Emptyeye

When I was young, I fell in love with the Nintendo Entertainment System, known in common parlance as the NES (The site I linked to also has an interesting tidbit in a way–people tend to talk about the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. While it’s true that a ton of terrible games were released in that year, most notably Pacman and ET, both on the Atari 2600 [Sorry cuz, but the latter is still a terrible game–also, as I defend Deadly Towers, I suppose I have no room to talk.], the effects of all these games on the market weren’t really felt financially until the next year). For a time, saying video games were my only friend, while not absolutely true, would really not be far off the mark, particularly during middle school and most of high school.

Over the last few years, I kind of fell out of love with gaming, with the exception of Dance Dance Revolution. Indeed, I still have some Game Boy Advance games from Christmas 2006 I haven’t played yet. But recently, I started playing a Christmas 2007 gift, Super Mario Galaxy. Suffice to say that with my limited play so far, it lives up to the hype. I own Super Mario Sunshine on the Gamecube, but never really got into it and quit after about 10 or so Shines. I don’t think I’ll be doing that here. It really is the sort of game you could play for hours on end, saying “Just one more star…” to yourself. And yet, it’s also the sort of game that, if you have that type of willpower, you can pick up and play just one star at a time while waiting for, say, your laundry to finish, or for your laptop to finish converting your Let’s Plays into something you can throw on Youtube (Sup 400MB video that you have to shrink down to under 100MB?). So yeah, bottom line, SMG is amazing, and may get me back into games that aren’t DDR more seriously.

On another gaming note, yesterday I also made another attempt at playing my copy of Beatmania. Those of you up on your arcade history will be amused to note that the game is advertised here in the States as “The arcade hit”, even though I’m pretty sure Beatmania has never seen an official US arcade release (Compare to Tecmo’s Rygar or Ninja Gaiden–both NES games, both advertised as “THE #1 ARCADE SMASH” in their time, both having very little to do with their arcade namesakes). Perhaps more interesting to most of you is the fact that I have no skill whatsoever at this game, and any practice I get in on it really fails to yield significant improvement. And I’m not just being modest–in all honesty, if I can pass something rated a 3 in Beatmania, I’m having a pretty good day. It’s a hard game, generally regarded as maybe the hardest rhythm game out there, and I am apparently not a bad enough dude to take it on. Oh well.

You’ll all be delighted to know that “incompetency” is a word. Yes, this is important, for reasons that will become apparent as I start uploading my Ys I & II Let’s Play.

Speaking of Let’s Plays, watching Cornshaq’s playthrough of the NES game Rambo convinced me that this game may be the worst application of a license in video game history. I mean, you’ve got the Rambo license. You know, Sly Stallone, hugely musclebound Vietnam Vet, bow and exploding arrows? Apparently someone decided that a game playing much like Zelda II’s overhead sections, and set in Vietnam, would be the perfect use of the license.

Full disclosure: When I was little, I liked this game a lot. The music especially stood out to me; there aren’t a whole lot of tracks, but what’s there is great, and would suit itself pretty well to a rockout-fest Minibosses style. Re-watching the game as an adult, I still think the game would hold up pretty well as one of the better licensed games of its era (Admittedly not a difficult feat), and removing the Rambo license altogether would leave you with a solid adventure/exploration game that could hold up on its own merits.

But c’mon. Someone decided RAMBO would make a good Zelda II clone? All right…

This is why I’m not a game company executive, I guess.

Most of the interesting stuff in my life this week has been previously covered on the site, so this is really more out of tradition than anything else. Although honestly, the fact that I’m still updating after close to four months is something of a minor miracle in and of itself (Though I really should get on that music thing soon…).

I did start recording a Let’s Play of Ys Book I & II (Not “Y’s Books I & II” as my cousin said…extremely nitpicky, to be sure, but it’s the difference between champ and chump on Final Jeopardy!, so I don’t feel as bad as I perhaps should in correcting it). I’m going to wait until I get a buffer of a few more videos before I start Youtubing them, though, so I can keep a regular update schedule even if I don’t play the game on a given day or five.

