Special Demonstrations ver1.1 #01: Battle Garegga (T3-神威, ALL, Gain)

This is a re-release of the original Special Demonstrations #01 replay, except: - the annotations (which were lost when YouTube removed the Annotations system from their services) are now burned into the video, - the video is now in 1080p 60fps, and - the design of the video layout is now updated to match more recent releases in the series. - - - - - First, a little backstory: Recently, I had travelled to Rennes, France to attend Stunfest 2013, a large annual fighting game tournament. This year, three leading Japanese shooting game players - T3-Kamui, NAK and Clover-TAC - were invited to fly over to the event to demonstrate their skills, and to meet the group of shooting game players who were also attending. I had travelled over to meet up with a few of my friends from shmupsforum who would be there, to go and meet the Japanese players in person, and to watch them play up close and maybe learn some new things from them. The event was successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The Japanese players had loads of fun while they were there, and we who attended got to witness some amazing skill. Getting to chat with them during the weekend was icing on the cake, and over the three days, we got to know them well, understand their motivations and passions, and they returned our courtesy with encouragement, advice, and friendship. Long story short: towards the end of the last day of the event, I exchanged Twitter contact details with NAK and T3-Kamui, with the intention to remain in contact with them (Clover-TAC unfortunately doesn’t do social media), and hopefully to arrange to meet up with them in the near-future. After I sent them some messages of thanks via Twitter, the both of them then tracked me down on Facebook. After returning their friend requests, and chatting to them for a bit, a few days later, Kamui posts a couple of pictures of a few monster scores from her latest plays at her favourite arcade, with the (loosely translated) comment “I finally got revenge on this game, K score!“, and I think to myself, “I would have loved to have seen that credit in person“. Lo and behold, the next day, I receive a private message with a few links to a filesharing site which was hosting .vob files direct from a DVD recorder, with the (loosely translated) message, “Here’s the replays recorded from the arcade recently. I wanted to send these directly to you. I hope you enjoy watching them. They’re unedited raw footage, so feel free to edit them, share them, and add commentary to them as you wish.“ And here we are. This is the first of what I hope will be a long, successful series of releases from high-level Battle Garegga players, edited and mixed into commercial DVD-style layouts with intro sequences and additional commentary. The footage, as you may have gathered, was given to me raw and untouched from the DVD recorder facilities directly from Kamui herself, and rather than upload just pure footage, which would have been boring, I’ve gotten a little creative with the intro, credits, and backdrop to the replay, because I felt her footage deserved a bit of flash and style. The gameplay is all Kamui, and in her own words, this is a demonstration of some of her new techniques for Gain, designed to consistently get her over the 19.5 to 20mil mark even after poor luck on the flamingo section in stage 2. A lot of her new tricks are quite subtle, but where possible I’ll point out some differences between her older replays in the annotation commentary. I’m hoping that this series will continue to grow, as there is a distinct lack of readily available footage from high-level players. I’d dearly love to get in touch with the rest of the top players of the other seven selectable ships, and get some heavy duty footage for everyone’s enjoyment, but for the time being, Kamui herself has said to me that she intends to keep supplying me with footage as she aims for 21mil with Gain. So at least we know we’ll have her amazing skills on display for a while yet. Everything was created using Apple Final Cut Pro X and Compressor within the space of three days. I had never used Final Cut before for anything, so I had to learn to use it very quickly. Thankfully I have a lot of experience with just general video processing, and Final Cut itself works in much the same fashion as Ableton Live, something I do have some experience in, which helped accelerate learning quickly. The rest of the time was spent testing compression to ensure the final output video had no artefacts before uploading to YT. A huge thanks goes out to Kamui herself, for being generous enough to send me this footage unrequested. I wasn’t expecting it, to be honest, but it was kindly received, and I’m sharing this replay with you now on her behalf. Kamui, good luck in your quest for 21mil! To everyone else, enjoy! More information on the Special Demonstrations is available on the shmupsforum releases thread: