My channel has been top100 views for Gurus and Gaming for a while now, but I’ve never had an individual video in the top100 for Gaming. Until now. Without even noticing it, TITOL1 is #73 all time in Gaming. Which makes it 1 of 4 flash games in the top100 (Red Remover walkthrough, Pandemic 2 instructions, Wake Up The Box walkthrough). Here’s to hoping on getting many more vids in there.

On my top portals/devs list, I only included my own videos. I was debating including games I did not do the videos for in this list (Red Remover, Cover Orange, etc)… but decided that I couldn’t make it all-inclusive, and therefore I should not include it. So here is the list of games that I’ve done videos for that have over 1 million total video views:

That’s the full list. 7 games. Hopefully there will be some new additions soon.

So after all this type and posts and whatnot… the game is now out. Play it. Post comments telling me your thoughts on it.

Play TITOL2 here on Tasselfoot.com. Play TITOL2 on Armor Games.

If you need assistance (you probably will… the game is harder than the first!), try this.

January was shaping up to be a very bad month for me… worst since June, when my content still hadn’t really taken off yet. Then this weekend happened, and while the month was still sub-par compared to the previous few, it at least made it respectable. Why was January going to be such a bad month? A few reasons that I can think of… I was away for almost 3 weeks at the end of Dec / start of Jan, and made almost no videos in that time. Between Dec 11th and Jan 14th, I didn’t have a single monetized video do even 50k views… and all told, I only made about 20 vids. Not many games released over the holidays, and those weren’t very good. Also kids off from school go away on vacation during this time, etc etc.

This weekend changed that. The past 7-10 days, some good games started to hit my plate… i remain, werebox, and foreign creature 2. The planets aligned, you could say. The result was 3 of my 4 best days in terms of both ad impressions and money made (excluding my one crazy click-fraud day) and 3 of my 5 best days ever in terms of views (including #1). First, weekends always produce more views than weekdays… for obvious reasons. But what happened this weekend to cause this massive jump? Let’s look at these graphs I pulled from Insight:

(ignore that it says 1/30/10… for some reason Insight always displays the graphs as 1 day earlier than they actually are).

The least expected, and biggest, reason for this weekend’s success is that Addicting Games added This Is The Only Level to their site on Friday, leaving in the walkthrough link in-game. This pulled in 40k+ hits alone, each day… compared to the 4-6k/day it had been doing for the past few months. Second, WereBox… although I’m not 100% sure why yet. It’s on BubbleBox, but didn’t take off until 3-4 days after release. It’s on a few other mid-large portals (notdoppler, gamesfree.ca, etc), but none of the largest ones (just went onto Kong today)… yet it pulled in 25-30k for the past 3 days. Third, i remain was given a completion badge on Kongregate on the 26th (Tues), so it was already starting to taper off by the weekend. It also has yet to hit any of the other large portals. So those 3 alone were 80-85k/day views (out of the 150-160k for each day). Add to it Foreign Creature 2, Cargo Bridge Armor Edition, Alice is Dead Ep2, and Demo City 2 all contributing 5k+ each and then 400 other videos, it works out to 150-160k a day.

Basically, what this says to me is that this was one hell of a weekend… and it might not be over with yet. Numbers are definitely dropping big time today, as expected, but when WereBox and i remain hit the other large portals, it should jump their numbers big time. Plus I have 2 videos sitting finished on my desktop for Kongregate (one probably won’t do very well, the other will do at least decently with upside potential to do well). I have 2 games waiting to hit my desk for another site, one of which will do VERY well. And, let’s not forget about TITOL2… which might be released as early as Friday of this week.

I often feel like I’m in a vicarious position. On one hand, I’m a gamer. I like the challenge of figuring out puzzles and levels and the sense of accomplishment when I succeed. On the other, I’m a walkthrougher. I need other people to not care about the challenge and only want instant gratification.

I wish that there wasn’t such a heavy demand for walkthroughs. That today’s youth had the patience and intelligence and drive to want to figure things out on their own. Sadly, they don’t. Kids just want the easiest path from A to B, regardless of how stimulating it is. So I might as well give it to them… because if it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.

I don’t feel bad about what I do; not at all. I do, however, feel a bit sad for those who are so dependent on my videos. I guess, ideally, people would only turn to my content after being stuck on a specific spot or level for a certain amount of time and exhausted their mental capacity to try new things. But, I’ll survive and be thankful that I don’t have to do actual work to make a living.

A classic battle in monochrome: You vs Chopper vs Scissors vs Sheep. Who will win? Navigate your way through 21 levels and become the masta of yo choppa.

Play Hanna In A Choppa! A walkthrough is also provided, of course.

I’ve started work on Tass Approved GAMES, the portal side of this site.  So far, I have 1 game up for you…  a personal favorite…  This Is The Only Level by jmtb02.  I’ll make sure to keep everyone up to date as I continue to add more games to the site (I’ve got about 70 picked out so far).  As I’ve mentioned, I’m open to suggestions on future games to add.  I’m also open to suggestions and constructive criticism for the page layouts.  So please post comments telling me what you like, what you don’t, and why.

To go along with the games, I’ve added a walkthrough section to the site.  I’ll try to add a walkthrough for every game… even if I didn’t make it.

Thanks and enjoy TITOL!  A small fairy has told me to be on the lookout for a sequel in the coming weeks.  PLAY THIS IS THE ONLY LEVEL NOW.

