Special Demonstrations #18: Leiria -Stargazer- (12.6.23)

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Re: Special Demos #11: Garegga (SDD-Kaede, 18.45m ALL, Miyam

Post by CHI »

Icarus wrote:
Icarus (sometime in 2014) wrote:I might ask if she knows if players of any other ships would like to contribute. Maybe someone like SDD-Kaede…
So about that...

A couple of months ago, Plasmo asked me if I'd be interested in editing a replay using SDD-Kaede's great annotated run of a nearly-WR score with Miyamoto, that's currently hosted on his own YouTube channel. I had some initial reservations as the footage we had originally thought to use was low quality and a little problematic to work with, so Plasmo asked Kaede-san if he still had the original footage, and to my surprise, he gave us the original capture footage and his blessing to use it!

So here we are: Special Demonstrations #11: Garegga!

It took a bit longer to get started due to Christmas and work schedules, etc, but along with a new super-fast Hackintosh I custom built up, the past week was spent just leisurely putting it together and checking it over. Of course, YouTube nuked all soft annotations, so this is the first SD with hardcoded annotations, so I'm still trying to find a good method to incorporate them. I'll revisit the past episodes at some point in the near future to bake their commentary back into the footage and re-release.

Thanks to Kaede-san for letting us use his original capture footage, and to Plasmo for keeping in touch with him, and for translating the original Japanese annotations.
This project has been taking a break for a while, but hopefully we'll have more stuff to come soon.
It's back... And that final boss fight, so intense :shock:
Cheers Icarus and the people who are involved, looking forward and waiting patiently for SD12 :wink:
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Re: Special Demos #12: Pink Sweets ver1.00 (Plasmo, ACmode A

Post by Icarus »

Special Demonstrations #12: Pink Sweets ver1.00 has been released!

This one has been in the works for a long time. Both Plasmo and I are keen Pink Sweets players, and since the release of the game in the arcades, we've been putting our heads together, trying to find information and develop strategies that will enable us to understand how the WR in the arcade game was done, and whether we can adapt those strategies to ver1.00 on the X360 port, known for disabling the infinite lives bug and being a thousand times harder as a result.

Fuelled by a short replay of the port by Japanese player YOS.K many years ago, and combining both our own strategies and some observations of the very rare PS players he's encountered on his travels around Tokyo, Plasmo (and his legendary stubbornness) has finally put together an ALL of the Arcade Mode on ver1.00!

This replay features a nice digest of the strategies for both Arcade and Score Attack Mode (as a bonus), and is a great milestone for the very small Pink Sweets player community. I know Plasmo's not satisfied at all by this, and is currently working on improving it further.

There's a couple more episodes in the works, just waiting on commentary scripts. More announcements as they come.
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Re: Special Demos #12: Pink Sweets ver1.00 (Plasmo, ACmode A

Post by BIL »

Great to see you back, as always. Loved the ACA Image Fight footage by the way, I knew it was good to pick up when I saw you were into it. :smile:
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Re: Special Demos #12: Pink Sweets ver1.00 (Plasmo, ACmode A

Post by CloudyMusic »

Great to see another episode :o Looking forward to whatever's in store for the future!
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Re: Special Demos #12: Pink Sweets ver1.00 (Plasmo, ACmode A

Post by Shepardus »

Wasn't expecting to see this!
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Re: Special Demos #12: Pink Sweets ver1.00 (Plasmo, ACmode A

Post by CStarFlare »

Amazing stuff - Pink Sweets is the last unconquered Cave game among western players, right? I've always been intrigued by it, but was never disciplined enough to dig into it. Glad to see someone pull it off, and glad to hear he's not done with it!

