Emptyeye

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Since it’s about a week and a half away, I figured now is a good time to promote the Speed Gamers Metroid Marathon, taking place March 12th through the 15th.

For those of you who don’t know, while The Speed Gamers may or may not have been the first group to do gaming marathons for charity, they’re definitely the group who popularized the concept. On a somewhat more personal level, even though some people at Speed Demos Archive–including myself–were rather critical of some of the gameplay in their marathons, they were still cool enough to send two of their ranks, Phil and Baltes, to Virginia to help out with the SDA Marathon back in January.

So a little bit more about this marathon in particular. They’ll be playing through every game in the Metroid series in a span of 72 hours. They’re trying to raise $15,000 for the Halton Autistic Family Support Group.

For more on The Speed Gamers, visit their website, or lurk around their community.

First of all, yes, I am still alive.

My speedrun of Air Fortress is…well, I’m still trying. Thus far, the furthest I’ve made it without Game Overing on a space-shooter segment is level 8 of the First Quest, although I have done all the fortresses themselves clean in one go. Still a ways off from a quality run though.

When I’m not doing that, I’ve been playing through the NES version of Wizardry I: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Perhaps more appealing to you more creative sorts out there will be the fact that I’ve been trying to take this and turn it into a story of sorts. You can read my efforts on that here, or if you want to jump right into where the storytelling begins, that post is here.

Finally, I’m still working on my game. New progress includes actually pulling one enemy from a choice of several for you to fight based on the region of the (Still very small) world you’re in, and more differentiation between the three classes you’ll be able to choose from (Different stats on level up, etc.)…although now that I think about it, the mere fact that you even can pick your class is new. So that’s still coming along as well.
-EE

Last night I made my first attempt at speedrunning Air Fortress while recording to my DVD recorder. This attempt ended about 25 minutes in because I was too risky in the space-shooting segments. It’s really amazing that it even lasted that long, however.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a screenshot of, effectively, what I’m seeing while running while recording. You’ll note the giant RECORDING symbol which obscures my life total. In this particular screenshot, it’s actually not a big deal (You die in one hit in the space-shooting segments), but it’s a bit annoying to not know how much life I have at any given time in the fortresses themselves.

Still, I’ll get through it like I do everything else.

Just a quick note that, if you have time this weekend, check out Bonus Stage Marathons as they play through pretty much every game Donkey Kong was ever in in order to raise money for Lucky Cat Rescue. I’ll be checking it out at various points when I’m not working on Air Fortress stuff.

No, don’t worry, I’m not going to turn into one of those “Mirco$oft SUXXX! Open sores 4-EVAR!!” people like you see on Slashdot who thinks that the solution to everything is “Get some Linux, it cures cancer.” In fact, I’m not even going to install it anywhere. Let me explain.

Yesterday I went to my parents’ house to help them swap out their 8-year-old computer for a shiny new one my dad had gotten for Christmas. This was a two-part process:

1. Get rid of the data on the old one.
2. Set up the new one with the “standard equipment”–Firefox, AVG Antivirus, OpenOffice, etc.

As it turned out, the second task was a lot easier than the first.

My plan was to move the old computer downstairs for the day to let it do its thing while I set up the new one. As it turned out, this was a good move, but not quite for the reasons I thought. You see, trying to format the hard drive of the old computer didn’t work from directly in Windows (Makes sense, you can’t format a drive from the drive you’re trying to format from, if you get my meaning). Okay, no big deal, format from the Windows CD, right? Problem: To do that requires the administrator password into Windows, which I had long since forgotten.

Needing a way around that, my solution was Knoppix, essentially a “Boot CD” of Linux. Using this, I could bypass the windows password and format the drive that way. The only thing was that I should’ve paid more attention to the filename of what I downloaded–apparently that “DE” on the end meant that I had downloaded a “Deutsch”, or “German”, version of Knoppix. As it turned out, that viewing of Link’s Awakening in German I did during the SDA Marathon did not make me as fluent in German as I thought it did.

After more time lost, I manage to re-download Knoppix in a language I can actually read, and with that, manage to find out part of why I was having trouble. Besides the language issue, for whatever reason, Knoppix didn’t recognize the hard drive as an IDE drive, but as a SCSI drive (This necessitated a slightly different syntax for the “Hey wipe this hard drive thanks” command. And yes, I had to input a command–apparently the computer was old enough that it couldn’t even open the GUI program that would let me do this easily.). Nonetheless, I succeed in wiping the data (“No Boot Device Detected, System Halted” was the exact message when I tried to start it up without the Knoppix CD), and the new computer is also up and running. Plus, I now have an emergency boot CD should I ever need it.

Next time: A More Exciting Update!

This post isn’t going to have quite the marathon-to-MAGFest balance I thought it would when Silver and I embarked on the journey to MAGFest 8. But more on that later. Once again, most of this is behind a cut because it’s obscenely long.
(Continue reading…)

Until Classic Games Done Quick, which is the official name for the SDA Charity Marathon! Myself and 21 other runners will be playing through 72 games in 54 hours or so, starting at 6PM January 1st with the original Mega Man, and ending at about midnight January 3rd/4th with the completion of Final Fantasy VI. Again, we’re playing for CARE, so come by the SDA Main Page over new year’s weekend to watch, chat, and donate!

