Sep 07

So You Want to be a Speedrunner Progress- Day 28

This is really stretching the definition of progress further than I have to date.

But in any event, some time ago, I ordered business cards. The intention behind this is that I’ll have something to hand out after my Gobble-Con panel, in case someone had a question that didn’t get answered, or they just wanted to get to know the person behind the panel (Besides an e-mail address, my website URL is also on the cards). Today, they came in. The conversation was actually kind of amusing, in that Silver got the cards from the mail, and promptly texted me:
Silver: “You have a package. Can I open it?”

Emptyeye: “Sure, I guess…does it say who it’s from?”

Silver: “Nothing obvious, which is why I wanted to open it.”

Emptyeye: “Okay, go ahead….*suddenly remembering I had ordered business cards three weeks or so ago* OH! I wonder if they’re my business cards.”

Silver: “Business cards?! When the hell did you order those?”

In any event, you can see what they look like just below:
Photobucket

Silver says that they look “bland”. I disagree–they’re basic, sure (And yes, that’s my actual AIM name), but they serve the purpose as something to hand out after the panel, and the visuals aren’t unnecessarily complicated (One thing I definitely don’t have is an eye for aesthetics; better to do the clean text on a solid background and not have to worry about that part, at least). My main concern with them is actually that the text is small and kind of hard to read, although that’s not obvious by the picture.

Nonetheless, actual progress and rehearsal will commence once again in the next couple days.

-EE

Sep 06

Wizardry I Liveblog Bonus Edition: Prologue

You’ll find out…now!

Prologue: How We Got Here

Llylgamyn. A land ruled by the Mad Overlord. He wasn’t always mad, no. Indeed, Trebor had been democratically elected by the people of Llylgamyn. But, while he wasn’t always mad, he was always power hungry. And he found a mysterious Amulet as a way to increase his power.

Unfortunately for Trebor, he wasn’t the only person searching for that Amulet. Mere hours after he had claimed it, another person went to where the Amulet had been originally. That person was the evil Wizard, Werdna. And Werdna would not stand for having this Amulet in the hands of another. So, one night, while Trebor and his Elite Guard conferred, Werdna simply marched in and cast a spell, paralyzing everyone in the room with terror!

When the spell wore off, Trebor found that he was no longer in possession of the Amulet. Worse, Werdna had used its power to construct a 10-level labyrinth right beneath Llylgamyn, and had summoned monsters to come up toward the city! Werdna himself hid at the lower-most level, trying to divine the secrets of the Amulet. Trying to get his Amulet back drove Trebor to madness. Fighting hard, he managed to reclaim the top four levels of the labyrinth. Adventurers would return from venturing any deeper as mad as Trebor—if they returned at all…

Trebor decided to take advantage of the situation as best he could. The first four levels of the dungeon, he decreed, would be his Proving Grounds. Those who survived these levels would be allowed to go deeper, to defeat Werdna and recover the Amulet.

It was this challenge that our band of heroes stepped into. Their leader was Emptyeye, a Neutral Gnome Samurai and the only non-Evil-aligned adventurer in the crew. Joining him on the front lines would be Nyperold and mahel042, both Dwarven Fighters. Providing magic would be Xanatos the Gnomish Cleric and Zudak the Elven Mage. Rounding out the group was Rocky, a Hobbit Thief.

(LIVEBLOG NOTE: The “default” party a fresh copy of the game provides you with is 2 Fighters, a Cleric, a Thief, and 2 Mages. I’ve always preferred 3 physical characters [Fighters or Samurai, depending on how patient I am with rolling characters]/Cleric/Mage/Thief with a Wizard for backup/identifying stuff hanging out in the Tavern most of the time.)

But these heroes were young, with Emptyeye and Xanatos, the oldest, being only 16, and Nyperold, the youngest, a scant 14 years of age. And they were untested, with no practical combat experience to their names. More pressingly, though, they were all naked.

After meeting at the Tavern, the bartender discretely suggested that the party get some armor on.

(LIVEBLOG NOTE: Gilgamesh’s Tavern—no, not that Gilgamesh—is where you recruit characters, remove them from your party, and generally check them out. You can also divide your gold evenly here.)

The party made their way to Boltac’s Trading Post, where they encountered their first snag.

Emptyeye: “Okay, so…25 for a Long Sword, 40 for a Large Shield….um, guys, I seem to be a little short here. Someone wanna spot me some cash?”

