Symphony of the Night

Played through all of Symphony of the Night in a couple of days!  It was a fun game; nothing was really too bad about it (aside from perhaps the infamous voice acting), though on the flipside i wouldn't say anything was particularly outstanding about it either.  Just an overall good package.  It's really cool seeing an RPG-styled twist on the classic Metroid formula -- one that ended up defining an entire genre together with Super Metroid.  Exploring different areas, encountering new enemies, searching for secrets, it was all pretty enjoyable.  Some balance issues, particularly with the equipment / some of the more overpowered items, for sure, and a few secrets / item descriptions that are a little =too= obscure/cryptic, but even aside from all that everything was more or less fine.  I guess the other thing that's a bit odd is the entire second half of the game being locked behind a "bad end" in which you need to explore and solve a bit of a riddle in order to progress through.  A bit curious since the bad end also gives you the same credits sequence.

Overall I'm pretty glad that I played through it, but at the same time I can see how there's room for improvement and how other games have tried to take the same formula and clean it up a little bit in their own style (looking at Hollow Knight as an example).

Oh, I made it to Master rank in Pokemon Unite as well, so woo.

Now I'm onto starting to play Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom.  I'm not sure whether I'll play through on Hard or Very Hard difficulty (Normal is probably too easy), so I'll start on Very Hard and see how I fare through the first couple of missions.  I'm enjoying it so far!

It's been okay.  I didn't really get much done this week, though understandably so.  I did end up getting all of my xmas mailing done, so all that's left there is a few extra things that are still coming in the mail, and then the ol' Santa run.

Since I've still been feeling slightly ill I've mostly been lazing about, though I did end up cleaning out all the chicky stuff this morning; that was good.  I even took some time tonight to actually try and work on a little bit of spriting for Rhythm Quest, so at least it wasn't like it was a zero productivity day.  Tomorrow, maybe I'll try and knock out the last commission piece that's due for the year, and I have some knife sharpening to take care of as well.  Maybe some more spriting too, who knows.  Next week is already Christmas week, so I probably won't really work any.

I finished watching Arcane, since, like I said, I've been lazing around.  Spoilers ahead I guess?  It was alright, if a little overdramatic at points (but I'm not often bothered by this sort of thing).  I didn't have too much specifically to criticize wildly, but I didn't really have that much to specifically laud either, besides the art style being pretty interesting to look at (especially the backgrounds).  I think the central story conflict portrayed between Vi and Jinx is a solid one...but I think the execution maybe left a little to be desired.  There's a point near the end where Jinx says something to the effect of "I thought we could maybe be like we once used to, but I've changed...and you've changed, too."  I think that's set up to be a poignant moment, since that's really what drives the proverbial nail in the coffin (even though you already know it's coming).  But I think it didn't really have as much impact because as an audience I'm not really sure I saw how Vi changed specifically, or at least how Jinx sees her as having changed.  Is it that she's concerned with more people, more bigger picture things now? (Caitlyn, the impending war, etc)  Is it the fact that she walked away from Jinx at the bridge?  Is it just the fact that they solidly on different sides of the conflict?  I'm not really sure.  I think as a storyteller I see the power in this moment coming from the fact that we are ostensibly rooting for Vi and Jinx to resolve their differences and be with each other again.  The shallow tragic end to the Vi-Jinx relationship is for it to be doomed because external forces drive them apart in the end.  The deeper resolution is for there to be a realization as the viewer that it's impossible for them to be with each other anymore, even in the absence of external forces.  I feel like that was not really sold on me effectively, so I guess maybe the execution was a bit lacking in that regard.

Moderna booster kicked my butt, so I've just been sitting around and watching videos all day -- catching up on all the matches from Smash Summit 12, as well as Arcane: LoL.

The birdies have been doing ok...quails are growing up bit by bit -- there is one really fast one (maybe the oldest?), and one really small yellow one (was born after the other two).  The electric chicky heater has replaced mommy dumbchicky as their heat source since dumbchicky is too kicky and doesn't stay put.  Chickies are starting to get a little stinky; hopefully it will be better once they can graduate back to the bigger bin with more pine shavings.

Got 2 more knives, haha.  They aren't for me, though; presents for xmas.  But they are really nice!  One of them has a really pretty handle...

 

The new Median XL patch dropped and I don't think there were a ton of changes / relevant changes to my paladin, but I've instead been working on leveling a sorceress instead.  I tried a poison build for a while, which actually worked really well for leveling, but was having a lot of trouble with bosses (I was missing one piece of the poison set, and probably lacking elemental pierce, maybe that's why?), so I've transitioned out of that and into a lightning build.  I'll probably just be farming K3BA for a while to get levels, so if I happen to get more set pieces for something like a cold sorceress build, I could try that too, or whatever.  We'll see.  I'm honestly a little surprised that I'm still going on strong with this, but I guess ARPGs are just addictive in that way.

 

Still playing Pokemon Unite as well.  I've basically become a Snorlax main, though I keep on wondering whether I should go back to playing more Blastoise since I keep seeing good Blastoise plays.  Mamoswine is apparently pretty good this patch as well.  I might pick up Talonflame, actually...

Baby quails, The Last of Us Part 2, Unholy Melee Paladin Respec, The Matrix: Reloaded

It's been ok....until this morning when I had interrupted sleep for the second night in a row.  The day didn't really go so well.

Let's start with the stuff that's more relevant to the people who are likely to be reading this.

So...dumbchicky has actually managed to hatch some baby quails, amazingly.  I found one dead baby chick (not sure what happened to it, maybe it got stuck, or trampled, or something), and one other egg that might be cracked (in a bad way), but other than that she has four healthy baby quail chicks scooting around and nestling under her belly now.  This was our experiment to see if we could break her out of her brooding by actually giving her some eggs to hatch, and lo and behold, despite her clumsiness she actually managed to do a good job.