I’ve been stepping up my practice for this over the past two weeks, especially my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles playing, since I had very little previous experience with it, and it’s known as one of the harder games on the NES. My best run is currently a little over 24 minutes, which I’ll definitely take in a live setting. Part of this was the fact that I got some good luck with where the Technodrome decided to spawn in Area 5, but my actual execution is definitely improving as well. The other four games I’m not particularly concerned with.

In non-speedrunning news, I’ve gotten past a bump in the road as regards the game I’m making. I managed a completely inefficient, but ultimately working, method of equipping and (More importantly) unequipping items. The next step is going to be working out magic.

We’re slightly less than a month away from MAGFest, and I’m seriously looking forward to the SDA Charity Marathon, seeing as I’ll be participating in it and all. Click the link and you’ll be taken to a page related to the marathon directly.

Though I was a frequent patron of the challenges booth at the previous two MAGFests, I’ve barely looked at the page this year. This is mainly due to the fact that I’ve been trying to get ready for the Marathon, though I do plan to look it over and see if I can at least complete one challenge of each difficulty to get each of the prizes for the associated difficulties. Sadly, I don’t think Ryon took my (Half-joking) suggestion of a “Challenges Expert” pair of pants to go with the t-shirt of last year and hat of two years ago, which would give me a full “Video Game Expert” outfit.

In other news, I wound up playing through Final Fantasy V Advance over the last month or two. It was quite fun…one of the things that struck me is that, on average, it didn’t take a particularly high level to get through. I beat the game with an average level of about 43 without really fully exploiting the job system. This is far lower than I needed to be for either FFIV or FFVI (Or, for that matter, FFVII). Actual game-wise, the Job System is maybe my favorite advancement system in a Final Fantasy game to date. As for the plot, supposedly the game doesn’t take itself that seriously, but I didn’t really notice that to be honest.

And…that’s really it from here.

I’m excited! This is because I can now officially really start promoting the Speed Demos Archive Charity Marathon! I’ve mentioned it before, but I can finally give you most of the details both relating to me specifically and the marathon in general.

The theme is “Classic Video Games” focusing on the NES, SNES and Genesis. The complete schedule as it currently stands is available here. It’s not quite final (Despite Mike’s claims), but there won’t be any huge changes from here until the marathon. The marathon starts at 6PM EST on New Year’s Day, January 1st, and goes until about 12:30AM EST on Monday, January 4th. All of my actual running occurs in the first 24 hours, ending with Marble Madness. The other four games I’ll be running are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Battletoads, Rygar and Kung Fu (Not in that order). Interestingly, three of the five games will be race affairs–Kung Fu will be a 3-way race between myself, Daniel “Kareshi” Brown, and Freddy “Frezy_Man” Andersson (Who holds the current SDA run, Marble Madness is going to be a 2-player game with Andrew Gardikis (Who has the current SDA run) controlling the 2-player marble, and Battletoads will be a semi-reprise of Pianotoads, with the added element of another competitor in Pablo “DJ Mike Haggar” Bert (Who…actually doesn’t have the current SDA run in the format we’ll be competing in, although he does have the warpless run of the game).

“But Emptyeye!”, you’re saying, “Where can I watch this marathon?” Well, that’s easy–during the marathon, you can watch on the SDA main page, located at http://www.speeddemosarchive.com. You’ll actually see two camera angles–one focused on the TV running the game being played at the moment, and the second focused on the people commentating on the run. There will also be a chat powered by UStream. You can watch everything and follow along with the chat just by going to the SDA page when it’s time, but you’ll need to register a UStream account to actually participate in the chat.

“But Emptyeye!”, I hear you from the other side of my computer, “Why the heck would you do this?” How about for a good cause? As you watch, there will be a place where you can donate to charity, specifically CARE. CARE are an international charity dedicated to fighting poverty, especially (though not exclusively) as it relates to women. More specifically, rather than just throwing money at people as a quick fix, they try to eradicate the root causes of poverty in the third world–systemic discrimination, corrupt governments, social conflicts, etc. It’s a great cause, and it’s international too, which was important to SDA given the contingent of speedrunners who aren’t from the U.S.

So if you’re not doing anything over New Year’s Weekend, head over to SDA and check out some high-quality speedrunning on some of your favorite games of yesteryear.

-EE

I keep saying that. It continues to be true.

• Final Fantasy V is still going. I’ve also occasionally been playing Rock Band 2 again, though oddly, not a whole lot of The Beatles Rock Band. My FC count continues to slowly increase, though I’ve lost count of exactly how many I have on Expert Vocals, other than “Between 150 and 200″.
• I’ve also been working on my runs for the SDA Charity Marathon. Rygar is going pretty well, and…that’s about it. Everything else I still have from minor to major concerns about. I’ll keep practicing, though, and hopefully everything will work out.

Other than that, not a lot has been happening here since the last post. I’m still alive, which is always good.