For those of you who don’t know, while The Speed Gamers may or may not have been the first group to do gaming marathons for charity, they’re definitely the group who popularized the concept. On a somewhat more personal level, even though some people at Speed Demos Archive–including myself–were rather critical of some of the gameplay in their marathons, they were still cool enough to send two of their ranks, Phil and Baltes, to Virginia to help out with the SDA Marathon back in January.

So a little bit more about this marathon in particular. They’ll be playing through every game in the Metroid series in a span of 72 hours. They’re trying to raise $15,000 for the Halton Autistic Family Support Group.

For more on The Speed Gamers, visit their website, or lurk around their community.

My speedrun of Air Fortress is…well, I’m still trying. Thus far, the furthest I’ve made it without Game Overing on a space-shooter segment is level 8 of the First Quest, although I have done all the fortresses themselves clean in one go. Still a ways off from a quality run though.

When I’m not doing that, I’ve been playing through the NES version of Wizardry I: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Perhaps more appealing to you more creative sorts out there will be the fact that I’ve been trying to take this and turn it into a story of sorts. You can read my efforts on that here, or if you want to jump right into where the storytelling begins, that post is here.

Finally, I’m still working on my game. New progress includes actually pulling one enemy from a choice of several for you to fight based on the region of the (Still very small) world you’re in, and more differentiation between the three classes you’ll be able to choose from (Different stats on level up, etc.)…although now that I think about it, the mere fact that you even can pick your class is new. So that’s still coming along as well.
-EE

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a screenshot of, effectively, what I’m seeing while running while recording. You’ll note the giant RECORDING symbol which obscures my life total. In this particular screenshot, it’s actually not a big deal (You die in one hit in the space-shooting segments), but it’s a bit annoying to not know how much life I have at any given time in the fortresses themselves.

Still, I’ll get through it like I do everything else.

Yesterday I went to my parents’ house to help them swap out their 8-year-old computer for a shiny new one my dad had gotten for Christmas. This was a two-part process:

1. Get rid of the data on the old one.
2. Set up the new one with the “standard equipment”–Firefox, AVG Antivirus, OpenOffice, etc.

As it turned out, the second task was a lot easier than the first.

My plan was to move the old computer downstairs for the day to let it do its thing while I set up the new one. As it turned out, this was a good move, but not quite for the reasons I thought. You see, trying to format the hard drive of the old computer didn’t work from directly in Windows (Makes sense, you can’t format a drive from the drive you’re trying to format from, if you get my meaning). Okay, no big deal, format from the Windows CD, right? Problem: To do that requires the administrator password into Windows, which I had long since forgotten.

Needing a way around that, my solution was Knoppix, essentially a “Boot CD” of Linux. Using this, I could bypass the windows password and format the drive that way. The only thing was that I should’ve paid more attention to the filename of what I downloaded–apparently that “DE” on the end meant that I had downloaded a “Deutsch”, or “German”, version of Knoppix. As it turned out, that viewing of Link’s Awakening in German I did during the SDA Marathon did not make me as fluent in German as I thought it did.

After more time lost, I manage to re-download Knoppix in a language I can actually read, and with that, manage to find out part of why I was having trouble. Besides the language issue, for whatever reason, Knoppix didn’t recognize the hard drive as an IDE drive, but as a SCSI drive (This necessitated a slightly different syntax for the “Hey wipe this hard drive thanks” command. And yes, I had to input a command–apparently the computer was old enough that it couldn’t even open the GUI program that would let me do this easily.). Nonetheless, I succeed in wiping the data (“No Boot Device Detected, System Halted” was the exact message when I tried to start it up without the Knoppix CD), and the new computer is also up and running. Plus, I now have an emergency boot CD should I ever need it.

Next time: A More Exciting Update!

