Emptyeye

It’s definitely been awhile since my last update, for a variety of reasons. Over the last week, I had to deal with the death of my aunt, which put a halt to any practicing for the SDA Charity Marathon taking place at MAGFest. Hopefully, with things getting back to something resembling normal (I’ll be going back to work) tomorrow, I’ll be able to get back to practice on that too.

Games-wise, I’ve been playing something that I finally decided to start after owning it for almost three years: Final Fantasy V Advance. My main reason for finally picking it up and starting through it was what I had heard about the Job System: Namely, it’s possible to utterly break the game (IE Make it really easy) if you know what you’re doing with it. To a degree, that’s definitely true–a little thought and you’ll be dealing massive damage to normal enemies and bosses alike. A bit more thought and you can probably utterly destroy everything without breaking a sweat.

(No FFV hints/spoilers please)

Here’s something to cheer you up: A brief collection of some of M. Bison’s best moments in the Street Fighter movie. Note that Raul Julia’s portrayal of M. Bison is pretty much the only reason to watch the movie; he’s obviously having a great time portraying a video game villain, in contrast to everyone else who are trying their damndest to make an honest-to-goodness movie.

Here’s another funny video for you: A prank on the set of Stargate SG-1. In this particular scene, Colonel Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson and Captain Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) are stuck on a glacier, chipping away at the ice. Col. O’Neill remarks that he’s not sure how they’re going to get out of the situation. Captain Carter’s response is…not quite what O’Neill expects.

Lastly, check out the Let’s Play videos of HCBailly, especially if you like RPGs at all.

Yeah.

Over the weekend, I traveled to Marlborough, MA for the first-ever GameUniCon, a convention that was being hyped as New England’s largest video gaming convention. I arrived on Thursday night, as I tend to do for these things, picked up my badge, and got ready for the weekend.

On Friday, I realized that this, frankly, was set up unlike any other gaming convention I had been to to this point. Most other conventions have a large Free Play room for general gaming, and tournaments are either held in smaller rooms, or within the larger Free Play room. At GameUniCon, the biggest gaming room could best be summed up as “The Madden and Fighting Game Room”, mostly with the various Super Smash Bros games, though there were some systems running Street Fighter IV as well. There were various smaller Free Play rooms set up throughout the hotel, plus a Rock Band/Guitar Hero room and a Halo room. I also thought that the event was, overall, quite a bit smaller than was hyped, although I have to admit that I didn’t have any interest in what were advertised as the biggest tournaments (Halo, Smash Bros. Brawl).

That said, some of the competition that was there for the various tournaments were definitely top-tier in their respective games. For one, ScoreHero had a huge presence in all of the various rhythm game tourneys, which really shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. I wandered in and out of the Rock Band room throughout Friday, waiting for the Vocals tournament to start. Finally, at about 8PM, it got underway (It was supposed to start at 5PM. This, honestly, is par for the course for convention tournaments in general–my CTCon 08 Addendum has an amusing story of how I missed a tournament when I took this effect into account in my plans…and the tourney miraculously began on time. Ben, who was running the Rock Band room at GameUniCon, noted that he thought they didn’t give him nearly enough time for the Guitar and Drum tournaments earlier in the day [It was the Guitar tourney that ran long in particular, which set everything else back].), with something I didn’t expect–because of a spotty Internet connection, the Rock Band Import songs couldn’t be accessed, making the tourney Rock Band 2 songs only..a major help for me. My first two matches were, to sum up, easy (I won on Down With the Sickness, Cool for Cats, Shackler’s Revenge, and Any Way You Want It, though it took me until the last one to actually 100% something). Unfortunately, then I ran into other ScoreHero denizens (ScoreHero’s official motto is “Graciously Documenting Our Future Arthritis”. Its unofficial motto is “Welcome to ScoreHero. We are all that guy.”)

