Emptyeye

Rock Band 2 has a lot of songs. One of those songs is “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette, her rather bitter, sarcastic ode to Uncle Joey of Full House (Which is a bit creepy in itself; Dave Coulier is about 15 years older than Morissette is). Given its subject matter, it’s not surprising that someone (Be it Harmonix themselves or someone at the ESRB) saw fit to censor some of the lyrics. Besides the obvious removal of an “F” word, there’s additional censorship that is the subject of this post.

Early in the song is the line “An older version of me/is she perverted like me/would she go down on you in a theatre?”, a not-all-that-veiled reference to oral sex in, um, a theatre (Or “Theater”, if you’re particularly anal about the spelling of your band name). For some reason, it was decided that removing the word “down”, and only the word “down”, was acceptable here. This actually makes the phrase even worse/more hilarious. The reason for this is that it leaves “Would she go (pause) on you in a theatre?”, which makes it sound like the subject of the song has a thing for being urinated on during the movies.

Funny censorship indeed! Can you think of anything else like this? The only other real example I can think of is the Playstation 2 release of In the Groove, where the method of censoring used–turning the words into complete gibberish–tended to make things even worse if you listened hard enough/knew what to listen for.

Just wishing everyone out there in USA-Land a Happy Thanksgiving. May it be filled with fun, family, and games where you simulate being in a band.

Woo-hoo!

• I decided that, in my Rock Band 2 playing frenzy, I’m going to attempt the Endless Setlist 2 on Expert Vocals on December 8th, which is a little less than 2 weeks from now. I have that day off, so it’s as good a day as any. For those of you who don’t know, the Endless Setlist (2) is every song in the game, one after another, and doing it all in one sitting (No pausing or failing) gets you a special achievement called the Bladder of Steel Award, in addition to the various achievements you can get for simply completing the thing on various difficulties (Harmonix were at least kind enough to give you any achievements on lower difficulties at the same time. In other words, if I actually pull this off, I’ll not only get the Bladder of Steel and Endless Setlist on Expert awards, I’ll get the awards for doing it on Medium and Hard at the same time). This will involve about 6 hours or so of singing, which isn’t the easiest thing in the world, to say the least. I’ve been going through the setlist in chunks to identify potential trouble spots before I try the whole thing at once.
• Lately I’ve been in a “see friends I haven’t seen in years” phase. Today I saw my friend Kelly whom I hadn’t seen since 2004 or 2005, and about a week ago I got together with my friend Barbara, whom I hadn’t seen since shortly after I graduated high school in 2001. It’s definitely fun to actually get into real-world contact with some of these people again.
• Not long after I update WordPress thanks to an e-mail from my ISP saying I might be vulnerable, they release a new version. Bah.

Yes, after quite awhile, my speedrun on that platforming classic (By which I mean “Game that goes rapidly downhill once you press Start to get beyond the title screen and actually start playing the game”) Chuck Rock has been posted to SDA. Go check it out! And for those of you who found the site via the link in the run’s comments, welcome! Feel free to browse through the blog archive, or check out some of my music. If you’ve got your own site to advertise, consider putting in a bid for the ad-space to your right at Project Wonderful. Thanks, and hopefully you’ll keep checking back!

Oh, and a special shoutout to the people/bots/whatever from Amsterdam who keep trying to spam my Comments. I mention this only because they were the first people since I activated Akismet to actually succeed in getting through it–for about 6 hours, when I blocked any comments coming from their IP block. Hi Amsterdam!

On the eve of the release of Axl Rose’s Daikatana Guns N’ Roses’s Chinese Democracy, I have to say that I’m surprised that there was a never of list of “things that have come out while we were waiting for this album to be released” like there currently exists for the video game Duke Nukem Forever.

That is all.

On my lunchbreaks, and during commercials for the few programs I watch with any regularity, I see glimpses of news programs, top stories, etc. A few months ago, economists were worried about rapid inflation. Fair enough; prices going up reduces buying power, which in turn slows the economy down.

Now, however, the concern is apparently about deflation; that is, prices “falling too far”. This confuses me, both in terms of the specific example (I believe it was gas prices), and in general.

