A Dodonpachi Run Commented On TV !

[PROMETHEUS]

"NoLife" is a rather underground French TV channel dedicated to games / geek culture in general. One of the shows they run is titled "Superplay", in which an interviewer interviews a "Superplayer" in a different game (mostly arcade) every time it airs, with a video of the run and the player commenting on the run and the game in general. The guy who's in charge of that show (the interviewer), Radigo, came to me during a shmupmeet in Paris (at Japan expo) and said he'd like to record an interview of me for Dodonpachi. Naturally I jumped on the opportunity and just had to say "yes" to such a cool thing !

So we scheduled a first meeting in Paris in NoLife's studios and talked about what we'd show and say during the shooting. Radigo's himself quite an adept of shooting games and was very interested in Dodonpachi so it was very cool to talk about this with him. It was also nice to see a TV studio with various people working on sound, software to make TV graphics, database, etc... Got a chance to talk to some of them and it was definitely a nice experience. A very special atmosphere in there too since the channel is ran mostly by people passionate about games.

Then we met again like a month after to actually shoot it : a 45 minutes interview where we sat at a table with a blue wall as background, talked about the game, what it's like to play it, practice and achieve high scores, along with a full commenting of my best run's second loop (the 505M one).

The show just aired for the first time today on Nolife, with cool editing by the staff people of the channel : as we talk, the blue background is replaced with videos of the game, and when the commenting of the run starts the screen sort of divides in 2 parts with the right half showing the video of the run that we're commenting on. Then when the run is over we keep talking for a little while and more game footage is shown as background. All of this came with nice bits of editing here and there : highlights on some parts of the screen/game area, or text inserts to emphasize on something we've just said.

I gathered with friends to watch this tonight with a couple beers and smokes and had a good time. Thank you so much Nolife, Radigo, Alex the editor and whoever else is behind the making of this show ! Dodonpachi and shmups got a lot of attention from the French gamer crowd thanks to you.

I'm pretty sure there's no way to get access to this channel outside of France, however it's possible to watch a podcast of it as of right now on this site : http://www.nolife-tv.com. It's all in French without subtitles though, and you do have to pay 3€ for one month of access to all podcasts, so I guess most of you guys can't directly enjoy the show itself.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share this nice little shmup story, check it out if you can !

[lgb]

sub and upload to youtube plz

what, they do it for zun ;_;

[Dave_K.]

I couldn't seem to figure out how to download the podcast, but I captured this cool pic.



Also found what I thought was an urban legend, some guy really 1CC DDP with a guitar hero controller? Or is he just rocking out with his best non-air guitar to the soundtrack watching the NAI superplay VHS tape?

[captpain]

Is that PROMETHEUS on the left?

[spl]

Anyone have a link for the podcast?? I can't navigate that site.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I like how French can be snobbish (I mean it in a good way) about things such as shoot 'em ups. This is an utterly obscure topic even for the majority of today's computer/videogame geeks, and yet you can see the likes of Japon: histoire du shooting game on the French TV, just because they seem to think telling people about shmups is cool.

[Keade]

Is that PROMETHEUS on the left?

Yes.

The other player with the beard is Erhune, indeed one-crediting DDP at the guitar (non default setting, in the video he tells he starts with 5 lives)

Thanks for the news Prometheus, I'll watch this as soon as I can

[DEL]

^Yes?? - PROMETHEUS must have changed a fair bit since I last met him

Anyway, its a good thing to see DDP on the TV

[PROMETHEUS]

^Yes?? - PROMETHEUS must have changed a fair bit since I last met him

Yes that's me! Indeed I have changed quite a bit since then. I think I was 19 at the time and I'm 23 now, and most importantly I've grown my hair a little :p
When is the next international shmupmeet ?! ;]

[moozooh]

That's very nice indeed, congratulations on your interview. :)

Going to join the crowd of those passively waiting for a subbed YouTube video.

[DJ Incompetent]

That's awesome you got on the show!

super-the-thread-merging http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26840

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Congrats Prometheus!

Even though i dont understand French, Im gratefull for all those documentries that make it to you tube with subs. I hear shmups plus arcades themselves are allot more healther then most other countries nowadays (or atleast in the west.)

