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The Narrows Beta tournament
Today was a LOOOOOOOOONG day.
To sum up: I qualified 28th out of 57 people (and 32 actually got to play) in tech; was double eliminated quickly; won the costume contest (a 3rd mix marquee!) because I was the only person in costume; and then botched my act in freestyle, not that it REALLY mattered anyway.
Allan, a guy I'd talked to on the DDR BBS, offered to give me a ride to Narrows. So I called him at 8am, put on my Alice costume, and he came here at 9am, and then we were on our way.
Got there around 10... a bunch of people were already there, not too many though. I met Amber, who is quite an interesting person, to say the least. She was running the tournament. I signed up... the qualifying songs were Orion.78 Civ Mix Light and Let The Beat Hit 'Em Really Bogus mix. Whee. I decided to try O.78 because I know I know it better than LTBHE. Then I went to warm up on the 5th mix machine. Tagged along with a girl who was playing... (turns out she's Cracker's girlfriend)... played some songs with her, mostly maniac. She picked Matsuri Japan as the last one. I figured WTH, it couldn't hurt to try it again. So I did. I passed! Wow. I can last through Matsuri Japan. This is new and different. My legs were killing me for 5 mins later when I had to qualify though. Still... I put on a really decent show. I got umm... 45 greats, out of 232. That sounds pretty lousy, but... well, so qualifying took like two hours. There were a LOT of people (57 in all, eventually) qualifying, and then there were tiebreakers. And there was this guy driving up from Portland who was running a little late, so they waited for him. (This guy, "Dancing Jedi", was AMAZING. He got out of his car, ran inside, was told "go go qualify now!" and he apparently said "but I really have to pee!" and they said "no now now" and he got up there and qualified with LTBHE, and got 2 greats. Only 2. No warmup, no nothing. Oh man.)
Anyway, it was funny... qualifiers happened, and I hung out playing other bemani games. Derick and Dylan showed up at one point and we did Para Para, and I played on the Beatmania CM2 machine, and some KBM, etc. And I talked to Casey for a while again, which was cool, since he rocks. Eventually they put "the writing on the wall" as it were. Nykkel and Farren both came up to me like "Well, the good news is, you qualified. The bad news is, you're up against Tanya in the first round." I was apparently 28 out of 32. Farren was 12 or so. Still, wow, I qualified! WOW! "At least I get two games!" It was double elim.
Well, after a while things got underway. Tanya is, for those not up on the Seattle scene, one of the top tech players around here. So I knew damned well I was going to lose. Still. We got the card... it had, umm - CSFIL, Candy Heart, Era, .59, and The Whistle Song, all on Light. We were both like "god, these all suck" and so I eliminated Whistle because I just hate that song. Tanya eliminated Era. (!?!?!?!) After she windexed down her side of the stage, we played Candy Heart first. I actually WON. I got 8 greats, and she only got 3, but she got a miss, which was worth my 8 greats, so holy shit. She won the next two, but I actually put in a decent performance (only getting 30 or less greats for three songs, nothing less than great). Whee.
So I went into the loser's bracket, playing the guy that Farren beat in the first round. It took a while for them to get to the loser's bracket though... I wandered around and watched some matches and talked to some people. An interesting one:
GPF Lith (if you don't know who he is, he is the BEST DDR player in the Pacific Northwest) was up against this 8-year-old girl in the first round. The 8-year-old girl was the daughter of the arcade owner. She apparently qualified 32nd. Poor girl... she got STOMPED. Of course, Poor Lith... it must have sort of sucked to be up against someone almost 1/4th his age. :) He did get one great in three songs (so for those not counting, that's two AAAs).
Eventually my second match came up. We got the card; it had Burning Heat Standard, Drop the Bomb Maniac, Tsugaru Standard, Fantasy MAX2 Heavy, and some other song I forget (Lovin' You maybe). I eliminated Fantasy and the other guy eliminated the other forgotten song. We played Burning Heat first. I WON. I won by like 1 good though. It was insane, we were practically perfectly tied. Second song: Tsugaru. I was dumb and put it on 1.5, having played everything else on 1.0. Fuck. I lost by like 4 perfects. Then I just totally botched Drop the Bomb - I just don't know it very well. So. There went my second match, and I was out. At this point Joe showed up and so we went and played some 5th mix.
