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Saturday was a UW Dance Dance Revolution tournament, organized by "brilliant.naoki" (aka TRIP) and advertised on the Team Gwai Lo (TGL) forums.
TGL and I go waayy back to when jetgirlx2 founded them in the first place. They started off as a simple DDR Team, hoping to be a part of the competitive DDR scene that was hot in Japan. I didn't like the name (Gwai Lo being something like Cantonese for "white person") so my highschool friends and I decided we'd be our own team, The Exploding Teapots. We were going to be the Exploding Teapot Cats (which could be abbreviated XTC, our energy drink of choice at the time). But EXT happened instead. Man, I miss those days.
I had always been hoping for tournaments of sorts at the time, but the whole Ottawa DDR scene was still really immature; nobody was any good. One time at AAS (the Anime Appreciation Society, also founded by jetgirlx2, and a place where I met/hung out with lots of random cool ppl like beetlebum and krk and yaiven), we had a small DDR tourny. We were using a pirated copy of the game for PSX, hooked up to soft pads taped to the stone floor of a building at Carleton. Lol. yaiven took the crown that day, and I still blame 3rdMix's shoddy scoring mechanism as well as the broken pads :D
Eventually TGL started up their webforums which became the life of the North American DDR scene for many years. I refused to join them because, having an account on the forums became synonymous with being a member of TGL; and, of course, I had to stay loyal to my roots in EXT. Even when TGL had hundreds of members (as if that counts!).
Anyway, it's funny to see TGL still thriving in any sense.
The tournament was long and hard and fun, running from noon straight to 7pm. The calibre of the contestants was very very high, most of the moderates in the Waterloo scene didn't come out. spoonkun and anne_marie played well, although maybe a little underpracticed -- obviously you need more DDR and less WoW! :P (and homework... uhh wait)
I barely scraped through some of the tournament; there were a lot of surprises and upsets and randomly awesome matches. My favourite was spoonkun vs. Josh -- they both picked Stoic against each other -- that was sooo broken -- I can't wait to see the videos for it.
Mike beat me twice, knocking me into the loser's bracket very near the end. Both times he used the same song to beat me, Paranoia Survivor, obviously something I need to practice more. Lucky for me, Thomas beat Josh out then and I had an easier time getting past Thomas than Josh. In the final matches, I had to beat Mike three _rounds_ in a row: the first to get out of the loser's bracket, and then apparently we were playing best-out-of-three rounds (not just songs) to compete for winner. Mike was pretty exhausted at that point and I got reeeeally lucky, beating him 6 songs in a row (which is three best-out-of-threes) and thus winning the tournament. Yay happy! My first time winning a tourny, and something like 6 years after I set out to compete against TGL. Not that this was TGL lol. But still :)
More of my older sister being sooo random. She also links to the future home of smably: and it's even in BC! (natch)
I had some ppl over to watch Cronk's New Groove on Sunday. It was good times, but the movie was depressingly terrible. At least now I know what's (presumably) up with Disney's straight-to-home-sequels -- it was like a few (poorly-construed) episodes of moral-teaching TV for 5yo's, using the familiar characters of the first movie. Sooo bad it still hurts. Llama-face!
Now I wanna play more ddr... instead, back to numbercrunching! *crunch*
TGL and I go waayy back to when jetgirlx2 founded them in the first place. They started off as a simple DDR Team, hoping to be a part of the competitive DDR scene that was hot in Japan. I didn't like the name (Gwai Lo being something like Cantonese for "white person") so my highschool friends and I decided we'd be our own team, The Exploding Teapots. We were going to be the Exploding Teapot Cats (which could be abbreviated XTC, our energy drink of choice at the time). But EXT happened instead. Man, I miss those days.
I had always been hoping for tournaments of sorts at the time, but the whole Ottawa DDR scene was still really immature; nobody was any good. One time at AAS (the Anime Appreciation Society, also founded by jetgirlx2, and a place where I met/hung out with lots of random cool ppl like beetlebum and krk and yaiven), we had a small DDR tourny. We were using a pirated copy of the game for PSX, hooked up to soft pads taped to the stone floor of a building at Carleton. Lol. yaiven took the crown that day, and I still blame 3rdMix's shoddy scoring mechanism as well as the broken pads :D
Eventually TGL started up their webforums which became the life of the North American DDR scene for many years. I refused to join them because, having an account on the forums became synonymous with being a member of TGL; and, of course, I had to stay loyal to my roots in EXT. Even when TGL had hundreds of members (as if that counts!).
Anyway, it's funny to see TGL still thriving in any sense.
The tournament was long and hard and fun, running from noon straight to 7pm. The calibre of the contestants was very very high, most of the moderates in the Waterloo scene didn't come out. spoonkun and anne_marie played well, although maybe a little underpracticed -- obviously you need more DDR and less WoW! :P (and homework... uhh wait)
I barely scraped through some of the tournament; there were a lot of surprises and upsets and randomly awesome matches. My favourite was spoonkun vs. Josh -- they both picked Stoic against each other -- that was sooo broken -- I can't wait to see the videos for it.
Mike beat me twice, knocking me into the loser's bracket very near the end. Both times he used the same song to beat me, Paranoia Survivor, obviously something I need to practice more. Lucky for me, Thomas beat Josh out then and I had an easier time getting past Thomas than Josh. In the final matches, I had to beat Mike three _rounds_ in a row: the first to get out of the loser's bracket, and then apparently we were playing best-out-of-three rounds (not just songs) to compete for winner. Mike was pretty exhausted at that point and I got reeeeally lucky, beating him 6 songs in a row (which is three best-out-of-threes) and thus winning the tournament. Yay happy! My first time winning a tourny, and something like 6 years after I set out to compete against TGL. Not that this was TGL lol. But still :)
More of my older sister being sooo random. She also links to the future home of smably: and it's even in BC! (natch)
I had some ppl over to watch Cronk's New Groove on Sunday. It was good times, but the movie was depressingly terrible. At least now I know what's (presumably) up with Disney's straight-to-home-sequels -- it was like a few (poorly-construed) episodes of moral-teaching TV for 5yo's, using the familiar characters of the first movie. Sooo bad it still hurts. Llama-face!
Now I wanna play more ddr... instead, back to numbercrunching! *crunch*