Zudak: “Are you serious? What happened to the money you saved to go on this quest in the first place?”

Emptyeye: “Had a bad run at the poker tables last night.”

Zudak: *Headwall*

The rest of the party conferred.

Rocky: “Fine, but only after we’ve all bought what we need.”

Emptyeye: “Fair enough.”

The party bought their equipment. Long Swords, Large Shields, and Chain Mail for the Fighters, an Annointed Mace, Large Shield and Chain Mail for Xanatos, a Short Sword, Leather Armor and a Small Shield for Rocky, and a Staff and Robes for Zudak later, fortune smiled upon Emptyeye. Pooling the party’s leftover gold, he realized he had enough for not only the Chain Mail he had coveted, but a Helm as well. Overall, the equipment was basic, but the party hoped it would serve them well in the Proving Grounds. It would have to…

Next time: Meaningful gameplay!

Amazing Bonus Commentary!
I had two basic goals here:

  1. Tell the story of Wizardry I without outright plagiarizing it from elsewhere on the Internet
  2. As much as possible, give the characters in the party some personality that doesn’t exist in the game itself

I think I did a pretty good job of the first, but you can judge that for yourself here, or, for the story in Werdna’s words, here. As for the second goal, I decided to focus on the character named after me here, as he’s the defacto leader (And, abilities-wise, something of a Mary Sue–Samurai eventually gain the ability to cast Mage spells in Wizardry, in addition to being great fighters. The drawback is that long-term, they tend to be outclassed in the HP department by the “pure” Fighter class.) of the group. We see here that he has something of a gambling problem (A somewhat exaggerated variant on my own love of poker), and Zudak is the guy who will call him out on his lack of financial discipline. If you’re curious, in reality, I just got screwed by the Random Number Generator–upon creating a character in Wizardry, they start out naked, with a small amount of gold to their name (The “stock” characters get a set of starter equipment in lieu of any gold). Just how much gold is random, but it can be from approximately 100-200. I forget exactly how much Emptyeye started with, but I’m pretty sure it was under 110, which was barely enough for the Chain Mail, let alone the rest of the equipment. Luckily, the other five characters combined had enough gold left over that it didn’t matter.

Other stuff to note:
-The various LIVEBLOG NOTEs were something I took from Ace of Scarabs’s Pokemon Soul Silver Liveblog, although the actual “LIVEBLOG NOTE” comes from another liveblog that I apparently can’t place right now. These are basically for when I want to impart information, but can’t really do it “in-narrative” as it were–for instance, exactly what Gilgamesh’s Tavern is for.
-I screwed up the “You All Meet In an Inn” link hidden in “meeting at the Tavern” in the original post, calling it “You All Meet At An Inn”, which doesn’t lead anywhere.
-Speaking of the original post, “You’ll find out…now!” was in response to a question regarding the names of some of the party.
-Speaking of the names of the party, they’re named after various Tropers who requested that they be added to my merry band of adventurers.

-EE

Sep 06

Announcing Some New Old Material

On the TV Tropes Live Bloginations Forum, I detailed my experiences playing through several games, Wizardry I and Dragon Warrior, both on the NES. More accurately, I turned both playthroughs into a sort of fan-fiction (Yes, there are more types besides “Two male characters mercilessly screw one another’s brains out”), creating an actual story and characters which were rather scarce in both games.

Since I’ve done pretty much everything I can do short of actually rehearsing my panel, in order to continue making posts, I’m going to be doing a sort of “Director’s Cut” of those two liveblogs. What I plan on doing is re-posting them here, correcting any misspellings, bad links, etc, but not changing any of the actual content other than that. In addition, I’ll be posting post-entry commentary stating what I was thinking both in terms of the writing and the actual gameplay, and what I think of it now. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this.

Also, after entirely too long, I’ve gotten rid of the “latest song” thing near the top of the site. I also did some minor tweaking to add a space between “and” and the category names on each entry. And the copyright notice has finally been updated too.

-EE

Sep 05

So You Want to be a Speedrunner Progress- Day 27

I didn’t do much with this today, thanks mainly to being out most of the afternoon and evening. The only real progress I made was in finishing up the outline I mentioned yesterday, and printing it out. It came out to 4 pages, which sounds like a lot until you consider I printed it out in 24 point font. The reason for that is that it has to be big enough for me to quickly glance down without making it obvious that I’m doing so.

