About IskatuMesk

I'm a veteran modder with over 26 years experience in custom content creation ranging from voice acting and sound engineering to basic scripting and 3d graphics. I have extensive experience in designing, balancing, testing and quality assurance for large-scale mods and games. I have studied professional gaming and the related elements of player psychology and interaction. While I have been offered jobs for graphics and voice acting I turned them all down for one simple reason - I hate the industry, and I'd never work for someone or something I don't respect.

I am an Elitist; I hold allegiance to nothing except the pursuit of quality.

I made total conversions for Starcraft: Brood War from 1999 to 2009. All third party Brood War modding projects from thereon to present day in 2025 are in part or in whole built on the foundations I presented in Brood War or Starcraft 2 through myriad total conversions and developer content such as the vast Apex R&D series. Chances are if you are familiar with the game's modding scene this is where you know me from.

I suffer from mental disabilities and personality disorders, making my LP's extra entertaining for those who just like watching someone make a fool out of himself. At the same time, thanks to my extensive experience creating and analyzing media, I can offer insight into production that few other LP'ers would be able to spot or are paid to ignore. I am a person whom believes strongly in the quality of a man being manifest through honesty, and I live and present content by this belief even if I can have a hard time expressing it.

Video production has always been in my blood. Back when 007 Goldeneye first came out on the N64, I created VHS tapes documenting my adventures in using Slow Motion and Remote Mines to send various guards into orbit by breaking the "physics" of the game amongst other things. I take pride in breaking everything I touch.

Bug hunting and exploiting design flaws are critical parts of my everyday playstyle and I go to great lengths in the name of science. Some videos feature or exclusively focus on such scientific endeavors, usually with hysterical results. Often times even the most innocent of titles are still susceptible to even the most basic of playtesting, while some games prefer to just crash your GPU at the slightest provocation. The Western Game Industry is a truly fantastic place where no one can do anything wrong and everyone always succeeds no matter how little they attempt to. Even more concerning is how the vast majority of hipsters don't seem to think there's anything wrong with this. Well, I do. My hope is to educate viewers and provide a foundation for a lifelong pursuit of quality entertainment, and along the way I hope to share with them a few laughs, often times at my own expense.

Throughout my many years of custom content I've learned a great deal about not simply designing and balancing games, but also making them, QA'ing them, and the kind of effort (or commonly lack thereof) that the average game has put into it.

My reviews are honest, first-impression based with no bullshit. I usually break down games into elements such as audio and AI, as a game's value is determined ultimately by the strength of how those elements synergize with one another to form a final presentation. Unlike brand name reviewers, who are paid by the word, you can expect an honest and reliable review from me addressing both opinionated and objective elements. Nearly everything I discuss is something I've personally brushed shoulders with at the very least.

My reviews and runs are built in a linear manner and I treat each new project as a stepping stone, and often times I revisit discussions or subjects throughout sequential runs. Professionals and mooks alike help me peer review my observations and reflect upon my inner goat. I treat the process of reviewing and analyzing as a learning experience, and seek ever more to broaden the depths of the locus that is my insight into the wacky world of industrialized scamming.

My views do not reflect the official views of Campaign Creations in whole or part.

Portfolio

Experience (as of 2025) -

Voice acting & sound engineering - 32+ years (both analog & digital)
2d game design - 26+ years
3d game design - 25+ years
Public Video Commentary - 18+ years
Private Developer Commentary - 15+ years
Unreal Engine Game Development - 6+ years
D&D VTT DM'ing, hosting and designing (5e, homebrew) - 8+ years

I have done numerous VA and graphics requests for projects private and public, including Vile Eggression, Flame Knives, Heart of Storms, Babylon 5: We've Found Her, Temple Siege 2, Carbots's Starcrafts, The Antioch Chronicles and Dwarven Combat. Some major third party projects are derived entirely from my work and research, and many accomplished casters, including MrBitter and PainUser, launched their careers as a result of my work. I have also produced narrative and commentary for many community pet projects, both scripted and timestamped. I have produced over 200 hours of private developer commentary for third parties. There are extremely few things I have not at least attempted, mostly being Programming, Animation, Concept Art, Sculpting, and hand Texturing.

I have exceptional experience in creating full-scale total conversions for the following titles:

Starcraft: Brood War
Diablo 2
Warcraft 3
Starcraft 2
Supreme Commander
Homeworld 2
Sins of a Solar Empire
Age of Wonders 2: Shadow Magic
Halo CE (Models, level design, texturing, log mods)

I have moderate to small amounts of experience in the following titles and engines:

Dawn of War (QA for Dawn of Skirmish project, made a very successful private fork for FFA build orders with LUA)
RPGMaker 2000, 2003, XP, VX ACE
Unreal Tournament 2004
UDK (materials, particles, level design)
Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2

I dabble in:

Advanced kitbashing
Texture modding
Radioplay production
FumeFX for flipbook texture creation
Nvidia PhysX & Apex Cloth, Chaos Physics

I have professional-level skills in blueprint, technical art, AI, level design and general familiarity with Unreal Engine 5, demonstrated in the various ApexX productions.

