Jan 27

Emptyeye.com Week 15

Most of the interesting stuff in my life this week has been previously covered on the site, so this is really more out of tradition than anything else. Although honestly, the fact that I’m still updating after close to four months is something of a minor miracle in and of itself (Though I really should get on that music thing soon…).

I did start recording a Let’s Play of Ys Book I & II (Not “Y’s Books I & II” as my cousin said…extremely nitpicky, to be sure, but it’s the difference between champ and chump on Final Jeopardy!, so I don’t feel as bad as I perhaps should in correcting it). I’m going to wait until I get a buffer of a few more videos before I start Youtubing them, though, so I can keep a regular update schedule even if I don’t play the game on a given day or five.

Speaking of Jeopardy!, over the past week I’ve been reading the blog of past Jeopardy! über-champ Ken Jennings, and so thought it’d be fun to share what was possibly his greatest answer during his 75-show run. Somewhere on the site, Ken mentions that between the start of the question and the time he gave the answer, his thought process went from “This is totally the right answer!” to “Saying this answer on Jeopardy! is totally worth the $200 I’m about to lose on it!” (Note a. his smile immediately after he gives the answer and before Alex says “No”, and b. he was the only one with positive money at that point anyway, to say nothing of the huge lead he had) Apparently, it was a good thing Ken got to that answer first, as apparently the person who ultimately gave the correct answer was thinking about saying Ken’s answer for giggles as well.

Until next week…

-EE

Jan 24

R.I.P. Cookies and Other Less Depressing Thoughts

Cookies was my girlfriend’s family’s dog, who died earlier tonight. Eerily, I was actually at their house maybe 20 minutes before Cookies died. When I first got there, she seemed happy to see me, and even better than she had been the last time I saw her when she just kind of shambled up to me as opposed to the enthusiastic greeting I was used to. Not long after that, though, she started panting as though she had just run a marathon, which I had never heard her do before (This wasn’t ordinary dog panting, mind you, it was closer to what a human who had just intensely exerted themselves would sound like), and which frankly freaked me out. She eventually calmed down, and seemed okay, if tired, when I left. On my way home, I checked my text messages to see “Cookies just died”. I got home and called my girlfriend, and literally asked her “What do you mean Cookies just died?”

See, I don’t handle death well. Logically, I know that most pets have short lifespans compared to humans, and Cookies was over ten years old, apparently pushing the upper limit of how long a Black Lab is supposed to live. And further, she’d been in pain for awhile, which was fairly obvious–my girlfriend had wanted to put her down awhile back, but her family, maybe out of attachment to the dog, said no. So in that sense, it was probably for the best.

But the thing is, I didn’t think of Cookies as really being that old, even for a dog. Shelby, my aunt’s GIANT* BICHON** FRIEZE OF DOOM***, lived to be either 14 or 15, I can’t honestly remember (Dearest Aunt, I know you read this, feel free to set me straight). So Cookies was practically still young to me, even though she had been there all the time since my girlfriend and I started dating (Almost 8 years now. Wow.). So it’s weird to me that she just..won’t be there anymore, I guess. And as I said, I don’t handle death well in general, which is in fact one of the main reasons I don’t want a pet–I don’t want to deal with the various emotions that come up when the pet invariably passes away.

*sigh*

In other, less depressing news, Akismet is working nicely. I have no idea what the name actually means (According to this, it takes its name because the program is Kismet by Automattic), but Akismet is a program that filters out spam comments before I or anyone else ever sees them. As Supreme Overlord and Dictator Site Owner and Administrator of emptyeye.com, I can see how many comments it’s blocking, plus the comments themselves if I so choose. It’s applying the smackdown to porn bots and other things quite well. Good for you, Akismet! Have a cookie!

I also think I’ve picked a game to Let’s Play that no one else has done before. And it won’t be a speedrun! Indeed, it can’t be a speedrun (At least by SDA rules), because while I own the game (By “own” I mean “Have a copy in my possession that was given to me”), I don’t own the system to play it on, meaning I’ll have to resort to emulation to actually record it. I think my cousin will be very pleased with the choice, if he hasn’t figured it out already.

Finally, I know some of you out there have downloaded my Rygar Speedrun Commentary. Seriously, let me know what you think. My ego can take it. My ego would actually prefer to take it, as it would give me a good excuse to not do commentaries for my significantly longer runs.

