I'm hitstun, from Westerville, Ohio. I've been lurking for a few years, and I've started making some edits
too. I play in local Fighting Game Tournaments and I'm Older Than I Look. I work on independent video games at Bakamo Studios.
My weekly justin.tv stream contains examples of:
- Aborted Arc: The streams for MegaRace and Roller Coaster Tycoon sounded good in theory, but turned out so boring to watch that the games were switched out mid-stream and the challenges stricken from record. My Skype chatters want to call those challenges failures.
- Angrish: If I'm talking and get interrupted by my character taking damage, my sentence usually turns into this
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: My run at the game I'm streaming can get easily interrupted by off-topic chat, internet videos, or even other games I feel like playing for 5 minutes at a time
- Drunk with Power: Played for laughs. My mods and I have a tendency to issue ten-minute time outs to users for poor grammar, bad jokes, dumb links, or just saying hi. I've been toning this down lately, but it still happens when it's deserved
- Epic Fail: I have a tendency to stumble upon very unlikely ways to either die or get stuck, like involuntarily falling through a solid floor or getting corner juggled to death by a single enemy
- Failed a Spot Check: A frequent source of frustration. I can wander around a map for 10 minutes looking for the next objective, only to be informed by a chatter or a FAQ that I had somehow walked around it without noticing it was there. This happened a lot in Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub Zero and Doom.
- Hypercompetent Sidekick: Sometimes a chatter becomes this when I play a well known game that I haven't beaten before, like Mega Man X2, Yoshis Island, and Postal 2. Likewise, I'll actually become another broadcaster's Hypercompetent Sidekick on their stream if I know the game they're playing well enough.
- Kaizo Trap: I could struggle for a good 20 minutes on a level's Scrappy Mechanic, and when I finally make it through, I have a tendency to die to an easy jump or low-level Mook before reaching a checkpoint, forcing me to confront the Scrappy Mechanic again.
- Let's Play: Kind of. Justin.tv video game streams are typically this done in real time with a live chatroom audience, and only the highlights get kept on Justin.tv's servers for longer than a week. I talk less about the game, and I certainly don't do voice acting for the dialogue.
- Monster of the Week: The original Hitstun's Random Gaming stream would play a different game each week, aiming to start and end the game in about 6 hours. The new Hitstun's Challenge format averts this, since it allows games to span multiple streams, and I can't start a new challenge while one is still running. My chat seems to get bored quickly if I run one game multiple weeks in a row, so I want to try to find more games that I can play start-to-finish in 6 hours or so.
- MST: The Skype chat alternates between this type of mockery and random off-topic chatter
- Mundane Utility: I love to waste a character's special abilities this way. The Skype chatters are not amused.
- Remembered I Could Fly: I tend to forget to use my character's core abilities, like an X-Wing's photon torpedoes or Sub-Zero's ice blasts
- Sanity Slippage: Natural consequence of throwing myself at a level filled with Goddamned Bats until I get through so I can finish the game and win the challenge. That's if I don't Rage Quit and admit defeat.
- Save Scumming: Usually averted in that I try to treat emulators as the actual consoles they're emulating. If I get stuck and it takes me too long to progress in the game, I'll begin Save Scumming just enough to make progress. This is an Acceptable Break from Reality so the viewers don't have to see me fight through the easy part of a level dozens of times in a row, only to die at the hard part. If I have to resort to save scumming or other cheats to beat a game in a reasonable time, the game gets recorded as a triangle (beaten with cheats) instead of a circle (beaten) and doesn't count as a win or a loss.
- Schedule Slip: It used to be that any game I didn't reach the end of in one sitting would fall into this category. It would be weeks or months before I came back and finish it. The new challenge structure prevents me from procrastinating like this, but there are games from the first year and a half that my chatters want me to come back and finish.
- Self-Deprecation: I deliberately pick games outside my expertise so I can improve at them, knowing this results in stream after stream of failures. Furthermore, any challenge I lose from now on results in a penalty game picked by the Skype chatters.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome?: Games that I think would make an awesome stream often fall flat on my audience. I guess the suspense and danger of a Shiren The Wanderer run is lost if you're not the player.
