Lets racing time

God, I keep having ideas for crazy challenge runs, and it would be super fun to string 5 or so of them together into some kind of pentathalon. It works best if you find a goal that can be achieved in multiple ways, but the occasional linear section could be fun, too. Here are some ideas I came up with in the shower this morning:

Mega Man X: The save state drops you off right after you get the dash boots in Chill Penguin's stage. Your goal is to get to a second upgrade capsule, doesn't matter which one. The save state could have a few of the stages already beaten to provide some weapons (just for fun), or not.

Super Metroid: The player is dropped off somewhere in Brinstar with the absolute minimum number of powerups they can have at that point. Their task is to pick up two energy tanks.

Ninja Gaiden: You start at the beginning of the second level and to finish the challenge, you have to destroy the second boss' weapon. If you kill him without doing so, you have to reload the save state and run the stage again.

Dragon Warrior: You start at level 10 outside Tantagel castle and your goal is to accumulate X gold. Players could play risky, picking up more gold by fighting tougher enemies, but potentially losing half their haul if they get killed. Smart players would sell all their equipment at the very end to put them over the top, or might know where to find a treasure chest with a lot of gold in it (if such a thing exists in DW).

It isn't that hard to come up with endless variations, although whoever plans a challenge would have to know the game pretty well and do a few test runs to see how long it takes them. If the goal is to complete 5 challenges, then each of them should only take about 15 minutes unless you screw things up royally. Which, of course, someone will, leading (hopefully) to hilarity!

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As for this Thursday, I doubt that I'll have my recording setup tested by then, since I've changed operating systems since the last time I recorded any game footage and I'll need to test a few things. I'll sit this one out, but I'm super interested in participating in one a little later.

From a technical perspective, the one thing I don't know how to do is record game audio and my voice simultaneously - although maybe you don't even need game audio for a race? If that's a big deal, well, maybe someone can suggest something for me. I have a good voice recording setup, but CamStudio and my audio recording program both use the same audio input, so I can't get my microphone and the game audio at once (or at least, not without recording the game audio into my talking track, which would be super annoying).

As would I! I'll have to poke around with how to record and stuff, though. Any tips for recording on Mac OS X? I'll see what I can do after I get off work this evening...

I said so on aim haha but I'm in so long as we're done by 10 pm est Thursday.

Brick mentioned earlier that you don't need to record your own game's audio, so don't worry about it. It'd be obnoxious having 5 or 6 different recordings of the game audio going at the same time.

Just a quick follow-up here now that I'm home from work: If you guys'd rather have someone than a second person that might cut in and out, that's ok by me. My setup is yet untested in any case; Game + mic shouldn't be an issue (I plan to test after I get some sleep), but you never know.

Sounds like Austin's primed for it. Maybe I'll just pinch hit if someone can't make it?

Yeah, no need for game audio, just video + mic.

I love Mike's pentathlon idea. Sort of reminds me of the Nintendo World Championships. There could be endless variations of those. We could run one based on OctoPrime's LPs of Every Terrible NES Game. =)

I'd like to get started tomorrow by 6pm EST with narcodis, Spoony and Austin. Add ickroadbray to your Skype so I can find you guys tomorrow. Get your recording rigs tested and make sure you already have an SMB rom.

In the meantime, I encourage everyone who hasn't recorded before to experiment with recording software, and post questions/problems either here or in the tech thread. I'll be free to race again as early as Friday night.

I can either put the resulting videos on my YouTube channel, or I can set up a second channel and put them there. The benefit to the second thing is that if we end up doing these pretty frequently it would be nice to have several people who can process and upload.

Let's Race 8 Eyes

CHALLENGE: Play 8Eyes for an hour without killing yourself.

That's how we lost Octo!

Edit: Also because I don't think a video of me starting at 1-1 every 30 minutes would be very entertaining, I'm going to use the All-stars version.

This could become a thing you guys.

And I'll watch as long as it goes on. I may even join one if I can find a place to record.

Me too! I'd love to participate as soon as I'm able to.

Same here.

Skype recording test seemed to go OK, I might get dropped now and then but Skype seems to try and reconnect immediately, and since we're pooling all of our audio it should come out clear even if on our end some of us sound scratchy over Skype.

Though, how are we going to send our recorded videos to Brick? A ten minute video I recorded and encoded with ffDshow is 192 megs, so the longer this goes on the bigger each of our output files is going to be. At that quality an hour long video will be close to 1.2 gigs, and we may go longer still.

