Welcome to Summer! Subscription Giveaway #1 This Saturday!
First off, I want to welcome everyone to summer. How can I tell that it is summer you ask? Not by the hot & humid weather out here in Chicago.. Not the Cicada brood buzzing outside of our windows.. I can tell it is summer because we typically have over 1500 people at any given second on the site at 10:00am in the morning. Even at our lowest traffic point at 4am we still have almost 700 people on playing FFR or chatting. It’s good to see you all enjoying yourself. As everyone finishes up with school, the traffic will intensify even more I am sure.
So I was trying to think of a way to kind of kick off the summer. I came to the conclusion that we would start it off tomorrow afternoon with a new subscription giveaway! Basically, at 12:00 Noon Central Time (1pm Eastern) we are going to be giving away 1 subscription an hour for 6 hours straight! How will we decide the giveways? It’s simple, at the top of each hour we will announce how we will pick the winner.. or.. we will tell you what you need to do in order to try and win the subscription for the next hour. Think of it as a very easy all day “FFR Spontaneous contest”.
What could possibly make this contest any better? Well at the top of each hour, we will be releasing a new song to the subscribers and beta team! So that is 6 songs total that will be released tomorrow. But will we stop there? Nope, You know I am more crazy than that.. At the end of the 6th hour we will release an additional 4 songs to the public! This will bring the new subscriber and public song releases up to a blistering 10 new songs this weekend!
While subscriber songs always flow out to the public eventually in a few weeks, subscribers and beta team members get first play to get on the highscore list and give feedback. Subscribers and beta team members also get access to the subscriber forum to help actively test and form the future of FFR (not to mention beta access to the latest version of FFR). For those who don’t subscribe, you would be surprised at how many threads and posts we have in there now. I could go on and on about the benefits (like discounts in the FFR store and custom titles etc) but I will leave all that for another time. 
/plug
If you guys are interesting in joining us over on the darkside. Here is the link to the subscriber setup area (you must have an FFR username) Thank you if you are considering helping out FFR. All money goes directly to the development and the costs of running the site.
Oh yeah, there is a new public release of FFR coming out on Sunday! It will be released at exactly 8:00am on Sunday central time. I will list the new features at the time of release.
Big thanks from all of us. Welcome to summer!
Cheers,
Synthlight + The June Bugs
SOTW News Update (First week of June) – Music by Cranky and Banzai
Friday’s song is J219 (Ura-Rokkou Mix), a cool sounding eurobeat/rave song by Cranky. Cyanite stepped this file, and he stepped it with the correct difficulty and everything. It’s a 4/6 in difficulty (Very Difficult) It has some jumpstream, some 24th bursts, 24th gallops and a lot of other stuff. The music won’t keep you bored when playing this, and the simfile shouldn’t either.
Today’s song is another well known song from the game “In The Groove”. It’s Zodiac, one of two songs made by Banzai that appear on the first In The Groove game. It’s another nice simfile created by dore. It’s easy for the most part. Slow 16th gallops and stream. The only hard part of the file is a small 32nd stream in the middle. That’s why we rate it a 3/6 (Tricky)
Enjoy these two songs
Summer FFR Merchandise. Ideas Anyone?
Now that it is officially on it’s way to being scorching hot here in Chicago, I thought it would be useful to see what you guys were looking to have stocked in the FFR Store. Sure we have quite a few t-shirt designs and a vinyl stickers and all that.. but… What kind of products do you want to see besides those? If you guys can think of anything and the demand is there, I will have it made. I don’t care what the idea is. The idea could be custom Rubik’s cubes or underwear or fishing poles. Lets hear some ideas and I will get the ball moving to get them produced.
Don’t be scared to shout out your ideas. Think of this as kind of a large scale brainstorming session.
Cheers,
Synthlight
SOTW – 4th Week of May
Friday’s song is one stepped by Jimerax and is entitled Expedite. The artist is xTrance, I don’t know anything else about that. The simfile is rated Tricky (3/6), so it’s fairly easy to score well on. The first ~220 arrows of the simfile shouldn’t be a problem at all but once you pass 220 combo you’ll run into the real difficulty of the file. It’s got a lot of 16th action near the end but it’s not that fast of a bpm.
Today’s song is another one of my simfiles, but this one is different than all of my others. This one is actually easy!!! MY GOD REBIRTH MADE AN EASY SIMFILE! I realize I’ve made a TON of simfiles rated Very Difficult and higher, and absolutely zero that are easier than Difficult. It’s time to change that, I’ll start making some easy simfiles along with my more difficult ones. I’ll start with Lesson. It’s an easy and gentle piano song made by Kil. A good fraction of the file is just a bunch of 4th jumps that are spread throughout the file, but it has quite a few little 12th note streams to make it more fun. This one is rated Standard (2.5)
Over the last few weeks we’ve mainly been adding harder songs to the game. Giving the experts more fun but leaving the newbies to sit crying and waiting for easier simfiles to play. Well, starting now we’ll be releasing some easier simfiles for a couple weeks to make up for this. So don’t expect a huge challenge out of the SOTWs for the next couple weeks.
