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archer3-13 · 1 year ago

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sat down recently to power through pokemon violet [laptop was in for repairs].

i think so many months out from its release and with a lot of the buzz around it died down i can settle on a lot more coherent of an opinion on it. and that opinion is that scarlet and violet are at their best when its doing things to actually encourage exploration of the environment. theres some really fascinating lil mini areas here and there with a solid atmosphere one can just indulge in as they scrounge in the dirt for interesting pokemon.

it certainly makes battles more tedious then ever however since without the constrained angles and forced camera perspectives of the pocket battle dimension the spectacle doesnt hit that hard and without that spectacle how much time each battle takes up becomes ever more rapidly apparent from playing out animations to loading up battles [its not quite that bad but it is noticeably longer compared to the 'hayday' of pokemons inception where battles load in split seconds]. it breaks up the pace too much effectively.

and the performance does bite it quite badly in certain spots regardless of what ya do, which does unavoidably hamper things.

as for gameplay, well i haven't quite gotten to the very end of things i will note [for anyone who hasn't already figured this out anyways] that the most natural way of doing the whole thing is in my opinion just tackling whichever titan/don/gym is closest from your starting pick until ya hit a roadblock. the upgrades you aquire from doing so come at a natural pace that way as does the level curve.

as for each of the 'individual' [as i would honestly say the game was more so geared for doing everything at once] paths though

victory road: the easiest of the god damn paths and clearly geared towards being your first path/the most noob friendly. the last gym leader is nearly ten levels lower across all of his pokemon then the last titan or don. the gym challenges themselves range from insipidly easy, to this is literally just a gauntlet, to actually kinda fun and interesting [the normal gym challenge being the highlight honestly]. as for this crop of gym leaders can't say im a fan either, they arent bad they just dont elicit much interest from me.

legendary titans: the middle difficulty path where the only challenge is if your pokemon are leveled enough to not immediately die. if your at or just a lil below parity with em, the titan fights can be pretty fun but if your hitting well above their level they quickly become a joke. it needed something more then just the titan fights as the pokemon themselves are literally just out in the open and marked on your map even when they change positions. there needed to be some sort of minigame where ya wrangle them down before you can actually fight them, then we'd be getting somewhere.

operation starfall: the most difficult path, the dons tend to be higher level then the local gym leaders as noted before, and their god damn super cars are tougher then the titan pokemon on the whole even packing some nasty strategies behind them [with the best soundtrack for their fights by far compared to the other paths]. would be the highlight of things if not for the fact that the lead up to them is pretty boring and completely toothless. eri kicked my ass [in part because of my own lazy strategies and a team makeup that was particularly vulnerable to her] a couple of times but the slugfest with her goons was a leisurely stroll by comparison. i think operation starfall would have been a shineout example in the game [and possibly worth the price of admission alone] had the challenges before each don fight been both more varied and more challenging/active in participation. say with atticus ya have to sneak through his base like a ninja before ya can fight him, well with eri its a battle gauntlet with no rests against tough pokemon to mimic the 'mountain climb' the game has ya do.

and as for story

victory road: well im not thrilled on the gym leaders and the elite four ya get hints of before hand [i do appreciate seeing the elite four before challenging them atleast], i like nemona quite a lot as a rival striking the right balance of friendly but still competitive a lot of other friendly rivals completely miss the boat on. he enthusiasms just kinda infectious really. and the goku memes do help brighten my opinion on her. because they are absolutely true.

legendary titans: the most emotional i got was with arven and the dog, and i can fully admit thats because it speaks more to my own experiences then arvens strained relation with his dad. arven himself just feels a bit to awkwardly written for me to fully get onboard with myself, like i like him well enough but more so despite of the writing rather then because of it.

operation starfall: well the battles might have been the best, the story definitely feels the weakest and its frustrating to feel that way about it. like its clear what they wanna do there, what themes they wanna tackle about bullying and how it can be more complicated then adults make it out to be, and on not judging people on appearances or eccentric behaviour, themes that are good to teach kids in general, and all that. i dont even dislike the dons themselves. its just... i can feel the writers hand at work here demanding i feel sympathy for these people and that just makes me wanna dig my heels in on the matter and say 'no i will not blindly awe at the sap story your putting on here'. not helped by penny's motives for wanting to break up the thing she started feeling confused [though i can admit thats probably part of the point] but more importantly so underwritten. in fact she just feels the most underwritten of the three of them [arven, nemona and penny] in general which probably isn't helping the emotional impact of it.

might follow up on this once i polish the very ends of the game off.

#pokemon #pokemon scarlet and violet #im interested in what others thought on this #cause i dont keep up with pokemon opinions but this is nawing at me enough to ask

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songbirdstew · 3 years ago

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Between family, work, and parenting, I spent a collective 14+ years reading out loud to the under-8s crowd. Here are a few books I read over and over and never got tired of:

Dragons Love Tacos and Secret Pizza Party, by Adam Rubin

Really all of Sandra Boynton, but especially Snuggle Puppy, Hippos Go Berserk!, Moo, Baa, La la la, and One, Two, Three!

Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

Horton Hears a Who and The Cat in the Hat, Dr Seuss

Go, Dog, Go!, PD Eastman

The Pigeon Books (and The Duckling book), Mo Willems

In a Dark Dark Room, Alvin Schwartz

Goodnight, Gorilla, Peggy Rathmann

These selections all meet the following criteria: repeatedly (R E P E A T E D L Y) requested by children, often multiple times a day; made me laugh out loud; enable the use of several silly voices or dynamic tones; kids looove to join in, and then will recite lines throughout the day, which is hilarious. These stand out because the kids loved them, and more importantly, I also loved them.

The first story which In A Dark Dark Room takes its name from is especially great if you can whip it out from memory. The kids get hypnotized watching your face and listening to you gradually get down to a barely audible whisper; if you slightly lean toward them as you get quiet, they’ll lean toward you; the payoff when you blurt out “A GHOST!” is gales of shrieks and then hysterical giggles and rolling around on the floor, and then, “DO IT AGAIN!”

Snuggle Puppy can be adapted to any and all musical styles. Curtis went with death metal; I favored a Paul McCartney “Oh Darling” style bellow. Sid loved BOTH and would ask us one after the other to read it.

Of all the many, many Seuss books out there, those two are the two that got requested time and time again. Our personal copy of Horton is falling apart, we read it so much, and I NEVER got bored of it. It’s fun to read, and it’s sweet and important. I personally love Green Eggs and Ham, but I found the kids kind of sense there’s ~a lesson~ in it and they resent it lol.

You may think there is some glaring oversight in here. “No Richard Scarry? What about Goodnight Moon? What about [favorite artsy book from the last ten years here]?” My fellow adults. Your favorite kids books are boring as fuck and everyone knows it. Get that Pat the Bunny shit outta here. Richard Scarry is super super great for kids who want to look at books on their own; I myself was fascinated by his illustrations as a youngster. But I do not recommend them for read alouds, because they are sooooooo loooonnnnnnnng, and because kids love them, they will ask for them Every. Damn. Day. You will have to spend an hour of your life every day reading about the Pig Family’s Misadventures, and I’m sorry to say, that shit gets old. If you DO get roped into it, I strongly suggest you start by skipping pages or paragraphs from the get go. It will be over sooner, and you can vary it every time you reread it, so it will be less tedious for you and you can avoid the “Ms Treva, you forgot a page!!!” a little longer.

There are also plenty of books that aren’t terrible, but also didn’t wind up our faves. They’re just, fine. A lot of Eric Carle and Jan Brett falls into this category. Approximately one million board books about trucks fall into this category.

If the kiddos in your world are between 3-8, they are also at the perfect age for comics, especially if they aren’t reading on their own yet. Calvin and Hobbes is what inspired baby Sid to teach himself to read, and is probably the top tier best choice for kids of all ages. The art is vibrant, the scenarios are highly varied, and Sid loved any comic that was about, quote, “a kid just like me.” They relate to Calvin even before they can read what he’s saying. At about 6-8, he got into Lumberjanes, Bad Machinery, Foxtrot, and Garfield.

Please pay attention to which books your kids actually like. If you insist on reading a book because your grandma read it to you, but kiddo never actually asks for it unprompted, that means they don’t like it. Respect that. And make peace with the fact that you will indeed end up rereading the same boring story every single day, because kids are dumb and they like dumb things. Don’t @ me, the Berenstain Bears suck.

#this post is almost as long as Cars and Trucks and Things That Go #OH THAT NAUGHTY DINGO #GO GET HIM FLOSSY

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phoenotopia · 5 years ago

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2020 March Update

Happy New Year! Well, I guess it's a bit late for that...

Much of what transpired in the past few months will fall under polish and bug-fixing. Will and I have a mutual friend who got married, so I had the occasion to visit Will to attend the wedding as well as have Will playtest the game in its most complete form yet. He logged 24 hours of playtime and just reached the entrance of the final dungeon. Then we had to call in for the night since it was 5 AM, and I had a flight to catch in the morning.

His completion rate where we stopped was 42% of Heart Pieces, 33% of Energy Gems, and 44% of Moonstones. So... I think we have a pretty lengthy game!

This will take a while to playtest & polish... Will's daytime profession is QA Engineer so he's pretty great at catching bugs. From his playtest, we jotted down 200+ items to fix/adjust. Some as small as a simple misspelling, and some more significant (like Gail being unable to jump when standing at the edge of a steep slope). I'm about half-way through fixing that list...

(Will’s living room where much playtesting was done)

Here are some other things we've accomplished in the past few months. A lot of it falls under polish and bug-fixing, which won't sound outwardly impressive, so I'll dive in a bit under the hood.

-------------------------- Item Balancing --------------------------

There are over 200 items in the game. Of which, 90+ are healing items. While much of their flavor text was already written, their stats weren't yet finally decided. So a large effort was spent to balance them as well as possible. Initially, I balanced items by observation (ex: "The player is relying on this item a lot, so I will nerf it...") Now, I've moved to a more systematic way of doing things. I made an equation that takes in all of an item's parameters, and spits out a score. The higher an item heals, the higher the score. The longer an item takes to consume, the lower the score. And so forth.

As usual, I used google spreadsheets, since they support equations. I could tweak the values of a healing item, and immediately see how its final score was affected. I also made use of automatic color formatting, so a field becomes highlighted red, if it's particularly bad, or green, if it's particularly good. Of course, the sheet is just a guideline. The aim wasn't to make all items have the same final score, but that they made sense for what they were and when you could get them. Late-game items tend to have higher overall scores versus early-game items. Some items, like doggy biscuits, have notoriously low scores across the board - as a joke!

-------------------------- Cooking Systems --------------------------

Another thing that had to be done with the healing items was finally determine their cooking sequences. 38 healing items could be cooked and will transform into something else. The way I specified that an item could be cooked was to add a a little snippet to an item's "meta data". An example would look something like, "COOK,57,62,ABXY,10,1.5,1".

In order, this specified the item_ID that would result on success (57), the item_ID that would result on failure (62), the button sequence (ABXY), the time you had to complete the sequence (10 seconds), how quickly the cursor should move (1.5x speed), and if the item multiplied on success (1). The system appears simple enough - but it was actually extremely inefficient!

For one, this system didn't allow random button sequences - all "berry fruits", when cooked would have the same button prompts and in the same order every time (ABXY). Initially, I thought having set button sequences would be a feature, but in practice, it was less fun.

Two, this system wasn't human-readable at all. I'd see a sequence of numbers, forget what they were, and have to look them up over and over.

But the biggest problem was that you couldn't evaluate an item's cooking difficulty from these numbers without manual testing. At 1.5 cursor speed, how many times does the cursor pass the center panel in 10 seconds? Maybe that's 15 times... for a 4 button sequence, the player has 11 opportunities to miss - that's too wide a berth for failure. The system also had variable penalties - if you misspressed a button prompt you loss time on the cooking meter. If you didn't press anything, you missed the opportunity, but not the time - but the clock was still ticking, so you did lose time, just not as much. In the end, the difficulty of cooking each item was all over the place. It was also possible to create "unwinnable" scenarios if I made the button sequence too long, the time too short, or the cursor speed too slow. Testing each item manually to ensure doability was too tedious and unreliable - it was a mess!

Which is why, the underlying cooking system was revamped. The new meta data looks like : "COOK,57,62,seq_length,5,spd,1.5,ease_add,2". This is a lot more readable. Beyond the first 3 entries, the arguments could be specified in any order. And their meanings were easy to understand.

"seq_length,5" means a random button sequence of 5 will be generated (no need for me to personally generate it)

"spd,1.5" means the cursor moves at 1.5x speed. I could also leave this field out to get a default value of 1x cursor speed.

"ease_add,2" - the biggest improvement to the system is how we now approach difficulty. We streamlined a miss-press and a missed opportunity as the same level of "mistake", and difficulty is framed as, "how many mistakes is the player allowed to make and still have a successful result?" By default, the player is afforded the ability to make 2 mistakes, and "ease_add,2" bumps the number of allowable mistakes to 4. We then automatically calculate how much "time" the player should have to cook something based on its cursor speed, how long the button sequence is, and how many mistakes the player is allowed to make. This was a more sensible and efficient system that let me knock out all 38 healing item cook sequences in one sitting!

-------------------------- Badges Nearly Done --------------------------

As you may recall from the last update, I was working on implementing the badges.

Thinking up the badge and having its graphic drawn is just the first half. Underneath, the code also needs to be made to track all the relevant player stats - how many times the player fished, ate, got money, used a certain move, etc. Some badges require extra guards, because they can be spoofed. For instance, the "Treasure Hunter" badge is obtained when the player has collected XXXX RIN through the course of your journey. However, there is something like a "gold exchange" in the game, where you could circularly trade gold and RIN to boost this number artificially. It's important to guard against cases like those.

So far, 30 of 33 badges are implemented. The last three have to do with late-game things that have inter-dependencies that we're still figuring out. The Speed running badge for instance is still dependent on two things. One, I need to speed run the game a few times to see how fast it's possible to beat the game and decide finally what's a reasonable time-limit. Two, there's actually a time-keeping bug which can inflate the game time if the system is left in sleep mode. I don't expect either things will be too hard to figure out - just gotta find the time for it.

-------------------------- Script Extra Polished --------------------------

We continued to polish the script, which I thought was basically done before. We added some extra NPCs here and there, and fleshed out the world with lore text where it seemed appropriate. In the end, the game's script ballooned to over 100,000 words! Hah... It's definitely DONE now however!

Some interesting things I noted as I was polishing old text - there were quite a few instances where Gail talks. I began the game's development with the idea that Gail should definitely talk since I wanted her to be a more active participant in what she chose to do. But I discovered later that if Gail talks, but only talked a little, she comes off as a very reticent person. There's no middle lane here - you're either all in or all out.

If Gail was a silent protagonist, she still talked symbolically. She is understood to be talking based on how people react to her - kinda like Link. So that's the direction I went with in the end (again). When Gail has occasion to talk, it comes in the form of a player dialogue choice. She also has an inner voice when she needs to remind the player to do something.

Another reason I went with this direction, is for brevity. Take this exchange for instance: QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : Maybe. I can't make any promises...

