Endy

FF5 Job Fiesta after thoughts

The other day I finished a playthrough of Final Fantasy V for the Four Job Fiesta, which is a donation drive of sorts for Child’s Play. People make pledges based on how many people finish over the course of two months, or other things, etc. The basic gist of it, on the game playing side, is that you get 4 jobs, one from each crystal in the game, and you must use all four of those jobs at all times, and only those four jobs. The jobs are doled out at random through a twitter bot. My four jobs? Thief, Summoner, Bard, Dancer. If it sounds rough, which several people told me it was, it wasn’t that bad, which is particularly why I figured I give my thoughts and experience with this party. 

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evo2k11

The final day of evo2k11 is starting shortly, and I have been staying up to catch most of the finals for SSFIVAE and MvC3.  If you haven’t been watching and have any sort of interest in competitive fighting games, today is the day to tune in, with the top 8 for all 5 major games going on, along with a Street Fighter 3 exhibition and other surprises.  

If you don’t know anything about who is playing, here is some stuff I wrote for a small forum I frequent about the top 8 for the two Capcom fighting games present.

SSFIVAE Top 8 Rundown:

Winners Bracket:
Daigo Umehara
Little to say about Daigo, every knows that he’s a hard as nails player playing a hard as nails character. At Norcal Regionals 9 they ran a concept match between him and the player that beat him last year, Fillipino Champ. 2 sets, one with him Ryu, one with him playing Yun, both against FChamp’s Dhalsim. The Ryu set lasted 20 minutes and came down to the wire with Champ winning. The Yun set lasted 5 minutes, 2-0 Daigo. Watch it here. His road to top 8 was paved with the blood of American veterans John Choi and Alex Valle, and his team mate and friend Tokido.

Poongko
The machine from Korea who plays Seth of all characters. A lot of people were debating if he would go far or fizzle out because of his erratic play style, but it’s gotten him all the way to Top 8. To Poongko’s Pedigree, he won the Australian Shadowloo Shodown against top Japanese player Momochi, using Yun, who according to several players, thought was going to go undefeated. And Poongko beat him convincingly. Watch it here. On his way to Top 8, he beat Fillipino Champ and FlashMetroid.

Latif
A C Viper Player from Arizona, and an online warrior, who appeared out of no where for the East Coast Super Battle Opera, a Japanese Team Tournament, Qualifiers, and took the whole damn thing by himself (because he teammate didn’t even take a single round, let alone a whole game). However, he forfeited it to second place. Sadly no videos for this tournament are on youtube yet, but is in its entirety here. He made his way to top 8 by destroying Justin Wong and Korean favorite Infiltration.

Fuudo
I don’t know shit about Fuudo beyond that he plays Fei Long and plays him well, and should probably just be called ‘the Mountain’ regardless of his play style. He sent boy Singapore’s hopefuly Kun Xian and Detroit’s hero Wolfkrone into losers.


Losers Bracket
Flash Metroid 
Flash Metroid is an Florida player that uses primarily Zangief and C Viper. He is an all around decent player, though I know him more for his odd but effective team choices in MvC3. Funny enough, he got to where he is by beating other well known Marvel players, Shady K and Combofiend. He also beat player DR Ray, who beat out strong players such as Vangief, Gamerbee, and JWong.

Kindevu
An oldschool CvS2 and GG player from Japan, using Yun of course for Street Fighter. Hailed as ‘the Genius’, he took 3rd place in Japan’s national tournament in 09, and then was crowned the National Champ of Japan in 2010, and also won SBO that year as well. He took out European player Evans, and was the one that eliminated FChamp from the tournament.

Wolfkrone
My pick to win it all, a C. Viper player out of Detroit: Online Warrior, Pad Warrior. He’s actually the EVO top seed, having won countless online and offline tournaments playing on a PS3 controller. He has a super sick style that’s just awesome to watch. You can see his real breakout moment here. If you ever cross paths with ‘porkloafking’ on XBL, say your prayers. He put child prodigy, CJTruth, into losers, and eliminated Mago from the tournament to seal his spot.

