Emptyeye

A few “U Fail It!” awards to hand out today.

First, a “U Fail It!” to Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama for insinuating that John McCain would be the Robin to George W. Bush’s Batman…and thereby playing right into McCain’s hands. The implication, as the link says, was that McCain would be another four years of what we as a country have had since 2000. Only problem: As this comic points out (And as anyone who even watched the great Batman: The Animated Series would know, let alone anyone who’s a hardcore comic fan), Robin actually does get mad at Batman pretty frequently–one Robin actually quit entirely and went on to become Nightwing. Whoops! Barack Obama: Wrong on Batman, failure at analogies.

The second “U Fail It!” probably marks the start of my descent into becoming a Stop Having Fun Guy, but oh well. It concerns my recent obsession, Rock Band, and more specifically, the album version of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” that you can buy at the XBOX/PS3 store. Suffice to say that roughly half the bass notes (On Expert) are simply missing, and the ending is, as a result, a lot easier than it would be on an actual bass (Which is something I have some experience with, both in a general sense and in the specific case of “Tom Sawyer”). Granting, Harmonix have said before that they place “having fun” over “100% musical accuracy”, but considering how utterly ridiculous some of the Expert charts are for other songs, would it have killed them to get this right? I submit that it would not.

Earlier this week, the MAGFest 7 Challenges were posted. This year is going to be interesting for a couple reasons. First and foremost, as compared to last year’s booth, there are a much higher percentage of games I’ve never actually played before (Though in talking to some other people, it seems a lot of us are in the same boat on that front). Last year, Metal Dream (You may remember him from such performances as “Taking second in last year’s Challenges Booth” and “beating my ass at Dr. Mario“) noted that I have an analytical play style when it comes to gaming. I suppose this is true, as it almost has to be to be a successful speedrunner (Where moreso than in ordinary gaming, you have to be ultra-prepared for every possibility and ready to adjust your gameplan on the fly depending on what you see), though I wasn’t conscious of it until he pointed it out. In any event, over the next two-plus months, we’ll see how true that really is as I prepare for this year’s Challenge Booth.

The other monkey wrench in the plans this year is a decided SDA presence. The administration decided to have an SDA gathering, and MAGFest was chosen as the gathering place. Put another way, there’s likely to be more competition than there was last year, at least as far as the top 10 went, where as few as 8 points was good enough for a shirt (As a reminder in case you didn’t click the above link, Kareshi had 51 points by the end, Metal Dream and myself had 50, and 4th place had 28). Or it should have been, had a series of events not conspired to ensure that we won’t get the shirts until arriving at M7.

Time to practice!

Yeah. Not a whole lot else to say about it other than Jess and I went out and picked up the Special Edition Bundle (With a microphone, guitar controller and drums) today. Amusingly, the mall opened later than I would have guessed it did, and so we actually got there just as it opened and claimed our prize. We’ve been doing some simple stuf in various configurations, and I managed to get my first Gold Stars on “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins. Hooray!

By the way, my XBOX Live gamertag is Emptyeye2112 if anyone feels like playing with me.

Lately I’ve been repeatedly playing the classic beat ‘em up game Final Fight. My ultimate goal is to speedrun it–considering that the version found in Capcom Classics Collection is pretty much arcade perfect, this is no easy feat. See, arcade games, especially in the late 80s, were fun, to be sure. They were also freaking cheap, the goal basically being to get you to pump in as many quarters as possible in a short time. This, essentially, makes me feel completely incompetent at this particular version (I can fake it pretty well on the SNES port, thanks to the fact that the limitations of the hardware mean you don’t face any more than 3 enemies on the screen at once). The fact that I choose to play as the impossibly buff mayor of Metro City, Mike Haggar, probably isn’t helping. Haggar is very strong, to be sure, and he’s also, to me, more fun than the other characters to play as–there’s something even more satisfying than usual about being able to piledrive a particularly difficult enemy to his doom. He’s also slow (In both movement speed and attack speed), which makes actual timing more of an issue than with the quicker characters. Somewhat paradoxically, Haggar can generally handle large groups of enemies without much trouble (Just keep suplexing them into one another), but individual enemies can be a bit of a problem, particularly the quicker ones.

