So we get our badges, and head back to the hotel to relax, shower, etc. before the convention actually starts on Friday.

Friday morning arrives, and I make my way to the convention center and don my cape. Yes, cape–I figured this was one of the few times I could wear a cape and have it be pretty much completely normal. In any event, I eventually find the rest of my band for the Rock Band tournament. But there are multiple issues at this point.

The first one was that there was a severe shortage of equipment for the tournament. This is solved soon enough by people running out and purchasing two full Rock Band 2 bundles, giving us several extra copies of the disc (Which turns out to be important later on).

The next issue was that there was only one TV. The plan was to split the XBox 360′s signal between two TVs–one that the band could face to see what they were doing, and back-to-back (More or less) with that one, another TV that would face into the audience so that the con-goers in the area could see how the qualifying band was doing. With only one TV, this becomes difficult. Eventually, we procure a second TV and the relevant cables to split the signal.

At this point, it’s mid-afternoon, and Darren, the guy running the tournament (And who has done so for the past several years), is slowly getting more and more annoyed for a number of reasons–what seems like a general lack of interest in the tournament, the complete lack of an adequate audio system (Which the tournament didn’t have last year, either, but the TVs were new enough then that the speakers held out long enough that we coped with it), and a more general feeling that the other departments were not helping him get the stuff he needed at best and actively hindering him at worst. At about 3:30, he finally has had enough, and simply picks up his stuff and leaves.

Over the next couple days, things are said that, while I won’t get into them here, I don’t think either Darren or Connecticon and its representatives will argue with the fact that the two parties have parted ways without so much as a “future endeavors”(1) toward one another.

Getting back to Friday afternoon. At this point, with the Rock Band tournament falling apart, myself, Sam (Who cites the Rock Band tournament as the only reason she comes to Connecticon), and John (One of our friends, who also competed in the tournament every years it’s taken place, and is another vocalist) are all pissed off at the Convention for allowing this to happen. So I start gathering people who had shown interest in the tournament (Keep in mind that I have a cape on while I’m doing this…Matt, the guitar player in my band, described it as being unbelievably badass), and we march toward the registration booth and ask to see the head of the convention.

At this point in the story, I’d like to apologize to the Green Monkeys, who had no idea at the time why I went “You three, come with me” and probably thought I was crazy. The intention was that we would go complain about the circumstances as a huge group, which I completely failed to say out loud at any point in the heat of the moment. So, sorry about that.

Getting back to the story, we’re assured that the tournament is still on, and that Kyle, who actually runs the video gaming department, is scrambling to make it happen. I eventually calm down, thank the convention staff, and wander back into the game room.

At this point, it’s 4PM, and time for me to head over to the random Wii Bowling tournament that I signed up for earlier in the day. This is well-timed, as it helps take my mind off of the Rock Band tournament currently being in a shambles. Also helping my mood: Out of 14 people in the tournament, I actually win, with a score of 214 in my game after, among other things, striking on my last four balls. This gets me $30 in Gamestop gift cards (It was actually supposed to be $25 in gift cards, but they only sent over $10 cards, and Kyle and Justin, the other guy running gaming, generously gave me a third $10 card).

With my new title of Connecticon 2010 Tournament Champion, I go back to the Rock Band setup, and while we finally have an audio setup, the outlook is not good–Darren took basically everything with him: mainly, his XBox 360 with the DLC songs, and the formula used for judging the tournament. The prize support is also nowhere to be found. At this point, Kyle, knowing that he’s in a nearly impossible situation, prints out a formula from a website, turns to me, and says “Marc, help me make sense of this.”

Well. Now you know where the title of this post comes from.

We decide to focus on the positives. We have plenty of XBoxes with Rock Band 2. We now also have all the equipment we need–the speakers aren’t perfect (In particularly distorting terribly on anything bass-heavy), but they work, and we have enough equipment now as well. Also, while we don’t know the exact formula, myself, Matt, and Dan (The drummer in my band) all have a basic grasp of what Darren’s formula tracked on a conceptual level. Finally, we have no DLC, but we do have all the 84 on-disc songs.

After failing to make anything useful out of whatever formula Kyle downloaded, he decides to turn the preliminaries into a straight scoring competition. It’s not an ideal situation, but it’s the simplest solution–that gives us the night to come up with a formula that takes into account performance, and makes it easy for Kyle to track results without necessarily having to know the ins and outs of the game. Also, qualifiers will go into Saturday morning as well, to make up for the lost time in setting everything up on Friday.

At this point, the next step is trying to select 3 songs for all the bands to play, out of the 84 on disc. This is a difficult task–Kyle didn’t want super-popular songs that everyone always plays, but at the same time, you have to give vocalists a fair shake, as vocals are the hardest thing for an otherwise-skilled player to sightread. In addition, it’s difficult for me to really be a fair judge of what songs to play, given that I am A. One of the competitors in the tournament, who B. Has 100%ed everything on the disc at one point or another. I know what the main songs to stay away from for a vocalist would be (Uncontrollable Urge and its ridiculous ending, One Way or Another and its ultra-finicky talkie, Tangled Up in Blue and its everything), but I also know all the obscure songs from the Harmonix Bands that I could suggest and gain an obvious advantage. In the end, without much input from me, Dan, John, Matt and Kyle end up selecting 2 Harmonix songs anyway–”Conventional Lover” and “Night Lies”–plus Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle”.

With that, qualifying can finally start. My band, M2D2 (Myself, Matt, Dan, plus a guy named Danny on bass…note the first letters of our first names), goes first, and as Kyle put it, we were a tough act to follow–I 100%ed two songs, and we gold starred “Conventional Lover” and “Night Lies”. We all felt like we could have done better on “The Middle”, but there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it at that point.

In the end, we end up qualifying second, behind Sam and John’s band, The Giant Fire Cobras. A person cosplaying as Squall winds up forming a band called The Lionhearts, featuring the vocalist that the other people in my band had last year. The other main competition we had was a band called The Green Monkeys, whom you may remember as the winner of Connecticon 2009′s Guitar Hero Smash Hits tournament.

As the game room closes down for the night, Kyle asks Matt, Dan and I to brainstorm something for the semis and finals on Saturday. We also attempt to figure out what, if anything, we plan on doing for DLC. The best options were either Dan’s or my XBox, and with Dan closer to the convention than I am (Although neither of us are exactly a huge drive away), he’s the best bet.

After that, Sam, Matt and I head to the “Totally Not a Rave Informal Dance” as someone on the Connecticon fora called it. There’s not a lot to say here, as I’m not really a big dancer, although I do meet a very nice young lady named Christina who compliments my cape. I also briefly meet my friend Barbara and her friends Everett and Alyssa there, but my attempts to introduce her to Sam fail when we walk off in two different directions and don’t see each other for the rest of the night. I soon walk back to my hotel room at the Hartford Hilton and head to bed at about 1:30AM.

We all wake up at about 9AM Saturday morning and freshen up, quickly eat, etc. I take the time to scribble down something resembling a tournament rule set on a piece of paper that Kyle would hopefully take into consideration. In short, it involved number of stars, the difficulty level the people in the band picked, and performance (Band difficulty of the song may also have been factored in, I don’t really remember at this point)–the point being to approximate Darren’s formula (And it would indeed be a rough approximation) without Kyle needing to have any sort of spreadsheet or do any complex math on the fly.

As it turned out, Dan and Kyle were already at the Convention Center working on a formula of their own, taking into account song difficulty (At both the Band and individual instrument levels), number of stars, the percentages the individual band members got, and difficulty level the people in the band picked, although not performance. This was the good news. The bad news was that apparently no one had bothered to inform Dan that we were counting on him being able to bring his XBox back to the convention…in fact, no one had even asked him to do so. One call to Silver later, and I walked back to the hotel to drive home to get my XBox. While it doesn’t have as much DLC as Darren’s or Dan’s did, it does have some stuff that one or both of them didn’t have–most notably the Lego Rock Band imports.