Tackling the example first: It’s tempting to think of gas stations as the extension of “Big Oil”; keeping prices artificially high to squeeze out every cent of profit they can on the poor consumer–I’ve done this myself. But the truth is that, in today’s age of plastic, gas stations want lower prices as much as consumers do. The reason has to do with the fact that credit card companies take a certain percentage (Not a set amount) of every transaction. So in some utopia where gas costs the gas stations 90 cents a gallon, they’ll turn around and sell it for, say, a buck a gallon. On cash transactions, they make ten cents a gallon profit. On credit card transactions, if the credit card company is taking three percent of every transaction, that’s three cents a gallon, and the gas station makes seven cents a gallon in profit. Not bad.

Now as gas prices rise, the stations adjust their prices accordingly to keep that ten-cent profit margin. Eventually, this is a problem–imagine that gas now costs that same station $3.90 a gallon. They’re selling it for $4/gallon, so nothing really changes for cash transactions. They have a problem with credit card transactions, though. Three percent of 4 dollars is 12 cents a gallon the credit card companies are taking, so the station actually loses two cents a gallon on credit card transactions. This is, incidentally, why some stations offered discounts for paying in cash (Which is, incidentally, supposed to be illegal, but that’s neither here nor there; I’ll presume some exemption I wasn’t aware of was granted to the companies).

As for prices falling in general, I’m having a hard time seeing how that’s anything but a good thing. Lower prices means more buying power, which means more people buying more things (The American people as a whole showing a shocking lack of discipline with their money over the last several years), which stimulates the economy, does it not? Isn’t this what the Bush the Younger administration wanted with those stimulus checks a few months back (Incidentally, since I was on pretty solid financial ground, I’m pretty sure I’m the one person in the country who used the check as intended; hi Rock Band 2!)?

Economics confuses me. What I take away from all this is that prices doing anything at all other than staying right where they are is bad for the economy. Is this correct?

Just heard this maybe a half hour or so ago on SportsCenter: Mike Mussina is retiring, apparently. Tim Kurkjian is discussing whether The Moose is Hall of Fame material:

“He is to me. More so than the 100+ above .500 (Note from EE: Part of the lead-in to the question of “Is he a Hall-of-Famer?” was the fact that his career record is 100+ games above .500. 20 other pitchers have that statistic; the 16 that are eligible for the Hall are all in [The other 4 are either still active or not retired long enough to be eligible]), is his winning percentage. He has a .638 winning percentage; the average during his time in the league is .501!”

I’ll let those of you who follow baseball point and laugh at Mr. Kurkjian.

For those of you who may not be in on the joke, I’ll explain. In every game (We’ll forget the 2002 All-Star Game debacle for purposes of this discussion), a team wins, and a team loses. Also in each game, there is a winning pitcher, and thusly, there is also a losing pitcher. In short, of course the league average winning percentage is going to be very close to .500 (I have no idea how it isn’t .500 on the nose, actually. My guess is that you have the occasional situation where some poor reliever gets tagged with the loss for whatever reason)–there will be an equal number of wins and losses in a season (And pitchers with said wins and losses)–making it an entirely useless statistic to compare Mussina’s winning percentage to in terms of Hall of Fame consideration.

Yeesh.

I’ve decided that, contrary to my previous stance of absolutely despising the New England Patriots–I’m pretty sure there were very few people happier than I was when they choked hardcore in last year’s Super Bowl–I’ve decided I want them to make a 2001-esque miracle run to a Super Bowl victory.