I have worked with Unreal Engine for close to a decade as of 2025. I started my journey porting and updating old meshes, including generating normal maps and correcting their bone weights and UV's, and can update them so they support PBR, as shown with these static meshes from Tera. They use a custom shader I created to translate the color data from their existing textures to create a highly customizable blending material for detail texturing. However, most of my work was experimental and for research only until 2017 when I began making maps for my D&D games using Unreal as my tool. In 2019 I began the private ARPG production called ApexX.

I have extensive experience in both porting and creating custom graphics and sounds across a variety of platforms and workflows. I believe establishing a new experience can only be done through total synergy of all four pillars of game creation - Gameplay, Graphics, Sound, and Computer AI, and strove to perfect all of them as a body in my innumerable adventures.

During Black Sun: Retribution (2013-2014) I became involved in creating entirely new environments destined for the UDK from scratch.

I am adept at taking existing models, such as what was once an incomplete Victory-Class by Jade Taggart, and turning them into something more.

My modeling capabilities are limited, but I am skilled in working with edgeflow and optimizing assets as well as bringing them into the game and updating them if necessary. All of my content is built with performance in mind, though I typically aim for high-end hardware.

In both video and audio I can work with multiple different styles and bring them together in a cohesive format. One day I hope to bring my dreams to life.

I am adept in level design, lighting and technical art. I am also skilled at using this content to create top-down maps for digital tabletop software such as Roll20. I have experience playing and running Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and creating content for the medium. Throughout my time creating content for my games I learned a great deal about lighting, mood-setting, visual storytelling and gameflow through improvising.

Refer to my Past Projects for a better idea of some of my previous work.

I don't exist on social media. Any such instances were from the distant past and have been scrubbed/deleted never to be revisited or are simply not me to begin with.

Summaries of some of my past projects can be found here.

FAQ

What do you do for a living?

The same thing every Canadian does - suck dick and revel in idiocracy. No, I don't do anything besides drink coffee and try to scrape together motivation to work on my projects.

What programs do you use?

See my 2018 video processing guide in the Articles section. In short, I frapsed videos and encoded them with ffmpeg or MEGUI all the way until mid 2018 where HKS discovered how to modify OBS to get high-quality recordings from it.

All audio work prior to 2020 was done in Audition 1.5 with the exception of very large scale projects, like Retribution or compilation projects like XXE, which were composited in Vegas. As of 2020 I use Vegas for processing audio for LP's and other video projects and rarely use Audition.

What hardware are you running?

Q1 2025

The annuals of time and investment of my remaining currency has placed me in top of the line hardware for my workload.

AMD Ryzen 9 5950x (Corsair H110i cooler)
128gb RAM
ATI 7900 XT
US-2x2HR XLR Front-End (Replaces the xi-fi as well)
Lauten LS-208 Microphone
Elgato Stream Deck+
Same as the older parts elsewhere

Post Q2 2019

Thanks to an extremely generous donation from HKS (UntamedLoli), we saw a significant hardware reprise in Q2 2019.

AMD Ryzen 2700x (Corsair H110i cooler)
32gb G-Skill RAM
MSI X470 motherboard
Samsung 970 SSD
Same as the older parts elsewhere

Pre Q2 2019

i7 920, no overclocking (unstable)
12gb corsair ram
older runs are run on either a HD2900 XT or a 4870X2, 6970 pre-2018 runs, and currently I use a Radeon R9 390
shitty asus mobo
Creative SB X-Fi
Console runs are recorded via Blackmagic Intensity Pro with either Component (Pre-2018) or HDMI (2018+)
Old runs (~2010) use a generic Macmice USB mic, everything gen3 (up to Q1 2016) is Blue Yeti, Q2 2016-2018 is AT2020 USB (Thanks Lavarinth!) and after Q1 2018 I'm using a Rode M2 with a Scarlett USB Solo interface
Most video is recorded to WD Blacks (1-4TB) but 30fps 1920x1200 is possible on Greens as well

Never buy garbage Chinese hipster brands like Nvidia and it gets hard to screw up a PC build.

Are you aware X Youtuber is basically trying to be you/copying you?

Yes, I am aware. Yes, people have already told me. There's a number of unskilled amateur Youtubers, especially those tangentially related to Starcraft, that have skinwalked my casting style, my vocabulary, and even entire projects. I do not support or endorse any third parties, their work is their own and irrelevant to mine.

Will you cast a replay, run a game or do some other service for me?

The only game run requests I consider are those from my internal viewers. I unanimously ignore business inquiries I don't do services for other modders either. Too often has it turned out to be something I've come to regret.

Where are your mods located?

If it isn't on this site it isn't public. Some retards have tried to hotlink my files in the past, so I randomly change them. Kindly fuck off.

Will you work on mod projects or mod-related content in the future?

No. I'm retired from modding and I no longer offer consultancy services.

I'm a new viewer. Where should I start?

XXE: The Revenge and other compilation series. If it's your thing, the Heroes of the Storm commentaries are some of my best episodic work, and the Castovers section has lots of bite-sized entertainment featuring way higher level gameplay than my own recordings. The Starcraft and Brood War LP's are probably the better of my modern long-form casting in a mainstream product.

If you'd like to contact me you may e-mail me at malkor at gmail dot com. If you inquire about something covered on this site I will ignore you.