Off The Cuff Thoughts On Rebuild Of Evangelion 4

 For reasons that'll be clear if you listen I decided to voice my initial thoughts on the movie with my voice. Listen here!

CW For Tomorrow's Post

 Buckle up fuckos; it's time for some game theory.

In Which I Complain About Gloomhaven

Demon's Souls and Dark souls are two of my favourite games of the last ten-ish years of computer game releases. You trudge through a miserable husk of a world ravaged by monsters allowed to run amok after years of systemic abuse by the monarchies who claim to be in charge. Levels are often designed with devious traps (both terrain and often very funny enemy placements) and an oppressive tone no matter if the architecture is Medieval or Gothic styled. Almost every one of the scant humans willing to talk to you are grifters, liars or extremists. All punctuate their often cryptic conversations with unsettling laughs. Whether you're playing as a pragmatic ranged archer/spellcaster, a damage tanking warrior wielding a heavy weapon or abusing the invulnerability frames on a lightweight roll, there's plenty of room to find your own voice in the combat.

I've been in a game of Gloomhaven for a few months now. It's a grid-based tabletop RPG with a map that slowly fills with information as you complete combat instances. There's a miserable tone to all the flavour text and a sense that you're trying to make as many material gains in the fight as you can before you're out of your scant resources. I'm sure to plenty of people who enjoy From Software's various Souls games, Bloodborne and so on there's a lot to love in both games and they take to Gloomhaven with ease.

I do not care for Gloomhaven.

Running Out of Event Commitments

 Well, that's both Australian Speedrun Marathon 2021 and Shmup Slam 4 behind me. What's next for hot Gaming News from ol' Pichy?

Well for a start we have dates booked to run a national fighting game event in October. Sadly, the world has still ended so we're probably just going to run a bigger local tournament. This does give me two full days to propose whatever nonsense fighting games or weird versus games I feel like. Study up on your Dark Awake. Learn a shmup and show it off while there?

There's also an online exhibition during the period that was supposed to be the PAX Australia convention in Melbourne. Currently my list of speedruns I can demonstrate are:

 - Mr. Driller: Drill Land All Level 1 (get that runback!)

 - Fantasy Zone (Regular, Master System Bosses)
 - Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (Maxim Any%, Maxim All Bosses. Latter is cursed.)

 - Shippu Mahou Daisakusen/Kingdrom Grand Prix.

Current works in progress include:

 - Metal Slug 7 (stages 5-7 are very tight routes to get what you need done)

 - ESP.Ra.De (Stage 4, man. Stage 4.)

- Fantasy Zone 2 DX

So Fantasy Zone 2 DX is a full remake of Fantasy Zone 2 for a modified build of the first game's Sega System 16 arcade board. It was developed by M2 while they were working on a PS2 collection of everything Fantasy Zone related and is the feature piece of that bundle. It's a radical reworking of FZ2's systems as it's intended to feel like the full arcade sequel Opa Opa never had.

The original Master System/Sega MkIII Fantasy Zone 2 has all the flourishes you expect from a console STG. Life bar instead of health, recovery items, three variations of every stage that must all be completed if you want the best ending. In comparison, the M2 reimagining is shorter, harsher and extremely cool. I'm still in the early stages of research and routing but it's going to be wild. There's risk/reward routes, secret item shops and a wider range of permanent upgrades that may make suicides less worthwhile than they are in the first game's boss rush.

I'm not sure how long it's going to take but I'm glad to say I finally have a new method of capturing the footage. My Open Source Scan Converter arrived.

Thesebeauties (what are you doing to my formatting, OSSC photo?) provide a lagless means of adapting analogue videos ignals to modern HD displays with far better scanline and dithering options than most HD ports of old games. They're pricey but the impact's been large so far. Take one of the roughest HD ports of a Cave game: the Muchi Muchi Pork and Pink Sweets bundle.

 

Terrible as my photography may be, I think you can see there's a difference. The photo on the left with the smeared sprites and washed-out colours is actually the HDMI 1280 x 720 feed. The right is a 480p output using a component cable.

Since my rotating monitor is a picky old jerk, capturing all those 3:4 vertical shooters I love was a bit of a pest. I have to output using a DVI signal which means the OSSC can't transmit audio through the HDMI cable. I've got some jerry-rigged solutions for that so I'll be able to capture everything from Fantasy Zone 2 DX through to ESPGaluda.

We can of course merge the feed with my stream layout from June to create works of beauty.

 

 

Buckle up, gamers.

Watch Me At Shmup Slam 4!

 In the world of Showbiz there's no low you shouldn't stoop to. With that in mind, it's shameless self promotion time.

At 5am on Sunday (SA time) I will be attempting a world record in the 2020 shooter Demonizer!

On The Big Reveal In Oddtaxi

If a text is worth paying attention to, I don't think spoilers are a concern. A well crafted story emotionally invests you to the point where you either forget or aren't thinking about a specific event coming in the future. An all-time classic will outright tell and remind you what's coming and you won't even care. I watch pro wrestling. You only need to doubt what you believe for two seconds to viscerally scream when it's delivered anyway.

Wednesday Post

 herehttps://twitter.com/Pichy_and_Pals/status/1425411398406868992?s=20https://twitter.com/Pichy_and_Pals/status/1425411398406868992?s=20https://twitter.com/Pichy_and_Pals/status/1425411398406868992?s=20https://twitter.com/Pichy_and_Pals/status/1425411398406868992?s=20

I translated the list of RTA In Japan In Summer

Japan's top speedrunning event is starting tomorrow so I've translated the games list. You can find the original here.