Bleh. The rest of the tournament was pretty insane to watch. There were a lot of people there, and I honestly did try to talk to some new people; DDR Pixxiy and her sister and their posse of 14-year-old Hot-Topic-dressing kids were there, but they were sort of tough to talk to (and they insisted on calling me Alice). Team Meitricks were there, and I hung out with Derick and Dylan a lot. Watched Allan play a ton of Initial D, and failed to really talk to many new people (though I vaguely got to say a few words to Lith, and to Tanya, and other people I am generally scared of). Because of the brackets I figured out who a lot of people were, but didn't really talk to them. Oh, the coolest thing was this guy Warren who had brought juggling clubs with him and after he failed out one round JUGGLED clubs and passed So Deep on Maniac without dropping any. No joke. It was the most amazing thing ever. Some of the rounds were just insane though. Lith did MAX 300 on Heavy and got some INSANELY low number of greats. It is fucking scary to watch someone do MAX 300 and just have PERFECT! flash over and over.
Anyway, eventually it came down to the scary Lith-Jedi matches, and Lith won, and the world was a happy place.
Then Amber said, "Well, we were going to have a costume contest, but there's no real contest... Deanna gets the prize because she was the only person cool enough to show up in costume." So whee. The costume prize was a 3rd Mix machine marquee. I am REALLY not sure what the heck to do with this thing... but it's kind of cool :)
After that, freestyle happened. I did my Dive thing, pulled off the cool bar-kick spinny thing, but choked on the rest. It was pretty poor. At least I got a B as my letter grade - there were much better freestylers but almost EVERY one of them got a D. As I said to people afterwards: "I may suck at freestyle, but at least I got a B!" Shrug. I didn't place anywhere in FS, but it's not surprising. None of the acts were REALLY memorable... maybe the Pink Snail guys beating up on each other and throwing out toys and crap, I guess. And the black guys who really had good moves (but bad tech).
After that I was like "I am starving." Joe was like "Let's go to Dairy Queen." I was like "no." Then I was like "hmm... I should see what Allan's up to, it'd be bad if I lost my ride home!" and what ended up happening is that Joe, Farren, Allan and I went to Wendy's for dinner, after I changed shirts into my Red Dwarf shirt, because I was sick of the Alice costume. Dinner was pretty fun, we had some really funny discussions of very wrong DDR song titles. Besides my "Butterfly Rebirth", Allan had "Insertion (Boy on Boy Mix)", Farren had "Butterfly.78 KOGG3 Mix" (involving "ai-yai-yai" to the tune of Orion, with "yo! yo!" in the background), and there was "So Deep Insertion (More Deep and Deeper mix)", among others. We talked about edits, IIDX, Voltron, and other random stuff. I'm glad I did that rather than holding out on the hope of being invited to a big dinner afterwards.
Eventually we went back, thinking S4R was over but it wasn't - we got to basically go in and see Lith win it. Whee. I went around and played some PPP and some PIU and then at one point I went back and suddenly like all the stuff was gone and all the people were gone and... yeah. Oh well. I really should have talked to more people.
We hung out at Narrows for an hour or two longer anyway... I played some Session DM/GF with Allan, and a decent amount of Beatmania, and even some more DDR. My limit really does appear to be halfway through Higher on N130, and now halfway through BTF on NS. Also played the BeForU set with Allan, and did okay until Ever Snow (duh). There were some people still around, some very good players, but many were not very friendly, except Tacoma Max - he was nice. After my last set, Naoki Standard, I ended up coughing up my sinuses - guess I didn't wait long enough between dinner and DDR. Stupid me. And it's not like all the freaking smoke in Narrows didn't help. So I convinced Allan it was time to go home. I got to see Max try Ryan's bad-ass Ordinary World edit, and then we left. (There was a great MAX 300 edit called "Umm... yeah." on the machine, that Mechdragon did... he got about halfway through before failing, and well... the name is accurate, after he failed, everyone was just like "Umm... yeah." It was nuts.)
God, I'm too incoherent to write this. I really need sleep.
All in all it was a decent day... it was nice to have people to talk to from time to time at the tournament... and hey, I only had to make a fool of myself three times to get a prize! Whee! Still, I qualified and won a song in each of my matches - that's pretty awesome. The Seattle bar is pretty high for these things.
I kind of wonder whether any of the Seattle DDR players actually read my journal entries and whether they'd really tell me even if they did. I've debated making them friends-only so I can avoid the talking-about-other people thing, but I mostly only have nice things to say, so it's not too big a deal, I think.
To sum up: I qualified 28th out of 57 people (and 32 actually got to play) in tech; was double eliminated quickly; won the costume contest (a 3rd mix marquee!) because I was the only person in costume; and then botched my act in freestyle, not that it REALLY mattered anyway.
