Emptyeye

Yeah.

So you’ve probably noticed that my posting here has slowed down of late. This is basically my fault, and while I’d love to say that it’s because I’ve been busy–which is, to a degree true–the main truth of the matter is that I’m just lazy.

At some point during 2013, I plan to update the site’s theme and incorporate all of that fancy twitter and Facebook and what-have-you social media stuff people nowadays use. I also, frankly, need to update the theme just because–this one is five years old, and it shows in both the look of the site, plus the fact that my interests now have almost nothing to do with the banner on the top of the site currently.

I do have other projects I’m working on. I’ve been playing around with Gamemaker Studio, beginning to create a game that will, if all goes well, essentially be a remake of Kung Fu for the NES, only playing as Sylvia. It’s interesting learning what GM:S lets you do, and it’s definitely powerful enough for what I’m using it for. You can apparently use it to make 3D games if you know what you’re doing–which I don’t.

And of course, it’s time to get hype for Awesome Games Done Quick 2013. Mrs. Emptyeye and I will be playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii on Wednesday the 9th at about 3:45PM. Make sure to check that out, since it will either be an awesome run or the first real-life example of Divorce Done Quick.

-EE

So there!

It’s been a busy month in the Emptyeye household. The big news is that Mrs. Emptyeye and myself are now cat owners. Meet Mario the Cat. Mario is an 8-month old, 8.5 pound domestic long-haired feline. He is also very cute. He can do something wrong, like scratch at the couch, and then lay down and roll over and basically ask “Can I have some belly rubs because I am super-cute?”, and we (Especially I) pretty much have no choice but to go “Yes, you are super-cute; here, have some belly rubs.”

Other things of note are that I have participated, and will be participating, in a number of video game charity marathons. Recently, the main portion of the Hurricane Sandython finished up, and this upcoming weekend, I’ll be both playing and commentating in the Nintendo All-Stars Marathon. That should be an interesting experience, since I know very little about the games I’m covering during my commentary shift, other than Metroid Other M was pretty controversial for (Allegedly; I haven’t seen the game myself) breaking Samus’s character, and New Super Mario Bros. U is basically NSMBWii on steroids.

Incredibly, I’m not dead. Happy Halloween everyone!

I’m sitting here in my cape, figuring it’s one of the few days of the year it’s socially acceptable. Not that this stops me from wearing it when I stream.

Mainly, I wanted to say that I’m still alive, and let you know some upcoming projects/etc. At the end of November, I’ll be playing in part of a Nintendo All-Stars marathon, playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii. This is to help out The Trevor Project, a charity dedicated to helping out gay, bisexual, and transgendered teenagers.

In January, Mrs. Emptyeye and I will be co-oping NSMBWii for Awesome Games Done Quick 2013. Currently, we’re more-or-less in the middle of the schedule, which is fine with me.

If you want stuff I’ve done for marathons recently past, here‘s my run of Magician I did for the Speedrunning Spooktacular to benefit Lindsey Layne King. Featuring the heartwarming story of Paul, the Magician who hates doing dishes, with a special guest appearance by Marc the Goat’s Milk Addict.

I do eventually plan to post reviews of some of the games I’ve been streaming, both donated and not. Stay tuned for those.

-EE

I have something of a complicated relationship with the 1992 SNES game Lagoon, most of them having little to do with the game itself. For more on those feelings, you’d be well-advised to set aside a day and check out my playthrough of it.

This, though, will focus only on my feelings of Lagoon as a game. And as a game, it’s…interesting. I’ll first point out that the game was first released on the Sharp X68000 with Ys-like gameplay, where you crashed into your enemies to damage them. For whatever reason, the SNES version uses a different system, such that the game almost becomes A Link to the Past with more RPG elements.

The issue with this change, and likely the main reason people know of the game: The range of your resulting attack is ridiculously short. The best part of this is that the initial sword you acquire is named “Short Sword”. “Okay, that’s cool, it’s a short sword, surely the next sword I get will be longer”, the game goads you into thinking. Nope.

Or rather, the graphical representation of said attack is very short–the actual hitbox of the attack is a bit longer, such that you get used to it fairly quickly when attacking horizontally. You also, eventually, acquire magic spells that alleviate the problem of “Why does my attack have no range?” when not fighting bosses.