The next hour and a half plays out like one of those tragicomic sequences in a movie where the universe simply decides it hates the main character….with me in the main character role. I had parked across the street from the hotel lot because that garage was slightly cheaper, and that way Sam and Co. would use the ticket I would ordinarily get from the hotel garage.

So I make my way to where the car is parked…and the pedestrian entrance to the garage is locked.

“Okay, weird” I think to myself, “But no problem, I’ll just get in via one of the car entrances.”

So I walk around the corner…and the car entrances are closed. As in, totally gated off, metal covering over them.

I walk around the entire building, and it’s the same story at all the entrances.

I walk into the Hilton just as it starts to rain, and ask the front desk if they know who operates the garage. “The Hartford Stage“, I’m told. Calling the number on their building doesn’t really get me anything useful, and a couple options in their automated help line simply lead me to voice mail. Also, at this point, it’s now pouring out.

I can see my car in the garage, but can’t get to it. I can also see one of the security vans in the garage, so I try calling that number. It’s the same story as the Hartford Stage number, with no obvious helpful option presented to me.

Desperate, I make my way back to the hotel room and commandeer Henry’s laptop. A Google search for ‘MAT Garage Hartford’ gets me the website for the Hartford Parking Authority, and from there, I learn that the operation of the MAT Garage in particular is contracted out to Connecticut Parking Services, and find their number.
I head back down, intending to call the number as my last resort as far as getting in…and realize I’ve forgotten my “MAGFest Video Game Expert” hat in the room. I go back up…and realize I’ve also locked my card key in the room. These would be kind of amusing events on their own, but at this point, I can’t get to my car, I’m soaked, and I’m letting down a bunch of people who were counting on me to provide some damn songs for the tournament.

I stop at the front desk and get another room key, collect my hat, and make my way back to the garage with the Connecticut Parking Services number stored on my cell phone. I call it…and no one picks up. I let the phone ring for a good three minutes, and nothing. Defeated, I make my way back to the convention, knowing that I don’t even have a Wii Bowling tournament to distract me this time. About the only thing that cheered me up was Silver sending me a text message. The fact that we had been talking helped, and I did consider her suggestion to take a cab before ruling it out (Too expensive, not enough time before the semi-finals were supposed to start), but frankly, it was that fact that this is my “You have a text message!” tone that really makes me smile every time I receive one.

Back at the convention, it seems there’s a small emergency–amongst the various fake weapons (Toy guns, etc) people have for their costumes, some miscreants have apparently snuck in actual paintball guns with actual ammo. Meanwhile, I’m apologizing to basically everyone for my failure to procure my XBox–Matt repeatedly tells me that it isn’t my fault, although at that point, I basically just want to wallow in self-pity (And water–I’m still pretty drenched at this point) for awhile.

There’s no time for that, though, as it’s time to help set up for the semi/finals of the Rock Band Tournament in one of the Marriott’s ball rooms (AKA the “Totally Not a Rave Informal Dance Room”)…and we may have an XBox with DLC on it after all. In the meantime, it looks like the semi-finals will be the first test of the thrown-together scoring system we made up to imitate Darren’s original–M2D2 were supposed to be the guinea pigs for it on Saturday morning, but that went out the window thanks to my losing an hour and a half to Connecticut Parking Services and the Hartford Parking Authority (Whose website about the MAT Garage, as of this writing, currently contradicts reality…I’ll see about shooting someone an e-mail to correct this). The formula is very rough–Dan has some concerns about it just eyeballing it, and there’s not even a performance element yet–but it’s workable for now.

Thanks to time concerns, the six bands (Seven attempted to qualify in total, but one didn’t show up to the ball room for whatever reason) will play a single song, based entirely on skill as determined by the formula, which takes into account all those things I mentioned earlier. The top four bands will go on to the finals. Oh, at this point, Matt’s sister Morgan threatens to disown M2D2 if we fail to win. The Giant Fire Cobras, by virtue of their top qualifying score (Although not by much–they beat us by about 50000 points out of 3 million total), get to go first. They pick “Almost Easy” for their song.

When they’re done, I pretty much immediately say that something is wrong with the vocal setup, and that it should be fixed and they should get a second chance at the song. The task of fixing said vocal setup naturally falls to….me. While on one hand, it makes sense–without trying to self-inflate my ego too much, I was probably the most skilled/serious Rock Band vocalist there, and the most likely to know what was wrong and how to fix it–it also goes to show how much trust Kyle and, really, everyone, put in me. I could easily have sabotaged the setup even worse for anyone except me if I really put my mind to it.

In truth, I don’t do a whole lot–the microphone stand is moved back so as to not pick up as much of the game noise, and I lower the mic sensitivity a notch while seeing how everything works via singing most of “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter”–before it’s time for my band to play our song choice, “The Trees (Vault Edition)”. I should probably point out at this point that the whole DLC thing was a no-go–the would-be savior had his hard drive and XBox…but it wasn’t the original XBox that a lot of the songs had been downloaded to, so we had no way to access them. Also, if I remember correctly, this was the point that Matt accidentally jostled the XBox, rendering the Rock Band 2 disc unreadable. Luckily, we had all sorts of extra copies of the game thanks to the Con’s buying spree, so one “please stand by” later, we’re back in business.

The song goes really well–I 100% the song on my end (My third out of four songs in the tournament, in case you’re counting), and we gold star the song on the ending guitar part. After all is said and done, four bands are left for the Finals, and they’re the four bands I mentioned earlier. The Green Monkeys wind up with the top seed, M2D2 are again second, and the Giant Fire Cobras (Even without a second chance at qualifying) and the Lionhearts round out the top 4.

And now for something completely different–a band with actual instruments! It’s time for The New Inertia to play! In hindsight, this was a…questionable booking decision for various reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I had to run and get food at this point, as the entirety of my food consumption between waking up at about 9AM and now (About 3:30 PM) consisted of a Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal bar (Which was, admittedly, delicious).

What I was of them was pretty cool, and Matt and I decide to help them move some of their stuff back to their van. This nets us some free stuff–a bunch of New Inertia posters, plus two CDs plus one of the guys’ solo CD.

And now it’s time for the Rock Band finals. The main change is that there’s now a performance aspect to our rough, thrown-together formula. Besides that, the rules are that each band will play three songs. You can repeat your song from the semi-finals if you want, but no song can be played twice in the finals (Either by your band or any other), and we’ll play a song at a time based on seeding–The Green Monkeys will go first, M2D2, then the Giant Fire Cobras and the Lionhearts. Then we repeat the process two more times with different songs, and eventually we’ll have a winner. At this point, the rest of my band and I decide to brainstorm songs, and eventually have a pretty solid list–Aqualung, Any Way You Want It, Alabama Getaway, Give It All, and Rob the Prez-o-Dent.

The Green Monkeys take the stage…and select Aqualung as their first song. Well, there goes our idea. When it’s our turn, we decide to go with Give It All, or as I call it, “The most effeminate version of Give It All you’ve ever heard.” Due to a combination of this, tournament nerves, and my running around the area in my cape before actually taking the stage, this song goes rather poorly for me, although my 93% is still the best vocalist score of the first round.

Before the second round choices are made, my band and I argue over whether to play Rob the Prez-o-Dent or not–Matt and I feel as though we can perform the hell out of it, but Dan and Danny are less confident in their abilities on the song. Adding to the debate is the fact that the Green Monkeys decide to reprise their semi-finals choice of Ramblin’ Man for their second song. In the end, the two Dans push for us to re-do The Trees, and I end up agreeing, under the condition that we save it for the third song (And secretly hoping one of the other bands will play it in the meantime).