Match number three was against John “JohnIsADumb” D. We both 100%ed the two songs in the match (Drain You and Go Your Own Way), with him picking a slightly better Overdrive path on Drain You (Leading to a win by about 1200 points on his end), and managing to hit a vocal squeeze on the second activation (Squeezing dates back to early Guitar Hero, and is basically activating your Star Power and/or Overdrive as late as you possibly can to try and “squeeze in” a few more notes/a bit of the next phrase under that precious double scoring.) on Go Your Own Way, beating me by under 300 points on the song (The score was, roughly, 149,900 to 149,600, for an idea of how little 300 points actually is).

My fourth (And last) match was against Cameron “Cam101″ Brock. I actually won the first song (Aqualung) by about 6000 points. Then, when my turn to choose the song came, I made what would amount to a tactical error. After considering picking Tangled Up in Blue, I wind up going with The Trees: Vault Edition. Similarly to Drain You in the last match, I lose due to not having the best pathing/squeezing skills (I fell behind on the squeezing aspect; the bad path I picked at the end was just a formality, though it did put me further behind). After two tie-breaker songs picked at random were rejected (Today, for not being difficult enough per the rules, and Aqualung, because we had played it earlier in the match), we settle on…Welcome to the Neighborhood by the Lybians as our tiebreaker song. This is seriously one of the most obscure songs in the game, to the point where I’m not even sure what the general consensus on it is quality-wise (At least people hate Visions…). But it fits, and as Cam said, “Well, a random song is a random song.” I was hoping I could win via the song’s sheer obscurity, but no such luck–apparently the only two people on the planet[1] who ever played the song were Cam and myself, and once again, I get outsqueezed to lose the match and get knocked out of the tournament. This leads to the following conversation:

Me: Let me guess, I finished just short of the money, right?
Ben: …yeah, you tied for fifth.
Me: Awesome! Spectacular!

(The top four places paid out, in case you couldn’t figure it out)

Ultimately, JohnIsADumb wins the tournament, a guy named Tobias comes in second, and Cam, who eliminated me, takes third.

Furthermore, I managed to miss Freezepop play on Friday night. This sucked mainly in that finding out they were headlining the Friday night show was what took me from “This sounds pretty cool, maybe I’ll check it out.” to “I am so going to this.” Although, thinking back on it, my missing the concert was probably for the best….

…because I still had one more tournament to go: Myself (On Vocals), TH3DARKM3TAL (On Bass, and the guy who approached me about forming a band for this tournament in the first place), SeanFTW (On Drums), and Gaara (On Guitar) were signed up for the Rock Band Full Band tournament on Saturday. But first, drama (Amazingly, not related to my scrambling to find a band)! It seems that someone got drunk and tore lights off of the hotel walls on the third floor on Friday night/Saturday morning…and the hotel was threatening to shut the entire convention down if the culprit wasn’t found. This became “We’ll let the convention keep going if the damages are paid and someone takes the blame for it.”, which eventually turned into “Don’t worry about it” as the official word from the convention. As I understand it, the actual culprit was eventually found.

With that, the full-band tournament began, slightly later than expected. Perhaps as karma for my easy first two matches in the Vocals tourney, in the first round of the full band tourney, OHai (Our band name) is immediately paired against (Insert Epic Band Name Here), which consists of, amongst other people, Hellashes (AKA “The first guy to full combo Jordan“)…who is a top-tier drummer in addition to being an insane guitar player, and Tobias, who came in second in the Vocals tourney. Sigh.

We lose on Shackler’s Revenge, then actually win on Everlong primarily to their drummer’s drum kit malfunctioning. There was a bit of controversy here concerning (Insert Epic Band Name Here) and looking up overdrive paths for Everlong after the match had already started. It’s quickly ruled that they can’t do that (Looking up paths is not allowed after the start of the match)…at the time, I thought that the ultimately-agreed-upon definition of “Start of the match” was a bit sketchy (It was decided on “When the first song is officially picked” as opposed to “When the match’s pairings are announced.”), but now realize that, depending on who picks first, there isn’t that much functional difference. In any event, our tiebreaker song was Give It All, which we ultimately lose for an express ticket to the loser’s bracket. This is not starting well.

