Rygar Racing, the sport of kings.

I realize Rygar is technically a princess by virtue of his tiara and improper to be wagered upon by a king in most contemporary constitutional monarchies, but times were much tougher in his day. And for that matter, days were much tougher in his time.
Additionally, in this case it refers to non-kings playing the video game rygar against each other in a race to completion of it. The crowds have turned out in great numbers to view the splendor of its spectacle.

How much do I have to pay the “games done quick + 2016” people to STOP playing rygar? They could be DONE with it far more quickly.

And I say this as somebody who owns a framed copy of Rygar. I know what it is capable of. The frame is not for ITS protection.

I have a cruel, stupid life. Somehow or another I was informed in advance that the Rygar match would take place at approximately 8:30am beastern irregular time, and I became fixated on the idea of reporting this, on twitter, live as the event was in progress, which meant violating my sleep schedule in a most unfortunate manner, to wake up at 8am, like a person with a life, to do a largely lifeless thing. However, what sleep I had was restless and filled with made up mental images of rygar-playing. Which is to say, I had a dream about watching somebody else play Rygar. Could my existence be any more empty?

When I awoke I saw that the event had been rescheduled. At this point I ascertained that the effort put into keeping matters on schedule was faulty, and after several days of doing games quickly, but slightly less quickly than anticipated, everything on the list had been bumped forward four hours. Even to get one’s self psychologically prepared for Rygar that seems high. I had earlier noticed that posted videos were consistently a 3-10 minutes longer than the estimates, but I wasn’t expecting 4 whole hours to go missing. And they hadn’t:

I checked back around the 12:40ish adjusted start point, got my computer in the mood to watch videos, and then realized that the times had reverted to more or less what they were the first time I looked, which was by now four hours ago. I had, earlier in the day, forgotten that on the previous day’s visit to the Rygar schedule, I had only temporarily enabled scripts on the website, since I hate, and always have hated, when videos automatically try to load, which a video streaming website of course will want to do. It had not struck me that one of the scripts might have been adjusting the schedule to reflect my time zone, despite the considerably more dinkity, glitched font that replaced the fancy one when I saw the incorrect time. I am accustomed to living with broken things (in part from growing up with the likes of Rygar), and so do not necessarily assume somebody else’s thing looking broken is a cause for investigation.

To summarize, I dreamt about Rygar, woke up early to watch Rygar, and then missed it, and I felt bad for missing Rygar, and had to wait two days for the Rygar to be posted in non-live form, and somehow made it a matter that took me a week to get around to writing about, rather than just making a few brief statements within the limited window that somebody else might care. And the truth of the matter is that my internet is too crummy to facilitate live-streamed video anyhow, and trying to process it often knocks my computer unconscious. I literally have no reason to live. Which makes my life a curiosity worthy of study and consequently worth continuing.

With that said, the fact that one of these people is simply called “darkwing duck” while plainly being a man [playing RYGAR] is terribly amusing to me. Also, I don’t know which of them it is. What a scary thought, to be in a room with a man named Darkwing Duck and not even be able to determine who it is. If your NAME is Darkwing Duck and people call you that in public, you ought to at least be dark, have wings, or be a duck. It was my belief that the internet nickname concept broke down in person; nobody should be able to use such varied, ridiculous names with seriousness when all the people they address look and behave fundamentally the same. I realize this is hardly original observations; the laughing at of nerd gimmicks executed in public was a staple of comedy television prior to nerds having loads of cash and becoming higher in number than not-necessarily-nerds. I further acknowledge that nobody on television has or will ever talk to me, while with nerds it is still possible, and I stand to gain nothing by attempting to irritate them. But the overall message of this bimshwel posting is that I do not do things for “reasons.”

A few years ago I sneered at the idea of paying somebody else to play video games (and other stupid things disconnected from value or necessity), but years before that I proposed paying people specifically to play really poorly-made video games well, so that the general population unable to devote their lives to enduring such abusive garbage could still fulfill any curiosity that the game’s existence might bring forth.

