Emptyeye

With one week until I travel to Rhode Island to get absolutely destroyed in this tournament (Despite the topic title, actual cancellation of the tournament seems unlikely), I figured a fully DDR-centered post would be good.

MAX 300 was the first “10-footer” in DDR history. 10 feet is as high as the DDR difficulty scale goes (In the Groove went as high as 13 for its difficulty, and unofficial fan-made files for Stepmania go even higher than that), despite the fact that nowadays the range of “10s” is so wide that the game could really benefit from 11 or even 12 being added to said scale. But in any case, MAX 300 has become something of a project for me of late. I can get through the song with no problem, but there are a few spots in it I simply can’t seem to get right no matter how hard I try.

If you’d like to see these yourself, just click on the thumbnail above and have a look at the spots labeled 1, 2 and 3 (Warning, the file is big, about 1000*900 pixels. Also, my thanks to DDR Freak, who provided the original stepchart and who will hopefully not sue me into oblivion for putting up this modified version.). Spot 1 isn’t actually that difficult, but for some reason I like switching arrows 5 and 6 around in my head and thus missing both of them.

Spot 2 is the second half of the “run of 33″ arrows, which is basically what you’d expect–a run of 33 continuous arrows (Although, because the first 16 are essentially just alternating two arrows back and forth, it doesn’t feel that bad). Once again, here I mess up arrows 5 and 6, which somehow throws me completely off for the rest of the run (My foot position is wrong) and saps my lifebar down to almost nothing. I have no clue what’s going on here. I can hit it fine slowed down even slightly, but I just don’t process it at full speed, or something. What’s frustrating is that at one point, I could mentally do it fine–my feet weren’t fast enough to consistently combo it, but I at least had the sequence of arrows correct. And now…I don’t know.

Spot 3 is another one where my feet simply refuse to step the correct sequence, though I at least have it down to a single incorrect arrow at this point–I tend to step the first four steps in the spot as up-down-up-down instead of the up-down-left-down that it should be. This particular mental block isn’t anything new though–I came to the conclusion that I had always been doing it wrong when I broke my combo either two or three consecutive times in the exact same spot each time. I’m trying to work on it anyway, though–as the first video link in this post shows, people can AAA the song. I may never get that good, but I’d like to at least fully combo the stupid thing at some point.

This entry doesn’t particularly have a point, other than to talk to myself about this, but if there are any other dance gamers who’ve gone through something like this, feel free to chime in.

Though honestly, another reason that I wanted to post this is that this marks the first time in emptyeye.com’s history that I have successfully posted some type of update at least once a day for an entire week. Essentially, either my life is getting more eventful, or I’m getting better at divvying up what I want to post when, but either way, this is a good thing (As it shows that I’m keeping the site very much alive, giving you something to look forward to and giving you more reasons to come back). I don’t think I can keep it up for a second week in a row though–this was more a fluke than anything else. In any event, not to worry, you’ll still get at least the Sunday Night “week X” posts, plus anything else I feel like posting throughout the week.

Speedrunning video games is something I’ve done for quite some time now–even before I was aware of a speedrunning “culture” so to speak, and indeed, it could be argued, before such a culture really even existed, at least in the form we know it today–I have memories of trying to beat games like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night as quickly as I could (Efforts that were absolutely pathetic compared to the top times of today, of course). So it was that in late 2002 or early 2003, I came upon a video, probably linked via the then-still-somewhat-worthwhile GameFAQs boards, titled “Contra in 15 Minutes” (The video can apparently still be found online, though I admit I don’t remember the audio getting as badly offsync as it apparently does, which is why I haven’t linked it here), which I thought was pretty insane at the time.

Well, yesterday on SDA came the news that one Freddy “Frezy_man” Andersson had plowed through the game in a completely insane 10 minutes and 24 seconds (In contrast, my best time is 14:38. Respectable, to be sure, but far slower than even the original SDA run of 11 minutes and change). In watching it, all I could say was “wow”. Understand that there are certain speedruns that are in a class by themselves–that top tier of runs in which even fellow speedrunners watch one and go “holy crap”. Some excellent examples are Andrew Gardikis’s Super Mario Bros in 5 minutes flat, Satoru ‘Hotarubi’ Suzuki’s Super Metroid in 32 minutes, and Jacob ‘LeCoureur103′ Cannon’s Super Mario 64 (70 Stars) in 1:01:32. On the endurance side of things, there’s Kari ‘Essentia’ Johnson’s 4 hour 48 minute magnum opus that is her Final Fantasy III (US) run…which she did in a single sitting. Yes, really.