Our second song ends up being Alabama Getaway by The Grateful Dead, and thanks to the song being more in my vocal range, plus my not running around as much beforehand, I do much better on this song, getting a 98% while trying to actually perform at the same time. The Giant Fire Cobras play Let There Be Rock this round, and The Lionhearts select Our Truth.

The last round goes Testify, The Trees (Vault Edition) (Secret wish: Not granted), Colony of Birchmen, Spoonman for the respective bands. I “only” 99% it this time, sounding particularly horrible on one phrase where I break combo and let the Score Hero side of me escape with a quick “Gaaah!” when it happens.

After that, it’s time for the results. After some anxious waiting, the results are tabulated:
In fourth place, The Lionhearts, mainly because the guy dressed as Squall accidentally hit a button after one of the songs before the results could be written down. Between myself and another person, we manage to remember three of the four numbers, but wound up deciding to give the bassist an 80% when no one could come up with his number–he probably did far better than 80%, but that seemed like a fair number given that the button was hit when it shouldn’t have been.

In third place, The Giant Fire Cobras. Although, at this point, I should mentioned that this was easily the strongest year for the bands on a technical level. After a total of zero bands in the finals the first two years playing entirely on Expert, all four bands had all their members on Expert this year. Really, any of the top three bands could have won the whole thing, and if not for the unfortunate premature button hit on Squall’s part, all four of them would have been in contention (Again, the 80% their bassist was given was probably a lot worse than he actually did).

As it happened, to illustrate just how close the top two bands in particular actually were…well, you can look at the results here. But suffice to say that when Kyle said “And by 22 points, first place goes to…”, I really didn’t expect the sentence to end “…M2D2″.

Yet it did.

We had done it. We had won. Despite practicing a bunch of songs that it turned out we couldn’t use (In my case, until I really didn’t want to play them anymore), Matt and Dan’s recruiting me basically immediately after Connecticon ’09 paid off for all of us. Even better, I become Connecticon’s Best Vocalist for the third year in a row, which makes me happy and relieved that all the practice on that end had paid off as well. Although this paled in comparison to Sam’s reaction upon winning Best Guitarist (Also for the third year in a row)–she was genuinely thrilled about it. One person each from the Green Monkeys and Lionhearts also won a Best Instrumentalist award, but I can’t remember their names, or even which band member won which award. Sorry guys.

With the tournament over, Matt and I head back to the hotel while it’s still light out in order to drop off our prizes. Shaimus (I’m probably spelling that wrong) had quickly constructed makeshift awards in the 24 hours or so between Darren’s leaving and the tournament ending, and my Best Vocalist award was what could best be described as a sexy anime catgirl holding onto a Rock Band microphone, autographed by the members of The New Inertia. I also received five “Tix”, which could be used at the Collectible Card Game desk, for winning the tournament, plus another 3 Tix for winning Best Vocalist. We then go eat at Burger King, where I receive all sort of strange looks (Yes, I’m still wearing the cape at this point. More unfortunately, I happen to arrive when there are zero cosplayers there, making me the bizarre one in the room.), and they screw up my order (Although not badly enough to be worth complaining about. I ordered a large value meal, and they charged me for and gave me a medium. Because they gave me what they charged me for, and the meal itself was the right meal, I figured “No harm no foul”.).

Back at the convention, not much of note happens until it closes for the night. I head back to the totally-not-a-rave on Saturday night, but I frankly don’t feel much like dancing–at this point, to say that my little toes on both of my feet have blisters isn’t really right..saying that they are giant blisters is more accurate. So I take a shuttle back to the hotel at about 12:30AM.

On Sunday, the entire crew get up at about 9AM again, and once everyone has showered and packed, we check out of the hotel. At this point, what had been in the back of my mind since Saturday is now at the forefront of it–”What if I still can’t get to my car?” Luckily, while the pedestrian entrances are still locked, the exit is at least open, and after the attendant and I talk past each other for awhile (I think he initially thought I had wanted to get a car into the garage, not out of it), he lets me in and I liberate my car from the garage. From there, I remember enough about this area of Hartford from my Connecticon 2007 and 2008 trips to make it to the Convention Center, where I frankly don’t even care that I’ll have to pay for parking there as well.

I hit the Dealer’s Room for the first time all weekend, and purchaseShortpacked! Book 3, a T-Shirt (On the front: “Looks like the rules…just got screwed” with a picture from YuGiOh the Abridged Series. On the back: YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!), a badge (“The doctor said it was cancer. I call it a challenge.”), and some pocky. I also stop at the CCG booth and pick up a Magic Deckbuilder’s Kit and another pack with my Rock Band tournament winnings–I’ve considered getting back into Magic for awhile as something to occasionally get me out of the apartment, but monetary concerns have held me back. This goes some way toward alleviating that. Then it’s panel time.

The “How to Run a Panel” panel was actually really cool. While some of it was obvious–act professional, practice your presentation if at all possible–I learned some useful tips about the tech side of things that amounted basically to “cover your butt” in terms of bringing various connections, extra copies of what you plan to present, a clicker, etc. Since I’ve considered doing some kind of “So You Want to be a Speedrunner” panel at the last couple Connecticons, I may take what I learned here and actually submit it for consideration for next year–Connecticon has been trying to get away from its image of “Anime Convention” for the past couple years, and something like this would help that, I feel.

Finally, it’s time for the “Con Feedback” panel, which takes a decidedly unexpected turn. Given two days to calm down, I realize the Convention probably has a side of the story regarding the events that led to all hell breaking loose on Friday afternoon with the Rock Band tournament. After complimenting Kyle and Shaimus on rescuing the whole thing in their own ways, I basically ask “Not that it necessarily has to be here in front of everybody, but at some point I’d like the Convention’s side of things as to what happened that led up to that.”…and get ushered out of the room by Shaimus.

In a corner of the Convention Center, he and I talk for roughly a half hour, at the end of which the conversation takes a completely unexpected turn: I get asked to be on the staff of the Video Game Department next year.

If I remember right, my response was close to “Wow, staff…*exhale* You know what? If that’s what it takes to keep this whole Rock band thing going, then yeah, okay, I’ll do it.”

After the panel, I talk to Kyle about it, and he’s basically as enthusiastic as he gets about anything, essentially saying he’d have no problem with it. That done, I finally get in my car and head home.

So that was Connecticon 2010. I honestly have no idea what’s in store for me for Connecticon 2011. About the only thing I know is that agreeing to be on staff, in all likelihood, will disqualify me from defending my titles at next year’s Rock Band tournament. And honestly, on one hand it’s disappointing, but on the other hand, I can’t deny that it’s sort of a relief too. Not only because I can now say I won Best Vocalist every time I entered, but for a more basic reason: If my Score Hero page is accurate, even though I won Best Vocalist at Connecticon 2008, the moment the “Hey, I could be really good at this” switch turned on in my head was around the middle of March 2009 when I 100%ed “Pinball Wizard” on Expert Vocals for the first time. Even still, that means that I’ve been playing Rock Band 2 on a competitive level for over a year, on and off. This is a long time for me to stick with anything, to be honest. And I don’t want to call this my “retirement” from Rock Band or whatever–I’ve always been opposed to people who make posts like that on Score Hero–but it’ll be nice to be able to just sit back and have fun with the game for awhile too.

In any event, next it’s time to get ready for MAGFest 9!

(1)- When World Wrestling Entertainment releases a wrestler, the boilerplate language is approximately “WWE has come to terms on the release of Wrestler X as of today’s date. We wish Wrestler X the best in all future endeavors.” If that second sentence is missing, you know something is really screwed up–the person repeatedly violated the WWE’s Wellness Policy (Yes, they have one), for instance. That second sentence is definitely missing here, on both ends.

