Welcome!

By Tom on October 20th, 2009

You’ve found/stumbled into the homepage of the Ocean City Trinity!  We’re a video game marathon team that makes events out of playing video games, streaming our progress online, chatting with people interested enough to join, and collecting money for a charitable cause from anyone that likes what we do.  Keep going to see our latest posts, or check the categories on the right to see the most important parts of the site!

Our next marathon will be another versus marathon, this time featuring the Banjo-Kazooie series, set to take place the weekend of March 27.  More details are coming soon!

If you have any thoughts, questions, observations, or other comments, send them to oceancitytrinity@gmail.com!

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About a lazy bear and arrogant bird

By Tom on February 27th, 2010

If you like our marathons, and you’re excited about seeing us play more games, but you’re not all that familiar with the Banjo-Kazooie games, this article is for you. Here’s a quick summary of the games we’ll be playing.

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What to expect from our Banjo-Kazooie Versus marathon

By Tom on February 20th, 2010

Still a work in progress as usual, but this should be enough of a preview that you know what’s going on, right?

Q: What is this?
A: This is the second official versus marathon held by gamemarathons.com. This one, as the title suggests, features the Banjo-Kazooie games. Each team will have 48 hours to complete as many achievements within the games as possible, and whoever has the most points at the end wins. Beyond that, each team will be interacting directly with any of our viewers interested enough to watch through a live chatroom. We’ll also be collecting donations to be sent directly to a great charity.

Q: When does this take place?
A: This even will happen on or around the weekend of March 27, 2010, and last for 48 hours.

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Explanations are in order…

By Tom on February 18th, 2010

I was trying to come up with a way to explain the lack of updates on a marathon that I implied would be coming in a few weeks in such a way that justifies the absence but doesn’t reflect poorly on us either.  Here’s my best shot, and if this doesn’t work, sorry in advance.

Around this time last year, I realized some of us within the group openly disagreed with how I was running these video game marathons…I won’t go into specifics here, but rest assured we don’t always agree.  I also realized that if I was acting as the organizer and team captain, we’d only run games that I personally liked, and anyone that’s watched us enough can tell there’s a few genres I rarely, if ever, play or enjoy.  To that end, I tried encouraging everyone else on the team to take my role in organizing a game marathon for games they liked to play.  I also thought it meant we could hold these events a little more often, and reduce the expectancy for one of our team members to show up for game series they don’t actually like.  And sure enough, I think we had five or six different people go at least somewhat into planning their own ideas and actually say on camera they were going to hold them at some point.  In theory, great idea, right?

In practice, though, not everything always comes together.  I’m not going to get into the reasons it doesn’t in detail.  The short way to put it is that we have lives outside these marathons too, with things that take greater priorities than having to plan around an entire weekend of gaming.  If  you need further justification, shoot us an email and we’ll explain further.

So in short, the Halo marathon is on hold again.  Shawn was going to plan that one, but at the moment there’s enough personal stuff on the radar that he can’t put it together.  I personally don’t think I can give a Halo marathon the respect it deserves since I’m not a fan, nor has anyone else taken interest in putting it together on his behalf at the moment.  But this doesn’t mean we won’t do it, and believes he can put something together with it in time for this summer.  I’m sorry if this was something you were looking forward to, but let’s face it, real life catches up to all of us at some point.

If that’s not enough to hold you over, though, the next versus marathon for Banjo-Kazooie is happening as planned.  As I’m writing this, we’ve got enough people interested, most of the achievements written, half the game finished in terms of practice, and three other teams also interested in playing (yes, four teams now!).  I expect I’ll be posting the first details about what to expect from that before the end of this week.

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Our early 2010 plans

By Tom on January 18th, 2010

Here’s what it’s looking like we’re doing next up.

Shawn announced during our last marathon that he’s going to do a Halo marathon in late February or early March, and he intends to follow through with that.  I personally do not know the details with that…but Shawn does, and he’ll be updating the site with said plans in the near future.

Looking ahead a little bit further, Chris from 1up Marathons and I enjoyed running the versus marathon that we’re going to make it into a quarterly event, with the winner nominating the games to be played the next time around!  For the next versus marathon we’ll be playing [temporarily removed], and we’re going to get more teams into the mix!

And beyond that…well, we’ll admit it, we haven’t planned that far ahead, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something.

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The noteable moments of our marathons

By Tom on January 13th, 2010

There have been several noteable moments with our marathons that get referenced a lot by us or the viewers, but if you weren’t there to see them it’ll require some explanations.  In the interest of having to do that a little less often, here’s a quick rundown of some highlights, lowlights, inside jokes, and other things that’ll probably pop up from time to time.