Thanks Plasmo, and Icarus!
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Re: Special Demos #12: Pink Sweets ver1.00 (Plasmo, ACmode A

Post by Xyga »

Congratulations and thanks a lot for that vid! The only other one I remember seeing was AZI's run.
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Re: Special Demos #12: Pink Sweets ver1.00 (Plasmo, ACmode A

Post by Mark_MSX »

Excellent job on the video and run Icarus and Plasmo :-D Pink Sweets is a really interesting game, glad to have more accessible information about how to play and score. Not too long ago, I played PS for the first time and was very confused about what to do ha.
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Re: Special Demos #12: Pink Sweets ver1.00 (Plasmo, ACmode A

Post by M.Knight »

Excellent work on the replay and commentary!
This video helps a lot with dispelling misconceptions and answering some questions we could have about the game. Rank not necessarily having to be managed past a certain point, the Rose Cracker being an essential part of the game instead of a "thou shalt not use" CAVE bomb, but also how it's still possible to get an extend even very late in the run after having used so many BOMBA. That last one I definitely didn't expect.
The ending to the Score Attack run is very entertaining too. Nice bonus content. :mrgreen:
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Re: Special Demos #13: Garegga (T3-神威 - 20.95mil ALL, Gain)

Post by Icarus »

Special Demonstrations #13: Garegga has been released!

So Kamui managed to beat her long-standing WR last year - after a five year long break - and as usual, she's provided the SD Project with exclusive footage taken direct from her runs at the arcade, and a very very detailed commentary script. I've done something a little special with this one, sorting out the capture from 30fps interlaced to 60fps progressive, and encoding in a slightly higher quality than usual to retain the visual clarity. I've also provided her with a Japanese version for distribution on her own social media networks.

Will she hit the much coveted 21mil ALL? It seems from her commentary, she's found renewed focus and energy to resume the hunt, so only time will tell. :3

Two more replays to go for this batch. Stay tuned!
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Re: Special Demos #13: Garegga (T3-神威 - 20.95mil ALL (WR), G

Post by EmperorIng »

that's footage from the arcade? It looks gorgeous. Thanks for putting this together as always, Icarus n' co.!
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Re: Special Demos #13: Garegga (T3-神威 - 20.95mil ALL (WR), G

Post by z0mbie90 »

Amazing work as always Icarus and everyone else involved into the working on these projects. Looking forward to watch this later on tonight.
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Re: Special Demos #13: Garegga (T3-神威 - 20.95mil ALL (WR), G

Post by heli »

After the flamingos shes beaten my personal record.
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Re: Special Demos #13: Garegga (T3-神威 - 20.95mil ALL (WR), G

Post by M.Knight »

At this point, you should just rename the series "Garegga Demonstrations" instead. Half of the videos are about it. Image

That said, it's a very good replay with lots of very useful insights (the different firing rates, the odd/even frame shots, the option control, the enemy destruction with specific weapons, etc.) that show she really knows the game inside-out, and some pretty tense moments to remind us that Garegga is still ruthless. That final boss was so frightening! And the medal chain save earlier, dayyymn.

One comment I have is that some annotations are not long enough on screen to be able to be read without pausing the replay. When there are some things coming up right after which require new annotations it's fine, but sometimes it's in a boss fight or something and the text is discarded pretty early with a lot of empty time before the next annotation that could have instead been useful for actually reading the annotation.
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Re: Special Demos #13: Garegga (T3-神威 - 20.95mil ALL (WR), G

Post by Plasmo »

One comment I have is that some annotations are not long enough on screen to be able to be read without pausing the replay. When there are some things coming up right after which require new annotations it's fine, but sometimes it's in a boss fight or something and the text is discarded pretty early with a lot of empty time before the next annotation that could have instead been useful for actually reading the annotation.
Time to complain to Kamui why on earth she is writing so much!

In all honesty, the more notes the better IMO. I pause these kinds of videos every 5 seconds. :D
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Re: Special Demos #13: Garegga (T3-神威 - 20.95mil ALL (WR), G

Post by Icarus »

M.Knight wrote:At this point, you should just rename the series "Garegga Demonstrations" instead. Half of the videos are about it. Image
Fun fact: the series was originally intended to be just for Garegga, but I expanded it to allow for other games.
That said, the series' biggest contributor is Kamui, so it's natural that it's mostly about Garegga atm. ¯\(°_o)/¯
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Re: Special Demos #13: Garegga (T3-神威 - 20.95mil ALL (WR), G

Post by M.Knight »

Haha, that explains so much!
It's cool to see that Kamui is so eager to share strategies and is supportive of any efforts to make the game more known. What she said about being an ambassador of sorts is pretty damn inspiring. Now if there were more players with that same kind of attitude, we could have even more runs and strat' sharing on a lot more diverse set of games. Well I guess it's up to the contributing superplayers.
Plasmo wrote: Time to complain to Kamui why on earth she is writing so much!