If Gail is silent, I can reduce those 2 lines to 1. QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : ...

-------------------------- Business Taxes --------------------------

Not too exciting, but new year means I gotta do taxes for the business. They're a lot more complicated than personal taxes, and more expensive! Since the game hasn't sold anything, you would think there'd be nothing to file. Hah! If only... The business is there so we can act as a legal entity and record expenses for when we do start selling. I really want to focus on making games, but there’s a small percentage of it that is sometimes boring and dreadful (-_-) ... still it needs to be done.

------------- Why no Public Beta Testing? -------------

As you may have noticed, I haven't put out any public calls for testing help despite being at that stage. Some have offered to help, which I appreciate! But sadly, I cannot accept. Here's the story for that.

Two and a half years ago, I got my hands on a console dev kit - that's very exciting, so I hurriedly took the steps to convert my dev station to be console-capable. After about two weeks, I had the console version working and integrated into my workflow, so all appeared good...

4 Months later, an artist needed an updated PC build to test some new art assets, so I went to build a new PC version. We use Unity, so generally you just need to click your desired build target, and hit "build". However, I now discovered that by attaching the console "hooks" into my work environment, I could no longer build to PC... It was possible, from my end, to test the game from the dev station in dev mode, which was why it went undiscovered for so long.

I did try to excise the hooks, but proved unsuccessful after a day of work. I decided to take this as an opportunity to focus exclusively on the console version first, which afforded me some niceties. Knowing that there's a standardized control scheme meant I could make full use of the control stick for the fishing mini-game. I also didn't need to create a rebindable keys menu - which is a MUST for PC versions... Most importantly, it lets me focus on making the one version as good as possible before moving onto the next. I have NO idea how those other guys release on all platforms at once...

Chalk it up to inexperience. In my defense, this will be my first commercial release, so bear with me. Don't worry, I still plan to make the PC version! It's a bit unconventional, but we're just going to go in the reverse direction of the usual. Console first, then PC, then other consoles. Wherever it makes financial sense, there we will be. (Sorry Ouya!)

Back to the original question - that's why I haven't sent out any public calls for playtesting. Current playable builds of the game are locked to my console dev kit. So actual playtesting unfolds in a very closed setting. Like what I did with Will, I literally sit behind the playtester, breathe down their neck, and watch them play, taking notes all the while.

But since I'm observing the player directly, even just one playthrough nets me a TON of bugs and adjustment tasks. So it evens out I think.

-------------------------- Trailers, Release Dates, etc. --------------------------

Alright, get your frowns ready...

We finished two trailers, and they're raring to go. BUT! We can't show them yet... We're sort of at an awkward spot where we're waiting on some conversational threads to conclude. Say we win a slot in a show - that'd be a HUGE plus for us - but that may also be contingent on us having NOT shown anything substantial yet. The game in its unrevealed state is a negotiating chip. So we're trying to leverage that... and you can only do the reveal once...

We also want to have some "actionable" items in the trailer - a launch date you could mark on your calendar, a wishlist, a website you can visit, etc. So since those things aren't entirely lined up yet, we can't let the trailers rip just yet...

Right now, I can only say we're *aiming* for a late Q2/early Q3 launch. But I can't commit to anything concrete yet. As soon as we know, we'll happily sing it from the rooftops. I hope I can update this blog sooner with good news, but if things move slowly again, I'll send out the next "we're alive" update 2 months from now (end of April).

I know it's frustrating to have nothing major after so long still, so I captured some gameplay footage... May it sate your hungers!

-------------------------- Footage 1 : Fishing --------------------------

You've seen pictures of the fishing, but never video of it in action. Well, here it is!

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(And right after I uploaded the video, I noticed there actually was a video of fishing before. D’oh)

The idea is simple. First, get the lure in front of a fish, and assuming the fish isn't scared, it will soon bite. Then begins a fight sequence, where your energy meter is pitted against the fish's energy meter. Whoever's energy outlasts the other's wins.

The fish's resistance is represented by a red moving circular subsection. You fight the fish by pushing the control stick and keeping it on the subsection, which will dart around and try to escape you. Bigger and tougher variants of fish will do a "shake" which will reverse the wheel. When the wheel is reversed, so too are the controls, so it gets extra tricky!

While fishing, your energy meter doesn't recover, so one of the ways you level up your fishing ability is by finding energy gems to increase your max energy. There's another way - but we'll keep that a secret.

-------------- Footage 2 : Kobold Boss Fight --------------

You can actually skip the next section if you'd prefer to be surprised and you find your hunger for info sated. That's how I prefer to consume the games that I know I'm going to get. If you're still hungering for info, and you don't mind the slight spoilers, then feel free to proceed!

The next video shows the new Kobold Boss fight. Let's take a moment to reflect on the old game's visuals and how far it's come...

(we've come a long way since the time of the flash game)

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You'll notice the Kobold boss has a name now - Katash! He's a significant enough character that he's earned it. The second thing you'll notice is that he looks better!

Some people have humorously pointed out that the old boss looks like Wolf O'Donnel from Star Fox. There's a funny story behind that. Basically I asked an artist to draw me a space wolf. And the artist, whom I'm assuming wasn't familiar with Wolf O'Donnel, drew that - all of it - all the animations and everything. The first time I laid eyes on it, it was already done, so it was too late to ask for edits. So I just ran with it.

That was seven years ago. Nowadays, I know to involve myself more in the process. I ask for just the design first, and we don't move forward with animations until we're happy with the design. Life lessons!

By the way, if you like Katash’s personal boss theme, give it a lesson on Will's Sound cloud (LINK)

-------------------------- Fan Arts -------------------------- Lots of fan art came in over the past 3 months!

This one is a pixel animation made by Pimez, and shows Gail singing a Christmas carol in various parts of the game. So cute! Years ago, I too was making little animated gifs for my favorite games, so it really brings me back!

This one was made by cARTographer (twitter link) after a request by Deli_mage, so thank you both. Gail rocking stylish boots with a pose that shows confidence in her batting skills. Very anime - Love it!

Another submission of laptekosz of the Last Song of Earth area. Whereas the last picture depicted the night sky, now the orange trees are lit by a rising sun. Artfully done! Kinda makes me want to eat eggs. I hope you'll like the new Last Song of Earth area just as much :D

A new artist to the scene, Not_Quin, submitted two pictures, one of Gail and one of the Sand Drake re-imagined as a centipede. I'm always a fan of these re-imaginings! I like how it's spiky all over and appears to be wearing a skull mask. The Sand Drake is often pointed out to be too similar to Zelda's Dodongos, so maybe a long slithery body would have indeed served better. Fun fact, long ago, when we were working on Phoenotopia 2 in earnest, we actually had a giant man-eating worm planned - WIP animation depicted below. One day... one day...

Negativus Core made two cool new arts! I'm really impressed by their use of unique perspective! Having characters run towards the screen or reaching close to the screen from afar is tricky since the proportions get all distorted - but not an issue for Negativus Core! Love the blur on Gail to show speed, with 66 in focus - really skillfully done! And the cube. Amazing!

--------------------------

I'm really honored by the huge fan art community. Thank you all!

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ckret2 · 5 years ago

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How long does it take for you to write a story (not oneshots but like multi-chaptered shit or just a very lengthy one chapter) and how much do you research and map it out? Is researching fun, tedious or exhausting for you?

It depends on how long the story is! “Man Of Dreams” on FFnet, about 108k, I wrote in uhhh, I’ve been saying “about a month” for years but I don’t remember exactly how long I spent where writing it was my primary project, but I DID write it over one summer break and spent about another month proofing it. “The Cop & the Cryptid,” about 130k, I wrote in about a month and a half and proofed over a few weeks. (That’s not counting the time those fics were with betas.) Cold Day In Hell, at 24k, took me... god, idk when I started it. Maybe a couple weeks, week and a half? I’m pretty sure I didn’t have time to start it until NaNoWriMo ended on Nov 30, and I posted it Dec 13, so.

If you want to see exactly how much I map out a long fic, you can directly compare “The Cop & the Cryptid” to its outline. In a lot of places you can go paragraph-by-paragraph in the fic and find a corresponding line/sentence in the outline. TC&TC is 130k, and its outline alone is 40k.

I was able to write the outline super fast because it’s incredibly goofy. When I write an outline, I just ramble it out at a couple friends in a chat room, and i can write like 10k a day if all I’m doing is rambling. And then, once I have that outline, I can also write the fic super fast, because I’ve already written the fic, I just need to make it sound like a fic instead of like i’m gossiping about someone’s weird workplace drama that i overhead. So even though in total I’ve written 170k between the outline and the fic, it goes a lot faster than if I’d just tried to sit down and write the 130k fic all by itself, because the first time i’m only worrying about plot but don’t have to worry about word choice and the second time i’m only worrying about word choice but don’t have to worry about plot. When I was writing TC&TC, I literally had the screen split between the outline and the actual fic, and just glanced back and forth going line by line on the outline and expanding it into proper narration & dialogue and tweaking as needed as I went.

And jeez, how much do I research. That is a difficult question because like. I’m constantly researching. If I get a tiny seed of an idea for a detail in a story, and I don’t know whatever I need to know in order to write that, my next instinct IMMEDIATELY is to look up whatever it is I need to look up in order to know enough to write that thing.

Example: when I was writing “You Made That?” and decided this giant frigging pteranodon was going to blow glass using a volcano as the oven, I had to go look up how exactly blowing glass works, because like, I know Apply Heat To Sand, but I wanted to be realistic, I wanted to know what kind of sand Rodan would have to get and what other ingredients. And because of that research I discovered that the lava in volcanoes isn’t actually hot enough to melt glass. And then I discovered that the lava in volcanoes isn’t hot enough to melt lava. The mantle where rocks melt into magma isn’t hot enough to melt rocks. And then I spent the next five hours feverishly trying to find out first how rocks melt into magma if they’re not hot enough to melt, and then how the hell humans got fires hot enough to melt glass back when all they had was wood fires to work with. And I read a lot of very academic papers about volcanoes and glassmaking with a lot of words that I had to go look up, because I have not studied either of these fields, except to the extent that I’ve learned about volcanoes in order to write about Rodan.

(The super simplified answer, for those of you who are now going to be haunted by the thought that the mantle isn’t hot enough to melt the rocks that it clearly is melting: the melting point of a rock gets lower when a) it’s mixed with water, or b) the amount of pressure on it is suddenly reduced. As rocks in the mantle are pushed upward toward the crust, water from the surface gets sucked underwater that mixes with the rocks, and the pressure on the rocks is decreased because it’s now closer to the surface/has less weight pushing down on it; and both of these things combined lower the melting point of the rocks enough that they can melt into magma. Then, once it’s on the surface, it’s no longer mixed with water and the pressure is stabilized rather than decreasing, so the melting point of the rock increases again and it solidifies. And you can melt glass with a wood fire by, first, putting it in a little oven so that none of the heat escapes, and second, blowing air over it at the EXACT right speed so that it maximizes the amount of oxygen reaching the wood fire and makes it burn hotter but doesn’t go so fast that it blows some of the heat away. Trying to maximize the heat of a wood fire in an oven like that is all about trying to hit the exact balance between “add more oxygen” and “don’t blow away heat” where you reach the point where the fire is as hot as you can mathematically make it.)

And like once I knew that, I just made sure that Rodan had a makeshift oven in order to contain heat and the ability to blow air over the fire to make it hotter and bam story’s done.

And like... nobody was making me do that. I needed a tiny factoid for the story, and I was possessed by an all-consuming hunger to obtain that factoid and nothing could drag me from my course until I’d obtained it. I didn’t need to know how the mantle melts rocks, but like... I needed to know how the mantle melts rocks.

Sometimes when I do research it’s like that, I know I need a specific factoid and I go out and find it; sometimes it’s more general, like, “oh, one of the characters I’m dealing with worked in the radio industry in the 1930s, what was that like?” and when I’ve got spare time or am bored I go read up on the history of radio, even though I don’t need it right now, but because I don’t know what I’m gonna need until I need it. What if it turns out that people who worked in the radio industry in the 1930s, like, carried around forks for good luck? Then I can say this character carries a fork everywhere and that’s a weird character detail I never would’ve gotten if I hadn’t done the research even if I didn’t know I needed it. (Note: to my knowledge, there is no association between lucky forks and the radio industry. I made up this example to illustrate the kind of thing you can’t possibly know you don’t know unless you’ve already done the research without looking for a fact like that.)

And sometimes research flows into each other. Like for one thing I needed to know what a traditional radio sign-off format sounded like, back when radio stations turned off at night and played the national anthem before they went dark; and because I was looking that up, I found a YouTube video talking about how a radio station in 1939 recorded an entire day of broadcasts, so now I know I can go look that up and listen to an entire day on one radio station in the 30s and learn a lot more about how radio broadcasts sounded within a few years of the timeframe I’m working with for the above character. I wasn’t looking for that when I was looking up radio sign offs, but because I have that it’s gonna be hella useful.

So, like, tl;dr: I research a lot. I research anything that crosses my mind as something I want to put in a story that I don’t already know enough about to write about. I research for tiny details and I pre-research big broad concepts that might be relevant to my stories later. My research leads to more research, and prior research tells me about things I can look into on future research. The research never ever ends. There is a whole amazing world out there with billions of people alive and that’s only counting the people alive right now, not all the people that were alive before, and ALL of those people were Doing Stuff and Creating Things and Making Discoveries and ALL of it connects together and you’ve gotta understand all of it, the whole universe and everything in it, all of the science and every single human achievement, before you can write a story.

But failing that you’ve gotta at least understand whatever’s surrounding your characters.

If I try to write without research like that, it kind of feels like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with only 20% of the pieces. I am annoyed and dissatisfied that I don’t know those things.

The argument against that much research is typically “oh if you’re writing sci fi/fantasy you can just make that stuff up” but let me tell you, the creativity of one single human writer will never match the creativity of tens of thousands of hardworking humans trying to make a discovery or accomplish a task. One single human writer all alone will never be able to match the fascinating weird details of the real world and all the things we’ve put into it or discovered in it. If you try to make all that stuff up—like, if you’re writing high fantasy and you just make up how forging a sword works—then you have shackled yourself to the limits of your own imagination. If you do the research, dig into how actual swords are made in the real world, then you have supplemented your own creativity with the creativity of however many humans over the millennia have contributed to that craft. There’s so much interesting stuff out there. And I am bound and determined to find it.

