Hey everyone. Hope the weekend has been kind to you all. This week I chugged along with my playthrough of the Persona 3 remake, I am in the final month if the game. I am still having a great time with it but the dungeon crawling has become very tedious. Hope everybody has a good week ahead!
I’m not good enough to complete Disco Elysium! I will hand in my bearsite membership card.
I used one of the presets this time (fourth attempt or so) and I’m now in a situation where I need to ESTABLISH AUTHORITY over the big guy in the Whirling but I have like -5 Authority from various Mazovian Economics related thoughts. I’m so good at this
I don’t think there’s any way to soft lock yourself outside the situations I believe were fixed where you can have nowhere to sleep in the first day or two. There’s probably an alternative to that situation, or failure just lets you move forward anyway and you do something that makes you look like a goofball.
I now realise what my real roadblock is, which is that I don’t want to get judged by Kim.
<- Me when I get scolded for fumbling the Joyce Messier interview
You’re still good, there’s only a single check that’s mandatory in the game and that’s not it (and the “mandatory” one just lets you keep rerolling by doing side content until you get it, more or less).
put fallout new vegas on a new computer, it runs quite nice from the various optimizations even though the machine can’t render it as pretty as ive gotten it on other computers.
one new mod i installed kinda rules, its this collection of ‘cowboy’ guns and includes, unbelievably, muzzle loaders (animated!). most importantly though it has a sharp’s rifle, the premier John Brown larp weapon. shooting slavers has never been so fun, or inefficient
Got Windblown on the Steam summer sale, gameplay loop is very similar to Dead Cells and the art / color palette / music is all a real vibe. They basically made Dead Cells 2 with furries and bisexual lighting.
Be careful with windblown, I’ve already lost three hundred hours of my life to it :o
Farting around with classic ultima online and universal century gundam online (which is like uo but with gundams)
universal century gundam online (which is like uo but with gundams)
my ears perk up and rotate forward
private server?
It’s totally dead but it’s called ucgohost https://wiki.ucgohost.com/index.php/Main_Page but if you want to play and fight npc mobile suits you can!
oh hell yeah! definitely gonna check that out when i get home
DM me if you want to ever play when you get situated, I got a character I’m working on a character now. I’m zeon side, or if you want to go eff and attack me.
played through Ultrakill last week and now i’m going back through looking for secrets and getting P ranks and shit
it’s not often a game is so fucking over the top that multiple times i had to stop and walk around after beating a level
killed minos prime
Modded Minecraft (Stoneblock 3)
I’ve been rewatching some Threefold modpack let’s plays and trying to take his advice to always craft/gather more than you need at that moment in time, and it’s working out REALLY well. Yeah, I’ll make 64 pistons at a time—I need them for compacting drawers now, and I’m sure I’ll need them for various machines later. Saves so much time and mental energy in the long run to have batches on hand!
I beat Ocarina of Time for the first time, collecting all Pieces of Heart, Gold Skulltula Tokens, upgrades, and optional key items (…or so I thought—see below the horizontal rule)!
gameplay diary
Armed to the teeth, I headed into Ganondorf’s Castle. Lifting the seals was pretty smooth sailing, although it was pretty embarrassing that I needed to reset the ice block puzzle a few times before I figured it out. And damn, even though it’s only for that last section, tossing those giant stone obelisks with the Golden Gauntlets makes you feel pretty badass, and it finally solved the mystery of what the deal is with that thing with the “Grab” prompt in front of the Hyrule Castle Great Fairy Fountain—something I’d been wondering since mere minutes after becoming Adult Link. Getting that defense upgrade definitely made me feel like I kinda facerolled the tower through Ganondorf’s first phase, but hey—what’s wrong with feeling a bit powerful? And I have a feeling I’ll be a lot more appreciative of that upgrade when I do a Master Quest run.