Unfortunately since she has been in lockdown she has also been having really stinky poos in her bin since I'm not putting her outside to poo anymore.  I woke up at 5AM this morning because I smelled her poo from the other room ....  .... sigh.  I also didn't get very much done at all on Rhythm Quest done today, so I wasn't in the best mood.

Anyways, we will see what happens with these quails, I think my current plan is to keep them until they start causing any sort of problems, then......they will probably become dinner, lol.  So far they have been causing me a surprising amount of stress despite actually taking care of themselves fairly well.  But I guess that isn't totally surprising.

 

In other news, I finished up The Last of Us Part 2!  The game actually went on a bit further than I expected, but I think it was warranted in order to really reach the appropriate conclusion.

Overall I really appreciated this game, though I don't think it is one for the weak (as should be fairly obvious).  There are fairly gratuitous amounts of violence and gruesome acts depicted (as is probably pretty clear if you know of the game), but I think surprisingly I think a lot of this felt rather necessary in order to really reach the proper impact of the game.  That said, I have some counterpoints that I'd like to bring up about this.  First, while I think that the violence involved in the game's "main" plot scenes is feels justifiable to me, I found myself a bit off-put by the amped-up level of physical violence during gameplay compared to TLOU1, particularly in using melee weapons.  I think that there's a big part of TLOU2 (arguably all of it) that leans into the discomfort of violence, but I think that the melee combat felt a little over-the-top when compared to both stealth kills and weapon-shooting, and this was definitely amped up from TLOU1 from what I can remember.  There's a youtube video I remember watching where a reviewer/player was commenting on how they were excited about how many different "fatalities" were included in the game, when using different melee weapons in different situations.  Regardless of whether or not this person "missed the point", I just felt like this feature in particular was outside of my taste.

I also think that despite the multitudes of accessibility options present in TLOU2 (the navigation assistance/hint feature was a godsend, not to mention the motion sickness options without which I probably could not have finished the game in the first place), there's a distinct lack of options around trigger warnings and violence/gore settings.  I don't want to be too critical here as there is no real way to make this game work without a significant amount of violence and if you included "trigger warning for violence" it'd end up getting redundant.  As I mentioned before, TLOU2 has some very dark and gruesome moments, and I don't think those can really function any differently.  However this is honestly too much to stomach for a lot of people and I'm just wondering whether there could have been an option to simply cut to black during some of the more intense / triggering moments.  I understand this might seem a bit silly, "why not just close your own eyes" you might ask, but I really feel like this is a legitimate concern.

Despite all that, I think they really pulled it all off well in the end, and I really appreciated seeing what they had to show, even though it went into some very unpleasant territory.  TLOU2 does a very good job of pointing out parallels and putting you in similar yet different situations, or maybe similar situations with different contexts.  The story is told linearly for a majority of the game, but there are some important/major exceptions to that, and the game uses that to full effect in order to recontextualize actions and situations which you thought you might have understood at first.

I saw this mentioned in reviews, as well, and I think it's quite obvious how TLOU2 does this on a very surface level.  But I think what makes me appreciate TLOU2 is that it doesn't just stop at a surface level, it goes much deeper than that.  Subtle things such as seeing the same piece of artwork in two different settings (is it graffiti?  Or is it a holy symbol?) really gets your head going.  It's not just a one-and-done thing, TLOU2 is really thorough in how it explores this theme and I was really impressed by that.  TLOU2 makes you feel different ways in similar situations and when it does so, it doesn't feel like a slap in the face; it makes you ask yourself, "why?".

I enjoyed the gameplay as well, I think the additional tools and crafting options compared to TLOU1 really help to spice things up and make combat/stealth feel very fresh.  The downside of this is that the more new things that get added to your toolkit, the more overwhelming it is when you need to quickly do a gut instinct reaction.  In a brain-dead FPS game if an enemy sneaks up behind you, you do the same thing you always do -- wheel around and shoot it dead, using the same buttons you do for everything else.  Here, that isn't so simple, as you've got stun bombs, pistols (with detachable silencers), throwable bricks, crossbows, etc.  This works out great when you're hidden under cover carefully planning an angle of attack on how to assassinate three zombies without making any noise.  However when you run into an unexpected situation, there's this moment of "oh god, what do I press, what weapon do I even have out right now, argh" -- or at least, there was for me.  So I think that was a weak point of the combat design.  Granted, the goal of stealth combat is to =avoid= those sorts of situations in the first place, so perhaps it's not such a big deal, but I did want to note it as that was a moment when things felt a bit clumsy for me.

I could say more about the story and characters in detail but I've written enough and I don't want to do a deep analysis and this has all been spoiler-free anyways, so I'll just call it there.

In Median XL news, I finally took the plunge and respec'ed my Neutral paladin into an Unholy Melee Paladin, currently using the fire-based Blood Thorns skill -- though in hindsight I'm wondering whether I should have chosen to go with the cold-based Lemures skill.  I actually had the complete 4-piece  equipment set for this build, so that was a a pretty good start on things; then it was just a matter of figuring out all the mystic orbs, socketing, skill speccing, etc.  It took a lot of looking at different things (including the only forum guide written on the build, which is...unfortunately several versions out of date), and tweaking a bunch, but that happens to be something I quite enjoy in my RPGs, so I didn't mind a ton!

Funnily enough, I might not have actually went through with the respec, except I still have not been able to find the glove piece of the neutraldin set (despite trying a bunch).  I wonder if luck had been different, if I would have just stayed as a neutraldin?  Anyways, the new build unfortunately actually seems to have significantly less single-target damage (lemures might have been doing better on that.....).  On the plus side, I managed to clear an uber quest that I was really struggling on with the neutraldin build!  The new build also sustains much better, and I'm able to farm areas like teganze and fauztinville without having to resort to chugging potions or anything like that.  So in that sense I think it's been an improvement, which is great to see.  Unfortunately I'm still at a similar plateau of sorts and there aren't obvious ways to drastically improve my build without lucking into some nice sacred uniques or doing more min-maxing of charms and stuff.  But we'll see how it goes from here.  Patch 2.1.0 is dropping in 3 days, so I might just download that and see what that brings anyways, though I don't think there are a ton of changes to Paladins in particular.

