PlasmaFire.org

Last night was our DDR organization’s turn to host an event for LateNight PennState, held at the HUB-Robeson student center. While the club, aptly named “Dance Dance Maniacs,” did their duty with panel dance video games for the common people, one of the guys (Joseph Sherman) in our club headed over to the nearby pool room to do some work on the In the Groove 2‘s pads. I followed up later to check it out, and it was safe to say that the inside of the dance pads looked…really bad. Not so much that the sensors didn’t do their job of recognizing taps, but the dirt and grime that built up over the months couldn’t be removed by merely blowing and wiping on the internals. Interesting, considering a snug 1/4″-thick slab of Lexan (for each arrow) covered the box of electronics and sensors.

Since a picture would describe well, here’s one such box before any significant cleaning. Pardon the cell phone images:

We decided that one of the Lexan arrow panels would make a good photo prop. (in order: Joseph Sherman, myself, Jason Gilleece)

“I’m in your base, stealing your arrowz.”

Nevermind. The cleaning effort wasn’t really worth it then; we’re gonna need some heavier-duty equipment.

Only months ago, I never knew that the In the Groove series of panel dance games could be so much fun – more so than the DDR line, for that matter. I don’t know for sure if it’s due to the more diverse step patterns, the great music selection, or just because it’s not a Konami game (or, at least wasn’t); hey, it’s more than just a Dance Dance Revolution clone.

And so, I finally passed an Expert song several days ago on the HUB-Robeson student center’s ITG2 machine. “This is Rock and Roll,” 9-foot. On a side note, if a C+ were my grade for the most recent CSE 297A exam, I would’ve been extremely pleased; too bad ITG2 and computer science can’t trade places. :/

Hard to believe that only a year ago, I wouldn’t even touch an arcade dance machine, nevermind a soft pad. Next goals: get better than a C+ for this song, and pass “D-Code” on Expert (because it sounds great and has equally-good steps). The following screenshot isn’t worth posting on GrooveStats.com, anyway.

Today’s episode of “Another Halo Comic Strip,” hosted on Halo.Bungie.org, made me laugh a little more on the inside than usual. Not that AHCS is humorless or anything (ZZoMBiE13 has made some amazing and hilarious works since he joined HBO in 2003), but this one brings back memories of former enemies from the original Halo: Combat Evolved. I find it rather interesting that only two days from now will be the 1-month anniversary of Halo 3‘s release.

“Another Halo Comic Strip #6 – Nostalgia: Evolved“

Similar to a post in RELAy several months back, I’ve continued to make more simfiles and YouTube autoplay videos for StepMania 3.9. This time around, I have a non-lagging version of Animusic‘s “Stick Figures” and a brand-new stepfile built around Animusic‘s “Drum Machine.” The latter was a lot of fun to make, but I’d say it’s very difficult even for experienced keyboard players; actually dancing to it on a pad would impress me immensely because of the number of 3/4-panel hands involved. Finally, there’s a tricky negative BPM/mine-laced singles file created around Jimmy Luxury’s thumping “Cha Cha Cha” track.

All of these simfiles are Challenge difficulty, with “Stick Figures” clocking in at 12-foot difficulty rating (for a dance pad), “Drum Machine” at 13 (keyboard), and “Cha Cha Cha” at a whopping 20 (dance pad). Each video has a second version where I turn on the assist tick so that viewers can understand the rhythm better; for couple-type tracks such as “Stick Figures,” the tick is enabled for just the left side instead.

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It’s interesting how I’ve moved around the scene of PlasmaFire.org over the years. Blogging in general, too. For one thing, I’ve never turned serious about weblog writing at all; between my very first Xanga post and my final RELAy.PlasmaFire.org writeup, one could possibly tell the inconsistencies that abound. Respectively, I still can’t get myself away from using netspeak and l33tspeak (LOL, JK kthxbai… :/), nor can I ever complete a simple writeup of an anime convention experience. The only exception would probably be the Tesla Coil Graduation Project, but that was never summarized in full detail during the aftermath: I never wrote up what happened after the device was completed and presented to my Physics II class.

The PlasmaFire.org domain is quite a journey in itself. Back in 2005, I thought about creating a website dedicated to figuring out how science was used in the production and play of video games. It came to be “PlasmaFire.org – Video Game Science HQs.” Rather a low-key name, but what really killed it, along with the forums (COMm.PlasmaFire.org), was my lack of time to write worthwhile articles. Yes, the founder became unfounded in his premise. The community died a quiet death due to a conversion from phpbb to SMF forums, and more importantly, a switch from the Mambo CMS, to Xaraya, and finally to Drupal. Ah well, it’s lamenting something that someone else could easily take up and expand upon by someone else–or some other community (take Stephen Loftus, who wrote several pages about Halo‘s science and story for Halo.Bungie.org, or the Halo Science 101 article on Gamasultra.com). If anything ever comes to mind once again, I’ll write it…assuming there’s time apart from college.

So as of today, welcome to the new, and possibly final destination, of PlasmaFire.org; it is now mostly a slice of Kevin’s life again. Enjoy!