-EE

*-“GIANT BICHON FRIEZE” is something of an oxymoron. It’s true that Shelby was relatively huge for a Bichon Frieze, but she was still pretty small compared to most other species of dog (A fact only reinforced by living next to a Chocolate Lab and a Rottweiler for several years).

**-I have no idea if the correct spelling is “Bichon” or “Bishon”. Neither Google nor Firefox spellcheck are any help.

***-Okay, now I’m just flat-out lying–Shelby was extremely friendly, and pretty much totally harmless, both because she was small (as mentioned above, a “GIANT BICHON FRIEZE” is still not very big), and because she had a very laid back demeanor–it was very rare to even hear her bark at anything.

Jan 23

O Fortuna Makes Everything Awesome

Just an observation I made awhile back. You probably know “O Fortuna”, you just don’t know it by that title. It’s this piece of music, which is currently being used in several commercials. But seriously, anything set to “O Fortuna” just automatically becomes awesome. Gotta make a copy of something at work? Set it to “O Fortuna” and you’ve just turned an everyday workplace occurence into the most mind-bendingly epic event of the year!

It also occurred to me that, if not for the beginning, “O Fortuna” could serve as the pre-Internet (By about 100 years) prototype for those “Screamer” sites that were big a few years back (You know, “Look at this picture and find what’s wrong with it with your volume all the way up…AAAAAAAAAH!! [With a scary picture flashing for good measure]”). You get the big “O fortuna” beginning, then the whole thing gets really quiet for about a minute and fifteen seconds before….*WHAM!!* everyone jumps up the octave and it gets super loud and epic (It’s generally only this last part that’s used in pop culture, by the way).

-EE

Jan 22

Rygar Speedrun Audio Commentary Now Available

This is a sort of test run for an idea I had to record audio commentaries for my speedruns and offer the “With commentary” versions here (The vanilla, just-the-music-please runs would obviously still be available on SDA if you prefer those). It’s an audio commentary for my Rygar speedrun. You don’t need any fancy codecs or anything, but you do need a program capable of playing .MP3s, which any computer less than, say, 10 years old should have. What you do is download the file (Warning to those of you who are still on dial-up: Don’t even bother, the file is about 38MB in size, to say nothing of the size of the run itself), plus the speedrun, play the commentary file, and when it tells you to, press Play on the speedrun so the two sync up. Let me know how it sounds, if it was useful to watching the run, etc. If it’s bad, please, for the love of whatever deity you worship, tell me as much. You’ll save myself and everyone else who may download these things a lot of work and frustration.

All that said, you can download the commentary here.

-EE

Jan 20

Emptyeye.com Week 14/Stuff on the Site!

Even leaving out the stuff as regards my DDR adventure yesterday, this was a pretty eventful week for me site-wise.

First, on the music front, I’ve been messing around with my new drum machine I got for Christmas, and the next song I upload will be the first using it. I have a basic knowledge of how to work it now, I think, although to be honest, it sounds a little too much like me playing drums. The buttons on it are weight-sensitive–in other words, the harder you press, the louder the drum sound–and I have yet to really get the hang of that, so the volume of the drums in the song varies pretty wildly at points. Oh well, as long as I fix it up for the album, this will be a fascinating document of me learning as I go.

In site news, you’ll notice a new section on the sidebar, “Emptyeye Elsewhere on the Web”. It’s a list of my profiles and speedruns on various sites I frequent. I figure that with the LJ and MySpace in particular I direct them to here a lot (Almost exclusively, in fact), so I figured I’d go the other way this time and see what came of it.

Speedrun wise, my Astyanax run continues to sit in the SDA queue. If you know the game, and you’ve been around SDA, let Mike at SDA know that you can verify that I’m not a dirty cheater–the quicker it gets verified, the quicker it can be viewed by the masses. I’m also considering recording audio commentary over all of the runs I currently have on SDA, which is apparently five of them (Two Battletoads runs, plus one each for Rygar, The Magic of Scheherazade and Willow). It seems that I have a few people who would watch them if I could avoid simply repeating my text commentary, and as one person said, “it is always handy to have multiple potential sources from which to watch [speedruns].” There is some element of self-interest there too, as it may give more people who watch speedruns a reason to go to my site and check out the music, etc, which works out well for me. Tomorrow sometime I’ll probably try to record just an audio track for my Rygar run and upload just that. That way, people who have the run (Like, um, me) already will just download a relatively small audio file and, if the whole thing turns out to bomb, it won’t be a huge investment of time on my part (Except for the “Uses Warps” Battletoads run, this is my shortest). If it does work out, then I’ll do the work to integrate the audio with the video and do commentaries for my longer runs. Being bitten by the Let’s Play bug, I may start doing some of those too. Those are just normal playthroughs of a game with commentary. I’m not exactly sure what games I’d do these on, though Power Blade is one candidate. If you have any other ideas, feel free to suggest them.

