Feb 16

Ideas Swirling in My Head

One of the great things about going to the Connecticon Member Appreciation Days is being surrounded by creative stuff and creative people. The Connecticon offices have a game store that sells various card and tabletop games. Additionally, several people there are in creative professions (Costuming/makeup design), and one is basically constantly creating and testing quick games.

Being around this environment makes me want to at least get down on paper (Or, uh, in computer) some of the ideas in my head, most of which I’ve mentioned here at one point or another. There’s the card game idea, and of course Hysterium is not technically dead yet. I’ve started typing up the basic ideas for the card game…as I believe I mentioned here once before, it would effectively be “Magic: The Gathering meets Raw Deal in mechanics–you would pick a character, that character would have a once-per-turn ability, and you’d be able to win by playing cards that either reduce your opponent’s life to 0 or making them overturn their entire deck (Which are both win conditions in Magic, yes, but the latter isn’t really an integral part of the game).

I’m not sure how I’d go about attempting to monetize or promote these ideas once I have them completed, but I figure just doing something with them is better than nothing.

Jan 19

The Second SDA Marathon, Ninth MAGFest, and first Emptyeye Wedding

(And that third item will hopefully also be the last Emptyeye Wedding)

Silver and I had a pretty crazy week and a half recently. It started on Thursday, the 6th, when we left at 7:30 AM or so to head to Alexandria, VA. This was actually not for any marathon or festival or anything–those would come later–but rather, it was to obtain our marriage license. This actually went without a hitch once we arrived in Alexandria at 2PM or so, and so from there it was on to the 4H Center in Chevy Chase, MD for the Second Annual SDA Charity Marathon, titled “Awesome Games Done Quick”. Over the next five days, we’d be playing 100 games in what was projected to be 100 hours (But turned out to be about 120) to raise money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, whose mission is basically in their name.

But first, a bit of digression about the 4H Center itself. We are not their typical clientele, being older than the average. For reference, one of the other groups there while we were there was a group of French high school students that, from the brief snippets of their seminars I happened to overhear, were part of a class on business customs in the US. In any event, the Center was awesome in terms of what they allowed us to do versus what the rules stated be should have been able to do. The main example of this is that the rules, as written, forbid food and drink that was not purchased on the premises (Similar to a lot of convention centers). By about the 4th day, the center was handing us menus of places that would deliver there. Just an awesome place to work with in general, and I can’t imagine we won’t have the next marathon, whenever that may be (No official plans have been made yet, but pretty much everyone on staff at SDA agrees that one will happen at some point), at the Center as well.

But back to this year’s marathon. Unlike last year, I only was slated to run 2 games–Battletoads in a race with PJ, and Final Fight in cooperation with Mike Uyama. But before that, we opened the schedule with Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Halo, and some other games. And a couple things became immediately apparent.

  1. Some people hadn’t practiced their games as much as they should have.
  2. Practice or not, we were way over-ambitious with our scheduling.

After two games, we were about 2 hours behind, and the drift was only going to increase, whether due to lack of practice, not taking into account setup times, or other unexpected technical difficulties. The good news is that we were getting a huge flood of donations right off the bat, to the point that even with a program to help us handle donations, actually getting and tracking them was a major challenge. This was a problem that would rear its head throughout the marathon, as we would occasionally get huge donation spikes faster than the people manning the donation input computer could get them in.

As for my own games, Battletoads came first. Given how terribly practice had gone for both PJ (My competitor) and myself, I felt it necessary to add a disclaimer before the start of the race, approximating “I’m told a lot of people (including many of the speedrunners at the marathon) were looking forward to this. I believe I can speak for PJ as well when I say..’heh heh heh, suckers.'”. How terribly had practice gone? PJ and I had come up with a contingency plan that, if one of us missed the Level 1 warp, rather than resetting and losing about 30 seconds, the other person would reset and we’d do an impromptu 100% race through the game, setting everything back about 20 minutes (This was before we knew just how far off schedule the rest of the marathon would go).

