Sonic Whammy Enterprises

Hello to all once again. Been quite a while, hasn’t it?

Since Otakon, as you can see, we’ve been on quite a dry spell over here at SWE. We started with our proposed chance to start Season 5 turning out not to be as for the second year in a row, New York Comic Con could not find a way to bring Anime Game Show Super Show along for the ride. It was disappointing for sure, and as it turns out, it wouldn’t have mattered, as I could only stay half of the day on that Saturday because of my niece Sydney’s birthday party. But I got to do a brand new wacky Card Sharks survey with the crowd there, and I got to get Sydney a mini Domo plush like she wanted. So, not a total loss.

So while that went down, all of us have been busy with life, really. In between, we discussed new places to bring Anime Game Show Super Show, picked a couple places, then decided not to when real life was just getting too much in the way. And you know we were busy if I was too busy to not only post here, but to get all the rest of Season 4 up on YouTube. As of this moment, we STILL haven’t posted out Otakon trio yet. They will probably go up in February once we get an updated deal with Mythical Fair going. So stay tuned for those.

But then, a few weeks ago, we got hit with a bombshell. No, not Hurricane Sandy, we made it out of that all right, and we continue to wish the best for those who didn’t. However, Sandy was partly responsible for this bombshell. Due to a combination of factors which they discuss on their site, iconsf.org, the good folks at I-Con had to cancel their convention for 2013. They’re hoping to bring it back in 2014, so please help them out to make it happen, if for no other reason than for how good they were to us last year.

However, it still leaves once again with no show to start our new season. So, we immediately brought the vote back up, because there was no way we were going to wait until AnimeNEXT to play again. And now, we’re in process of applying to a couple new conventions to lead off Season 5 in the Spring, and one of them is already interested in bringing us in. This has brought a little bit of life back into the gang here, because we love bringing you this show.

In the coming days, if you don’t see it already, I’ll have a new section here on the site listing the cons we’ve played, will play, and are applying for in all of our travels. And if one of the new cons we’re applying to says yes, we’ll announce it right here and talk all about it.

And that’s not the only big announcement I’ll be making here. A very huge one is coming up in a about a week. It’s going to have a big impact on Season 5, so stay tuned. Don’t forget to keep following us on Facebook & Twitter for other mini updates & new videos.

For now, back to the drawing board to prepare. Later!

So we’ve made it to the end of another season. Otakon 2012 has come and gone, and after the wild success we had there last year, we could only imagine what this year was going to hold for us.

What we got was probably one of the wildest rollercoaster rides we’ve ever been on. And I’ll let you in on something about me: I HATE rollercoasters. (The only present-day exception is Aerosmith’s Rock ‘N Rollercoaster in Disney Hollywood Studios.)

The wild ride began literally on the drive down. In the past 3 years that I had been running Sonic Whammy Enterprises as both its own entity and as part of Disorganization XIII, short but intense rainstorms hit New Jersey while I drove the NJ Turnpike. This year, the streak continued, and it was the worst storm yet. Once it started, we were continuously racing with it, and not only were we losing to it, but these storms were so massive that on at least 3 occasions, we could barely see a car length in front of us. It’s also the first time in my life that I’ve ever had to actually put my high beams on when I drove. Somehow, Robert, Francis & I finally managed to reach our hotel in Linthicum just after 11PM. Trevor, though, was not so lucky. You can read his blog for more on that, but still, between the twice in 3 years that he’s had weather issues, and the now 4 for 4 rainstorms I’ve faced, we just really don’t have a good track record trying to get to Otakon.

Once we did get there, though, things started to come together. Friday started with a touching moment that I didn’t plan for. I was talking with a non-otaku family of 3 vacationing from Illinois while on the light rail heading toward the Baltimore Convention Center. The son, about 5 years old, was asking questions about Otakon and what everyone was dressing up as. At one point, he asked if anyone cosplays as Indiana Jones. I said I had never seen it, and Robert & Francis said they only ever saw it once long before we met. Minutes later, we all get off the light rail and pass by the front of the BCC, and as luck would have it, there standing in the registration is a middle-aged man dressed as Indiana Jones! The kid was really happy to see that, and the parents were happy, too. It’s awesome when you can make someone’s day like that.