Until next time…

-EE

Jan 20

Your Out-of-Context Quote of the Week

“Democracy was such a bad idea.”

Context behind the cut.
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Jan 19

I Am a Dancing-with-Arrows Machine!

I went to the Brass Mill Center today to play on the DDR machine of the Regal Cinemas within the mall. It was…an interesting day, to say the least. Because of my mad DDR skillz*, I received:

  1. Half a pack of gum
  2. A dollar
  3. The assurance that I could continue to use the machine

I’ll discuss the last one first. You may be asking “Why would you think that you couldn’t use the machine? Did you perform some criminal act while at the mall or something?”, and the answer is “No.” But here’s the thing. You’ll note that I wrote “…to play on the DDR machine of the Regal Cinemas…” Apparently (This was being explained to someone behind me–while I was playing a song..I think it was Keep On Movin’, and I got 5/1/1 on it if you fellow dance gamers reading this are curious–so I just picked up bits and pieces of it), though the Brass Mill Center houses the cinemas who currently own the machine, Regal Cinemas are a separate entity from the mall. Further, cinemas in general don’t like being treated like arcades–the machines, including this particular DDR, are supposed to be there as something you do for a game or two while you wait for your movie to start–not, as I was doing, for one person to play continually without ever going near the theater proper. I didn’t know the second part of this at the time, although in the end it wouldn’t matter. I finished my song, and as the theater guy, I think his name was Mike, finishes his explanation about how he doesn’t like people treating the cinema area like an arcade, he tells me “Well, I’ll let you do it, because I like watching people do really well on this game” or something to that effect. So yeah.

I got the dollar from some kid after doing (Relatively speaking) really well on some songs on my last set of the day. He just gave it to me and actually said something like “Here you go, thank you.” and I just said “Wow, thanks.” I don’t actually know if getting the gum was directly related to my skill or not, but it makes the whole story somehow better if it was, so…

By the way, pictures of my three best scores of the day are behind the cut below. They’re my first three arcade SDGs, or “Single-Digit Greats”–in other words, getting under 10 Greats on a song and nothing below that.

*I’m still not that good compared to top-tier players, and would get destroyed at almost any tournament on the game (Fourth-place finish in a tournament in Trumbull notwithstanding).
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Jan 13

Emptyeye.com Week 13/New Song and Other Thoughts

This past week, I was on vacation from work! Fun, huh? I suppose, although I wasn’t nearly as productive on the musical front as I would have liked to be. I did manage to finish a new song, a solo bass instrumental that you can get here. Given the title of the song, I think people are going to be directed here via some truly disturbing search strings in short order, even though the title just refers to the fact that it’s a bass solo, which are generally useless to the majority of the planet who aren’t bassists. Either way, though, download it and let me know what you think! There are comment links at the bottom of every post, feel free to use them!

Besides that, lately I’ve been getting into Let’s Plays in a big way. Most of these aren in picture form, but a search of the term on YouTube reveals some in video form beginning about halfway down in the results. There are some surprisingly obscure games there too, like the Magician one I’m working my way through now (Despite having played through the game myself long ago). Even some of the “static” ones are great to just read through–the Phantasy Star II one from the perspective of the main characters is great (RANDOM FUN FACT: I actually tried and failed to speed run this game. Well, not failed per se, as I got through a probing run with my main party at a final level of 18 across the board (And rest assured if you’ve never played the game, you are NOT supposed to beat it with levels that low), but got frustrated and stopped with practice runs for the sake of my sanity.), and some of the video ones are funny as well, my particular favorite bit being Part 10 of Scous’s Faxanadu Let’s Play where he dies and proceeds to start yelling at the game. The game’s response: “Don’t have negative thoughts.”