Luckily, the actual race featured us both hitting the level 1 warp, and even hitting a much more difficult trick later on that let us skip part of a level. PJ ultimately won, although I frankly wanted to just turn the power to the NES I was using off and quit as soon as he hit said trick. I did finish, and actually am pretty pleased with my play despite losing, outside of one stupid mistake late in the game after the race was already lost. In all, people seemed to enjoy it, especially when Kareshi, who was playing the game music on piano (If you’re curious how this was handled, he played the music of the level that the person who was ahead [Which was PJ from start to finish] was on, and then went back and played the songs of the levels I was on when PJ finished), went into Final Fantasy IV music (Because A. He was sick of the Battletoads Boss Battle Theme, and B. As his tribute to what would become the finale of the marathon, Final Fantasy IV [Or “Final Fantasy II” as its initial US release was called], since he couldn’t be there at the time).

Several days after Battletoads came Final Fight on my list of games, this one co-op with Mike Uyama. We took donations for our character selections, having practiced all three possible combinations (Haggar/Cody, Haggar/Guy, Cody/Guy) despite MIKE HAGGAR being the only correct character choice. Fortunately, the Haggar-Cody combination won out, allowing me to play as The Good Mayor (I was prepared to give everyone a Shocking Swerve, given my love of MIKE HAGGAR…both Uyama’s Haggar and my Guy are far superior to Uyama’s Guy, meaning he would’ve been Haggar in the Haggar/Guy combination).

As for the run itself, it actually went pretty well, with Mike in particular managing to 1-credit the game for the first time ever (While on not-nearly-enough sleep, no less). I decidedly did not this time, although we did manage to raise some decent money by finishing every possible boss with a piledriver (The final boss of Final Fight, Belger, acquires Magical Throw Protection(TM) once he gets low on life. Even if you hang onto him long enough to perform a throwing action/suplex/piledriver, he’ll just jump out of it and you’ll perform your animation on air). Our final time was 29:13, although it was good that we left our estimate at 35:00, since apparently neither Mike nor I know how to work an XBox 360.

That was probably the main problem with the schedule; that people (Including myself for Battletoads) failed to take into account either endings or setup time when making their estimates. Random donations that came in for challenges pushed the time back further in some cases, although this was probably a worthy tradeoff in all. And really, the constantly slipping schedule, while something Mike is justifiably sick of hearing about, was our biggest issue this year. If nothing else, we’ve learned, or at least I’ve learned, to pad our estimates a bit in terms of setup time, endings, and random challenges that might come in.

Overall, though, the marathon was a giant success. Last year, we raised $11000 or so in about 50 hours, so the SDA administration saw fit to raise this year’s goal to $25000. I had thought this was a lot, but in hindsight, given that the marathon was twice as long as last year, plus accounting for a bit of natural growth year-on-year, it was actually a reasonable goal. Or so we thought, because for whatever reason–better promotion than last year, better game selection making people want to tune in, a charity that more people could identify with and donate towards (helping women in the third world is without a doubt a noble cause, but as a first-world while male, it’s difficult for me to feel a personal connection with said cause, and I imagine the same is true of most of our audience)–we met that goal in about 48 hours. Ultimately, before the marathon and subsequent bonus stream were through, we ended up raising about $53000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. For a bit of context, this is over half of a two-year research grant that has yielded all sorts of advances in fighting cancer. Suffice to say that this blew away any of our wildest dreams when the marathon started.

This is without getting into how all the people there were amazing to hang out with, talk games and speedrunning with, etc. Particularly, because Silver and I actually roomed with them, I want to mention MercuryZelda and Lag.Com for being super awesome, both to room with and for all the stuff they did individually and collectively for the marathon–knitting stuff, chat modding, and being the tech guy were some of the things one or both of them did.

You can check out just about all of the marathon runs at this page. Some of the highlights that I saw were UltraJMan’s Metroid run, the already-mentioned 1-credit-clear of Final Fight, and the finale, Final Fantasy IV, whose final battle just has to be seen.

After the conclusion of the marathon “proper”, those who remained reconvened at Mike Uyama’s house (Site of last year’s marathon) for bonus streaming, featuring Lagoon. Unfortunately (Or perhaps fortunately), Silver and I couldn’t stay there very long, because it was time to head to the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center to prepare for our MAGFest wedding! Arriving there, it was clear that we had discovered the secret to being treated like MAGFest VIPs, and it’s actually pretty easy. All you have to do is be the first couple in the history of MAGFest to get married there! More seriously, on Wednesday night, we got to go to Brendan’s (AKA Mr. MAGFest, the guy who ran the whole show this year and many years prior) hotel room. Then we got to drink vodka with Jon St. John, best known as the voice of Sonic Adventure’s Big the Cat Duke Nukem. Pretty cool stuff, and enough to pacify me for the night. It was not, however, enough to pacify Silver, who was (rightly, although at this point I was just euphoric from meeting Jon St. John, plus my sleep schedule was already destroyed from the marathon) freaking out about the room the wedding would be held in not being ready. At about 3AM, though, Brendan and Ryon (Who organizes the MAGFest Challenges Booth each year, and where I spent way too much time at M6 and M7) managed to set the room up enough to satisfy her.