#anonymous #ask #writing #about my writing

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rogertaylcr · 5 years ago

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its alright if its long! i asked bc i was curious, id love a long answer

OKAY HERE IS THE SUPER LONG ANSWER, it’s self indulgent and, dare I say, Boring as shit -- but it’s the full answer to how/when/why I started drumming -- it is also 1.5k words long so it’s under a read more

so I started like drumming in a serious way i would say like a year and a halfish ago which isn’t a super long time I know but theres a tediously long story behind it which you asked for so don’t blame me for how long this is cause dude i know it’s long

The why of it is actually pretty short though. So my house is a music house, my mom plays a bunch of instruments and sings and my dad listens to a bunch of music so theres a lot of musical passion (even when theres no talent necessarily). As a kid, like 3-4 like EARLY memory, I remember listening to bohemian rhapsody and hearing the drums specifically, which idk if this is universal but for a lot of songs for awhile i just didn’t hear the drums as like part of the song really, and with bohemian rhapsody they were just so clear, like i could hear the heartbeat of the song. (this was the first song I felt that with but definitely not the only one, baba oreilly was another one that i made me realise the life of the song comes from the drums) When I was .... like 6-7, a beatles doc came on MTV and I saw Ringo drumming during the early beatles years and he was standing and stomping the hi hat and bass and there was just so much movement and power behind it and so much more fun in my opinion than the other instruments and i was like “i wanna be the one giving songs their heartbeats”. The more i got into a bunch of other, new and old, bands the more i was like This Has To Be Me. I had always been a fidegty person who was drumming to shit anyway but like the idea that that could translate into like something palatable and musical and entertaining and LOUD was News™ to me and I wanted to do that, but at the time I only knew a bit of piano and like a single chord on guitar and, like a lot of people’s parents, my parents saw creative fields as really unstable/unrealistic so I was like “well obvious it would be nice to be a loud drummer but I’m going to be a business person” (this is how cynical i was as a child).

the WHEN of it is a longer story, like it isn’t actually cause the actual answer is that i’ve been seriously drumming for about 1.5 years but theres like more to it imo

When i was in the third grade, instruments were compulsory at school so we all had to choose and buy one to learn on as well as basic piano lessons. I wanted to play the drums as “my instrument” at that time BUT my school didn’t have the budget or the space really to accommodate that (i would've had to buy my own kit and haul it to and from the school which didn’t make sense for me to do for someone who hadn’t ever touched drums) AND they didn’t have a teacher that could really teach drums, our percussion section was just a xylophone and some cymbals it was a school of like 2000 kids so :/

So I learned clarinet and then when i was 10, in the fifth grade, my older sister’s friend stopped playing saxophone and got permission to bring her drums in. We only had an orchestra so our teacher had to write her music for/with her which was cool but anyway. She left her drums at school and i knew her and so while i was supposed to be in the practice room playing clarinet i was trying semi-fruitlessly to drum. I knew i wanted to drum by any means necessary but like I was 10 and since i had no guidance (and no proper sticks i was using xylophone mallets) I didn’t think I was “good” at it and when we moved away I took that as a sign that it wasn’t meant to be.

When we got to america I joined school bands (as in orchestra/concert band) as a clarinet player once again, I still wanted to be drumming and i was in a public school by then so i had access to like “school drums” but I was so far behind the not-self-taught drummers in the actual band that I just like decided I had to focus on what I was already good at which was my art and dove into the upper level art program which like GOOD cause that made life worth living but it also meant the only time I could drum was when I was at this one friends house or had access to the band hall and like I just couldn’t keep the improvements i’d made, like i’d perfect a song and then have zero access for a couple weeks (except to like stand alone snares but :/ ) and i’d have to start over essentially and it was SUPER discouraging and it made me feel like I wasn’t making any progress

In the meantime I was trying to get my musical fix by learning guitar/piano and piano came back to me pretty quickly (its gone again now) but guitar like.....you can’t hit it lmao, piano i could slam the keys how i wanted to and get that really great loud resonating sound and i could stand to play and get more movement out of it but guitar is tedious in a way that other instruments aren’t imo, like the sound is loud but the movement is very precise and i never had the patience for that

when I got to college I really had to focus on my art especially the first two years, I literally lived in the studio (im not exaggerating, the students in my major and I had a janitorial bathroom set aside for showering) so pretty much all of my hobbies got tossed aside those two years it was grueling, fun but also hell

Junior year came and i had like 30% of my time back and i was like considering switching majors. I knew i didn’t want to do animation but also you can’t just switch into music at a university, you have to be pretty accomplished already and percussion at my school is HUGE like i would’ve had to be roger himself to have a chance of switching in. On top of that the degree isn’t super useful so I now have my Bachelors of Science. But by junior year i KNEW i didn’t wanna do that, I knew i wanted/i want to drum so I.... licherally................went to the library and printed like 50 pieces of paper each with three flyers on them and cut them up and put them up ALL over campus essentially begging for access to a drum kit. I could only afford like a couple hours on this one guys kit every few weeks for one semester (and then the following semester i did a semester away, they had drums at the school there but i only got access like a total of 5 times) so when i came back to america I did the exact same thing, I put up flyers in the music building and eventually i found a girl who let me use her drums for free all year, she gave me access like last august? I think? and just now has packed them away in the last month or so, and i would literally go into this tiny stuffy unairconditioned room (that had an automatic light timer so i’d be in the dark halfway through a song ahsdkhajkda and a couple times the heat got to me and i had to go outside and sit in my car w/ the AC before coming back in ahdjkahdjkasdjka) and drum for about 6-8 hours MWF and maybe like 3-4 hours T/TR which i know isn’t as much as some people but like I had school work still so I couldn’t do too much more. (it worked out great cuase i only took 7 hours my last two semesters so it was like something i could do while all my friends were in class and they weren’t open on weekends so my social life didn’t get fucked up) and like i know i haven’t been drumming drumming that long comparatively to like normal people who start at age -2 and are born with a snare in their laps but you spend that much time each week doing something and you’ll get good you just like… have to and I like where I’m at right now, I think I’ll always have super severe imposter syndrome abt my skill level b/c of how long it took me to get here and being an overcritical perfectionist doesnt help but yeah

i really dont think its a coincidence that my coming out (to myself) coincided with when I said “fuck it im gonna play drums come hell or high water” but SUPER LONG AND OVERLY DETAILED story short, I heard roger drum and said “if i dont do that ill die” and then when i finally had the resources i drummed myself into multiple heat strokes and i recently saw roger live so the universe rewarded me for all that shit

#AND THERE YOU HAVE IT #my boring journey to mediocrity #im sorry if its like hard to read i don't do well with 'punctuation' ahsdkadkja #personal #ill probably delete this later cause its kind of annoying asdhajksdhasj #Anonymous #asks

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helenofsimblr · 6 years ago

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I have a LOT of catching up to do!

I was tagged to do the 57 facts thing by @fayts4 @tabbyrhsims4simblr and @midnightdevotions I think I got everybody if not you’ll have to forgive me my shoddy memory. But I have so many blogs to catch up on I am ready to cry!

1. Simblr is a secret thing for me, only my husband knows about it. Its my own guilty pleasure.

2. I recently became a parent and I am very much planning to have at least 1 more while there is still time!

3. I have done a lot of work on some really amazing stuff, none of which I can ever talk about due to secrecy agreements.

4. I have a PhD in mathematics, so that proves I am super boring.

5. I tried my first cigarette at age 11, but didn’t touch it again till age 26 which was when I took it up, I would smoke anything from 0 to 10 cigs a day depending on the day I had. I quit cigs this year aged 32 in January. So hopefully didn’t do myself too much damage.

6. At age 29 I started smoking cigars on special occasions those are: my birthday, Christmas, New year, Valentines, and my wedding anniversary. Being the “badass” I am, I inhale every 5th drag for a little extra kick, even though you shouldn’t do that... I have not quit the cigars!

7. I have a younger brother and an older sister, I am the middle sibling.

8. I have only ever had 3 boyfriends in my life. And 1 “fancy man.”

9. I was engaged to be married to my second boyfriend, I basically twisted his arm into it because of my condition I was afraid I’d be some old woman called Ms instead of Mrs, he did not want to be married, not to me anyway. I should have realised that back then...

10. While I was engaged to boyfriend number 2 I had an affair which lasted about 8 months, it was with a colleague at work, and it was amazing! I don’t condone cheating, not in the least, but I realise, the sensible thing to do would have been to call off the engagement.

11. I had giganstism (Acromegaly) as a child, I am 6 foot 7 inches tall bare foot. I do not like being this tall... not one bit. There are so many health issues that come with this, that it really isn’t worth it.

12. When I stopped growing, Acromegaly causes your face and hands and feet to carry on growing... I have size 14 feet. UK size. My hands are large enough that I can grip 4 tennis balls in one hand easily.

13. I have no tattoos. I have never ever wanted a tattoo. I don’t actually like them very much.

14. I don’t have any piercings anywhere else beside my ears. I have 2 piercings in each ear.

15. I am a huge petrol head. I love cars and I will happily have a discussion with any man about them, or woman if she is so inclined!

16. Due to the facial changes caused by Acromegaly I decided to go and get cosmetic surgery in late 2017 to change my face back to a more softer look.

17. I love Star Trek. Captain Kirk is my favourite captain, he is the best. No discussion. If it wasn’t for Kirk there would be no Picard, no Sisko, no Janeway. None of those pretenders would be here!

18. I think Quentin Tarrantino and his films are vastly overrated and often incomprehensible and worst yet, non linear.

19. I really dislike the taste of alcohol. The only drinks I get on well with are Guiness and Gin and tonics. Most others I don’t like. I hate wine.

20. I hated that stupid Pokemon Go craze!! The amount of people who walked into me in the street... That shit was dangerous.

21. My hair used to be naturally blonde, but in recent years its started to get darker, which is why I now use colouring to keep it where it was.

22. I should wear glasses to read, but I don’t bother.

23. While preggers I had gestational diabetes. Which was not fun at all.

24. I love swimming, but I hate the sea because I am afraid of whats in it. Sharks, jellyfish, all sorts of wonderful, yet horrid creatures designed to kill and maim!

25. When I was doing my PhD, somebody on my research team literally took about 80% of my thesis content and used it in their thesis. I had no time to appeal or go through proper channels as I already had a job lined up, and was due to have my pituitary tumor removed, therefore, my only option was to redo 80% of my thesis.

26. I am not religious (at least not in any organised way), however, I find the theory of how the universe came into being utterly laughable. A big bang... seriously?? If before the universe, there was nothing, where did the shit that exploded come from? Its bullshit. Truth is, nobody knows for sure, but we’re so desperate to know that scientists will happily invent theories to fit what few facts they have.

27. Despite not being religious, I firmly believe in existence after death. I say existence, not life, there is a difference. I have seen what would be colloquially referred to as a “ghost” when I was 13 years old.

28. I love the old pulp sci fi, things like Lost in Space, and voyage to the bottom of the sea

29. My favourite foods are pizzas. I cannot get enough of them! In particular just bog standard pepperoni

30. I suck at sports. Any sport, and I suck at it.

31. I often worry about things so much I lose my perspective, I cannot help but worry and it usually leads to a cascade of worry and I may make poor decisions.

32. I am part German. I can speak German, to a fashion... its not very good as I rarely use it.

33. I have regular chiropractic care and I have to say its worth every penny. I feel better physically now than I have in years! As a bonus, the IBS I suffered with, since I have been seeing my chiropractor has actually cleared up!

34. I am currently trying to complete something on my bucket list, I am attempting to watch EVERY John Wayne film.

35. I hated Star Wars the Last Jedi. Shit film!

36. I have a cuddly toy from I was a baby which I still have! (I don’t sleep with it of course)

37. I love inappropriate/dirty jokes.

38. I am, somewhat, anti-abortion. I understand there is a time and a place for everything however, but given birth control and access to morning after pills...

39. I am not political, I loathe politicians. None of them have a clue what it is like to be in the real world. Also... why do we have Ministers of health who have never been a nurse or doctor? And so forth... doesn’t make sense!

40. I have been married 3 years now.

41. I cannot bend over and touch my toes.

42. I recently took a woman to court and won! After she keyed (Scratched the car with a key) my Range Rover from bumper to bumper in the supermarket.

43. I hate shopping. I find it so tedious and inconvenient. I honestly do not understand how other females can find this a pleasurable activity!

44. I have never tried any illegal drugs in my life.

45. Apparently I was late performing all my children milestones. Walking, talking and potty training. I took months longer than my siblings did.

46. I find it really hard to go to the toilet in a public toilet. It disturbs me.

47. I hate it when people tell me “You’re late.” As though I have no concept or track of time. I usually reply with “I was quite aware before you pointed it out.” I never apologise for being late, unless I know that my being late was definitely my fault.

48. I am often amused by simblr. Especially at all these “dramas” that pop up round here. Particularly over custom content and how it should never be uploaded by anybody but the creator or changed or whatever... did I mention how somebody took 80% of my PhD thesis and used it in their work? Oh yes. Point number 25.

49. If I go for ice cream, doesn’t matter where it is, I will always go for vanilla.

50. White chocolate is my favourite chocolate of all. So sweet and creamy...

51. I am allergic to penicillin.

52. I love superhero films. Particularly the Marvel ones. I think Marvel do better films than DC but DC do better animated films / television than Marvel do.

53. I think Nolan’s batman trilogy is overrated speaking of superhero films.

54. Speaking of films, only once ever have I walked out of the cinema. I remember I went to see Mr and Mrs Smith, and half way through I walked out. Have never seen the end of that film since.

55. My favourite Junk Food is bacon double cheeseburgers!

56. Due to having acromegaly... every year... without fail... I have to go and get a camera up my ass! Yeah its great being tall(!)

57. I HATE pears. I mean hate them! I hate the texture of them in my mouth, I hate the feel of their skin, I hate EVERYTHING about pears. Even sat here typing this I get goosebumps. If I was trapped on a desert island where all there was to eat was Pears. I would starve to death!

I tag, @themoonglitch @rebelsoulsims @igglemouse and @flowers--girl and @sparkiemonkey and @alittledaylight do this EPIC tag. If you think you can’t. or done it, or don’t want to cool.

#tag game #57 things tag

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nealdanderson · 6 years ago

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I actually really liked Samus Returns. What were your issues with it? Also, there's always AM2R to fall back on. It's on the Internet forever, whether Nintendo likes it or not

I’m glad you liked it!I have a lot of issues with it, so prepare for a lengthy answer, haha. And just a disclaimer to everyone- I played through the entire game and beat it 100%, so no one can say I didn’t give it a fair shot. Since it is a remake, it can’t be judged as entirely separate from the original, so here goes. Spoilers ahead.1. It largely misses the point of the original. Metroid 2 for the GB is far from a perfect or even great game, but it is an ambitious sequel as far as tone goes. M2 is easily the most ‘horror’ feeling entry in the franchise, and it directly correlates to how to the game treats your objective and how the map is laid out. Metroid 2 doesn’t feel like a heroic quest- you’re playing a character committing mass genocide of a species incapable of intergalactic travel and as she travels increasingly downward through the planet, the more desolate, lifeless and lonely it gets. Upon killing the Queen and finding the Baby Metroid, it is a somber moment and retroactively, the most unique ending in the franchise(no thrilling escape sequence, no enemies…etc.). Samus Returns abandons most of these unique aspects and paints your quest in a generically heroic light, the darker atmosphere is completely done away with, and the ending is totally botched. These tonal problems may only be a problem to a few people, and may come across as nitpicks to many, but I think it’s worth mentioning. 2. The map and item placement doesn’t make for an enjoyable experience. The original Metroid/Zero Mission, Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion have maps that are designed in a clustered fashion, meaning that traversing from one major area to another and backtracking to get previously unobtainable items feels organic and convenient. Metroid 2 on the other hand has a directly linear path descending through SR388. Due to this linearity, the designers didn’t implement the backtracking for items that the series would go on to be known for. I know this is a criticism Metroid 2 often receives, but this approach makes sense given the game’s map design. Samus Returns instead tries to encourage more backtracking, but due to the map not being designed for it, it always feels tedious to go back and find these items(usually normal missile packs that are extremely useless so late in the game). The teleporters only further illustrate the lack of organic interconnectivity the map has and feel like a lazy solution(this is something AM2R handles much much better). Basically, Samus Returns tries to make the original Metroid 2′s map do something it was not designed to accommodate.