Speaking of bosses, some of them are quite challenging, due mainly to that short-range attack I wrote about earlier. In particular, the second boss, Natela, is a challenge pretty much no matter what, and another boss, Ella, is known for her 93977993 attack pattern, but is actually pretty easy once you know that pattern. The rest of the bosses, though, have the annoying sword working for them. When attacking vertically, you pretty much have one pixel along the Y axis you can stand on and hit them. Not my idea of fun, especially when the second-to-last boss in the game stopped me from beating him for about 20 years due to my inability to locate the one spot in the room you could stand to damage it.

One of the more amusing things about the game is how gloriously “stereotypical fantasy” it is. You have your Elves (In a forest), your Dwarves (In a desert), and your Hobbits (In a valley), plus another area names for Gnomes. And the thing is..the plot as constructed would work just fine if all of these races were to be changed to simple humans. It’s like the developers said “This is fantasy, so we need fantastic races, even if they make no difference to the actual game!”

In all, though, I enjoyed the game more than I expected to. Owing mainly to those feelings I mentioned earlier, I expected to be thoroughly miserable throughout my time playing it, but except for a few parts of the playthrough mostly unrelated to the game itself, I didn’t find it to be a bad experience. The music in particular is very enjoyable, taking its cue from Ys in terms of giving a more rock feel as opposed to the symphonic scores associated with the genre.

-EE

No, not like this. Like this!

This past Sunday, I finished my on-stream playthrough of EarthBound. I included it as an option in the “What Should I Stream Next?” poll, expecting it to run away with the voting. It really only took the lead in the eleventh hour, though, but I’m glad it did. I last played all the way through the game when I was about 13 years old, and as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t appreciate the charm and humor of the game at that time.

Suffice to say that, while there were times I thought the game liked its toilet humor a little too much, I can see why people love the game as much as they do. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of care went into the game, and parts of it are legitimately pretty terrifying when you stop to think about them (The people trapped in tubes filled with fluid of some kind, asking for help, being a prime example). And of course, the ending is a complete mindscrew, which was only accented by my choice of player name.

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, it was obvious that a lot of care was put into the game. Most games have a special final dungeon theme, and a final battle theme, etc. Not a lot of games continually give you new themes right up to that point, though, which Earthbound does. There are very few repeat themes in the game, and for that matter, there’s a sound effect that you’re very unlikely to hear, that the developers went to the trouble of including anyway. After you beat the game and take Paula back to Twoson, go into Deep Darkness and ride the bicycle in the swamp. This is the only time you’ll hear that splashing. Amazing stuff.

Which is not to say that it’s a perfect game, the way some of its more devoted fans would have you believe. Besides the “Not-Quite-Always-Easy-Button” issue I mentioned in the last post, the game helpfully provides you a recap of where the Your Sanctuary locations are near the end of the game. Why do I consider this a flaw? Because I feel like the game has to provide you this recap, because the main story narrative, despite the Sound Stone and the Your Sanctuaries being ostensibly the main quest of the game, lets you skip up to half of them with no problem, forcing you to go back at this late juncture. Very bizarre.

In all, I’m glad I played through it again. I don’t know that I’ll make it a frequent thing, but I have a much better appreciation for the game now, despite some of its minor flaws. The cartridge is very expensive, going for lots of money on EBay, but there are, of course, other methods of playing it. Which you should.

-EE

Okay, that was a little bit dramatic.

I know I haven’t updated in quite awhile. Let’s see if we can rectify that.

Since moving into the new condo, and finally (more or less) finishing moving in, I’ve been trying to do three streams a week. The Tuesday night streams, at present, are trying to knock off the last few seconds before submitting a Golgo-13: Top Secret Episode run to SDA. Thursday nights tend to be practicing New Super Mario Bros. Wii, since I’ll be playing it for Awesome Games Done Quick 2013. I’m still about 10 minutes slower than I really want to be, although that would put me at not only marathon-ready status, but very close to, if not better than, the current SDA run.

The really interesting game that I’m streaming is the game I’m streaming during the weekends–the (In the US) cult-classic game EarthBound. This was the winner of the “What game should I stream?” poll that I ended, it turns out, a bit prematurely (I really should have looked at the Spree River map here before declaring myself done with Golgo-13; avoiding that ambush is why I continue working on getting the time even better). So far, I’m roughly halfway through the game.