All we need is someone to sub it for us (hint hint) Oh and they might aswell to the 3rd episode of LOck-On while their at it

[Keade]

Unfortunately, arcades are dead in France. I can't imagine them much more dead in the west

It's done relatively quick and easy, so I could transcribe the video to a script (in english), if someone has got the video file and do the timings ajusting.

[PROMETHEUS]

Someone from NoLife's staff just posted a preview of it, extending the preview length to 16% of total instead of 10% because he's aware of this thread and wants to let foreigners see what it looks like : http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcorvj ... videogames

There's been talk about possibly subbing it after viewing this thread... let's hope someone will do that!

[Smraedis]

Oh wow, that is really cool! The full show would be more than great. Grats on being on such a show too!

[Udderdude]

Pretty awesome. I love the show name ..

[vld99]

Some translation I did very quickly for the heck of it, probably too literal on times and too summarized on others, but that's pretty much it.

Interviewer: Hi, and welcome to Superplay. Hi Prometheus.
Prometheus: Hi.
I: So, Prometheus, you play Dodonpachi.
P: Yes.
I: So we've already seen Dodonpachi in our show some time ago, when Ehrune came to demonstrate it played with a guitar, and...
P: Congrats Ehrune!
I: Yes, congrats! It was a nice performance, with a lot of class. So, you do something else on DDP, you do scoring.
P: Yes.
I: So, to do scoring, overall, you... well, how does scoring work in DDP?
P: Well, Dodonpachi is really the game that introduced the chaining system as we know it today in shooting games, so the game is about chaining, by trying to destroy enemies one after another without any...
I: Time gap. [lit. dead time]
P: Yeah, without time gap between each destroyed enemy.
I: Agreed.
P: Overall, it's the main goal of the game, and in secondary, survival is very important. There are bombs like in many shooting games, that you can use simply by pressing the bomb button to save your life when you feel threatened, and the game motivates the player to never use them, because when you collect additional bombs, when your bomb stock is full, there is a maximum bonus that activates, and increased on each additional bomb you collect, giving a lot of points. So you must not use bombs and not die either, because when you die, you lose the maximum bonus and you only get it back by getting another bomb.
I: So you lose the multiplier of the maximum bonus.
P: That's it, there is a multiplier that increases on each bomb, and you lose it.
I: So wrapping up, when you chain, destroying enemies one after another, you multiply directly the value of the enemies, and the maximum bonus is a little counter that increments points very quickly over time, and...
P: Yeah, those are the two main sources of points in the game. There are also some secondary things, like the bees as we'll see later, the bullet cancelling that exists a little bit in the game, and the stars but that's negligible...
I: And when you're a beginner, you think that you must collect the stars...
P: It's a bit like the medals, it's something you think, oh it's all shiny [lit. golden], you focus on that but in fact...
I: But in fact no.
P: No.

--cut--

P: My objective in my last runs was to achieve over 500 millions.
I: Ok, so to give an idea, when you finish the game without really making combos or stuff like that, I think you're at like, 40 millions...
P: When you finish both loops or the first one?
I: The first loop.
P: The first loop, without combos, yeah that's about it, 40-50 millions, it's a little random but that's around it.
I: So that's 10 times more.
P: But like I said, it's exponential, so when you do a little better, it increases a lot, that's the principle.
I: So it's gratifying to delve into it...
P: Yeah, that's the game's trap, exactly.
I: *laughes* Yeah, it's a trap... you spent a lot of time on it.
P: Yeah.
I: Ok, so we will see right now how it goes.

--cut--

I: Ok, so what are we going to see in this part?
P: So we will just show the... The game has two loops, in fact, so it's a concept that is common in shooting games, which means that when you clear all levels of the game, if certain conditions are met, the game restarts at the first level, and you enter the second loop which is a lot harder than the first. So in the Hachi loop, the second loop is a little different, it's the same levels, but there's a lot more bullets on the screen. It's harder, the chaining is a little different...
I: We will talk about it later.
P: And more importantly, at the end of the second loop, at the end of the last stage, there is an additional part that we call the True Last Boss, Hibachi, which is famous to shooting players because, well, it's the boss of Dodonpachi, impressive because it's very hard.
I: And it's often the last, super hard step to take...
P: Certainly, and you must also spare all your lives, during all the game, to be able to defeat it.
I: Ok, so we will see what it looks like.