For me, the rest of the con leading up to showtime was mostly straightforward. In my classic (and only) Ryu cosplay, I completed our Family Feud surveys in preparation for our show, attended my Fighters Megamix photoshoot after dinner, and fulfilled my Otakon tradition by taking in a little bit of Fan Parodies that night. (I’ll say more about that another day.) Saturday, revolved around final preparation, but I had some fun taking part in a mock Pokemon battle with a Typhlosion cosplayer against a Jirachi – one that became the LONGEST… Pokemon battle… EVER. After that was over, those of us in Panel Ops were treating to an hour of silliness as a couple of people were firing a nerf-like disc launcher off the tall walls of the room trying to hit a stack of plastic cups clear across on the other side. Easily the most different amusement I’ve ever had at a con to date.

But now we come to showtime. The room filled its 600-seat capacity right away, and coupling this with the over $1,000 in prizes I snatched up from the Dealer’s Room, this was our biggest show ever. And then… disaster.

Up to this point, the laptops I’ve been using to run this show have been my now 7-year old Dell Inspirons. The batteries and their plugs, however, are now officially failing all around. So, for the first time, my present Toshiba L675, with its own set of issues, was called into service. And in the final preparation, a new issue presented itself: It wouldn’t take the DVI feed! That means we had NOTHING projecting on the screens! What do we do now?!

Well, we pull together with our fans, that’s what we do. Family Feud went on despite having no screen, with my shouting the results of each answer from the back of the stage as Trevor called for them. During that time, an audience or staff member (I never found out which) brought their laptop up to us, and the test run worked out. So we moved the files to that laptop as soon as Feud was over to do Card Sharks. That went great, but then we were faced with only 20 minutes to do Press Your Luck, and that was WITH a 15-minute extension that we received. After a lot of debate, I made the call to go forward. And somehow, thanks to an insane combination of events, we pulled it off, with a finish that made the audience explode several times. In fact, the crowd stayed with us and gave us 100% of their enthusiasm all the way through. That’s the sign of a great panel, and to those of you that came to our show and are reading this, we thank you more than words can tell.

While we’re thanking people, I would also like to thank a few select fans of our show. First, special thanks to Kristen “Sai” Ludewig, Sean “Taicho X” Blouch & Abby “Minion” Davis for the loan of their copy of the Family Feud software. (They hosted Feud at last year’s Otakon, and you’ll see that very soon.) Next, to our Card Sharks dealer, Elizabeth “Elisto” Ingianni, an awesome friend to us, as Robert will attest to. And finally, to two of our most devoted fans – and former contestants along with Kristen & Abby – Liz Reedt & Justin Cohen, who took the time to hang with us both after the show and the following morning. All of these guys are some of the best friends I’ve made on the con scene since I started this, and I hope to make many more in the years to come.

Oh, incidentally, I found out today with the help of Trevor and Bryan Espinoza of Florida Whammy Entertainment what my laptop’s problem was. Turns out that the driver for the DVI port was out of date. Having never used it before now, I would’ve never guessed. But we got it updated this morning, and it works fine. With luck, we should not run into that problem ever again.

So, despite the storms, the 2AM nights, the technical difficulties and everything else, we pulled it off and had an amazing time once again. Otakon, we thank you for another amazing season finale, and for proving that as much as I hate rollercoasters, there are some that are worth the ride.

Greetings once again. Brian Sapinski here, just returning last night from a few days away in Lake George, NY. It’s been a regular getaway for Andrea’s parents ever since she was a kid, and I’ve been going up there now for 16 straight summers and counting.

Since I started Sonic Whammy Enterprises, I’ve always been hoping to find either fans of my show or to bring new people into the fold. When I’m on vacations, that’s no exception. Well, I finally got lucky for the first time the other night, as someone complimented me on the Sonic shirt that I was wearing. I asked him if he was an anime fan, to which he said he was, so I gave him our website address (saved it on his cellphone) and told him about our Card Sharks surveys. To this point, he hasn’t answered them yet, but I know that I can’t expect success every time. All I can do is try. So if I’m abroad and see you wearing an anime or video game t-shirt, get ready, because you can become the newest part of our audience.

