Mar 24

This is a Test

KHAAAAAAAAN!!

Yeah, running tests on your live site is generally not a good idea. This was a lesson I refused to learn after my first WordPress upgrade debacle. But in any event, this is a test of a Polls plugin that I installed earlier today. Hopefully I can make the thing display in this post. It involves my link button at my cousin’s site. As I’ve mentioned before, my button there has nothing whatsoever to do with any content on the site (It’s the one just above the Jamesfaqs button, and is a holdover from when it linked to my LiveJournal, or you can just look at it at the top of this entry. Note that the brown border that I see is an unfortunate side effect of the “unvisited link color” I chose, I think. Like I said, I’m not an artist by any stretch.). So I’m wondering if I should change it. If all goes well, you’ll be able to vote on that within this post. Here we go…

(EDIT 3/12: This is like four years old, so if you’re looking back this far, awesome, but just go ahead and ignore this post. Thanks.)
-EE

Mar 23

Emptyeye.com Week 23- A Consistent Update Schedule

This past week at Emptyeye.com, I managed to post at least something every single day, and my viewership apparently liked this. Either that, or spreading what little promotion I do throughout the week increased said viewership compared to the previous week. Whichever it is, hopefully I can somehow maintain that, or even increase it over time.

I started recording a new song over the weekend. Currently I have drums (Using the drum machine this time, which I am getting better at operating) and bass done, and want to get the rest done as quickly as reasonably possible (Though I don’t have a firm date for that yet, I’m helped somewhat by the fact that this new song is shorter than either “Epic Failure” or “7-11“).

Other than that, I don’t have much new to report. It would be a good time to give a heads-up that next week’s “Week XX” post will probably be superseded by a report on the DDR tournament I’ll be going to this weekend. Also over the next week, I’ll probably be playing with some behind-the-scenes stuff on the site. And in Super Mario Galaxy, I have 104 stars, not much of an idea of how to get most of the remaining 16 (EDIT: I figured it out. That’s actually sort of evil given the way I tried to play the game), and can go beat the game at any point.

Until next week…

-EE

Mar 23

Happy Holiday from Emptyeye.com!

Just a quick note saying Happy Easter to all you who celebrate the holiday! Happy Holiday that Corresponds with Your Religion if you’re not Christian. And Happy Candy Day if, like me, you’re not particularly religious at all.

Mar 22

On the Run of 33. And 16. And 11.

MAX 300 Problems

With one week until I travel to Rhode Island to get absolutely destroyed in this tournament (Despite the topic title, actual cancellation of the tournament seems unlikely), I figured a fully DDR-centered post would be good.

MAX 300 was the first “10-footer” in DDR history. 10 feet is as high as the DDR difficulty scale goes (In the Groove went as high as 13 for its difficulty, and unofficial fan-made files for Stepmania go even higher than that), despite the fact that nowadays the range of “10s” is so wide that the game could really benefit from 11 or even 12 being added to said scale. But in any case, MAX 300 has become something of a project for me of late. I can get through the song with no problem, but there are a few spots in it I simply can’t seem to get right no matter how hard I try.

If you’d like to see these yourself, just click on the thumbnail above and have a look at the spots labeled 1, 2 and 3 (Warning, the file is big, about 1000*900 pixels. Also, my thanks to DDR Freak, who provided the original stepchart and who will hopefully not sue me into oblivion for putting up this modified version.). Spot 1 isn’t actually that difficult, but for some reason I like switching arrows 5 and 6 around in my head and thus missing both of them.

Spot 2 is the second half of the “run of 33” arrows, which is basically what you’d expect–a run of 33 continuous arrows (Although, because the first 16 are essentially just alternating two arrows back and forth, it doesn’t feel that bad). Once again, here I mess up arrows 5 and 6, which somehow throws me completely off for the rest of the run (My foot position is wrong) and saps my lifebar down to almost nothing. I have no clue what’s going on here. I can hit it fine slowed down even slightly, but I just don’t process it at full speed, or something. What’s frustrating is that at one point, I could mentally do it fine–my feet weren’t fast enough to consistently combo it, but I at least had the sequence of arrows correct. And now…I don’t know.

Spot 3 is another one where my feet simply refuse to step the correct sequence, though I at least have it down to a single incorrect arrow at this point–I tend to step the first four steps in the spot as up-down-up-down instead of the up-down-left-down that it should be. This particular mental block isn’t anything new though–I came to the conclusion that I had always been doing it wrong when I broke my combo either two or three consecutive times in the exact same spot each time. I’m trying to work on it anyway, though–as the first video link in this post shows, people can AAA the song. I may never get that good, but I’d like to at least fully combo the stupid thing at some point.

This entry doesn’t particularly have a point, other than to talk to myself about this, but if there are any other dance gamers who’ve gone through something like this, feel free to chime in.