The Pizza Toss (From Sonic and carried forward)
About six to eight hours into the Sonic marathon, the team had ordered some pizza.  Around the same time, Alex had arrived on site, and repeatedly did an impersonation of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, as referenced in a then-popular Saturday Night Live skit.  In an attempt to stop him, Tom threw the nearest object he could find that wouldn’t hurt if thrown — a leftover pizza crust — across the room to lightly hit him.  As the moment was considered probably the funniest of that marathon, Tom carried forward the joke into each of their later events and threw a pizza crust at someone the first night of the marathon:
Mario: Thrown at Shawn after accidentally clogging the toilet
Devil May Cry: Thrown at Joe for getting the first game over
Suikoden: Thrown at Joe for arriving late to the event
Mega Man: No pizza was thrown, but Tom did say he was planning to throw pizza at one of the event rookies as an initiation ceremony
Lost World (From Sonic)
This is the group meme that seems to get referenced most often, thanks in part to a few viewers that bring it up.  It comes from the second-to-last level of Sonic Adventure.  The level, played primarily by Sarah, took an unusually long time to finish compared to the others thanks to a few cheap deaths and difficult platforming in a vertical room where a misstep caused her to redo sections of the room.  Since then, Lost World has become synonymous with a player doing poorly on part of a game compared to how difficult it actually is.  Other Lost World moments include:
Crisis City from Sonic 2006 (by Mason)
The fourth world of Super Mario Bros. 3 (by Mason)
The very beginning of Super Mario Sunshine (by Chris)
Pretty much every boss in the second half of Devil May Cry 1’s hard mode (by Tom)
Nevas in Devil May Cry 3’s very hard mode (by Shawn, Dan, Phil, and Tom, the only such incident to be given up on entirely)
The final fight with Sarah on Suikoden 3 (by Tom)
Lumine in Mega Man X8 (by Tom)
The Game Hates Itself Too (From Sonic)
During the first marathon, the team came up with a system of win points and fail points for good and bad behavior and game playing.  They decided that at the end of the stream, whoever had the most fail points would have to play Sonic The Fighters, known to be one of the worst games the series had to offer.  Mason was the big winner (big loser?), and agreed that the game was horrible.  However, as if the game realized its pathetic existence and committed suicide, the game crashed with a generic error partway through (“The Nintendo Gamecube disc could not be read”), giving us a spectacular ending none of us could have planned or predicted.  Mason also had the most fail points at the end of the Mario marathon, but no further punishment took place since there were no really bad Mario games on site.
The Worst CO Ever Contest (From Mario)
With so many people at the marathon, several of the other players ended up playing other games off camera.  At one point, Mason, Chris, Dan, and Phil started playing Advance Wars against each other in an attempt to figure out who was the “worst CO ever”, or simply the worst at the game.  Mason ended up being the worst, and got fail points as a result.
The Cracker Debate (From Mario/Devil May Cry)
At one point during the Mario marathon, Shawn declared he was going to give away a box of Triscuits to one of our viewers (which, out of pure laziness, never was actually done).  Later, at the Devil May Cry marathon, the incident was brought up again, and when questioned why it was Triscuits, Shawn said it was because it was the best cracker out there.  This led to a surprisingly heated debate on which cracker actually is the best between everyone else there.  The debate wasn’t formally settled at first with an even split between that and Cheez-Its, but Joe (who was away at the time this started) eventually settled the debate with Cheez-Its winning.  In reference to this, Cheez-Its have been on site for snack food every marathon since.
The First Complete Game (From Devil May Cry)
Ocean City Trinity does not usually assign specific games to specific people, instead simply choosing to pass off the controller as needed.  As a result, it wasn’t till the team’s third marathon where one player, Tom in this case, made literally all the progress on a single game (Shawn – literally the only other person awake at the time – did play a few times but they all ended in game overs).  However, the terms by which this happened were impressive on their own – it was Devil May Cry 1 on hard mode, all in one sitting, starting at hour 35 of the marathon (3AM in local time), and Tom had gotten surprisingly little sleep since the event had started.  In recognition of the event, a few viewers who had watched most of Tom’s attempt at this chipped in for a donation.
The Gamer Rune (From Suikoden)
Within the Suikoden universe, runes were the source of most special abilities, and were embedded into a person’s hands or head.  Early in the Suikoden marathon, in an attempt to conform to the spirit of the games, Tom had a rune drawn on his right hand, which he called the Gamer Rune, in the shape of a game controller, which he claimed enhanced his gaming abilities.  The rune was noticed by multiple viewers and the occasional guest commentators Joe and Alex, to which Tom explained that he got the rune from “Johnny, who has an unmarked building on route 37”.  The rune disappeared for the second half of the broadcast, under the claim that it was getting Tom weird looks from the FPS-centric game crowd at work.  Interestingly, Tom had planned a similar idea for the Mega Man marathon in which he would change shirts periodically claiming to have defeated a boss, but the idea barely materialized since he didn’t have enough time off camera.
The Five Minute Rule (From Suikoden)
The five minute rule states that a village whose name actually contains the word “village” will burn to the ground in a glorious blaze if the main character leaves it for more than five minutes.  The rule was noticed when Tom was playing Suikoden 2 and two such villages were burnt down within an hour.  The rule was invoked five times total during the marathon, and once found gave the crowd a bit of excitement every time Tom entered a new village.  Incidentally, Toms River (the city which Ocean City Trinity broadcasts out of) was for a long time, legally speaking, a village.
Panic Attack (From Mega Man)
While the team has been fairly good about keeping a long broadcast going outside of technical issues, one notable exception occurred about halfway through the Mega Man marathon.  Up to this point, Tom and Sarah had been the only people running the marathon for a significant period of time.  Additionally, Tom had not gotten a chance to sleep at all during the marathon (and had gone into work early the morning it started), and thus had been awake for almost 36 hours.  So around the halfway point, just before starting Mega Man X, the sleep deprivation caught up to him and had a brief panic attack.  Sarah was resting at the time, so with no one else able to run the show in his place Tom called a temporary break.  He used the time to, among other things, encourage another moderator (AlenMcDohl from Bonus Stage Marathons) to put on an impromptu show in order to keep viewership up and call in a few friends that were unable to make it earlier to the show, and when they arrived he got the sleep he needed (in a moment of good timing, they arrived about two minutes before the next game was finished).  In spite of the sleep deprivation, this isn’t the longest period of no sleep for these marathons – that record goes to Shawn, who stayed up for all 48 scheduled hours of the Mario marathon (plus a few hours before and after the event).
The Tastiest Boss (From Mega Man)
In the Mega Man X series, most of the bosses are based on different animals.  While playing through Mega Man X3, Shawn, Ricky, and Tom got into a discussion on which of the bosses they thought would be the tastiest, coming up with creative answers on what would be their equivalent (i.e. “Blizzard Buffalo sounds like a frozen burger”).  From within the first three games, Bubble Crab was considered to probably be the tastiest.
Delayed Ending (From Mega Man)
Tom and Sarah had no problem continuing the Mega Man marathon well past its scheduled end time to finish the last games on the list, going up until about 5AM on the last game with a scheduled end time of 7PM the previous night (though one hour was cut out as a dinner break), but the final boss of Mega Man X8, the last game in the series, proved to be too difficult in the end, visibly frustrating Tom.  Thanks to some encouragement from everyone watching, Tom agreed to put together an impromptu show the next night to complete the game.  Clearly the time to rest helped immensely, as he was able to finish the boss on his third try.