Sep 04

So You Want to be a Speedrunner Progress- Day 26

Today I managed to begin attempting one of the weaknesses I had when running through the presentation for the first time–namely, not knowing what was on my slides (Or, more accurately, not remembering their exact order). I quickly learned that, while the “black slide” concept makes a lot of sense, you had better damn well know where you’ve put them before you go up and make your presentation “for real”. Fortunately, I have plenty of time in that regard, especially now that Silver has a part-time job, a side-effect of which is the apartment to myself on some nights (I do plan to eventually rehearse this in front of her, and probably some other people too. For now, though, I feel less like an idiot without an audience, especially as I work the kinks out of exactly when I have to click from one slide to the next).

How I did this was to begin writing an outline of my presentation that I’ll have, with (Click) interspersed through the outline to tell me when to click to the next slide. I don’t plan to read from the outline by any means, but it’ll be nice to have so I can occasionally glance down at it and note where I am, what’s coming up, etc. I’ve gotten about 2/3 of the way through it so far, and will probably finish it up tomorrow.

-EE

Sep 03

A Farewell to an iPod…and a Hello to an iPod

In April of 2006, I entered a Dance Dance Revolution tournament at my college, the one and only time since I graduated in December 2005 that I’ve gone back. Yes, if you know how your college commencement schedules work, that means I didn’t attend my own graduation ceremony. To make a long story short, I won, and my reward for this was a 2GB iPod Nano, seen below. In 2006, this was a pretty big deal.

Emptyeye's 2GB DDR iPod

My Trusty 2GB iPod. Awesome 80s Metal Added by Me (The display reads "Love Chaser/Europe/The Final Countdown").


Well, it’s now 2010, and the iPod Nano has undergone three redesigns and upgrades since then, with a fourth on the way. Furthermore, 2GB was never really enough to hold my entire music collection even then, and it’s certainly not enough now.

Luckily, the Capital One Rewards Program had the solution for me. My credit card usage is frequent enough (IE I use it for basically everything, although I make sure to pay off a substantial portion of it, if not the entire outstanding debt, every month) that, combined with their Summer Rewards catalog, I was eligible to receive a free 16GB iPod Nano. Despite my current Nano’s lack of capacity, I have to say, I’d have it for 4 and a half years or so, and the fact that I won it at a college DDR tournament makes it one of the few connections I have left to my “pre-real world” life, as it were–despite the fact that I had gotten a nasty dose of the “real world” in the second half of 2004. So it’s a bit strange to actually be discarding the 2GB iPod given that aspect.

Still, though, it’s been good for me in a way too. In preparation for being able to hold 8 times the music on the thing, I re-listened to a couple of albums that I hadn’t heard in many years–Stabbing Westward’s Wither, Blister, Burn and Peel and Rush’s Tech for Echo. I plan to do this to a lot of other albums I have but haven’t listened to as well, which should be pretty neat. Hopefully, the new iPod will get here in the next couple days, and I’ll be able to start loading it up with music and the like soon after that.

Sep 02

Keeping the Momentum Going

This doesn’t really count as “Working on the panel” per se, but I took some time to check out laptop speakers today. I did manage to find one set of speakers that is, sadly, sold out at Best Buy. Maybe I’ll try and see if I can order them somewhere else.

Also, even though I’ve yet to actually beat the game, I’m having serious second thoughts about speedrunning Flying Warriors. It’s just a seriously cheap game; I’d go so far as to say that Flying Dragon is actually better designed in that regard. I am still going to go ahead and beat the game though, if for no other reason than to add another game to my trophy case, as it were.

Sep 01

Setting New Records in Running Obscure Games

Taking my role as the guy who runs really obscure old school games Beyond the Impossible, I believe I may have found my next target.

That game is Flying Warriors on the NES, a typical Culture Brain title that blends beat-em-up, 1-on-1 fighting game, and RPG. Unlike The Magic of Scheherazade (Another Culture Brain game, and one that I have a run for), it doesn’t do the genre-mashing thing quite as well–in particular, it likes to pull the time-honored NES trick of “constantly respawning enemies near bottomless pits” that enraged so many people when they were younger.

Flying Warriors itself has sort of a Power Rangers-esque vibe to it, only without the humongous mecha–five allies? Check. Transforming into more powerful forms? Check. Martial artists? Yep, that too. If Wikipedia can be trusted, the game is actually a kind of mashup of two games released in Japan, Hiryu No Ken II and Hiryu No Ken III (The first game came to U.S. shores as Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll).