Though honestly, another reason that I wanted to post this is that this marks the first time in emptyeye.com’s history that I have successfully posted some type of update at least once a day for an entire week. Essentially, either my life is getting more eventful, or I’m getting better at divvying up what I want to post when, but either way, this is a good thing (As it shows that I’m keeping the site very much alive, giving you something to look forward to and giving you more reasons to come back). I don’t think I can keep it up for a second week in a row though–this was more a fluke than anything else. In any event, not to worry, you’ll still get at least the Sunday Night “week X” posts, plus anything else I feel like posting throughout the week.

Mar 21

Contra Done Quick

Speedrunning video games is something I’ve done for quite some time now–even before I was aware of a speedrunning “culture” so to speak, and indeed, it could be argued, before such a culture really even existed, at least in the form we know it today–I have memories of trying to beat games like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night as quickly as I could (Efforts that were absolutely pathetic compared to the top times of today, of course). So it was that in late 2002 or early 2003, I came upon a video, probably linked via the then-still-somewhat-worthwhile GameFAQs boards, titled “Contra in 15 Minutes” (The video can apparently still be found online, though I admit I don’t remember the audio getting as badly offsync as it apparently does, which is why I haven’t linked it here), which I thought was pretty insane at the time.

Well, yesterday on SDA came the news that one Freddy “Frezy_man” Andersson had plowed through the game in a completely insane 10 minutes and 24 seconds (In contrast, my best time is 14:38. Respectable, to be sure, but far slower than even the original SDA run of 11 minutes and change). In watching it, all I could say was “wow”. Understand that there are certain speedruns that are in a class by themselves–that top tier of runs in which even fellow speedrunners watch one and go “holy crap”. Some excellent examples are Andrew Gardikis’s Super Mario Bros in 5 minutes flat, Satoru ‘Hotarubi’ Suzuki’s Super Metroid in 32 minutes, and Jacob ‘LeCoureur103’ Cannon’s Super Mario 64 (70 Stars) in 1:01:32. On the endurance side of things, there’s Kari ‘Essentia’ Johnson’s 4 hour 48 minute magnum opus that is her Final Fantasy III (US) run…which she did in a single sitting. Yes, really.

All this exposition to say that this new Contra run is most certainly good enough to join that unofficial elite group of runs. And the best part about it, to me, is that, while Contra is certainly a famous game (And thus most who watch it will be familiar with the game), the run can be enjoyed with no Contra experience whatsoever–while it’s an unwinnable debate as to which is truly the “best” run on SDA, most of the other runs I’ve linked include some sort of trick that will have the uninitiated calling “WTF Hax” or else wondering in general how certain tricks were performed. Not so with the Contra run–it’s just 10 minutes and 24 seconds of Andersson mercilessly kicking the game in its genitalia until it crumples to the ground, unable to do anything except kind of squeak out a plea for it to be over already.  The run really is that good.

You can read his comments on the run here, and download it or watch it in the quality of your choice here.

Mar 20

New Bonus Material Plus More DDR

Raspberry <3 Heart AAAFevah AAAAnd Then We Kiss AAA

With yesterday’s release of a new song comes the associated failed takes in the Into the Aether section of the site. You get failures of anything that isn’t drums in this particular package–2 minutes and 20 seconds of me playing guitar badly, sounding like a dying cat vocally, and going way the heck off beat in an attempt to record a 5/4 bass solo. Sounds like something you want to hear, right?

What wasn’t a failure yesterday was my session of Playstation 2 DDR. I picked up 3 new “Full Perfect Combos”, which in previous mixes were called AAAs (Supernova 2‘s scoring system is set up such that you can get Greats and still receive a AAA grade for the song). This brings my home version total Heavy/Challenge difficulty FPCs to a nice round 20. These are the little thumbnails at the top of the post; from left to right, they’re Raspbery <3 Heart (#18), Fevah (#19 and my first Extra Stage FPC), and And Then We Kiss (#20, obviously). If you’re that curious, you can click any of the thumbnails to see the full-size picture of the respective FPC.

Mar 19

New Song- 7-11

Lo, with 35 minutes or so to spare, I have fulfilled the commitment I made to you, the reader, yesterday. The new song quickly overtakes “Epic Failure” as my longest to date. It’s called “7-11”, which is a reference to some of the weird time signatures I employ throughout the song. Note to my cousin: Here are those bizarre time signatures that have been sorely lacking from most of The Six Day Exile to this point. Anyway, read the story behind the song–in brief, it’s me being annoyed at how video games are constantly persecuted by politicians and the media alike–here, or download the song directly here. And, as always, go ahead and leave feedback, good or bad.

Mar 18

Your Obligatory Random Tuesday Thoughts

Hooray for a semi-regular emptyeye.com segment, huh?