3. The enemies and bosses are extremely repetitive, boring and/or tedious to fight. This is definitely a valid complaint and massive oversight on Nintendo’s part–Samus Returns’ enemy variety straight up sucks, which is made more pathetic due to the fact that its 25 year old gameboy predecessor and even the NES original have way more. The parry mechanic is cool to start out with, but after a while, it really becomes the only way to dispatch of enemies, and it is used the exact same way every single time- wait for tell, parry, kill enemy in one hit. The Metroids, well, let me say that they’ve always been the weakest aspect of Metroid 2- they’re boring, silly looking and really only serve to be an irritation. Samus Returns gives them a much needed visual facelift, but doubles down on how much of a chore they are to fight. Meeting a new Metroid form for the first time was pretty neat, but after fighting your 20th gamma, each fight taking longer than it should, it isn’t any fun. Each encounter is basically a tedious game of waiting for the Metroid to be parried, but if you miss that parry window, it makes the fight drag on way too long. And then to ‘mix up’ the experience a bit, the designers decided to have Gammas run away like cowards mid fight, only for you to play a very irritating game of hide and seek with the damn thing. The few bosses Samus Returns has aren’t that memorable or enjoyable, the robot in particular spends most of the time in a state that can’t be hit(like the Metroids), reducing the fight to being 90% running away and dodging. Ultimately, these boss fights and Metroid encounters don’t feel challenging and feel more like a test of patience.�� 4. The graphics are rather subpar or inconsistent and the overall aesthetic feels rather uninspired. Some rooms look really cool, while others are just ugly. Samus’ Redesign looks too edgy, haha. I love Super Metroid, it’s my favorite game ever made, but lately, most Metroid games just try to recycle moments, areas and music from it, and it really annoys me. Metroid 2 has a very unique soundtrack, but inevitably, they replace its tunes with more upbeat or heroic remixes, and and its worst, replace tunes with Super Metroid themes.

5. Ridley. Why.

—-

So yeah, I’m not saying I don’t like Samus Returns just to be a contrarian, I genuinely found the entire game to be a rather tedious and unenjoyable experience. I will commend the few things it does well- actually implementing different abilities in boss fights(like the spider ball), implemtning new uses for old abilities(spider ball+power bomb), the DS being a perfect fit for Metroid with its map and inventory screens, and the overall engine having a very solid and fluid feel.AM2R handled everything better, and the few things it misses the point of regarding the original Metroid 2, it still handles much better than Samus Returns. Just because AM2R exists and will continue to do so doesn’t make Samus Returns exempt from critique. Even if I thought that Samus Returns’ announcement was badly timed after Nintendo’s DMCA on AM2R(which was completely unnecessary, learn the difference between trademark and copyright), I was still excited that Nintendo, after 13 years, was finally making another 2D Metroid game. I’m more just disappointed that the company who created this genre, a genre that may be more popular than ever, generally refuse to capitalize on it, and when they do, it’s a sub standard effort. I may be harsh to Nintendo, but they’ve objectively treated this franchise like crap over the past decade, and I have a very hard time trusting them anymore. To those telling me to ‘lol, calm down dude’, like, I’m perfectly calm, I was never planning on ever buying a switch anyway, but Nintendo should seize on the opportunity to mend fences with the gaming community outside of their devoted fanbase(I’m a Metroid fan, but I’ve never been what you’d call a Nintendo fan). Since I’ve never been a Nintendo fan, E3 is really the only gaming event I’m fully aware of, and I felt it was a wasted opportunity for them to even merely mention that Prime 4(which isn’t even it’s final title, lol) was still being worked on. I highly recommend watching The Gamer’s Toolkit and Gamingbrit’s videos on Samus Returns, they illustrate the gripes I had with the game in ways more eloquent than I could.

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ruffsficstuffplace · 7 years ago

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And The AWRD Goes To... (Part 54)

Akko could finally use the mind palace machine later that day, and the sound of cranking, pedaling, and whirring quickly became a constant presence in AWRD’s dorm room, like their studying for their exams on Thursday and Friday had been given a soundtrack.

Whether it was going over their notes, old quizzes, and mock tests they’d borrowed from Blake, Lotte, and the rest of the student tutors; planning and practicing for the practical projects like for Gen-Mech; or even the rapid ramping up of their recovery training, there was scarcely a free moment in their schedules.

However, they unanimously agreed that Wednesday evening would be free for all of them, and Ruby and Weiss took that opportunity to go down to the city with their siblings for dinner.

“You guys are really going all out for this, aren’t you?” Yang asked, reaching into the steamer basket in front of them for another steamed bun.

“Mhmm!” Ruby replied as she munched on the one in her hands. She swallowed, and continued, “Gotta get those good grades so we can focus on the Tsukimi Festival! It’s gonna be really bad for the plan if we have to do the really intense extra credit work, like with your team.

“How’s your week off going so far, anyway?” she asked, before she swallowed the last of her bun.

“Amazing, and it’s actually gotten even better!” Yang said, smiling as she peeled off the paper underside of her bun. “Dr. Freya’s just up and decided to give us an extra two days off!”

“That’s great!” Ruby said, still chewing. “Changed your plans any?”

“Oh, you bet your ass we have! Whole thing’s still starting right after exams Friday afternoon, but now ends early Wednesday morning!” Yang explained before she ripped the top off a sauce packet with her teeth. “It may just be two weeknights, but it’s going to be two weeknights where we can decide how the hell we’re going to spend them, and we are going to make them count!

“You or any of your teammates want in?” she asked as she poured a generous heaping of spicy sauce on to her bun. “Sucy’s coming with us this time, now that she can leave campus and all, but I promise I won’t let her try any freaky experiments on any of you—just keep a very close eye on your drinks, she’s like a ninja,” she said before she bit into her food.

“Oh, I’d love to, but we’re going straight back to the plans for the Festival right after exams—Diana and Weiss made synced up schedules and alerts for our scrolls, and everything,” Ruby said as she reached for the basket again.

“Aww, c’mon, Ruby, I know it’s important and all, but you gotta fit in some fun time in there!” Yang said through a mouthful of food.

“We already are!” Ruby replied as she peeled off the bottom. “We’re actually going out to dinner at the Bakunawa on Friday, because they want us to give our opinion on the new Festival menu—so business and pleasure!”

“Oooh, sounds fun!” Yang swallowed. “Any chance we can get in on that? We need a new hangout since we’re still can’t afford to buy our way back to the Shitty Bar.”

“Sorry, it’s a negative, not unless you’re willing to fork up the Lien like any other customer,” Ruby said as she poured sweet sauce on her bun. “We’re only eating free because we’re helping for the Festival, and Weiss and Akko both say that Aqua’s uncle Jun-Jun is SUPER strict about who gets free food and discounts.”

“Ah, well, at least I get to hang out with my little sister again!” Yang said, roping her arm around Ruby’s shoulders and pulling her in close. “Been way too long since we’ve done this last...”

“Well, to be fair, the world does seem to be incredibly intent on either killing you and your team, or drowning you in work, which has made scheduling difficult,” Whitley said as he and Weiss had dinner in a different restaurant. “There’s also the fact that we’re going to two different schools now, and you’re not living at home any longer.”

“Fair points,” Weiss said as she poked another cube of meat on her skewer, dipped it into the pot of boiling broth between them. “How is life in Sanctum, anyway? We haven’t really had much time to discuss, well, anything about you.”

“That’s mostly because my school year has been infinitely more boring and tedious than yours,” Whitley replied, casually pointing his empty skewer at Weiss.

“Oh, c’mon, Whitley, something interesting has to have happened in your life.”

“Not if it isn’t related to you, Akko, or the Shiny Rod,” Whitley replied. “I assure you, life in Sanctum is still just the same old teenage angst bullshit with legally sanctioned death matches that you and Akko have finally escaped,” he said as he looked at the remaining selection of bite-sized food in front of him.

Weiss nodded. “Speaking of which: are you doing alright now that we’re not around?”

“I’m… managing, I suppose...” Whitley replied as he slowly skewered a piece of potato.

Weiss frowned. “Define ‘managing,’ please,” she said as she fished out her meat, let it drain over the pot before she brought it over her plate.

“I’m attending all my classes,” Whitley started as he dipped his food into the broth. “I’m doing well in them for the most part, save for PE, but that’s always something of an inevitability. And of course, BCT continues to be the bane of my existence, except on the rare occasion when I do get a team or a partner that understands the concepts of ‘semblance exhaustion,’ ‘protect your support’ and ‘for fuck’s sake, get out of the way!’”

Weiss chuckled. “Met up with your old friends? Made any new ones?” she asked as she put her food to her mouth.

“… Kind of, and kind of...” Whitley replied, his eyes keenly on the end of his skewer and the bubbles rising from the broth.

Weiss stopped, and frowned. “What do you mean by that?” she asked as she put her skewer down on her plate.

Whitley pulled his potato out. “Well, with the old friend situation, we’ve recently realized you and Akko more than just the people that introduced us to each other, you two were kind of the reason we even hung out with each other and/or tolerated the other’s presence.

“With the new friend situation… it’s been… complicated.”

Weiss face softened. “Whitley...” she said as she reached out to him.

Whitley pulled his hand back. “Look, Weiss, please don’t worry; I’ll figure out something on my own eventually. That’s what this whole year is for us, isn’t it? Learning how to be independent?” he asked before he put his potato into his mouth.

“Yes, but being independent doesn’t mean you suddenly can’t, or shouldn’t rely on others...” Weiss said as she pulled her hand back. “Do you need help? Someone to talk to about it?”

Whitley shook his head. He swallowed, and said, “I appreciate the concern, Weiss, but I want to do this by myself a little longer, and I don’t want to talk about it—not right now.”

Weiss looked at him in concern, before she reluctantly nodded. “Good luck with that, then.”

“Thanks,” Whitley said quietly. He gave Weiss a warm look. “I mean it, honestly.”

Weiss smiled. “You’re welcome, Whitley,” she said, before they both returned to their food.

“So, the new Starlight Crusaders spin-off was released last week,” Whitley said as he skewered a chunk of meat this time. “You been able to watch it, by any chance?”

“No, haven’t had the time,” Weiss said as she pondered her choices. “Have you?”

Whitley nodded. “I have; the animation is still solid thanks to Lucidity doing it, but of course, Bhatt still wrote it, so I wouldn’t recommend it to you.” he said as he dipped his food into the pot.

“Ugh, I still don’t get what you see in them, Whitley,” Weiss said as she speared a chunk of carrot. “Black Hole was an absolute mess, and Centauri somehow made it even worse!”

“Bhatt has potential, Weiss!” Whitley complained.

“I’ll agree on that, but I still think the studio should be throwing all that money, resources, and good will with the fanbase on someone that can actually produce something actually good on its own, rather than with the extended universe media!

“Just admit it, Whitley, Bhatt should just go back to the indie scene or smaller studios; they had their chance in the spotlight, and they face planted not once, but twice in a row!”

And so the two siblings continued to argue, shouting and throwing points and counterpoints, until the hour grew late, and it was time for them all to head back to Haven.

“… And what do scholars generally agree doomed the state of Archaea?” Diana asked, holding a mock exam in her hands.

“In-fighting,” Akko muttered as she had her face flat on her desk, the top half of the mind palace machine pushed away as far as possible. “All the factions in the city finally got fed up and decided to go to all out war in the middle of winter when the grain started to run out.”

“Correct, but be more detailed, Akko; try and give me the names of at least three of those groups.”

Akko groaned. “Let’s see… there was the ruling class, the ‘Fortunata,’ the uh, the nationalist ‘Builder’ guys, and uh, the local mafia.”

“Who called themselves…?”

“The uh… the…?” Akko groaned. “I give up...”

“Ouroboros, Akko,” Diana said, “they called themselves the Ouroboros, as their philosophy was that man taking advantage of their fellow man was an inevitability, like death for everything that has ever lived.”

“Uuroobooroos, got it...” Akko muttered.

The lock to their door beeped, and was carefully pushed open. Weiss and Ruby paused for a moment as they noticed the overhead light was still on, before they stepped in. “Hey guys!” Ruby said, waving.

“You two are still up?” Weiss said.

“I don’t feel yet adequately prepared for exams,” Diana replied.

“And I’ve been waiting for you guys to get back...” Akko said, still face-down on her desk.

Weiss smiled. “Wanted to give a rousing speech to the team before exams?”

“No, I need someone to drag me to bed ‘cause my legs and arms are dead from all the studying I’ve been doing...” Akko muttered.

“I would have done it myself, but you all know how well that went last time...” Diana muttered, blushing.

“I’ve got it!” Ruby said, before she dragged Akko out of her chair and into her futon; they didn’t end up in the most dignified positions, but Akko was fast asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, and Ruby easily untangled herself from her.

“Not going to bed yet either, Weiss?” Ruby asked as she saw her sitting down at her desk.

“Yes,” Weiss replied as she pulled out one of her binders. “Before sleeping is the best time to learn, anything, after all!”

“Well don’t stay up too late!” Ruby headed to their closet, and started changing into her pajamas. “All that studying’s going to be useless if you fall asleep on your answer sheet.”

“Fret not, Ruby, we’re still well prepared for that,” Diana said, gesturing to two thermoses full of moon bloom or black moss.

“Can’t hurt to have a reminder or two!” Ruby chirped as she passed by them again on her way to her futon. “Good night, guys.”

“Good night, Ruby.” Weiss and Diana replied, before they shut off the main light and turned on their desk lamps.

They continued to read and quietly quiz each for an hour more, until their scrolls both locked and started vibrating, a cartoonish representation of Freya’s face scowling at them and telling them to go to sleep.

Diana chuckled. “Your grandparents were really involved in your studies, weren’t they?”

“That they were,” Weiss said, pressing the button labeled ‘Yes, Grandma!’ before she got up from her desk, and stretched. “You feeling ready now, Diana?”

“Not even close,” Diana replied as she neatly put away her things. “Then again, my idea of being ready for exams is to have studied and prepared for them daily since the first day of each grading period, and, well, life hasn’t been very accommodating to that recently.

“Speaking of which, can I ask you a question, Weiss?”

“Sure, what is it?”

“How have you survived all of the events of this month, and still be able to function this well?” Diana asked. “I mean, we’ve all suffered in one way or the other, but you’ve had objectively the worst time out of all four of us, as if some sadistic deity was targeting you specifically, and we were simply victimized by associtaion.”