We check in and grab some food with Sam and MagicalYardGnome of The Shizz. After that, I get corralled into giving the two a ride to Church at about noonish on Friday. At some point Thursday night, I head down to the Challenges Booth despite giving it almost literally zero practice (The Super Castlevania IV and Ninja Gaiden III challenges were things I had done on my own long ago, and that was about it). It was at about that point that I should’ve realized that things for the Charity Marathon weren’t as smooth as they should have been by then, as I met up with Mike Uyama (Currently the head of SDA) and he essentially asked me if I knew where we were supposed to be set up.

Again, the head of Speed Demos Archive was asking me if I knew where the Speed Demos Archive Charity Marathon setup was.

This does eventually get squared away, at least tentatively–we’ll be set up in the Console Room, next to the Challenges Booth (And with a custom DDR setup directly behind us). This isn’t the end of the marathon troubles, however–it seems we don’t have an Internet (To my fellow computer-oriented people out there, I know this statement is ludicrously incorrect from a semantics standpoint–as I ranted during the weekend a couple times, “No, the Internet is not down! The Internet was built to withstand nuclear attacks! Your connection to the Internet may be down, but I assure you that the Internet itself is fine and dandy.”–but it amuses me anyway).

Now allow me to state once again for the record that we realize that this wasn’t MAGFest’s fault at all. In short, the company they got their Internet service from was bought out by another company called Clear (Which I’m not linking to for reasons that will become apparent, but after debating not even naming the company, I decided you should know the name if only to know what to stay away from if at all possible). Clear promised a seamless transition to their service, then not only failed to deliver on that promise, but made MAGFest spend additional money on equipment that didn’t work the way they said it would, or at all for that matter.

(QUICK NOTE: If anyone from SDA or MAGFest think I got anything I said in the previous paragraph incorrect, feel free to e-mail me and I’ll gladly change it. If you’re from Clear, on the other hand, don’t even bother–of course you don’t want anything that may make you look bad online.)

In any event, it’s possible that the Marathon will have to be moved to Mike’s house, about a 10-15 minute drive away. In the meantime, MAGFest staff are scrambling to do everything they can to get us a reasonable Internet connection.

Before the game room closes to allow staffers to not have to work during the New Years hour, I decide to make an all-levels run through Battletoads just to see if I can do it (The Pianotoads route uses warps). As it turns out, I can.

We go to bed Thursday and wake up Friday. I do a few Challenges, then bring Sam and Yardgnome to church. They give me fine directions to the Church, but as it turns out, I can’t go back the way I came because the way I came required a turn onto a divided road. Luckily, I have Silver’s trusty GPS, and manage to work out an alternate route back to the hotel. I do go and retrieve Sam and Yardgnome and we make it back to MAGFest without incident. At this point, it’s all but decided that the Marathon will in fact be taking place at MAGFest, with Mike and Nate trying to come up with some sort of contingency plan for the lack of Internet.

At this point, I decide I need food, specifically Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza. Since Pizza Hut utterly failed to get their act together in terms of delivery (Later in the weekend, I would call a Pizza Hut who said they didn’t deliver to the hotel and gave me the number of one who did. I then called that number, who also said they didn’t deliver to the hotel, and proceeded to give me the number of the Pizza Hut I had initially called to get their number. SOLUTION: Order online from Papa John’s!), I decided to run out and get it myself.

Big mistake.