Tokido
MurderFace aka the 2D God, Tokido fucking plays everything, so he’ll be in top 8 for MvC and BBCS too. He plays Akuma just so he can be a total dick. Along his way her took out Momochi’s Yun and Texas’s best player, Hsien Chang, before getting put into losers by Daigo, and finished off lovable weirdo Juicebox.

If I were putting real money down on EVO events, I would not have put any actual cash on outcomes for MvC, as it is far far too unpredictable. As a testament to that, an 8-year-old boy named Noah made it as far, or farther than, both Daigo and Tokido. Daigo humbly admitted that his skills were not on par to what the Americans were putting up, and Tokido just said fuck it and got top 8 in Blazblue and Tekken instead.

Here is the Marvel top 8 Rundown:

Winners’ Side
PR Balrog (Dante/Wolverine/Tron)
PR Rog is a SF player that has had a hard time transitioning to AE, but has made strides in MvC3. Though he hasn’t had any 1st place wins, he has been taking some respectable finishes at majors all over the states. Sadly because of this I really don’t have a highlight video for him, but he did send vets Sanford Kelly and Combofiend into losers. Though he’s an underdog, you could do worse rooting for him. 

 
Filipino Champ (Phoenix/Sentinel/Magneto)
If PR Rog is the underdog Face, then FChamp is the underdog Heel, and not just because he plays Phoenix. Another person who is taking the shift to AE shittily, he’s made some strides in Marvel as well with his own handful of high-place finishes. He has a reputation for his shitty temper, but if he can keep cool and not be a dumb shitty showboat, he has a good chance of winning. If not, he’ll probably burst into tears like he did last year when he was eliminated from SF pools.

Viscant (Wesker/Haggar/Phoenix)
Here’s a likable guy that plays Phoenix! Viscant is another MvC2-come-MvC3 player, and is one of the top ranked MIGHTY LORDS on XBL. He won the ReveLAtions MvC tournament a while ago, though that might be because Justin was over in Florida getting blown up by Tokido. Viscant is also kind enough to give away his secrets in this MvC3 tutorial produced by CrossCounterTV. On his way to the top he took out MvC2 king clockwork, and TvC champion Marn.

Justin Wong (She Hulk/Wolverine/Akuma)
What Daigo is to Street Fighter, Justin is to Marvel. There isn’t much to say about him, as he’s been winning tournaments or taking 2nd/3rd when applicable. Rumor mill says he has some secret tech he’s been saving up for Finals, and he might need it to take care of Viscant. 

Losers Bracket
Mine (Wesker/Taskmaster/Phoenix)
Mine is an idiot and isn’t going to win. He almost won NorCal Regionals 9, but then he went 1 and 6 with Justin in grand finals. He did beat Marn, but at this point who hasn’t?

Combofiend (Spencer/Taskmaster/She Hulk)
How could he lose? He has a Bionic Arm! Combofiend took a solid stand by winning the game’s first post-release major, Final Round, beating Marn in loser’s finals and Justin Wong in winner’s finals. However, since then he’s only been making top 8s and no 1st prizes. He built his spot in top 8 against Canada’s favorite Detrimantix and the ever impressive flOe.

Noel Brown (Wesker/Wolverine/Akuma)
What is this shit head doing here? People continually doubt how good Noel Brown is, and don’t get me wrong, he’s pretty good, but he’s not a contender for 1st place. He’s also an angry retard. To show how he manages to be bad, Justin Wong once attempted to throw a tournament match, and Noel managed to lose 2 games anyway. And then we found out it was so flOe could beat him in grand finals instead. He managed to eliminate Santhrax and HORI’s AndyOCR some how. Other notable victories including punching a heckler on stream and breaking a Sambo de Amigo machine in the process. NerdJosh’s mom has gone on the record to say he is an ass.

X-Ray (Dante/Amaterasu/Magneto)
I can’t put a location or name on X-Ray, but he beat clockwork. He is the darkest of the dark horse’s in top 8, and to top it off: no wolverine, wesker, phoenix, sentinel, etc in his team.