I =did= keep a copy of my saves before respecs, so I could also try rolling back and going for a lemures build as well, if I end up hitting a brick wall.  We'll see.

Edit: Right, I guess I can also mention that we watched through The Matrix: Reloaded.  I've seen it before, but this was so long ago that there's no way that I could remember that much about it.  I was unsurprised by the fact that it was....a pretty poor movie.  However this time around it was so much more clear to me exactly why this is -- at least, to me.  It's not the convoluted plot, it's not the dialogue, it's not the needlessly excessive fight scenes, it's not the awkward let's-show-sex-as-if-we're-mature-now attitude, though all of those of course reflect poorly.  It's the fact that there's no stakes or meaning to any of it.  The fight scenes in the first film worked so well not just because they were cool but because they had meaning to them.  Neo fighting Morpheus has a clear undertone of Morpheus wanting to unlock Neo's potential, but at the same time showing him that he's still too weak in his current state.  Even when Neo and Trinity are just blazing guns like crazy to rescue Morpheus, the emotional message is in Neo's confidence -- he's proactive, working as part of the team.  It's notable how little of the fight/chase scenes in The Matrix: Reloaded have any dialogue involved, or at least any meaningful dialogue.

The same is true for all of the exposition and world-building.  In the first film, all of the exposition about Zion, the Nebuchadnezzar, The Matrix, and all of that works well because we're pulled in by the mystery and intrigue set up by the first chapters, by Neo (and ourselves) wanting to discover the truth after it being hinted at for so long.  In the second film, we get a whole bunch of shots that show the architecture and culture of Zion, but there's no reason to care about any of it.  Morpheus (tries to) give a really grand speech about how humanity will prevail, yadda yadda, but again, it falls flat because we weren't given any significance to it.  It almost feels like a Star Wars movie, but...not a very good one.

The ironic part is that the movie itself seems to repeatedly pose the question of "purpose" -- postulating that choices are predetermined, but the only important thing we can do is find out "why".  Unfortunately the film really fails to answer that question for itself.  Why did it matter?  Why did we bother watching this?

There is some actual potential in some of the ideas and plotlines presented in the story.  Neo's visions of Trinity's death are really important, as is the revelation that The One can't actually end the war or save humanity.  Morpheus has built his entire existence upon this belief, so having it torn down so unceremoniously is obviously a huge thing.  There's a story here somewhere about the weight of expectations, and about how even though Neo became The One, up until this point he was still just playing a part.  Who are we when we no longer have a path before us to follow?  Agent Smith becoming a virus -- the very thing he compared the human race to in the first film -- is also significant.  And no, "it gets covered in the third film" isn't a good excuse for any of this.

It's been alright.

I took last week off; Thanksgiving and all that.  It was a good week for me!

Dumbchicky seems to actually be successfully (??) incubating some of the quail eggs, so they are progressing with their development; I'm getting ready to lockdown on them so that they can perhaps hatch (??).  We'll see what happens.

I hit lvl 130 in Median XL and now I've started to really see progress slow down; I'm not sure how much more it will take for me to try and tackle the next set of ubers/dungeons, but there was already a lvl 125 boss that I couldn't take out yet.  There's some set equipment that I've tried farming for that would be good for my neutraldin build but haven't managed to find yet, so that's an option.  Interestingly enough, there's actually a new patch coming out on Dec 10th...crazy.

I played through the finished chapter 2 of Deltarune.  This chapter offered another fantastical-type adventure with the same sort of intermingling of genuine character development and slappy humor that I've come to recognize from Toby Fox's work.  It seems like Deltarune is setting up for more questions, more exposition, more...stakes (?) when compared to Undertale.  The dual interplay between the worlds of the "Lightners" and "Darkners" I think facilitates deeper readings of the main characters, and they all feel more layered than they did in Undertale.  I'm not saying that the characters in Undertale were necessarily all one-note, but with Deltarune I feel like it's more obvious that they've got stuff hidden underneath their surface layer and that really makes you wonder exactly who these people are.  The game never spells any of this out for you either (yet), but there is enough there to make you wonder about it very strongly.

In the meantime, I took my break last week as an opportunity to play through a bunch more of The Last of Us 2, completing the majority of it and getting past a supposed "twist" that I heard at least one reviewer mentioning as turning their worldview upside-down.  Sigh.  As usual, I find myself not really agreeing with other people's opinions.  Like when I was watching Brave, the overarching direction and path of the plot was easy to predict early on, but all of the little destinations and detours along the way have proven to be worthwhile.  There's no one singular moment that stands out as jaw-dropping, but there are a multitude of smaller experiences contained within the narrative and environment of TLOU2 that I've really appreciated.

TLOU2 has actually done this really funny thing where every time I start coming down with a criticism of it, it remedies that criticism in the next chapter.  "It feels like they haven't really done anything new with the zombie encounters in this game", I told my friend, immediately before going into a new chapter where a new mechanic around the zombies was introduced.

The gameplay pacing of TLOU2 is entirely familiar (tense exploration, followed by stealth action encounters, culminating in an intense action scene, and then story beats and exposition), but that's because, well...it works.  The dialogue and character interactions, too, take the strengths of TLOU1 and carry it over.  The "Left Behind" expansion story was honestly probably the most memorable part of TLOU1 as a whole and I think they've really taken that experience and used it again here.