Our next match thankfully goes better–we win on Battery thanks to some well-timed Unison bonuses (If everyone hits the phrases that give them Overdrive, they get bonus overdrive) that coincided well with when I activated my Overdrive on Vocals, meaning we spent a lot of the song in X8 bonus territory. Carry On Wayward Son was actually the most “fun” song in the tournament for us–our opponents failed out of the song early on, essentially handing the song and the match to us by default. This led to Sean and T.D.M. switching instruments in the middle of the song during a break where vocals are really the only thing going on, and myself getting into the act by singing to a camera that was recording snippets of the tournament as opposed to looking at the screen to find out how well I’m holding the pitches the game wants (I still 100%ed the song). Suffice to say we get through the song (It was ruled that despite our opponents’ failure, we would still have to pass the song to win it), though we could have done much better had we been taking it more seriously.

Match number three also saw us winning both songs, Rob the Prez-o-Dent and Visions. Amusingly, I managed to 100% the former (Mostly talkies, but with some hard singing phrases if you’re not paying attention) and somehow miss a phrase on the latter (Entirely talkies. Even better, I missed on a phrase that has essentially filled itself on literally every other time I’ve played the song). With only six bands entered, this put us into the top 3 and the money, such that it was. Woo-hoo!

Round 4 put us up against the band That’s What She Said for a ticket into the final two. Unfortunately, our run ends here, as we get absolutely crushed on Aqualung to the tune of about a half-million point gap (As Jim Mora would say, “Playoffs?! Don’t talk about….playoffs! A disgraceful performance….In my opinion, that sucked!”), though I do 100% the song, something I didn’t do the night before. That’s What She Said pick Almost Easy, and that seals our fate, as we lose by 100K or so. Adding some measure of insult to injury, That’s What She Said’s singer was…Cam Brock, making this the second tourney he had eliminated me from. Oh well.

The finals would pit That’s What She Said against (Insert Epic Band Name Here), so at least we could say we lost to the top 2 bands, however the finals played out. After the latter win on their pick of Panic Attack, an amusing conversation follows, that went roughly:
TWSS: Okay, we pick Get Clean.
(IEBNH): Okay, but we like just played that.
TWSS: We don’t pick Get Clean anymore.
*Laughter in the room*

That’s What She Said ultimately select Peace Sells as their song choice, but it doesn’t matter, as (Insert Epic Band Name Here) win that and the tournament.

In the end, our third-place payment comes out to $9 each, or $1 per person less than our entry fee. But officially, darnit, I got paid for playing Rock Band, which is pretty cool. All in all, I knew going in the caliber of competition I’d be facing in both the Vocals and Full Band tournaments, and I gave a good account of myself, proving that I’m at least in the same league as them–despite my lack of pathing/squeezing skills, I 100%ed all of the songs I lost in the Vocals tournament, meaning I didn’t give/choke anything away. In fact, while I’m still kicking myself in terms of tactics for not picking Tangled Up in Blue on Cam (I found out later that it was one of three songs in Rock Band 2 he had yet to FC), in terms of actually executing the songs, Almost Easy in the Full Band tournament is really the only one I wish I had done better on, and I don’t know that not making the mistakes I made would have made up the difference by itself. So I’m happy with how I played all weekend, and proved to T.D.M. (Who was the person who initially contacted me and said “Hey let’s get a band together for this thing.”) that he made a solid choice as far as finding a vocalist.

On Saturday night, I happened to check out some of the concerts, being done with my tourney obligations. Jesus Candy (The band of Jamie, who was the main man behind the whole convention and, I believe, the owner of Game Universe, the store behind the con) were great, as was what I saw of Powerglove, and Bang Camaro brought the house down, in spite of not playing Night Lies (I had hoped to see the song done right, as opposed to my butchering of it at CTCon ‘09.). Great shows all around. I shouted myself hoarse by the end of it, and it’s my tendency to do this at concerts that probably made it a good thing I didn’t get to see Freezepop on Friday night.