All this exposition to say that this new Contra run is most certainly good enough to join that unofficial elite group of runs. And the best part about it, to me, is that, while Contra is certainly a famous game (And thus most who watch it will be familiar with the game), the run can be enjoyed with no Contra experience whatsoever–while it’s an unwinnable debate as to which is truly the “best” run on SDA, most of the other runs I’ve linked include some sort of trick that will have the uninitiated calling “WTF Hax” or else wondering in general how certain tricks were performed. Not so with the Contra run–it’s just 10 minutes and 24 seconds of Andersson mercilessly kicking the game in its genitalia until it crumples to the ground, unable to do anything except kind of squeak out a plea for it to be over already.  The run really is that good.

You can read his comments on the run here, and download it or watch it in the quality of your choice here.

With yesterday’s release of a new song comes the associated failed takes in the Into the Aether section of the site. You get failures of anything that isn’t drums in this particular package–2 minutes and 20 seconds of me playing guitar badly, sounding like a dying cat vocally, and going way the heck off beat in an attempt to record a 5/4 bass solo. Sounds like something you want to hear, right?

What wasn’t a failure yesterday was my session of Playstation 2 DDR. I picked up 3 new “Full Perfect Combos”, which in previous mixes were called AAAs (Supernova 2’s scoring system is set up such that you can get Greats and still receive a AAA grade for the song). This brings my home version total Heavy/Challenge difficulty FPCs to a nice round 20. These are the little thumbnails at the top of the post; from left to right, they’re Raspbery <3 Heart (#18), Fevah (#19 and my first Extra Stage FPC), and And Then We Kiss (#20, obviously). If you’re that curious, you can click any of the thumbnails to see the full-size picture of the respective FPC.

Lo, with 35 minutes or so to spare, I have fulfilled the commitment I made to you, the reader, yesterday. The new song quickly overtakes “Epic Failure” as my longest to date. It’s called “7-11″, which is a reference to some of the weird time signatures I employ throughout the song. Note to my cousin: Here are those bizarre time signatures that have been sorely lacking from most of The Six Day Exile to this point. Anyway, read the story behind the song–in brief, it’s me being annoyed at how video games are constantly persecuted by politicians and the media alike–here, or download the song directly here. And, as always, go ahead and leave feedback, good or bad.

Hooray for a semi-regular emptyeye.com segment, huh?

• To lead off, here’s another fine example of O Fortuna making everything awesome. Hockey is actually a fine sport to watch–it’s fast paced, play stops fairly rarely all told, and perhaps its biggest advantage over something like football or basketball is that the last 20 seconds of a game are actually played in 20 seconds and not 20 minutes–but c’mon, everything’s better with “O Fortuna“.
• Sometime last night marked the second time that my Myspace profile had been taken over by nefarious spammers. I’m not exactly sure how it keeps happening–I only put my Myspace password into the actual Myspace site, and my password for that site (Amongst others) is neither easily guessed nor does it have any particular connection to me, so I can only surmise that there’s something in those “Click here for my naked pics” profiles that’s sending it to less-than-desirable sources (While I don’t actually click anything in said profiles, I do check every Friend Request I get, and 99% of them are some type of pseudo-porn spam. I’m not sure what that says about me, to be honest). That, or Paragon sold them the password (Long story/inside joke here).
• Watch for a new song hopefully late tomorrow. I just need to record a solo for it, and drop in some samples and it’ll be good to go. I figure saying “Watch for it tomorrow!” will pressure me to actually get it done tomorrow, because consistently meeting reader expectations is an excellent way to foster loyalty, is it not?
• Lastly, here’s a strange video featuring Ronald McDonald apparently teaching you how to play DDR. Note that the Left and Right arrows are the opposite of how they would normally be oriented on a dance pad, presumably to make it easier to follow. You fellow dance gamers out there may appreciate this edit of the video more.

The name Daniel “Kareshi” Brown should be a familiar one to regular emptyeye.com visitors. If you need a primer, click here for all the posts in which he’s mentioned on the site. Anyway, the NES gamer and piano player extraordinaire has released his first CD, titled Mystic Awakening: Music of Final Fantasy VI. As you can read on his site, it’s 21 tracks from the game Final Fantasy VI (Originally released in the United States as Final Fantasy III, restored to its proper place in the chronology with the release of Final Fantasy Anthology in 1999), from the opening theme to Part 3 of “Dancing Mad” (The Final Boss theme) and everything in between.