Why my change of heart? Not because I suddenly like the Pats, mind you–I still can’t stand the media love fest for them, and I still think 90% of their fans are worthless bandwagon jumpers who couldn’t name their quarterback at the start of the 2001 season (More on that later). No, I just decided I want the Pats to win so that everyone will love Matt Cassel and go “Tom Brady? What’s a Tom Brady?” like the bandwagon jumpers did with poor Drew Bledsoe (He’s the answer to the little trivia question posed above, by the way) seven years ago. I’m of the opinion that Big Babychick Bill Belichick isn’t the coaching messiah that so many see him as (Look how the Wildcat absolutely confused the heck out of the Pats during the Dolphins game this season. Gimmick plays aren’t supposed to work more than once or twice, but the Dolphins kept running them, and the Pats–led by the supposed defensive genius that is Belichick–bit every single time), but rather just got really freaking lucky that a sixth round chump selection got some playing time thanks to a freak injury and turned out to be one of the best quarterbacks of my generation. I’ll remind everyone once again that after two games of the 2001 season, Bledsoe was out for the year, the Pats were 0-2, and everyone had proclaimed their season D-U-N Done. I’ll also remind everyone that Brady’s record through his first five games was 3-2, the same as Cassel’s record. And yet everyone who follows the Pats, apparently forgetting how their Golden Boy QB came to prominence in the first place, has apparently just given up on this season and are waiting for Brady to come back. Wrong attitude, I say.

A few entries down, I gave my preliminary thoughts on some of the MAGFest VII Challenges. In the comments for that entry, Ryon, who’s running the booth, asked me if I thought any of the challenges were mis-rated besides Castlevania II. Because it seems like my comments have actually caused this challenge’s difficulty to be changed, and because I don’t want to seem as though I’m colluding with Ryon to change some of the difficulties for my own personal gain, what follows is the entire text of the e-mail I sent him regarding this, with his replies interspersed throughout.

For readability purposes, my words will be in red, while Ryon’s will be bolded. Typos have not been fixed; the only change I made was that the word between “Mike” and “Tyson” was not originally starred out, and I removed our respective signatures. I’ll be pointing stuff out as we go; that will be in ordinary black text with parantheses around them.

Hey,

Earlier today I went and finished up my first looks at (Most of) the MAGFest VII challenges. I’m honestly a bit leary of giving you my thoughts on them, for a couple reasons. The first is that, like you, I’m only one person, with a skillset and familiarity that’s different from yours. The second is that a lot of these are based on rather short practices/first looks (Go ahead and presume this to be the case unless I say otherwise)–with enough time, I get the feeling I could eventually handle most of them without major problems (Exceptions: Some of the ones I tried and failed at least year, and Mike ******* Tyson). The third, and most important reason, is that I really don’t want to make it look like I’m colluding with you to change difficulties to make things easier on myself. As such, if you don’t mind, I’d like to also post these comments to the various places people would be interested (Off the top of my head: My site, The Shizz, the MAGFest.org thread, and SDA). That way, opinions from other people could also be solicited, and even if they do all plan on competing in the Challenges Booth to varying degrees, a cross-section of opinions is almost certainly better than going off of the opinions of one high-finishing person who has a vested interest in how the difficulties ultimately end up.

Mark,

I’ll comment on your thoughts individually (and probably on The Shizz if you get any discussion)

Oh, and since the Castlevania II challenge appears headed for a difficulty change (Which I don’t mind), you may want to put some kind of “difficulties subject to change” message on the site up to a certain date based on opinions from others.

I still can’t get Drac stuck, despite trying for quite a while tonight. Hard is a better difficulty for it, as a random person walking up to the booth with no clue what they’re doing will definitely find it challenging. Interesting side note: I really thought that one was impossible, as it was damn near impossible getting to Drac with only the Leather Whip and the Holy Water. Oh well, that’s why we want people to test them for us beforehand.

(I tried this challenge again today to make sure it was as easy as I remembered. It is, although Drac escaped the lockdown several times in each attempt, which was something I hadn’t experienced before [Usually it was once or twice].)

That said, my thoughts:

-In general, I note that a lot of “one-hit kill” challenges are on the Normal difficulty, which is weird to me. Again, take this with a grain of salt, as this is really my first time playing through a lot of these, so they’ll probably get easier with more practice.

Usually, if someone can play a Normal a couple of times and beat it, that’s about right. I don’t usually consider it Hard unless it’s pretty unfair from the start.

-Balloon Fight is an odd one. I actually haven’t been able to Perfect the bonus stage yet, even knowing you can cross the screen by going off its edge. Maybe I’m just bad at it, I don’t know.

I think you’re just bad at it.

(Ouch!)

-Battle of Olympus: I found that the Lightning Bolt you can shoot (Up + B) helps a lot here, particularly if you can get a good six or seven hits on Hades first. That said, this is probably fine where it is.

