Cracked Rabbit Gaming » Life

Frogger: The Later Years (image)

Tommy Gun — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:19:14 +0000

I made this image for a random online game, but since it’s very game related I figured I’d post it here. I made it in response to this caption:

It might be entertaining for the video game fans, but all those hours spent trying to cross the road to get home have left frogger extremely sleep deprived, and exhausted when he gets up for work in the morning.

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Well I feel like an idiot. Comments approved!

Tommy Gun — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 07:17:47 +0000

This site gets so much spam (don’t they all?), that I really don’t bother checking the “marked as spam” comments (I have yet to see a false-positive in there). I have the site configured to email me whenever a real comment gets held for moderation, but for some reason, it stopped emailing me months ago! I haven’t been posting a whole lot recently, and when I post videos I figure most people simply comment on youtube, or on the various sites (NeoGAF, rock band forums, etc.) where I link to the video. Well I finally was going through some settings and found there were tons of comments held for moderation that I didn’t know about! So I went through them all and approved them, and will make sure that doesn’t happen again. Very sincere apologies to anyone who took the time to comment! They were not lost, just delayed!

Of some note are all the great comments on Half-Life 2: Episode 2 – “Little Rocket Man” Gnome Achievement Tips. Nine months later, and people are still leaving comments, which can now be seen! Thanks for all the extra tips!

Another good comment is the review by Eugenio, posted under my Getting Up Review.

So aside from that stuff, I’d just like to say that I will definitely be putting up some Rock Band videos! I wanted to wait until I had better drums, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen anytime soon. I’ll be sure to get some full band videos — we may be having a “Rock Band 2 BBQ” in the next week or so.

I’d also like to get more content up, maybe some more podcasts (I wanted to do a GTAIV podcast, but my roommates took forever to finish the game! I beat it in three days). Now that I promise your comments will be seen — what do you want to see more of on this site? Guides? Gameplay videos? Rabbit Runs? Podcasts? More papercraft videos? :)

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Rock Band: 5-starred Blackened! (expert drums)

Tommy Gun — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:23:22 +0000

I really didn’t expect to do that; I guess it’s all thanks to my new pedal. I still need work on Kool Thing, Hammerhead, The Perfect Drug, and a few others. I added some of my high scores to ScoreHero, and will add more later.

I’ve also been trying to raise my career score, and have almost broken the top 500 on the 360 leaderboards. I’ve been reading about the best overdrive paths to use, so I just thought I’d let everyone know:

Public Service Announcement

Rock Band: Expert Pro Drums 100% flawless scores Here are some of the more notable 100%s I’ve gotten...

The Best Rock Band pedal, 5-starred Disturbed Expert Drums

Tommy Gun — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:52:17 +0000

I haven’t been able to play Rock Band for the last week and a half because our 360 Red Ringed. Luckily, a friend came over today and brought his Xbox, so we swapped HDDs, bought some new songs, and played for a while. I’ve been really wanting to play the MTV pack, and now the new Offspring/Avenged Sevenfold.

I finally decided to just mod the pedal that came with my Yamaha DTXplorer, since I play Rock Band more than Drummania nowadays (and it doesn’t disable the pedal or anything). This is the best Rock Band pedal there is now (click for large):

I tried attaching the sensors under the pedal, like with my last pedal, but the “bounce” of the pedal set it off because it’s too close, which was unplayable. So finally I attached it directly to the beater, which I know other people have tried, and it works perfectly. It goes off right on the beat, and you can do rapid hits and it won’t miss, since the beater has such a large throw. Since it’s from my real set, it has the back which gives great rebound, and it feels soooo nice. Proof that it works as well as I say (no double-bass):

Once we get our new Xbox, I WILL make some videos, I promise!

Rock Band: Expert Pro Drums 100% flawless scores Here are some of the more notable 100%s I’ve gotten...

This picture speaks for itself.

Tommy Gun — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:15:11 +0000

No, I don’t care about Gold Starring it!

Now that my drums are working almost perfectly, I’m trying to raise some of my scores. I just re-calibrated Rock Band, because it still felt off. I tried harder this time and tested it, and it really felt like it made a difference. I basically have to just guess the settings though, because the “calibration tool” never works.