As it turned out, my memory of what Sam looked like from last year was somewhat (Though as she told me later, not totally) off, as evidenced by the fact that I wound up following her for a block or so without realizing it, until she heard the echo of me talking to her on her cell phone and turned around. Ha! Because of this, my original plan to walk to the Connecticut Convention Center to grab my Connecticon badge that night was scrapped, and we ended up hanging out at the hotel that night instead, watching Henry play Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires. At a little after midnight, we all went to bed, waking up at 7 or so on Friday morning.

Early Friday morning was spent getting ready and walking to the Convention center, during which I managed to get sidetracked a bit when I decided “Screw the directions, I see the Marriott attached to the Convention Center, I’ll just walk in that general direction.” I still managed to beat Sam and Henry there, though, since they had to stop back at their car to grab stuff. Despite the long line for both pre and regular registration (Hopefully I’ll have a picture up before too long), once the process actually started, getting to the registration desk was impressively quick. Slightly more annoying was the fact that they didn’t think I had paid for my pre-registration initially, but a second stop took care of that, very quickly I might add. Then it was time to wait around for the Console Gaming area to open up, during which time I talked with some of the people from last year’s Rock Band tournament.

The Console Gaming room opened up…and less than two hours before the first Rock Band qualifier, I didn’t have a band.

But first, a bit about the Rock Band tournament itself. The plan was to hold four qualifiers, with one band from each qualifier going on to the finals on stage at the Marriott’s ballroom. Each qualifier would have several rounds, with one or more bands being eliminated in each round until one remained. The final round would be judged by Tim Buckley of Ctrl-Alt-Del, and representatives from The Rock 106.9 WCCC and Harmonix, the last one jumping on board about a week before the convention (In that time frame, their involvement went from, roughly, “Maybe we’ll send a PR guy down there to check it out” to “We’re sending some executives to help judge and we’ve got some prize support for you all too.”). Darren, who ran the tournament, had a spreadsheet to help him judge the competition and, as he put it, “Compare apples to oranges” without any audience members, or bands for that matter, having to hear the same songs over and over again. Without getting overly into the particulars, the following things would give you bonus points:

• Playing on a difficulty above Easy. In particular, playing on Expert is worth huge points over all other difficulties. Note that most if not all people in the tourney played on at least Hard; Easy is just the scoring baseline as far as this goes.
• Doing well on the song, based on the number of stars you got, with Gold Stars counting as 6 per song.
• Picking something with a high degree of difficulty on individual instruments. Band difficulties were standardized per round, and you could pick anything within those difficulties. For instance, the first round may be something like “Play three songs, one with a band difficulty of 1, one with a band difficulty of 2, and the last with a band difficulty of 3.” What songs you picked were up to you. Within a preliminary, the same song could not be heard twice (The slate was wiped clean after each preliminary, and again before the Finals). This left some room for strategy, as the individual instrument difficulties are not standardized (In particular, there is very little correlation between Band Difficulty and Vocal Difficulty), so there were some big bonus points to be picked up if you had the personnel to exploit this.
• Having some kind of theme in your choices. Maybe all songs by the same band, all love songs, etc.
• Performing! Actually rocking out, looking like you’re having a good time, etc. Bonus points for ultra rock star moves, like (For guitarists) playing behind your head, or (For vocalists) singing without looking at the screen, introducing your band/bandmates/songs, etc. This is different than a lot of other Rock Band tournaments, which tend to be strictly score based (Two bands play the same song, higher score wins). It also allows for people who may not necessarily be able to consistently full combo things on Expert to potentially compete on equal footing with the ultra hardcore people–a band who isn’t perfect technically, but puts on on awesome show, can beat a band who can full combo things in their sleep, but just “stares slack-jawed at the screen”, to use another Darren-ism. I spent the last couple weeks before CTCon working on this aspect of my game, trying to pick out a set of songs on each band difficulty that I felt like I could do this with comfortably without sacrificing score too much.

Now, back to the drama.

The original plan for a band was for the four individual Best Instrument winners from last year’s competition to form a supergroup for this year. Unfortunately, Jay didn’t show up this year, and Sam and Nick wound up playing out a version of the Fleetwood Mac story, starting and ending a relationship in the past year. So the plan as of Friday morning was for Sam and myself to try and form a band for the 1PM qualifier, with Henry joining on bass if need be. Only problem: As it turned out, Nick’s band needed one more person to have a full band, and so Sam joined up with them despite their turbulence, leaving me without, really, anything.

So, let’s review. Less than two hours before the qualifier, and I, the defending Best Vocalist, don’t have any bandmates for said qualifier.

Clearly, Connecticon was not going according to plan thus far.

So I had to take things one step at a time. Fairly desperate, I asked Darren if, should worse come to worst, three-piece bands (With one person simultaneously playing an instrument and singing) were allowed, and found out that they were (As with last year, I think if one person wanted to try and play all four instruments at the same time, they were technically welcome to, though it would of course end badly). Okay, so now the situation wasn’t quite so dire–if I could find two other people, I could try playing bass and singing at the same time.

The next step was finding two other people. A quick look around yielded me a drummer who was game, Ev (His given name is Everard, which I actually messed up as “Everett” at one point during the tourney), and, remembering his earlier offer, turned to Henry and said “How’d you like to play guitar in the Rock Band tourney?”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure!” I’m pretty sure he hadn’t expected an offer to play guitar, but I’m also sure he was very happy to do so. After telling Sam “I kidnapped your boyfriend,” I was now in the qualifier. As it stood, the situation wasn’t ideal–I’d be bass-voxing with basically no experience at all in the discipline–but it was far better than it was not long before that.

With 30 to 60 minutes to go before the qualifier, I now had to try to find a bass player. I found people hanging out at one of the Rock Band stations, and more or less said “Hi! Billy Mays here for I’m trying to qualify for the Rock Band finals! Currently, I’m in a three-piece band where I’ll be playing bass and singing at the same time. Is there anyone who’d like to play bass in my band so I don’t have to do this? I’ll pay your share of the entry fee.” This sales pitch actually yielded me a bassist, a guy named Dan.

I didn’t know if I was necessarily “in business”, but I did have a full band. As it turned out, Ev could only drum on Hard, but that would actually not be the biggest obstacle in our way, and I regarded it as only a slight setback–most of our competition, it seemed, had at least one person on Hard, though which instrument it was varied from band to band.

At slightly after 1PM, the first qualifier began. There were four bands, and our three band difficulties to select from were 0, 2, and 3 on a 0 to 6 system (Rock Band 2 has its difficulties represented by dots, from 0 through 5. If you see little devil heads that on first inspection look like hearts, that’s even harder than 5 dots, and so we call that 6).

My band’s choices:
0: Drain You- Nirvana (No particular reason. I think Ev suggested it, and I was cool with it.)
2: Psycho Killer- Talking Heads (This was an “exploit the system” choice on my part. The song is really easy on drums [And bass], which takes a lot of the pressure off of Dan and Ev–indeed, I think Dan actually 100%ed this song. Most importantly, though, the song is a 6 on Vocals…and, like everything else on the Rock Band 2 disc, I’ve 100%ed it at some point or another. I figured this was our best chance at wracking up points–not knowing the capabilities of anyone in my band at this stage, I took what I could control [Namely, my own performance] and ran with it.)
3: Inside the Fire- Disturbed (I wanted redemption for failing and almost knocking my band out of this song last year…in the finals. This was actually my worst performance of the entire tournament on a technical level by a good margin–an 86% if memory serves…I think my next lowest was 92 or 93%–but I did manage to get through it without failing this time. In hindsight, there were any number of better strategic choices, but what’s done is done.).