Back here on the homefront, I want to try to find my fans as well, and know who they are at the same time. Down at the bottom of each page here on the site, you’ll see that you can leave comments. Well, as I know is the case with many WordPress sites, we’re subject to a lot of spam here. I would like to be able to pick out the real comments from the junk, and I have the simple answer. The spam always contains some kind of junk website link attached. So, if you’re leaving a comment on this site that is meant for the world to read, DON’T LEAVE A LINK! If you have something you really want me to see, save it for Facebook and Twitter and I’ll get it over there.

Well, that’s it from here. We hope to hear from all of you soon here and abroad, and you’ll be hearing from us again soon…

VERY soon…

Well, that was an interesting experience.

AnimeNEXT is now about 2 weeks removed. It was a wacky night for us there. A few days before the con, as you saw on Facebook, news came that our 60-minute show got expanded to 90 minutes to make more use of the panel room by the last couple panelists in there. Unfortunately, we were lucky to get in just the 60. We first got crossed up with another group who were told they were in our room at the same time we were supposed to be there, so that ate up time. And then, it took a while to get the video set up properly to get The Challengers up and running. Fortunately, we have a very patient and awesome audience who stayed with us every step of the way. This crowd was led by Lisa Cornelius Young, one of our AnimeNEXT faithful, and Justin Cohen, a contestant from last year’s NEXT run of Anime Press Your Luck. We thank you guys for all your support.

Speaking of The Challengers, that show is the reason why I haven’t posted about NEXT until now.

First up, a big thank you again to Jon Nielsen of Florida Whammy Entertainment for helping us put this program together in 7 weeks(!) to get us to play the game as tribute to the late Dick Clark. We were literally up until 4AM the night before the con trying to make sure the program worked without any bugs in it. I don’t know how we managed, but we did. When we went to play the game, I had to call Jon to get it to display on screen properly. It was my first time working with Visual Basic as opposed to Flash, and Jon runs his programs on a double-wide monitor setup. But now that I know how it goes, we’re cool, and who knows, we may keep The Challengers in our library.

But if we do, we’re definitely changing one thing… THE QUESTIONS WILL BE EASIER! When you see the video down the line (we’re still editing I-Con, too, don’t worry), you’ll see that our contestants were just not hitting on anything. Search the premiere episode of the actual Challengers on YouTube and that’s what happened to us, only worse.

Now, after this happened, I posed a question to myself: Was the game too hard, or did we just have Dumb Contestant Syndrome for that game? So, I tapped into my inner Uncle and did… RESEARCH! I took the questions to several of the students at my high school last week who are huge anime fans. Of the 4 of them that played the game (3 in a standard game and 1 solo player), only 1 of the 4 managed to finish with a positive score. Furthering the research, Jon Nielsen played the same game this past weekend at MetroCon in Tampa, and one of their players finished in the red as well, with the others posting very low scores. All in all, what this concludes is that the questions will become simpler, and our criteria for what defines easier and harder questions will be reassessed. So, to our NEXT players, if you happen to read this, you can rest easy, it wasn’t just you.

But everyone still enjoyed the game, even if it was a washout. PYL went very well, as it always does, so we got to finish on a high note. We didn’t get to do Card Sharks, sadly, but people still got to see the cards, and they loved them just as much as I-Con did. To be honest, though, I don’t think we could’ve done Card Sharks in our very small panel room, anyway. But what can you do?

Videos will be coming soon. Thanks to everyone that came, and we’ll see you guys at Otakon!

Brian here once again. Before I start this late night post at 1AM local time, let me first congratulate a friend of mine from the AnimeNEXT universe, Lisa Cornelius, who just became Lisa Young on June 1. Congratulations, Lisa, to you and the mister. I wish you two all the best, and if he gives you any grief, you come and see me, because you are part of the circle of marriage now, and we need to do everything in our power to keep that circle strong.

And with that shoutout out of the way, we can now move on to another shout out (spacing intentional).

OTAKON, HERE WE COME!