  • To lead off, here’s another fine example of O Fortuna making everything awesome. Hockey is actually a fine sport to watch–it’s fast paced, play stops fairly rarely all told, and perhaps its biggest advantage over something like football or basketball is that the last 20 seconds of a game are actually played in 20 seconds and not 20 minutes–but c’mon, everything’s better with “O Fortuna“.
  • Sometime last night marked the second time that my Myspace profile had been taken over by nefarious spammers. I’m not exactly sure how it keeps happening–I only put my Myspace password into the actual Myspace site, and my password for that site (Amongst others) is neither easily guessed nor does it have any particular connection to me, so I can only surmise that there’s something in those “Click here for my naked pics” profiles that’s sending it to less-than-desirable sources (While I don’t actually click anything in said profiles, I do check every Friend Request I get, and 99% of them are some type of pseudo-porn spam. I’m not sure what that says about me, to be honest). That, or Paragon sold them the password (Long story/inside joke here).
  • Watch for a new song hopefully late tomorrow. I just need to record a solo for it, and drop in some samples and it’ll be good to go. I figure saying “Watch for it tomorrow!” will pressure me to actually get it done tomorrow, because consistently meeting reader expectations is an excellent way to foster loyalty, is it not?
  • Lastly, here’s a strange video featuring Ronald McDonald apparently teaching you how to play DDR. Note that the Left and Right arrows are the opposite of how they would normally be oriented on a dance pad, presumably to make it easier to follow. You fellow dance gamers out there may appreciate this edit of the video more.

Mar 17

CD Review: Kareshi- Mystic Awakening: Music of Final Fantasy VI

The name Daniel “Kareshi” Brown should be a familiar one to regular emptyeye.com visitors. If you need a primer, click here for all the posts in which he’s mentioned on the site. Anyway, the NES gamer and piano player extraordinaire has released his first CD, titled Mystic Awakening: Music of Final Fantasy VI. As you can read on his site, it’s 21 tracks from the game Final Fantasy VI (Originally released in the United States as Final Fantasy III, restored to its proper place in the chronology with the release of Final Fantasy Anthology in 1999), from the opening theme to Part 3 of “Dancing Mad” (The Final Boss theme) and everything in between.

A bit of a disclaimer: FFVI isn’t exactly one of my favorite games in the series–I’m fond of echoing those that said before me “FFVI is an incredible half a game. I’m still looking for the second half, it’s gotta be in there somewhere…”–though I did like the music a lot when I’d look at gameplay footage again for the first time in many years. The point being that it’s somewhat difficult for me to judge faithfulness to the original songs, so all I can really do here is judge the playing itself (Believe it or not, I took a semester of piano lessons in college. So obviously I’m qualified to judge someone who plays the piano as his primary instrument..).

And the playing itself is spectacular. Kareshi definitely knows what he’s doing on the piano. And the songs I do remember have been faithfully reproduced (In as much as Nobuo Uematsu‘s pseudo-orchestal soundtrack can be replicated on one piano) here. The production is also top-notch–compare Kareshi’s first recording of anything video-game related to one of the samples on his site and it’s pretty easy to hear the difference (The use of a digital piano certainly helps here). As such, all the tracks have the right “feel” to them, as it were–“Edgar and Mash” sounds majestic, “Dark World” sounds ominous and bleak, and so on.

The one issue I have, and it’s probably a function of my lack of familiarity with the songs as much as with anything Kareshi did, is that the songs tend to blend into one another, especially if you’re not really paying attention. This is especially true toward the beginning of the CD. This is really minor, though, and really doesn’t even detract from my enjoyment of the music at all.

There are a lot of video game cover bands out there. There are far fewer video game cover pianists out there. And Kareshi, besides being my friend and rival when it comes to old-school video game, is an excellent video game cover pianist. This CD is proof of that.

You can order the CD and hear samples at Kareshi’s website.

Mar 16

Emptyeye.com Week 22- New Songs Plus DDR Stuff

This past week at Emptyeye.com saw the release of a new song, which is easily my longest one to date, plus the associated bonus material that you can grab in the Into the Aether section. That was the main thing regarding what you saw on the site. Off the site, I’ve been working on other songs in the meantime, writing lyrics and coming up with drum parts to record so I can then go back and add the rest of the song–bass, vocals, etc. I also decided to start dating non-blog stuff to make it a little less confusing for people who haven’t been reading the site since the beginning.

Today I went to the mall to play some more DDR. It went pretty well, as I got two new SDGs, bringing my arcade total to 9. The two new ones were Let the Beat Hit Em- 3 Greats (You’ll have to take my word for it; the picture came out awfully), and SP Trip Machine- 7 Greats (This one is actually readable).

Sometime this week I hope to have another song up. Most of the hard stuff is done, so it’s just a matter of recording some kind of solo and getting some samples from Youtube regarding the subject matter. Hopefully that’ll go well.

Until next week…

-EE