TLOU2 does a lot of work with contrasting and contextualizing things under different lights.  That sounds vague, but that's because that statement applies to a lot of different things in TLOU2.  There are extremely obvious ways in which this comes up, but also much more subtle ways as well, and I think it's those more subtle ways that I've really been appreciating as I go through the game.  It's something that would make the entire thing worth another playthrough, I'd imagine.  Unfortunately, this is also the sort of thing that I don't really see called out in reviews.  It's easy to talk about such-and-such plot twist or whatever, but I think it takes a more nuanced critique to call out attention to how color palettes are used, to how subtle parallels are drawn between similar scenes and characters.

At a certain point in TLOU2 I was wondering "what are they trying to say here?  What is the 'point' that they're trying to get across?"  And fortunately, it doesn't actually seem like there is one.  I say fortunate because if that was the case, then no matter what the "message" is, it would probably fall flat.  The best allegories, after all, are the ones that don't tell you what to do with your life.  They merely explore a situation, and make you think about it.  I feel like TLOU2 does this well; it makes you think about things, and it does so in a very fleshed-out way, more than just surface-level.

So far, at least.

"What would Sayuri do?"

It's a question that I find myself asking again, today.

And I realize, as I think about this question, that Sayuri has changed over the years.  She has grown up, somehow, even without me realizing it.  I think the Sayuri of yesteryear would simply not say anything, would simply be fulled along with the flow, with a quiet expression in her eyes.  But the Sayuri I know today believes in herself more than that.  She does what she believes in, wordlessly.  She is not cold as ice, not sharp like a dagger, but she can carry a silence that will undoubtedly make some uncomfortable.  It is not always a silence like that of her older sister...sometimes, it carries a warmth with it as well.

Sayuri is...careful.  I think part of the atmosphere of deliberate motion and action stems from contemplating everything before doing it.  But I think even when caught off guard by something, when put into a negative situation, she would do her best to remain composed.  To choose what is right and then follow through silently.

To be unapologetic, yet push forward with such minimal force that one need not turn around after making a mistake.  It feels almost paradoxical, but perhaps it is similar to taking a step without committing weight.

How does one push forward with so little force?  Perhaps--surely, this is something I used to know.  For now, it is something that I will meditate on.

Why do you always tell me "I should" instead of "I won't"?

--Someone who once believed in you

Let's see here...

I'm back from my trip (and tested negative, yey).  It was a good week, with several highlights here and there.  I spent some time worrying about what exactly I should be doing with myself, but that actually subsided fairly quickly as I settled into a sort of natural balance between doing a tiny bit of work, playing Median XL, and exploring the area and doing various things.  I got to have some nice food, including some shrimp/lobster/crab rolls, and also got to visit the aquarium, which was really nice.

I've progressed very far in Median XL with my Neutraldin build -- now level 125 and starting to try the uber dungeons/rifts that unlock at that level, which are proving to be difficult, haha.  It's been fun though, even though I worry about hitting a wall with the progression at some point.  Honestly, I expected that to have happened already, so I'm a bit surprised that this build has taken me so far.  I had still been waffling between some different builds -- unholy melee paladin seems to be regarded as one of the better ones -- but somehow ended up taking this one all the way so far, and at this point all my gear is specced for that build, so it would be sort of a commitment to try and respec (though I guess it's not out of the question).

I also tried to go reach out to my past.  It didn't work, but I think I learned a lot for myself regardless.

I seem to sort of be back on the train of rolling along with Rhythm Quest development, which feels nice...I feel like with all the breaks that I've taken and trips and everything I've been missing out on days where I just do a good amount of work on it, but today seems to have bucked that trend.

That's about it, I guess?  My latest soundtrack commission has been turning out well, and things in general are in a pretty good spot for me I think.  I've perhaps started to figure out some ways to put a more positive slant on things that maybe have previously struggled with.

I made it to the other side of the country!  Where I will be (temporarily) staying, just for a bit.  Hopefully the chickies at home don't get too stinky.

 

Impostor Factory and the Freebird Games series

I played through Impostor Factory, the third main game in the "To the Moon" series.  The Freebird Games works have a specific brand of intrigue and suspense woven into their stories that I think is really their strong suit.  Though I admit that after a while you start to get a bit accustomed to it and always start wondering how tragedy is going to strike whenever things are going too well.  I suppose that is just standard fare for stories at some point, though.

Impostor Factory itself was good, but how do I say this...it wasn't necessarily personally meaningful to me.  I think my favorite work in the series was "Finding Paradise" if only because it was the only work that I feel like had something to say to me beyond the story itself.  Perhaps this is merely because the themes explored in "To the Moon" and "Impostor Factory" were less resonant to me personally (perhaps, in a similar vein to watching Ratatouille and thinking "that's a cool story which I cannot really relate to"?)

I had a bunch of stuff typed out about To the Moon and Finding Paradise but I'm beginning to really doubt my own reflections of the works, so let's just leave it as a personal preference for now.

There's a world in which I take to replaying these games with an eye towards serious critique and analysis, but that probably isn't something I have the time for now, unfortunately.  However, I do think that the best way to get better at expressing opinions about and analyzing/critiquing works of art is to....practice...

Vacation

Or as much as you can go on vacation while self-employed, anyways.  It's been an interesting week so far and I guess a refreshing change of pace.  I've done various things here and there, nothing big though.  Just mostly taking it easy, as I should.  I've done a bit of walking around, a bit of work, a bit of just hanging out and playing, and today I went to the aquarium, which was really fun.  I even tried cooking shrimp etouffee for the first time, so there's that.

Median XL

Oh, and I've been playing Median XL a bunch, somewhat surprisingly.  There was definitely a sort of initial hump that I had to get past where I was sort of figuring everything out, but I've settled into things now.  Notably, I was speeding through the acts a little too fast and thus running into heavy exp penalties (d'oh).  I was trying to find references for the monster levels in Median XL by area so I could figure out which areas I should actually be in, until I realized that this is built into the new UI to begin with (it displays in the top right of the automap screen, if enabled).  Derp.