So I often get comments about things that could have been done better in my vids or that aren’t optimal, etc etc. And I’m usually well aware of these things. But let me explain a little on why my vids are often not perfect…

In all cases, I’m trying to get content up on YouTube as fast as possible. This is especially the case when I’m working on a game after it’s public, since there will be 20 other vids up within 24 hours (see Alice is Dead ep2). But even when I’m being contracted, there is always a time constraint; sometimes I have weeks… but usually the sponsor wants to get the game live ASAP, and I’m holding up the process. So speed is essential. Because of this, I’m forced to cut corners and post up the first thing that I get that “works”. In almost every case I could have gone back and spent extra hours optimizing and perfecting… but I don’t have the liberty to do that.

The other major factor is that I’m making most of my vids before the game is publicly released. This means that I don’t have the resources of thousands of users to base my strategies off of. It’s just me. I am only able to show in my vids what I personally come up with. Occasionally I get stuck and have to bring in 1 or 2 friends of mine, but most of the time I’m all alone. It’s pretty easy to say, “Oh you should have done this this and this” when the game has been out for days or weeks and people have had plenty of time discuss and share strategy.

When combined together, I don’t have much time to think of or experiment with strategies… so the first thing that I do that actually works, I run with.

So please consider these things before being too critical of my work. I’m always aware that what I show is usually not optimal, and this is why. I also almost always wind up going back to games and optimizing a bit (or a lot) past what I did in the vids.

I saw quasi, because I really don’t mind… it’s just silly that people lack the common sense to figure this stuff out themselves, then they go and post about it. Makes me do a *facepalm* most of the time.

1. “What music is this?” – For the past 6+ months, 95% of the music in my vids has been in-game music, which I have 0 control over and almost never know what it is. If you want to know what it is, check the game credits or ask the developer. For anything before ~March 09 (or the other 5% since then) where I added music myself, it’s ALWAYS listed in the video descrpition what the music is… unless I’ve been forced to audio-swap it do to it being copyrighted music (only on pre-March stuff), in which case it’ll be listed under “Statistics and Data” as to what the song is.

2. “This is complete hax0rz” – C’mon man… none of my vids include hacking (except 1 Sonny vid, which is clearly stated that I messed with the sol for the sole purpose of recording the ending battle within minutes of the game’s release). Accusing me of hacking in one of my vids is just plain silly. You can clearly see what I’m doing; whether you can duplicate it or not is not my fault or problem. User error ftw.

3. “My level 19 is different than your level 19!” – Not my fault ((. I try to record walkthroughs ASAP after a game is released, and sometimes developers decide to change things after that (or because of something in my vids). If something changes, sorry. But I’m not going to re-record 1 or 2 levels because the developer can’t properly beta test their game.

4. “OMG yer vid sux! I ken get to level 800024!” – In most cases, I’m either a) not trying to get an insanely high score, b) not claiming to have such an amazing score, c) doing it really quickly so I don’t have the benefit of days/weeks of strategy discussions, or d) I have a specific purpose that I’m trying to show in the vid…  If I achieve it, that’s all I care; it doesn’t always work out to be 100% optimal, but it still works.

5. “It’s too fast.  I can’t follow it.” – If I speed any of my vids up, its listed in the description, but I sometimes get this even on vids that are 1x speed.  Most people don’t want to watch 40 minutes of video (or even 10 minutes)…  speeding it up is needed to make the vids short enough to keep people’s attention span.  My advice if it’s too fast: Watch 1 level (or a few moves), pause the video, duplicate it in the game, watch a few more moves, pause the video, duplicate it in game, repeat, etc.

6. “How do I do such-and-such” – 9 times out of 10, the question that is being asked has already been answered…  either by myself or someone else in a previous comment, by me in the video description, or most likely…  by me in an annotation.  There is NO reason not to have annotations turned on when watching my vids…  I very regularly have annotations in my vids to explain certain things that I’m doing that might not be obvious or to explain how to get achievements (like in Epic War 2).

I’m probably missing a bunch of other random things, but these are the ones that I get consistently, every single day.  And occasionally some of them are worthwhile, but most of the time…  they’re questions that have already been answered or I don’t have the answer to.

edit: This is like 2 and 4 combined…  “I beat the game blah blah” but you know it’s impossible to do – Basically, the person is posting a comment that is meant as a brag, but it’s 100% obvious they cheated to do it.  That is super lame and you fail for bragging on my videos when cheating.  You cant beat Learn To Fly in 6 days.  You can’t beat Escape: The Bathroom in 12 seconds.  You can’t beat Clickplay in 47 clicks.  Etc.  So just stop trying to think you’re super cool; you aren’t.

I’ve decided that a good feature of this site will be to highlight the best and worst of the comments that I get on my videos. I do in fact read every single comment I get… although I don’t reply that often. This initial comment is a good one, from YT user nbaietti.

In regards to my Whiteboard Tower Defense video, done over a year ago, he writes:
“dude, you are like the ESPN OCHO, you cover all the most obscure games ever! I LOVE it! … if you stumble upon “the crazy pirate’s leg eating donking tower defense” you can be sure Tas can show you all the game youre sucking at playing!!! keep up the awesome job, man! gratz, and long live the lance! ”

An ESPN 8 reference, love for Dragonlance… I’ll overlook the poor grammar and give my props on a very nice comment!