Should I reduce the recording quality maybe? Since it's going to be compiled into a video with three other recordings sharing the same space it's probably not necessary to record it as high as possible. What should I be shooting for, megs-per-minute wise?

I've got my recording setup working. Any suggestions on improving audio quality? In particular, I want to avoid puffs of air and other sudden, loud noises.

1) Set up a torrent and I can grab it that way. Maybe not a great idea in your case since your connection isn't great.

2) Upload it as a private video to YouTube, and I can snatch it using ILLICIT THIRD PARTY PIRACY WEBSITES.

Wrap the mic in a nylon. Not perfect, but it works pretty well!

For filesize issues, I've taken to using Free Zune Video Converter, since my VBA videos are so big.

First I remove the sound desync (a specific issue that VBA has), then I load the video in Free Zune Video Converter and convert it to 'WMV 8 - video and audio'.

This converts a 1.5 gig video to around 40 MB!

I'd be curious what someone who knows more about video thinks of this, though.

Man recording a smooth framerate eats up a lot of hard drive space! That said, recording and just having to worry about mic audio is a lot easier than trying to muck around with getting game audio and voice recorded.

I had to fiddle around with the settings a bit; Even at a low volume my mic was picking up the game audio coming from my headset.

I really don't know too much about video. I just use formatfactory to convert all the video I record. It's free and converts anything to anything, pretty awesome.

Man, this looks a lot better than the equivalents I've seen online, which are mainly livestream based where broadcasters tend to jump the gun and go live early, which means they spend about half an hour in their skype group straightening out edges instead of actually playing the games, it's very anticlimactic for viewers.

SMB also seems like a great starter challenge, I'll be watching for certain and hopefully I'll learn something upon the way!

I'll probably go through Youtube then.

And I tried that Zune converter and it turned a 200 meg, ten minute, file into a 50 meg one, so I'll be using that! It makes the output resolution kind of small, but since it's going to be joined with three other videos that shouldn't be a problem, even if mine's a tad blurrier than the others I need it to be as small as possible so there's less of a chance the upload will fail.

What video formats are you able to work with, Brick? My rig can output in a bunch of types, but most of them don't work right with the system I use to process my own videos.

Expanding on Brick's suggestion:

Take a wire coat hanger and bend it into a square or circular shape. Stretch part of an old pair of nylons over it and boom, free pop screen!

Alternately, put a sock over your microphone. Seriously.

I would definitely like to get in on this at some point. I guess I'll have to learn about this Skype business eventually, and I can't imagine a better reason to start.

The only thing is that I tend to have a lot of running around to do on weeknights, so I'd generally only be down for weekend sessions.

You could sign up for a cloud service (dropbox, box.com, google drive) and upload the file to this. Then mark it as shareable and send Brick a download link to it. I think box.com has a deal right now for 50 GB of space.

Couple other ideas:

• Elimination style tournaments: Randomly divvy up players into appropriately numbered groups, and the top player(s) from each group move onto the next round.
• For anything longer form, put a hard timer for that session that everyone has to stop (two hours, for example). Everyone picks up from where they left off the next session.

Both of these would require a higher level of interest I would think.

Tour de France style.

It might be interesting to have a non-player commentator, if it's even possible for someone to watch all X streams at the same time.

narcodis, do I have you on Skype?

Hey guess who totally lost internet access for the past hour and a half?

Like not even 'it's pretty shitty but I'm still connected' like it's been for the past month, but totally 'no internets at all'?

Hopefully you guys found a back-up or continued on without me. For what it's worth I did record my play of SMB whilst talking to myself regardless, but I can't really say how entertaining it might be (besides my hilariously bad playing, there were some short bus moments here).

I'm thinking trying to synch this up with the others would be disastrous, so I might just try and upload it to my own channel for lulz. (wish I could say I beat the game, but while I was attempting World 8 I wound up pulling an Arino, and if you watch GCCX you know JUST what I'm talking about. Yes, it actually happened)

But anyway, yeah, sorry for the utter failure guys. Send hate mail to Bell Canada.

How quickly did you complete it? I finished the game twice and am almost done with Mega Man 3, waiting for Nodal and narcodis to finish.

These guys suck at Mario.

Like really suck.

A hundred kinds of butt suck.