For the first round, my band, Penguin Conspiracy (Suggested at the last second by one of the other band members, I forget which) actually won the round with a score of 180 or so points. The second and third place bands had 155 and 150 or so, and the last band, who unfortunately failed completely out of two songs, had roughly 55 points. Further, I was the unofficial “most valuable component” of the round, apparently racking up more points than anyone else.

Round two saw us knocked down to three bands, and our top score got us the privilege of playing last in the round (On the downside, we also had the final choice of songs. A fair trade to see how your competition did, though). Our assigned band difficulties were a 1, 3, and 4.
1: Cool for Cats- Squeeze (Because the whole thing is squarely in my vocal range–a rarity in Rock Band songs–and again, there’s nothing too difficult in it)
3: Go Your Own Way- Fleetwood Mac (This was one I had actually really worked on the performance aspect of)
4: Any Way You Want It- Journey (As it happened, I didn’t realize I had made a mini-theme out of doing things your way until it was pointed out to me, although I of course didn’t say that. Again, no particular reason for this choice, but it was as good as any other)

My band chose to play them in the order 3, 1, 4. In the process, I nail the first Vocal 100% of the tournament on Go Your Own Way, and nearly do it again on Any Way You Want It, messing up the third-from-the-end phrase. In spite of this, we only finish second out of the three bands this time, scoring about 175 points (If nothing else, we’re consistent) to the 225-ish points of Geohounds (The Sam-and-Nick band).

Because we were the second out of two bands going on to the final round of the qualifier, we got first choice of song selection, though it also means we’d play first. At this point, we got a bit of exciting news: No one had yet signed up for the second qualifier of the day. If, after the two bands performed, there were still no sign ups for it, that qualifier would be canceled and both bands would go on to the finals. Our assigned difficulties for the round were 3, 5, 6.
3: Girl’s Not Grey- AFI (I don’t remember how much, if any, thought went into this choice beyond “Do I know this song? Yes. I’ll suggest we play it.” If I remember correctly, we considered, but ultimately rejected, Tangled Up in Blue here [Tangled Up is a 6 on Vocals, but that's balanced out by the fact that it's a 0 on drums. On a 2, that's fine. On a 3, we were trying to find something a bit more balanced.])
5: Down With the Sickness- Disturbed (Same thing here, although I’m pretty sure I didn’t suggest this one. Still, I felt I knew it well enough that it was a solid choice.)
6: Almost Easy- Avenged Sevenfold (This was one of the few choices that the entire band was confident in their ability to pass as far as a 6 went)

We chose to play them in the order 5, 3, 6. Girl’s Not Grey was both the highlight and the lowlight for the band. Henry failed out of it, but was saved before we bombed out of the song completely (Whether by me or someone else, I don’t remember). On the other hand, I 100%ed it (My second of the competition), which surprised even me, to be totally honest, as this was definitely not a song I had worked on the performance aspect of. I later found out that I scored maximum performance points on it too.

After our set, things got crazy. Darren had a family emergency to attend to, and Wylie (Who runs the Console Gaming section of Connecticon) was busy with A. Making sure Darren was okay and B. Running other stuff, so we ended up using someone from one of the eliminated bands as an emergency judge for the Geohounds’ final set (After a quick Wylie crash course on how to use the spreadsheet). At the end of the set, we had the official word: No one else had signed up for the second qualifier (And at this point, even if someone had, there was no way a qualifier was being run anyway), so we were both going on to the finals. Officially, Penguin Conspiracy won the qualifier by under one point, although it wasn’t a totally fair comparison despite the emergency judge trying to think “What would Darren think about this?” as he was watching Geohounds’ set.

That was Friday. I had somehow helped a band get to the Finals. Up next, Saturday, and playing before Harmonix and the Rock!

The Finals began at 5PM Saturday, and we had to be at the hotel ballroom(!) between 4 and 4:30 to set up, check the room out, etc. This left me with plenty of time to kill, even if I wanted to watch any other qualifiers that would be going on with the intention of scoping out the potential competition, considering I got to the Convention Center at maybe 9AM that morning. So, just before 11:30AM, I went to the boffing desk (It’s not as dirty as it sounds; it’s basically fake swordfighting) and signed up for their Beginner’s Tournament, telling the person there “And by ‘beginner’, I mean ‘have never, ever done this in my life’”. Hearing that most of the other entrants to this particular tournament were in a similar situation made me feel a bit better. As it turned out, I actually won my first match by a 3-0 score before losing in the next round, 3-2. I had a lot of fun doing this, too.

I also decided to try and qualify for the DDR tournament going on that day, on an actual arcade machine no less. Despite not seriously playing for upwards of a year now, I manage to surprise myself and qualify 11th or so out of 40 people. Not that this matters, as the format being used (3 songs per match), combined with the huge number of entrants (32 into the main tournament), makes me realize pretty quickly that sticking around is going to conflict with the Rock Band finals. As a result, I concede my first round match so as to not waste anyone’s time. As it turns out, the last Rock Band qualifier had five bands attempt to qualify, with a band called Tanhaüser Gate moving on to the finals.

Thanks to Darren (Who was now back…his family emergency being slightly less dire than he thought in the sense that his relative was, in fact, still alive) being a tricky sort, I choose poorly in the game of chance (“Guess how many cigarettes Darren has in his case.” After considering the possibility that this could be a trick and there are actually none in there, I throw out “13″ as the first guess. The other two bands go with “10″ and “7″…and it turns out that my first instinct was correct; Darren was out.), meaning we get last choice of songs. Further, we have to play first in the Finals.

Wonderful.

So, three bands (Penguin Conspiracy first, then Geohounds, and finally Tanhaüser Gate, who also got the luxury of first song choice), four songs each, with a clean selection slate for the Finals. One band would win, and there would be individual prizes for Best Instrumentalist at the four positions.

Our weapons of rock would be a 3, 4, 5, and 6 in band difficulty.
3: Go Your Own Way- Fleetwood Mac (It was this or Girl’s Not Grey, given that they were the two songs I 100%ed in the qualifier. Since we didn’t nearly fail out of Go Your Own Way, this choice was pretty easy)
4: Night Lies- Bang Camaro (Part sucking up to the judges, the other part being that at the time, both our other two choices for a 4 were taken–Any Way You Want It by Tanhaüser Gate, and Testify by Geohounds. The latter would end up changing their choice, but I don’t know how much it would have mattered)
5: Aqualung- Jethro Tull (We could all handle it pretty well, we thought)
6: Get Clean- Anarchy Club (Another non-ideal choice–Tanhaüser Gate took “Almost Easy” from us too. I wasn’t sure how well I could perform this, but in the end, we decided that my taking a hit on performance for this song was better than picking something else and risking failing out of the song entirely. I knew the melody pretty well, but wasn’t so clear on the words)

We went in the somewhat unorthodox order of 3, 6, 5, 4. As for the conditions, I quickly noted that, similar to last year, I had to sing somewhat sooner than I would’ve expected in order to fully get credit for each phrase. It was also hard for me to avoid looking at the screen, given the setup, although that wasn’t the setup’s fault–I don’t know of any other fair setup, to be honest. Lastly, the way the stage was set up didn’t give us a lot of room to move around, particularly if we wanted to avoid crossing in front of the drummer. Performance-wise, Henry almost failed out of Get Clean, but somehow hung on to the end of the guitar solo. My worst performance (At least on a technical level) was easily Night Lies; in hindsight, we maybe should have picked something else. This is because even when not performing the song, it tends to give me trouble, in that I have to sing most of it consciously flatter than I want to. This was the 92-93% I mentioned earlier. Everything else went pretty well, particularly Aqualung, which I think I 99ed.

After the other two bands played–Geohounds in particular rocked so hard that they actually blew a fuse and made everything related to the game, including the projector, crash–it was time for the results.