Speaking of Jeopardy!, over the past week I’ve been reading the blog of past Jeopardy! über-champ Ken Jennings, and so thought it’d be fun to share what was possibly his greatest answer during his 75-show run. Somewhere on the site, Ken mentions that between the start of the question and the time he gave the answer, his thought process went from “This is totally the right answer!” to “Saying this answer on Jeopardy! is totally worth the $200 I’m about to lose on it!” (Note a. his smile immediately after he gives the answer and before Alex says “No”, and b. he was the only one with positive money at that point anyway, to say nothing of the huge lead he had) Apparently, it was a good thing Ken got to that answer first, as apparently the person who ultimately gave the correct answer was thinking about saying Ken’s answer for giggles as well.

Until next week…

-EE

Cookies was my girlfriend’s family’s dog, who died earlier tonight. Eerily, I was actually at their house maybe 20 minutes before Cookies died. When I first got there, she seemed happy to see me, and even better than she had been the last time I saw her when she just kind of shambled up to me as opposed to the enthusiastic greeting I was used to. Not long after that, though, she started panting as though she had just run a marathon, which I had never heard her do before (This wasn’t ordinary dog panting, mind you, it was closer to what a human who had just intensely exerted themselves would sound like), and which frankly freaked me out. She eventually calmed down, and seemed okay, if tired, when I left. On my way home, I checked my text messages to see “Cookies just died”. I got home and called my girlfriend, and literally asked her “What do you mean Cookies just died?”

See, I don’t handle death well. Logically, I know that most pets have short lifespans compared to humans, and Cookies was over ten years old, apparently pushing the upper limit of how long a Black Lab is supposed to live. And further, she’d been in pain for awhile, which was fairly obvious–my girlfriend had wanted to put her down awhile back, but her family, maybe out of attachment to the dog, said no. So in that sense, it was probably for the best.

But the thing is, I didn’t think of Cookies as really being that old, even for a dog. Shelby, my aunt’s GIANT* BICHON** FRIEZE OF DOOM***, lived to be either 14 or 15, I can’t honestly remember (Dearest Aunt, I know you read this, feel free to set me straight). So Cookies was practically still young to me, even though she had been there all the time since my girlfriend and I started dating (Almost 8 years now. Wow.). So it’s weird to me that she just..won’t be there anymore, I guess. And as I said, I don’t handle death well in general, which is in fact one of the main reasons I don’t want a pet–I don’t want to deal with the various emotions that come up when the pet invariably passes away.

*sigh*

In other, less depressing news, Akismet is working nicely. I have no idea what the name actually means (According to this, it takes its name because the program is Kismet by Automattic), but Akismet is a program that filters out spam comments before I or anyone else ever sees them. As Supreme Overlord and Dictator Site Owner and Administrator of emptyeye.com, I can see how many comments it’s blocking, plus the comments themselves if I so choose. It’s applying the smackdown to porn bots and other things quite well. Good for you, Akismet! Have a cookie!

I also think I’ve picked a game to Let’s Play that no one else has done before. And it won’t be a speedrun! Indeed, it can’t be a speedrun (At least by SDA rules), because while I own the game (By “own” I mean “Have a copy in my possession that was given to me”), I don’t own the system to play it on, meaning I’ll have to resort to emulation to actually record it. I think my cousin will be very pleased with the choice, if he hasn’t figured it out already.

Finally, I know some of you out there have downloaded my Rygar Speedrun Commentary. Seriously, let me know what you think. My ego can take it. My ego would actually prefer to take it, as it would give me a good excuse to not do commentaries for my significantly longer runs.

-EE

*-”GIANT BICHON FRIEZE” is something of an oxymoron. It’s true that Shelby was relatively huge for a Bichon Frieze, but she was still pretty small compared to most other species of dog (A fact only reinforced by living next to a Chocolate Lab and a Rottweiler for several years).

**-I have no idea if the correct spelling is “Bichon” or “Bishon”. Neither Google nor Firefox spellcheck are any help.

***-Okay, now I’m just flat-out lying–Shelby was extremely friendly, and pretty much totally harmless, both because she was small (as mentioned above, a “GIANT BICHON FRIEZE” is still not very big), and because she had a very laid back demeanor–it was very rare to even hear her bark at anything.