Yes, that’s right, we’re heading back to Baltimore once again, for our 4th year, and the 1st for Anime Game Show Super Show. And oh boy, get ready for a big party, because we’re coming with 90 minutes of action! That’s right, we’re gonna be playing THREE shows for our fans down there: BODY LANGUAGE, CARD SHARKS, and of course, PRESS YOUR LUCK.

We were very surprised to har that Otakon is going to let us play a 90-minute show. I had one with Disorganization XIII at my first Otakon in 2009, though I didn’t know it was 90 minutes. That’s another story for another day. Fast forward, then, to last year’s edition of Anime Press Your Luck, which brought us one of our biggest live audiences ever, as well as some of the best Whammy Cosplayers we’ve ever had, not to mention great gameplay. Otakon has always been our season finale, and fittingly, our biggest show of the year. So if you thought last year was a heck of an experience, wait until Anime Game Show Super Show comes to town.

And here is where I turn to all of you, our fans. If you know us and love us, be there like you always have. But at the same time, tell your friends about us, too, and bring them here, because I’m sure that there are many fans out there who don’t know about our name change, and might still be expecting to see Anime Press Your Luck. Tell them to not let the name fool them. Let them know that it’s still gonna be there along with more of the world’s favorite game shows. And when that music hits, we plan to blow the roof off of the Baltimore Convention Center.

So come one, come all! Join us for the biggest game show of the year, Anime Game Show Super Show, coming to Otakon in July. We hope to see you all there.

(That means you too, Liz, whereever you are. I know you’re out there waiting to be a contestant again. We’re waiting for you.)

And now to conclude our look at our trio of new games. I was actually going to post these all in one post. Seeing how insanely long it was, I decided to do this 3-day breakup. Could you imagine if I left it all together? You’d never get anything else done for the week!

So don’t think that your friendly neighborhood game show nut isn’t looking out for you. You can invite me to dinner as a thank you later.

CARD SHARKS
Out of all the new games, this was the one we were the most excited for. In fact, when we decided to create Anime Game Show Super Show, Card Sharks was the first show we all said we wanted to do, before we even created the voting list. We have Francis to thank for suggesting it first in early 2011, because as soon as he said it, we all immediately thought it was so crazy that it just might work.

Since then, I have worked tirelessly on the preparation of this game. As we all came up with these surveys, I’ve scoured the con message boards for places we’ve been to, as well as on cosplay.com, and polled people face to face at our various shows. Everyone that’s taken part has had a lot of fun, and we got some very interesting stories along the way, too. I hope you’ll take our surveys as well and share your thoughts and experiences, too.

But that’s the easy part. What about those cards?!

As soon as we decided to do this, I knew exactly who I needed to call on: my mom. As she works for a formerly family-owned printing & pre-press company, I knew I had a shot at this with her help. Amazingly, she agreed to help, and after several months of finding down time at the shop, the cards were made. I then spent the last few weekends leading up to I-Con spray-gluing the cards together. The decks were finally finished at 3AM the night before the con! We got a lot of compliments after the show about them. Heck, a couple people wanted to buy them off us! True story. But trust me, for how much these would have cost us, I don’t think these cards are ever getting made again unless we have to replace some. But none of this would have been possible without my mom’s help. Mom, we bow to you for all the help. Thanks!

We will, however, replace our rack setup. We just used simple children’s picture frames from IKEA, and to make things more interesting, it was raining the day of the con, and when I went to pick Robert & Francis up on the way, half the frames fell out when we opened the door into a giant puddle, along with my cell phone! Everything was fine, but those frames, wet or dry, can’t hold the weight of two cards leaning against them. We’ll work on it, don’t worry.

Incidentally, Card Sharks once went into the statistics on their cards, so we will as well. Each deck weigh about 9 1/2 pounds, give or take a few ounces, and each card measures 16×12 inches, the same size as the real decks created for the show. (Jim Perry said the cards were 24×12, but that was wrong. I measured both a real playing card and the pixels of a screenshot to confirm this.) As far as the images on the cards go, I was originally planning to only have the royal cards (10 through Ace) have character images on them, but it was the team’s decision to go all the way with all 52 cards representing 52 different anime. We took the characters that are the faces of their respective anime… or the villains for the 8′s (Robert & Trevor’s idea)… assigned them to their cards, and now you see the result. Coming soon, as I promised during the show, we will post the full list of the deck so you can see who else will be popping up. Feel free to take guesses in the meantime.