Weiss shrugged. “Eh, I guess it’s a Schnee thing: the universe just seems to have it in for us both ways of the spectrum.” She looked over at the peacefully sleeping Akko. “Though, having a friend like Akko helpst, even if she did cause problems almost as much as she solved them.

“Why do you ask? Worried you can’t take much more?”

“No, not at all,” Diana said. “It’s just that that the events of this month are quickly becoming on par to some of the worst years I’ve faced, and it’s… well, it’s noteworthy, I suppose.”

Weiss smiled and touched Diana on the shoulder. “We’ll just make sure to pack lots of umbrellas from her on out.”

“Pardon?” Diana asked.

“It was my grandpa’s polite way of saying ‘Be prepared for future shitstorms,’” Weiss explained. “He couldn’t use the original for interviews little kids were watching, after all.”

Diana chuckled. “I see…”

5AM Thursday morning, Weiss didn’t wake up as usual, exhausted from last night.

5:30 AM, the alarm Akko set in her scroll activated.

“AKKO! WEISS!” Freya’s voice screeched. “WAKE UP! IT’S EXAM DAY!”

Akko and Weiss woke up screaming, bolting out of their futons. Diana and Ruby were jolted awake, sat up in their beds and watched as Weiss and Akko zipped about their room, rushing through their morning routines, ready to go in little less than a minute.

“Wow, you guys really weren’t kidding when you said this’d get you ready in no time at all, huh?” Ruby said as she climbed out of her futon.

Akko and Weiss both nodded, leaning on their desks as they waited for their heart rates back down to reasonable levels. Ruby and Diana went through their morning routine at relatively slower pace, and soon, they were standing before their door and ready to go.

“Team AWRD to exams?” Akko asked, raising the arm not holding a cup of black moss tea.

“To exams!” the rest cried, before they joined the droves of students filing out the dorms, and to wherever their exams were.

They headed to massive halls lined to the brim with desks; they got up on stages and before their proctors and peers; they carved out a spot for themselves in massive open areas they shared with dozens of other teams.

Pens, erasers, scratch papers, and pencils were used up, lent, broken, or lost in the blitz; presentations were given and questions were thrown back at them; machines were examined, repaired, or taken apart then put back together again.

Akko sweated and panicked at the blank spaces and pages on her test papers. Ruby flubbed a question that was far from any of the ones they’d rehearsed for. Diana got her fingers stuck in their “Useless Machine” project for Gen-Mech, Weiss was hit in the face with a wayward nut in her attempts to free her.

But still, they survived each their exams, if not feeling confident that they’d aced it, then at least that they had passed, or hadn’t failed that badly.

Finally, 6 PM Friday night, down in a tent in lower Mistral, team AWRD’s exams were finally over, Ruby pulling off her headset and waving at her teammates as they victoriously rode in on the back of a rickshaw, waving three digital trackers in their hands, their lights glowing bright green.

“Great job, AWRD!” Professor Nelson said as they turned the devices in, Akko signed the equipment sheet. “Maybe you four didn’t even need that handicap, with how fast you got this done anyway!”

“It really rather helped that Ruby knew so many shortcuts,” Weiss said. “Even if some of them were a little… out-of-the-way.”

Nelson chuckled. “I’ve noticed, but like I said, so long as we don’t get any reports of trespassing or anything else illegal, go for it. Anyway, you four are free to go; feel free to take the rickshaws back to the elevator, or wherever else they can take you—school’s got them paid for the next hour, anyway.

“See you on Tuesday, AWRD!”

The team bade her farewell, before they all climbed into the rickshaw, and they were off to the Bakunawa to celebrate.

Note: I know I've said this before, but feedback really means a lot to me. Anything from a short "Good chapter" or a little comment on what you liked or didn't like would be really appreciated.

Next chapter's going to be team AWRD's double-date night team bonding dinner.

#dianakko #white rose #rwby #little witch academia #and the awrd goes to #fanfic

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slapegg · 7 years ago

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Quick Critique: Battle Chasers: Nightwar

Before I even get to the meat of this: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME, IT IS VERY BROKEN. Again, even if you loved the comic and love turn-based RPGS: DO NOT GIVE THIS COMPANY MONEY, THEY RELEASED A BROKEN GAME.

Joe Mad is one of my favorite artists and I read the Battle Chasers comic pretty much just to see him draw pretty things. I only just read it a year or two ago, so I thankfully avoided the whole incident of him bailing on the series and leaving it unfinished after a main plot twist. The actual story (and most of the writing) is kind of just Dungeons and Dragons meets generic anime stuff, but it had enough moments and unique ideas here and there to make the comic series worth it, even this many years after its initial release. So Battle Chasers the comic is pretty good. Battle Chasers the video game, however, is a steaming pile of garbage.

This game is so unfinished and slapped together that I'm just going to list out a stream of the constant issues it has: It crashes. A LOT. It's not just one thing going wrong, it crashes all over the place and multiple times at different spots (inventory screen, leaving a dungeon, changing screens, and so on) I actually had a crash during the ending credits It locks up every time I try to enter the Arena forcing me to force close the game I finally managed to enter the Arena (apparently some of the difficulties work and others don't), it's a series of battles with a 20 minute time limit, I'm doing the hardest difficulty to get the final prizes, get through multiple rounds where I'm one turn away from the entire party dying or I lucked out and a character dodged an instant kill move, I'm at the last boss with 2 minutes left on the clock, deliver the killing blow with 23 seconds left on the clock, I get the Playstation level trophy for completing the Arena, the game showers me with prizes, I leave the Arena, I open the menu, the game crashes and upon relaunching sets me back at the beginning of the Arena having made no progress at all and with none of the prizes. I think I just instantly skipped over anger, sunk back in my chair, and whispered "mother fuckers" to myself for a few minutes After a battle, I lost the ability to interact with any objects. Seeing as how the dungeon required me to flip a switch to advance, I had to quit the game. This happened multiple times Frequent hitches and freezing for a second on the map, exploring, and in battle Menus aren't responsive for a few seconds after opening them I had a story scene fail to load and the game just displayed a screen full of that "missing image" pink I had a different story scene fail to load but I still got the subtitles. This one was a major story sequence so it wasn't repeatable the next time I played the dungeon so I would have liked to have seen that The voice acting is Sega Saturn levels of bad. They're horrible choices for the characters but then poorly acted on top of that. And they apply random odd filters over the readings. There's a scene in the open air in a town where your characters talk to each other but Gully sounds like her lines were recorded in a particularly echo-y bathroom. The only character I cared for was The Collector, a sinister but gleeful little monster that is likely eating the remains of dead bosses that you bring it. The Collector deserves to be in a better game than this one The text size is WAY too small The walking speed is slow. If you doubled the walking speed, it would still be too slow Battles are slow both in animation and action speed and how many hits it takes to kill a grunt enemy The core combat system is tedious and relies far too much on crits and applying status effects. Most end game fights devolve into who can apply the most debuffs to the other team and then spamming special moves that gain extra traits if the enemy has specific debuffs The music is so laid back that it (rightfully) just seems uninterested in being a part of this game, even during battles. The soundtrack is so forgettable and uninteresting that I usually turned the game audio almost off and listened to the BBC while I played. The Shipping Report pretty much matches the pace and excitement of this game Totally unnecessary crafting mechanics By the time you get enough crafting materials to build a weapon, it's worse than what you get from dungeon crawling You can't sort your crafting materials alphabetically, so when you're looking up how many of a quest item you need, have fun sorting through that mess Totally unnecessary fishing mini-game Every time you enter battle, the UI flashes a move description. I think it's loading the last thing you used in the previous battle Occasional multiple second pauses at the start of a battle before the UI will display or you can interact with it in any way Clunky menu UI Loot-based drops that do nothing to make the game more interesting Loot that isn't even interesting or exciting because most of the equipment is very similar and the vast majority of what you find is just crafting materials you won't use Major side-quests and items that are gated by random loot drops. You have to hope the characters show up on the map and then hope they drop the item you need (usually multiple times) or else start a dungeon from scratch and do it all over again Semi-randomized dungeons where the actual rooms barely change but their order does, so combined with the need to grind, the dungeons get really boring and just have you looking for the exits rather than rewarding you for exploring. Later dungeons even repeat pieces of earlier dungeons Items in shops are stupidly expensive for how little they change your stats and for the piddly amount enemies actually pay out or what items sell for. While spending a night at the inn cost me 40 coins, selling a purple rank weapon only got me 17 coins. It's actually faster to play through the whole first dungeon and get the health and mana refill before the boss than it is to grind out the money to stay a night at the inn for a large chunk of the game Just about every item you find in the wild will raise one stat but then lower multiple other ones so you kind of just have to pick one stat for a character to use and min/max the hell out of it Items in your inventory will mark themselves as new even though you've seen them before Items in the world will still sparkle as if they're unchecked even though you already have them If you have to close and restart a dungeon (say because the game crashed or locked up), it will acknowledge that you've been through the rooms but respawn the enemies past a seemingly random point. I had one dungeon where the objective was to kill two mini-bosses, I did so, saved the game in case it crashed at the boss, and upon reloading it, the mini-bosses respawned even though I had the objective that said they were dead checked off Every time the game crashes, it resets your super meter. So you can go through a dungeon, build up your meter, save it for the boss fight, the game crashes, you reload at the boss, and now you have no meter and you're at a serious disadvantage Perks and equipment will unequip themselves (this may be related to all the crashes) I met an enemy without warning that was vastly stronger than anything I'd seen in the game before, I could only do 80 damage to it per turn, and every turn it could heal itself for 84 health. And for some reason I wasn't allowed to run away from the fight so I had to sit there for 10 minutes turn by turn hitting the enemy, watching it heal, and letting it whittle down my party's health. Dying then made me lose a chunk of my money Apparently those are special enemies that offer a special reward if beaten, but it wasn't until I was at the final dungeon that I ever saw them again. I don't know if the game was broken and would no longer spawn them or what Another dungeon had a bunch of enemies that I tore through with no problem, and then I got to the boss and it killed each member of my party in 1 hit. Dying, again, made me lose a chunk of my money. So the lesson is to never sell anything until you can fully afford the thing you're trying to buy because you never know when the game is going to throw balancing out the window and punish YOU for it I don't think you can manually save without quitting the game. But quitting the game dumps everything it loaded into memory or something because when you load the game back up, it can take 40 seconds to load into your first battle. Given all the crashes, you have to save and quit often, so get used to watching the first 15 seconds or so of the opening cutscene because you can't skip to the title screen until that plays out The trophies aren't properly proofread and sometimes won't award when you earn them and instead pop the next time you load the game If a character dies from a status effect at the start of their turn, the UI is not graceful I would love to hear some kind of justification on the game's balancing because the way it's set up is that you beat a dungeon, unlock the next story dungeon, but you're not actually strong enough to progress the story yet, so you have to go back and grind the dungeon a you've already finished to level up a bit. You pretty much have to beat each level on each difficulty before you can move ahead, so by the time you're ready to move the story along, you're really, really sick of the previous dungeon Characters not in your party don't gain any experience from battle, so the game actively discourages you from trying new characters. I was level 10 when I unlocked Knolan, but he was only level 9 and the more I use my normal team, the further Knolan falls behind, so I have no reason to ever add him to my party. Changing team members just means you have to redo all the grinding you've done to level them up and hope you get some loot drops for them. Maybe it's just how I play the game, but there's really only one viable team. You HAVE to have Calibretto on your team because he's the only decent healer. Garrison is the only one that can do any decent damage. Gully is slow and focuses on defense, while Monika has high evasion, good damage, and can bog enemies down with stat debuffs so Monika is way more useful Doing end game clean up, I used my weaker teammates because my main team stopped earning experience from the early dungeons, I met those special pirate enemies with this team, was happy to have a chance to fight them, but the pirates scale to your strongest team not the team you're actually using so my level 9, 12, and 17 characters got destroooyed by the level 30 enemies The team couldn't even do New Game + properly. Starting NG+ causes you to lose all your items, so all that time you spent on random drops to get the ultimate weapons and armor was totally wasted. It's completely unnecessary to do this because all the weapons are level gated. So if you reset the character levels, you stop them from having access to the top gear from the start, but once they level up, they get their hard earned weapons back. That would have been the competent way to handle NG+ here New Game + starts you off with the whole team, but it doesn't properly handle that you've unlocked characters before their normal unlocking event, so the shops won't sell you their perk bonus or costume items. Even if you come back at the end of the game when you'd normally have those characters, the game still treats them like they haven't been unlocked yet

Even with its many, MANY glaring flaws, they have the audacity to not actually finish the game's story. You slog through all of this, beat the final boss, and the ending is barely more than "hey, buy some DLC or a sequel".

So, yeah, don't spend money on this game. The perk system is kind of neat though. You get points when you level up and you can cash them in on an attack path or a defense path. As you buy perks on each path, every 20 points you spend unlocks a bonus perk that can offer some substantial stat boosts. You can respec for free, so you can mess around with different choices as you slooowly grind out levels or boss fight currency to get more points.

Battle Chasers is bad but not in the way that most low budget games are bad. The art's great so the game looks fantastic and draws you in. It's the quality design sensibilities and usability in the game that are godawful, the gameplay is as dry as it comes, and it's an unfinished mess. Everything about this screams that the team got a slew of crowdfunding money but then nobody on the team actually knew how to make a good video game so this got rushed out the door without proper testing or fixes to hit a deadline. Battle Chasers makes me question whether Playstation cert matters. If this game, with its constant crashes and 100% reproducible lock-ups, can be released for sale, then clearly nobody is checking the actual game or doing anything remotely resembling quality control.

#Battle Chasers #nightwar #battle chasers: nightwar #airship syndicate

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burgermiester · 8 years ago

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Grinding Renown Made Fun!*

*Grinding for Renown in Fire Emblem Awakening is never really fun. Its tedious, and if you want to max it out it will take many, many hours. This guide is just to show you how I made it as fun as I could while still keeping it relatively fast and efficient. Maybe you will want to try it for yourself or make a variation based on what you like.

(also note that my method uses a lot of the DLC so if you dont have at least Lost Bloodlines 2 and Smash Brethren 2 for Dread Fighter and Bride then it probably wont work very well, but maybe you can modify it, I am not sure. It also would probably be nice to have Lost Bloodlines 3 for Paragon and I liked having all stats +2 from Champions of Yore 3 but those 2 arent necessary)

For starters I want to be very clear that everyone knows this isnt technically the fastest way to grind renown. The fastest way to grind renown is exactly what it says on the wiki: make a ton of money on golden gaffe then summon a weak/cheap character, pay to recruit them, then dismiss them, repeat 2000 times. I tried doing this on a file where I was at endgame and I found it terribly boring, which in turn meant it was not the fastest way for me to grind renown since it would take me forever to find the energy to do it.