Just an observation I made awhile back. You probably know “O Fortuna”, you just don’t know it by that title. It’s this piece of music, which is currently being used in several commercials. But seriously, anything set to “O Fortuna” just automatically becomes awesome. Gotta make a copy of something at work? Set it to “O Fortuna” and you’ve just turned an everyday workplace occurence into the most mind-bendingly epic event of the year!

It also occurred to me that, if not for the beginning, “O Fortuna” could serve as the pre-Internet (By about 100 years) prototype for those “Screamer” sites that were big a few years back (You know, “Look at this picture and find what’s wrong with it with your volume all the way up…AAAAAAAAAH!! [With a scary picture flashing for good measure]”). You get the big “O fortuna” beginning, then the whole thing gets really quiet for about a minute and fifteen seconds before….*WHAM!!* everyone jumps up the octave and it gets super loud and epic (It’s generally only this last part that’s used in pop culture, by the way).

-EE

This is a sort of test run for an idea I had to record audio commentaries for my speedruns and offer the “With commentary” versions here (The vanilla, just-the-music-please runs would obviously still be available on SDA if you prefer those). It’s an audio commentary for my Rygar speedrun. You don’t need any fancy codecs or anything, but you do need a program capable of playing .MP3s, which any computer less than, say, 10 years old should have. What you do is download the file (Warning to those of you who are still on dial-up: Don’t even bother, the file is about 38MB in size, to say nothing of the size of the run itself), plus the speedrun, play the commentary file, and when it tells you to, press Play on the speedrun so the two sync up. Let me know how it sounds, if it was useful to watching the run, etc. If it’s bad, please, for the love of whatever deity you worship, tell me as much. You’ll save myself and everyone else who may download these things a lot of work and frustration.

All that said, you can download the commentary here.

-EE

Even leaving out the stuff as regards my DDR adventure yesterday, this was a pretty eventful week for me site-wise.

First, on the music front, I’ve been messing around with my new drum machine I got for Christmas, and the next song I upload will be the first using it. I have a basic knowledge of how to work it now, I think, although to be honest, it sounds a little too much like me playing drums. The buttons on it are weight-sensitive–in other words, the harder you press, the louder the drum sound–and I have yet to really get the hang of that, so the volume of the drums in the song varies pretty wildly at points. Oh well, as long as I fix it up for the album, this will be a fascinating document of me learning as I go.

In site news, you’ll notice a new section on the sidebar, “Emptyeye Elsewhere on the Web”. It’s a list of my profiles and speedruns on various sites I frequent. I figure that with the LJ and MySpace in particular I direct them to here a lot (Almost exclusively, in fact), so I figured I’d go the other way this time and see what came of it.

Speedrun wise, my Astyanax run continues to sit in the SDA queue. If you know the game, and you’ve been around SDA, let Mike at SDA know that you can verify that I’m not a dirty cheater–the quicker it gets verified, the quicker it can be viewed by the masses. I’m also considering recording audio commentary over all of the runs I currently have on SDA, which is apparently five of them (Two Battletoads runs, plus one each for Rygar, The Magic of Scheherazade and Willow). It seems that I have a few people who would watch them if I could avoid simply repeating my text commentary, and as one person said, “it is always handy to have multiple potential sources from which to watch [speedruns].” There is some element of self-interest there too, as it may give more people who watch speedruns a reason to go to my site and check out the music, etc, which works out well for me. Tomorrow sometime I’ll probably try to record just an audio track for my Rygar run and upload just that. That way, people who have the run (Like, um, me) already will just download a relatively small audio file and, if the whole thing turns out to bomb, it won’t be a huge investment of time on my part (Except for the “Uses Warps” Battletoads run, this is my shortest). If it does work out, then I’ll do the work to integrate the audio with the video and do commentaries for my longer runs. Being bitten by the Let’s Play bug, I may start doing some of those too. Those are just normal playthroughs of a game with commentary. I’m not exactly sure what games I’d do these on, though Power Blade is one candidate. If you have any other ideas, feel free to suggest them.