I should give a special shoutout to Brendan here, for scrambling to set up the room despite not sleeping for 3 days prior. Indeed, prepping for MAGFest this year gave him stress hives all over his body. We’re both very appreciative of the effort he went through both for the wedding specifically and the festival in general.

The next morning arrives, and we go down to the room to get the flowers we’ll need and meet our high priestess, Millie Knox, for the first time. I’m then tasked with finding plain and sparkling water. Finding the plain water was easy enough; as for the sparkling water, I get lucky that the hotel has an upscale restaurant inside of it, and purchase a bottle of sparkling water.

After that, there’s not much to do except wait for the wedding to start. Well, besides having a random panic attack 15 minutes before the wedding, due mainly to my feeling like I have no idea what the heck to do because we didn’t get a rehearsal period (Note to people getting married in the future: Rehearse if at all possible). This shows when I pretty much completely miss my entrance cue, as well as in my face when a specific part of Wiccan tradition is explained: that the couple, according to tradition, spend the entire wedding day handfasted (Those giant cords are tying her right hand to my left).

Luckily, some things do go right, the most important of which is that we get through the ceremony and get our wedding certificate to the courthouse on time, meaning we are now officially legally married. Hooray! Also pretty cool: Jon St. John agrees to “DJ” the wedding, meaning basically operate the iPod with our entrance and exit music. This came about from him walking by and Silver going “Jon! We need your help!” He is indeed what the younguns would call “A pretty cool guy”.

Fortunately for me, Silver decides not to adhere to the letter of Wiccan tradition, and we untie ourselves after cleaning up the wedding room (Itself a very interesting experience, to be sure…especially since I’m left-handed, meaning we didn’t really have a dominant hand to use between the two of us) and getting back to our hotel room. Then it was MAGFest time!

This year’s edition included a fun new activity–waiting in line for your pass for about an hour and a half. MAGFest actually sold out of their pre-registrations this year, necessitating the need to hunt for a new location next year (Frankly, parking was ridiculous enough last year–see My post on MAGFest 8/Classic Games Done Quick for more–that it can be argued that it should’ve happened this year.). This led to a ridiculous wait to get your badges, which my strategy–to get in the staff line with Silver, and basically hope I could use the “I just got married here!” defense to explain why I was in the line despite not actually being on staff–didn’t really help alleviate.

Still, MAGFest itself was quite fun. The game room was fun as always, and on Thursday night I headed to the concert room to check out Bit Brigade, which was an awesome show. While not quite a speed run per se thanks to watching the cinema scenes, the live game play accompanying the music (Or vice versa, depending on your perspective) was quite skilled, and added a dimension that set it apart from the various other “video game cover bands” of the weekend.

Friday brought what I, and a lot of other people, had been waiting for for years–the return of The Minibosses to MAGFest! For those of you who don’t know, the early years of MAGFest served essentially as the Mecca for people on The Minibosses Message Board, as well as The Shizz in general, thanks to The Minibosses being the convention’s big attraction in its very first year. Some behind-the-scenes drama, combined with the Minibosses taking a hiatus, meant they were absent from MAGFests 5 through 8, but by that time the Shizz community had grown big enough that MAGFest’s status as “The main Shizz party” persevered regardless. But the Minibosses returned for MAGFest 9, and despite being given a pretty random slot in the band hierarchy, absolutely rocked the house. The Minibosses were probably one of, if not the first, band dedicated to video game music covers, and they’re as good now as when I saw them 5 years ago at M4, if not better (It was tough for me to fully appreciate the M4 set, because A. I had no idea I wouldn’t see them play again for 5 years, and B. I had gotten approximately a half hour of sleep in the 36 hours or so leading up to the ‘Bosses set). Honorable Mention goes to The Protomen, who among their original Mega Man-inspired rock opera tunage saw fit to include a cover of Journey’s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)”, best known for having maybe the most gloriously 80s music video ever.