A bit of a disclaimer: FFVI isn’t exactly one of my favorite games in the series–I’m fond of echoing those that said before me “FFVI is an incredible half a game. I’m still looking for the second half, it’s gotta be in there somewhere…”–though I did like the music a lot when I’d look at gameplay footage again for the first time in many years. The point being that it’s somewhat difficult for me to judge faithfulness to the original songs, so all I can really do here is judge the playing itself (Believe it or not, I took a semester of piano lessons in college. So obviously I’m qualified to judge someone who plays the piano as his primary instrument..).

And the playing itself is spectacular. Kareshi definitely knows what he’s doing on the piano. And the songs I do remember have been faithfully reproduced (In as much as Nobuo Uematsu’s pseudo-orchestal soundtrack can be replicated on one piano) here. The production is also top-notch–compare Kareshi’s first recording of anything video-game related to one of the samples on his site and it’s pretty easy to hear the difference (The use of a digital piano certainly helps here). As such, all the tracks have the right “feel” to them, as it were–”Edgar and Mash” sounds majestic, “Dark World” sounds ominous and bleak, and so on.

The one issue I have, and it’s probably a function of my lack of familiarity with the songs as much as with anything Kareshi did, is that the songs tend to blend into one another, especially if you’re not really paying attention. This is especially true toward the beginning of the CD. This is really minor, though, and really doesn’t even detract from my enjoyment of the music at all.

There are a lot of video game cover bands out there. There are far fewer video game cover pianists out there. And Kareshi, besides being my friend and rival when it comes to old-school video game, is an excellent video game cover pianist. This CD is proof of that.

You can order the CD and hear samples at Kareshi’s website.

This past week at Emptyeye.com saw the release of a new song, which is easily my longest one to date, plus the associated bonus material that you can grab in the Into the Aether section. That was the main thing regarding what you saw on the site. Off the site, I’ve been working on other songs in the meantime, writing lyrics and coming up with drum parts to record so I can then go back and add the rest of the song–bass, vocals, etc. I also decided to start dating non-blog stuff to make it a little less confusing for people who haven’t been reading the site since the beginning.

Today I went to the mall to play some more DDR. It went pretty well, as I got two new SDGs, bringing my arcade total to 9. The two new ones were Let the Beat Hit Em- 3 Greats (You’ll have to take my word for it; the picture came out awfully), and SP Trip Machine- 7 Greats (This one is actually readable).

Sometime this week I hope to have another song up. Most of the hard stuff is done, so it’s just a matter of recording some kind of solo and getting some samples from Youtube regarding the subject matter. Hopefully that’ll go well.

Until next week…

-EE

Yeah, pretty much what the name of the post implies.

The left thumbnail is another attempt at a banner-sized sort of ad for the site for Project Wonderful. I think it’s actually pretty good, though the URL on the right is a bit superfluous, as the banner will link directly to the site anyway. On the right is a picture of my 17th home version DDR AAA, this one on Peace^^ from DDR Supernova. I noted here that generally I tend to get really close on a song before I finally seal the deal on a AAA for it, and that definitely applied here–I can think of at least four times I’ve gotten one Great on the song before I finally pulled this off. Definitely good to get it out of the way, at any rate.

Tomorrow is a day I’m going to head to the mall to play DDR for what will probably be my last arcade practice session before the tournament in Rhode Island. We’ll see how it goes.

There’s some new material inside the Into the Aether section of the site. One track is a collection of Epic Failure rejected guitar takes, while the other one isn’t, but both probably do a good job of showing that I’m a better bassist than I am a guitarist. That hasn’t stopped me yet, though…

Also, you’ll note that on a go-forward basis, I’ll be adding the posting dates to anything that isn’t on the blog proper. It occured to me that if people download the songs and read about them in sequential order, it’s going to be very confusing, since they’re not on The Six Day Exile in chronological order by upload at all.

Once again, I have successfully delivered a new song when I said I would. This one is called “Epic Failure“, and it’s my longest, most unashamedly prog-rock song to date, despite its rather silly origins. Read all about it by clicking on its name, or go ahead and download it directly here. As a bonus, you can check out the original, much more sloppily played (Yes, really) clean guitar version here. Its own page, plus some aborted distorted guitar takes, will be coming either tomorrow or Saturday.

As always, I don’t mind feedback, be it positive or negative.