Until next time…

-EE

“Democracy was such a bad idea.”

Context behind the cut.
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I went to the Brass Mill Center today to play on the DDR machine of the Regal Cinemas within the mall. It was…an interesting day, to say the least. Because of my mad DDR skillz*, I received:

1. Half a pack of gum
2. A dollar
3. The assurance that I could continue to use the machine

I’ll discuss the last one first. You may be asking “Why would you think that you couldn’t use the machine? Did you perform some criminal act while at the mall or something?”, and the answer is “No.” But here’s the thing. You’ll note that I wrote “…to play on the DDR machine of the Regal Cinemas…” Apparently (This was being explained to someone behind me–while I was playing a song..I think it was Keep On Movin’, and I got 5/1/1 on it if you fellow dance gamers reading this are curious–so I just picked up bits and pieces of it), though the Brass Mill Center houses the cinemas who currently own the machine, Regal Cinemas are a separate entity from the mall. Further, cinemas in general don’t like being treated like arcades–the machines, including this particular DDR, are supposed to be there as something you do for a game or two while you wait for your movie to start–not, as I was doing, for one person to play continually without ever going near the theater proper. I didn’t know the second part of this at the time, although in the end it wouldn’t matter. I finished my song, and as the theater guy, I think his name was Mike, finishes his explanation about how he doesn’t like people treating the cinema area like an arcade, he tells me “Well, I’ll let you do it, because I like watching people do really well on this game” or something to that effect. So yeah.

I got the dollar from some kid after doing (Relatively speaking) really well on some songs on my last set of the day. He just gave it to me and actually said something like “Here you go, thank you.” and I just said “Wow, thanks.” I don’t actually know if getting the gum was directly related to my skill or not, but it makes the whole story somehow better if it was, so…

By the way, pictures of my three best scores of the day are behind the cut below. They’re my first three arcade SDGs, or “Single-Digit Greats”–in other words, getting under 10 Greats on a song and nothing below that.

*I’m still not that good compared to top-tier players, and would get destroyed at almost any tournament on the game (Fourth-place finish in a tournament in Trumbull notwithstanding).
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This past week, I was on vacation from work! Fun, huh? I suppose, although I wasn’t nearly as productive on the musical front as I would have liked to be. I did manage to finish a new song, a solo bass instrumental that you can get here. Given the title of the song, I think people are going to be directed here via some truly disturbing search strings in short order, even though the title just refers to the fact that it’s a bass solo, which are generally useless to the majority of the planet who aren’t bassists. Either way, though, download it and let me know what you think! There are comment links at the bottom of every post, feel free to use them!

Besides that, lately I’ve been getting into Let’s Plays in a big way. Most of these aren in picture form, but a search of the term on YouTube reveals some in video form beginning about halfway down in the results. There are some surprisingly obscure games there too, like the Magician one I’m working my way through now (Despite having played through the game myself long ago). Even some of the “static” ones are great to just read through–the Phantasy Star II one from the perspective of the main characters is great (RANDOM FUN FACT: I actually tried and failed to speed run this game. Well, not failed per se, as I got through a probing run with my main party at a final level of 18 across the board (And rest assured if you’ve never played the game, you are NOT supposed to beat it with levels that low), but got frustrated and stopped with practice runs for the sake of my sanity.), and some of the video ones are funny as well, my particular favorite bit being Part 10 of Scous’s Faxanadu Let’s Play where he dies and proceeds to start yelling at the game. The game’s response: “Don’t have negative thoughts.”

A brief note that the whole Let’s Play concept, like most Internet phenomena, seems to have originated (At least with that name; I’m willing to bet that video walkthroughs certainly existed before “Let’s Play”) with Something Awful (Not Exactly Work Safe), but has, from what I can tell, spread beyond SA.

I’ve been trying to get back into Dance Gaming of late, but my pad is making it difficult. Trying to clean it seems to have only made it worse. Oh well.

Until next week…

-EE