And if you’re wondering about the graphic overlays this time, they’re there because Francis had to do a LOT of moving about with the camera to see past the player’s heads as the game went on. It’s not his fault, though. When we went back for the cards after our early shows, they were so bulky to carry that we had no way to carry the tripod with us, and none of us had the energy to go back to the car for it. We’ve got a hand truck ready for next time to work past this.

So with that, our first set of new games from the Anime Game Show Super Show came to an end. Now I know that you might consider Hollywood Squares a new game, too, but that’s I-Con’s show, not ours. Sara Dorchak simply asked us to host that, too, because she liked our ideas so much, and decided to help us get more panel time so that we could get our badges comped. Once again, Sara, you rock!

And now, I’m beat from writing all this. I’m gonna go recharge and get ready for AnimeNEXT. Seeya there, gang.

Another day, another game show. Let’s take a look at the 2nd of our 3 new games in its premiere episode: Match Game.

MATCH GAME
In our voting for the new games, Match Game was far and away voted #1, with three of the five giving it top ranking.

While you saw the other celebrities sitting on the sidelines during Body Language, we got them all seated and set to go right away for Match Game.

The shortage of time for this game caused a few things to go differently than they normally would. First, though our rules state that we play 3 rounds, similar to Match Game PM, we only played two. Second, Robert accidentally did the contestant introductions while we were still setting up, which is why you don’t see them here. Third, the super brief rules discussion led to an on-the-fly reminder later on to keep the answers clean. This didn’t stop Bill Rogers & Jamie Marchi from saying what they said, but it’s cool, guys.

Also, thanks to my camcorder memory card giving us problems, we ran into a memory & battery issue that cut us off from recording the whole game. Thankfully, Ernie Layug & the gang over at Out Of Time Productions have come through for us once again, as they were shooting the show for both themselves and for I-Con, as Ernie was a key staff member there for this year. Hats off again, guys, and thanks for your continued support of our shows.

Incidentally, we do have game software for this, which was provided to us by Travis Schario, the man who did our Press Your Luck game. We didn’t get to use it because Travis never had a chance to send me a formal set of instructions. I did figure out what keys did what on my own, mostly, and he was able to tell me the rest, but I couldn’t remember those commands in the rush to keep the show going. Fortunately, it was a good thing we didn’t use it, because I found out later that the Super Match setup in the program was wrong. So we avoided another technical difficulty. I simply wrote everything on Notepad as we went through that portion of the game, and I overlayed the graphics for you guys later on.

And then there’s one more little added treat. Keep in mind as we did this, we had two computers running, one for software, and one for Skype. Unfortunately, much as the I-Con technicians tried, neither computer could do both video and audio on its own, Skype or no Skype. So, with no music or sound effects to be heard, our cameraman Francis decided to provide some music himself for his own amusement, and since his is the closest voice to the camera, that means we got to hear it. I didn’t know he did this until I went to edit the show. I was going to dub all the music in, but as soon as I heard Francis, I was cracking up so much that I just had to leave it in. I hope you enjoy it.

And I hope you enjoy Robert’s first attempt at hosting one of our shows. I said a while back that when Anime Game Show Super Show was first devised, we said that I would not host every game. Robert and Trevor will be jumping into the action as well. Now I couldn’t help but jump in myself during this first go of Robert’s, but it’s only because I’m too used to being in the role. But he did just fine, and you’ll get to see a lot more of Robert hosting our games in the conventions to come.

I should also point out that one of the students who competed in this game, Martin, is a Stony Brook student. A staff member told us after the show that Martin was one of her students, and from what she knew of how he is, she would have never expected him to do something like this, so she was very happy and excited for him. And Martin told us on our Facebook page that he had a great time at our show as well. Hearing things like that is a big part of why I started doing this, and I hope I get to hear more compliments like that for a very long time to come.

Greetings once again to our slowly growing fanbase.

By this point now, all of our new games – Body Language, Match Game and Card Sharks – have now been up on YouTube for a week. We’ve still got two more games to post, Press Your Luck and I-Con’s Hollywood Squares, so stay tuned for those. Hopefully, by now, you’ve had a chance to watch the premieres. And if you haven’t, WHY?! Well, you’re in luck, because you can watch them here as you finish reading this!