Saturday saw me do something that I don’t think I had done at a MAGFest since M5: Attend a panel! This was the “Make Your Game Now!” panel, which more or less confirmed that I’m doing the right thing as regards my (Currently dormant, as 99% of projects I start tend to wind up) RPG–essentially, “Try to get stuff working on a small scale, one feature at a time. Once you have a ‘mini-game’, so to speak, then design/implement everything full-scale”. I also saw Cheap Dinosaurs (A chiptune band composed mostly of members of Chromolodeon), although I did not end up in The Shizz Family Photo. Oh well. Also sometime during the weekend, I believe it was on Saturday, several people gave Silver and I free stuff for being married at MAGFest (I told you being treated like a VIP was easy!). Plus, I got free food from the Staff/Super Supporter room. Super cool all around.

Alas, on Sunday (And for us, actually relatively early on Sunday…we were on the road by about noon), it was time to leave the video game utopia we had occupied for the last week and a half and return to reality. We did get one more pleasant surprise on the way back, though–during MAGFest Closing Ceremonies, those who had gathered there yelled out a last “Congratulations!” to us over the phone while we were driving back to Connecticut.

In short (Too late, I know), this was one of the greatest spans of time of my life. As I said to Brendan, “I wrote on the proposal to hold the wedding at MAGFest that ‘if I’m doing it right, it’s not something you run multiple times’. I’m sorely tempted to now.” (I had to present the wedding as a convention panel, which the panel questionaire wasn’t really designed to handle, with questions such as “Have you ever run this panel before?”) It was amazing, and while I presumably won’t have another wedding again, I can’t wait for the next marathon and/or MAGFest, whichever comes first.
-EE

EDIT 6/5/11: Updated the link to the new, permanent page for the January 2011 marathon.

Dec 25

Merry Christmas from Emptyeye!

Just a quick post wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. Feel free to substitute the holiday analog of your choice if you’re not Christian.

-EE

Dec 20

Speedrun Races Ahoy!

Speed Runs Live.

The page doesn’t really explain where to find this. Basically, you need An IRC Client such as mIRC, or the one I use, LeafChat. You use it to connect to the IRC server mentioned at the first link, and join the #speedrunslive channel. From there, it’s just a matter of finding the people to race the race you want to race!

I’m mainly putting this out here because it’s primarily N64 games at the moment. It, frankly, needs more NES representation, like Contra. :P Which I just completed in a bit over 13 minutes, according to RBABot.

Dec 09

Emptyeye Plays Games for Charity. Again.

In a little under a month, I’ll be heading to Virginia to participate in the second annual Speed Demos Archive charity marathon. This time, we’re playing for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which is dedicated to the eradication of cancer via its prevention. This is done through research, education, and community outreach.

The marathon will be bigger and better this year–almost 100 games spread out over approximately 100 hours–although my personal workload for it will be lighter than last year. I’ll be racing Battletoads with PJ, then later on, running through Final Fight with Mike Uyama.

Stop by the SDA stream from January 6th through the 10th to check it out!

-EE

Nov 29

A VVVVVVery Good Game

A couple days ago, Steam had a sale where you could get the game VVVVVV–yes, that’s really its name–as part of an Indie Games Pack. The game, normally $15, was instead $5…and because it’s an Indie Game Pack, you essentially got four other games–World of Goo, Eufloria, Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time, and Iron Grip: Warlord–for free.

If you don’t know what VVVVVV is, in short, you’re the captain of a space ship who’s become separated from his crew, and you have to travel through the world to find them. The gameplay is really simple–besides moving left and right, you have one button: A “flip gravity” button that makes you go from the floor to the ceiling, or vice versa. Despite that, the game is a lot of fun, as you have to dodge spikes and other obstacles to find your crew members and get back to safety. There are also trinkets you can find, and despite an automap, a few of them take real thought to obtain.

One drawback to the game is that to simply beat it doesn’t take very long–I had found all my crew members as well as the trinkets in about 4 hours. Still, the fact that I played it for 4 hours over two days is a testament to how fun the game is–I haven’t done that for a game in quite awhile. Also, there are trophies you can earn by beating time trials with high ranks, completing the game in under a certain amount of deaths, and maybe the hardest trophy to earn, the Master of the Universe trophy, earned for clearing the game in No Death Mode.

In all, it’s quite a bit of fun, and definitely worth it if you can grab it at a discount. Even at full-price, give it a look–there’s a downloadable demo so you can try it before you pay anything.

