Here Comes A New Challenger!

Challenger with Commentary

I like Instagib, but it’s a lot more difficult to get good stream highlights onto YouTube from there. This run of the 1985 Japanese-only Famicom game Challenger was so watchable and the chat was so random that I jumped through the technological hoops to get this posted for all.

Challenger is famous for its control scheme which is backwards compared to modern games. On the NES controller, you would press A to shoot and B to jump. I actually played this on a Power Joy by Trump Grand that I bought for $5 at CORGS-Con, but it has the A and B buttons reversed. It makes the Power Joy terrible for most games but perfect for Challenger.

The video features Skype chat from myself, Jdetan, and Kinkaido, so of course it’s NSFW.

Wow, it's been a long time since I've had an actual image on this blog, right? Anyway, the top of the N64-ish controller actually has a pointy bit that functions as the Zapper. The trigger is where the N64's Z button would be. It doesn't work well.

Source: Challenger with Commentary – YouTube, which is edited from an .flv archive of my Instagib stream (Instagib.tv deletes archives after 24 hours), uploaded to YouTube, downloaded from YouTube as an .mp4, and finally edited in Pinnacle Studio 14 like my other videos. I really need to find a better way to do this. Also, the camera on my phone.

Rob Scallon – Angel of Death

Hold onto your hats! Versatile string player Rob Scallon just released another Slayer cover. This adds to his playlist of metal on instruments that aren’t metal with the description “If I wasn’t going to play Slayer on my banjo then what did I buy it for?”

Source: Slayer – Angel of Death (Banjo cover w/ solos) – YouTube via YouTube subscription

BANJO OF DEATH!!!!!

Feedly and RSS Feeds

Feedly is where I spend most of my time on the Internet. It’s the window through which I organize and read posts from dozens of other sites in one long page, and you should use it too. If you frequently read a news site or blog by visiting their front page every time, you’re probably doing it wrong. Read the rest of this post for links to some RSS feeds I recommend and links to subscribe to them in Feedly or your favorite RSS reader. You’ll be hooked.

I don’t want to spam up the main feed with a lot of links, so you’ll have to click through to the real post this time.

Here are some RSS feeds to get you started. Click the links open the feeds in Feedly so you can follow the feeds there. For those of you with other RSS readers, click the (RSS) after the feed’s name to get its RSS feed. Here we go:

House of Hitstun (RSS) | stuff from the Internet Bakamo Studios (RSS) | my game company RT (RSS) | world and US news from Russia WBNS 10TV (RSS) | manageable amount of Columbus news ESPN (RSS) | sportsball headlines Consumerist (RSS) | Consumer Reports news, tips, and complaints Shoryuken (RSS) | fighting game community news and videos SlickDeals.net (RSS) | bargains from the Internet Wired Science (RSS) | Wired Space Photo of the Day and more Noirlac Sourced (RSS) | nice old video game backgrounds xkcd (RSS) | snarky stick figure webcomic The Adventures of Dr. McNinja (RSS) | high quality serial webcomic Sinfest (RSS) | open-minded webcomic I posted about Did You Know Gaming (RSS) | video game trivia I posted about Botchamania videos (RSS) | pro wrestling outtakes I posted about Classic Game Room videos (RSS) | retro gamer reviews all video games TASVideos Top Rated Movies (RSS) | best new tool assisted superplays Building Feedly (RSS) | updates to Feedly service

Yes, I really have 1,889 unread articles, some dating back to 26 days ago. The biggest backlogs are RockPaperShotgun (269), my YouTube subscriptions feed (261), UsVsTh3m (208), and DarkSakura's blog It's All Around You (160). They're all not accessible at my work so I can't catch up on them there.

Source: a screenshot of today’s Wired Space Photo of the Day from NASA’s Curiousity Mars rover’s Mastcam on my Feedly home page in Pale Moon

Ode to the 2-Hit Combo

I played Ultra Street Fighter IV last night hitting with lots of Final Turn Punches and I remembered this classic from August 2004. Jchensor, Maj, MrWizard, and zEvil compiled 20+ minutes of footage that ranges from the earliest fighting game combos to Playstation 2 games and their highly impractical setups. Jchensor also posted his commentary for every scene.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRWLKT0RH0s, originally found via the old version of ComboVid.com

Tool-Assisted Speedruns Out of Context

In only one week, @TASNoContext speedran becoming my new favorite Twitter account. TASVideos publisher EZGames69 posts short clips of old games freaking out when they receive frame-perfect sequences of gamepad input. Already, the tool-assisted madness has consumed Contra III, Sonic 2 and 3, Pokémon Yellow, UMK3, Donkey Kong 64, and dozens more.