I five-starred a whole bunch of songs: Dead on Arrival (as you can see. I don’t think I’ve played it since the first month we got RB), Next to You (Yes!), March of the Pigs (although I think I’ve only played that one once before, not a huge NIN fan), and some others. I still haven’t gotten 5 on Run to the Hills, but I’m closer (4 and 3/4?).

I even passed Blinded by Fear for the first time (3 stars), but I played cheaply and purposely missed half of the hi-hat notes. If you just alternate hands (hi-hat, snare) and still hit the bass pedal, it’s not too hard, and you’ll still maintain your health. I don’t think I can physically play that song correctly all the way through, it’s just too fast.

So now I only have a small bunch of 4-stars left (including DLC), and just that one 3-star!

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New Server!

Tommy Gun — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:01:52 +0000

You may have noticed CRG has been down for a few weeks, and was a little spotty before that. Well we are now on a completely different, much better host! The old server went down unexpectedly, so some comments were lost, but that’s about it (my backup was about a week old). I also got rid of all the ads!

In other news, my other roommate just bought a PS3, so at some point I might have some PS3 reviews up (though he keeps it in his room, unlike the 360 in our living room). There really aren’t too many PS3 exclusive games I’m interested in playing though — LittleBigPlanet is the main one that comes to mind, and of course a new Twisted Metal if they make one.

Now we just need to get our hands on a Wii, which we’ve been trying to do for a year. We’re all pretty broke at the moment though, so we haven’t been trying that hard.

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AN-I-MAL!!

Tommy Gun — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 03:57:22 +0000

I finally beat the last Expert drum song. I would have done it much sooner, but the final song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” has tons of bass notes towards the end (plus we’ve been playing TONS of BWT mode). If I had a real bass pedal, it wouldn’t have been a problem at all, but the crappy plastic pedal just wears your leg out so quickly. The song itself really isn’t very hard…which is true for most of the songs. Other songs I had some trouble on:

Dead on Arrival:
This was the first song I failed on. Maybe it’s because I really didn’t know this song at all, but it also has a weird pattern that’s pretty fast. I got it on my third or fourth try, scraping by with overdrive.

Foreplay/Long Time:
This song is fun, but the beginning is pretty tough, mostly because of the lack of rebound on the drum pads (haven’t modded yet). There’s a fast “L L R” pattern you need to do, but after that the song is easy.

Next to You:
I forget if I actually failed this song, but it’s definitely hard. Very fast, lots of bass.

Run to the Hills:
Very fast rolls, not very complicated though. The problem was that the pads weren’t registering all the hits, so I failed a few times. On my next try I played really lightly, which helped tremendously, and I passed it. It must have been pretty funny to watch.

In other news, we just got a whole bunch of DLC, including the Metallica pack. I’ll have to see if I can get through Blackened, as that has tons of notes close together. Hyperspeed, please!

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Rock Band Drums: Score Duel TIE! Same 1 note miss! (screenshot)

Tommy Gun — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 12:29:40 +0000

I have a free month of Xbox Live Gold because I just signed up, so I figured I might as well try to get the online achievements while I can. I’m not really an online gamer for the most part, but it was fun. I was trying to get the “five-in-a-row wins” achievement.

I kept running into the same few people online — because it was late, or not many people play on Hard*, or everyone’s playing Guitar.

* I would play Expert, but the songs are random, and I can’t stand playing “Don’t Fear the Reaper” with its ten billion bass notes in a row.

After playing Shoombabi I think two times, we played again and got “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” This was the final result:

TIE! We both missed the SAME SINGLE NOTE! It wasn’t even an off-beat note or anything! It was almost at the very end of the song (the 986th note, not sure how many there are total). I know I hit it, and he said he hit it too, so what’s up? Either both our drums happened to glitch on us at the same time, or the game glitched. Crazy. Who else has gotten a tie (not counting 100% ties)?