Oh well, I’ll keep plugging away, slowly suplexing and pile-driving my way to competence in this game.

Closed-down gas stations are an interesting thing. They fascinate me more than most defunct businesses because, unlike most others, you can generally still see the price of the various types of gasoline they offered just before their closure–for whatever reason, the big signs right outside the stations themselves aren’t usually taken down. To me, it’s really interesting to see precisely how much gas was going for when a given station went belly-up. This is even more true now that the price of gas is down a buck a gallon or so from its all-time high.

For instance, on Wolcott Road in Waterbury can be found the remnants of a gas station that was selling gas at $1.62/gallon when it closed. This seems ludicrously low nowadays, though it was bit less so for awhile after it shut down. My cousin and I noted that if it were open (Even when gas was at $2-something/gallon), the lines for it would surely be around the block. At the other end of the spectrum is a closed-down gas station somewhere between Southington and Naugatuck that was selling regular unleaded gas at $4.39/gallon when it closed. There’s a “CLOSED” sign outside of it and everything, which seems odd now–why would anyone pay that much for gas nowadays?

After entirely too much attention and dedication to it, I managed to get a run of Chuck Rock that I’m truly happy with–the entire game completed in roughly 11 minutes and 55 seconds. Hopefully, I can send that in to SDA soon and get it up for everyone to see.

Other than that, not too much has been going on here.

My friend and I joke that Myspace, Facebook and their ilk are really what amount to “Sanctioned online stalking”. I’m now convinced that Facebook, in a way, really does encourage this, at least in terms of making initial contact.

See, al of these social sites allow you to make “Friend Requests” (I’ll leave out the argument about whether you can call thousands of people on your list that you never actually talk to “friends”), and they allow you to send a message to people besides. The problem with Facebook is that the message has a very low character limit. On one hand, I understand this to an extent, as it prevents people from writing pages-long love letters to people they’ve barely met. On the other hand, though, it also prevents you from saying anything more than “Oh hey I went to high school with you remember me?” to people that you knew in high school (Or college) and are curious to know what they’re up to. Again, some could see this as a good thing, but I think it’s possible to have this curiosity without being a shady creep, and it’s sort of frustrating.

From my watching way too many Let’s Plays on Youtube–I particularly recommend Deceased Crab’s channel–I’m occasionally introduced to cool games I would never have heard of otherwise. Mr. Crab indirectly introduced me to a couple games by one Nifflas. Within a Deep Forest, Knytt, and Knytt Stories are relaxing little games with ambient music where the focus is less on killing everything that moves and more on exploring your world. Yeah, there are objectives in each game, but the point is really to explore the games’ universe and discover its secrets. In all three of the games, there’s relatively little that can kill you, save points are frequent, and in Knytt in particular, exploration and non-linearity are the name of the game (Within a Deep Forest and Knytt Stories play a bit more traditionally–there’s still not much that can harm you, but the structure is a bit more focused on grabbing power-ups to increase your capabilities and access new areas. Knytt gives you all that from the start). Check them out if you get a chance, even if you don’t normally play a lot of video games. Amusingly, the games were made using Multimedia Fusion 2, which was also the development tool for the decidedly not ambient and friendly I Wanna Be The Guy, which can be best summed up by this video starting at about 3 minutes and going to 3:30 or so. Yes, Dracula chucks his glass at you in the middle of his speech and kills you if you’re not paying attention. Pretty much all of IWBTG is composed of sadistically difficult trial-and-error stuff like this.

So, bottom line, play Nifflas’s games.

Yeah. Today I managed to record my first really satisfactory (Read: one-life) speedrun of Chuck Rock. The time from gaining control of Chuck to the final hit on the T-Rex was 13:11 (For some comparison, the average Youtube video is typically only on the third of fice levels at that point); the SDA time would probably be several seconds higher, as they time until loss of character control, and there are roughly five seconds after striking the decisive blow that you still have control of Chuck. I’m still going to try and improve the run a bit more, though…the last boss in particular can be done faster.

In other news, I’ve been messing about with something called the RPG Toolkit. I don’t expect anything serious to come out of it–making games takes a lot of time and dedication, and we know by now how flighty my attention span is–but it’s fun to play with regardless.