Emptyeye

Just a quick post wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. Feel free to substitute the holiday analog of your choice if you’re not Christian.

-EE

Speed Runs Live.

The page doesn’t really explain where to find this. Basically, you need An IRC Client such as mIRC, or the one I use, LeafChat. You use it to connect to the IRC server mentioned at the first link, and join the #speedrunslive channel. From there, it’s just a matter of finding the people to race the race you want to race!

I’m mainly putting this out here because it’s primarily N64 games at the moment. It, frankly, needs more NES representation, like Contra. :P Which I just completed in a bit over 13 minutes, according to RBABot.

In a little under a month, I’ll be heading to Virginia to participate in the second annual Speed Demos Archive charity marathon. This time, we’re playing for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which is dedicated to the eradication of cancer via its prevention. This is done through research, education, and community outreach.

The marathon will be bigger and better this year–almost 100 games spread out over approximately 100 hours–although my personal workload for it will be lighter than last year. I’ll be racing Battletoads with PJ, then later on, running through Final Fight with Mike Uyama.

Stop by the SDA stream from January 6th through the 10th to check it out!

-EE

A couple days ago, Steam had a sale where you could get the game VVVVVV–yes, that’s really its name–as part of an Indie Games Pack. The game, normally $15, was instead $5…and because it’s an Indie Game Pack, you essentially got four other games–World of Goo, Eufloria, Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time, and Iron Grip: Warlord–for free.

If you don’t know what VVVVVV is, in short, you’re the captain of a space ship who’s become separated from his crew, and you have to travel through the world to find them. The gameplay is really simple–besides moving left and right, you have one button: A “flip gravity” button that makes you go from the floor to the ceiling, or vice versa. Despite that, the game is a lot of fun, as you have to dodge spikes and other obstacles to find your crew members and get back to safety. There are also trinkets you can find, and despite an automap, a few of them take real thought to obtain.

One drawback to the game is that to simply beat it doesn’t take very long–I had found all my crew members as well as the trinkets in about 4 hours. Still, the fact that I played it for 4 hours over two days is a testament to how fun the game is–I haven’t done that for a game in quite awhile. Also, there are trophies you can earn by beating time trials with high ranks, completing the game in under a certain amount of deaths, and maybe the hardest trophy to earn, the Master of the Universe trophy, earned for clearing the game in No Death Mode.

In all, it’s quite a bit of fun, and definitely worth it if you can grab it at a discount. Even at full-price, give it a look–there’s a downloadable demo so you can try it before you pay anything.

-EE

(For more on the title, check this out. It’s in regards to this convention I attended.)

This past weekend, I attended the first-ever Gobble-Con in Milford, Connecticut at the Hilton Garden Inn. In contrast to Connecticon, or even to MAGFest, Gobble-Con is a small (about 300 attended), first-year convention created to fill the gap between cons in the Connecticut area, as not much really goes on in that department later in the year.

I arrived late on Friday morning to…not really a lot. As it turned out, registration took place to the left of where I had entered, and the actual picking up of the badge for pre-registrations was to the right, actually inside of a hotel room. The setup was a bit strange, but probably the best they could have done given that the actual registration desk was off in a corner, in a relatively high-traffic area for the convention, right by the dealer’s room and two panel rooms, as well as the screening room.

While I didn’t really have to be there until early Saturday morning for my panel, I figured I should check out the convention on Friday and see what it had to offer, as well as hand out business cards and try to drum up interest in said panel (It being at 9AM Saturday morning, combined with this being a convention geared toward [although not exclusively for] a 21+ crowd, meant I was going to need all the help I could get in that regard, 9AM Saturday being “Booze-induced sleepytime” as SDA member DBallin called it). At opening ceremonies, I meet a person named Oliver who was doing a Kingdom Hearts-related panel on Sunday morning, and who offered to record my panel for me, as he was interested in it anyway–an offer I quickly accepted, not really having any high-quality ways to do so myself.