Allan, a guy I'd talked to on the DDR BBS, offered to give me a ride to Narrows. So I called him at 8am, put on my Alice costume, and he came here at 9am, and then we were on our way.
Got there around 10... a bunch of people were already there, not too many though. I met Amber, who is quite an interesting person, to say the least. She was running the tournament. I signed up... the qualifying songs were Orion.78 Civ Mix Light and Let The Beat Hit 'Em Really Bogus mix. Whee. I decided to try O.78 because I know I know it better than LTBHE. Then I went to warm up on the 5th mix machine. Tagged along with a girl who was playing... (turns out she's Cracker's girlfriend)... played some songs with her, mostly maniac. She picked Matsuri Japan as the last one. I figured WTH, it couldn't hurt to try it again. So I did. I passed! Wow. I can last through Matsuri Japan. This is new and different. My legs were killing me for 5 mins later when I had to qualify though. Still... I put on a really decent show. I got umm... 45 greats, out of 232. That sounds pretty lousy, but... well, so qualifying took like two hours. There were a LOT of people (57 in all, eventually) qualifying, and then there were tiebreakers. And there was this guy driving up from Portland who was running a little late, so they waited for him. (This guy, "Dancing Jedi", was AMAZING. He got out of his car, ran inside, was told "go go qualify now!" and he apparently said "but I really have to pee!" and they said "no now now" and he got up there and qualified with LTBHE, and got 2 greats. Only 2. No warmup, no nothing. Oh man.)
Anyway, it was funny... qualifiers happened, and I hung out playing other bemani games. Derick and Dylan showed up at one point and we did Para Para, and I played on the Beatmania CM2 machine, and some KBM, etc. And I talked to Casey for a while again, which was cool, since he rocks. Eventually they put "the writing on the wall" as it were. Nykkel and Farren both came up to me like "Well, the good news is, you qualified. The bad news is, you're up against Tanya in the first round." I was apparently 28 out of 32. Farren was 12 or so. Still, wow, I qualified! WOW! "At least I get two games!" It was double elim.
Well, after a while things got underway. Tanya is, for those not up on the Seattle scene, one of the top tech players around here. So I knew damned well I was going to lose. Still. We got the card... it had, umm - CSFIL, Candy Heart, Era, .59, and The Whistle Song, all on Light. We were both like "god, these all suck" and so I eliminated Whistle because I just hate that song. Tanya eliminated Era. (!?!?!?!) After she windexed down her side of the stage, we played Candy Heart first. I actually WON. I got 8 greats, and she only got 3, but she got a miss, which was worth my 8 greats, so holy shit. She won the next two, but I actually put in a decent performance (only getting 30 or less greats for three songs, nothing less than great). Whee.
So I went into the loser's bracket, playing the guy that Farren beat in the first round. It took a while for them to get to the loser's bracket though... I wandered around and watched some matches and talked to some people. An interesting one:
GPF Lith (if you don't know who he is, he is the BEST DDR player in the Pacific Northwest) was up against this 8-year-old girl in the first round. The 8-year-old girl was the daughter of the arcade owner. She apparently qualified 32nd. Poor girl... she got STOMPED. Of course, Poor Lith... it must have sort of sucked to be up against someone almost 1/4th his age. :) He did get one great in three songs (so for those not counting, that's two AAAs).
Eventually my second match came up. We got the card; it had Burning Heat Standard, Drop the Bomb Maniac, Tsugaru Standard, Fantasy MAX2 Heavy, and some other song I forget (Lovin' You maybe). I eliminated Fantasy and the other guy eliminated the other forgotten song. We played Burning Heat first. I WON. I won by like 1 good though. It was insane, we were practically perfectly tied. Second song: Tsugaru. I was dumb and put it on 1.5, having played everything else on 1.0. Fuck. I lost by like 4 perfects. Then I just totally botched Drop the Bomb - I just don't know it very well. So. There went my second match, and I was out. At this point Joe showed up and so we went and played some 5th mix.
