Emptyeye

Recently, I’ve been attempting speedruns of Chuck Rock. It remains a rather unremarkable game, but I’m slowly getting better at making my way through it quickly. The one part I need more work on is the last level, particularly the first section–I ruined a great run today by choking at that part, whereupon I threw a not-even-gaming-level tantrum. Despite that, one good thing about Chuck Rock is that it’s short. I don’t even mean that in an ironic “Haha what an awful game!” sense–generally speaking, a failed speedrun attempt on it doesn’t make me want to cry (As came close to happening a couple times when I would screw up Willow runs an hour in.).

Other than that, I managed to overcome one other obstacle in the way of Chuck Rock speedrunning glory, in that my DVD recorder didn’t like the fact that my TV ultimately wasn’t hooked up to anything. In other words, I wasn’t getting a complete signal (Because the TV isn’t hooked to the wall), so it refused to begin recording anything. I managed to get around this by grabbing some composite (Red-White-Yellow) cables and hooking them into the front of the TV–in this way, I could select “AUX” on the TV, and still record stuff, since my game systems are hooked into the recorder itself.

I’ve discussed Gil Thorp and its snarky fan-blog This Week in Milford before. I apparently managed to briefly set a trend on said blog in terms of signatures.

A bit of context: For some reason, one of the characters currently in the strip is 6 feet, 9 inches tall. For some reason, the comic continually refers to him as “6-9 Jeff Ponczak”, as though the “6-9″ were actually a part of his name. So in honor of this, well, take a look at how I signed comment #11 of today’s entry, then look at the signatures of the next 4 or so comments. This amuses me.

The one sentence version: Tomorrow, I’ll probably be streaming some Chuck Rock speedrun practice, what with finding a way to do so that UStream will actually recognize.

You may remember him as the Democracy-hating Let’s Player from exactly eight months ago. Well, apparently his next project is a certain mediocre game whose best part is its title screen music.

Actually, I’m not that bothered by it–DC doesn’t typically (Or at all) play games for speed, so there should still be a little niche for seeing the game done quickly.

Speaking of which, I’m at some point going to attempt to stream some practice runs of it live. I’ll post here when I actually get the kinks worked out.

I’m an hour or two into Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and it’s occured to me that, essentially, this game is going to be Diablo II set in the Marvel universe. I don’t have a problem with this, by any means, but I found it amusing.

Yesterday afternoon, I went out and bought an XBOX 360, after having been assured by a Gamestop employee (Admittedly not the most unbiased source, but more likely to follow this than I had over the past two years or so) that the famous Red Ring of Death problem that plagued early models had been fixed. I also picked up a game for it–actually, two games, the second of which I didn’t even realize I was getting thanks to my not checking the back of the box: Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Forza Motorsport 2. Today I played some Ultimate Alliance (And by “some” I mean “about 20 minutes worth”), and it’s pretty fun in that take-control-of-a-bunch-of-Marvel-characters-and-beat-the-snot-out-of-villains way.

Of course, the Special Edition of the real reason I got the 360 isn’t out for another month yet.

Today was a Connecticon Member Appreciation Day. These things are pretty cool; they’re essentially one day mini-cons, with video gaming and the like available all day. It was really kind of surreal–the events take place in an actual office building, which gives everything a weird sort of vibe (Not to mention making it impossible to find your way anywhere if you don’t know where it is in advance).

Anyway, I played a lot of Rock Band today, as you might expect from someone who won Best Vocalist at CTCon this past year. Also playing a lot of Rock Band was a girl named Rachel, who suffice to say was better than me at vocals in the game (But for some reason wasn’t in the tournament this past year). She played on Expert, did well at it, and seemed to have a lot of fun while doing it (My personal favorite was her singing “Creep” by Radiohead in the style of Harley Quinn from Batman: The Animated Series). Her skill can be summed up by the following conversation:
“Dude, I’m sorry, but I would’ve voted for her for Best Vocalist over you.”
“Dude, I would’ve voted for her over me for Best Vocalist.”

Yeah. Guess I’ll just have to work that much harder over the next year or so.

Just a brief rant..it seems that for some reason, Chuck Rock doesn’t emulate correctly in ZSNES whatever-version-I-have. I can play level 1 fine, but then Level 2 flips the heck out, rapidly flashing back and forth between showing the actual level and…some other, completely unrelated part of the level from what I can tell. It makes it rather difficult to practice speedrunning, as you might imagine. Blah.

Yeah. I’ve been a bit lazy with the Weekly Updates because, frankly, not much is happening here site-wise.

Last night, I beat the thoroughly mediocre Chuck Rock for the first time. Prior to then, I could never figure out how to harm the last boss, and as the game is really pretty average (Except for its awesome title screen music, which you can hear part of here), I never really thought to pick it up again until very recently. Not only that, but upon completing the thing, I came to the conclusion that it would be a good game to speedrun. It’s short, it’s obscure (So far, of the three-as-of-this-post comments at SDA, two are of the “I’ve never heard of this but more runs are always cool” variety, and the third calls the game…well, not very good.), it’s perfect for me. Now I just need to work out some strategies for it.

Yeah, I’m insane.

Emptyeye conveniently leaves out of the title of this entry the fact that he was the guy that nearly cost said pizza dude his job in the first place!

Basically, what happened was that Jess and I had some food (Ironically enough, not pizza) delivered. When I gave the guy the money, he didn’t have correct change, so he handed me back the money while he went to get it. He then came back and gave me the change…by which point we had both forgotten that I still had the money I was supposed to give him in the first place. I realized this about four hours later when I dug into my pocket and found the money in there. We’re currently waiting for someone from the pizza place to pick it up (As we called said place back after realizing our mistake).

The food was quite good, by the way. The place was People’s Choice Pizza, for those of you in the Connecticut area.