Oh, and I did eventually get the achievement. :)

—————————
Update: Regarding the probability of this happening (if it wasn’t just a glitch):

Assuming there are exactly 1000 notes total, for the sake of simplicity, there’s a 1/1000 chance of randomly selecting a “chosen” note. ~~But we BOTH missed the same note, which would be:~~

~~1/1000 * 1/1000 = 1 in 1,000,000!~~

Correction by WildBillKickoff:

Actually, the chances of missing the same note in a scenario like that would be 1 in 1000, assuming you both intentionally missed one random note. You can’t count the first 1 in 1000. It’s one in a million that you would both miss that one exact note.

However, that probability is only if we CHOSE to only miss one note! But we didn’t, we *accidentally* each missed only one note, and it was the same note. We could have missed more notes. So there’s the probability that we each missed one note only, and the probability that it was the same note, and the probability that we were playing against each other when it happened, and…. [insert head spinning emoticon]

Anyway, the point is, it was very unlikely!

Rock Band: Expert Pro Drums 100% flawless scores Here are some of the more notable 100%s I’ve gotten...

It’s time to ROCK! How we got Rock Band, and what’s to come.

Tommy Gun — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 19:28:30 +0000

I’ve been crazy excited about Rock Band ever since it was announced. Even after hearing about how tons of people’s guitars/drums were breaking after a few hours, I just had to get it; largely because relatives were over for the holidays, and I wanted to play it with them.

I finally got a chance to get it (on Black Friday, ugh), even though I was about to go to sleep. We ran over to Target (close by, and I called first to make sure they had it), came back, and played for four or five hours straight. After everyone left, I played a bit of the solo tour for another hour, then went to sleep. Six hours later, I heard my roommates getting home, so I jumped out of bed, ran downstairs, and we played for another five hours. It was a strange couple of days. We don’t have any Guitar Hero guitars for the 360 yet, so we only played with three people (me on drums, and my roommates switching mic/guitar).

Now we’ve “completed” the Band World Tour (BWT) mode, and some questions I had are answered, so I’m going to be posting a lot about it soon. I have been writing a huge review, but decided to break it up into multiple posts instead.

There’s a new category specifically for Rock Band, so you can always go there to find the new updates.

Rock Band: Expert Pro Drums 100% flawless scores Here are some of the more notable 100%s I’ve gotten...

Second Life: “Burning Life” going on RIGHT NOW!

Tommy Gun — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:50:55 +0000

Forget everything you’ve heard about Second Life (SL), if you’ve never tried it. Two years ago I joined (and this was back when you had to PAY to join!), after seeing the Burning Life 2004 video (embedded below). Burning Life (BL) is the Second Life version of Burning Man, and it is the reason you should check out SL, right now. The event ends on October 1st, so you still have time, but don’t put it off! It’s free!
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Read the rest of Second Life: “Burning Life” going on RIGHT NOW! (426 words)

CRG mentioned in NGamer magazine! Twice! (scans)

Tommy Gun — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 12:51:39 +0000

A while back KieranMcClung commented that my Donkey Konga video was in NGamer magazine. I finally got some issues, so I took some pics.

NGamer is a fairly new UK Nintendo magazine (and, might I say, a pretty damn cool one. I’d get a subscription if I could). Some months they do a list of the top Nintendo “happenings” around the world. In issue #5 (Jan 2007), they did a top 15, and my konga video got #3:

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Read the rest of CRG mentioned in NGamer magazine! Twice! (scans) (168 words)

How my Nintendo DS helped us change a tire

Tommy Gun — Sun, 06 May 2007 22:44:04 +0000

It was 3 am this morning, and we were at a friend’s house. Some people were hungry, so three of us decided to go drive over to a fast food restaurant. I just went along for the ride. Well, this quick trip to get food resulted in some wrong turns, and getting pulled over for speeding (he let us go). Then, distracted looking for the right street, my friend ran into the curb, popping the tire:

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Read the rest of How my Nintendo DS helped us change a tire (128 words)

Rhythm Tengoku guides! (and: moving!)