Anyways, I played around with a few different characters but decided to take my Neutral Paladin the distance for now -- this is a funny build that uses two buffs that shoot lightning at nearby enemies automatically, so you sort of just walk around as enemies get hurt and fall to the floor.  It's a little more complicated than that in actuality, of course, but that's still the core aspect of the build.  I seem to be doing pretty well, and am level 115, now firmly into the territory of starting to do some of the end-game quests and hidden dungeons and such.  It's been fun!

 

Pokemon Unite

Is taking a bit of a break this week, so I'll probably be back to it next week instead.

Just because there's nothing more you can do doesn't mean that it's over.

Things are...okay.  I wasn't feeling so hot today, so I spent a little time on self-care.  I think it seems to have a helped a bit, maybe?  I read a letter from The Past (with a capital P) and then lied down in a bath for a while.  There have been various thoughts going around in my head, about things, about The Past, about people and different perspectives on things, about self-expression or the lack thereof, as well as just about what I want; what would make me happy.  Just, stuff.

I've got a week more of letters to write, and then another week after that to work hard.  Or, maybe I shouldn't look at it that way.  I've got my next thing to work on for Rhythm Quest as part of my (potential) graphics makeover, which is putting all of the level graphics onto a combined spritesheet (as in, authored as a combined image) rather than just single images that are later combined automatically.  That will let me author all of the graphics (and palettes) for the level at once rather than editing each individual image.  Not really sure why I didn't do that already (or maybe I had at one point??  I don't even remember, really...).  It's sort of more of a "busywork" task than any actual creative challenge, but honestly I feel like a lot of what keeps me making forward progress on this game is breaking down all of the work into small enough little bits that all seem like they're more or less straightforward.  It's way easier to stay motivated when the task ahead of you seems really simple; it helps avoid operational procrastination...

Well, tomorrow I get to pull 3 heads off and then attempt to turn some bodies inside out.  So maybe that will be fun?

Mega Man: Super Fighting Robot

This is the latest Mega Man fangame that I decided to play through.   This one was quite enjoyable!  All the standard stuff is there -- you know, 8 robot masters, NES-style music, etc etc etc.  Physics and movement felt just fine, although one nitpick is that you can't shoot additional buster shots if a half-charged (not fully-charged) buster shot is on screen, making that by far the worst level of charge to use against normal enemies.  Normally in most Mega Man games, the small charge shot can still be fired in tandem with normal pellet shots.  Eh, again, just a minor nitpick.

I played on Normal difficulty -- I tried hard difficulty briefly and it seems like it basically doubles the damage that you take(?).  Normal difficulty was actually a bit easy for me, I only had to retry a stage once or twice and I hardly ever had to use e-tanks at all.  Part of this may be because of the game's upgrade system, which lets you purchase minor upgrades to several facets of Mega Man, giving you a bit of damage reduction, better charge shots, and even faster movement and slightly higher jumps (!).  Granted, there are bonuses/achievements for not using any of the upgrades.  Maybe I ought to have played on Hard instead?  It's hard to say whether the extra damage would have felt difficult in a good way, or whether it would have just felt annoying.  I can't really fault a game too much on its specific difficulty level, especially given that it has added challenges and hard difficulty, but I did find it a little too easy, just as a personal experience.

Besides that, this game does a lot of things right.  The music might not be as "catchy" as some of the classic MM tunes, but it's certainly good (and honestly, it's hard not to be biased since a lot of us have played the old MM games multiple times).  The enemy designs are very good and the levels are all both interesting and challenging.  The challenges feel very fair for the most part as well, and even if you lose a life due to a "gotcha", the rest of the game is forgiving enough that it's sort of within my quota.  The weapons are all very unique, and the bosses are fun to fight as well, though again, a bit on the easy side sometimes.  Maybe I'm just miscalibrated from playing other (harder) fangames...

All in all, it was a good time!  I got through it pretty quickly, and decided not to pursue any of the additional content (I'm not really one for replaying stuff).

I dunno what I'll play next...maybe I ought to try out Emperor?

Time for another update...

Ludum Dare 49 Results

The voting period ended for Ludum Dare 49, and our game took 11th place overall out of 2,204 jam entries.  Worth noting that Ludum Dare has continued its downward trend -- LD46 had 4,959 submissions, LD47 had 3,206, and here we are in LD49 with 2,939 total submissions.  That's a 40% dropoff in under 2 years!  Meanwhile, Game Maker's Toolkit jam is continuing to rise, currently at 5,750 submissions for the most recent event (higher than LD has ever had, I believe).  We'll try for GMTK jam next year, maybe.

Anyways, LD results are always a crapshoot, but this is our best placing since taking first place in LD40 (I also managed a bronze by myself in LD45), so that's pretty cool.  I'm pretty happy with how things turned out, and the jam itself went very smoothly as I mentioned last time.  For a while I was going to maybe try and iron out some small improvements to it, but I decided that it's probably not worth it.  This is a very odd-feeling departure from my usual perfectionism, and I still don't know how to feel about this new attitude.  Overall I think it's healthy to realize that some things are less worth the effort to work on than other things, and that there's no need to be perfect, especially for things that not a ton of people really care about.  However, I don't like the idea of complacency potentially creeping into more different aspects of my life.

Room Stuff

I guess on a somewhat related note, I've finally started redistributing my prints and decorations across my walls.  I have most of the big stuff put up, but I'm a little baffled at what to do with the smaller stuff.  There is a lot less of it that I care about now, but it still doesn't really seem like it belongs anywhere up on the walls anymore, so I haven't figured out what exactly to do with it yet.  On the plus side, I have these sweet new DDRKirby(ISQ) prints:

I've got some people who I guess are pretty into my work, but I'm not going to lie, I'm definitely my own #1 fan...