Anyway, I decided to share with you this 3-part retrospective detailing some of the things that you didn’t see during the playing of our games and what went into them. Simply put, every one of these games had a story to tell. I’ve already told you some of what went on just getting to the con, so I’ll do my best not to repeat things here unless it’s relevant to the conversation. With that, here’s the lowdown.

BODY LANGUAGE
When we first decided to create Anime Game Show Super Show, we suggested a dozen different games. The five of us – Robert, Francis, Trevor, Andrea and myself – each ranked the top 3 games we wanted to play. When the votes were counted, Body Language came in 2nd.

Now you already know that we started this game and our show in general with virtually no time to set up. Fortunately, the celebrity guests were a little late themselves in arriving to the room, which bought us a little breathing room. With us already behind time, though, I could only give the briefest of briefings to them on the games we were playing, and to decide which two of them would be our first volunteers (or maybe victims, in their minds) to play in Body Language. Kristen Nelson & Bill Rogers stepped up, and once we got the contestants chosen and Trevor contacted on Skype, we were ready to go.

Out of any of the new games, Body Language suffered the most from a presentation standpoint. I couldn’t get the puzzle files set up to go on screen like I wanted, hence why you guys see them captioned in on YouTube. You can also see me scrambling to write the words on cards as we were going because we couldn’t show them on screen and get the charades to face camera and the audience at the same time. I think we might revisit some of these things for future episodes. In addition, this, along with Match Game, was the first time that we chose our contestants without the raffle like we usually do. Why? Our scramble to make it to the room forced us to leave some things in the car. That included the prize box… which happened to have the tickets inside.

However, in spite of all this, I think that all of the players did incredibly well. They proved that charades is far from dead, and if I had more time to give everyone the suggestion on how to act out famous names, they would have done even better. As for the puzzles, it took a little time at first, but everyone got the hang of them. Let me tell you, though, those puzzles are a lot harder to come up with than you think. Watch any episode of the real Body Language, and notice that every puzzle is just one long sentence where only those 7 words or phrases in the blanks have any meaning. It was a challenge, but we were up to it, and now that we’ve got it, we’re ready to give you guys more. And I hope we find more contestants, and celebrities like Kristen & Bill, who are game as well. They all started this off right.

We’ll talk about Match Game tomorrow. For now, enjoy our debut of Anime Body Language.

(Original date of post: 5/7/12)

Greetings to all of you once again. Brian Sapinski here.

April 18, 2012, as we all know, marked the passing of game show legend and entertainment mogul Dick Clark at the age of 82. His death is still being mourned by many in the game show world, including myself. And this past weekend, the loss was made even sadder with the passing of Bob Stewart at the age of 91. For those that don’t know, Bob was the creator of several of the most iconic game shows of all time between his time with Goodson-Todman Productions and within his own company, including The Price Is Right, Password, To Tell The Truth, and the legendary Pyramid itself. It’s has been a very sad month to see these two legends leave us so quickly of each other.

As I mentioned previously here, we, along with several of us around the anime convention scene, are planning tributes to Dick Clark at our next shows. For us, we will be playing THE CHALLENGERS, and it can now be announced that we will be playing it at AnimeNEXT in Somerset, NJ next month. We will play on either Friday night, June 8, or Saturday night, June 9. Stay tuned to our Facebook & Twitter pages, and the AnimeNEXT’s online schedule to find out which night it will be. For the record, The Challengers will pre-empt our regularly scheduled game of Card Sharks for NEXT. However, what we will do is bring one of the CS decks with us to show it off, and if time allows, we will be play a fast minigame with someone in the audience for some extra prizes. So we hope you can join us for all the action.

In the meantime, as of this writing, our shows from I-Con are still in editing, but they’re almost done. Right now, Body Language us up on YouTube, with Match Game going up by the end of the night, maybe by the time you read this. The rest of the shows will be up later this week. We thank you for your patience, and give us your gracious and honest feedback when the shows premiere, especially if you were with us there live.

Take care, and we’ll see you soon.