I then checked out the Game Room, which was really more of a Pachinko freeplay room with a couple gaming systems off in the corners. I will say this: It was cool to actually see these machines firsthand and get to try them out. That said, I’ll admit that I don’t really see what the excitement is all about, although that’s probably a reflection of me moreso than the concept itself–I also don’t see what the big deal is about slot machines, preferring to use them to compose progressive rock albums rather than actually trying to win money on them.

If you’ve never played Pachinko before, or heard of it, it’s essentially slots meets pinball. You have a bunch of small metal balls that launch into the playing field via a knob; how far you leave the knob turned to the right affects the power the balls are launched with. Your goal is to get the balls into a slot in the middle, at which point a slot machine kicks in. If you get a lucky spin of the slots, your payout is…more balls. In this case, filling up a tray full of balls got you entered into a drawing to win money toward the purchase of a Pachinko machine; in Japan’s Pachinko parlors, I’ve read, the balls can be exchanged for various prizes.

There were two specific panels I had wanted to check out on Friday, glancing at the schedule. The first, Cosplay/Con Survival, basically turned into the Foamy the Squirrel (Warning: Link not really work-safe) panel, although the first video tied in with the message the panel was originally supposed to have (Namely, “Take a freaking shower every once in awhile”). The second was a panel on Sailor Moon (Yes, really), that got into some of the non-anime media the series has had over the years, such as a live-action series, a bunch of musicals, and some foreign-language commercials for it. It was pretty neat to actually see some of this stuff I had heard about, but never really sought out due to laziness amongst other things. They also showed some of the differences between the American and Japanese versions of the series.

I should note that I actually missed the beginning of this panel because, between the two panels (Which were scheduled one right after the other), I decided “Hey, getting a Long Island Iced Tea from the bar would be a good idea. Drinking the entirety of it in 20 minutes so I can make most of this Sailor Moon panel would be an even better idea!” This led to a text message to Silver stating that, in fact, this was not such a good idea, and that I wouldn’t be home for awhile due to my need to sober up. Don’t worry, I remember everything I did, and I didn’t do anything that I regret at all, although I can now cross off “Wind up in the hotel room of a female stranger while drunk” off of my Convention-To-Do list. No, nothing happened, and I remember exactly how I got there. We struck up a conversation, and I asked if I could tag along with her and her friends while I sobered up. She said yes, and then I followed them to their room, and just sat there talking to them while they got ready to go to the Totally-Not-A-Rave Informal Dance that night.

I briefly went to said dance, but then had to head home to try and get to bed kind of early for my 9AM panel. I succeeded well enough in this, and made it back on Saturday morning with plenty of time to spare. Once there, I had a couple surprises waiting for me. The first was that the room was still a frosty 62 degrees thanks to the Still-Not-A-Rave Informal Dance. The second was that the panel after me, dealing with the Sailor Moon musicals I had mentioned earlier, needed use of my laptop to both rehearse and actually use for their panel.

I could go on about those things or other factors out of my control, but truth be told, I think I did pretty okay with what I could control. My two main mistakes were not stopping on the comic long enough, which made me feel like a jerk, and forgetting about a black slide just before the excerpt from my glitchy TMNT run, which probably went unnoticed. Well, there was also the fact that the slideshow wasn’t quite full screen, but hey. The few people that were there seemed to like the panel, which was reinforced by talking to Don (The guy who runs the convention) later on. He basically told me that I already have a panel slot for next year (Presuming that A. There is a next year and B. I actually want the slot). So I guess I did all right.

I then watched the Sailor Moon Musical, or “Sera Myu”, panel, and not entirely because they were using my laptop either. In the middle of the panel, what is apparently a new convention tradition for me occurred (I got a similar on Saturday morning of Connecticon 2010): The helpdesk at work called. Apparently someone at a branch was trying to close a loan, but was getting a warning preventing them from doing so. Not really knowing whether the particulars behind the warning’s programming had changed recently, and not being in a position to be able to log into the system even if I had wanted to, all the advice I could offer amounted to “Try having them follow what the warning says”. I didn’t get a call back, so I’m hoping that did the trick. In any event, this was a fun panel too, and apparently they had it even harder than I did–besides the lack of a laptop, their web mistress and main tech person was in the hospital the day before, meaning at least one of them was literally seeing the slideshow they had lined up for the first time as they were doing it live. This is obviously not an ideal situation.