I have even less experience with this game than I did with Chuck Rock when I said “Hey that’d be a good game to run.” I’m really playing through it for the first time right now, other than a brief rental when I was much younger and got stymied by a seemingly impossible jump (As it turns out, the solution requires kind of a speedrunning train of thought: Use a Cyclone Spin Kick to carry yourself to the platform). This time is going better, although as mentioned above, the game itself is kind of frustrating as a whole. Still, I do want to at least beat the game once.

-EE

Aug 31

Breaking the Nostalgia Filter

When I was about 6 or 7, my aunt, grandmother and I went to the house of another of my aunts. I don’t remember what for–what I do remember is that my cousin was tasked with keeping me entertained (As he would be many times in the following years). It says something about both of us that his method of choice was to show off his shiny new Sega Genesis. The games he had were pretty much all launch titles, but amongst Space Harrier II, Golden Axe, and Altered Beast was one game that particularly stuck with me, arguably the crown jewel of the Genesis launch lineup.

Phantasy Star II.

Yep, seven years before Final Fantasy VII made it cool to like RPGs in the U.S., Phantasy Star II had quite a bit of hype behind it in 1990 or so. It made the cover of an early issue of GamePro, and an early Game Player’s had quite a bit of coverage too. In any event, seeing the game made quite an impression on little Emptyeye, even though at that point all I got to see was my cousin repeatedly trying (And failing) to kill the final boss. Actually getting to play the game later on only increased my “must have this game” desire.

Unfortunately, I was a Nintendo kid growing up, not actually owning a Genesis until it was all but dead in the U.S. I finally got Phantasy Star II in my early teens, and loved it, especially the ending (Which pretty much confirmed everything a 13-year-old me in the peak of his I-Hate-Everything phase needed to know about humanity).

A couple years ago, I played through the game again intending to speedrun it. I never actually a completed a speedrun, other than a pseudo-test where I got through the game at Level 18. While I still love the game on a personal level, looking at it objectively, it really hasn’t aged very well.

In case you don’t know, when the game first game out, it came with its own full strategy guide. This is because you needed it. The dungeons were huge, and especially in the beginning of the game, you had to do quite a bit of level grinding in order to survive them. This wasn’t quite as much of a problem later on, although the dungeons themselves got even more fiendish. Here’s one of the later dungeons; the black squares are pits, and your two goals are the chests marked Neislasher and Neishot. Have fun getting to them even with the map. The pace of also rather slow, and any characters not in your party don’t level with the rest of your characters. This basically means that several of the characters you get will never be used in normal play.

Despite all these flaws, I still like the game a lot, and might play through it again on stream sometime. Maybe once I don’t have to constantly stress out about So You Want to be a Speedrunner.

Aug 30

So You Want to be a Speedrunner Progress- Day 25

Today was the first real “test run” of the presentation. As with running through it in the car on my way to Newington, once I got started and got used to feeling of talking to an empty room, it was surprisingly easy to get through the whole thing. Unfortunately, I don’t quite have my actual slide deck memorized–or written out, for that matter. As such, the whole thing was kind of awkward, as I’d click onto slides too soon, not use the black slides I had put in the presentation, etc. Still, I got the whole thing done in 50 minutes or so. I’m fairly sure I can hack a few minutes off of that, if by doing nothing else than actually knowing what’s going on in the slides behind me, and a 45-minute presentation plus 15 minutes of Q&A would make a nice hour-long panel.

Other stuff to improve:

  • Actually mentioning the fact that there will be a Q&A earlier than I did.
  • Being more aware of what I’m doing with my hands–I slipped one of them into my pocket on occasion.
  • As mentioned above, actually knowing my slidedeck a little better.

What did I actually do well?

  • I felt like I didn’t really “um”, “er”, etc. at all, although I would need to actually record myself giving the presentation to be sure.
  • Similarly, I felt like my actual command of the material was pretty good. If I had to give the presentation without any visual aids whatsoever, I think I could do it.
  • Finally, I think I did a good job keeping my head up. In other words, if I actually had an audience, I would’ve been making eye contact with them (Or at least faking it).

Again, I feel like this is really starting to come together. Since I’m now at the stage where I can’t really tinker with the slideshow anymore, this will likely be the final daily update on the panel. I’ll make sure to continue trying to at least make some kind of daily post, though, as that way you’ll keep coming back (And I’ll actually get some value out of the fact that I have the site paid up for the next 2 years). And I’ll continue to update on the panel whenever I actually do something, rehearse, etc.

-EE