Tag: Stream

Game Quicky: Everloop (PC – Steam) ~ Did This Happen?

Steam store page – Developers link

You walk in a corridor and after turning the corner and see an altar and 8 candles above it. Then you turn the corner again and you see the same corridor again. You remember the note. If something looks off in the exact copy of the corridor, you need to return to the start. Then walk the other way. Otherwise, you have to continue walking through the Everloop. Will you manage to escape the looping corridor and understand its mysteries? Well, that’s what we are going to discover in this game quicky article. I invite you to leave a comment down below. Share your thoughts and/or opinions on this game or the content of this article.

The good

The gameplay of Everloop is very simple. It’s basically spot the difference. You have to walk through the same corridor and check if something changed or not. These changes can be subtle, like a change in a painting or a book on a table changing color. Or these changes can be drastic and obvious, like totally different lighting. Only one change can be activate at one time, and it’s unsure if a change happened or not.

In case of a change, you have to turn back and walk in the other direction. In case there is no change, you have to keep walking forwards. Before the altar is the cut-off point. If you judged right, a new candle will be lit. If you make a mistake and miss a change, all your candles will be blown out. If you claim something changed and nothing has, you start over. The idea is that you have 8 rounds without a mistake in a row.

Now, it’s always random if a corridor has a change or not. So, you need to check it all, and it becomes a paranoia guessing game if something has changed or not. Since, you start to doubt yourself. Have the titles always looked like that? Has the cat suddenly changed color? Since, when you fail, you don’t get any feedback why you failed. It can be because there was a change you didn’t notice. Or, you mistakenly said that an unchanged corridor had a change while it hadn’t.

The amazing thing is, when you correctly identified a change, you unlock a small lore description in the codex. You can only see this description in the main menu. The descriptions are written amazingly. They were a lot of fun to read through.

The game maintains a tradition in this genre. It doesn’t show you duplicate changes unless you have beaten them all. You beat a change when you find it correctly and walk back from where you came. Then the change will be taken out of the pool that change show up. After finding all the possible changes and beating them, the game resets them. It throws them all back in the possibility pool.

The atmosphere in this game is very nicely done. I loved the visuals, and some changes were extremely sneaky to find. Like, one of the fans can be spinning in the opposite direction. I highly recommend avoiding the “all anomalies guide” in the Steam discussions. Reading it takes a lot of the fun away.

The controls in this game are a blast. They are responsive, and I could look in the corridor with ease. I can go in extreme nitpick mode. The tutorial prompt in the left corner shows WASD. I have an AZERTY keyboard, and it doesn’t adjust. But then I would be missing the point a bit. Since, you can play this game using a controller. And I don’t know what I liked more, the keyboard or the controller. Man, it this movement in this game snappy and perfectly tuned. But if I’m allowed to say, one more extreme nitpick. The tutorial shows that the “R” trigger is set to run, but the “L” trigger works as well.

The negative

Now, in this game, you don’t really have chaser changes. Unlike in other similar games in this style, you don’t have changes that if you touch them, end your run. This is something I feel mixed about. At one hand, it’s amazing to not have your run be ended out of nowhere. But on the other hand, it takes away some tension this game can have.

This is a nitpick, but the game doesn’t show you a number on how many changes still haven’t been discovered. But, you can easily calculate that by looking in the codex on the main menu.

Some people might find this a negative aspect of the game. But, I totally understand why the game works this way. When you exit the game and go back in it, you start from zero in your loop. So, keep that in mind if you think that the game saves your round progress.

You will notice all anomalies that this game offers. After beating the game, there isn’t much replay value. This negative isn’t big. This game is only €5. Still, I rather mention it in the negatives section. Some people find it important that there is replay value in their games. But, I personally don’t mind it since it’s a lovely small experience that is a blast to play through.

The biggest negative is that there is no easy way to reset your progress. To do that, you have to remove your save file and turn off Steam Save Cloud syncing. In various other games in this genre, there is an easy choice in the options’ menu to make that happen.

Conclusion

This is a small, bite sized game created by a small team of four people. You can finish this game completely in, gave or take 2 hours.