Bleh. The rest of the tournament was pretty insane to watch. There were a lot of people there, and I honestly did try to talk to some new people; DDR Pixxiy and her sister and their posse of 14-year-old Hot-Topic-dressing kids were there, but they were sort of tough to talk to (and they insisted on calling me Alice). Team Meitricks were there, and I hung out with Derick and Dylan a lot. Watched Allan play a ton of Initial D, and failed to really talk to many new people (though I vaguely got to say a few words to Lith, and to Tanya, and other people I am generally scared of). Because of the brackets I figured out who a lot of people were, but didn't really talk to them. Oh, the coolest thing was this guy Warren who had brought juggling clubs with him and after he failed out one round JUGGLED clubs and passed So Deep on Maniac without dropping any. No joke. It was the most amazing thing ever. Some of the rounds were just insane though. Lith did MAX 300 on Heavy and got some INSANELY low number of greats. It is fucking scary to watch someone do MAX 300 and just have PERFECT! flash over and over.
Anyway, eventually it came down to the scary Lith-Jedi matches, and Lith won, and the world was a happy place.
Then Amber said, "Well, we were going to have a costume contest, but there's no real contest... Deanna gets the prize because she was the only person cool enough to show up in costume." So whee. The costume prize was a 3rd Mix machine marquee. I am REALLY not sure what the heck to do with this thing... but it's kind of cool :)
After that, freestyle happened. I did my Dive thing, pulled off the cool bar-kick spinny thing, but choked on the rest. It was pretty poor. At least I got a B as my letter grade - there were much better freestylers but almost EVERY one of them got a D. As I said to people afterwards: "I may suck at freestyle, but at least I got a B!" Shrug. I didn't place anywhere in FS, but it's not surprising. None of the acts were REALLY memorable... maybe the Pink Snail guys beating up on each other and throwing out toys and crap, I guess. And the black guys who really had good moves (but bad tech).
After that I was like "I am starving." Joe was like "Let's go to Dairy Queen." I was like "no." Then I was like "hmm... I should see what Allan's up to, it'd be bad if I lost my ride home!" and what ended up happening is that Joe, Farren, Allan and I went to Wendy's for dinner, after I changed shirts into my Red Dwarf shirt, because I was sick of the Alice costume. Dinner was pretty fun, we had some really funny discussions of very wrong DDR song titles. Besides my "Butterfly Rebirth", Allan had "Insertion (Boy on Boy Mix)", Farren had "Butterfly.78 KOGG3 Mix" (involving "ai-yai-yai" to the tune of Orion, with "yo! yo!" in the background), and there was "So Deep Insertion (More Deep and Deeper mix)", among others. We talked about edits, IIDX, Voltron, and other random stuff. I'm glad I did that rather than holding out on the hope of being invited to a big dinner afterwards.
Eventually we went back, thinking S4R was over but it wasn't - we got to basically go in and see Lith win it. Whee. I went around and played some PPP and some PIU and then at one point I went back and suddenly like all the stuff was gone and all the people were gone and... yeah. Oh well. I really should have talked to more people.
We hung out at Narrows for an hour or two longer anyway... I played some Session DM/GF with Allan, and a decent amount of Beatmania, and even some more DDR. My limit really does appear to be halfway through Higher on N130, and now halfway through BTF on NS. Also played the BeForU set with Allan, and did okay until Ever Snow (duh). There were some people still around, some very good players, but many were not very friendly, except Tacoma Max - he was nice. After my last set, Naoki Standard, I ended up coughing up my sinuses - guess I didn't wait long enough between dinner and DDR. Stupid me. And it's not like all the freaking smoke in Narrows didn't help. So I convinced Allan it was time to go home. I got to see Max try Ryan's bad-ass Ordinary World edit, and then we left. (There was a great MAX 300 edit called "Umm... yeah." on the machine, that Mechdragon did... he got about halfway through before failing, and well... the name is accurate, after he failed, everyone was just like "Umm... yeah." It was nuts.)
God, I'm too incoherent to write this. I really need sleep.
All in all it was a decent day... it was nice to have people to talk to from time to time at the tournament... and hey, I only had to make a fool of myself three times to get a prize! Whee! Still, I qualified and won a song in each of my matches - that's pretty awesome. The Seattle bar is pretty high for these things.
I kind of wonder whether any of the Seattle DDR players actually read my journal entries and whether they'd really tell me even if they did. I've debated making them friends-only so I can avoid the talking-about-other people thing, but I mostly only have nice things to say, so it's not too big a deal, I think.
no subject
You said something about Cracker's girlfriend. Are you talking about CMU Cracker, or some other Cracker?
(:,
Pace
no subject
I'm surprised Pace you didn't catch the journal entry time. You've conditioned me to always search for the number 212.
no subject
You totally, totally have to come visit here. I have plenty of crash space if you let me know a little bit in advance. Plan it around a tournament and it'd be all the better :)