As it turned out, the convention, while always popular, was absolutely huge in terms of visitors this year, which created an utterly absurd parking situation, and I wind up parking in front of some random building near a parking garage after literally looking for a spot for over an hour (And stopping to fill the car’s gas tank, since the light was on). At around 6-ish, after Silver finished her shift at the Console Room checking stuff in and out, we attempted to find a parking space a bit closer to the hotel…which ended with another hour wasted and us even further away than before (Although we were at least in a parking garage this time). While on the way down the marathon, certain I had missed part of it (I had told Mike to feel free to make fun of me for failing to speedrun finding a parking spot in the event this happened), I ran into the other guys from SDA…who tell me the marathon was being moved to Mike’s house. Silver’s response to this is “not in my car, you’re not (going to Mike’s)!” Mike is kind enough to offer me a ride to his house, and we eventually get up and going. We have some technical difficulties with the commentary stream at first, but the good news is that we’re actually streaming video from the game feed, as opposed to the “occasionally moving screenshot” we were apparently sending from MAGFest. At this time, we’re three hours behind schedule (And still not up and running with commentary yet, just game), and quickly begin axing things from it in an attempt to catch up–S.O.S. (How did this end up in a marathon called “Classic Games Done Quick” anyway?) and Castlevania II were pretty obvious choices, the former for everyone sort of wondering how it got on the schedule in the first place (And rest assured folks, if I’m wondering “What the heck is this game?”, that’s a pretty good sign it’s too obscure for a classic games marathon–ask the other runners about the good 30 seconds or so I went off about what Faxanadu was during Breakdown’s run while they were basically looking at it confused), and the latter because it’s really sort of boring and neither of the potential runners of the game were really at the level they should’ve been to run it. TMNT II is also cut, due to the phenomenon of it being a fun game, but an utterly boring speedrun (Jump & Slash an enemy. Do it to another enemy. Repeat 800 times.) The good news about this is that the actual first run of the marathon (Andrew Gardikis’s run of Mega Man) was far better than the attempt he gave at MAGFest during the last ditch effort to get going there, causing me to joke with Mike “So now we all get a practice run before the real thing, right?”

Actually, there was an additional TV in Mike’s basement that was used for practice when it wasn’t being used for game races, and it was really fascinating to see who did and didn’t use it. I was personally of the opinion that if I still needed practice at the marathon, then I had failed in my duty to make sure I was up to par on the games beforehand. Others, like Andrew and Freddy “Frezy Man” Andersson (Whom I have given much love to multiple times on the site..see here for every post in which I’ve mentioned him), were frantically getting in last-minute touchups on their games (Both had volunteered to run a ton of games for the marathon, which makes sense as they were two people who have had full game runs exhibited at SDA panels; Frezy Man’s Contra and Andrew’s original Super Mario Bros. runs for the curious).

At around 2:30AM or so came my first run, a race with Daniel “Kareshi” Brown on Kung Fu (We had some difficulties getting even two systems for streaming up and running, and Frezy Man had already run a bunch of games already, so we decided that he would be the one to sit out the planned 3-way race). Suffice to say that I get through the game on one life and Kareshi doesn’t, which in such a short game is enough to give me a fairly easy victory. Then there was yet another delay to change the setup to accommodate the piano for Pianotoads Mk. II. Unfortunately, Pablo “DJ Mike Haggar” Bert couldn’t make it out due to financial problems, meaning my run was a solo run (Though in hindsight, I don’t know how we would’ve made a streaming setup work). And, considering it began at 3:15 AM or so, I can’t really complain about how it went. I definitely had a few stupid deaths, but on the other hand, I definitely had a bunch of times where I should have died and didn’t. The only thing I really would have changed overall was hitting the Boot Scuzz glitch (I failed miserably at it in this particular run). Kareshi, for his part, said that his piano playing was a lot better than at MAGFest VI, and the people watching online (Somewhere in the neighborhood of 600!) seemed to really enjoy it too.

Unfortunately, the next run didn’t go so well, although it wasn’t my fault. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles simply refused to cooperate, freezing on me three times–twice late in Area 1 and once right at the start of Area 3. After that third time, we agreed to make the game the first casualty of the “Mercy Rule” whose intended purpose was actually to kill off runs where the gamer was struggling–while watching someone struggle with a difficult section for a few minutes makes you root for them to overcome it, watching them struggle for much longer than that eventually makes you wish they would just kill the attempt and move on. Anyway, we agree to come back to the game if there’s time–which, considering we’re already behind, is not looking good.