Yup.

-Burgertime’s save state didn’t work for me. I’ll presume the problem is with the ROM I have for now.

Probably. Try getting the ROM from where I’ll told you earlier. Also, which version of FCU Ultra are you using?

(No, I’m not publicly telling you where he told me to get them.)

-The difficulties of Castlevania and Castlevania II could probably be switched and you’d be fine. As with a lot of the challenges, play the Castlevania one long enough and you can eventually figure out how it works, so to speak, but even then, taking the knowledge and actually using it to kill Death with no special weapons is still pretty tough.

The battle with Death can be reasonable or hard thanks to the randomness of the sickles. If you get a good pattern, I wouldn’t consider it an Expert. The Legend of Zelda challenge is similar. If the severed Gleelok heads stay in the top left and right corners, killing the rest of him with the wand is cake. Since randomness factors quite a bit, that’s what separates it from being Expert. (my opinion)

(I’m not actually convinced that the sickles are totally random, though I suppose it’s close enough, and I consider this challenge on the Hard/Expert border even taking this into account)

-Code Name: Viper was really the most obvious of the “Yes, this is my first time playing the game, but this is really only worth one point?” challenges I went through.

If enough people complain, I’d raise it to Hard. Or drop the difficulty in the game to Normal, which slows down the bullets and enemies quite a bit.

(Note that Rolling Thunder plays pretty much the same way, but I found that challenge much easier for some reason)

-The US version of Contra wasn’t in the torrent of ROMS I downloaded at all, unless it’s hiding under some different name. Weird stuff.

(I have no idea why I included this in the e-mail)

-There’s an Hour Glass in your inventory that makes the end of the Faxanadu challenge pretty easy (Presuming the challenge is merely “get Pendant” and not “get Pendant and escape tower”). I’m not sure if that was intentional–if you didn’t know, the hour glass stops the Wyverns from firing their fireballs while it’s in effect.

Whoops! That wasn’t supposed to be there. Pretty much makes the two Wyverns a cakewalk. That’s removed and will be updated on the site.

(I now wish I hadn’t mentioned this. ;) )

-Ghosts N’ Goblins is an interesting one in that “Clear level 1 with a weapon generally thought to be awful” is apparently the same difficulty as last year’s “Clear level 1; how you do it is up to you.” I don’t disagree with this at all (Level 1 isn’t THAT bad; it’s about the second half of level 2 that the game starts kicking your ass), just thought it was interesting.

Since so many people hate that game, I figured anyone could walk up and run through it. Probably the hardest part is the Red Demon at the end of the cemetary with the Torch. So, it’s a little challenging. Dan probably laughed at this one.

(Of all the people to give “FREE POINTS HERE!” challenges to, he picks Dan. That said, it’s only 1 point, and the challenge itself is actually not bad at all, for the reason I mentioned above. Plus, I guess I shouldn’t complain, given last year’s Battletoads challenges)

-Gradius and Ice Climber both had bizarre behavior for me. As with Burgertime, the problem is likely on my end (Thanks for that link, by the way–I’ll check it out in a bit).

Strange. Both of these challenges can be performed w/o the save states. Start a new game in Gradius and select Mountain 5 in Ice Climber. The save states were only for show.

(I had a feeling about these being doable without save states, even though the challenges page says Mountain 10 for Ice Climber. Not sure which one is wrong. And no, I’m still not publicly giving you that link.)

-I note that a “one life” clause has been added to last year’s Mega Man Hard challenge to make it Expert. Probably a good move.

Especially since no one gave it a try.

(This challenge minus the one-life clause was “Hard” last year, and was basically ignored in favor of the corresponding Expert challenge “Beat the Yellow Devil/Rock Monster with only the Arm Cannon”..which was actually easier in my opinion).

-I’m sort of confused as to why the Mega Man 4 and 5 challenges are Hard and Normal respectively, whereas similar challenges on Mega Man 2 and 3 last year were Expert, and 2 even gave you an energy tank to use. Are the bosses easier as a whole? Does the Mega Buster make a difference? Are you expecting that lots of people will have played the games before (Like with MM2 and 3 in particular)? Just curious as to the reasoning here.