--on screen: beginning of second loop--

P: Here we are, 3-2-1-go. So it's the first level, we see the ["tuning", no idea what it means, probably France slang, rough guess would be "action"] starting, with the hit counter at the top left. So the idea is to not destroy enemies all at once, so that some remain until the next enemies appear.
I: So always keeping some enemies on the side.
P: So in the second loop the chaining is a little...

--end of video--

[orange]

thanks a lot for the translation!

[PROMETHEUS]

Thanks for going through the trouble of translating dude.

we see the ["tuning", no idea what it means, probably France slang, rough guess would be "action"] starting, with the hit counter at the top left.

I think that word was just "chaining" pronounced French-style.

[vld99]

we see the ["tuning", no idea what it means, probably France slang, rough guess would be "action"] starting, with the hit counter at the top left.

I think that word was just "chaining" pronounced French-style.

Haha, you're right. Pronunciation of english words in France confuses me a lot sometimes.

[Erhune]

Also found what I thought was an urban legend, some guy really 1CC DDP with a guitar hero controller? Or is he just rocking out with his best non-air guitar to the soundtrack watching the NAI superplay VHS tape?

Hi, urban legend here

The 1cc clear of DDP's first loop using a Guitar Hero III PC controller is not a fake, it was performed by myself right in front of the camera for the Superplay emission. We then recorded a commentary for the live performance afterwards, because if was kind of difficult to comment & play at the same time ^^' I did a few proper 1cc runs with default settings beforehand, but couldn't put it up in front of the camera, so we used the unofficial 5 lives setting to compensate for the added stress of the recording (the runs commented in the Superplay emission are usually recorded off stage by the player itself and commented in front of the camera, just like Prometheus did)

I'm by no way a good DDP player (I can reach level 2-3 quite regularly, but do absolutely no chaining whatever). It took me about 2 weeks of training with the guitar to find new paths adapted for the strange controller (of which 1 full week was dedicated to perfecting the level 4 boss initial positioning above the turrets, which I consider a move so cool I couldn't affort to try it with the guitar). I called this "performance" a Stupidplay instead of a Superplay, because the only goal of this was to add some fun in a program that is quite serious usually.

I'd love to see these emissions available subbed somewhere, but there are legal complications, especially considering the TV channel Nolife is completely dependant on the subscriptions to its online video service for its survival.

[PROMETHEUS]

I'd love to see these emissions available subbed somewhere, but there are legal complications, especially considering the TV channel Nolife is completely dependant on the subscriptions to its online video service for its survival.

Maybe they should just sub some of them when there is potential foreign interest and make the subbed programs downloadable when you have subscribed for a month of access, instead of just viewable on the site. I bet some foreign people wouldn't mind paying 3€ to get access to a bunch of such programs, everyone liked to see the Shooting Game History documentary and a lot of the superplay shows are interesting to them. Didn't ben.shinobi do one for Radiant Silvergun for example ? I heard his score impressed a lot of people.

(By the way Erhune are you still in japan? :])

[captpain]

Yeah, if that stuff gets subbed then I'll gladly pay the fee to see it... that's pretty cheap, really.

[PROMETHEUS]

Yeah, if that stuff gets subbed then I'll gladly pay the fee to see it... that's pretty cheap, really.

Well you guys should voice it here if you'd be ok with paying 3€ to get access to a bunch of subtitled shows because they are looking at the thread now (I linked it on their forums) and some people were discussing about subbing after seeing the thread, if you talk about it here it just might make the staff think about it more seriously.

[Dragoforce]

Yeah, i'd defintly pay a few euros to see the show subbed!

[spl]

I'd definitely pay the 3 euro to see all the stuff translated. I want to see alot of the superplays and also they had a history of fighting games which is on youtube but it's in French.

The quality of the shows seems quite good.

[ZOM]

Yo, same here. For a mere 3 euro? I'm in.
(I understand a tiny bit of french. but I'd rather have it subbed)

[Voxbox]

3€ sounds worth it, definitly.

[Pirate1019]

Yeah, i'd defintly pay a few euros to see the show subbed!

[Erhune]

everyone liked to see the Shooting Game History documentary

By the way, the guys who made this documentary are the same who are now making the Nolife TV channel, including Superplay.

(By the way Erhune are you still in japan? :])

Yup, I work here now I'm waiting for you to come here to introduce you to some real monsters