Writing-wise, I’ve finished a revision of my Machine of Death story that, I think, is stronger than my original concept. As I mentioned before, I changed the concept a bit to focus less on the original main character and more on the reactions to her calling. I’ll have to run this by a few people to see if they agree with what I’m saying, but I personally like the new version better despite it running about 600 words longer.

We’re less than two weeks away from Connecticon, and suffice to say that my subconscious knows it. I feel like Trevor Horn (Yeah, that Trevor Horn) when he was in Yes. That’s all I’ll say on the subject for now.

How about all of you out there? Anything fun/exciting/stressful going on?

-EE

Honestly, I’m more nervous about running this than I ever was participating in it. First of all, despite what happened last year, I’m working from a pretty solid foundation that I don’t want to have come crashing down. Secondly, prize support for the tournament was not cheap–while I’ll ultimately end up being reimbursed for it, for the con to fully reimburse me and still hit the break even point for it, I have to attract a total of sixteen qualifying bands somehow. I made a post on Score Hero about it, and I’ll have Dan post on the Rock Band forums as well (His 2 posts there is an infinite number more than my 0). After that, I’ll have to do some Internet searching for places to promote it.

So, I’m still here, and still being productive.

-EE

That weapon is an OpenOffice.Org database. With this, I feed the spreadsheet into the database, and then, using queries and the like, can spit out the list of allowed songs (Current plans for the preliminaries are one “easy”, one “medium” and one “hard” song, with those adjectives determined by the total number of dots the song has for whatever combination of instruments are in play) for the combination of instruments being used, and the difficulty we’re trying to find a song for.

The other big news is that I’m considering a site redesign. The site, and the look for it, is almost four years old now. It has some quirks I never entirely fixed, and site technology has improved a lot as well. In other words, I don’t need to, EG, list out every single month on the sidebar anymore, I can theoretically just put the years with the number of posts, and then from there you could click and get to the months. So sometime soon, I’ll start looking into themes I can modify for my own purposes, coming up with new categories, and so on. It should be fun.

In less big news, I do still intend to finish a speedrun of Magician. In the meantime, I plan to upload the best run I have so far on my Screw Attack account, where you can currently see a couple “work-in-progress” versions of the run. I’ll make sure to post when that’s done. Really, this time.

-EE

My current main activity is preparing for the Connecticon Rock Band tournament. This being my first year running it, I’m trying to do a really good job of getting prizes and things for it, to the slight irritation of my “boss”, so to speak (In short: He loves the initiative I’m showing, but for the sake of reimbursing me, wishes I hadn’t gone and bought stuff right away. Truthfully, this was stuff I was buying even if I had to eat part or of all the cost of it. I’d rather spend a bit more money and have this be memorable.). But it’ll be worth it in the end, or at least I think it will be.

The other thing I’ve been up to lately is writing short stories. I’m in the process of revising several of them, and I’ll share the ideas behind them once I revise a couple more of them. Eventually, what I want to do is self-publish a collection of short stories, and possibly some novels as well. knowing my proclivity for not finishing projects, it’s admittedly unlikely this will get anywhere, but we’ll see.

My Magician speedrun continues to move along. I think I’m one more improvement away from submitting to SDA, which is now under new management. Frankly, I’m amazed Mike lasted as long as he did; as he mentions in the first post, he outlasted two people, one (Both?) of whom assumed site duties after he did. Still, he was the one who got the site where it is today, and he’s left it in good hands. Also, he’ll still be planning the marathons for the site, which is definitely a good thing.

Next time: More Substance?

There’s a lot of new stuff in Rock Band 3–”Pro” instruments, mainly–that I can’t play because I lack the necessary equipment. What I can talk about is the new Career Mode. It’s actually pretty cool, in that it’s challenge-based. More importantly, though, you can simply go into quick play and, as long as your band is active, anything you do in Quickplay counts toward the challenges, or at least most of them. It’s nice to not have to go into career mode separately to make progress in that regard.

Additionally, all the songs are unlocked from the start, which is nice, especially for tournament-type purposes. No “unlock all” code needed for that.

Speaking of tournament-type purposes, one of the controversial things over at Score Hero is the removal of Score Duel mode. While it’s not a big deal for the style of tournament run at Connecticon, it does interfere with people who wanted to run technical-only individual instrument tournaments (Although, on a personal level, I myself only used it during a couple Score Hero Score Duel nights).

As far as the setlist itself goes, I’ve only played a small portion of it, but on the whole, I’m not sure I’m as big a fan of this one as I was or RB2′s. This kind of makes sense, though, since a lot of truly iconic songs have already appeared in the series (Or Guitar Hero) either in previous games or as DLC.

In all, I like it. As I said, though, i haven’t really tried any of the new stuff, so hopefully I can come back with an opinion on that soon enough.

-EE

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.

We’re now less than two weeks away from Connecticon. On an individual level, I honestly don’t think I’ve practiced as much as I did for last year’s tournament. As far as my band situation goes, though, I’m in far, far better shape, with an actual band (Who won’t desert me this year!), and a solid set list to practice between now and then. Hopefully I’ll come out of it with my entire band victorious, as opposed to just me winning Best Vocalist. Not that I would necessarily complain about that outcome, mind you.

In writing news, I’ve started a liveblog of the original Dragon Warrior. Unlike my Wizardry Liveblog, I actually expect this one to end in success, if only because dying just sends you back to the castle minus half your gold (And because you have to do enough experience grinding anyway that this penalty is effectively meaningless in the long run).

Hysterium development is still slowly going on. I plan to really ramp that up and turn it into an actual writing project as well once I finish the Dragon Warrior liveblog. I figure that forcing myself to write about what I do every day, no matter how small, will motivate me to get something playable out into the world.

Luckily, the game is not one of them as yet. I don’t know that I’ll make my goal of having a playable demo out by the end of April, but I do try to do at least a little with it each day, even if that little is just “Restructure something so that it doesn’t make people who actually know what they’re doing with Object-Oriented Programming cry unicorn tears when they look at the source code”.

In other news, I’ve been getting back into playing Rock Band, since we’re less than three months from Connecticon and I have a title to defend. I’ll probably take the next month or so to work primarily on LEGO Rock Band, which I’ve not given enough love since getting it for Christmas, and spend the last two months or so working with Matt, Dan, and Whoever-We-Get-As-A-Bass-Player (TravellinMan, if you’re somehow reading this, please respond to the private message I sent you on Scorehero like a month ago. Thanks. Love, Emptyeye) on potential setlist songs for this year. Hopefully that’ll produce some quality results.

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.

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.