One of the things about EarthBound that I didn’t appreciate as a teenager was the humor, the fourth-wall breaking, and just the motif of the game. The game take places in the modern-day, and you use weapons like baseball bats and frying pans to fight enemies like annoying revelers and abstract art (Yes, really). Gameplay-wise, the game had some very cool ideas too–if you’re strong enough, you can auto-win some battles, and depending on how you approach enemies on the world map, you can get in a preemptive attack (Or enemies can do the same to you). Earthbound, at least in the US, was one of the first games to have an encounter system that expansive.

One double-edged sword the game had was what I like to call its “Easy Button”. Basically, it’s a context-sensitive button that you push, and the game automatically decides if you were trying to Talk to someone or Check the area around you. A great idea, and one a lot of RPGs use today. The only issue is there’s one specific point where there’s a story trigger you have to “check”, near a person you can talk to…and the game decides that talking takes priority, even if you’re not facing the person the game decides you’re trying to talk to. It’s a minor thing in the big scheme of things, but that one minor issue briefly killed any love I had for the game to that point.

The other thing is that the game itself is sometimes less-than-totally-forthcoming about what to do next. Almost as if the game knows this, there are “hint” stations you can purchase hints from to get more guidance throughout EarthBound. I’m still not sure whether including the hand-holding in this fashion is brilliant commentary on the genre, or just a haphazard way of filling in the gaps in the narrative.

Still, I’m continuing to enjoy it, and will stream it again, probably next Saturday (Sunday is a Connecticon staff meeting). Tuesday, more Golgo.

-EE

So I have a computer I can actually stream from. No more kidnapping my wife’s computer to do so. Hooray! Later on tonight I’ll likely try a stream from this computer and see if it works as well as I hope it does.

Work on Hysterium slowly continues. I have to work out why some stuff isn’t saving exactly the way I want it to. I may have to actually save changes in the items database, now that I think about it.

I haven’t played much Phantasy Star III of late. That’s because I was busy successfully completing the main part of The Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta. You can see the final bosses here and here, and my victory over bonus boss Shinryu here. I eventually want to take out Omega, the other bonus boss in the main game.

And that’s about it, really. Next weekend is Connecticon!

So over the last week, I’ve made some decent progress in the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta. I’m in World 2, with a party of Black Mage/Berserker/Bard/Chemist. While staying power is a bit of an issue, this is actually a pretty solid party. Chemist, by itself, is something of a “You Win The Game” class (A la Thunder God Cid/Orlandu in Final Fantasy Tactics) if you know what you’re doing with it, and the formerly spoony Bard is actually quite powerful as well. The Berserker is, well, the Berserker, and the Black Mage is my primary source of damage dealing. In short, I like the party. I hope to try and make a bit of progress in this sometime this weekend.

I’m still trying for a speedrun of Golgo-13: Top Secret Episode. I’m presently about 30 seconds from a run I want to submit. Theoretically, I could probably submit my 54:14 run and get it accepted, and perhaps I should for my sanity. But if I do that, it would be the second time in a row I would submit a run that I know isn’t the absolute best I can do. On the other hand, I get the feeling people are clamoring for me to start Ninja Gaiden II (360), so….

I’ve even managed to do a bit of work on Hysterium, essentially closing off the world into a tiny, self-contained portion of what I ultimately would like it to be. I also got some (not particularly elegant, but nonetheless functional) treasure chest code working for what is currently the one chest in the game. Hopefully, soon, I’ll have a very short, but still complete (In the sense that there is a quest, and something resembling an ending when the quest is completed), game.

More next week!

-EE

In the end, I proceeded from a faulty train of logic. Forgetting that Maya was actually Layan (And thus Ayn was a hybrid Orakian/Layan), I decided that I wanted to keep the bloodline as Orakian as possible, and elected to marry Sari.

Sari quickly put Ayn in his place, telling him “No more adventuring!”

Wow.

With that, I began the third generation. Ayn and Sari produced a nearly blond-haired offspring, Crys. The story so far: For twenty years after the end of the second generation, Ayn and Sari defended Landen from the cyborgs. But now Siren is back, and he’s pissed. Like “Hurl the Planet Into the Sun” pissed. This mad-scientist-in-a-bad-50s-sci-fi movie plot is made more plausible by the fact that the planet is not a planet at all. And cheesy or not, I wouldn’t like it if the Earth were suddenly hurtled toward the Sun either, so I took up the quest to prevent this catastrophe.