I threw in a bit of guest commentary on the next couple runs because I felt bad about not being able to finish TMNT, even though it wasn’t my fault. I made an effort to sleep on Mike’s floor at about 5AM, and went back downstairs shortly after 8AM Saturday morning, although I’m pretty sure I got no actual restful sleep in that timeframe. At that point, I discovered that the planned commentary had pretty much devolved into a group commentary/conversation sort of thing, which was fine with me. I watched a few more people do their runs, and then came Rygar and Marble Madness. Rygar was amusing, as someone asked if I was going to threaten the SDA record of 24:59 (My response: Oh God no.). I did end up beating my now obsolete 30:30 run though, coming in just under 29 minutes despite a death and a few more conservative moves put in on the fly. Marble Madness was…amusing to say the least. I had gotten in my practice on the 1P side of the screen, and Andrew said he had been practicing some with the 2P Marble…but neither of us had really practiced a proper 2-player simultaneous game before, which is a completely different experience. Oh, and the game froze near the end. Despite my being ahead, we decided Andrew won because he technically didn’t lose. Works for me…

After that, I went back to the hotel to freshen up, get some food for myself and Silver, and try to sleep a bit. This time, I was actually successful, although not for as long as I would have liked. I laid down shortly before 5PM and got up at about 8PM, though I think I only slept for a small portion of that. I then, just out of curiosity, decided to see if I could watch the stream from my hotel room…and discovered that it was actually pretty watchable from there. I went downstairs to tell Silver about this, but she said that they had problems connecting to anything at all Internet-wise down in the game room. Incidentally, at about this time someone came up asking where the Marathon was, and I had to relay what went on and point out that it would be available to watch later.

This was where I at least tried to experience some of MAGFest proper..after I woke up, I toured the game room a bit, and did a few of the Normal challenges (Winning myself a “Normal” patch in the process). This would wind up being rather amusing later on. I also stopped to chat with some of my fellow Shizzies, relaying what happened with the marathon and sort of updating our progress with it. At about 1:30AM Saturday-into-Sunday, I went to sleep.

Sunday morning at about 9-ish, I woke up from an actual full night of sleep. More showering ensued, and then I tried to move Silver’s car back into the hotel parking lot. I actually succeeded, and as a bonus, I was let out of the parking garage I had been in for free when the gate simply opened right up. I then played a bit of Vs. Excitebike, and managed a high score on the machine before Kareshi and I headed back to Mike’s house and the Marathon. From the beginning of Contra to the end of Contra: Hard Corps was, frankly, one giant highlight. This began with a successful donation drive to have Frezy Man play Contra shirtless and wearing a bandanna. When Super C came up, someone jokingly said that Frezy should rip off his t-shirt. His response was “You mean..like this?” as he proceeded to actually do it, something I didn’t even think was possible without a t-shirt specifically designed for that purpose. It’s then decided to auction off the shirt, highest single donation from this point to the end of Contra: Hard Corps wins it. Even better, a donation drive was started to add TMNT back onto the schedule (After Mike found out I had actually gotten a full night of sleep, he asked if I would be game for giving it another try, and I said “sure”. It was then that it was decided that $30 in donations specifically asking for it would get the game back on)…and it was successful. Out of nowhere, I go from “Not running TMNT again” to “Running TMNT immediately following the conclusion of Super C”.

At this point, we’re at about $4500 in donations, almost to our $5000 goal. Remember this.

The first 2 Areas of TMNT go well..then the game glitches like crazy. But it doesn’t freeze. Mike moves to kill the game, saying “Okay, we’re gonna have to reset.” …and I stop him. “No, wait….I wanna see how far I can actually get with it like this.” After a couple of basically joking “How crazy would it be if he actually finished the game like this?” comments, a couple of people pledge to donate some money if I actually pull it off.

Including one person who pledged to get us over our goal if I did it.

No pressure or anything.

The good news is that, as Area 3 starts, it becomes clear to me that, while the game is visually borked, the actual data seems fine–all the enemies are the proper enemies in their proper places, all the pizzas are where they should be, etc. It all just looks a little strange. So I keep going, expecting that the game will either fix itself or simply freeze and force me to restart anyway.

I finish Area 3, and it starts to set in on me that I may be in this for the duration of the run.