So when deciding how I wanted to grind renown for myself I had a few objectives: fight the spotpass characters, not buy them, and make fighting them as quick as possible; minimize the number of spaces that a spotpass character could spawn when I summon them to cut down on walking around the world map; minimize the number of times that I go into the wireless menu to make it easier to multitask (basically it was harder to watch movies or tv in the background using the fastest method since its so menu heavy, so I wanted to cut that time spent down); if possible, completely eliminate the need to manage items on my units. I solved all these issues and these are the steps of my method (the Miester Method?):

Step 0: Grind supports before you even start grinding renown. Grinding out supports is much more interesting than grinding renown. You get new dialogue after most fights and a lot of it is interesting. Just make sure you are grinding on spotpass characters instead of risen since spotpass fights/purchases give the most renown, that way you are maximizing your gains for when you run out of supports to grind and are ready to move onto proper renown grinding.

Step 0.1: Pray your past self really loved playing Awakening. Just having played the game a lot normally will put you in a nice starting position. By the time I finished support grinding gen 1 and moved on to renown grinding I was at nearly 45,000 renown, close to half of the 99,999 max. I cant recall how much of that was support grinding on spotpass characters and how much was there from just playing a ton of Awakening, I forgot to check, but both helped.

OK, now on to the actual steps for renown grinding.

Step 1: Start a new game. You arent challenging yourself here so just go normal casual.

Step 2: Play the game up until Chapter 8 (but dont play chapter 8.) Also beat Paralogues 1 and 3 but not 2. This should have your world map looking like this:

The reason you want to do this is because it leaves your world map with exactly 10 empty spaces in which to summon spotpass characters. As 10 is the maximum number of spotpass units you can summon at once, having 10 spots on the map lets you spend the least amount of time in the wireless menu. Its also good to not allow more than 10 free spots because every extra square you add means more time wasted walking across the map. This is why its not a good idea to do this grinding at endgame: you could be on Donnel’s island and summon a bunch of spotpass units in Valm and vice versa.

Now, as for why I picked prologue-chapter 7 and paralogue 1 and 3 over other choices for my 10 map spots, it mostly came down to map layout. They are all small early game chapters that take only 2-3 turns to beat on auto battle most of the time. Paralogue 2 was much too big and would take more turns to beat and Chapter 8 is full of turn adding desert. Remember, youll be fighting MANY battles in these maps, an extra turn or two each time translates to hundreds of extra turns in the long run. That being said, I want to emphasize that if you havent gotten lucky getting second seals from the random shop annas, you should play chapter 8. Chapter 8 gives you Gregor and another second seal, Gregor is especially important because hes got armsthrift without using a second seal (more on that in a bit). I had already gotten 1 other second seal from Anna by the time I got to chapter 7 so I chose to not play chapter 8, whether or not you do is up to you. If you choose to play chapter 8 then you need to cut either paralogue 1 or 3. Paralogue 1 is a smaller map so will be more likely to give you a 2 turn clear over paralogue 3′s 2-3 turn clear, but paralogue 3 gives you a store with access to javelins and hand axes, two weapons that are very nice to have.

Step 3: Build an Army. Trust Armsthrift. Now its time to prepare your team. The maximum number of units youll need to field in any of these battles is 9. If you go under 9 youll need to waste time in battle prep deselecting units, and we dont want that, so getting to 9 units is important. To eventually get to a point where you never need to buy items for your units youll want armsthrift on your whole team. Unfortunately theres a few hurdles to jump to make this happen since we only are at chapter 7/8. First, we dont have our full team to pull from and second we cant buy second seals. Naturally we will need to get as many spotpass units with armsthrift as we can, but only 5 come with armsthrift: Malice, Linus, Ike, Roy, and Ogma. This means youll need 4 second seals to get a full armsthrift team. Robin, Cordelia, Donnel, and spotpass characters can reclass to mercenary this way. You will have one second seal from renown rewards meaning you need 3 more from anna shops (or only one if you choose to do chapter 8 and get Gregor and another second seal.) Chrom is a good temporary member while you train up your team since he has an unbreakable weapon, but sadly its only 1-range which is not going to cut it since enemies will always attack him at 2 range making battles last at least 1 turn longer than they would otherwise. As for the actual training, do Yore 3 over and over to collect all skills plus 2 for everyone and gain levels to be better prepared for Bloodlines 2 and 3 which are a bit tougher but also get better rewards (and youll be doing Bloodlines 2 a hell of a lot to get all the dread scrolls youll need to reset levels until everyone has max luck.) Bear in mind you will need limit break to go over 50 luck, but just capping it normally or even just pushing it into the 40s then giving all your dread fighters and brides a full inventory of hand axes or javelins will make it so that your stops at the armory are few and very far between.

(optional step: if you have golden gaffe then once your units are decently strong run it 5-10 times and then never think about money again)

Step 4: Setting up the grind. By now you are ready to fire up a couple of rounds of proper spotpass grinding. You might want to wait until you have a full team of limit broken armsthrifters but I recommend waiting a bit, I will explain why in a sec. So I will now give the rundown on the actual grinding that will probably become auto-pilot like for you before too long. Open the wireless menu, go to bonus box and bonus teams and summon 10. If your team isnt maxed out then I say pull the first 5 from one game and the first 5 from another, just to be sure you wont run into anything that kills you. You are on casual, so its not normally a big deal if a unit dies in this process, but if its Chrom or Robin its a game over, and even if its not thats stopping for a text box which slows you down. I recommend the shadow dragon and binding blade teams because there are no cleric/troubadour team leaders who slow things down by not killing themselves on your units and theres no armor knight leaders (and few armor knight other units) who sometimes add turns by not making it to your units as quickly in the bigger maps. Dont save after every battle, it adds like 3 seconds each time, just do it after every cycle (10 battles). If your units are over the 50 luck line give them their best weapons and let them go to town. If they are under 50 then give them a full set of hand axes for dread fighters and javelins for brides and they will last dozens of cycles before you need to restock their inventory. If you are still using Chrom and/or another non armsthrift unit then make sure they are at the 9th slot on your team so they dont go into most fights. Then just turn off and skip all animations and phases and set auto battle to blitz and auto battle every turn, forever.

Step 5:

Step 6: Break up the Monotony. This is the crux of the Miester Method. Summoning a full set of 10 spotpass units and killing them with a very strong team will take ~8 minutes and net you 500 renown. From 0 renown thats closing in on 24 hours of still very repetitive grinding (now you see why I recommend you grind supports first, if you can get close to 50k renown before beginning actual renown grinding youve cut that time in half). Some people might not find level grinding to be a sufficient break in the monotony but for me leveling up in awakening, especially if your units have Paragon, is very fast and fun and rewarding. I might even go so far as to say that building super units is the most fun part of Awakening’s gameplay. So what I recommend is every 15 minutes or so (2 cycles of 10 spotbass battles roughly) head back to dlc land and power up somebody. Get another dread scroll to reset the level of someone with a lot more stats to cap then run them through Bloodlines 3 solo to gain like 20 levels in 5 minutes. Then pop back to the world map and do another cycle of spotpass renown grinding. When enough of your units are close to max stats try and start taking on Rogues and Redeemers 3 to get limit break for everyone and start getting luck to 50. Once they are at 50 luck you can throw your ultimate bonus box weapons like book of naga and mjolnir on them and they will never break and you wont need to mess with their inventory ever again. Try to be going back and forth this whole time too: do a few spotpass cycles, then grab a limit break skill, back and forth. Once everyone has limit break on them go for capping every single stat on every unit. This will take a while because some of them really dont want to get points of magic and/or resistance. So back and forth now between cycles of spotpass and getting more dread scrolls and resetting levels to try to get that res. Everytime one of my units maxed all stats I gave them a forged weapon to celebrate. I ran out of characters to cap before I finished renown grinding so I then broke up my cycles running Infinite Regalia to try and get a ragnell for Ike and a second Gradivus for my second Bride. By the time that was done, I had less than 20k renown to go, and so I was ready to buckle down and sprint to the finish line. That last 20k wasnt even all that bad because I felt like only now was I really in a total grind, breaking up the monotony for the majority of the experience really helped make it more fun for me. Hopefully it makes it easier for you too!

Step 7: !!!VERY IMPORTANT!!! Once you finish Renown grinding you need to beat the game on that save file or it wont carry over on new files!!!! So do that. It will be....very easy.

I dont expect it will take more than an hour.

Once its over, congratulations! You are now W o r l d R e n o w n!

#fire emblem #renown #fire emblem gameplay #awakening #guide #long post

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ninches96 · 6 years ago

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Why Torna will always be the Golden Country

Apologies to those who have the pleasure of hearing this opinion on a daily basis, but Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a good game. In fact, in a year that brought us Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade stood out as my favourite game I played in 2017. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to defend this opinion shortly, but in the interim I’d like to give a brief backstory of my relationship with Xenoblade.

I didn’t Play Xenoblade 1 or X. Actually, it wasn’t until Xenoblade 2 came out that I even considered buying it at all. The only reason I bought it at all was to round out the ‘Year of Nintendo’ having bought a new AAA Switch game every month. I didn’t even play other Japanese RPGs like Final Fantasy and games like Octopath Traveller didn’t interest me in the slightest after playing Xenoblade.

The basic premise of Xenoblade is that you are a Driver, basically a swordsman, who has up to three Blades at a time. Depending on which Blade you have engaged at any given time, you have different elemental attacks which have individual effects. Rex, the protagonist, accidentally encounters the most powerful Blades in existence. First is Pyra, an Aegis who becomes the main companion of Rex and is the key component to the story. Then there’s Malos and Jin, the antagonists, who want Pyra dead for reasons that only 100 hours of gameplay can really make clear.

When I played Xenoblade, it took me hours and hours and hours to finally clock the combat system, by which point they’d added various combos, gauges and other factors to start thinking about. Every time it stepped up the complexity, I was drawn further in. And, though everyone else hates it, I found the cutscenes to be fun and enjoyable. The story managed to suck me into learning everything about the universe that I knew nothing about, in a way that Skyrim never coaxed me into.

Where Xenoblade Chronicles 2 falls short is in its length, clocking in at well over 100 hours from start to finish and immeasurably longer if you’re interested in all the side quests. Also the combat system, while is engaging in isolation, can get tedious during grinding and uninteresting side-quests. Oh and the map/waypoint system leaves a lot to be desired. And there’s too many blades which bond with a given driver permanently. And Poppi is a super irritating blade to try and manage. Despite all these factors, the sheer scope, beautiful environments and complicated storyline kept me hooked to the point where a year on I’m still itching to get back on and start a new game from scratch, then start a new game plus to 100% it. If I had another 300 hours to spare, I would.

This year, the Xenoblade team made a magnificently unique choice. They released a DLC pack called ‘Torna: The Golden Country’, a prequel that explores Jin, Malos and the characters you meet only in flashbacks during the main game. Well, yes that’s been done plenty. But this DLC is also a stand alone game. You can walk to the shops and buy Torna without having touched the main game.

Torna is perfectly crafted to exist as a standalone game to those who have no idea Jin is destined to become a villain in the future as well as for those who know everything about Lora’s future but want to learn more about her past. Lora in general, actually, is an excellent protagonist compared to Rex. She is flawed and heroic in organic ways where Rex was built to be a generic, blank-slate, hot-headed but good-willed kid like we’ve seen time and time again.

If you’d not guessed it yet already, Torna: the Golden Country being a standalone game is the perfect way to release this game. Not only because it entices people into the franchise with a much more manageable £20 price tag, but because it lets me get away with calling it my Game of the Year 2018.

Lets start with the squad. Xenoblade 2 has Rex, Tora, Nia, Vandam, Zeke and Morag as the main components of the party, each of which has 1 ‘key component’ blade who has their own character traits and 2 more blades which are assigned by the player. That makes it incredibly busy and gives you lots to keep track of. This works in a 100 hour campaign, but for a 20-30 hour DLC pack it would be far too much. That’s why Torna has just 9 (playable) characters. Lora, Adam and Hugo will always be your party and each has exactly 2 blades. This compacts the experience and allows the developers and the player to focus all their attention on these characters to develop them all as much in 20 hours as Xenoblade 2 does in 100. Admittedly Hugo felt a little generic, as though he’d already had his story arc, but that’s of little consequence.

The world is compacted down too, Xenoblade 2 sees you scouring dozens of Titans (basically islands) with snow, plains, cities, forests, oceans and all kinds of different environments, each with its own distinct feel. Torna has just two Titans to worry about, the sprawling Gormott, which exists in Xenoblade 2 as a similar but distinctly changed map, and Torna itself, which is divided into several sub-sections for ease of navigation. It would have been nice to have one extra environment to explore, but these two are all you really need. Gormott is so vast that it’s easy to forget what you’re doing because you saw a chest in the distance while Torna is compact and incredibly functional, making it easy to catalogue all there is to do and work at it methodically. This also make the enemies you fight consistent and there tends to be more of a focus on animals than generic human soldiers than the full game.

The story itself is engaging but curiously, fails to address a lot of the questions I was left with at the end of Xenoblade 2. Adam in particular is an elusive character in Xenoblade 2’s flashbacks but we meet him in Torna after he’s done his ‘legendary’ stuff without ever finding out what it was. It does an excellent job of going over the basics without dwelling on stuff we already heard Rex talk about every half hour in the main game but I can only hope these gaps in the story can be filled in through future games.

Some smaller changes include the campfire crafting, which replaces a majority of the NPC interaction in the main game. Shops are few and far between so you must make do with what you can make yourself. In the grand scheme of things, very little is changed with this alteration besides (as I’m sure you’re sick of me saying) condensing the gameplay down.

The only considerable drawbacks from the game, which if you’ve read any other reviews you’ll be more than aware of already, are that the voice acting is a very acquired taste and the characters will repeat the same half dozen phrases in combat for the entire adventure. More frustrating though is the wall you come against at two points in the game. There are two segments in which your only quest will become ‘do X side quests’, amounting to around 50 side quests that are unavoidable to complete the game. This didn’t affect me because the side quests were a natural part of my progression in the game, so I was only ever a couple away from my target anyway but if you were hoping to blast through the story without touching the optional quests, you will get angry. The optional quests themselves vary a lot from ‘kill x enemy’ to genuinely engaging sub-plots that span the whole game. Generally I found them to be an enjoyable extension of the game rather than a chore but I can see why others would disagree.

When Ubisoft talked about their Donkey Kong DLC for Mario Vs Rabbids, they explained how the DLC was actually quite a lot easier than the main game was in its later levels. It was an expansion, not an extension. Given that Torna is marketed for both newcomers and veterans, it’s easy to see how the complicated gameplay would be a barrier for one of these two groups. Newcomers would have to learn a 100-hour gameplay loop in 1/5 the time or veterans would be left bored that their hours of learning were wasted as Torna becomes too easy. The gameplay is by far the best part of Torna.

The very basic concepts are still in place, Lora still has her Blades and they grant her powers. You still have two other team members and all of you have various elemental attacks that can combo together. Where Torna refines the work of its predecessor is that Blades and Drivers can both be playable in combat. Rather than Pyra granting Rex a fiery sword, Jin can step forward in battle and Lora grants him bonuses. They have special attacks that trigger when they’re ‘tagged out’ which deal more damage and make encounters more interactive. You feel more like a team of 3 characters rather than a Pokemon Trainer with his Fire, Ice and Electric types. There’s also a more effective Elemental Combo system which makes it laughably easy to set up an enemy with all 8 elements and ‘break’ them for a massive chain of damage. This would probably get on my nerves but later in the game, they start to punish you for over-extending. Certain bosses deal immense damage to you if you leave elemental orbs for too long, giving you the choice between setting up and breaking as quickly as possible with the risk of it backfiring or learn new techniques to win battles without elemental attacks. In addition, there being only 9 characters to think about means the developers could build real synergies between them which are easy enough to work out without spending hours trawling through the wiki.

