Emptyeye

When I was about 6 or 7, my aunt, grandmother and I went to the house of another of my aunts. I don’t remember what for–what I do remember is that my cousin was tasked with keeping me entertained (As he would be many times in the following years). It says something about both of us that his method of choice was to show off his shiny new Sega Genesis. The games he had were pretty much all launch titles, but amongst Space Harrier II, Golden Axe, and Altered Beast was one game that particularly stuck with me, arguably the crown jewel of the Genesis launch lineup.

Phantasy Star II.

Yep, seven years before Final Fantasy VII made it cool to like RPGs in the U.S., Phantasy Star II had quite a bit of hype behind it in 1990 or so. It made the cover of an early issue of GamePro, and an early Game Player’s had quite a bit of coverage too. In any event, seeing the game made quite an impression on little Emptyeye, even though at that point all I got to see was my cousin repeatedly trying (And failing) to kill the final boss. Actually getting to play the game later on only increased my “must have this game” desire.

Unfortunately, I was a Nintendo kid growing up, not actually owning a Genesis until it was all but dead in the U.S. I finally got Phantasy Star II in my early teens, and loved it, especially the ending (Which pretty much confirmed everything a 13-year-old me in the peak of his I-Hate-Everything phase needed to know about humanity).

A couple years ago, I played through the game again intending to speedrun it. I never actually a completed a speedrun, other than a pseudo-test where I got through the game at Level 18. While I still love the game on a personal level, looking at it objectively, it really hasn’t aged very well.

In case you don’t know, when the game first game out, it came with its own full strategy guide. This is because you needed it. The dungeons were huge, and especially in the beginning of the game, you had to do quite a bit of level grinding in order to survive them. This wasn’t quite as much of a problem later on, although the dungeons themselves got even more fiendish. Here’s one of the later dungeons; the black squares are pits, and your two goals are the chests marked Neislasher and Neishot. Have fun getting to them even with the map. The pace of also rather slow, and any characters not in your party don’t level with the rest of your characters. This basically means that several of the characters you get will never be used in normal play.

Despite all these flaws, I still like the game a lot, and might play through it again on stream sometime. Maybe once I don’t have to constantly stress out about So You Want to be a Speedrunner.

Today was the first real “test run” of the presentation. As with running through it in the car on my way to Newington, once I got started and got used to feeling of talking to an empty room, it was surprisingly easy to get through the whole thing. Unfortunately, I don’t quite have my actual slide deck memorized–or written out, for that matter. As such, the whole thing was kind of awkward, as I’d click onto slides too soon, not use the black slides I had put in the presentation, etc. Still, I got the whole thing done in 50 minutes or so. I’m fairly sure I can hack a few minutes off of that, if by doing nothing else than actually knowing what’s going on in the slides behind me, and a 45-minute presentation plus 15 minutes of Q&A would make a nice hour-long panel.

Other stuff to improve:

• Actually mentioning the fact that there will be a Q&A earlier than I did.
• Being more aware of what I’m doing with my hands–I slipped one of them into my pocket on occasion.
• As mentioned above, actually knowing my slidedeck a little better.

What did I actually do well?

• I felt like I didn’t really “um”, “er”, etc. at all, although I would need to actually record myself giving the presentation to be sure.
• Similarly, I felt like my actual command of the material was pretty good. If I had to give the presentation without any visual aids whatsoever, I think I could do it.
• Finally, I think I did a good job keeping my head up. In other words, if I actually had an audience, I would’ve been making eye contact with them (Or at least faking it).

Again, I feel like this is really starting to come together. Since I’m now at the stage where I can’t really tinker with the slideshow anymore, this will likely be the final daily update on the panel. I’ll make sure to continue trying to at least make some kind of daily post, though, as that way you’ll keep coming back (And I’ll actually get some value out of the fact that I have the site paid up for the next 2 years). And I’ll continue to update on the panel whenever I actually do something, rehearse, etc.

-EE

So I did, indeed, come up with an opening for the presentation. And I also added one more black slide to it. The rest of the slideshow aspect is pretty solid, I think. If nothing else, I’m avoiding the major trap of reading text-heavy slides to the audience, and I feel like what text is on them is there to reinforce what I consider to be especially important in the presentation.

Tomorrow will, in all likelihood, come my first “dry-run” of the content with my cool little slide advancer thing that I bought at an Officemax a couple weeks ago. That’ll give me a rough idea of how much time I need for the presentation on its current form. From there, I can ask Don at Gobble-Con for that block of time, and he can either give it to me, or tell me “That won’t work, you’ll have to cut some stuff out.” (I suppose “We’ll actually need you to fill more time than that; can you come up with some more material?” is a third option, but it’s not one I’m counting on, and to be honest, it’s not even one I’d particularly want at this point, although I’d deal with it if it came up).

This is really starting to come together!

Today’s progress on the panel was mainly finishing up the slideshow to accommodate the remaining videos I have for the presentation. I have permission from all the runners save for “linner”, who hasn’t logged into Youtube since I sent the message. Tomorrow will likely be spent writing up an intro and outro, and maybe adding some more “black slides” to the presentation.

-EE

I was hoping to finish up the slideshow aspect of this today. Unfortunately, Linux’s Openoffice is being uncooperative, so that will have to wait until tomorrow. I did manage to get the Double Dragon II video in, though.

21 days in a row (Kind of)? Really? I’m pretty sure this either ties or beats my record for most consecutive days with at least one post.

Anyway, my main activity today was overcoming my own ridiculously verbose writing style and asking linner for permission to use his F-Zero X Fire Field run in Japanese (Well, whatever babelfish calls Japanese anyway) as well as English. Hopefully something will come of this.