A brief note that the whole Let’s Play concept, like most Internet phenomena, seems to have originated (At least with that name; I’m willing to bet that video walkthroughs certainly existed before “Let’s Play”) with Something Awful (Not Exactly Work Safe), but has, from what I can tell, spread beyond SA.

I’ve been trying to get back into Dance Gaming of late, but my pad is making it difficult. Trying to clean it seems to have only made it worse. Oh well.

Until next week…

-EE

Jan 08

MAGFest Wrapup Addendum

For those curious as to what I did to earn my points in the MAGFest challenges, the complete list is here. Comparing it to the complete challenges list, my cousin in particular will note a certain delicious irony in the fact that the one game I failed to earn points on was Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!. He took my heart, ate my children, (screwed) me ’til I loved him, and in the end, officially denied me first place.

Jan 07

Emptyeye.com Week 12/Post MAGFest Wrapup.

Rather than a summary of the last week, I’m basically going to give a blow-by-blow account of MAGFest here.

So my weekend began at about 8:15 Thursday morning. Or rather, it didn’t, because my car door wouldn’t close right away (This isn’t as bad as it sounds for those of you from warm climates–basically, on mornings after cold, wet nights, the door latch takes awhile to thaw out. It’ll open, but not close). Eventually, that gets worked out and I get to Jess’s house at about 8:45 to 9AM or so.

I then begin the first leg of the drive to MAGFest. For an hour and a half or so, everything goes fine. Then we hit a snag–our paper directions took us one way, while the Garmin Navigation System we borrowed from my dad sent us another. We decide to follow the Garmin–onto I-95 through New York City. Oops. We don’t get lost or anything, but it does take us an hour to go roughly 4 miles. Eventually we stop and switch spots at a service station. The rest of the trip goes uneventfully, and we make it to MAGFest at about 5PM. I wander around and say hi to people for about an hour, and then walk into the mysterious RESERVED on the M6 schedule.

Actually, it wasn’t mysterious at all–this was the block of time for Kareshi and I to play Pianotoads together for the first time. In all, I actually played through the game twice on Thursday–the first time, I was kind of screwing around while Kareshi ate dinner, taking huge risks (Jumping over walls you’re supposed to dodge in Turbo Tunnel, charging the insta-death robots in Terra Tubes without stunning them first) that I wasn’t going to do in the live performance. Then it was time to practice for real, and the practice went really well–almost too well, in fact.

After that, we ate dinner, ordering pizza from Pizza Hut (Which I am linking to here despite the awful design of their website), and then it was down to the game room. You probably remember my talking about the challenges that would be set up there, and I went and won myself a hat by completing an Expert challenge. Take a guess which one. No, go on and guess. You’ll never do it.

Did you guess Battletoads? *BUZZZZZZZZ* WRONG! I actually did the Batman challenge for the hat.

Told you you wouldn’t guess it.

I actually got the Batman challenge on my first try, too, which was cool–there are strategies for both The Firebug and the Joker, but even knowing how to do the battles (The Joker one in particular), it usually takes me a couple tries to actually execute it properly. So that I got it right away was cool. I don’t remember if I did any more challenges that night or not. I do remember getting to bed at about 11:30PM Thursday, which is ridiculously early for a MAGFest (For some perspective, I didn’t even arrive at MAGFest the two previous years until about 1AM Friday, or about 8 hours after I got there this year.), but I had to make sure I was in top form for Pianotoads.

At about 9:30AM or so Friday, I woke up and got ready for Pianotoads. At 11AM, it was time. Now, I tend to be self-critical, sometimes to a fault. Also, this was only the second time I had played along to the piano. Keep both of these facts in mind…

…when I say that I totally nailed it.

Outside of boss fights, I died exactly one time–I screwed up a jump in Level 4 (Arctic Caverns) and whacked some spikes–which matched my best performance in any of the practice runs (Notably…the first time I played it with the piano, the previous night). General reaction from Shizzies and non-Shizzies alike was quite positive, which was cool. If for some reason Brendan (AKA Mr. MAGFest, who sort of oversees the whole show and until M4 or so did everything on his own) asks me to do it again next year, I probably will, but won’t insist on it on my own–honestly, this time went so well that I doubt I could match it. Major thanks to Kareshi for learning all the music, he did an awesome job with it (Especially his Level 10 [Rat Race] rendition)

The rest of the weekend is sort of hazy. I know I spent a ton of time at the Challenges booth. I also know Jess and I walked down to a plaza for dinner Friday–she picked up two sandwiches from Subway (One for Friday, one for Saturday), while I got McDonalds. I did also check out the Temp Sound Solutions set, which was absolutely amazing–Battletoads baby! I went to bed at about midnight Friday.