Music Production

I went through and did a huge cleanup of my VSTs (virtual instruments and effects) and samples, cleaning out everything (there was a tooonnnnn of old stuff that I never used) and attempting to reorganize things so there wasn't so much clutter.  There are a lot of great sounds out there now, for free even, but I've found that if they're not easy and efficient to load up and get to then they may as well not exist...

Anyways, that took a while, especially as I found a bunch of interesting new sounds and effects that I threw into my toolbox, but I'm happy to report that it really paid off.  I made a really nice lo-fi chillhop track for One Hour Compo today (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep_I2iR03wk) and was really pleased at how all the new sounds were working out.  Though, my computer was struggling to run it all near the end, haha.  Some of these new instruments are a bit CPU-heavy!

Dance

I continue to work on my freestyle dancing every once in a while.   Interestingly, I've stopped posting videos of all of my glowsticking sessions -- for whatever reason I feel like I only want to put out stuff that I'm actually happy with now.  I'm definitely seeing improvement; there are moments where the body movement and isolations really play into good effect, but there's still a lot that I need to clean up.

Cooking

I spent like the entire day on Tuesday cooking up various stuff in the kitchen....a bit part of that was making a really rich and intense broth for tsukemen dipping noodles, which involves boiling bones (I used the pressure cooker), then blending a bunch of meat into the broth and straining it out.  It was....certainly an interesting process, and kinda weird/unappetizing at parts, but the end result is certainly very rich.  I'm interested to see how it'll pair together with actual ramen noodles, along with some shoyu tare and some accompaniments (pork belly, green onion, fish powder, maybe some lemon zest).

 

Rhythm Quest

I can finally say with confidence that I've gotten back into the swing of working on Rhythm Quest (my indie game).  Right now there's a lot of design improvements, reworks, and new features that I don't exactly know to best do, which means I've pretty much accepted that I'm just going to have to try different things and just iterate on it.  It's sort of an approach where I need to "just try stuff, anything", and then once I see it in action I can then start to actually get a better idea of what I actually need to change (if anything).  It's not exactly confidence-inspiring to not know what exactly I'm working towards, but it's a good thing, I think, to be iterating like this and just trying things.  Better than just doing nothing and being out of ideas, that's for sure.

 

Median XL

I'm not really 100% sure what all I'm doing in Median XL.  It does seem way less fun than the times of yesteryear when I played together with my brother, but at the same time I do still color myself interested in all the different skills and what the midgame/endgame has in store for me.  Right now I'm still sort of just playing around with different characters and seeing what there is.  I took a melee Sorceress all the way through Normal mode, but then I realized that I should probably try some different things rather than just settle on a single build without really trying that many other things.

The real question though is whether I should really be spending my time on this, or should I be playing Deltarune Ch 2, Omori, Impostor Factory, Symphony of the Night, etc.  We'll see, I guess.

Life in General

I feel like was a little down for a few days, but right now I'm feeling pretty good about it.  I guess it helps that I've been sort of in my groove as far as bouncing around getting various different things done -- the music production cleanout (and resulting successful track), putting up my prints, working on Christmas letters, starting up Rhythm Quest work again, etc.  All that stuff feels good.  I've even had a little bit more company than usual these past few weeks, it feels like, which is actually welcome.

Ludum Dare 49

As I mentioned in the last post, the weekend-long "Ludum Dare" game jam took place again last weekend.  We made it out alive with another game under our belts, and things actually went pretty smoothly this time!  This is our 16th game working together and my 25th time personally, so it's all old hat by now, but still remains fun (I mean, One Hour Compo is also still fun, and I've done literally hundreds of those...).

We came out with a fun two-player cooperative game, which people seem to have been enjoying!  I'll be continuing to rate other games for the next 10 days as well as take care of various things like the soundtrack release, small fixes, and cleanup, and then we'll see what the results are like.

Day-to-day Life

Since then I have been taking things really easy for the past week and just trying to relax (while still taking care of things here and there, like my Inktober letters and Vote Forward letters, etc).  I drove up for an hour or so to see one or two friends the other day and it ended up being a very lovely day for me; that's something I'll have to look to do again sometime for sure.

Baldur's Gate

I'm calling it quits on Baldur's Gate after finally reaching Sarevok (the big bad guy in the original game) and taking him out.  There of course is a slew of additional BG content, including the expansion, as well as the entire sequel, but I think I've seen and had enough for now.

Overall, it was enjoyable to go back and actually play through the game fully since I really didn't spend much time with it when I first encountered it.  As always, I enjoy going deep on any sort of game, so I did a lot of research into stats, spells, characters, and the like to inform my playthrough.  In the end, though, I didn't think it was fantastic.

BG does a lot of worldbuilding, setting up an elaborate plot involving schemes and multiple organizations, and there is a LOT of dialogue and journal entries to go through if you so choose...which honestly was a bit too much for my tastes.  I appreciate that there's a very rich world full of different people, but it's a little much to take in.  It's fun to go through random NPC houses and such for a while, but there's rarely anything of super high value in them, and once you reach the titular city of Baldur's Gate, there's definitely a LOT to slog through (if you do choose) since the city itself is massive and divided into 9 different separate areas.

Combat is sort of an interesting hybrid of turn-based and tactics, as you're constantly pausing to issue new commands.  With mages in the mix, there are quite a few different strategies at your disposal (direct damage vs disabling spells, etc) but in the end a lot of the combat turns out relatively similar in vibe.  That doesn't mean it's not enjoyable though, but after a while it perhaps does get a little old.  I will note that with all of the different spells and buffs things do end up getting a little confusing.  There are a lot of different "rules" and effects that go on in the battle system (e.g. if someone has mirror image cast on them, you need to damage them X times before they can be hit), and unfortunately it's not very easy to get access to that information unless you're already kind of in the know.  You can run into an enemy mage that has a swirling blue / red orb covering them, but I don't think there's any facility to really learn what that does or how you should best interact with it besides just trial and error.