Anyway, Ganondorf! I love that you walk up hearing this faint music growing louder and louder, and then you walk in to find him literally playing his own boss theme—now there’s a villain! It took me like six cycles of light ping pong to realize I needed to shoot him with a Light Arrow after zapping him—what tipped me off was that, after the first however many times, it only took like two back-and-forths to stun him, which I think was the game telling me, “Hey, buddy, that’s just the first part!” I got knocked off a bunch (and more often than that, just missed my jumps from the central platform to the outer rim), but I did manage to finish the first phase without using a potion. I made it through the escape phase without any serious trouble, although I did waste like 30 seconds at the bottom of the boss room wondering why nothing was happening before I realized that Zelda was just tapping her foot in a corner, and that ReDead at the very end is pretty cheeky.
Even though I knew he was gonna transform into Ganon, I still got chills from the transformation sequence, and the crackling blue lighting being reflected on Link’s face was an especially cool cinematic effect. As for the fight itself, I played it very sloppily and probably not with the intended care, thanks to the defense upgrade, but I still needed to use a Blue Potion. My main strategy was just running through his legs when he prepared his attack (perhaps I’ve played too much Elden Ring) and flailing around with the Biggoron Sword, although that got me whacked a whole bunch of times. I had a bear of a time trying to lock back on to his tail when I did that, since I would disengage the Z-targeting to execute the roll more easily. Also, I didn’t realize I could stun him with a Light Arrow to the face until well after I got the Master Sword back (it wasn’t until later that I learned that every weapon besides the Master Sword does 1 damage to Ganon…explains why the second phase took me so long). Definitely not my finest gaming moment, and I’m sure there’s a better way to do it. But in the end, with Zelda’s help, I vanquished him.
I had said that I was a little spoiled for the ending, but I actually didn’t know anything about the seal opening part, I only vaguely knew that there was a ping pong part with Ganondorf, and I knew that there was a tower collapse follower by the Ganon fight, but since they use the Deku Stick glitch in speedruns I didn’t really know anything about either fight.
I also didn’t know anything about the ending sequence! I teared up when Zelda played her lullaby and on that ending screen…really brought things full circle. And it was fun to see everyone partying on Lon Long Ranch and the sages looking on from atop Death Mountain.
This was a wonderful journey, and I’m so glad to have finally played and beaten Ocarina of Time. Even though I had no personal nostalgia for it, I still had tons of fun—it absolutely holds up. I can only imagine how mind-boggling of a game this would have been playing this back in 1998! Now that I’ve beaten it and don’t have to worry about spoilers, I’m gonna have fun reading through all the contemporary coverage of the game after its release—both the professional reviews/features and the fan letters. I plan to play Majora’s Mask next, but I’m still contemplating whether to take a brief break from Zelda to play something else from a bit so I don’t get too burnt out on it, especially since it’ll be in the same engine.
I’m definitely excited to play Majora’s Mask because I’ve heard it’s got a unique flavor and I know very little about it—I know there’s masks that give you powers/let you transform, Tingle shows up (based that off of the stage in Super Smash Bros. Melee), there’s some sort of time limit system with the Moon, and I know it’s darker in tone. But genuinely, that’s about it! After a bit of research, even though I played OoT via Ship of Harkinian, I think I’ll play MM via the Recomp because apparently there are some graphical issues with 2Ship2Harkinian. The reality is that I barely enabled any of the tweaks available because I wanted a close-to-vanilla experience, so hopefully I won’t be missing much on that front.
Big thanks to @ChaosMaterialist@hexbear.net (for being my patient guide and interlocutor for my playthrough) and @Demifriend@hexbear.net (for giving me the last few hints I needed to get those finicky remaining collectibles, saving me hours of fruitlessly running about Hyrule without robbing me of the fun of discovering things for myself). The experience wouldn’t have been nearly as rewarding and memorable without you! I hope someday I can pay it forward and help out another Ocarina of Time newbie.
…okay, I looked at the end of the Nintendo Player’s Guide and
obscure secrets
Holy crap, you can summon fairies at the Gossip Stones using the ocarina? And there are Big Fairies that restore health AND MP?? Even after scouring Hyrule, it seems like I still have a lot to learn!