I wasn’t lying when I said Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was my favourite game of last year, standing tall above Mario and Zelda and Splatoon and Pokemon. It was so imperfect that it’s really easy to talk about the problems it had. And, as I hope to explain one day, it is not as good as Odyssey and Breath of the Wild were last year. But it was by far my favourite game. Torna systematically deconstructs Xenoblade 2 to find out where those faults were and how they can be addressed. Torna doesn’t take a 100 hour adventure and cut it down to 20 hours. It fits 100 hours of depth into 20. It makes me truly excited to see how Xenoblade 3 takes the same 20-hour experience and extends it back out to 100.

If the huge investment and complicated gameplay put you off buying Xenoblade Chronicles 2, or if you’re wanting an excuse to jump back onto the Titans of Alrest, Torna: The Golden Country is a must-have.

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penetratetopermeate · 6 years ago

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review

Good:

Can do weird stuff in terms of gameplay

Presents decently grey moral dilemmas every now and then

Dope soundtrack

Bad:

Game took longer than I thought

Gameplay is slow paced and there is just straight up too much of it

Mediocre story

Garbage bosses

Overall : C+

I only started playing this game because I started to listen to the soundtrack. I loved it and thought surely the game that inspires such dope tunes has to be better than the mediocre reviews that I remember reading about it. I was more or less wrong.

The problem is just the gameplay isn't very stimulating. Its very basic stealth mechanics. Though the levels are decently non-linear. Still its just enter new room->take out or avoid guards->do quest thing->repeat. For a 30 hour (took me considerably longer) game that just isn't enough complexity and gets incredibly old very quickly. Especially since its story is not that good

The enemies are very basic. They just walk around and then shoot you. Later they can sometimes go invisible. That's really it. I think this is probably a good reason why the game gets old so fast. You are literally fighting the same retards the entire game. Sure you get a few extra tricks to deal with them but its still the same stuff and really boring. Its basically like Metal Gear Solid 1-3 except less linear. The less linearity actually kind of hurts the game. Because it just makes everything take way longer. They present these sprawling levels so you have many ways to complete the mission, but in the end the cost of these more complex levels is just the gameplay taking far longer. MGS2 on the other hand is a way shorter game, less than half the time. It focuses more on a zany story with weird bosses and characters. The enemies are similarly simple though. In terms of actual combat you aren't really playing it that much. The stealth aspect is considerably easier in MGS which I think helps it. In MGS you rush through levels and get to the fun part which is the crazy story. MGS's top down perspective really helps as well.

Deus Ex on the other hand tries really hard to make more complex gameplay. It does so a bit but the problem is the game just lasts so fucking long. I enjoyed the first few levels you can do decently weird stuff like knock people out and then stick them in vents but before even half way through it was a chore to play. Each section would take awhile and the story wasn't interesting at all until maybe the end.

So what's the story? Well in summary your scientist GF gets kidnapped and you want to track her down. That's it basically. There is sooo much stuff inbetween but the problem is it all feels like filler. Activate this thing, deactivate this signal, talk to this person, get this file. Who cares. It's all meaningless fluff. Nothing is really happening. Most of the sidequests you can't really do anything crazy either. It would be more enjoyable if you could for example betray NPCs and do completely evil things. Or irrational things where everyone gets screwed. But you can't really do much. Oh look I can either help this prostitute or help extort money out of her. That's basically it. Who cares about this person? I think this is probably why the sidequests felt so mediocre. They were all inconsequential in the grand scheme of things and involved characters you only meet during that quest, so that character you helped? Who cares because you'll never see them again. The ending presents a somewhat interesting choice about technology and centralized power but that's about it in terms of the interesting part of the story. The game does present a decent amount of morally grey situations. Do you let the bad guy go to free a hostage or endanger the hostage to murder the guy? Do you let a ton of people die to save one person who is more important to the mission? There are only a few of these though unfortunately. It also doesn't help that the main villains are basically not present. It's literally random tasks but then OH WAIT this has a connection to my GF, with bosses literally showing up randomly to mess with you.

So overall the game has a pretty shitty story, decent ending, and boring tedious gameplay and is way too fucking long. I don't really recommend it, though I do recommend the soundtrack. if you are forced to play it you'll be okay though its not that bad.

How to make it better:

Make it way way shorter. Just cut out a few levels. It doesn't help I played the directors cut which included the too-long DLC. But still plenty of the missions could have been much shorter or removed as they were just simple fetch or whatever quests.

Sidequests need a complete overhaul story wise. They should have had reoccurring characters and more meaningful consequences to the sidequests. Instead its help a stranger who you will never see again. None of them really stood out to me in terms of interesting moral dilemmas or anything either.

Better story: Your GF gets kidnapped sure. But how about instead of chasing a bunch of mysterious strangers you get more about each of the bosses. Maybe you can work for them even. Each one could present a different goal and philosophy that you learn as you progress through their layer. Backstory especially could help. Why did this guy decide to get augmented in the first place? Why are they helping kidnap a scientist? What are their goals? Instead we are basically left in the dark about everything until the end. Maybe you can even convert one of them to help you out and they do stuff in the last level. So many options really. I think the major flaw is that they thought mystery could carry the story. But really its just an excuse to present nothing for the majority of the game.

Gameplay: Weapons that aren't just your typical guns could help. More movement options would help a ton. Climbing walls and such. The game is practically unplayable stealthly without the go invisible upgrade. That's bad design right there. There is also no way to distract guards. That would have helped a ton. Throw distraction then run around as the enemies face the other way. The game needs more freedom. It makes me feel like a rat in a maze. I want to feel like a real super-human.

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apairofcrepeswiththerarestape · 6 years ago

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Y'all spring is here! The sun is out! Flowers are blooming! I feel a sense of shame as I look at other people's instagrams of being in like parks or whatever while I sit at home writing/watching parts of I, Tonya on Hulu/telling myself that I need to be out of the house by 1 but actually leaving the house at 2:30! It also means that there are many vegetables out and around and insides of stores and also in those shame inducing instagrams. Between that and the friends from last week that were sick and could not come over and experience the delicious cauliflower but this week were not sick but were still vegetarian, I needed something from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child that was springy. Unforch there are no regular salads in the book as far as I can tell but there is a dish that is pretty much hot salad! Ratatouille aka Eggplant Casserole - with Tomatoes, Onions, Peppers, and Zucchini! Ratatouille has no direct translation but is related to the french word for "to stir up". I personally would have preferred that as the english version of the recipe so I'm going to say I made Eggplant, Tomatoes, Onions, Peppers, and Zucchini All Stirred Up. No I have not seen the movie but I have been on the ride based on the movie at Walt Disney Studios Paris and it was great (no I did not ride the Rock 'N' Roller Coaster starring Aerosmith, yes that is a real thing)!

What you have to buy for hot salad is vegetables, because other that salt and olive oil and fire and cooking tools that is all this dish is. I went to the fancy grocery store because instead of having no choice in eggplants, as was the case at the grocery store down my block, I wanted to be paralyzed by my choices of eggplant and briefly I was! There were like 4 kinds of eggplant at the fancy grocery store and I stood there dumbfounded for at the selection like I was in the third act of an indie dramedy about sad upper middle class white people living in Los Angeles (for a second I thought a Duplass brother was going to walk up, tap me on the shoulder, and tell me to channel the feeling of my favorite succulent dying). I really wanted to get the very cool looking stripey eggplant but I totally chickened out because I'm a rule following nerd. I ended up getting a regular ass eggplant that weighed exactly 1 pound which is exactly what the book told me to do. I also got 1 pound of zucchini even though as I child I despised zucchini, really all squashes were super gross to me. I think it stemmed from a meal where I was served "spaghetti squash" and my mind shut off after I heard the word spaghetti, so I was sorely disappointed and blamed it on all squashkind. Along with the zukes (me and zucchini are cool now, so I can call it that) I got a head of garlic, a yellow onion, two green peppers, a pound of tomatoes, and just however much parsley they give you in a bunch (could I just peel off a few sprigs from that bunch? Am I just contemplating this now? See, I AM a rule following nerd) and THAT WAS IT! I stuffed it all in my backpack without plastic bags even though I'm sure the fancy grocery store has biodegradable ones and prayed that my belongings wouldn't be covered in crushed tomatoes on my train ride.

All these vegetables needed to be prepped to hell before the actual cooking took place, so prep them I did! I peel the eggplant and cut it into slices 3/8 inch thick, 3 inches long, and 1 inch wide, I did the same to the no longer gross to me zucchini. I mean, actually I did my best to keep these measurements but after a while I just got tired so they were all roughly the same size. I tossed my vegetable shapes into a bowl with a teaspoon of salt and let that sit for a half hour. While those salted themselves I went to work on the other parts of this hot salad. I peeled and juiced my tomatoes, still creepily enjoyable, also was it weird that this time I did it while Goodbye Horses played in the background (hey it's an excellent song!)? I also sliced the onions and and green pepper and then mashed a couple of garlic cloves and then all of my hot salad elements we almost ready to become hot. Before the hottening could begin though I had to drain and dry my eggplant and zukes and this was a huge pain in the ass! 1 pound of eggplant and 1 pound of zucchini makes for many 3/8 by 3 by 1 inch slices, all of these had to be dried by hand. One of the few things that I knew about food before I started this was wet eggplant before cooking made for slimy eggplant after cooking so I knew I had to be diligent in this very boring pain in the ass activity. After what seemed like the lifetime I was done drying all the pieces and it was finally time to make these cold veggie chunks considerably warmer.

Could I just throw all this stuff in a pot and let it cook? NO! Of course all these vegetable pieces had to be cooked on their own and then cooked again because Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child is all about letting you know that french people had and have a lot of time on their hands. Luckily, I could do all the cooking in just two cooking vessels rather than the parade of pots and pans necessary for a lot of these recipes (MY DISHPAN HANDS!). First I had to saute all my tiny and very very dry pieces of eggplant and zucchini, in 4 tablespoons of olive oil for just a minute on each side which was fun (just kidding, it was very tedious! Also it was impossible to cook each on both sides for just a minute unless I had some sort of stopwatch for each individual piece or cooked them one at a time, both of those choice would be insane!)! I set those aside so I could replace them with the sliced onion and green pepper which I sautéed for about 10 minutes, during which I probably read about Westworld theories (I think the one human guy might be a robot guy!), then I stirred in the two mashed cloves of garlic and some salt and pepper to my taste which is NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS. I sliced the pulped and juiced tomatoes into 3/8 inch strips then laid them on top of of the other stuff in the pan, I salted and peppered again and tried to find something to cover it all with. In a pinch I went with plate even though seconds later I realized we had a cover for that pan because I am very good at planning things. I sat in my regrets for 5 minutes then took the plate off of all that cooking vegetation. I then basted all that mess with the juices it had rendered which was fun and also a little gross now that I write it out. After I basted I turned up the heat and boiled that biz, which will be the name of my business seminar for small Irish restaurants and dermatological practices, until almost all that liquid was gone. THEN IT WAS FINALLY TIME TO PUT ALL THIS STUFF IN A DANG POT.

Like I was creating one of those coke bottles creatures filled with sand at the state fair (You know the ones you'd put googly eyes on and like a golf tee for a nose and maybe a treasure troll like shock of hair at the top? Is this a reference that you understand? One of the deep subgoals of this project is testing the unanimity of state fair experience) I had to layer all these cooked vegetables in the pot. First went one third of the tomato/onion/garlic/pepper mixture, then 1 tablespoon of minced parsley, then half of the eggplant and zucchinis, then another third of the tomato mix, then another tablespoon of parsley, then the rest of the eggplant and zucchinis, then the rest of the tomato mix and then finally one more tablespoon of parsley. I covered my stratified vegetal mix and simmered for 10 minutes, then I took the top off (of the pot you pervs), leaned the pot on its side and basted that mess with its rendered juices (no way to stop you pervs from going wild with that one). I turned up the heat and cooked everything for another 15 minutes, basting every now and then as the mood struck me (and it struck me OFTEN (actually Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child instructed me to baste several times so I did it, it was not in any way whimsical)), till pretty much all the juices were cooked off besides a couple of spoonfuls. Then, at last, my ratatouille was done.

AND MY RATATOUILLE WAS GOOD! I felt bad though at the end because I realized that this whole thing didn't have any butter so it was probably the only vegan dish in this whole book and I didn't even invite over the one vegan who we're good enough of friends with to invite into our apartment! Sorry unnamed vegan friend! You missed out (well not really since you had no idea it was happening) on some delicious hot salad! Anyway, this was very tasty and not slimy and goopy like I thought it might be. It was, however, a lot of work! Maybe too much for hot salad! If you are a vegan though and need to make something French for your Bastille Day party (it's coming up!) this would be great for you to make! I will probably not be making this any time soon though! So I would say to you, non-vegans, this one doesn't quite have to ROI that you might be looking for in cooking! But do make RATATOUILLE aka EGGPLANT CASSEROLE- WITH TOMATOES, ONIONS, PEPPERS, AND ZUCCHINI aka EGGPLANT WITH TOMATOES ONIONS, PEPPERS AND ZUCCHINI ALL MIXED UP aka HOT SALAD for your vegan pals! They will probably like it! SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

#tdandjulia #ratatouille #EggplantCasserolewithTomatoesOnionsPeppersZucchini #allstirredup #hotsalad #disneylandparis #aerosmithrollercoaster #mesmerizedbyeggplants #ifcaliforniaissogreatwhyareallthepeoplesetinmoviestheresosad #manysteps #terriblemeasurements #westworldrumors #puyallupfair #sorryveganfriend

#tdandjulia ratatouille EggplantCasserolewithTomatoesOnionsPeppersZucchini allstirredup hotsalad disneylandparis aerosmithrollercoaster mesme

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joshua-norton-ii · 7 years ago

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A list of Super Mario platform games and how they handled secrets.

So, first of all, let’s define a video game secret for this conversation. It’s something that is meant to be found, and that is meant to enhance the experience for the player, especially if they like to complete a game as opposed to finishing it as soon as they can. We’re not talking easter eggs here, just “ordinary” secrets. Pretty much anything that is not actually required to finish the game applies (though they can of course help making it easier to finish), whether it’s stamps, pieces of hearts, energy tanks, etc.

In addition to this, a secret can be “hidden” in two different ways. It can be either hard to find, or it can be hard to get. Or both. In the latter case, you know where it is, and you have the in-game tools (jumping, shooting, skiing) necessary to get it, but you’ll be required to skillfully use those tools to actually get it.

A secret that is hard to get is generally better than one that is hard to find; especially for replay value. Sure, the challenge is generally easier the second time around, but it’ll still be a challenge.