-EE

Nov 22

Gobble-Con 2010: Presumably Not Financed By A Bank Robber

(For more on the title, check this out. It’s in regards to this convention I attended.)

This past weekend, I attended the first-ever Gobble-Con in Milford, Connecticut at the Hilton Garden Inn. In contrast to Connecticon, or even to MAGFest, Gobble-Con is a small (about 300 attended), first-year convention created to fill the gap between cons in the Connecticut area, as not much really goes on in that department later in the year.

I arrived late on Friday morning to…not really a lot. As it turned out, registration took place to the left of where I had entered, and the actual picking up of the badge for pre-registrations was to the right, actually inside of a hotel room. The setup was a bit strange, but probably the best they could have done given that the actual registration desk was off in a corner, in a relatively high-traffic area for the convention, right by the dealer’s room and two panel rooms, as well as the screening room.

While I didn’t really have to be there until early Saturday morning for my panel, I figured I should check out the convention on Friday and see what it had to offer, as well as hand out business cards and try to drum up interest in said panel (It being at 9AM Saturday morning, combined with this being a convention geared toward [although not exclusively for] a 21+ crowd, meant I was going to need all the help I could get in that regard, 9AM Saturday being “Booze-induced sleepytime” as SDA member DBallin called it). At opening ceremonies, I meet a person named Oliver who was doing a Kingdom Hearts-related panel on Sunday morning, and who offered to record my panel for me, as he was interested in it anyway–an offer I quickly accepted, not really having any high-quality ways to do so myself.

I then checked out the Game Room, which was really more of a Pachinko freeplay room with a couple gaming systems off in the corners. I will say this: It was cool to actually see these machines firsthand and get to try them out. That said, I’ll admit that I don’t really see what the excitement is all about, although that’s probably a reflection of me moreso than the concept itself–I also don’t see what the big deal is about slot machines, preferring to use them to compose progressive rock albums rather than actually trying to win money on them.

If you’ve never played Pachinko before, or heard of it, it’s essentially slots meets pinball. You have a bunch of small metal balls that launch into the playing field via a knob; how far you leave the knob turned to the right affects the power the balls are launched with. Your goal is to get the balls into a slot in the middle, at which point a slot machine kicks in. If you get a lucky spin of the slots, your payout is…more balls. In this case, filling up a tray full of balls got you entered into a drawing to win money toward the purchase of a Pachinko machine; in Japan’s Pachinko parlors, I’ve read, the balls can be exchanged for various prizes.

There were two specific panels I had wanted to check out on Friday, glancing at the schedule. The first, Cosplay/Con Survival, basically turned into the Foamy the Squirrel (Warning: Link not really work-safe) panel, although the first video tied in with the message the panel was originally supposed to have (Namely, “Take a freaking shower every once in awhile”). The second was a panel on Sailor Moon (Yes, really), that got into some of the non-anime media the series has had over the years, such as a live-action series, a bunch of musicals, and some foreign-language commercials for it. It was pretty neat to actually see some of this stuff I had heard about, but never really sought out due to laziness amongst other things. They also showed some of the differences between the American and Japanese versions of the series.

I should note that I actually missed the beginning of this panel because, between the two panels (Which were scheduled one right after the other), I decided “Hey, getting a Long Island Iced Tea from the bar would be a good idea. Drinking the entirety of it in 20 minutes so I can make most of this Sailor Moon panel would be an even better idea!” This led to a text message to Silver stating that, in fact, this was not such a good idea, and that I wouldn’t be home for awhile due to my need to sober up. Don’t worry, I remember everything I did, and I didn’t do anything that I regret at all, although I can now cross off “Wind up in the hotel room of a female stranger while drunk” off of my Convention-To-Do list. No, nothing happened, and I remember exactly how I got there. We struck up a conversation, and I asked if I could tag along with her and her friends while I sobered up. She said yes, and then I followed them to their room, and just sat there talking to them while they got ready to go to the Totally-Not-A-Rave Informal Dance that night.

I briefly went to said dance, but then had to head home to try and get to bed kind of early for my 9AM panel. I succeeded well enough in this, and made it back on Saturday morning with plenty of time to spare. Once there, I had a couple surprises waiting for me. The first was that the room was still a frosty 62 degrees thanks to the Still-Not-A-Rave Informal Dance. The second was that the panel after me, dealing with the Sailor Moon musicals I had mentioned earlier, needed use of my laptop to both rehearse and actually use for their panel.