Sunday mainly saw me watch the Guitar Hero: Smash Hits and Guitar Hero: Metallica tournaments. Both were won by the same person, who goes by GuitarHeroDude on Youtube and is an absolutely incredible player (He scored something like 898K on Through the Fire and Flames in the finals. This wasn’t even his best run of the song in the tournament; he hit 920K or so in the semi-finals. He also won the Metallica tournament by 100%ing Battery as the final song).

The ride home was pretty uneventful, thankfully. In all, it was definitely a fun time, and I plan to go next year if a second one is held. Despite what I linked to in the Unofficial ScoreHero Motto, everyone from the site was actually really cool and more than capable of having fun, both in terms of playing the game and just talking to them.

[1]- According to Scorehero, it’s actually been 100%ed by about 300 people just on the XBox 360. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they can all do it consistently, though.

So let’s see here.

• Fresh off of my Connecticon Best Rock Band Vocalist title defense, I’ve been working on my Rock Band imports from the first game in preparation for next weekend’s GameUniCon. This tournament is a bit different than Connecticon’s; for one, it’s strictly score-based–two bands enter, play the same song (Or set of songs), highest score wins–and for another, the allowed pool of songs is significantly smaller, being Rock Band 2 on-disc songs and Rock Band 1 imports only. For a third, some of the absolute top-tier Rock Band talent will be there. As a reference pool for just how good some people are at the game, my having 100%ed all of the Rock Band 2 stuff (And about a third of the Rock Band 1 imports) qualifies me as “Not a liability that the rest of my band will have to overcome” in this world. Yes, there’s actually a level of dedication beyond just 100%ing the game (I’m currently in 144th place on Rock Band 2 Expert Vocals on ScoreHero), especially as it relates to full-band play, where my experience is honestly pretty limited. Still, right now, with the exception of a couple Rock Band 1 songs that I’m simply terrible at, I feel like I’m good enough to at least give the band I’ll be in a solid chance at any given song.
• I’ve decided to take up jogging, since I’ve regained most of the weight I lost through the first six months or so of 2007 (When I was big into exercising in general). So I went to a local athletic store, and on getting my foot measured, found out that I’ve been wearing shoes that are way too big for me for the past five-plus years of my life. Part of this is that I hadn’t gotten my feet properly measured in a long time. The other part is that my feet are very much like my fingers–short and fat. So in getting a “proper” shoe fit, my toes, especially the big ones, felt somewhat “scrunched” in the sneakers. Still, I imagine I’ll just have to break them in a bit.
• I’ve been doing design work for the game I had mentioned awhile back, so that project isn’t dead just yet. I’m still working out precisely how to work the inventory system out. This is going to be, by far, the biggest challenge. I’m almost thinking some kind of concealed database and/or data table from which the appropriate stuff would be pulled is the best way to go…which is going to require me learning and/or re-learning about that stuff.

I think that’s it for now…
-EE

And I’m not quite sure how I managed to pull it off.
(WARNING: The word is over-used, but this is seriously an epic-length [About 3900 words according to Wordpress] post. It’s behind the cut here so you won’t have to scroll through it all to read the older stuff)
(Continue reading…)

Indeed it has.

Really, the best time to make a post announcing that I was still alive would have been Sunday. See, I don’t talk it a lot here–though it’s in the About Emptyeye section–but five years ago Sunday I was officially diagnosed with T-Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma. In English, “A large cancerous mass in my chest was pushing on my lungs and heart, causing me dry-coughing fits and making my heart look huge on scans”. Yeah. I’m better now, obviously, but at the time I was probably a lot closer to dying than anyone told me. Without getting too gruesomely into the details, there were certain procedures performed and tubes inserted that, I found out later, are generally not inserted into people unless it’s absolutely necessary. That, plus the “We need to start chemotherapy on you…immediately.” (Which weren’t the exact words–again, leaving out details–but that was the gist of it), should have been a clue that things weren’t good for me.