Pokemon Sword/Shield PokePark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure Inmost Cuphead Demon Heroes LOVE 2: kuso Super Cable Boy Donut County 10 Seconds Away Man Returns Dragon Quest 8 Atelier Sophie DX Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity motherfucking ＤＥＡＴＨ　ＣＲＩＭＳＯＮ Air Hockey ｐｅｐｓｉｍａｎ

 Viewtiful Joe Poenotopia:Awakening Metal Slug 5 Tales of Destiny (PS2) Crash Bandicoot 4 Zelda: LttP Kirby Star Allies Kirby: Planet Robobo MAJOR WII baseball Mario Tennis Advance ｗｉｌｄ　ａｎｉｍａｌ　ｒａｃｉｎｇ Fight Crab Age of Empires 3 Deathsmiles Megablacklabel Trials of Mana (Remake) Bullet Witch (remember Bullet Witch? I do) Astro's Playroom Sekiro Indivisible Fatal Frame Zero Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2

Megaman 4 Gunvolt X The Out Of Gunvolt Demon's Crest (hell yeah) Golf It! Wild Guns (SNES) Mister Driller: Drill Land (oh hey it's that run that died on me) Hard-working UFO Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine Some Yugioh 5D's game Mario Kart 64 (all glitches legal!) Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 Galactic Storm (superplay not speedrun) Touhou 15: Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity Hollow Knight Cyber Shadow Super Mario Galaxy 2 Sonic Adventure 2 Resident Evil (Original) Fouresident Evil 

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance Deathstate Hanaby the Witch Ape Escape 3 Burning Rangers Rapid Angel Adventure Island 3 The Great Battle 2: Last Fighter Twin The Mysterious Murasame Castle Ore no Ryouri Donkey Kong '94 ｄｅｖｉｌ　ｄｉｃｅ　ＸＩ Battle Garegga (Kamui going for world record) DDR Supernova Shin Hokkaido 4000km Momotaro Densetsu (Switch) Ring Fit Adventure 

 

That's it for today. 

A New Noah Caldwell-Gervais Vid Just Went Up

 Noah Caldwell-Gervais is a video essayist who writes longform pieces looking at computer games holistically. They're thoughtful, insightful and a positive example of strong media literacy. Sometimes, such as in his piece on several Star Wars games he brings in a broader critique of theory such as Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces at the same time. If you've met me in person and heard me blather on about something for an hour or two with little provocation, it's that but American.

Noah's audio editing sucks. The bitrate's all over the place. The mid-range frequencies are too loud. The mostly inconsequential B-roll footage that plays over his narration has inconsistent levels. You can hear every mouse click from his pressing "record" or "stop" in what is presumably Audacity. He never cuts out coughs.

I'm not bringingt his up as a criticism or to bring him down a peg. It's actually what inspires me the most about his work. Nobody's perfect and nobody has mastered every skill. Skills take time. Time to learn skills often requires money. Bills need to be paid. There's so many limits to achieving perfection in a field.

The free and easy access we have to media from all sorts of producers often disguises just how much goes into making things. Slick, expensive documentaries, serials and propaganda produced by for-profit companies with fully paid actors, editors and set constructors sit next to abandoned podcasts. As an amateur there's always a pressure to make a single, perfect text that will be a breakout moment.

Audiences don't care about perfection. For somebody who knows nothing about audio editing, script writing, video editing or even how to capture game footage, all that matters is if a text informs, inspires or simply entertains. If a travelling stoner can leave me excited to listen to 8 hours of Resident Evil discussion, I should be able to finish one of the 20 or so large drafts I have floating in this site's cache.

Mushihimesama Or "How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bugs"

 On February 6th 1991, the scrolling shooter (STG, shmup), one of the oldest genres of computer game died. It's been in denial but the fatal blow was struck on that day. Much like how early arcade games like Pong, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong forever dethroned pinball as the primary appeal of game arcades, so too did Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior kill the scrolling shooter.

I Haven't Gone To Bed Yet So It's Still Saturday

 I streamed and talked about some games and some design things on Saturday so that's the post.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1110868233

Quick Thoughts At Work On School Rumble

 Remember School Rumble? That comedy comic and TV show about unrequited love from the early 00s? I never found it very funny. Not even on a rewatch a while back. Was it 2019? 2020? Time is an illusion anyway.

早く俳句

Night returns, no calm.

Raindrop percussion tonight.

Tempo for writing.

 

No pen, quill or ink.

Fingers hammer cheap plastic

Lightning fuels the screen.

 

 Keys halt their clatter

Weariness muffles the words

Maintain the schedule

 

Time washes away

Mountains of dreams, ideas, hope.

Another dud post.

Four Days in and I'm Already Contracting Columnist Brain Worms

A spectre is haunting my brain - the spectre of Columnism. All the powers of good writing have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: tweets and theory, short stories and discourse, French New Wave Cinema and German Expressionism.

zzzzzzzz

 Apologies for Monday's vapid assessment of the duck. The role of Ego in the works of Chuck Jones is obviously Porky Pig.

I Bought A Bamboo Toothbrush On The Way To Work This Morning

 I'm not an expert in ecologically sound policy. Hell, I'm barely a linguist, media analyst or philosopher and I've actually studied those topics. It still seems like a sound argument to me that we need to use bamboo in more material goods. It's sturdy, grows fast and makes a cool "donk" sound if you run water through until the log drops.

I needed a new toothbrush for use after rushed breakfasts on the way to work and one made of bamboo was the cheapest option at the supermarket. This is a noble individual purchase which will surely reverse climate change.

Let's talk about the mouthfeel.

Blaugust 2021 Day One: Six Fanagraphs

 On an artist's quiet day on social media they might whip out one of these templates for inspiration.

My original plan for today's post is going up tomorrow so I just asked from friends to give me names for me to create word paintings with! Here's a previous example:

Images loaded with text and wonky Google blog sites don't go well together so I'll just write regular paragraphs this time.