There’s a brief moment of “Oh no, it’s about to freeze!” in Area 4, when the game goes into slow-motion mode every time I enter a side-scrolling area, until I can scroll the screen forward and it resumes normal speed (One-screen areas simply stayed in slow-mo until I exited). Area 4 was also the one time the borked visuals messed me up, as what I thought was a boomerang (That would hit me once and disappear) turned out to be a laser (That hit me three times and did not disappear) and I didn’t realize what was going on immediately.

Long story short, despite a brief moment of panic in Area 6 when I don’t quite scroll a laser soldier off the screen quickly enough and have to engage it, followed by my briefly forgetting where in the alternating whirlybird-laser soldier sequence I was (Knocking Don down to one and a half cubes of life), I actually manage to finish the game in this glitched state. With no deaths.

And even though the gap to get us to our goal at this point is about $360 dollars (Or twice what the person thought it was), the person who made that pledge keeps his word and we hit our goal.

Then it was time for Mike “Contra III Is Serious Business” Uyama to play…well, Contra III. He blazed through the game, although he did die once. Not long after this, I head back to the hotel one last time to get some food with Mickey_Mage (Who wasn’t actually running anything for the marathon, but showed up to provide moral support regardless) before heading back to the Marathon for the finale–Tigger77’s run of Link’s Awakening (In German!), followed by Kari “Essentia” Johnson’s runs of Dr. Mario and Final Fantasy VI. If you never thought you’d see “Speedrun” and “Dr. Mario” in the same sentence, you have obviously never watched Ms. Johnson play the game–I’m not kidding when I say that watching this was one of the highlights of my weekend. As for Final Fantasy VI, it made a great grand finale, even with a very forgivable brain fart toward the end (As it was 4AM or so and all)…”I didn’t Float. I just realized that!” *First tier Quakes the party to death*. It also brought in several thousand dollars on its own, which was absolutely incredible given how viewership dropped off due to it getting on toward Monday morning when we finally finished. As Mike said, “Suddenly I totally understand how people get all excited about donation drives to name characters!”, as several of us actually donated in-house to help out the names of our choice (Plus the “See Sabin [Named "Frezy"] Suplex a Train Fund”).

When all was said and done, we raised just over $10000 on the Chipin widget alone, plus another $500 or so in combined Paypal donations (That didn’t hit the widget) and in-house/MAGFest donations from before we moved to Mike’s house. Considering that some people in the IRC Chat (And, I think in the back of his head, Mike Uyama himself) thought even our initial $5000 goal was optimistic, that we more than doubled it was absolutely mind-blowing.

Monday was spent packing up, saying quick goodbyes to Shizzies and SDA Members alike, and claiming my Challenge Prizes. Yes, despite my utterly miniscule amounts of practice given to the Challenges Booth, I managed to finish high enough to win some prizes (18th; the top 20 got prizes). These included a free CD, a poster or two, 8 MAGFest Dollars (Good in various stores that were still up and running at MAGFest on Monday)…and a copy of the SDA DVD, with a mocking “Have you seen these SDA guys? I hear they’re pretty good.” from Ryon.

Amusingly, despite my spending less time at the convention proper than I had any of the four previous years, I came away this year with a comparatively huge amount of NES games, ranging from Nightshade to The Bard’s Tale to Wizardry I to Air Fortress, the last of which is another ridiculously difficult game later on (To say that the first level is a mere warmup of what’s to come isn’t even right…it doesn’t prepare you at all for what’s to come).

In short (Or not..), the weekend was great, and in hindsight, the fact that the Marathon had to be moved to Mike’s house was probably a blessing-in-disguise–it made the whole commentary atmosphere a lot more casual and conversational, and we didn’t have to compete with the din of the Console Room like we would have at MAGFest. And I certainly can’t complain about raising $10000 for a great cause. Definitely a huge success.

I’ve been stepping up my practice for this over the past two weeks, especially my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles playing, since I had very little previous experience with it, and it’s known as one of the harder games on the NES. My best run is currently a little over 24 minutes, which I’ll definitely take in a live setting. Part of this was the fact that I got some good luck with where the Technodrome decided to spawn in Area 5, but my actual execution is definitely improving as well. The other four games I’m not particularly concerned with.