Suffice to say that it wasn’t a particularly good time. While I think I can officially call myself a “cancer survivor” now–woo hoo for that–I do periodically think about it. More accurately, I sometimes wonder why I survived. On a physically level, I understand why–I was in my early 20s, and reasonably physically fit–but on an emotional level, I’m not sure I necessarily “deserved” to. Contrary to the image of the strong, upbeat, determined cancer patient, there were times when I was going through treatment and wanted it to just end, because I felt at the time that being dead would be better than going to the hospital for a week at a time and either sleeping of vomitting through most of that week.

It should also be noted that surviving one form of cancer does not magically make me an expert on giving pep talks to patients of every type of cancer under the sun. I can and do try when people ask me to do this, mind you, but one of the things that flat out pissed me off about going through chemotherapy was people telling me “I can imagine how you feel”, or even more annoyingly, “If I could take your place, I would.” To the first, quite simply, no you can’t imagine it, because it sucks. Conversely, I can’t imagine exactly how it feels for anyone else to go through it, despite what some people may think. For the second…well, I’ve told other people that I really hope my feeling on this change when and if I have kids. But currently, if I knew someone who was going through the treatment regimen that I had, and I could take their place to make them better…to be totally honest? I don’t think I would, at least presently. Because I went through it once already, and I know first hand how much it sucks. If it makes me a terrible person, and I can’t help but think it does, then so be it–but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to go through that again.

But onto happier news.

Development on my game is coming along, although I’m pretty sure I’m stomping all over best programming practices in the process. Nonetheless, I have a working movement system (Complete with tiny automap), and the start of a working battle system. Essentially, I actually have something that can conceivably be called a (Short, not yet particularly fun) game, in that you can talk to a king and he’ll say “Go kill the huge slime” and you can do that and go back to the king and he’ll say “Hey good job!” The next step is to get a working shop system up and going, and then I’ll have most of the components in place. Then it’s just a matter of expanding it. The game is going to be called Hysterium, and I’m determined to complete it, given the sheer number of projects I’ve started and abandoned over the years.

Also, I’m about a week away from Connecticon, where I have a title to defend. Unless something really wacky happens between now and then, the basic plan for this year is for myself and last year’s other Best Instrument winners to essentially form a “supergroup” this time out. Of course, it’s not strictly about score, but the rules for this year mean I should actually do better than last year, given that A. I now have a year a familiarity with exactly what the Rock Band engine wants in terms of vocals, plus B. I’ve been working on actually “performing” some of these songs in my spare time (Which, in a party environment, is preferable anyway, even if you’re not being strictly judged on it).

And that’s that.

Just a quick post to confirm I haven’t gone off and died in a ditch somewhere. Lately I’ve been playing an XBOX Live Arcade game called Castle Crashers (And yes, I’m a bit late here), which is a fun little beat ‘em up with some role-playing elements. It’s $15 in the XBOX Live Arcade, and is totally worth it.

I’m also working on learning (Or more accurately, relearning; I took a class in it back in 2003 for college) some Visual Basic stuff in the hope that I’ll be more useful at work. Not that I’m particularly worried about my job status right now, but our VB specialist left the department over a year ago, so I figure picking some stuff up will eventually help take some pressure off the person in the department who is basically God of All Applications right now.As a bonus, once I get more comfortable with the language, I’d like to do some of two things with it–make some form of software for organizing Rock Band tournaments, and/or create what amounts to a glorified old-school dungeon crawling game in the style of the early Wizardry games.

Speaking of Rock Band2, I achieved my goal of 84 out of 84 Expert Vocal full combos, well ahead of my goal of the end of July. When I play Rock Band now, I tend to play some of my DLC that I bought and then proceeded to not play (Yeah, I’m a model of fiscal responsibility). Eventually, though, I’ll need to work on my Rock Band 1 imports, since they’ll be selectable at Game UniCon in late August, and my scores on those are…well, let’s just say I don’t have all of them 100%ed.
-EE

Indeed!