In all honesty, the more notes the better IMO. I pause these kinds of videos every 5 seconds. :D
Oh yeah, having so many notes is very good! No reasons to cut down on them.
It's more that there are moments where you could let the text on screen longer so you don't have to pause as often. (even if having some required pausing is inevitable with all that info, of course)
Take the annotation at 2m58s for example. It is removed after around 10 seconds, while the trick described by it isn't even fully completed, and then there is just empty space for maybe 15 seconds before the next annotation appears.
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Re: Special Demos #13: Garegga (T3-神威 - 20.95mil ALL (WR), G

Post by Stanshall »

This is so good, an education. Thank you for the work you put in.
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi & Dodonpachi)

Post by Icarus »

We have a Special Demonstrations double release!

These were supposed to have been completed earlier this year, but my work schedule and responsibilities kind of killed all of my motivation. But now I have a bit more time free, I've decided to clear the decks of all of my personal projects including this, so I can free up more time to start prepping for more.

So for #14, we've added Jaimers' Dodonpachi 2-ALL to the collection, complete with updated hard-sub commentary script! Many thanks to Jaimers for allowing the use of his replay, and for working with me to update his script for the replay - we've also added a small note about the discovery of the glitch used in the higher-scoring WRs, so now that information is added to the replay as a footnote and accompanying citation. Make sure you check it out if you're curious.

Now, for #15, we have Donpachi by SOF-WTN! A big surprise, the legend himself has offered up an older but still very accomplished Type-A 2-ALL run, and a nicely detailed set of notes to go with it! Many thanks to WTN for allowing the use of his materials, and to Plasmo as usual for assisting with the translation of his information. Also, there will be a Japanese version of the replay on WTN's channel, here. Pay him a visit!

I need to sort out my project drive to prep for reworking the older replays with hardsubs, which is a problem as I appear to have lost one or two source files... at least it'll give me an opportunity to redo them in the style of the current replays. Stay tuned for more.
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by BIL »

Always a cause for celebration when you do another of these, to say nothing of two. Image
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by Bawa »

Agreed, it's always a cause for celebration when Icarus releases these.
Between this and Astral Gunners, I have an exciting weekend to look forward to!
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by Rastan78 »

Wow, nice work! :shock:
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by dmk1198 »

z0mbie90 wrote:Sounds cool. Haven't have time to watch it yet, but gonna grab some popcorn later on and hopefully have a blast :)
Ditto,!

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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by Plasmo »

Icarus doing god's work once again.

Gotta love these heavy bee hitters.

I'm also really looking forward to the older episodes with hardsubs. There's so much knowledge in the comments that got purged by Youtube, a real shame.
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

YouTube's short lived annotations system was a powerful object lesson: if you want subs, always implement hardsubs or subs tied to the video file itself. So many videos I enjoyed other people extensively annotated and all the info is gone now. :/
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by Mero »

Nice, that's the highest Donpachi run publicly available I believe.
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by zlk »

Cool X 2.
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by emphatic »

Very nice content.
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Re: Special Demos #14 & 15 (Donpachi 2-ALL & Dodonpachi 2-AL

Post by Animaitor »

Thank you as always!! Love these videos that come with extra information and the last 2 from some of my all time favorites!
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Re: Special Demonstrations ver1.1 premiere, Sun 16 Apr @ 1pm

Post by Icarus »

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All 15 replays in the Special Demonstrations ver1.1 project will be premiering in a single complete live stream on Sunday 16th April @ 1pm GMT (next weekend) on Twitch & YT, and individually released on YT right after.

What's new?
1080p60 for almost all videos, audiovisual fixes, and hardcoded annotations in all replays!

There'll also be a special announcement right at the end, so stick around for it. :3

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