Tanhaüser Gate won the overall band competition, which I’ll admit was sort of surprising, not in the sense that my band lost (More on that in a bit), but in the sense that I felt like the Geohounds, at least, did everything they did and better. In any event, Geohounds took second, and my thrown-together-at-the-eleventh-hour band brought up the rear, which was fine. If you asked me to try and objectively evaluate my band, I’d say we were one of the better bands, if not the best band, in the entire competition on a technical basis, despite Ev’s playing on Hard. On a performance level, though, I don’t think anyone, including my bandmates, would disagree that I essentially had to perform for all four of us. I did everything I could in that regard–in particular, smacking the microphone on the tambourine parts so hard that I actually bruised and reddened my right hand–but I’m not that surprised that we came up short overall, to be frank. Despite that, though, I really do have to thank them all one more time–without them, I wouldn’t have been able to even compete to try and defend my Best Vocalist title. So thanks, guys, if you’re reading this.

The good news: Sam and Nick repeated as Best Guitarist and Best Bassist respectively. The even better news: I repeated as Best Vocalist.

Holy crap, I actually did it. Last year, I felt like the definite weak link of my team, having been in the opposite position of randomly joining a band who desperately needed a vocalist (And being the “Play on Hard to everyone else in the band’s Expert” guy) and somehow winning Best Vocalist sort of by default. This time, I managed to prove that last year wasn’t a fluke, and really earned the award. And I actually got an award this time, too! My spoils included a copy of the Rock Band Country Track Pack (Not big into country, but it’s about 20 songs I didn’t have before, so I won’t argue with it) and, more importantly, a cool plaque that resembles a platinum record award–there’s a CD that has a Rock Band Vocal logo on the center of it, and below it, a little name plate that says “Connecticon ’09 Top Vocalist”. Suffice to say that I don’t think I’ll have a problem finding a band next year.

On a similar note, Tim Buckley actually remembered me from last year. I thought that was pretty cool.

Saturday night was spent, mostly, basking in the glory of my individual victory. Suffice to say that at the end, I was totally exhausted. I did take part in another boffing tournament near the end of the night, though. It went about as well as the first one, though it was great fun.

On Sunday, I checked out of the hotel, went to the convention, and played in one more boffing tournament (I lost in the first round, though my sword was the victim of a vicious hit by my opponent’s face[1]). I also checked out the mock Voice Acting Audition panel. I wasn’t selected to mock audition, unfortunately, but it was still pretty cool to check out how the process itself works. Basically, you have timing cues and a script, and that’s all I’ll say on that, given that this is already nearly 4000 words in length.

So, all in all, CTCon 2009 was great, and I’ve already pre-registered for 2010. Hopefully, you’ll be there too! It’s July 9-11 2010, at the Connecticut Convention Center, which is easily accessible from I91 in Connecticut.

[1] Actually, intentionally hitting the face wasn’t allowed in this set of tournaments. What happened was that I went to swing my sword, intending to try for a hit at about waist level…at the same time as my opponent more or less dove down to reduce his target area and try to hit me low, putting his face in the way of my weapon. Completely unintentional on my part. As I found out later, that wasn’t even the hardest he had been hit in the face to that point in the weekend.

Basically, it’s a 100% of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” in Rock Band 2 on Expert Vocals. It’s not a particularly long song, but it has some of the more notoriously difficult phrases in the game in the “Sure plays a mean pinball”s. I never had any major trouble with those specific phrases, oddly (Being more vexed by the “That deaf, dumb and blind kid”s myself), but this was the first time I 100%ed it in a solo game (I did it once before while playing with Jess on guitar, surprising even myself at the time).

This is the first full combo that tells me that I may be pretty okay at this whole “Rock Band 2 vocals” thing, despite what my scoresheet would tell you.

Woo!

• My quest to earn myself a shiny platinum vocal icon for Rock Band 2 was a success. My final score was 414 out of 420 stars, which, while obviously not perfect, is pretty darn good. As a bonus, I earned the Bladder of Steel award for not failing or pausing throughout, even if I sort of had to cheat to pull it off (Suffice to say that my bladder is, in reality, made of something far less capable of holding back water than steel. No, I didn’t wet myself, but the challenge, despite its name, doesn’t mention anything about not relieving oneself the entire time; you just can’t pause while you do so.). Now I have to start playing online so I can show off the icon.
• Having had to drink the stuff about 10 times in the past 4 years or so, I’m now convinced that “St. Anger” is a euphemism for “Barium Sulfate Suspension, particularly the line about “You flush it out”. In short, for those of you lucky enough to not need annual CT Scans, Barium Sulfate Suspension is a concoction that you drink 90 minutes to 2 hours before a scan. It basically helps stuff show up easier on the scan, which is good for the people who are trying to read the scans. Problems: It’s about as appetizing as it sounds, and it proceeds to mess with my insides for the next several hours afterward (As the side effects listed in the link may show you). Bleh!
]]> http://emptyeye.com/2008/12/09/have-some-random-tuesday-thoughts/feed/ 2 http://emptyeye.com/2008/12/03/theyre-the-final-countdowns/ http://emptyeye.com/2008/12/03/theyre-the-final-countdowns/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:10:21 +0000 emptyeye http://emptyeye.com/?p=286 First up is the fact that MAGFest is under a month away. THis will be my fourth time going, and the second time with the Challenges Booth. Truth be told, though, I haven’t been doing a lot of practicing for it, at least lately. That’s because I’ve been playing various Rock Band 2 in preparation for my attempt at The Endless Setlist 2–put short, all 84 songs in the game, beginning with the easiest for a full band and getting gradually harder. The somewhat good thing about this is that I’ll be attempting it on Expert Vocals, which is the one individual instrument whose difficulty doesn’t correlate that well with the full band difficulty. In other words, when the other instruments are drained from hours of playing and still have their hardest trials to go, the Vocals have it a bit easier, since the difficulty tends to jump all over the place given the order of the ESL2; from a familiarity standpoint, my biggest problem is actually going to be songs 40-55 or so. Endurance-wise, I should be okay; I’ve been singing small chunks of the setlist each day and seem to be all right, though ~12 songs a day is very different from 84. I actually plan to record the whole thing (In awful quality) and eventually upload some of the highlights and lowlights, which should be amusing.
]]> http://emptyeye.com/2008/12/03/theyre-the-final-countdowns/feed/ 0 http://emptyeye.com/2008/11/30/funny-censorship-is-funny/ http://emptyeye.com/2008/11/30/funny-censorship-is-funny/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2008 02:35:34 +0000 emptyeye http://emptyeye.com/?p=284 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.

]]> http://emptyeye.com/2008/11/30/funny-censorship-is-funny/feed/ 2 http://emptyeye.com/2008/08/04/emptyeyecom-week-41-post-connecticon-wrapup/ http://emptyeye.com/2008/08/04/emptyeyecom-week-41-post-connecticon-wrapup/#comments Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:43:26 +0000 emptyeye http://emptyeye.com/?p=237 (This post is huge; most of it is hidden behind a tag to prevent you from having to read it all each time the page loads)

This past weekend was spent at Connecticon. Quite honestly, I had hoped to have the CD/business cards/etc. out at this point, but various circumstances that I have documented before have prevented that thus far. In any event, I first became aware of this convention sometime last year, and went on the Saturday of last year to play in a DDR tournament. I didn’t do very well, but that’s beside the point–I had fun, and decided to go to the entire convention this year, and actually booked a room at the hotel despite living fairly close. This made more sense when I lived in Waterbury (My thinking was I’d go right to the hotel from work on Thursday, because I didn’t want to go from Waterbury to Cheshire, back to Waterbury, and drive back through Cheshire again on my way to Hartford), but as I’ve since moved out to Milldale, I did go back to my apartment after work to pack and then headed off to the Convention Center at about 7:30 Thursday night.

