GameBlast19: the countdown begins

Here’s the latest on our plans for GameBlast19, an annual gaming marathon for SpecialEffect. This amazing charity puts fun and inclusion back into the lives of those with physical disabilities by helping them to play video games using a range of technology, making a positive impact on confidence and rehabilitation. Take a look at this update on the SpecialEffect website or click on the link to see all Later Levels’ posts about the event.

The pace is picking up in the Later Levels household with only one day left to go until GameBlast19. If previous marathons have taught us anything, it’s that you can never have too many Wotsits close at hand; so we’ve bought more packets of the neon-orange-snack than two gamers could possibly eat in a weekend. They’ve also shown us there’s no such thing as too much testing so we’ve been triple-checking our kit over the past month to make sure the sound issues experienced in past years don’t come back to haunt us.

During GameBlast17, my capture card stopped pulling game sound into the stream. Post-investigation revealed it really didn’t like hot-swaps so we took the decision to stick to PlayStation titles only for GameBlast18. However, our new microphone then decided to keep turning itself off after several hours of streaming – a problem our pre-event testing didn’t pick up because it hadn’t taken place over a long enough duration. We made it through both events with a couple of sneaky workarounds but we want better for GameBlast19!

This time around we’ve gone all out, in terms of the amount and length of testing as well as equipment. A 12-hour stream of The Elder Scrolls Online and another of The Secret of Monkey Island earlier this month revealed a few minor issues but nothing that couldn’t be solved with several small tweaks. Our set-up is very much improved from least year and we’ve had fun playing around with a bunch of new kit recently:

Overall the equipment has behaved and the only real problem highlighted by our test streams is just how physically demanding a 24-hour marathon can be. In previous years our dream-team has included Ben and Nathan but, due to a spouse’s birthday and newborn son, it’s going to be just Pete and I for GameBlast19. The community has helped choose some great video games for us to play however so hopefully the enjoyment and adrenaline (as well as copious amounts of caffeine) will see us through.

We’ll be going live at 08:00 GMT tomorrow morning and are going to do our best to keep the Later Levels Twitch channel on air for 24-hours until 08:00 GMT on Sunday, 24 February 2019. You can take a look our schedule here to find out what we’re playing; and if you fancy joining in with any of the titles, get in touch and let us know. Say hello in the chat if you’ve got a spare moment and we may even play a special little animation or two just for you.

All donations received via our JustGiving page go directly to SpecialEffect and help them continue their wonderful work. There are other ways in which you can show your support too: watch us on Twitch tomorrow, host the Later Levels channel, share our press release, tweet about GameBlast19. We really appreciate every little action, and are looking forward to doing our bit to helping the charity level the playing-field for everyone!