Saturday was more of the same–a ton of time at the Challenges booth, plus lunch at the same plaza (With Sam tagging along) and dinner in our room (With Sam and Kareshi), this time Papa John’s. To any Shizzies reading this, I’m sorry I didn’t spend more time with you, though I guess this wasn’t too different from my M4 and M5 excursions–you’re all definitely cool people, but in general I spend most of my time in the game room anyway (Though as a result of this, I did get very well-acquainted with Kareshi and Metal Dream, who were my main competition challenges-wise)> as an old Seinfeld ep would say, “It’s not you, it’s me”.

Anyway, late Saturday/early Sunday presented me with a conflict–the Dance Dance Revolution tournament was finally ready to get underway, and I went to that instead of trying to complete a few more challenges. The tournament started at 1:30AM Sunday, and I finally got eliminated at about 3:45AM (Telling a guy named Flash, who was one of the favorites to win, “It’s too damn late to be Perfect Attacking” [For those of you who don’t play DDR, “Perfect Attacking” is trying to get a Perfect with every step–most DDR tournaments factor number of Perfects into the scoring in some way; This particular tournament’s scoring system was 2XPerfects + Greats + OKs], and saying to Kevin, who was my opponent in my final match, “Just eliminate me so I can go to bed” [Though I did try my best in said match, tying the first song before losing the next two].). At that point, I said “I mean no disrespect to those of you still in this, but it’s too damn late. I’m going to bed.” And I did.

We woke up about 8:30AM Sunday morning to pack up and check out and be at the Challenges Awards Ceremony for 10AM, where it turned out the competition wasn’t quite over yet–Kareshi had gotten 1st place by one point (Picking up that point at 1:58 AM Sunday, literally two minutes before the 2AM close of the stations), while Metal Dream and myself were tied for second (For some perspective on how obsessed the three of us were/how much we dominated, Kareshi had 51 points, and Metal Dream and myself had 50. Fourth place had 28.). The solution: a Dr. Mario-off–2 players, Level 10, High Speed, best two out of 3 games wins. Whether it was the lack of sleep or a lack of Dr. Mario skill, I wound up losing the match 2-0, effectively throwing the first game (I immediately started making mistakes and it spiraled out of control in the space of about a minute) and getting ahead in the second game before I started making mistake after mistake and losing that game too. Still, an official finish of third place wasn’t too bad, and in the end, Kareshi, Metal Dream and myself agreed to call it an unofficial tie for first and split the money evenly.

We left Sunday shortly after noon, and this time ignored the Garmin on what was now the second half of our trip in favor of taking route 287 to 87 to 84. My plan was to sleep for the first half of the journey and drive the second leg. I executed the second part of that plan, going from really tired to kind of in a groove to almost falling asleep at the wheel near the end. When we were almost to Jess’s house and she gave me directions of “Okay, it’s left, no, right, I’m sorry. Okay, here’s what we do, pull into that parking lot.” and I responded, freaking out, with “I can’t even see a parking lot!” she realized I’d had enough and drove the last ten minutes or so to her house. At that point, I was so exhausted that I didn’t trust myself to drive the last half hour or so back home, so shortly before 9PM Sunday I just passed out at Jess’s before waking up at about 8:30AM today and driving home.

So all in all, it was a great time, probably the best time I’ve had there so far. I’ll definitely be back there next year. The two bad things that happened from my end were:

  1. Jess’s camera misbehaved while recording Pianotoads. Showing she’s as hardcore about these things sometimes as I am, she proceeded to record most of it in 15-second increments on her cell phone.
  2. Unfortunately, that didn’t matter, because between 9 and 10 Saturday night, she lost her cell phone too. We looked around the area she had lost it, plus the room, to no avail. So she called and got it deactivated, which is good.

But yeah, like I said, definitely a great time.