In non-speedrunning news, I’ve gotten past a bump in the road as regards the game I’m making. I managed a completely inefficient, but ultimately working, method of equipping and (More importantly) unequipping items. The next step is going to be working out magic.

Though I was a frequent patron of the challenges booth at the previous two MAGFests, I’ve barely looked at the page this year. This is mainly due to the fact that I’ve been trying to get ready for the Marathon, though I do plan to look it over and see if I can at least complete one challenge of each difficulty to get each of the prizes for the associated difficulties. Sadly, I don’t think Ryon took my (Half-joking) suggestion of a “Challenges Expert” pair of pants to go with the t-shirt of last year and hat of two years ago, which would give me a full “Video Game Expert” outfit.

In other news, I wound up playing through Final Fantasy V Advance over the last month or two. It was quite fun…one of the things that struck me is that, on average, it didn’t take a particularly high level to get through. I beat the game with an average level of about 43 without really fully exploiting the job system. This is far lower than I needed to be for either FFIV or FFVI (Or, for that matter, FFVII). Actual game-wise, the Job System is maybe my favorite advancement system in a Final Fantasy game to date. As for the plot, supposedly the game doesn’t take itself that seriously, but I didn’t really notice that to be honest.

And…that’s really it from here.

The theme is “Classic Video Games” focusing on the NES, SNES and Genesis. The complete schedule as it currently stands is available here. It’s not quite final (Despite Mike’s claims), but there won’t be any huge changes from here until the marathon. The marathon starts at 6PM EST on New Year’s Day, January 1st, and goes until about 12:30AM EST on Monday, January 4th. All of my actual running occurs in the first 24 hours, ending with Marble Madness. The other four games I’ll be running are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Battletoads, Rygar and Kung Fu (Not in that order). Interestingly, three of the five games will be race affairs–Kung Fu will be a 3-way race between myself, Daniel “Kareshi” Brown, and Freddy “Frezy_Man” Andersson (Who holds the current SDA run, Marble Madness is going to be a 2-player game with Andrew Gardikis (Who has the current SDA run) controlling the 2-player marble, and Battletoads will be a semi-reprise of Pianotoads, with the added element of another competitor in Pablo “DJ Mike Haggar” Bert (Who…actually doesn’t have the current SDA run in the format we’ll be competing in, although he does have the warpless run of the game).

“But Emptyeye!”, you’re saying, “Where can I watch this marathon?” Well, that’s easy–during the marathon, you can watch on the SDA main page, located at http://www.speeddemosarchive.com. You’ll actually see two camera angles–one focused on the TV running the game being played at the moment, and the second focused on the people commentating on the run. There will also be a chat powered by UStream. You can watch everything and follow along with the chat just by going to the SDA page when it’s time, but you’ll need to register a UStream account to actually participate in the chat.

“But Emptyeye!”, I hear you from the other side of my computer, “Why the heck would you do this?” How about for a good cause? As you watch, there will be a place where you can donate to charity, specifically CARE. CARE are an international charity dedicated to fighting poverty, especially (though not exclusively) as it relates to women. More specifically, rather than just throwing money at people as a quick fix, they try to eradicate the root causes of poverty in the third world–systemic discrimination, corrupt governments, social conflicts, etc. It’s a great cause, and it’s international too, which was important to SDA given the contingent of speedrunners who aren’t from the U.S.

So if you’re not doing anything over New Year’s Weekend, head over to SDA and check out some high-quality speedrunning on some of your favorite games of yesteryear.

-EE

• Final Fantasy V is still going. I’ve also occasionally been playing Rock Band 2 again, though oddly, not a whole lot of The Beatles Rock Band. My FC count continues to slowly increase, though I’ve lost count of exactly how many I have on Expert Vocals, other than “Between 150 and 200″.
• I’ve also been working on my runs for the SDA Charity Marathon. Rygar is going pretty well, and…that’s about it. Everything else I still have from minor to major concerns about. I’ll keep practicing, though, and hopefully everything will work out.

Other than that, not a lot has been happening here since the last post. I’m still alive, which is always good.