The Exit 8 set the standard for the games in this genre. As a result, the market has been flooded with a ton of games in this style. Shinkansen 0, Dead end Exit 8, Project 13 to name just a few. And I find that Everloop should be in the list of the better titles. It feels like a lot of love and care has been put into this game. Especially the codex with the small blurbs. It makes various things sound bigger and more dangerous than they actually are. It’s an amazing touch that Infinity Green Game Studio added.

If you want a small game made in Unity, I highly recommend this one. It is a nice spin on Exit 8 with a more Brazilian twist. I enjoyed my time with this game so much. I even placed it on the long list of my top 10 games I played in 2024.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game. I am curious to see if any of you give it a try. If you do, feel free to drop a comment with your thoughts and opinions. Well, I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to welcome you in another article. Until then, have a great rest of your day. Take care.

Score: 80/100

Review: Mirillis Action v2.7.3 (PC) ~ A Let’s Player Tool.

action-1Mirillis official website

So, you want one tool that can easily record your screen, your gameplay, screenshots, record only sound, stream to Twitch AND record your stream and much more? In the past, I used various tools for that, but ever since I got contacted by the developers of Mirillis Action, I uninstalled most of those tools. Was this a good idea? Is the software good enough to replace them or does the software have holes? Mirillis gave me a review code. The software is usually 30$. So, let’s get right into the review and talk about how this software performs according to me. And as usual, feel free to leave a comment with your opinion and/or thoughts about the software and/or the content of the article down below.

Specs and such

Before we continue, I should say that I tested this program on two different machines. Both on my laptop I use for classes and my gaming desktop. My laptop is a Lenovo B50-80, the only modification I did was that I changed the standard 8GB RAM into 16GB RAM. I need that much RAM since I have to run 4 or more virtual machines and each VM can use up to 2-ish GB RAM each. And yeah, if I only had 8GB of RAM, I wouldn’t be able to follow the classes.

Before I tell you the specs of my gaming desktop, a computer I built myself with my uncle, I know that the graphics card isn’t the strongest or best in these modern times to play games on; but I’m happy with it. The specs of my gaming desktop are an i7-4820K CPU (3.7 GHz), GeForce GTX 660, 16GB of DDR3 RAM, 128GB Boot SSD and a 3TB HDD for my data. It’s quite a beefy PC in my opinion.

During the time I tested the software, the software updated twice. From v2.7.1 to 2.7.2 and then again to v2.7.3. While the software update crashed on my laptop when updating from v2.7.2 to v2.7.3, it ran fine on my gaming desktop. Probably a hiccup with files that were in use by Windows Update or something. Thankfully, a simple uninstall and reinstall fixed everything.

 The positive aspects.

action-3I can hear some content creator say already, why do we need this tool? What does it have over OBS Studio, which is free? I think a big plus is how clean the interface is when you compare it to OBS.

You can do a lot with OBS, but it’s all buried in menus. When I used OBS for the first time, I was quite confused how to set it up. I had to use a guide to get started. Most features of OBS are hidden in drop-down menus and that’s a real shame.

In addition to having a better-looking UI, a big advantage in Action is that you have a better indication if you are recording or not. The counter is visibly more present than in OBS Studio.

This tool is much more than a streaming and recording tool alone. You can take screenshots and benchmark as well. These are two quite handy features to have. The more I worked with the program, the more I was amazed by how handy this tool is for content creators.

Some neat features are, you can easily cap the framerate the video, you can set a length of time to record, there is a built-in video converter for the recorded videos. I think that this tool will be quite useful when I’m benchmarking a game for a review or when I want to record some gameplay footage to refer to when I’m writing a review.

Something that might make video creators quite happy is the feature that you can record your microphone audio on a separate track. So, when something happens in-game that is quite loud, you can easily edit that out without having your commentary be too silent.

If you need any help with the program, the help button is not too far away. When you use it, the program will display a very to the point help screen. If you still need more help, you have a button that will redirect you to the website with even more information to help you.

There is also support for greenscreen webcam recording. At this moment, I don’t own a good webcam or a green screen, so I wasn’t able to test out this feature. But, from what I read online; it’s pretty good.

The Action RCU app is an amazing feature, but I’ll talk about that more in depth later in the article.