After that was a lot of wandering about the convention, going into the Game Room and the Dealer’s Room, and getting commissions of little Christmas ornaments and artwork that I may take pictures of and link to here.

In all, it was a fun time for a small convention, and I’ll in all likelihood go to it again next year.

Links!
The pictures I took
Legendary Senshi- the New England Sera Myu Society, who borrowed my laptop for their panel
So and Sew Plushies, who made the ornaments I mentioned above
Chi Studios, who did the art that is the first picture on my Gobble-Con album.

-EE

Super Mario Bros
-When Mario is moving downwards, his collision priority takes precedence over that of the enemy. Thus, Mario will stomp on an enemy and kill it, even if it looks like he should die.
-Andrew hesitates for a split second at the end of 8-3 to stop the clock at 242 instead of 243, and thus avoid the fireworks that would cost him real-time.

F-Zero X
-Several advanced techniques are used here.
-One is sliding, which is self-explanatory: sliding around a corner to increase your speed during and coming out of it. This can be combined with boosting on any lap after the first to increase speed further.
-Another is rail-sliding—starting a slide, then grazing a wall and holding contact as long as you can to increase speed on a straightaway.
-Finally, there’s double-tap diving. The double-tap is a basic method of attack, but doing a double-tap while inside of a dive (EG coming off of a jump) will increase your speed very quickly.

Double Dragon II: The Revenge
-There’s actually nothing super-advanced or obscure here, just the fact that the flying knee is really hard to do once (As mentioned, it’s a 4-frame window after landing from a jump), let alone to chain together consistently.
-Yes, dropping straight down to his death is the quickest way to advance.

Final Fantasy VI
-Oh boy. Pretty much everything here requires an explanation—for the complete breakdown, check out Essentia’s full comments. Here are the basics.
1.Setzer’s special move is the Slots. Two possible combinations are 7-7-7 (Called Joker Doom; kills all enemies regardless of immunity) and 7-7-Bar (Also called Joker Doom; under ordinary circumstances, kills your entire party).
2.While 7-7-Bar normally kills your party, this can be manipulated to instead kill the enemies. The entirety of the strategy in the sequence rests on this (As well as the fact that 7-7-Bar is allowed to occur in the battle, while 7-7-7 will never occur in this battle under any circumstances). This is done via muddling and un-muddling Setzer. More precisely, the muddling has to be done as 7-7-Bar is being input, and the un-mudding must occur between the input and Setzer’s actually “casting” the slots. This is the primary method of attack.
3.The killing off of Gogo and Setzer is so they can be brought back with low HP. This will allow Celes, who A. has the True Knight accessory equipped, and B. is basically invulnerable thanks to her equipment setup, to protect them from pretty much any attack while the Joker Doom trick is being set up. Vanishing Gogo before killing him is to override his equipment setup; his being Vanished allows magic to always hit him regardless of his equipment (Otherwise, like Celes, he’s essentially invincible).
4.Gogo mimes Joker Doom twice per tier because of the way Miming works. It essentially attempts to duplicate the previous attack exactly—in other words, it attempts to Joker Doom an already-dead set of enemies the first time. The second time, it works properly.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Gobble-Con starts today. If anyone is curious, my panel is tomorrow morning (Saturday) at 9AM, in what wrestling fans like to refer to as “The curtain-jerking slot” (I’m the first panel of the day), but which would more accurately be called “booze-induced sleepy time” (Thanks for the phrase dballin) if this convention succeeds in its goal of being a place where adult geeks can hang out. If nothing else, I’m not really competing with anything “big” the convention has to offer, which is a plus. If you’re in the Milford area, come check it out!

Part 9: The Second First Extended Excursion

Nyperold: “Okay guys, just follow me and we’ll be fine. We’re gonna go get some keys, and then make you guys big and strong.”

