Time, well...spent.

As I record a run of Mega Man 5 to put on YouTube, I find myself constantly prioritizing. In order to make my videos look as excellent and entertaining as possible, I typically spend a great deal of time making things perfect, or as close to perfect as I'm willing to get. Most of the time, if I sit down to record a stage, it's the only thing I get done in an evening. If it takes me more than one night, however...

That's when things start to get ugly.

I love playing Mega Man, but the insane tricks I force myself to pull off require a good deal of practice and effort; sure, I'm playing video games, and it can certainly be fun, but it's hardly relaxing. In general, if I go too long without doing something like reading comics to unwind, bad things happen.

Naturally, I should take a break from time to time.

It's been frustrating, though; I had nearly the entire game recorded, and then I looked back on a few videos and noticed my recording software couldn't keep up with the SHEER AWESOME and started skipping and sputtering, almost always during the most exciting parts of the video. This would not do. My only real choice was to tweak some settings and re-record everything in the hopes that my recording software would fare better.

I had originally planned for this to be released by the end of 2009, audio commentary and all. When things got busy, I revised my goal to having all the video footage by the end of 2009, and to be done with the voice recording a few weeks later.

At this rate, I'm looking at late February, if I'm lucky.

I am so desperate to record these videos at a faster rate, but in a way it's a creative process: just as you can't force a writer to crank out a brilliant novel in a week, you can't force me to produce a spectacular run of Mega Man 5 just by having me devote all my free time to it. I'll get frustrated, burn out, stop having fun, and feel like I just wasted two hours on a stage I would have breezed through if I had just done something relaxing and tried the stage again the next day.

During my run of Mega Man 4, I had to come to grips with the fact that I can't afford to devote all my time to making my videos absolutely perfect. I get the feeling that the message this time around is that I can't force myself to produce high-quality videos; I need to be patient and work at them when I'm relaxed and focused to make it worth my time.

I'm trying to rush for the sake of my YouTube fans, who have to wait for absurd lengths of time for any new material from me. But, for the sake of my YouTube fans, I think that, ultimately, I'm going to need to take my time.