Okay, maybe not so obscure, but reading through the Versus Books guide, I realized I actually did miss a key item: Nayru’s Love. Oops! I fought Ganon again with it just to give it a try, and damn, it really trivializes it. It lasts so long that you can easily use it for the whole fight.
Also, looking through the September 1998 issue of Nintendo Power, apparently they were still planning to include the Beam Attack from the 2D games pretty late in the game’s development:
Since I got terrible luck on my playthrough, I decided to dig into the code for Dampé’s Heart-Pounding Gravedigging Tour; looking at the OoT decomp, we can see the five possible rewards:
s32 rewardParams[] = { ITEM00_RUPEE_GREEN, ITEM00_RUPEE_BLUE, ITEM00_RUPEE_RED, ITEM00_RUPEE_PURPLE, ITEM00_HEART_PIECE, };and the logic which determines what reward you get, which I’ve annotated with explanations of how it works.
Reward code
s32 EnTk_ChooseReward(EnTk* this) { f32 luck; s32 reward; luck = Rand_ZeroOne(); // 40% chance of Green Rupee // 30% chance of Blue Rupee // 20% chance of Red Rupee // 10% chance of Purple Rupee/Piece of Heart if (luck < 0.4f) { reward = 0; } else if (luck < 0.7) { reward = 1; } else if (luck < 0.9) { reward = 2; } else { reward = 3; } // This code looks at how many times you've already received a particular reward. If it's below // a certain threshold, you just get the expected reward and increment the counter. // But if it's reached the threshold, the reward is chosen by the next section of code. // Thresholds: // Green Rupee: 8x // Blue Rupee: 4x // Red Rupee: 2x // Purple Rupee/Piece of Heart: 1x switch (reward) { case 0: if (this->rewardCount[0] < 8) { this->rewardCount[0] += 1; return reward; } break; case 1: if (this->rewardCount[1] < 4) { this->rewardCount[1] += 1; return reward; } break; case 2: if (this->rewardCount[2] < 2) { this->rewardCount[2] += 1; return reward; } break; case 3: if (this->rewardCount[3] < 1) { this->rewardCount[3] += 1; return reward; } break; } // You can think of this code like a champagne glass tower cascade, where the higher (in this case, lower value) // glasses must fill up before the champagne can flow to the next layer. It checks each of the above // rewards in ascending order of value. If the above-mentioned threshold for an item has already been met, // it skips to the next item. If the threshold hasn't been met, it increments the count and grants that reward. // This has two effects: // 1. You are guaranteed to get the purple rupee (or Piece of Heart, the first time) // by the (8 + 4 + 2 + 1) = 15th try. // 2a. It actually punishes "early" good luck—e.g., if you roll a random number that would grant you a Red Rupee // three times in a row, you'll end up with a Green Rupee the third time thanks to that waterfall design. // So in the case where you hit the mercy rule, you will always have received exactly 8 Green Rupees, // 4 Blue Rupees, and 2 Red Rupees before getting the top reward. // 2b. More generally, the reward counters are only reset after you've collected 15 rewards—so even if you get // the top reward on the first roll, you'd need to get the aforementioned collection of 14 Rupees before // you could possibly get it again. if (this->rewardCount[0] < 8) { this->rewardCount[0] += 1; reward = 0; } else if (this->rewardCount[1] < 4) { this->rewardCount[1] += 1; reward = 1; } else if (this->rewardCount[2] < 2) { this->rewardCount[2] += 1; reward = 2; } else if (this->rewardCount[3] < 1) { this->rewardCount[3] += 1; reward = 3; } else { reward = 0; this->rewardCount[0] = 1; this->rewardCount[1] = 0; this->rewardCount[2] = 0; this->rewardCount[3] = 0; } return reward; }It also means that the net earnings for 15 attempts will always be exactly the same:
(1(8) + 5(4) + 20(2)) - 10(15)
= 68 - 150
= -82 Rupees for the Piece of Heart case, or -32 Rupees for the Purple Rupee case.It does seem a little mean to have it set up that way, but if you had the same odds with replacement, you’d have a positive expected value on each attempt, which would now be independent:
1(0.4) + 5(0.3) + 20(0.2) + 50(0.1) - 10
= 10.9 - 10
= +0.9 Rupees/digSo I guess they just wanted to ensure that it tended towards being a money sink.
