Hello!

My name is Luis, and I am very excited. Last year I participated in Extra Life for the first time, and put together my first actual live stream setup. Boy, it sure was a wild ride. Some of you may recall the blog post I made last year announcing all that stuff. I streamed my first play through of Persona 3 every freakin' day for 47 days prior to Extra Life, and then myself and a few friends played through 60+ PS2/GC games on game day. To this day, I'm still surprised I survived that whole ordeal at all. Perhaps calling it an ordeal is a bit harsh. I mean, I had an immense amount of fun doing it, and I wouldn't trade that for anything. It was, however, a intensely grueling endeavor. Having to stick a daily livestream schedule is HARD. On top of that, I work overnight, so I would have to get home and immediately start the livestream every morning. In the end, I was very proud of what I had accomplished. I raised over $200 dollars, had a ton of fun producing a really stupid livestream, and I learned a lot.

When I was putting together the livestream for last year, I had a goal in mind: Make my livestream not unbearable to look at and experience. I don't think I hit it, mostly because of the barrier of low quality equipment. Hell, my camera situation was fucked. I had two little $20 dollar webcams taped to the fucking wall. Consider that fact for a moment. One of the cameras was taped in such a way to capture a $100 clock that counted up the 24 hours. Again, consider that for a moment. $100 clock, two $20 webcams, some tape, a decent mic, a terrible capture solution for PS2/GC games (in other words, don't buy an El Gato), and BOOM you got an Extra Life stream. To compensate for the lack of quality equipment, I tried to make the layout of the stream as view-able and nice to look at as possible, and with that in mind I think it worked quite well. I learned a lot.

Since then, I participated in The Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run for my first time back in April this year. I attempted to do an entire playthrough of Siren on the PS2 for the event, but It didn't quite work out as intended. I didn't plan on streaming for longer than about 15 hours or so...but It ended up being a 21 hour stream of a horribly flawed game, lots of cursing, and awful technical issues.** I DIDN'T EVEN FINISH THE DAMN GAME! Though, we did end up raising over $3000 dollars for Pencils of Promise, and I was infinitely happy to have helped out. Again, I learned quite a lot.

**remember how I said "don't buy an El Gato"? Seriously, don't.

So, after upgrading my shitty webcams to GoPros, finding a solution to capturing retro game carts (see: Retrode), and learning from my past livestreams I have come out the other side ready for...

Extra Life 2015! - Supporting the Children's Hospital of San Antonio!

Remember that time when Ryan Davis bought two lots of Super Famicom/Famicom games and played them on an end of year stream? Well, about a year before he did that, I decided to buy a SNES and a lot of 100+ Super Famicom games off of Ebay for myself. I did pop in a number of those carts, (after modifying the SNES to accept Super Famicom carts) but never had the excuse to spend any real amount of time with them. I wanted to run through these games for Extra Life last year, but I couldn't find a good solution to capture them effectively. Then I remembered at one point @jeff talked about the Retrode on the Bombcast. I was curious about it, and after ordering one from Germany and testing it out, I came to the conclusion that...the Retrode is fucking baller as shit! So, I had the terrible/brilliant idea of the...

*taiko drum hits*

Super Famicom Super Famithon!! (cue video promo)

Links!

If you would like to donate FOR THE KIDS, then please do go check my donation page as well as the Giant Bomb team page, and I hope to see y'all at my twitch channel on November 7th!

Thanks so much for reading, and if you have any questions, thoughts, or suggestions please do let me know in the comments!

-Luis