When the Mega Buster was introduced in MM4, tackling bosses with just the cannon got easier. MM4 is still tough, but there are several bosses that are a cakewalk for energy refilling. MM5 is a joke (my opinion here) with the charge shot. But, if the MM4 is too hard, I’ll bump it to Expert. We’ll see what the masses say.

-I took a few cracks at the Metroid Hard challenge and decided that the time and effort it would take me to learn how to execute it would be better spent on the Expert challenge. Make of that what you will.

Each challenge is worth points individually. So, beat the Hard and Expert Metroid and you get the points for both challenges. That way everyone tries all the challenges, not just the most difficult for each game. That’s part of the reason I picked more games and fewer challenges per game. Unless the challenge for a single game was too evil (see Snake’s Revenge).

(This is a rule change from last year, even though Metroid and Snake’s Revenge are the only two games where it comes into play.)

-Ninja Gaiden II’s Expert challenge is something that I’ve done as a sort of personal challenge before this, so I’m not sure you should take anything I say about it seriously. From an objective standpoint, given that I was the only person to complete either Ninja Gaiden challenge last year (If I remember right, even Dan tried and failed the harder one), I suppose it’s okay on Expert; just be aware that it’ll be a fairly easy 3 points for me (Which, currently, is offset by my general lack of Mega Man games later than 3).

Must be nice to be good at Ninja Gaiden 2. And Battletoads. (Grumble…)

(Ninja Gaiden II final boss gauntlet with no special weapons? Easy. Battletoads? Piece of cake. Balloon Fight’s bonus stage? Just too darn hard for me.)

-Stupid yellow car in R.C. Pro-Am. That’s all I’ll say on that. Yeah, I know what you’re supposed to do, but I can’t seem to make it happen for some reason.

That’s the only reason I picked that stage. I can’t wait to see how many people start yelling at that stupid yellow car!

-Snake’s Revenge’s Hard challenge has a definite pattern to it, though both timing the rockets right and actually getting them through the corridor 14 times in a row with no mistakes is still pretty difficult such that it’s rated fine. As for the Expert challenge, holy Christ is that accurate. There’s some secret to survival that I haven’t figured out yet (And don’t tell me what it is please), apparently.

Allegedly, the Expert challenge is possible. Good f*kin’ luck.

Everything else seems okay (Though I share Metal Dream’s inability to beat Pro Wrestling, heh. Always had that problem, actually). And again, take everything with the requisite grain of salt. It probably looks like I’m slamming your efforts to try and rate these things, which isn’t my goal at all (Like you said, you’re one person, and these things are always kind of subjective anyway). Just my honest opinions, which are subject to change as I practice some more of these.

Great Puma keeping you down, huh? Funny, Phil and I both didn’t think much of that one. Just goes to show how much difference in opinion on these challenges there is.

Hope that helps you out. And again, let me know if it’s okay to post these thoughts elsewhere–especially as they may actually have some influence, I think it’d only be fair if they were public knowledge.

Please post away (even keep my comments if you’d like) as I’d really like to keep people interested and excited about the booth. Even if people figure out tricks to finish one challenge or another, unless you’re awesome at all 67 games, there will be enough competition to keep things interesting. Plus, we’ll actually have all the prizes in-stock this year!

(So here you go)

Just a quick post to say that, while Veteran’s Day is a day off for me (As are all federal holidays), it’s also a bit more than that. My grandfather was a Korean War veteran, one of my uncles has served overseas as part of the National Guard, and I have several friends who thermselves have friends and family in the various services. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll point out that I don’t think either of my relatives were on the front lines (In as much as “front lines” even exist anymore in modern warfare)–my grandfather never went overseas, and my uncle’s task while stationed in the Middle East was mainly flying generals back and forth to various places, but regardless. I just wanted to throw this out there and express my appreciation for the veterans in the various wings of our Armed Forces, whether they be truly putting their lives on the front lines, or doing one of those behind-the-scenes administrative jobs that keeps everything moving along. Thanks for willingly doing what you do so that, amongst other things, I don’t have to.