The negative aspects

action-2Now that I talked about all the reasons why I would recommend this software, here are the things that I didn’t like. Keep in mind, these remarks are made about v2.7.3. It’s possible that Mirillis patch or update their software to make these remarks invalid.

When you open Action, it displays by default a box (called the HUD) of what you will record and how many frames per second it takes. The default location for this is rather annoying. It’s in the top right of your screen. While I understand that the box is more visible there, it’s quite annoying when you have apps on full screen. While clicking the box does nothing, I keep thinking it will open the program. So, I try to navigate my mouse around it. I think it would be better if it showed by default in the middle of your screen at the right-hand side. Then, I realize that you can quickly hide it with F6. So, this is a true nitpick.

Something I miss from OBS Studio is a preview of what the video is going to look like. When you boot up OBS Studio, you see what it’s going to record. This is something you don’t see with Action. So, I had to make a test video every time I tried out some new settings.

A nice feature to have is to easily move the output folders at once to another location. In the current version, you must move it feature by feature. If an option is added where you specify a folder to output and Action creates the 4 folders it needs for the output; that would be awesome.

Something that is missing from the video recording & streaming tab, is an option if you want to record system audio. I would move that option from the options menu to the streaming and video recording tab. Since it’s more useful there.

A huge incoming update

Something I wanted to quickly touch upon is that there is going to be a big update in the feature. Action 3.0 will fix almost every negative I have with the program. The new features will include things like a live preview of the video composition and an improved HUD. Let’s not forget to mention that v3 will have StreamLabs support. You can read more about it and give your own suggestions on this Facebook post.

If you already own Action v2, you will be able to freely upgrade to the v3.

The Action RCU Android App

If you have an Android phone and you are a YouTuber or streamer, you are going to love this feature! When you enable Action RCU in the options menu and install the app on your smartphone, you will be able to control parts of the program with your smartphone. Before I forget to mention it, this is a free app! Yep, free.

In the app, you will be able to start and stop recording or streaming. But not only that, you will see the program that Is recording, how much free space is on the drive you are recording too, how many FPS you have and how long you are recording.

This is an amazing additional feature. I would love to see more promotion of this feature. Since this is going to be a selling point for a lot of let’s players and streamers.

If the app gets updated with these few remarks, I think that the app would be even better.

First, I think it’s quite dangerous that you can connect with any computer without giving a password. I think it would a good idea that you must enter a preset password before the connection is made. This password can be set in the program itself in the options menu. This would avoid annoying roommates stopping your recording without you knowing it. Or let the program pair your smartphone with the program and smartphones that aren’t paired, block them until they are paired.

Second, I couldn’t connect at first to my computer. After a bit a troubleshooting, I found out that some firewalls are blocking the app. I use Avast Internet Security now on my gaming desktop. Right after I made the connection, I can enable Avast again and the firewall doesn’t interfere with the app. There is a solution for this. You can whitelist the program in Avast and the problems will stop. On my laptop, I use Avira Free and Windows Firewall and that didn’t have any problems when I allowed it in the Windows Firewall settings.

Third, I think it would be amazing if a button is added in the app to mute the microphone. In addition to that, possibly a “light” that changes when the microphone is active or not.

Four, this might possibly in the pipeline; but create an iOS and Windows Phone version of this feature. Since the smartphone market is more than Android alone. The developers told me that they will first develop a MAC version of the program before they port the app to iOS. This is planned to start production next year.

Update 28/09: so, there is an iOS version of the app. There will be a version for MAC of the actual program possibly next year. Still, I would love to see a version for Windows Phones.

Five, if a limited record time is set, I think it would be lovely to have a countdown timer of some sorts too.

Six, add a screenshot button! Seriously, one that will be something useful to make thumbnails without having to search around in the video afterward.

And last, why not display the key(s) you need to press to pause the recording also in the app?

Apart from the first two remarks, the other remarks are just additions to improve the app and make it more powerful and even more useful than it already is.

Conclusion

Would I recommend this program? Without any doubt in my mind, I would. This program is already a great tool but with some additional features based on the remarks I raised in this article, I think this program can compete with major names like OBS Studio or DXTory. Besides, the program has more features than DXTory and is cheaper.