Have fun,
FFR Token #19. Who Will Find It First?
Welcome! Welcome Welcome! We thought it was about time we let all of you play with another FFR Token. Again, it’s a rather easy one. The answer will be right in front of your face and like I said, easy. We will work you into a more difficult token in a few days. Seriously, this token is so easy that if I say any more, 100% of the people will get it. Just check it out and like I said, the answer is right in front of your face. +
Click here to look for token 19
Cheers,
Synthlight, JasonKey and the many who work hard to make FFR possible!
FFR Featured on ZDnet’s Social Web Blog
I just wanted to let everyone know that to my surprise, I checked my messages and Steve O’Hear himself had let me know that he had written up an article on FFR that encompasses both the game aspect and the ever expanding social networking side of FFR. Here is the link if you wish to go support the article:
Don’t forget to tell Steve thanks for his support of FFR. I am overwhelming joyful that someone else understands what our community here has experienced for the last 4 years. And that is a sense of (no matter how twisted!) community & entertainment all rolled up into one insane package we call FFR.
Looking on from here with already 1.2 million members, things look great and I look forward to our further development over the next year.
Did I forget to mention that I squashed the secret arrows bug today? Yes I did. It’s all part of our Flash 9 beta version of FFR and will be up soon.
Cheers,
Synthlight
A Long Long Week
Wow. Between A new release of MeTrivia, A Rithum PR blitz and FFR development, we have had an incredibly busy week.
I am putting the finishing touches on the scroll rate feature for FFR but since it has been such an undertaking, I have migrated the source code from Flash 6 to Flash 9. Flash 9 will allow us greater security among many many other performance enhancements. Starting tomorrow morning I am going to release the Flash 9 version for a day of testing by the subscribers / beta testers. If everything goes relatively well and all bugs are squashed, we will release this update over the weekend to the public.
We also wanted to thank everyone for their support of Rithum yesterday. We actually made the front page of Digg.com and remained on the top of the list for Gaming Industry News nearly all day. In the end we had nearly 500 diggs and enough unique visitors to create a small city. It was really a great boost for Rithum.com and we appreciate all your help.
Our MeTrivia team has also been hard at work trying to get the new Beta 2 ready for release. The new beta will allow anyone to create their own trivia kits and we have ranking for nearly every aspect of the game. The interface has been completely reworked and backend rewritten from the ground up. There are many more features and we are JUST starting to wire up Beta 2. The graphics and milestone should be complete within the next week.
Thanks again to everyone for their support. It’s not easy but we are doing everything we can to expand. I will keep you guys posted on the scroll rate stuff and further progress. The sooner we can get these scroll rate changes working, the better.
Subscribers, Beta Testers and Staff, keep an eye tomorrow morning in the subscriber forum for the link to the beta. I should have it ready by about 8am Central time to start testing. Btw.. we now have given out around 130 @flashflashrevolution.com email addresses to subscribers. The list keeps growing every day.
Cheers,
Synthlight & the rest of the crazy staff at FFR
Halo 3 Multiplayer Status on Rithum.com (Please DIGG them!)
Rithum is currently #2 on the digg list for industry news. This may be the rare opp we have to get on the front page of digg. If you can, please.. please go digg the news story on Rithum.com. This would help us and Rithum tremendously.
Ok, well we know this is not FFR related but we are trying to gather traffic and support for our effort this morning over at Rithum Gaming News
We are providing up to the second beta status for the crackdown version of Halo 3 multiplayer and will be reporting it the second it goes live. Rithum has 4 people checking every 3-5 seconds and I know they would really appreciate any Diggs or support you could get them. To Rithum, it is about helping the user base with useful info and giving that up to the minute style of reporting with a wonderful community feel.
Cheers,
Synthlight (thanks!)
Special Weekday Song Release
Sudden release of a For Guru’s Only classical song.. why? just because Tass felt like it.
Song is by Oster Project, known for Dazzling series on FFR. Steps are by hi19hi19.
Imagine furiously burning fire, and furious demon, they are the image of this song.
It has a lot of jumpstreams and minijacks, 12 2-framers, 48 3-framers, 12 4-framers
(1 frame = 1/30 second apart). And at the fastest place, BPM is up to 201.
So difficulty is For Guru’s Only as I said, of course the hardest rating.
Difficulty is between Runny Morning and Molto Vivace IMO, really hard to combo.
It’s located upper left of classical for the time being.
have fun,
JX