I could go on about those things or other factors out of my control, but truth be told, I think I did pretty okay with what I could control. My two main mistakes were not stopping on the comic long enough, which made me feel like a jerk, and forgetting about a black slide just before the excerpt from my glitchy TMNT run, which probably went unnoticed. Well, there was also the fact that the slideshow wasn’t quite full screen, but hey. The few people that were there seemed to like the panel, which was reinforced by talking to Don (The guy who runs the convention) later on. He basically told me that I already have a panel slot for next year (Presuming that A. There is a next year and B. I actually want the slot). So I guess I did all right.

I then watched the Sailor Moon Musical, or “Sera Myu”, panel, and not entirely because they were using my laptop either. In the middle of the panel, what is apparently a new convention tradition for me occurred (I got a similar on Saturday morning of Connecticon 2010): The helpdesk at work called. Apparently someone at a branch was trying to close a loan, but was getting a warning preventing them from doing so. Not really knowing whether the particulars behind the warning’s programming had changed recently, and not being in a position to be able to log into the system even if I had wanted to, all the advice I could offer amounted to “Try having them follow what the warning says”. I didn’t get a call back, so I’m hoping that did the trick. In any event, this was a fun panel too, and apparently they had it even harder than I did–besides the lack of a laptop, their web mistress and main tech person was in the hospital the day before, meaning at least one of them was literally seeing the slideshow they had lined up for the first time as they were doing it live. This is obviously not an ideal situation.

After that was a lot of wandering about the convention, going into the Game Room and the Dealer’s Room, and getting commissions of little Christmas ornaments and artwork that I may take pictures of and link to here.

In all, it was a fun time for a small convention, and I’ll in all likelihood go to it again next year.

Links!
The pictures I took
Legendary Senshi– the New England Sera Myu Society, who borrowed my laptop for their panel
So and Sew Plushies, who made the ornaments I mentioned above
Chi Studios, who did the art that is the first picture on my Gobble-Con album.

-EE

Nov 21

So You Want to be a Speedrunner: Video Tricks Explained

Super Mario Bros
-When Mario is moving downwards, his collision priority takes precedence over that of the enemy. Thus, Mario will stomp on an enemy and kill it, even if it looks like he should die.
-Andrew hesitates for a split second at the end of 8-3 to stop the clock at 242 instead of 243, and thus avoid the fireworks that would cost him real-time.

F-Zero X
-Several advanced techniques are used here.
-One is sliding, which is self-explanatory: sliding around a corner to increase your speed during and coming out of it. This can be combined with boosting on any lap after the first to increase speed further.
-Another is rail-sliding—starting a slide, then grazing a wall and holding contact as long as you can to increase speed on a straightaway.
-Finally, there’s double-tap diving. The double-tap is a basic method of attack, but doing a double-tap while inside of a dive (EG coming off of a jump) will increase your speed very quickly.


Double Dragon II: The Revenge
-There’s actually nothing super-advanced or obscure here, just the fact that the flying knee is really hard to do once (As mentioned, it’s a 4-frame window after landing from a jump), let alone to chain together consistently.
-Yes, dropping straight down to his death is the quickest way to advance.

Final Fantasy VI
-Oh boy. Pretty much everything here requires an explanation—for the complete breakdown, check out Essentia’s full comments. Here are the basics.
1.Setzer’s special move is the Slots. Two possible combinations are 7-7-7 (Called Joker Doom; kills all enemies regardless of immunity) and 7-7-Bar (Also called Joker Doom; under ordinary circumstances, kills your entire party).
2.While 7-7-Bar normally kills your party, this can be manipulated to instead kill the enemies. The entirety of the strategy in the sequence rests on this (As well as the fact that 7-7-Bar is allowed to occur in the battle, while 7-7-7 will never occur in this battle under any circumstances). This is done via muddling and un-muddling Setzer. More precisely, the muddling has to be done as 7-7-Bar is being input, and the un-mudding must occur between the input and Setzer’s actually “casting” the slots. This is the primary method of attack.
3.The killing off of Gogo and Setzer is so they can be brought back with low HP. This will allow Celes, who A. has the True Knight accessory equipped, and B. is basically invulnerable thanks to her equipment setup, to protect them from pretty much any attack while the Joker Doom trick is being set up. Vanishing Gogo before killing him is to override his equipment setup; his being Vanished allows magic to always hit him regardless of his equipment (Otherwise, like Celes, he’s essentially invincible).
4.Gogo mimes Joker Doom twice per tier because of the way Miming works. It essentially attempts to duplicate the previous attack exactly—in other words, it attempts to Joker Doom an already-dead set of enemies the first time. The second time, it works properly.