Nario: “Gosh guys, this is so exciting! Our first real adventure!”

OptimusF: “Yeah, whatever. Hey, Mentor Buddy.”

Nyperold: “My name is Nyperold.”

OptimusF: “Spectacular. Hey, Nyperold, is there going to be anything I can steal here? Like maybe…some telephones? Or lampshades?”

Nyperold: “I…don’t even know what those things are, so no. There will be treasure chests you can disarm, though.”

OptimusF: “Uh…neat. I guess.”

The group walked to where The Silver Key was. Kareshi found it.

On their way to the Bronze Key, Nyperold struck up a conversation with the group.

Nyperold: “You know, all my blubbering about my old crew aside, I really hope you’re all grateful for the equipment. You all had it a lot better than they did when we were just starting out. Well, except for you, Nario. Mage equipment selection is kind of limited, unfortunately.”

Kareshi: “Oh, we’re grateful, definitely.”

Nyperold: “Cool. Yeah, we just had Chainmail to start off..and Emptyeye needed us to pool our gold to even be able to afford that! of course, the jerk bought a Helm with the leftovers…”

Spooky C: “Why was Emptyeye so poor to begin with?”

Nyperold: “The goofball thought going to the poker tables the night before was more important than resting up for our adventure!”

Spooky C: “…and this guy was your leader?”

Nyperold: “Yeah…the man loved his gambling, but in the dungeon, he knew what he was doing. Hopefully, I’ll be as good a leader as he was.”

Tobleron: “Well, considering what happens if you’re not…”

Nyperold: “Let’s not think about that.”

The party eventually found its way to the Bronze Key. After a quick trip back to the city to recharge, the group made its way back to the southeast corner of level one, to the statue that Nyperold’s old band had searched so many times before.

Nyperold: “Hey Nario. Search around that statue there, you’ll like what you find.”

Nario: “Okay! Let’s see…maybe I’ll find another keyyARRRRGH!”

OptimusF: “Ahaha, that was hilarious!”

Nyperold: “I thought you’d like that! Now let’s kill it.”

The group did. They then repeated the process for a solid 15 minutes, enough to raise the group to level 7 proficiency. Returning to town, Kareshi and Tobleron both bought themselves suits of Plate Mail. As they separated for the night, Nyperold thought to himself:

Nyperold: “You know….I think these guys and I will be all right.”

Next time: The second floor, the second time around!

XTREEEEEEEEME Bonus Commentary!

• Here we get a bit more personality of our characters, Nario and OptimusF(unk) in particular. Nario is pretty much how he posts on The Shizz, something of a Wide-Eyed Idealist. OptimusF is not nearly as much of a snarky jerk online (or in-person) as he’s portrayed here, but it seemed like the best thing to go with based on the fact that the “Lampshades and telephones” comment is based on a real MAGFest incident in which Optimus…relocated, let’s say, some hotel equipment to another room (And got that room’s inhabitants kicked out of the hotel when they found the equipment).
• Nyperold is also starting to show a hint of a personality that isn’t “kill everything”, brought on in part by the fact that he’s now the mentor for a group of newbies, rather than a one-track killing machine in a group of equals.
• Almost decent writing here! “Maybe I’ll find another…” is a reference to the fact that Nario found the Bronze Key, which I don’t actually state directly anywhere in the chapter. Woo!

Man, where’d the time go?

Actually, more concerning to me right now is the fact that, two weeks before Gobble-Con, I have no idea exactly when my panel is. Which is a bit disconcerting. A week from tomorrow, I’ll probably practice the panel for the first time in front of people, which will be interesting.

And…that’s about it for now.

I ran through the presentation again today. We’re about two and a half weeks again from Gobble-Con, so I really have to get practicing that again. I’m probably going to dry-run it at the next Connecticon M.A.D, which will give me some experience with doing it in front of people. Silver also suggested that I record myself giving the presentation. This is actually a good idea, although I don’t know how I’m supposed to do it.