That night I pretty much idled in my room, watching some Family Guy and then the X-Games, specifically Skateboard Big Air (Totally absurd, particularly Danny Way twice damn near killing himself, then getting up and nailing the tricks that slammed him on his next run) and Motorcycle Best Trick. Finally, I watched a History Channel program essentially about Batman technology and how close it is to reality (Surprisingly so, in many cases).

Friday was the first day of the ‘Con proper, and my main activity was going to the Para Para Dancing panel. Para Para is a style of dance popular in Japan in which every song has its own routine, although there are sort of standardized sets of moves that you see in pretty much every song. You can see one example of such a routine here. Is it goofy? Yes, and apparently it can get even goofier (As the instructor put it, “If they think a song sounds ‘girlie’, they’ll definitely put in things like making a heart shape with your hands in the routine.” Who “they” are, I’m not quite sure.). But it’s darn fun regardless. Other than that, the main activity was Rock Banding it up, jumping from instrument to instrument. Though I wouldn’t call it my primary instrument in either Rock Band or actual music-making, my voice would prove to be an integral part of the rest of the weekend.

Friday night, I honestly didn’t sleep a whole lot, because I was too excited for Saturday–rhythm game day! Yes, there would be Rock Band, but there were also Guitar Hero and DDR tournaments throughout the day. Things got interesting Saturday morning, as I signed up for the Rock Band tournament (Evidently, there was supposed to be massive prize support from WCCC that for some reason fell through at the last second.) as a “single”–in other words, a person looking for a band–on vocals, based on encouraging results from Friday night. Eventually, I start playing with someone, and decide to try “Working Man” by Rush, with me apologizing in advance for my horrible, horrible Geddy Lee impersonation.

Long story short: We fail the song–but despite me singing way the heck above my natural vocal range (Haven’t had the opportunity to use that link in awhile…), it isn’t my fault. It turns out that the drummer, who was absurdly good, was close to entering the competition as part of a 3-piece band with someone doubling up on guitar and vocal duties (Perfectly acceptable by the rules of the tournament–technically, as long as all four band positions were filled, I suppose one person could have tried to play all four instruments simultaneously). I offer my services on vocals, and after singing “Message In a Bottle” by The Police (Which I knew) and “Perfect Insanity” by Disturbed (Which I had heard exactly one time before), they allow me to join them. Woo, I have something to do!

Eventually, the tournament starts. Round one: Pick any song of your choice and five-star it. “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was played about four times thanks to a bunch of female singers and a shortage of material in that range. That, and it’s a fairly easy song (Though one band playing it managed not to qualify regardless). My band, named The Infringers (Brian, the guitarist, is a patent attorney), opted to make qualifying a lot harder than it had to be by playing “Limelight” as our qualifier (Keep in mind that we had picked a difficulty for our respective instruments and locked it in for the duration of the tournament. I was on Hard; the three instrumentalists (‘Jay’ on Drums, the aforementioned Brian on guitar, Jesse on bass) were all on Expert.), and almost manage to screw it up (Thanks primarily to my being the weak link), only locking in the five-star after all the vocals were through. Despite this, I managed to attract something of a fanbase thanks to a banshee-esque scream at the end of the song. It was at this point that I started to feel that A. We had a good chance to win the competition, and B. I had a shot at the Best Vocalist award despite what I wrote above, essentially because everyone else was either picking songs in their natural range or dropping octaves to force a song to fit in said vocal range, whereas I had no issues with attempting falsetto where necessary (To Brian’s consternation at times), which I figured would earn me points.

In any event, The next round’s format was changed, ostensibly to save time (I wonder whether this was actually accomplished; more on that at the bottom of this entry). The format being used in this round was that all the qualifying bands (nine in all) would play the same three songs–”Gimme Three Steps” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Rock & Roll Band” by Boston, and “I’m So Sick” by Flyleaf–and the top 4 scoring bands would go onto the final, on the main Connecticon stage. And thanks to our qualifying effort, The Infringers were the first band to play said next round, being privately given instructions to essentially demonstrate how the songs were supposed to sound. We wind up five-starring all three songs and putting up a total score in the neighborhood of 2.2 million points for the set (Roughly 1 million on “Gimme Three Steps”, 700K on “Rock & Roll Band”, and 500K on “I’m So Sick”). Then it was time for the wait to see if we would make it in. Privately, I didn’t think we had a whole lot to worry about as far as making the top four was concerned–the format tended to reward those who picked harder difficulties and did well on them, and there were only a couple bands who had the same or more difficult aggregate difficulties–but the wait for 8 other bands to finish the songs was nonetheless nerve-wracking. Nonetheless, as bands one by one failed to top our score, I gradually grew more and more relaxed, and eventually we were officially in the Finals. Woo! Not only that, but our score of 2.2 million actually made us the top seed overall.

The Finals themselves were pretty cool, though the format again got changed from what was advertised. What was advertised was that each band would play three songs on the stage–a standard song for score, a song picked by the judges (Tim Buckley of Ctrl-Alt-Del and an Ozzy Osbourne….to say “impersonator” is technically correct, but it really doesn’t do the guy justice. I was actually not quite sure if it was really Ozzy or not, until I decided that the sheer illogic of Ozzy Osbourne at a comic and anime convention meant that it wasn’t really him–a couple people were actually convinced for awhile that it was actually the Ozzy Osbourne. The guy was good). In any event, thanks to time constraints, the Judges’ Pick song was eliminated, and the standard song for score was “Peace of Mind” by Boston.

Our top seeding (At least, we think it was the top seeding) meant the The Infringers would take the stage last. As the other bands went up and started playing, it was clear that something was up with the equipment. Whether the game wasn’t calibrated correctly, or the guitars weren’t functioning, or some combination, I’m not quite sure, but pretty much all the bands before us had problems of one sort of another that couldn’t be explained by lack of skill alone (Especially given that A. These were the top 4 bands of the competition, B. They were each picking their own song, and C. “Peace of Mind” is, I would think, pretty well-known). Horror stories from guitar to vocal issues abounded.

In any event, we get on stage and begin “Peace of Mind”. and Brian stops and announces that the guitar isn’t working. We start again, and get through the song, and I get a round of applause for essentially being an idiot and actually attempting to replicate Brad Delp’s vocal range (I guess I succeeded as far as the game was concerned). After the song is where it got really interesting–before we went up, we had bounced back and forth between a couple different song choices, starting with “Working Man” (Before it got kiboshed for being too long. Stupid time constraints…) and debating between two Disturbed songs, “Perfect Insanity” and “Inside the Fire”, before finally settling on the latter. After “Peace of Mind”, the following conversation ensued:

Brian: “Message in a Bottle.” (Background: I had pushed to do “MiaB” as our qualifier, but got overruled. It was effectively a “safe” song from a performance aspect, as I scored in the high 90s% on vocals even attempting to replicate Sting’s vocals at points rather than drop octaves) The lag is too bad.

Me: Okay.

Jay: No, we have to do “Inside the Fire”. We’ll be fine.

Everyone else: All right…

So, we do “Inside the Fire”. I actually failed out of the song (My first and only failure in the entire tournament–pretty good for not actually owning an XBOX 360, let alone Rock Band), but got bailed out by someone’s surplus Overdrive (Rock Band’s “Starpower-although-we-can’t-call-it-that-since-Activision-and-Neversoft-took-our-Guitar-Hero property”, which doubles as a “save your partner” emergency bailout. You can do this twice per member per song; the third time, they’re out for good, and your band’s energy slowly drops to zero until either the entire band fails or the song ends) before things really hit a crisis point. And we finished the song…and the entire tournament pretty much got kicked out of the room at that point, thanks to those time constraints I talked about earlier, which was rather lame, actually.