Finding myself back in Landen, I assessed the situation. Wren and Mieu, my faithful cyborg companions, were once again with me, both at Level 39 and with the equipment they had at the end of Ayn’s quest. Crys began at Level 1, with 145HP and 72MP, slightly stronger than Ayn. However, he needed close to 13000XP to reach Level 2, and worse, he no longer had his father’s healing magic. Doh! He did retain his father’s equipment (And possibly even some slightly better equipment–I didn’t remember giving Ayn Laconian Armor, but Crys had a Laconian Chest and Helmet), as well as any items I’d need to gain access to various places.

Plot-wise, I found out that besides the primary Siren threat, Lune was amassing a cyborg army to the west. I still don’t know who this “Lune” character is, other than he is apparently bad news. Armed with this information, it was time to explore the world.

The third generation’s world is different in that I could now access the half of Landen that was closed off to me before. Exploring, I found a deserted, bombed out castle, with no explanation as to how it got that way. Creepy stuff, so close to my homeland. More exploration yielded a cave that would take me to the next continent. This was a long dungeon, and in truth, I didn’t fully explore it. The fact that I lack a reliable method of healing everyone in the party made this a fair challenge, especially once I emerged from the dungeon, looking desperately for a town with no real clue about where to find one. A trek to the east yielded nothing, but finally, near the continent’s center, I came upon a town called Northern Divisia. And yes, there’s a Southern Divisia, but I haven’t gone there yet, electing to save and quit here. Apparently, a pilot awaits me there.

-EE

In the previous chapter, I noted that Lyle revealed he could change into a dragon and then he died (This grammar, by the way, is not much worse than what the game actually said.). I feel like this should somehow have had more time spent on it, since it was a pretty important plot point from the first generation and all. This was also the first time I really regretted the relative linearity of the game. Lyle, before he died, begged me not to tell Rhys of this revelation–but it’s not like the game left me much choice other than to keep it a secret, since I was trapped on the island Techna was located on. The only way to go was forward.

Doing that involved going through the castle to Sattelite (Despite what I may have written earlier, this is how the game actually spells the place I’m looking for)–a place that, despite the tales, was very much not peaceful. The totality of the dungeon was actually quite long. First, I had the passage to Sattelite proper. Near the end, I was told that the Power Topaz proved my worthiness, and to continue on to learn the truth about my world.

Which, as it turned out, wasn’t a “world” at all, but a giant spaceship! I’ll admit, I found this pretty cool. Sattelite, or Azura, was a similar ship. Once I got there, though, there was still Sattelite itself to traverse, plus a second dungeon beneath it. This wasn’t particularly difficult, thanks to my being ludicrously overleveled. Still, the sheer length of a dungeon with no way to recover fully did make me a bit nervous–and the multiple passages, only one of which was correct, didn’t help. This was actually the first time I didn’t make a complete map of every path, because it was that confusing. Nonetheless, I eventually found Siren, a pissed off cyborg who was aligned with Orakio before being forced onto Sattelite by Laya. And he was the toughest challenge to date, reducing my party’s damage to under 50 per attack (When I had been doing several hundred per attack on average). Fortunately, Wren played the hero, doing as much damage as he always did (About 130 per attack) thanks to his Pulse Cannon. Siren was soon defeated, and thus ended Generation Two.

When I got Sari into the party, I had considered the fact that I may be near the end of this generation, and wondered how they were going to tie the marriage part into the plot. As it turned out, they didn’t really try. I was told that “Two women express interest in marrying Ayn”. And wouldn’t you know it, it was the two human women in my party that wanted Ayn’s hand in marriage! Here, I realized that the developers probably came up with the “Three Generations!” concept early on, and didn’t bother to try to make the transitions flow cohesively at all. Really, there was only a slight reason for Thea, Lyle’s daughter, to want to marry Ayn (In true old-school RPG style, saving someone from a dungeon means they must fall in love with you. See: The original Dragon Warrior/Quest). And there was, frankly, no reason at all for Sari (Lena’s daughter whom, you’ll recall, tried to kill me in combat before joining my party) to want to do so.

Still, I had to make a choice to get on with the final third of the game. Who did I choose?

…find out next time.

-EE