Edit: In less than a year, the Twitter account is retired because some idiot billionaire bought Twitter and did his own speedrun of destroying it. Tool-Assisted Speedrun Clips has moved to Tumblr.

Source: @TASNoContext media posts after their clip of pirohiko & FinalFighter's TAS of Mega Man

UberNES - Nintendo Screen Saver

If you still use screen savers, Columbus-based developer M \ K Productions has a good one for you. Nintendo Saver 2015 fills your monitors with several NES games. Each one is actually a fully-functioning NES emulator playing a replay that was recorded in UberNES, and if you like, you can pick up a gamepad and take over control of one of the games on the spot. The recorded replays include my Super Mario Bros 3 playaround and a couple shorter videos showing glitches in Super Mario Bros 1 and Mega Man 2. If you like it, maybe I’ll record some more.

Source: http://www.ubernes.com/nesscreensaver.html via the UberNES – NES Screen Saver Facebook page

Control Config Menus

I’ve been updating my VOGJAM game Skeleton Hunter with new features like custom button mapping. PC games need this because players might have foreign keyboards, nonstandard gamepads, or disabilites that make the default controls unusable. Mine works like the PC version of Skullgirls where every action has both a keyboard key and a gamepad button, and you can assign them one by one or all at once. Please try it and tell me if the menus work the way you expect them to.

Source: my game Skeleton Hunter v1.02 reusing code from my Control Config Demo

Oddheader – 100 Things You Didn't Notice in Tony Hawk Games

In the PlayStation 2 era, I spent thousands of hours playing the Tony Hawk games online and making levels and videos. We’d get out of bounds and explore behind the scenes, and sometimes find the developers left some easter eggs for us. Oddheader has compiled the community’s findings into one epic 24-minute video that takes us through Neversoft’s entire run with the series.

The transition from WordPress to Tumblr is about 75% complete. 108 WordPress posts became 120 Tumblr posts (20 are Tumblr reblogs). I lose the mouseover text on images, Twitter embeds, and email updates, but most things work and I’ve fixed about a dozen broken links.

Source: Oddheader via related videos for a LiangHuBBB Dragon Ball FighterZ video

Ludum Dare #28 is on!

I’ve entered this weekend’s Ludum Dare competition! Sure, it’s been two weeks since my last post here, but it’s been a full year since my last game compo. They announce a theme Friday night and you have 48 hours to make a game with that theme. I competed in LD #23 and LD #25 using Game Maker 7 and I’m pretty happy with those games, but this time I’m changing it up and using HTML5.

The theme for LD #28 is “You Only Get One.” I don’t know what I’m making yet, but I know I want to use HTML5’s Local Storage to make sure you don’t get another “one” by reloading the game. I need to test if my HTML5 Local Storage, Canvas, and Audio methods work on all of my target browsers, so here’s a quick demo. What you type into it gets stored in your browser’s local storage and doesn’t get sent to our servers. Check back here Sunday night and I’ll post the finished product.

(In the original WordPress post, I embedded my HTML5 Test here. Tumblr doesn’t support HTML5 canvases in posts. That makes me sad.)

Source: Dr. Mo's Ludum Dare #28 HTML5 Test and a sound effect made in Bfxr

Mega Man 1 - Glitchfest

Scykoh‘s Glitchfest series is all about breaking popular games in as many ways as possible. TASVideos’s resources for NES Mega Man games covers several methods for moving through the game quickly, but even that doesn’t explain what Scykoh does in Ice Man’s stage. When I planned the “bugs” in Skeleton Hunter, the first place I looked for inspiration was Mega Man 1’s zipping, pause tricks, and tileset corruption, and they’re shown off very well here.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdqJgCLVR2Q via YouTube subscription via recommendations probably generated from Did You Know Gaming?