Incidentally, does anyone who’s good with probability know how you’d model the actual expected value given the constraints? It’s sort of like a really janky version of drawing without replacement—e.g., once you draw your 8th Green Rupee, if you haven’t drawn four Blue Rupees yet, the probability of getting one of those will suddenly jump from .3 to .7, but it doesn’t affect the probability of drawing the a Red Rupee or Purple Rupee/Piece of Heart at all. The easiest thing would be to just run the actual code for a million trials and derive it empirically (which I’ll probably end up doing anyway), but I’m genuinely curious about the theoretical approach, since it’s beyond the bounds of my own probability and statistics knowledge.
Fun fact, if Dampé digs up the Piece of Heart and you leave without collecting it, it’s gone forever. They “fixed” this in OoT3D by making it so the Piece of Heart stays in the reward pool even after it’s been dug up, meaning you can keep collecting it over and over again if you want. There’s a joke speedrun called Dampé’s Valentine where they get all 20 hearts just from that Piece of Heart.
They “fixed” this in OoT3D by making it so the Piece of Heart stays in the reward pool even after it’s been dug up
Lmao, talk about phoning it in. I guess it’s better than not fixing it at all, though—maybe one of those situations where it’s like, “This might break even worse if we mess with it too much, so let’s just comment out the line that marks it as collected and call it a day.” I’ll probably get around to playing OoT3D at some point just to see what they changed; from what I remember hearing, besides the obvious graphical makeover, it’s mostly just small quality-of-life fixes rather than major changes?
There’s a joke speedrun called Dampé’s Valentine where they get all 20 hearts just from that Piece of Heart.
Love me some joke speedruns. I just learned about a regular OoT speedrun today where you use the Reverse Bottle Adventure glitch to obtain the maximum number of Small Keys possible (37 keys in the Water Temple, apparently). Oh, and related: I was surprised that in the April 1999 Issue #119 of Nintendo Power they showcased a major glitch (as well as a minor exploit that is coincidentally similar to the one OoT3D introduced):
Image description
A cropped scan taken from the ‘Classified Information’ section of the April 1999 Issue #119 of Nintendo Power. It the Ocarina of Time logo at the top and is mostly text, with three screenshots illustrating each trick (described below after each containing section)
Hyrulean Hyrulean
Hyrule is home to many things, and codes aren’t one of them. Even so, Link has a few tricks up his sleeves, tunic or wherever else a Hero of Time could hide an extra Skulltula, rupee or bottle. If your inventory has got you down, get a boost from one of these item-amassing tricks.
100-plus Skulltulas
Play the Song of Storms at the tree in front of Hyrule Castle (near Malon) to enter the lair of a Skulltula. Retrieve its token with your boomerang, but before catching it, backflip onto the warp platform. If you return to the hole, the spider will still be there, but you’ll get credit for its token.
[A screenshot of Young Link facing a wall with a Gold Skulltula, his back close to a warp platform.]
21 Bottles
To exceed the supposed four-bottle limit, swing a bottle at a fish, but before you capture it, pause the game, then replace your bottle with a new CButton item. Note: The item you chose will be gone, but another bottle will have taken its place.
[A screenshot of Link’s inventory after multiple glitches have been performed. In the 3 x 3 section of items in the upper left, instead of the usual loadout (including such items as the Deku Stick, the Boomerang, and Bombs), it is filled with nine bottles containing fish.]
