100 Weekdays of Daily Challenge Challenge

YouTube Link

Today marks 100 weekdays in a row of Daily Challenge Challenges (and another 60 videos prior to this streak), it has persisted through travel, family visits and even now a full time job. It is something I deliberately make time for each day, even now it has a sporadic schedule and the live audience is significantly reduced. I am proud of it mostly because of the persistence involved, even if the ultimately my initial goal of besting my friends reliably at Crypt of the NecroDancer has been an utter failure.

Turns out 5 games a week simply is not enough to get me to significantly improve at a game, ultimately that is 5-10 minutes a day and I don't really have the urge to play more often that that and as a result I still mostly die in zone 1 and only occasionally reach zone 2.

I also don't anticipate getting better at OlliOlli, the daily grind is fun and interesting, and it has only a very small community playing it such that I have actually made the number 1 slot a number of times. This is less impressive than even that sounds as the extreme score fall off in that game leads to my victories being more pulling a Bradbury over pure skill, timing and reflexes.

Finally Spelunky I think demonstrates most clearly of all that it takes more than the daily challenge to improve your skills. Spelunky has become my go to game for spending a little bit of time, meaning I have sunk a fair amount of time off stream into Spelunky as well and I have improved by leaps and bounds. When I started I avoided irritating shopkeepers and had never seen the end of the ice caves, now I have beaten the game 3 times, including one speed run and am pushing my way towards hell. It always feels like the high point of my stream, my chance to really push on and make progress. The kind of feeling I only get rarely when I play NecroDancer

To celebrate reaching a streak count of 100 I am running a giveaway. The winner will get their choice of:

• Crypt of the NecroDancer
• OlliOlli
• Spelunky
• Massive Chalice

To enter, either comment here or on video 100 congratulating me before my next stream (which will probably start sometime between 5 or 6pm)

Daily Challenge Challenge 2014 Death Specials

On the flight to Australia I had the bright idea to create a death compilation from my daily challenge series, ideally to be put out on New Years Eve.

I ran into a couple of problems doing this:

1. I don't have a local video editor
2. I don't have the footage on my tablet

Fortunately YouTube has its own editing tools I can vaguely work, but I knew my net connection for most of the trip pre-New Years would be pretty limited. So my time was limited and the tools I used were relatively crude but I did in fact get it done. Here are my two new years specials:

Necrodancer

Spelunky

Because in games like these if you can't take some pleasure in your repeated deaths, then they really would quickly become difficult to enjoy at all. I have died literally hundreds of times in Spelunky and only seen the final boss once, there is a reason I keep coming back despite the repeated mistakes and frustration.

The Daily Challenge Challenge

I had planned to post the second episode of Ranneko Plays Massive Chalice today, after recording it of course. Unfortunately it looks like I didn't actually press the record shortcut or something. So of the two episodes I recorded I only have the second, which is missing a couple of decades worth of play. It is pretty frustrating and I am kind of hoping I can go back to my previous save and kind of redo most of the decisions and see if things can line up closely enough, but I may just have to redo the whole thing. Just glad I chose to use a new save rather than recycle the old one.

Here is one of my best Spelunky runs

I figure however that now is a good time to talk a bit about The Daily Challenge Challenge, which is a YouTube series I have been doing for about 5 weeks now. The basic concept is that I record my play of the daily challenge of various video games (currently Spelunky and Crypt of the Necrodancer) and put it up online every weekday.

It started as an excuse to practice these games and try to get better at them so that I could reliably score better than Jarenth at the game he gave me. It is also just a fun personal challenge, seeing how reliably I can keep it up, despite travel and other aspects of life just getting in the way. I was able to continue to play, record and upload while I was in New York last week, but I don't anticipate keeping the streak unbroken forever given I have a trip to Australia coming up in December.

One of my best Crypt of the Necrodancer runs

During these videos I of course talk about the game itself, but I it has also become a little bit of an audio diary, I will complain about being sick, or talk a bit about interesting things I have done or come across. I am not sure how relevant it is to my fairly small audience but it keeps me engaged and hopefully avoids there being too much dead air.

In general since it is a daily series I'm not going to be putting every episode, or even many episodes directly up at my blog. The easiest way to keep track of it would be to follow me on Google+, Twitter or subscribe directly to my YouTube channel

The worst, and thus shortest of my runs.