Final results: We don’t win the overall award, but we do take home a consolation prize of sorts for having the top score on “Peace of Mind”. Not only that, but The Infringers manage to take home two of the four “Best Musician” awards–Jay for Best Drummer…and yours truly for Best Vocalist. Yay!

After that, the four individual musicians (Jay and I, plus Best Bassist Sam Nick of Hokuden Knights [Whose band actually won the overall competition] and Best Guitarist Sam of Stranger Danger and played a mini-setlist back in the Game Room, with each of us picking two songs, after which I was completely done with Vocals until…probably next Connecticon, given how I sounded this morning. Saturday night, a bunch of the finalists and I went out to CitySteam for a late meal, and generally bonded and talked about non-Rock Band stuff. Sunday was more hanging out, exchanging contact info (They were all extremely cool people, and at least some of them were apparently filming some of the footage, which will hopefully be online soon), and begging Darren (The Director of Video Games) to hold the tournament on Friday next year for extremely selfish reasons, which I’ll get into as CTCon ’09 draws nearer.

So yeah, I definitely had a fun time. And to my fellow Rock Banders, welcome, feel free to comment here or anywhere on the site, and hopefully you’ll stick around and check out some of the music I have here.

Other Rock Band Tourney Thoughts

I mentioned that I’m not sure whether the time-saving measures implemented in the “Trim to four bands” round actually saved any time at all. The reason for this is that the original plan was that the bands would be paired off against one another and would each play a standardized song for score, with the winner moving on until we were down to four bands. This would take a total of five matches, starting from nine bands to get down to four. Five matches times two songs per match (One for each band) is 10 songs. With the way it actually went down, which was more fun/inclusive/whatever to be sure, 9 bands at 3 songs a band is 27 songs. Granted, this was less setup time in terms of bands switching in and out and the like, but I don’t think that would make up for the 17 (!) extra songs that were actually played in the new setup. This paragraph is something of a mess in terms of opinions of proposed format versus what actually happened, so to sum up: Used format great for tournament fun factor, but an utter failure in terms of a time-saving measure versus the bracket style that was proposed.

In general, flatscreen TVs are nice–crisp picture and so on. For gaming, they’re not so hot, and for rhythm gaming, be it Rock Band, DDR, or some other game not really in either of those molds, they are awful–the lag is such that you can reasonably say that the audio doesn’t match the video, and you generally have to hit the button/pad/whatever well ahead of the actual “hit it here!” zone to get credit for it. Worse, despite various calibration settings for various TVs, it’s very difficult to actually calibrate the games correctly–several people tried and really just made it worse. This was one of the problems with the tournament as a whole.

Getting on stage to play Rock Band was pretty darn cool, I must say. I was definitely nervous for it, though I was helped out by the fact that, I think, I was the only one of the 16 final band members with previous main stage experience of any sort (The post-qualifying rounds of last year’s DDR tourney were also main stage), though this admittedly also lessened the “Guys we’re on the main stage this is so AWESOME!!” factor that everyone else had–Jay actually said “This is intimidating!” upon viewing the area for the first time. I didn’t think the vocal issues were as bad on the stage as the other bands made it sound like, at least relative to what I had been dealing with throughout the tournament. Yeah, the vocals were projected out to the audience as well, but I’m used to the sound of my own voice at this point, so that didn’t bother me at all.

A bit of Rock Band Theory: I don’t know precisely how vocals are scored, but I’m actually wondering now if a band comprised of Expert instrumentalists and Easy vocals would be the way to go for maximum point production. My thinking on this is that upping the difficulty on the vocals narrows the margin for error (In other words, the area “around” the correct pitch where you’ll still get credit for being what the game calls “correct”), but I’m not sure if there’s any tangible score benefit to actually getting it right on the higher difficulties. Does anyone who actually has the game want to weigh in on this? A brief online search didn’t really turn up an explanation of how vocals are scored. My thinking about this was spurred on by a conversation in which a band who was on straight Expert actually failed a song in the trim-the-bands round, effectively eliminating them from contention. Talking with Darren after the fact, it seemed that the impression he got was that the rest of the band had pressured the vocalist into going on Expert for extra points, regardless of whether she could actually handle it (Expert vocals are tough. Even on Hard, and knowing more songs than not, I had a couple close calls energy-wise besides the “Inside the Fire” incident).

Finally, thanks again to the rest of The Infringers for making me look good. And congratulations to my fellow award winners, and I hope I’ll see you all next year.

Until next week…

-EE

]]> http://emptyeye.com/2008/08/04/emptyeyecom-week-41-post-connecticon-wrapup/feed/ 5 http://emptyeye.com/2008/06/22/emptyeyecom-week-35-the-apartment-is-better/ http://emptyeye.com/2008/06/22/emptyeyecom-week-35-the-apartment-is-better/#comments Mon, 23 Jun 2008 02:15:35 +0000 emptyeye http://emptyeye.com/?p=215 This past week, a lot of the issues I had with the apartment got fixed, specifically the toilet and cable (The latter of which involved a simple reboot of the system on Cox‘s end). As a result, the place actually feels something like a home now, and to celebrate, we had a housewarming (Apartmentwarming, I guess) party earlier today. It pretty cool, as some of my friends from Massachusetts showed up, as did my parents and a bunch of Jess’s family. So that was neat.

In about a week, work on The Six Day Exile will resume, for real this time. It’s a good thing I had everything backed up onto two external drives, because on of them has just about died. Luckily, the second is still up and running; late next week sometime I’ll probably get another one to keep that redundancy (A good thing when it comes to backing stuff up) intact.

Speaking of things being on the fritz, my Cobalt Flux continues to not work right even after a cleaning. I’m not entirely surprised, mind you–what it did isn’t really consistent with it being dirty, but rather some type of wire problem–but it is a bit disappointing. Well, more than a bit–DDR was about my only form of exercise nowadays.

Finally, I’m back into playing StarCraft. I’m not exactly sure why, to be honest. But I’m going through all the missions again to get some semblance of skill in the game back.

Until next week…

-EE

]]> http://emptyeye.com/2008/06/22/emptyeyecom-week-35-the-apartment-is-better/feed/ 4 http://emptyeye.com/2008/04/27/emptyeyecom-week-28-speedruns-and-albums/ http://emptyeye.com/2008/04/27/emptyeyecom-week-28-speedruns-and-albums/#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:19:15 +0000 emptyeye http://emptyeye.com/2008/04/27/emptyeyecom-week-28-speedruns-and-albums/ This week at emptyeye.com, I returned from my self-imposed exile. Hooray! Since then, I’ve been slowly progressing on the album, doing a bit each day to bring it closer to release. I’d like to continue doing that until it’s finally out. Sometimes it’s significant progress, sometimes it isn’t, but every day it’s at least something.

My dance gaming has kind of taken a back seat as a result, though I did get my twenty-fifth home version Heavy/Challenge AAA, as evidenced here. High gas prices have also limited my trips out, to be honest, even though it really isn’t that far from my house to the mall.

In speedrunning news, my Astyanax run is in the SDA queue (Which reminds me, I need to re-send them my comments for the run), and I’ve begun practicing for a run of M.C. Kids as well. At present, my bugaboo is a trick that lets you skip pretty much the entirety of one level (Birdie’s Treehouse 6) that I learned from the Tool-Assisted Run of the game. It’s doable in real-time (And thus presumably, though I’ll admit I haven’t tried it yet, doable on console), but getting it consistently is a major problem, and the level is set up in such a way that if you miss it, you’ll probably have to go through the level the long way anyway, which isn’t good for a speedrun.

Finally, in book news, I’m currently read the epic that is KISS: Behind the Mask. I’ve said before that I’m a sucker for band biographies, and this is no different. It’s an interesting read, though the most fascinating part to me is a huge appendix of sorts, where KISS themselves review each of their albums one by one, and talk about the experiences writing and producing them.

Until next week….

-EE

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