Some quality of life features are sort of missing, including more sensible quest reminders (though I think that got added in the enhanced edition), better interfaces for buying large stacks of ammunition, certain auto-pause triggers (upon completing a spell cast), and automatically detecting traps, among other things.

So yeah, that's that.  It also seems like I probably won't be finishing up Terranigma (maybe will just skim through a playthrough of it?), so that leaves me to move onto whatever the next thing is, which could be Median XL, Symphony of the Night, Deltarune ch 2, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, or any number of other things.

Space Alert

I took a crew of 3 -- myself, a rookie that I had brought up to speed years ago, and a new recruit -- out into space with remarkable success.  My hopes started out low as on our first mission I assigned them to work together to take out a leviathan tanker (a tough threat, to be sure) and the energy/laser coordination seemed to be going awry.  Despite my best attempts at warnings, the newbie tripped on their way to the laser station, and it was only due to some extra missile fire from my android that we were able to survive.  Things got much better from there, though, and we ended up finishing no less than 6 successful missions in a row, ending off on a white/yellow mix of threats and making it out alive with nonfatal damage.  It was a good run.

Let's see...

Life

Has been going pretty okay.  I've had some pretty nice days, as well as some "eh" lazy sort of autopilot-blah days, I guess.  I think making an attempt to get regular physical activity in at some point during the day has really been quite beneficial to my mood and happiness (which is not surprising, of course).  As well as just keeping up healthy habits in general.  Slipping up is inevitable from time to time, I think, I don't think that's something to blame oneself for.  Just take it day by day, sort of like a recovering addict/alcoholic might.

I've been taking it remarkably easy; I guess somehow the past week turned into a vacation of sorts despite not intending anything of the sort.  It's been good for me though, I feel like there were days when I remembered that life is something that is meant to be enjoyed, and that it is important to have things to look forward to when the work is all done.

Vegetarianism

I attended a virtual talk that discussed some things around sustainable eating and food security/insecurity, among other things, and while I don't think I came away with discrete actionable learnings, it was a bit inspiring in a "generic motivational speech about [topic]" way.  I think I'm already doing an okay job of having cut down on meat consumption; however this reminded me that I'd still like to get more proficient in my vegetarian cooking, so that when I cook for others I don't have to fall back on meat dishes all the time.  It'll take time, I'm sure it will happen gradually as I become more comfortable with various recipes.

 

Relationships and Gender

I guess it should have been obvious in hindsight, but when people talk about relationships there's this sort of assumed dichotomy between "friends" vs "dating"...in addition to frequent assumptions that "dating" is monogamous, heterosexual, etc., and I realized the other day that this always feels awkward in the same way that people assume a dichotomy of "male" vs "female" when talking about gender.  Setting up two societally-constrained buckets for things to neatly fall into causes "friction" (to put it gently) for those who find that their circumstances don't slot neatly into either bucket.  I've always found it difficult to articulate this succinctly but relating it to the struggles of binary gender assumptions I think makes things a lot more obvious to me.

I am astounded sometimes at how people still ask questions like "what is love?" and "how do I know whether I am in love or not?"  Maybe this is partly just me as an ISFJ-type who sees little value in arguing semantics, but I think more than that, these questions again set up a false dichotomy, where relationships are either "true love" or "not true love".  Frozen and Maleficent both (in basically the same way...) offered us the anti-trope of "true love" being represented by an actual familial bond rather than the age-old "white knight kisses (also white) princess", but really the entire idea of "true love" I think as a construct can be really damaging in more ways than I can count.  Relationships in the real world are complicated and deserve to be treated with nuance rather than sweeping generalizations.

 

Chickies

They have been amazingly peaceful for now since 小黑 (who is still brooding) has just been sitting in one spot in a tiny bin all day.  I tried breaking her out of her broodiness for a couple of days by forcing her to stand on wire / wood rather than any nesting material, but she didn't seem to want to snap out of it, so I gave up and am just letting her sit for however long she wants to, making sure she has water and food next to her since she literally just doesn't get out of the one spot for most of the day.  She's super quiet as a result and 小白 is pretty calm too since she doesn't get bullied anymore.

Ludum Dare / Far Side of the Mirror

Is this weekend!  Work on Far Side of the Mirror actually went more quickly than I anticipated; it may actually just end up being fully complete before Friday (or at least, "more or less" so).  There's only a couple of days left, so I guess this is also time for me to shift gears and dig into trying to work on some framework stuff in preparation for the weekend.  And try to continue not stressing out about Rhythm Quest and everything else that needs to get done.

Pokémon Unite

I started playing it to try it out.  It's pretty fun actually!  It's nice how streamlined everything is and I think it sets itself up to be more approachable in several ways.  There aren't a gajillion characters (yet) and that is actually a good thing when you are just starting out because if there's one common thing that is always super confusing about moba-style games it is trying to remember what the hell each of the 100+ heroes do.  At least in a fighting game like Smash Ultimate or whatever, it's 1v1, so you get a chance to just rely on fundamentals while trying to feel out what the capabilities of the other character are even if you're not familiar with that specific matchup.  In a 5v5 team game where it tends to be important to understand specific game-changing abilities -- or at the very least general roles -- that can get to be a nightmare, IMO.  Pokémon leverages existing IP that a ton of people are already familiar with, which somewhat helps, but also the fact that they're animal-like creatures instead of all being humanoid also really helps to distinguish them visually a lot more.  Even if you aren't familiar with these specific pokémon, it's extremely easy to see that Crustle is a tank -- literally just looks like a huge cube-shaped stone walking around.  I do think that the pre-match loading screen for these types of games should probably list out the role of each character (as it already does for character selection) so that you can at-a-glance understand the opposing team's composition.  Accessibility is important...