A game can also have main secrets, which are usually tracked, and secondary secrets, which either aren’t or should not be. Games that have hundreds of “coins” and want you to find every single one of them in a stage are sadistic bastards (Looking at you, Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams).

So, now that we have defined secrets, let’s look at a long list of Mario games and how they are applying these principles:

SUPER MARIO WORLD

We start with this game because it’s the first Mario game where you could save your progress, and that basically changed everything. Now you no longer needed to make the final stages the hardest. Instead you could put the hardest levels in an optional place. This approach was a tremendous success from day one and has permeated Nintendo’s Mario games ever since.

MAIN SECRETS: Alternate level exits leading to secret levels

This game... Is still very, very good. This game is about 27 years old, and it’s still a great game because of how it’s handling its main secret: The optional levels.

They are found by getting to the secret exits in certain levels. Said levels are marked by being red dots on the map instead of yellow, so you know when there’s a secret. Also, all ghost houses has an alternate exit; and some of them are really clever.

Now, the best part about this is the fact that not every level has two exits. This is very, very important; because if you’re a game designer and you’re told not to make a main secret in every level, that frees you up to design normal levels without the need to shoehorn the secret in. So if you want a level where it’s paramount to run fast and make skillful jumps, it’s a good idea if the player know they can do that without making a stop every ten seconds (putting them off their rhythm) to see if they’re missing something important.

And as a result, the actual secret exits tends to have a variety of different solutions. And the player will know when they can just try to beat the level, and when it’s time to look around. This makes for a more varied pacing.

This super-important lesson, that not every level needs a Main Secret, is one that I feel game designers are way too often forgetting.

Plus, a lot of the time the second exit is a hard-to-get secret. And even if they aren’t, they immediately reward me with another level, AKA another challenge.

SECONDARY SECRETS: Yoshi coins

These are only tracked in-level, because collecting all five gives you an extra life. Other than that, they have no point, and therefore they are not showing up in any statistics whatsoever. This is, I feel, a perfectly rational approach to a secondary secret!

Normal coins are not overall tracked beyond giving extra lives. Good.

SUPER MARIO 64

MAIN SECRET: Power Stars

This game started the very interesting and mostly good trend in Mario games, in making it so that the main way of beating the game also become the main secret. It allowed the player to, after a short while of being rather limited, mostly pick whichever power star they want. If one star proves too difficult at first, they can always go somewhere else (including somewhere else in the same, big level) and get some other power star instead.

In addition, every open, normal level often had a “starting star”, and then the remaining five stars (I’ll get to the seventh one in a minute) were to be collected in any which way you could want to.

This was a fairly good system, with the one drawback that a lot of stars were obviously shoe-horned in to fill the quota. If instead a normal big level had anywhere from four to seven stars, it would allow for the game designers to make better, tighter levels

SECONDARY SECRET: Coins.

I didn’t really include normal coins as secret last time, but this time they’re more important. You need 100 of them in each level to get a seventh power star; and this includes mainly running around the entire level; sometimes backtracking a fair bit.

It’s honestly a bit of a meh system, but at least it was usually no more than moderately tedious; and sometimes pretty fun in that you had some hard-to-get coins to scoop in most worlds. And it definitely was tolerable compared to the horrible secondary secret found in the next game:

SUPER MARIO SUNSHINE

MAIN SECRET: Stars (in Sprite form, but I’ll still call them stars)

This game actually forgot the main reason for why the star system in Mario 64 worked as both a main game -and- a main secret at once. It worked because by and large, if you only wanted to beat the game, you could ignore the stars that were too difficult and collect the ones you wanted. But in this game, that’s not happening. The general world design is similar, but instead of being open-ended levels where you can collect any of the six stars at any point, each world now has 7 missions that you have to finish in order, plus one eighth mission that actually is optional. Plus two secret stars. Plus a “collect 100 yellow coins star”.

The reason this system doesn’t work is because a lot of the levels are in fact pretty sadistic, by taking away the one thing you rely a lot on to avoid dying (your hover pack). These levels are also, incidentally, the far most fun part of the game, but they’re still sadistic. So if you want to just beat the game, you’re in trouble; because there’s no way to get Star 6 without first doing Star 5, and if you can’t get Star 5, you’re fucked.

Sure, you can opt to visit other worlds and do their missions; and eventually you’ll have access to some optional mini-levels too... But you still need to do the 7th mission in each of the seven main worlds.

Of course, for people that are always collecting all the stars anyway, this didn’t make much difference. Except that since there was so many stars per world, this often meant even more shoehorning of stars into the world.

SECONDARY SECRETS: Blue Coins, yellow coins.

Fuck the blue coins. Not only are they mostly hard-to-find secrets, but a lot are also fucking seriously hard to find. As in, “you need to check the internet” hard-to-find because you’re most likely to give up.

See, each world has 30 blue coins. But the blue coins cannot all be found regardless of which mission you’re on. Oh no, they are in fact spread out over different missions; and some can only be found -before- Mission X while others can only be found -after- Mission Y ... So to find them all, you have to carefully and meticulously search the entire world 8 times. At least.

The yellow coins are also pretty bad. In Mario 64, once you entered a world, you could gather a hundred coins no matter which star you were hunting. In Sunshine, you cannot just do that. In many worlds, there are only a few missions (sometimes only one) where it’s even possible to collect 100 yellow coins. Again, this makes for A LOT of trial and error as you’re trying to find out which mission it’s actually possible to do the tedious process of getting 100 coins. And then you actually have to collect them, of course.

SUPER MARIO GALAXY

AKA the second best mario platform game ever.

MAIN SECRET: Power Stars (of course)

OK, this is where things are picking up again, and how! This game is really beautiful in how its handling the collection of stars, not to mention level design in general. It was like someone in Nintendo asked “So remember the levels in Sunshine where you lose your hovering ability? What if we made a game made up almost entirely of such levels, except better?”

And then they did just that. And they also added in a bunch of temporary abilities you could only use in specific levels; to spice up the variety.

The main galaxies are now down to six stars (from 11). Three “main mission” stars, one comet star, one secret star, and one purple star.

The good thing first: The secret star in each galaxy is always found in one of the three main missions. Now, if you did do all the three main stars and didn’t find the secret one, the game will now give you a hint where it is. So now you don’t have to search three levels, only one; and you’ll have a pretty good idea of where to look.

In addition to this, the secret stars are usually somewhat hard to find, but they are practically always of the hard-to-get variety; meaning that finding out where they are is only the beginning. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

Also, while the game is not quite as open as Mario 64, you’re at least much less restricted in which 60 stars you need to encounter Bowser. The only stars really required are the pretty easy opening stars, and facing either Bowser or Bowser jr. a total of five times. Since you probably won’t beat the game if you can’t beat those levels, this is pretty reasonable

The comet stars are usually dastardly difficult, but also entirely optional. Very, very much of the hard-to-get variety of secrets.

The one big disappointment is that a lot of the purple coin stars are boring and tedious, especially those in water-based galaxies. But the purple coin missions that are real missions are dreams to play through. Sadistic horrible nightmares, true, but that still counts as dreams. Getting the purple coin mission in the Dreadnought Galaxy will make you feel like a million stars.

A smaller disappointment is that while most of the main missions are beautifully executed levels, it’s still a bit formulaic to make every big galaxy have six stars.

SECONDARY SECRET: Star bits

I love the star bits. First of all, they’re so easy to collect, and the fact that you don’t have to run all over to where they are when you can just point at them makes life so great.

Secondly, while collecting them will open up secret levels, the game does not care -where- you collect them and doesn’t try to make you collect them all. If a particular level has a gazillion of them, go through that level... three times. And boom, you now have enough for that secret level.

I mean, sometimes you need a certain number to open up a secret star within a level, but even then, this never felt tedious, but instead like a challenge. Maybe not the most difficult challenge, but still plenty fun. Plus, you usually needed only about 30 or so, which is a very reasonable number of tiny things to collect when it’s so quick to collect them.

SUPER MARIO GALAXY 2

AKA Super Mario Galaxy, except even better.

This. Is. The. Standard. For. Hiding. Secrets.

MAIN SECRET: Still Power Stars, naturally

So let’s talk about the main changes from SMG1. First, instead of six stars, each galaxy has two -or- three.

This is pretty big. By allowing the designers to change between two and three, it also allowed them to choose -which- type of challenge each galaxy has to offer. No shoehorning here.

Secondly, no longer does every galaxy have both a comet challenge and a purple coin challenge. Some has one, some has the other, no galaxy has both, and some has neither!

Again, what this means is that you don’t have to shoehorn comet challenges if the galaxy does not really warrant it. Which is really, really, REALLY good in any galaxies with any swimming in it.

And as a result, not only is practically every star a hard-to-get star, they are also well-designed hard-to-get stars. The few times there’s a purple coin challenge, it’s never, ever, a tedious one; just pure (and often sadistic) challenge joy.

SECONDARY SECRETS: Star bits, yellow coins (sometimes), Comet Coins, Green Stars

Comet Coins are also nice. There’s only one in each galaxy, and it’s always found in the first mission/level in the galaxy. This means there’s little tediousness going on if you find out you missed one.

Now, the Comet Coins are mostly of the hard-to-find with just a hint of hard-to-get; but this is perfectly acceptable, because you basically use them to open up comet challenges, which of course is the real secret all along. Just a little incentive to explore this area a bit more. Perfect.

Some galaxies now have you collect yellow coins to open up secret challenges, but it’s somewhere between 10-30; and this is a perfectly reasonable number if you ask me. Usually this happens in levels where the coins are well placed; with the majority being snatched up as you go along, and a few that are hard to find and/or get.

Star Bits are like SMG1, except now you really only have to worry about the total, never about how much you get in one particular level. Ever. Sweet!

Oh wait, there’s also the green stars. Now, SMG1 basically had a Luigi mode to make you do the game all over again. This time, you have the Green Stars. The main difference is that a fair few of these stars are -immensely- challenging and the only people that will even know the green stars exist are the kind of people that wants to collect everything.

Be that as it may, while they do prolong the game; it’s the one spot where a certain amount of tediousness can be found. Many of them are hard-to-find, and without any extra challenge that you didn’t already go through when you collected the normal power stars.

But they’re still nowhere near as bad as some of the purple coin challenges in SMG1; and some of them makes previous challenges that I’ve referred to as “sadistic nightmares” look rather like a stroll in the park in comparison.

SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD

MAIN SECRETS: Green stars, Stamps (and a couple of secret exits)

After the absolute beauty and pinnacle of platforming that the SMG games, this game was obviously a bit of a letdown. Instead of truly building on the things that made SMG into such fantastic games, it turned out instead to basically be a 3D version of the New Super Mario Bros. Wii games.

The secret-finding now became a fair bit more formulaic again. Each level has three green stars (which you need to open up both boss levels and eventually secret world levels) and one stamp (which opens up a stamp to use when you write online messages about the game, which nobody over 12 ever did), and as such, are -very often- shoehorned in. Remember how in Super Mario World only a few select levels had a main secret; usually put in carefully? Or how Super Mario Galaxy 2 only had a Comet Coin in the first level of every galaxy, leaving the second and third level free from such things?

True, a fair few of them are cleverly hidden; but even then, they are more often hard-to-find, especially earlier in the game.

And as for the few alternate exits, they only function as warp exits, to allow you to skip levels.

Which is only something we did when you couldn’t save a game and continue from where we left off next time we turned it back on. Where alternate exits in Super Mario World meant new hard-to-get secrets (in the form of new levels), this is just.... pointless, really.

super mario odyssey

MAIN SECRET: Power Moons

Fuck the moons.

Fuck the stupid fucking moons so fucking hard.

Seriously, in the previous mario games, they were creating proper levels where almost every step brings you to a new, proper hard-to-get type of challenge, and where every time you collect a power star (especially a secret one), you feel like you achieved something... Instead of that, I got this crap.

Now don’t get me wrong, I truly wanted to love super mario odyssey. And at first I did. The waterfall world was pretty good. I enjoyed it.

But the next world was the desert one, and the goodness fell apart. When I realised that every world will have a moon that you buy for 100 coins. And with a couple of exceptions, the shop is placed -very- obviously.

It’s not a hard-to-get challenge. It’s not even a hard-to-find challenge. It simply isn’t even pretending to be a challenge. It’s nothing but a filler. I don’t want fillers in my Mario games. I want fun in -every- star/moon; or at least in, say, about 90% of them. I don’t want 25-30% fun surrounded by 70% of dull moons.

I mean, for crying out loud, this game even has the “kick every random rock you see because one of them might shine” ‘challenge’. In several worlds. Not all of them, but more than once is enough. Heck, once is more than enough.

Again, I don’t play mario games to kick random rock in the hopes that one of them has a shiny thing! That’s stupid and only stupid games make such stupid and lazy and sloppy design.

And while each world seemed to have a different amount of moons (I’m surprised they avoided that little pitfall), for the most part, the amount of moons in each world can be described as “Too Many”.

In some cases, “Way Too Many”.

How bad is it? Well, it started getting tedious collecting all the moons I could find in a world, even using all the hints available.

Then it started to get tedious to find enough moons to travel to the next world.

Heck, they even screwed up the “get temporary abilities to increase variety” by turning you into a variety of monsters that were, for the most part, only exciting for about two minutes each.

More is not always better.

And I haven’t even gotten to the worst part yet. Which is:

SECONDARY SECRETS: yellow coins and purple coins (or “coins”).

Speaking of horrible, I really hate the purple coins. Remember how I mentioned early on that it’s bad to make you keep track of something you collect dozens of? Well here it’s even worse. Because not only does it track the purple coins, but if you’re a completionist, you really want them all, because you need them to buy level-specific stuff with. True, it’s all only cosmetic stuff, but this is the kind of tracking that makes you compelled to do it. And “it” in this case means a horribly tedious process of searching through everywhere in these big and often dull worlds.

And unless you buy a special amiibo, the game gives you no hints of where the last 3 coins can be found (after spending ages collecting the other 97). This is Nintendo’s version of “Pay to Win”.

The yellow coins are at least not tracked, but instead, if you want a complete game with all the different suits, you now have to do something else that you should absolutely never and under no circumstances have to do in a Mario platform game.

You’re going to have to seriously grind for coins to afford all of the stuff you can get after beating Bowser.

So, to summarize: With all of the other games (even Sunshine), when I played them for the first time, I’d usually stop playing from exhaustion, with my eyes going square and it being waaay past midnight. As someone who loves proper secrets in games, the Super Mario Galaxy games in particular were like love letters to me, with only the occasional misspelling. And I’ve replayed them all to completion. Most of them several times. Even SMB3DW; though I replayed it by using different characters because it tracks which character’s finished the level.

I would stop playing super mario odyssey because I grew bored of the tediousness. I eventually did beat Bowser, but I have no interest whatsoever in completing it, and I especially have no interest at all in replaying it, because it has no replay value for me. It truly is a groin punch to people that enjoy secrets in games.

#Super Mario World #Super Mario Galaxy #Super Mario Sunshine #Death to the Blue Coins #Super Mario Odyssey feels as painfully long as Oddyseus' journey #Super Mario 64

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