In that case, Battletoads. Of course it was bloody boring and I never posted it, and apparently erred in assuming that the Battletoad authors knew the correct names of Double Dragon enemies; the guy with the gun is actually named Willy, and I only know that from reading, within the past three months, another internet account of somebody complaining about the Battletoads game getting the gun guy’s name incorrect. Which, by the logic I was using in 2005 or thereabouts, makes weblog writers more qualified to design Double Dragon games than the people who were paid to make Battletoad games for several years. Also apparently there is a different Double Dragon guy named “Will” who has neither a machine gun nor a Y, and BT+DD also identifies him as “Lopar,” without considering that is just “Roper” again Romanized differently. I now know far, far too much about this.

They at least wouldn’t be able to point to this old magazine contest and say “blame whoever won that! It was their idea!”

But that is all well because I would hate to have paid somebody ten million dollars to do it when I could just get a whole bunch of other people to pay another organization entirely considerably smaller sums.

In this case now, game-quality is not a factor and the players do not keep the money, but the important thing is that they play exceptionally well. They are not regular dorks running a game at an average, unrehearsed pace, or worse, complete schlubs running a game for the first time and putting forth no effort but assuming their poor playing is inherently noteworthy.
Having said that, I have little interest in seeing a game I have not myself used being played very well, because I will have no concept of the challenge involved, how big a deal it is to have the challenge averted, how many of the original obligations are being skipped entirely, and, perhaps most importantly, the feeling of having a personal investment. The Quick-Game-Doer videos, specifically the one for Final Fantasy Threex, is often accompanied by viewer comments like “I’ve never played this game before and I’m so glad to see it” which seems to me the worst way to experience it first. The player is running from every encounter, skipping all the dialog, and you can’t hear any of the music, which is some of the best there is for the Superb Nintendo system, and just generally doing nonsensical-looking things that you would never do when playing properly. And also there are hundreds of videos already online of any of these games but especially this one that you could watch, some that aren’t even nonsensical, if you have such an ancient unfulfilled curiosity, why do you need somebody else to dump it in front of you? Sometimes they accompany this with a donation, so the totally stupid comment gets read during the video. It is like eating dessert before dinner. Except you are watching someone else eat it. And paying to influence what fork they use. For example, the background graphic is determined by which gets most money pledged to it. And the competing categories accumulate over thirty thousand dollars. From about 20 different people. Not quite ten million, but still more than that singular aspect is worth. And then people re-donate to bring their preferred image back into control. I believe in charity, but knowing what motivates people to part with their money is a form of illogic I will never be in accord with.
I like to think that my life has more meaning than that of the sort of person who can toss a thousand dollars at dominance of what appears behind the mostly skipped-past text, for charity or otherwise, but I haven’t successfully procured so much money that I CAN toss a thousand dollars away. I could go to the bank and get a few hundreds but I would have to tie them to strings before tossing them so that would they be assured of coming back. Most of these people that I laugh at for devoting themselves to frivolous matters are getting loads of dollars with apparently enough time left over to watch other people play video games all week in. Maybe not Rygar, but there was also an Ironsword race.

And even with fore-knowledge a good game-showing can be frustrating, if a specific area that I would like to see executed skillfully is skipped in pursuit of the most efficient route to the primary game objective. And so it is almost better to see a live run of a game compared to an ideal take from something the person has recorded multiple times, since I can see how a good player recovers from error.

And specifically with regard to the “race” videos, I watched a few, and they were ultimately not so interesting, since both players were pursuing the same path, using the same glitches and exploits. Very little was improvised. When one player got ahead, as a result of an isolated random obstacle or one the other messing up, they stayed ahead. Much like a running race, I suppose. And so you can get a better sense of full completion, exploration, and the consequences of failure by watching a schlub’s video, but that will take them far longer, hours, days, to accomplish, they’ll usually be talking over it, and you can’t interact with them, and you are living through someone else doing something you could do yourself and feel less dirty for the time spent on it. It is not like tennis where you need a special huge setup, a human opponent in close proximity and the capacity for physical exertion. If you have two working phalanx digits, you have the capacity to play Battletoads poorly.

Thankfully, future generations will never have to.