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Star Fox marathon complete! Report for debriefing!

By Tom on January 5th, 2010

The final score was 2515-1670 in favor of our team.  And in the process, we had a great time playing the games!

The idea wasn’t to just finish the games this time but to accomplish more in the games than our opponent team, 1up Marathons.  As such, we ended up not playing the games in any particular order, instead trying to pace ourselves based on who was available and what we thought was appropriate.  I think it turned into playing Star Fox 64, then the original, back to 64, Assault, the Smash Bros. games, Adventure, Assault again, one more shot at the original, Command, 64, then tried to rush some more achievements at the original and Adventure.  And let’s face it, the approach worked well.  We took a different approach and assigned specific routes and games to specific people this time around, a first for our group but standard for most others.  And it’s not hard to see why, as we were able to get a lot more done in the process.

I tend to judge how things went by looking at what went wrong, and this time, really, I don’t have much.  One of our expected players didn’t show, but we got along fine without him.  We tried to run a DS game using a special prop consisting of two webcams, a set of Tinkertoys, and some duct tape (really).  In the end, one webcam turned out to be incompatible so we only got one screen, and it wasn’t a great quality shot, but thanks to changing the screen focus when needed it did get the job done in the end.  And our other team couldn’t finish the marathon due to some technical issues I’m told meant the entire modem had to be replaced, but we were able to put together a great finale without them.  And that’s all I can think of that really went wrong.  In the end, nothing beyond minor nuisances, right?

In the end, this was a very positive experience for us all, and we definitely plan to do another competition like this sometime later.

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The achievement list

By Tom on December 23rd, 2009

With the marathon two weeks away, our achievement list has been finalized.  Here is the list of things that we’ll need to do in each game.
EDIT: Now that the marathon’s over, the achievements our team actually got are in bold.
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Sarah’s little side project

By Tom on December 19th, 2009

Sarah mentioned during our last marathon that she wanted to start making Let’s Play videos on Youtube…you know, the type where she records playing through a game with some added commentary.  You’ll be happy to know she followed through with that and has a complete run of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as Tails up, and has plans for more games and videos soon.  Check out her channel here!

Sarah also wants me to add that it did not turn out like another Lost World, “thank you very much.”

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An interview with the trinity

By Tom on December 10th, 2009

This happened a little bit ago and I forgot to post it.  Sarah and I did an interview for gamemarathons.com where we talk a little about our group and our Mega Man marathon.  You can view it here.  Thanks also go out to Paul/AlenMcDohl from Bonus Stage Marathons for conducting the interview.

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Vote for Team Wolf!

By Tom on December 5th, 2009

For anyone who missed the memo before, most of the marathon stuff is at starfox.gamemarathons.com, but there’s one thing here that is worth special attention…

You can see the achievement list on the site and one of them, Preseason Prediction, will award 50 points to the person our viewers think will be the big winner!  So help us out, vote for us, and give us some free points and a vote of confidence!

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