Emptyeye

Download | Story | Lyrics

My friend and I joke that Myspace, Facebook and their ilk are really what amount to “Sanctioned online stalking”. I’m now convinced that Facebook, in a way, really does encourage this, at least in terms of making initial contact.

See, al of these social sites allow you to make “Friend Requests” (I’ll leave out the argument about whether you can call thousands of people on your list that you never actually talk to “friends”), and they allow you to send a message to people besides. The problem with Facebook is that the message has a very low character limit. On one hand, I understand this to an extent, as it prevents people from writing pages-long love letters to people they’ve barely met. On the other hand, though, it also prevents you from saying anything more than “Oh hey I went to high school with you remember me?” to people that you knew in high school (Or college) and are curious to know what they’re up to. Again, some could see this as a good thing, but I think it’s possible to have this curiosity without being a shady creep, and it’s sort of frustrating.

From my watching way too many Let’s Plays on Youtube–I particularly recommend Deceased Crab’s channel–I’m occasionally introduced to cool games I would never have heard of otherwise. Mr. Crab indirectly introduced me to a couple games by one Nifflas. Within a Deep Forest, Knytt, and Knytt Stories are relaxing little games with ambient music where the focus is less on killing everything that moves and more on exploring your world. Yeah, there are objectives in each game, but the point is really to explore the games’ universe and discover its secrets. In all three of the games, there’s relatively little that can kill you, save points are frequent, and in Knytt in particular, exploration and non-linearity are the name of the game (Within a Deep Forest and Knytt Stories play a bit more traditionally–there’s still not much that can harm you, but the structure is a bit more focused on grabbing power-ups to increase your capabilities and access new areas. Knytt gives you all that from the start). Check them out if you get a chance, even if you don’t normally play a lot of video games. Amusingly, the games were made using Multimedia Fusion 2, which was also the development tool for the decidedly not ambient and friendly I Wanna Be The Guy, which can be best summed up by this video starting at about 3 minutes and going to 3:30 or so. Yes, Dracula chucks his glass at you in the middle of his speech and kills you if you’re not paying attention. Pretty much all of IWBTG is composed of sadistically difficult trial-and-error stuff like this.

So, bottom line, play Nifflas’s games.

Yeah. Today I managed to record my first really satisfactory (Read: one-life) speedrun of Chuck Rock. The time from gaining control of Chuck to the final hit on the T-Rex was 13:11 (For some comparison, the average Youtube video is typically only on the third of fice levels at that point); the SDA time would probably be several seconds higher, as they time until loss of character control, and there are roughly five seconds after striking the decisive blow that you still have control of Chuck. I’m still going to try and improve the run a bit more, though…the last boss in particular can be done faster.

In other news, I’ve been messing about with something called the RPG Toolkit. I don’t expect anything serious to come out of it–making games takes a lot of time and dedication, and we know by now how flighty my attention span is–but it’s fun to play with regardless.

Recently, I’ve been attempting speedruns of Chuck Rock. It remains a rather unremarkable game, but I’m slowly getting better at making my way through it quickly. The one part I need more work on is the last level, particularly the first section–I ruined a great run today by choking at that part, whereupon I threw a not-even-gaming-level tantrum. Despite that, one good thing about Chuck Rock is that it’s short. I don’t even mean that in an ironic “Haha what an awful game!” sense–generally speaking, a failed speedrun attempt on it doesn’t make me want to cry (As came close to happening a couple times when I would screw up Willow runs an hour in.).

Other than that, I managed to overcome one other obstacle in the way of Chuck Rock speedrunning glory, in that my DVD recorder didn’t like the fact that my TV ultimately wasn’t hooked up to anything. In other words, I wasn’t getting a complete signal (Because the TV isn’t hooked to the wall), so it refused to begin recording anything. I managed to get around this by grabbing some composite (Red-White-Yellow) cables and hooking them into the front of the TV–in this way, I could select “AUX” on the TV, and still record stuff, since my game systems are hooked into the recorder itself.

I’ve discussed Gil Thorp and its snarky fan-blog This Week in Milford before. I apparently managed to briefly set a trend on said blog in terms of signatures.

A bit of context: For some reason, one of the characters currently in the strip is 6 feet, 9 inches tall. For some reason, the comic continually refers to him as “6-9 Jeff Ponczak”, as though the “6-9″ were actually a part of his name. So in honor of this, well, take a look at how I signed comment #11 of today’s entry, then look at the signatures of the next 4 or so comments. This amuses me.

The one sentence version: Tomorrow, I’ll probably be streaming some Chuck Rock speedrun practice, what with finding a way to do so that UStream will actually recognize.

You may remember him as the Democracy-hating Let’s Player from exactly eight months ago. Well, apparently his next project is a certain mediocre game whose best part is its title screen music.

Actually, I’m not that bothered by it–DC doesn’t typically (Or at all) play games for speed, so there should still be a little niche for seeing the game done quickly.

Speaking of which, I’m at some point going to attempt to stream some practice runs of it live. I’ll post here when I actually get the kinks worked out.

I’m an hour or two into Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and it’s occured to me that, essentially, this game is going to be Diablo II set in the Marvel universe. I don’t have a problem with this, by any means, but I found it amusing.

Yesterday afternoon, I went out and bought an XBOX 360, after having been assured by a Gamestop employee (Admittedly not the most unbiased source, but more likely to follow this than I had over the past two years or so) that the famous Red Ring of Death problem that plagued early models had been fixed. I also picked up a game for it–actually, two games, the second of which I didn’t even realize I was getting thanks to my not checking the back of the box: Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Forza Motorsport 2. Today I played some Ultimate Alliance (And by “some” I mean “about 20 minutes worth”), and it’s pretty fun in that take-control-of-a-bunch-of-Marvel-characters-and-beat-the-snot-out-of-villains way.

Of course, the Special Edition of the real reason I got the 360 isn’t out for another month yet.

Today was a Connecticon Member Appreciation Day. These things are pretty cool; they’re essentially one day mini-cons, with video gaming and the like available all day. It was really kind of surreal–the events take place in an actual office building, which gives everything a weird sort of vibe (Not to mention making it impossible to find your way anywhere if you don’t know where it is in advance).

Anyway, I played a lot of Rock Band today, as you might expect from someone who won Best Vocalist at CTCon this past year. Also playing a lot of Rock Band was a girl named Rachel, who suffice to say was better than me at vocals in the game (But for some reason wasn’t in the tournament this past year). She played on Expert, did well at it, and seemed to have a lot of fun while doing it (My personal favorite was her singing “Creep” by Radiohead in the style of Harley Quinn from Batman: The Animated Series). Her skill can be summed up by the following conversation:
“Dude, I’m sorry, but I would’ve voted for her for Best Vocalist over you.”
“Dude, I would’ve voted for her over me for Best Vocalist.”

Yeah. Guess I’ll just have to work that much harder over the next year or so.