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The first half of season 1 is kind of hit-and-miss, and you probably won't like the "Cutie Mark Crusaders" all that much at first. The show ramps up in quality as you go along, though.
Season 2 is -amazing-. There's only been two episodes this season I haven't much cared for, and one of them is alright because a talking minotaur makes it awesome.
She's now directly sending out stuff in Twilight's voice.
Personally, I vastly approve of this. New content is always welcome. Plus the remixers/Youtubers have more stuff to work with.
Also, hope you feel better soon MiracleManS! I just got over my sinus infection, and during midterms too! D-:
Beyond it there's ten seconds flat, etc etc.
So most of you probably know about all of the Dance Dance Revolution/Stepmania dancing-game stuff. A couple of you might have even seen folks who are REALLY good at the game to the point where you wonder how they manage to move their legs that fast.
Well, there's apparently some sort of small event that goes down somewhere called a "Sightreading Tournament", or SRT, where folks who are crazy-amazing at this game go to compete with one another/celebrate/whatever.
The SRT game itself is crafted as an independent game with it's own story and such, different each year, usually consisting of Touhou and the like, it seems. It starts off intermediate-to-high, but cranks up in difficulty to really high levels later on. what makes it unique however, is that, as if playing tough DDR isn't hard enough, they use visual gimmicks/obstructions/warping to make even seeing the right arrows to press really difficult.
I suppose the Touhou stuff is kind of appropriate, given the absurd difficulty.
Well. This year...the SRT's theme was...ponies.
Complete with intro and all.
(Try to ignore the guys commenting in the background.)
I've gone through the trouble of organizing everything into a playlist, as their page doesn't do exactly the best job of making sure everything is in order, so I've went ahead and collected them all together from this year's event. I HIGHLY recommend checking it out if this seems interesting to you at all (and even if it doesn't).
The playlist is here.
The tourney's split into two acts, each with a boss battle of sorts, and then finally a Phantasm Stage, which is supposed to be the balls-to-the-wall final battle.
To give an idea of what this whole thing is like, I'll select a few videos to show here. I'd highly recommend checking these out if nothing else.
First off, a small taste of what the skill level hereabouts is like. This is Stage 2 of the first act. This is still while the whole thing is warming up, before they do any actual sightjacking.
There's some minor sightjacking in the first act towards the end, with it all coming to a head at the Possessed Twilight Boss Battle
(Yes, Tom is made good use of here. Also, DAT NIGHTMARE TWILIGHT TRANSFORMATION)
Act 2 is where sightjacking regularly comes into play, with actual warping being made use of now. I decided to pick this one because I thought it was, visually, very impressive use of the song's beat. Plus, Lynx, you HAVE to see this one. (It's got Vinyl Scratch in it)
Boss Battle of Act 2 is Rainbow Dash, and DAMN. It's great.
And of course, if you skipped all of the other videos...
Yukari and Discord for the final battle to save the fabric of reality.
Again, the whole thing is just amazing. Check out the playlist for the full thing, plus goodies I haven't told about.
Thoughts?
This is incredible.
Those people you mentioned that move so fast that you can't think its possible - I'm one of those people. Though I'm a couple years out of regular practice, I mastered the three PS2-era DDR games by Konami, and all but destroyed the first In The Groove (Which was LEAGUES better than Konami's games). I play everything on the hardest difficulty and love it. (I also lost a TON of weight playing the game during college).
A lot of those distraction effects and techniques are in In The Groove, but they seriously took the difficulty to the next level with some of those effects. The Tom sequence... my Lord. How?
Do you know if these people are actually playing by standing on a pad, or are they using their hands in some way? It sounds like it might be a pad, but it's hard to tell. I know Stepmania is generally played with a keyboard. Some of the patterns on the Nightmare Twilight boss fight were so fast, I can't imagine that someone held combo and did so well. I've seen some of the best out there play DDR on a pad, and even at that, some of these patterns just look impossible.
Awesome stuff though. I wonder if I can get my hands on that, I'd love to play it.
*edit - found this video. It's the same cabinet that the above videos are recorded off of, so they're definitely playing with their feet. Pads look modified, looks like it just requires contact to trigger, so that may be helping with these players' speed. Incredible effort by these players. Considering DDR is all but dead these days, I would assume players like this to be the best of the best.
Sounds like inter-team politics got the best of them. Though what this story sounds like, the guy in charge got pissy because people weren't liking his ideas, he removed one of them that got in a debate with him, and the others mutinied, picked up their collective creative balls, and took 'em home. I think it might be interesting to hear the perspective of the other team members.
What a terrible way for a great project to end.
This is the latest video on their YouTube channel displaying the latest published state of the game's development.
I was so looking foward to flying around as a pegasus. They had some amazing ideas, TONS of custom music made for this thing, and months of work with this, and it's sad to see this all blow up in catfight drama. Damn it.
Too bad though, I hadn't heard of this but it probably could have been fun to just screw around on once in awhile.
That's kind of a dick move. Yeah, I have a feeling this is all about something childish.
Either he's trying to pretend right now that it doesn't exist, or he's hiding the videos to spite the work of his fellows.
This is bullshit. It sucks for EVERYONE that this had to happen. Why is he just going and making it worse?
What a disgrace.
Well, if he wants to control and own everything on a group-based project, he got half of his wish.
There's no rumors, lies, or speculation in the fact that I certainly wouldn't want to do a project FOR FREE under a guy like that.
On the other hand, great news on the fact that the 99% of the staff that left (and did most of the actual work we all saw) seem to be working on a very similar project, with the same intent. So at least it's still coming, albiet under a different banner.
At least we're 99% sure to get a completed Fighting is Magic, and I think PonyKart is likely to finish as well.
99% of the staff of Equestria Online has taken all of their work from September and beyond (for a frame of reference, most of what we've currently seen of the project was showcased in JANUARY) and slapped it into Legends of Equestria. So essentially what's happened is that they're pretty much doing business as usual, without a grabby project leader who wants lordship over all of the (FREE!) work they're doing, and knew about all of the terms and stuff they'd come up with well in advance while all of this was going on.
Essentially, we're getting the same thing, just under a different name, and under new management. So it's still -coming-. That's the good news in all of this.
No money is being charged for this, and the mane six will not actually be in the game. They're being rather careful about that sort of thing.
Their videos went over that issue better than I could, but unfortunately they're unavailable.