Since the last tiem I updated, I’ve gotten a bunch of Rock Band 2 full combos on Expert Vocals. My most recent was number 73 out of 84 songs on-disc (Downloadable, or DLC songs, are generally counted separately). The most recent, and the one I’m most proud of, is Uncontrollable Urge, which has a stupid hard ending and no real way to practice it in isolation (Thanks to Harmonix’s decision to not give vocalists a fully-functioning Practice Mode). In hitting this, I now actually believe that I can knock out the rest of the songs I haven’t gotten yet. And it’s a good feeling.

Given I haven’t updated in awhile–indeed, I haven’t really even been checking on this much, to the point that my Project Wonderful ad is currently delisted–I figured I’d throw everything into one somewhat large post.

• My quest to full-combo Rock Band 2’s vocals is moving along. I’ve now gotten the entire game gold-starred (A special designation for Expert scores a certain amount above and beyond the 5 stars that is the maximum for the other difficulties), and 45 of the 84 tracks have been full comboed at least once in solo play. So that aspect is moving along. Eventually, my rate of FCing stuff is going to slow down–not messing up a song at all is very difficult even if you know all the phrases; songs like Uncontrollable Urge or Tangled Up in Blue, which have a few phrases where I just have no idea what’s going on, are just about impossible at the moment–but I’m going to enjoy the progress for now.
• For Connecticon ‘09, I’m not actually staying at the convention center’s hotel. Unfortunately, the half hour drive from my apartment is just long enough to be annoying (Particularly after midnight), so I took advantage of my AAA membership (Thanks dad!) to score a hotel for that weekend within walking distance of the convention center at about $150 savings when all is said and done. That’s cool and all, but I’m looking for someone to split the room with to drive my cost down even further thanks to at least one other convention I’ll be going to this year. We’ll see how that works out. I’m starting with my fellow CTCon Rock Band players, and consider expanding from there if I can’t find anyone in that circle.
• A couple weeks ago, the UConn Women’s Basketball team won their sixth national championship with their third undefeated season. Naturally, this led to some discussions about which of the five undefeated women’s college basketball teams is the best ever (The two non-UConn teams to do it: Texas in 1985-86, and Tennessee in 1997-1998). Someone wrote as a weakness of this year’s UConn model that, essentially, they didn’t have a solid rival like some of the other unbeatens did (The 1994-95 UConn squad had a very game Tennessee team which they beat in two close games, for instance). You can actually see that in the linked article, maybe 3/4 of the way down.

  Huh?

  I’ve never understood this line of reasoning. I’ve seen it applied as a knock on Tiger Woods as well–that he hasn’t yet had a truly capable rival the way Palmer had Nicklaus, Nicklaus had Watson and Trevino, Tennis’s Pete Sampras had Andre Agassi (And vice versa), etc. And I just don’t get it. Essentially, Woods and the most recent UConn team are being penalized for being too good. It’s like the fact that they don’t have a truly capable rival are because they are simply on a different level from every other competitor is somehow something to penalize them for. It boggles me.

-EE

And still playing Rock Band 2, of course.

With slightly less than 4 months to go until Connecticon, I’ve decided I’m on a mission to get 100% on all 84 songs included in Rock Band 2 on Expert Vocals. Currently, I’m at 29 out of 84, meaning 1 new 100% every 2 days will get me there with a bit of room to spare. I think most of them will eventually not be too difficult once I hear the songs a few more times, particularly as I have what’s considered one of the hardest ones already out of the way (“Spoonman” by Soundgarden). Three in particular that are going to be tough for me are Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” (Which is long, and has a ton of verses. Worse, no two are exactly alike one another, which makes it extremely difficult to 100% if you’re not really paying attention at all times), Blondie’s “One Way or Another” (The song itself isn’t that difficult, but near the beginning of it is a “broken” talkie which has no real consensus on how to consistently hit it. Then, of course, if you do manage to get through it, you’ve got to get through the rest of the song too.), and “Bodhisattva” by Steely Dan (Because, unlike a lot of hard songs which are a matter of me learning what the game wants, I’ve managed to learn how to do a couple of sections of this song completely incorrectly, and can’t seem to unlearn them for the life of me. Suffice to say that it’s a bit frustrating.