Sadly, as far as Blazblue and Tekken go, I don’t know shit, but I can tell you about two of the top 8 for MK9:

Chris G is my pick to win it.  He recently took 2nd Place in MK9 at East Coast Throwdown, losing only to Michelangelo, who is out of this tourney.  ChrisG also won CEO2011 by beating Tom Brady, who was though to be the best after his win at Power Up, who is also out of EVO as well.  Chris plays a mean as fuck Reptile, so be on the look out for him.

PerfectLegend is also a top candidate in my eyes.  A former DOA player, he’s learned under the tutelage of Tom Brady for bother that game and MK9, taking second place at Power Up.  He also won the MLG Columbus event for MK9 as well.  He was considered top pick for the PDP MK9 $10,000 tournament, but lost, and later blamed it on having to use PDP’s shitty products on twitter.  However, both the 1st and 2nd place winners of that tournament, JWong and flOe, were in ChrisG’s pool, and both eliminated.

You’ll be able to watch the festivities here, but you can get a lower bit rate stream here if you have shitty internet like me.  

Now I am going to go nap so I can wake up for the SFIII exhibition, and hopefully hear about how awesome the grand finals between ChrisG and PerfectLegend in MK9 were.

HDD Failure: Remorseful News

As I returned from class today and was heading up my backdoor, I could see the monitor in my room from the deck.  What I saw was red.  I had left spinrite going when I left for school today.

I rush on upstairs to find that SpinRite has crashed.  Doesn’t tell me how far along it was when it crashed, but that it crashed while it was running isn’t good at all.  I was running a more comprehensive “Level 4”/”Maintenance” run to check out the drive, and that took a long ass time.  I had been running it on and off since last week and it was only at 50% when I left, no clue where it was when it ate it. 

So now I need to run it again, but this time I’m going with a lower level data recovery process, which should take much much less time. I think the rate for that process is about 2GB/minute so it should wrap up by the time I get home tomorrow if I start it tonight. 

Thursday I’m going to go into Best Buy and get a new HDD and force a copy off the old one just to be safe.  And then it’ll be business as usual, out 60 bucks.  But my data’ll be safe, and I’ll have a partition readily set aside for Win7.

In more pleasant news, I think I may go get an iPhone on Thursday.  Just need to pick up my previous paycheck and cash it so I have cash on hand. 

HDD Failure: The Great Journey 1

I haven’t had the time to catch up on my 30 day posting, but I’ll have time today to crank the next one out, and line up the next couple.

Before I left this morning, I checked the progress of my touhou music torrent. It’s a 156 GB torrent of remixes from the Touhou Project games.  Most of said remixes suck, but I only aim to extract the good ones for my ipod.  So I check utorrent and find that is not going.  I go to find why:

Cyclic Redundancy Check.

Basically this means my HDD has a bad sector because I stressed it the hell out with all my torrenting.  Super.  This means that its on its way out the door.  This is my 1TB Drive too.  

I’ve never had a HDD fail on me before, so I go googling around for fixes and shit.  So far it seems I can salvage the drive for a while longer, but it could cop out at really any moment.  I unplugged it before I took off so I would make sure that it wouldn’t die while I was away or something ridiculous like that.  The way this week has been going that’s what would happen.

Currently my plan is to run the processes to repair/salvage it the best I can when I get home, and order a replacement drive ASAP.  Usually the month before Youmacon I start saving up, but it seems this time I’m going to start pissing away.

Plan of Attack:

• Salvage/Repair what I can of the 1TB drive. 
• Order a new 1TB drive for general storage needs.
• Change torrenting habits to prolong old drive’s life, ie not running at all hours of the day.
• Only use old drive as a mediator.  Copy completed files to DVD or new drive.
• Wait for old drive to finally eat it.
• Buy a new, smaller (200-300GB would do) drive for torrent mediator.
• Give all HDDs sexy names because I’m a nerd.