Nov 19

Gobble-Con is Upon Us!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Gobble-Con starts today. If anyone is curious, my panel is tomorrow morning (Saturday) at 9AM, in what wrestling fans like to refer to as “The curtain-jerking slot” (I’m the first panel of the day), but which would more accurately be called “booze-induced sleepy time” (Thanks for the phrase dballin) if this convention succeeds in its goal of being a place where adult geeks can hang out. If nothing else, I’m not really competing with anything “big” the convention has to offer, which is a plus. If you’re in the Milford area, come check it out!

Nov 12

Wizardry I Liveblog Bonus Edition: Chapter 9

Part 9: The Second First Extended Excursion

Nyperold: “Okay guys, just follow me and we’ll be fine. We’re gonna go get some keys, and then make you guys big and strong.”

Nario: “Gosh guys, this is so exciting! Our first real adventure!”

OptimusF: “Yeah, whatever. Hey, Mentor Buddy.”

Nyperold: “My name is Nyperold.”

OptimusF: “Spectacular. Hey, Nyperold, is there going to be anything I can steal here? Like maybe…some telephones? Or lampshades?”

Nyperold: “I…don’t even know what those things are, so no. There will be treasure chests you can disarm, though.”

OptimusF: “Uh…neat. I guess.”

The group walked to where The Silver Key was. Kareshi found it.

On their way to the Bronze Key, Nyperold struck up a conversation with the group.

Nyperold: “You know, all my blubbering about my old crew aside, I really hope you’re all grateful for the equipment. You all had it a lot better than they did when we were just starting out. Well, except for you, Nario. Mage equipment selection is kind of limited, unfortunately.”

Kareshi: “Oh, we’re grateful, definitely.”

Nyperold: “Cool. Yeah, we just had Chainmail to start off..and Emptyeye needed us to pool our gold to even be able to afford that! of course, the jerk bought a Helm with the leftovers…”

Spooky C: “Why was Emptyeye so poor to begin with?”

Nyperold: “The goofball thought going to the poker tables the night before was more important than resting up for our adventure!”

Spooky C: “…and this guy was your leader?”

Nyperold: “Yeah…the man loved his gambling, but in the dungeon, he knew what he was doing. Hopefully, I’ll be as good a leader as he was.”

Tobleron: “Well, considering what happens if you’re not…”

Nyperold: “Let’s not think about that.”

The party eventually found its way to the Bronze Key. After a quick trip back to the city to recharge, the group made its way back to the southeast corner of level one, to the statue that Nyperold’s old band had searched so many times before.

Nyperold: “Hey Nario. Search around that statue there, you’ll like what you find.”

Nario: “Okay! Let’s see…maybe I’ll find another keyyARRRRGH!”

OptimusF: “Ahaha, that was hilarious!”

Nyperold: “I thought you’d like that! Now let’s kill it.”

The group did. They then repeated the process for a solid 15 minutes, enough to raise the group to level 7 proficiency. Returning to town, Kareshi and Tobleron both bought themselves suits of Plate Mail. As they separated for the night, Nyperold thought to himself:

Nyperold: “You know….I think these guys and I will be all right.”

Next time: The second floor, the second time around!

XTREEEEEEEEME Bonus Commentary!

  • Here we get a bit more personality of our characters, Nario and OptimusF(unk) in particular. Nario is pretty much how he posts on The Shizz, something of a Wide-Eyed Idealist. OptimusF is not nearly as much of a snarky jerk online (or in-person) as he’s portrayed here, but it seemed like the best thing to go with based on the fact that the “Lampshades and telephones” comment is based on a real MAGFest incident in which Optimus…relocated, let’s say, some hotel equipment to another room (And got that room’s inhabitants kicked out of the hotel when they found the equipment).
  • Nyperold is also starting to show a hint of a personality that isn’t “kill everything”, brought on in part by the fact that he’s now the mentor for a group of newbies, rather than a one-track killing machine in a group of equals.
  • Almost decent writing here! “Maybe I’ll find another…” is a reference to the fact that Nario found the Bronze Key, which I don’t actually state directly anywhere in the chapter. Woo!