Lets racing time

I don't know if I'm off that day but if I am off

Let's get dangerous

I'm actually taking vacation that day, so yeah, I'd be available and up for that!

Ok, so I'll pass to give someone who hasn't had a go a chance. Looking forward to it!

I'm down. That's during spring break for me.

I'd love to join in if you're not full, but Thursdays are a terrible day for me.

Aladdin was good fun! And the 'Disney Afternoon' run sounds amazing. I'd love to participate, but I still can't commit. Most of last week my internets was pretty good, but then yesterday and today I had frequent outages, there's just no predicting it. :/

Anyone who participates in this four-game speedrun, be sure and practice Darkwing a bit. Brickroad wasn't kidding, that game can be oldschool hard.

I don't know that I even knew there was a decent DWD NES game. I have to check this one out for myself.

If we have eight people who want to do Disney Afternoon, we can always run two groups. I know weekends are better for some people, though they aren't good for me.

never

I demand you splice in vintage commercial breaks between events in the Disney Afternoon.

It's actually really great, but yeah I could never finish it as a kid.

I may be down for this, need a decent controller for my PC and to test recording on the new rig. And likely to practice; how hard is Tail Spin, isn't it a horizontal shooter? I fall squarely into the 'weekends are better' camp, unless you dudes want to start super late east coast time.

I've never played TailSpin. Sovan said it was too hard.

It took me a long time to warm up to Darkwing Duck, because the game FEELS like Mega Man but it is not Mega Man. Once you learn the particulars of DD's moveset it works pretty well.

What I like about it is that every single monster type is a credible threat. You have to learn to deal with everything in the game before you'll be allowed to move through it. It's still a short game -- only seven levels -- but learning it takes a couple of hours.

Speaking of games that are like Mega Man but not, you guys should do a blind race of Whomp 'Em. It's not a great game, but it's interesting and I figure almost no one has actually played it.

I would try a Disney race.

This is mostly for Torgo's benefit, but I figured out how to mix the audio tracks in Avisynth. I don't have to do any mp3 processing for Rockin' Kats. It's surprisingly easy! Here's the code:

First I defined the four video clips. Once again I processed the videos beforehand, but I will eventually be able to do that with Avisynth too.

First I have to yoink the audio track out of each video with the GetChannel command. The 1 tells Avisynth which audio track to pull, in case of a stereo track. (You can also use GetLeftChannel and GetRightChannel to just grab one side of a stereo track, but that isn't necessary here.)

I was having problems with my mic throughout the recording, and sounded too quiet, so I boosted the volume of my track with the Amplify command.

Avisynth can't mix tracks of different bitrates, so I resampled them all to 44000. I don't know what "bitrate" or "resample" or "44000" means in this context.

Next is the mixing. I defined an audio clip called "mix" and then use a few MixAudio commands to put everyone together. MixAudio only takes two tracks at a time, so it took three commands to get the completed track. The finished track sounded a little quiet to me, so I Amplify it again.

I wanted to test just the audio, so I defined an empty video clip with BlankClip. This gives me a 50000-frame-long magenta square.

This plays the "blank" video clip with the "mix" audio clip. Result: a magenta square with four weirdos talking over it!

Once I have my music selections, I should just be able to use MixAudio to put the tracks together. I won't even have to screw with Audacity this time; I can tell AviSynth how loud I want each track to be. (I find a 9:1 ratio of commentary to music to be ideal.)

Fuckin' avisynth, man. I should have learned this shit years ago. This shit is the shit.

Just so you know, if you want, "bitrates" is basically how many bits ("samples") are processed per second. The more bits processed per second in an audio or video file, the more accurate the file is to the original source.

In general, 44kpbs (44000) is good enough for voice. It's always better to resample down if necessary, as resampling a file up can introduce errors. Basically just like resizing a picture file.


EDIT: I'm guessing that the result of this is that when we send you our video, you want the audio baked into the file, instead of being a separate audio file?

If you asked me what the ideal length of a race is, I'd probably say between half an hour and an hour, personally. But then you throw in people who are playing the game for the first time and everything goes off the rails regardless.

What I'm saying is I would watch a race of just DuckTales. Or, or! DuckTales 1 & 2.

What if we had some sort of crazy relay race? Two teams of four people all play through each Disney game. Once someone finishes a game, the next player starts the next game. Once he finishes, then the next player starts the next game, etc. And it goes until a team finishes all four games.

Might be difficult to coordinate, but I think it could be really entertaining. And also this way each player only needs to really learn one game.

Thoughts? Too impractical?

That seems needlessly complicated. At that point, why not just have each pair record their game and put the videos up seperately?

If you want to do multiple parts just use points Mario kart style.

I think at this point it's getting a bit too ambitious which conflicts with there still being some logistics to work out. I think it's a better idea to stick to 3-4 people for a whole video for another few attempts before trying some crazy complicated relay shenanigans.

Well, we could have folks who don't want to do all four games play just race one game.

I have to admit, trying to learn Little Mermaid AND Darkwing Duck AND race them might be a bit much.

Then again, Narcodis had never played Aladdin before his test runs, so...

You don't have to practice Little Mermaid. It's a fantastic game, but also ridiculously easy. A total noob could run it in 20-30 minutes.

Just posting to say I have enjoyed the races so far, especially Aladdin.

I will not participate though. After attempting to play the game I just watched four people complete with only minor setbacks and finding that I could not copy the racers' sucess; I realized you guys are way better at games than I. I will fufill my role as grandstand heckler.

Boo. Boo. Boo.

You mean 3 people.

It was the first NES game I ever beat without using cheat codes or the Game Genie, for what that's worth.

Hooray for learning I still remember the DuckTales levels...

Boo for realizing I'm terrible at The Amazon and that Magicka Despell is a pain.

Beat Darkwing Duck tonight. From what I understand, that's the hardest of the four games... right?

Learning Rescue Rangers next.

I feel like Rescue Rangers is an "easy" game that might actually be hard to try to do fast. It's been forever since I last played it, but I seem to remember it having a ton of hidden doo-dads to find, which generally kept you in full health, but would take time in a race.

DuckTales can be that way too, since your extra hits are hidden out of the way.