Tommy Gun — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:58:47 +0000

Sorry this took so long! I’ve been working on this for a while, and hoped to have it up earlier. I did not write this guide (more info here), but I added screenshots and other images, as well as formatted the whole thing. I think it turned out really great, one of the best guides on CRG yet. I still have the “bonus” page to put up, but here it is so far:

http://crackedrabbitgaming.com/guides/gba/rhythm-tengoku/

In other news…
Part of the reason this took so long is that I’m moving! We (me and two of my friends) just got a new house, so I’ve been busy with that. I’ll have much more space there, so I hope to film some new videos soon.

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GameStop’s Business Strategy

Tommy Gun — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 12:06:18 +0000

I was at GameStop the other day, and saw something amusing (the yellow “USED” sticker is GameStop’s):
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Read the rest of GameStop’s Business Strategy (56 words)

Police brutality in “Bully”

Tommy Gun — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:24:46 +0000

I’m totally addicted to Bully. In fact, I’m 35 hours into Okami, and stopped playing it because I got bored (it’s great, but just won’t end!). I can’t stop playing Bully. Now I remember why I was so hooked on GTA III. You’re always being rewarded for everything you do, and if you’re ever bored, you do something different. School classes are actually fun in this game, and really help you. It feels weird to say, “Damn, I’m late for class!” while playing a video game (although I guess if I were still in school I’d be saying it all the time while playing games).

Here’s an odd glitch that happened to me:
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Read the rest of Police brutality in “Bully” (308 words)

Elite Beat Agents song list revealed!

Tommy Gun — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 04:47:28 +0000

We don’t normally post news items here, but since we run one of the largest Ouendan fansites, we just had to comment.

It’s finally here, via Wired’s Game|Life, the Elite Beat Agents song list:

Walkie Talkie Man – Steriogram

ABC – Jackson Five

Sk8er Boi – Avril Lavigne

I Was Born to Love You – Queen

Rock This Town – Stray Cats

Highway Star – Deep Purple

Y.M.C.A. – Village People

September – Earth, Wind and Fire

Canned Heat – Jamiroquai

Material Girl – Madonna

La La – Ashlee Simpson

You’re the Inspiration – Chicago

Survivor – Destiny’s Child

Without a Fight – Hoobastank

Believe – Cher

Let’s Dance – David Bowie

Jumpin Jack Flash – Rolling Stones

Makes No Difference – Sum 41

The Anthem – Good Charlotte

I actually waited a day to post this just so I could get over my initial feelings. My first reaction was shock, and sickness. Avril? ASHLEE? WHAT? I just didn’t know what to do. I felt so lost and confused, like that time in High School when I really liked this cheerleader, but then I heard her telling her friend how much she loved Star Wars: Episode 1. When something so good clashes with something so bad, it feels like you just got punched in the stomach. That’s how you made me feel, EBA song list.

The “best comment” award goes to BLADEMARU:

La La….f’n La La made it on that list.

Why not throw Hollaback Girl and London Bridge on there too, then we’ll have a trifecta of crap.

I couldn’t agree more. Thankfully, those didn’t make it. If you actually don’t know those songs, trust me, you’re lucky.

Keiichi Yano, the EBA designer, said, “Also there are obviously songs that are just rhythmically fun to play!” I’m sure that’s true with probably all of those songs. Pop music is catchy, without a doubt. But I would rather stab my DS in the face than go for the high score on an Ashlee song. I can only hope that, as with Ouendan, these are all covers, and sound much different than the originals. After all, one of my biggest problems with Ashlee is Ashlee. Now there’s just the problem with her music being a pile of garbage, but Mr. Clean teamed up with Scrubbing Bubbles can’t help that.

My other problem with the list is that some of these songs are overplayed in general (YMCA), and some of these are even overplayed in other music games: “ABC” is in Taiko Drum Master, “Believe” and “Let’s Dance” are in DDR, “Rock This Town” is in Donkey Konga, and “The Anthem” is in Donkey Konga 2 — but I guess that’s just what I get for playing so many music games. For most people, that won’t be a problem.

I admit that there’s more to the game than just the music; the stories are a big part of it. However, after the first few times, I skip all the cutscenes and go for high scores, which leaves just the music. And I will never be okay with “La La.”