The other thing I did was finally make the decision to add Level 9 (And about 35 seconds) to my Double Dragon II run snippet. I do still have to redo the title card for it to reflect that update, though.

Let’s hope I actually remember to press Publish this time.

In F-Zero X run permission-getting progress, I got a way to get in touch with linner via his (Apparently linner is, in fact, a he) Youtube channel. There are some issues, though. If you scroll down a bit on that page, you will note a “Sorry, I can’t speak English.” More pressing (Yes, even moreso than the language barrier) is the fact that linner has apparently made himself scarce on the Internet of late, meaning that he may not even get the message until after Gobble-Con (Which is where I’m presenting the panel, and where you should go to check it out, wink wink nudge nudge.). UchihaSasuke noted that linner is a nice enough guy who would probably not mind me using the run, but I’d still like to try and send him something asking permission nonetheless. I’m now trying to find out whether Uchiha actually knows Japanese, or just machine translated something from English to relay messages back and forth.

If it’s the latter, I have an interesting challenge ahead of me. If you’ve ever tried to use Babelfish to translate something from a foreign language into English, you know that the results can be…amusing. This is especially true when going from an oriental language (Chinese, Japanese, etc) into English, where you almost need a translation for the translation (And this is without going into things like Multibabel, which passes the input back and forth through Babelfish repeatedly until the result is an utterly hilarious non sequitur that would make any self-respecting English teacher scream “WHYYYYYYYYYYY”.). In short, I’m not holding out a lot of hope that Babelfish handles going in the other direction any better than it does going in the direction a lot of people in the English speaking world use it for. This means that when I ask for permission in English, I’m going to have to really simplify the message in order to at least give myself and Babelfish decent odds of producing something linner can read. If you know my writing style, and you should, you know I’m in trouble here.

One person I realized I don’t need permission from, at least directly, is Mr. Ryan North–his About Page more or less says “As long as you’re making a profit off of the comics, do whatever you want with them!”, which is awfully nice of him. So I’ve integrated that into the slideshow.

The other thing I’ve integrated into my presentation is the concept of the Black Slide. It’s what you would think it is–a blank, black slide that you put up when you don’t need a slide behind you. The point of it is basically to keep the audience’s attention off of whatever you’re projecting and on you. Check out the blog post (And the comments) for why I’d want to use such a thing, as well as how it differs from just using the “B” key in the presentation software of your choice.

-EE

Despite the fact that I have yet to hear back regarding the F-Zero X run I had wanted to use, I made actual progress with the presentation today. The first thing i did was to turn the background of the slides with video on them black, which makes everything look a bit more professional in that I don’t have a tiny column of white on the far right of those slides anymore. I also managed to integrate my own glitchy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles run excerpt into the slideshow. Finally, I created a video demonstrating exactly how little time 4 frames (1/15 of a second) really is. This main reason for this is to illustrate just how difficult the seemingly simple Double Dragon II run really is.

-EE

As expected, getting in contact with linner is proving to not be as easy as it has been with everyone else so far. Asking Mike, the head of SDA, about it revealed that he’s pretty sure linner doesn’t speak English. He did direct me to “UchihaSasuke”, another poster on the SDA Forums, who was actually the person who submitted the runs on linner’s behalf. If the forums would like to move faster than a snail superglued to the ground, I’ll send him a private message and see if that leads me anywhere.

I’ve been waffling over whether to swap out level 3 for level 9 (Or even just add it in) in the Double Dragon II clip. I probably will in the end, if only to say I did some work on this tomorrow.
-EE

Once again, I did very little, this time thanks to my going to a Connecticon staff meeting, my very first. Not much of note happened this time, especially since Kyle, who co-heads the video game department, wasn’t there.

But back to the Gobble-Con panel that I’m doing. The main thing I did today was to re-watch candidates from F-Zero X to use in my panel, and I think I have a winner in the Fire Field run. Some other tracks have more individually impressive areas–Big Blue 1 uses huge shortcuts, and White Land 1 ends the second lap in mid-air without being anywhere near the actual track–but Fire Field is just ridiculously fast from start to finish, and has an amusing end where the car flies off the course to its death during the auto-controlled victory animation. The next step is trying to get a hold of “Linner” to get their permission to use the run in the presentation. I’m essentially pulling a “Weird Al” Yankovic here–strictly speaking, I could probably get away with just going ahead and using the video (Especially this for this one in particular, I’d be leaving the original SDA StatIDs on it. For the other ones, since I was using excerpts from longer videos, I cut out just the parts I needed and then attached my own title cards with the relevant information to them–runner name, URL of the full run, what exactly you’re watching in the run, etc. This one, though, is short enough that it’s not worth the effort to reinvent the wheel.), but I’d like to keep people happy with me. The big challenges here are that 1. “linner” is apparently Japanese from what I can tell (The Japanese options near the end of some of his* videos were a hint to this, although it was plausible until I did more research that he could have been a hardcore US or other region player who had the Japanese version because it had some sort of inherent advantage not found in other versions), and 2. “linner” doesn’t seem to have any easily available e-mail address. I’ll have to see if maybe Mike from SDA can get me that information. As for the language barrier, if there is one, well, I figure I’ll essentially send the e-mail twice (Once in English, once in Babelfished Japanese) and hope for the best.

-EE

*-Strictly speaking, I don’t even know “linner”‘s gender, and if you want to be cynical, it’s a little bit sexist of me to simply presume they’re male (If you’re more pragmatic, call it “playing the odds”. Note the male-to-female ratio in this picture from the SDA marathon. Now consider that there were about 4 or so runners in the marathon not in the picture…and that they were all male. Presuming the ratio is the same for the competitive F-Zero X community–and admittedly, I don’t know that that’s true–the odds of my being correct when I say “he” are pretty strongly in my favor.).