At that point I pushed the start date back to June and thought up two new episodes to do in its place, ones that would be relatively easy to write and edit (in theory), and give me more time to cook this other episode.
Uncharted’s Survivor Gauntlet was originally planned as the second episode, and was going to be fed into by episode one. I changed my mind and thought it would be more satisfying if the events of Uncharted fed into the other episode, so I swapped around the runtime and re-wrote the endings for both episodes to suit the new plan. The Survivor Gauntlet format was something I had planned to build towards, going as far back as my fifth episode of the show. I knew I wanted to do gauntlet style specials for franchise games, where every game was worth discussing, and couldn’t be whittled down to two entries. Uncharted was always my planned way of debuting this format, but I didn’t really have a story in mind. I just knew doing something faintly Uncharted-y would be pretty easy to cobble together. And, for the most part, it was!
The story structure came together very quickly, I tried to evenly spread out the tomb raiding (sorry) elements with the action sequences, and I think I did about as good a job as possible. The tomb stuff was a breeze to write and edit, but the car chase was where things got complicated. It was the most fun part to edit, but it required the most layers to put together. Splicing together assets to create the sound of a car explodin was a lengthy process. Struggling to do a bad guy accent, giving up and just using Niko from GTA for one scene (I used a text to speech generator for the first bad guy encoutnered in the tomb, but the lack of emotion inherent in that software meant it would be useless in every other context). Trying to get the sound of an airplane taxiing, and speeding up, was wildly difficult. You would think there would be countless examples of that sound online but it’s almost all taken either behind an airport window or inside the plane. I somehow managed it but it took a lot of looking around, and cobbling separate sounds together.
For the oversized henchman in the plane, I originally used audio of Brion James from Tango & Cash (specifically when he calls Kurt Russell a wanker, that line reading has stayed with me since my childhood) but it didn’t quite work and it meant there was no follow up lines for him to say. I decided to crib audio of Mickey Rourke from notoriously bad video game, Rogue Warrior, where he colourfully abuses his enemies. I have wanted to get some of that audio in an episode, somehow, and this felt like the best place for it. I also used some circular Oblivion NPC dialogue somewhere during the plane scene. Again, because it’s just very funny to me and if it amuses anyone else who picks up on it then I’ve done my job. But even if it only amuses me, that’s good enough.
I was really happy with how the episode turned out – I remember these games vividly, and we did a marathon replay of the first four games at Christmas so research was at a minimum, which is always handy for quick turnarounds. Although we did have to dig out my partner’s PS Vita to play Golden Abyss for the first time because that one escaped me on release. My overall experience with the Vita was really positive; it’s a lovely piece of hardware and I loved the user interface.
So now I’m back, up and running, already well on my way to editing episode two and tweaking episode three so it’ll finally be ready to put together. I have the entire season planned out now, although I did some last minute rethinking and re-worked a planned arc into a series of standalone episodes and removed one episode (which would’ve wrapped up the arc) from the running order. I’m excited to show you all what I’ve got in store, so stay tuned and all that bollocks.