In the end, I just have to remember that there are only a couple songs on there that I really hate, and overall it’s a good list. I’m sure it’ll still be fun, and I’m still excited about it. Some people are saying that if you’re a true Ouendan fan, you should buy EBA no matter what. I disagree. But even if you hate half the songs on it, you’ll have fun with the other half. Plus, if it sells well, there’s always the chance of a sequel, and you might really like the songs on that one.

HOT NEWS ITEM! GameStop’s Wish List lies I use wish lists on various sites to track prices...

“His hair sucks!”, and other creative comments.

Tommy Gun — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 19:04:44 +0000

After the amazing response to the Guitar Hero videos I put up, I just wanted to take a moment to respond to some of the comments.

People seem to like to comment on my hair. That’s not surprising, every time I go out someone asks me if they can touch my spikes (and I always let them). But some comments make it sound like I’m the only person on the planet with spikes! (Go to any punk show and look around. I’m not the only one!) The funniest part about it is that all the recent comments happened to be for my Guitar Hero video — now go get the Guitar Hero case and look at the cover. What’s on it? A guy with spiked hair! (See image at right. Spiked mohawk, but still.)

Anyway, to save you time, I’d like to present you with the following suggestions for next time:
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Read the rest of “His hair sucks!”, and other creative comments. (379 words)

Stop making me Crazy.

Tommy Gun — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 21:47:00 +0000

I shop at used game stores a lot. The GameStop near me has been having “buy 2 get 1 free” since December, so I’ve been buying tons of games. The thing is, I always feel like they’re judging me every time I buy something (usually many things). I’ll get comments like, “Oh, well at least you’re getting ______.” So every other game I got is total crap? Listen, I know you work at a game store, and you don’t know me, but that doesn’t mean I just randomly pick stuff off the shelves because of the pretty boxes. I know what games I’m buying. What exactly are the qualifications needed to work at a used game store, anyway?

To be fair most of the people seem cool, and seem to really like games, but do they have to be so damn condescending all the time?
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Read the rest of Stop making me Crazy. (718 words)

A counterfeit GBA ring operating out of my car hole! Er, ebay!

Tommy Gun — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 20:12:39 +0000

I realize I’m a bit late to the party here, as this has been written about many times before on the net, and even Nintendo has their own site about it. Unfortunately, I never saw any of those sites until after I got burned. I frequently scour ebay for good deals on games, particularly handhelds. One such good deal was a used copy of “The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap” for a crazy-low Buy-It-Now price of about $14 including shipping, when the stores sell it used for $27! I’ve gotten a lot of DS games for really cheap, and they’re all in great condition complete with box/manual, so I thought it was just another good find. I grabbed it right away, being totally unaware that there are tons of GBA scammers out there.
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Read the rest of A counterfeit GBA ring operating out of my car hole! Er, ebay! (677 words)

Me and Tim Schafer are totally BFF.

Tommy Gun — Sun, 07 May 2006 12:59:09 +0000

If you’ve read my little bio, you know that I co-own a yo-yo store. You also know that I love Psychonauts. After getting some stuff from the Double Fine store, I noticed they just got yo-yos! I wrote them back to thank them for the stuff I got, and also:

Email to Double Fine, 5/1/06:

By the way, in the description of the 2HB yo-yo it says they were originally used as weapons, but that’s not true, it’s just a myth. I know most people won’t care, but I thought I’d mention it. It kind of irks people in the yo-yoing community.

Well today I was reading their news page and saw this (bold italics mine, click on the thumbnail to see the full post):

Friday, Cinco de Mayo, 2005 — (they meant 2006)

Since our last post, some helpful readers have tried to inform us that Yo-Yos were never actually used as weapons, as we had claimed in our Yo-Yo product description. Luckily, it was just this one guy, and even more lucky was the fact that I was up in a tree branch when he said it, and he was standing right below me, so I was able to quickly Yo-Yo him to death.

Yes! I was almost indirectly mentioned in the news section on Double Fine! Life just keeps getting sweeter, my friend. I knew this pointless yo-yo knowledge would come in handy one day….

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