Pharaoh

I'm done with Pharaoh!  I didn't actually finish all the missions -- only up to the end of the "Ramses II" campaign.  There are 7 missions after that, but a good number of them seem to center around and/or require dealing with a bunch of combat stuff, and the combat in Pharaoh (especially the naval combat) is kind of just a pain in the butt to deal with.  So I'm calling it quits here.  Overall I stand by my previous opinion that I appreciated and enjoyed Caesar III more, but it was of course an interesting challenge designing a new style of city block with the differing constraints.  Overall the maps in Cleopatra seemed to lack a bit of diversity.  I guess a lot of this has to do with the fact that for the first half of the game (which is all I played) you're building royal tombs, all in the same bedrock mountain range.  That's sort of a nice thematic touch to see the older tombs that you've previously built, but it does make things less interesting, especially since that particular map has an annoying river passing through it with only one or two small locations on the shore to construct a dock (not ideal).  Eh, oh well.

Next will be my chance to try out Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, but probably not for some time.  I'll probably be busy playing Median XL anyways.

Things are okay, but I guess in general I always tend to write that, so maybe that's more of a formality than an actual legitimate statement.  There's been some good and a little bit of not as good, but overall most things have been good.

Day-to-day Stuff, October Prep

As is the case with many people, I spend a perhaps unreasonable amount of time day-to-day wondering whether I've done enough and what else I should be doing [insert rant about self-worth being unhealthily tied to productivity].  Every once in a while, though, there comes a time when I stop worrying about that because I've so obviously done enough for the day/week.  Of course, my goal isn't really to reach that point consistently (that would mean I'm overworking myself by far), but sometimes that's just how it goes.  Yesterday after dealing with retirement savings stuff, taking out the trash, putting together some stuff for Chickies, finishing cleaning the bathroom/toilet (probably the most annoying household chore...), and probably some other stuff too, I definitely got to that point.

At this time last week I think I was probably fairly concerned about getting enough done to be ready for October (and really, what I mean by "October" is "Ludum Dare weekend" which starts on Oct 1), but I'm pretty comfortably ahead of pace on all that.  I've already written my first 4 Christmas/Inktober letters, plus one out of the two early October bday letters, I finished my Monthlies pixel art album cover, I finished all the Rhythm Quest stuff I needed to do, mailed out my Vote Forward letters, put out another chiptune megamix, polished up a song for a music commission, updated some minor website stuff, and I'm even making decent progress towards the Far Side of the Moon revamp.

The only things that really remain are Far Side of the Moon stuff, probably one more music commission song, and then doing pre-Ludum Dare coding stuff, building more and more into my game template and framework code.

Room (?) Stuff

I have a sort of new long-term goal to look toward someday, so that's somewhat exciting.  A little birdie mentioned to me the other day how it felt a bit sad that so many things in my room were going away, and I certainly share that sentiment.  But I now have a hope in the future that both they and myself will both be pleased at what my space will look like someday.

Rhythm Quest

I sent out an closed alpha test build for my indie game, Rhythm Quest, so people have been giving me some feedback on that -- ...which I have actively proceeded to avoid reading because I now know better than to plug myself directly into these sorts of feedback channels.  It feels good to have reached this sort-of-milestone and to know that my game is at least functioning (yay) and seems to be enjoyable in some form (yay).

On the other hand I feel a pretty large dip in my motivation to work on it at the moment because "man, I already put a bunch of work into 'finishing' this part".  Well, more importantly, there's a lot of other stuff that has been more pressing, so I've just decided to shelve Rhythm Quest for now, it seems like the right thing to do.  Might as well wait until the feedback finishes coming in anyways -- and until I'm done with Ludum Dare... -- and then I can hop back onto it.  I'm a little uneasy at stepping away from the project, but I'll just have to trust in the process for now.

Chickies

Chickies are doing very well, though 小黑 is being very grumpy/broody today and yesterday.  As with everything else in my life (always...) I have been continuing to steadily improve their little corner over time -- most recently, making some additional accommodations to help make things easier in case I need to leave the house for an extended period of time.

Space Alert

I haven't been playing a ton recently but I guess my next goal is going to be trying to tackle a double-actions campaign with mixed white/yellow threats.  There's actually a bunch of different campaign achievements for me to chase after, so I'll probably be running those for a while.  I tried one the other day and got owned -- I ended the first mission with like 4 damage on both red+blue due to not planning for one point of damage on white, and then died on the second mission thanks to somehow not realizing that a malfunction had happened in red instead of white.  Eh, better luck next time.

In other related-news, I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of "Escape: The Curse of the Temple", another realtime board game that I enjoyed a lot.  This one has a bit of a different vibe than Space Alert, and I don't foresee myself going deep on it, but I'm excited to play it again as it was quite a fun time from what I remember.

ALLTPR

I feel like I've been doing fairly well, and getting pretty confident with running these open 7/7 seeds.  Check out this nifty graph I made of my times going down as I improve:

Pharaoh

Finished another mission in Pharaoh the other day, which proved to be unexpectedly difficult for whatever reason (maybe I'm just rusty?).  Somehow I was having a ton of trouble earning enough trade income to sustain my city....perhaps I was trying to export and import too many things at once?  The ships can only load a certain amount of cargo, so it's important that you don't waste those "slots" on low-profit items.  On my third playthrough of the mission I tried sticking to only one or two main exports and that seemed to work a lot better.

Median XL

I have just been =itching= to get into Median XL (the best Diablo 2 mod) again, but I know that's a pretty bad idea to do right now.  I'm telling myself I'll hold out until after Ludum Dare and then pull the trigger on that.

 

MBTI Stuff

I found another channel of funny MBTI parodies and skits (https://www.youtube.com/c/dearkristin).  I always find these pretty amusing, though they can admittedly be a bit hit-or-miss.  Every once in a while, though, one of these videos hits all the right marks and is a total hoot.  I'm a fan of how this person in particular portrays the ENFPs.  So relatable (sigh....)