This powerful tool is cheap in my opinion and I’m glad that Mirillis Team contacted me to look at their software. Since now I’m a proud owner of a great piece of software that’s going to prove useful in class when I record how to enter commands to configure routers and switches but it’s also going to prove useful to create screenshots for my articles.

The program is already worth the asking price, but it can only grow and improve. The developers update this program quite often, so it’s going to only get better from here on out! In my opinion, this is one of the best recording tools out there right now.

There are a lot more than this program can do, so if this program sounds interesting to you; go and check it out. So, that’s everything I wanted to say about this program. Time to wrap up this article.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

Ethan’s Mini Marathon: 16-hour challenge for SpecialEffect

Committed video-gamers Gamely Giving are continuing on their journey to raise £1,000 for people with disabilities.

This time they’re being led by ten-year-old Ethan in a 16-hour family-friendly marathon on 24 June 2017 in support of SpecialEffect, a charity that puts fun and inclusion back into the lives of those with physical disabilities by helping them to play video games.

Gamely Giving are a team of friends and bloggers from all over the south of the UK. Following on from their participation in GameBlast17, during which they played  for 72-hours straight and raised over £800, they’re asking people to help them reach their target by sponsoring via their online fundraising page.

“Gamers joined hands to raise as much as possible for SpecialEffect during GameBlast17 so they can continue their amazing work. Over £100,000 was donated in total and we’re extremely proud of doing our part for the organisation,” said Kevin, a member of Gamely Giving.

“We’re continuing our support by participating in further events such as Ethan’s Mini Marathon. It’s admirable to see such a sincere commitment to SpecialEffect from someone so young, and his example inspires us to keep going and create more opportunities to raise awareness of the charity through gaming.”

As an added bonus for viewers, for every £1 donated Ethan will place a block of TNT on a massive structure in his Minecraft world along with a sign showing the supporter’s name. He’ll then light it towards the end of the stream and see how much destruction it causes!

Anyone can sponsor the team online at www.justgiving.com/fundraising/GamelyGiving2017, and can watch the event at www.twitch.tv/GamelyGiving from 07:00 GMT on Saturday, 24 June 2017. For more information, please visit the website at www.GamelyGiving.com.

Publishing: Gamers to battle sleep in 72-hour charity challenge

Committed video-gamers Gamely Giving are gearing up to burn the midnight oil from 28 April to 01 May 2017 to raise £1,000 for people with disabilities.

They’ll be gaming continuously for 72-hours from 16:00 GMT as part of GameBlast17 and are aiming to raise £1,000 for SpecialEffect, a charity that puts fun and inclusion back into the lives of those with physical disabilities by helping them play video games.

Gamely Giving are a team of friends and bloggers from all over the south of the UK. They’re asking people to help them reach their target by sponsoring them via their online fundraising page.

“We love what SpecialEffect does. They make it possible for people to play the games we enjoy and take for granted by providing them with controllers custom-built to their needs so they can join in with friends and family,” said Kevin, a member of the team. “As gamers, we believe in the healing power of gaming and how it brings people together. GameBlast gives us a chance to put this belief into action by playing to raise money so SpecialEffect can deliver a bit of joy to those who need it.”

“Playing for an extended period is a big challenge, but we’re asking people to attempt it to help thousands of people who, because of a disability, can only sit and watch other people have all the fun with family and friends,” said Mark Saville, the charity’s Communications Officer. “GameBlast is an opportunity for people to do what they love best and level the playing field for individuals with disabilities at the same time.”

The charity is inviting teams of friends, family members, and work colleagues to join the GameBlast event, which has been likened to a Children in Need for gamers. It’s backed by big names in the industry including GAME, Twitch and FACEIT, and aims to raise £150,000.

“Gamely Giving’s efforts will help people like John who never thought he’d be able to play video games again because his muscular dystrophy stopped him using a controller,” said Mark. “The sponsorship raised through the GameBlast event will change the lives of much more people like John through the gift of gaming fun and inclusivity.”

Anyone can sponsor the team online at www.justgiving.com/fundraising/GamelyGiving2017 and can watch the event at www.twitch.tv/GamelyGiving. More details about the GameBlast17 event can be found at www.gameblast17.com.