2019 Blind Kaizo Race OST

Happy New Year's, everyone! This isn't a typical update post since my previous one was very recent so I'm holding off until sometime later in Janruary before I give everyone a taste of what's to come throughout 2022. For now I wanted to squeeze out one final project before the end of the year, and since I've gone quite some time since I made one of these.

Back in the year 2019, a "Kaizo" ROM hack of Super Mario World was created specifically for Summer Games Done Quick 2019: the 2019 Blind Kaizo Race. Instead of controlling Mario, you play as one of eight Kaizo Mario World speedrunners split off into two teams: the blue-clad One Tile Men, and the orange-donning Lunar Magicians and carry them through seven levels of chaos. At the event itself, the teams would rotate out their respective players each time one bit the dust, and the run concluded with the One Tile Men winning the event overall. That said the ending doesn't change based on which team you carry to the end of the game, so for casual runs it mostly boils down to which set of runners you prefer.

The OST is a 10-track collaboration of both original and converted tunes from five different artists, all rendered in Super Mario World's engine. Ripping them was not as straightforward as you might expect since only ZSNES provided audio that wasn't prone to stuttering mid-song, and still some songs were affected and didn't result in flawless recordings despite my best efforts.. Two of the levels spawned enemies that would produce some kind of sound- interrupting the recording's first parts, and the credits, well, cannot be accessed unless you beat the final level. Since I had no patience to play through the hack, I edited the levels through Lunar Magic so the enemies cannot cause sounds to play through their actions and the final level can be beaten by just taking a door to the final room then defeating the boss in a much safer environment without killer plants everywhere. At the end of the day I still managed to do everything the night before New Year's and provide something to cap off 2021, despite the possible likelihood that I'll have to come back to this hack and re-rip a song or two in order to improve the recordings.

Will I rip the songs from another Kaizo hack? Likely not, as many of them run for much longer lengths and don't give you the connivance of skipping levels or jumping straight to the final level. Anyways, you can grab the download for current version of the soundtrack here and I'll see you all in the new year.

The Finale of 2021

It's nearing the end of the year 2021, and the pandemic still looms over the world.

Times lately have been a mix of stagnant and slow progress, including a recent visit from two different repairmen late November before Thanksgiving to get things started towards breathing new life into my retro arcade machines and get the game room and arcade better fit for local visitors. My Xbox One is now fixed and able to play games again after months of breaking due to a failed system update, but on the flipside my launch edition Nintendo Wii might never see life again due to its busted disk drive being not easily repairable or replaceable and save transfers between two different Wii's not being as convenient of a process as I'd like it to be. I have a spare Wii, sure, but it's strictly for homebrew games and expansions and has not been updated in a long while since late 2013 to reflect updates for various mods.

Outside the game room and arcade, not much else was done. Mostly it comes from having very little inspiration with nothing of highlight going on outside and large-scale cons still being out of the picture until April next year provided Omicron doesn't get too severe by mid Spring (and for those wondering, I'm not due for my booster until February). I'm still trying to improve my physical physique and recover from some issues with one of my legs so when con season does start I'm sort of back to the athletic prowess I was before the pandemic hit. In other words I'm putting priorities towards real-life matters, and not helping is having to watch over my mother while she's laid up from surgery earlier this month and not being able to do much of anything until January when she recovers.

Some new art on Aozora and his close pals Satoru and Zik, plus a new face and a character I have yet to draw in my style, have been in the works since August and I've been developing it off and on. Once again the pace has been... pretty glacial despite my best efforts to keep focused. Aozora's girlfriend Keisha and her pal Sakaki are in the queue for after the boys are finished, and I've long hinted at making these renders of my girls in Clip Studio Paint in an effort to learn the program following being recommended it by more than several of my artist buddies. I still have plans to launch an artist's Twitter and a Discord server to help further my works and serve as a general hangout spot respectively. I originally planned to launch the artist Twitter and the Discord community this month, but postponed it to a point where I felt more comfortable with doing art and other content at a good pace in the case of the former and work on adding bots to the latter to help with role management in the case of the latter.

For other ventures for Aozora and co, I begun development of a Toyhou.se page for a more descriptive and visual format for displaying my original characters for Aozora's Adventure compared to the current Wiki. Currently it is very barebones as I have not been feeling the drive to go work extensively on character lore and character bios- even on the Wiki. That's not to say Aozora has had nothing worked on lately beyond the above WIP's; in the background there have been some attempts to get several different drafts and documents for game ideas for the Aozora's Adventure project going, just to give an insight on exactly how each game would function. From 2D platform games, to racing games, to a full-on tournament fighter (a given when you have so many detailed character designs that you always think "how would they work in a fighting game?" while designing them). As for game-development itself, since it was stressing me the heck out months ago, I've put it on hold until sometime next year so I can get myself into a more productive mood, and I'm the opposite of that.

I've also been considering getting into game streaming just as much as I'm considering getting into 3D modeling, programing, and web design. Only I need to get myself a better PC rig, which is hard with all the GPU shortages due to ridiculous demand, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to make due with my 2015 rig for a bit longer and possibly when Windows 11 gets better. After having to jump between several big-name and small-name streamers I think I might have what it takes to broadcast a game or two, even if I won't be able to stream everything in my collection since I have no capture cards to record from my TV's and I'd be forced to use emulation whenever I want to or not. Still, it might give me that social experience that I haven't had since November 2019.

Since it's getting late, I might as well wrap it up for now and save what else I could bring up for a future post. In the meantime, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.