Raking in the Rupees
A bug captured in a bottle will become many bugs when you release it. To earn rupees, free a bottled bug, catch the numerous bugs that flee, then sell the mites to the bug buyer in the Market or in Kakariko Village. Keep one bug to bring back whenever you need to tap into this unlimited source of money.
[A screenshot of Young Link in Hyrule Castle Town showing the contents of his bottle to the Buyer NPC, with the text box showing the dialogue “Oh, it’s a cute little Bug! I’ll buy it for 50 Rupees! All sales final, OK?”]
They also printed instructions for the Safari Zone glitch in February 1999, which is barely a step removed from the legendary old man glitch that allows you to encounter glitch Pokémon like Missingno, so they’re clearly more willing to publicize glitches in their own games than I expected!
Completely tangential, but I found this neat video that proposes an interesting theory about the location of the Ice Arrows and Iron Boots being swapped late in development (although information in the comments makes it seem a lot less plausible). Regardless, that video taught me that
spoiler
you can jump over the broke Gerudo Valley bridge with Epona instead of using the Longshot, which I had no idea was possible, and also that you can freeze the Blade Traps. And from a different video, I learned that you can jump over the back walls of Lon Lon Ranch to escape instead of jumping over the gate (and Ingo) which is what I did instinctively.
I’m sure I’ll discover many more little secrets of the game as I continue to learn about it via secondary sources and subsequent playthroughs!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
i kinda want to try it now that it’s cracked. how are you liking it?
are there significant updates to the story beyond the graphics?
Undertale 2 and Bad Company 1 and a bit of Timesplitters 2
Doll’s Nest: https://hexbear.net/comment/7267978
I was supposed to finish Scorn but I’m habitually getting sidetracked on stuff now. Assuming another sidetrack doesn’t happen, I’m gunna’ try to 100% Mario Kart World and also replay Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (I think last time I played it was on PS2, this time will be Wii).
I downloaded Escape from Duckov on my Mac mini. Gonna give it a whirl.
Played the new Deltarune chapter. Luckily I have a fairly similar appreciation for JRPGs/Touhou/dumb jokes as Toby Fox, so it was a good time. The actual gameplay was better this time as well, kinda impressive what they’re managing to pull off in gamemaker. Also, getting one of the Void Stranger devs as a guest programmer is super cool.
Been watching Evo so I haven’t played much this weekend, but before that the usual Warframe, Deltarune Ch5 and Street Fighter 6. But today I’m bummed out and pissed off because I just logged in Warframe to find out I have been banned from the clan I was in, I asked a player that added me if they could ask in chat and know the reason and the cland just didn’t gave any. I barely interact there and yesterday all I did was help another user counter the bullshit eugenics that were being spread there, later some other player started saying a bunch of conspiracy theory bullshit about how the “jews did 9/11” (this “reveal” by them was gradual, so there was no way of knowing it would go straight to that) and stuff like that was trying to make me believe them and watch some conspiracy theory channel but me not buying it was apparently enough to get me banned there. The fucker also got banned but still.
The fact the clan didn’t have a explicit political leaning yet no usual rules “against politics” made me weary, but this sucks man, there was at least another leftist there that was very vocal and that I saw chatting a lot about all sorts of stuff. Kind of makes me wanna create an actual leftist clan, but the amount of resources needed makes this impractical
The resources you need aren’t that bad, I think it’s like 10-15 forma for mandatory rooms and then some invasion materials grinding for research. Plus the hema, I guess, but the less said about that the better.
If you want you can join my completed clan (except for pigments) but it’s just me (and some IRL friends that don’t play anymore).
I see, thanks for the offer comrade, but I think I’ll stop playing till Tennocon in a couple of weeks, this bummed me out quite a bit. I also have yet to talk about this with my friend I’m playing with, so I don’t know what he will do for now. Good thing is that I can dedicate more time to SF6 since I wanted to properly learn fighting games for years now.
currently playing detroit: become human with my friend (I’m playing, he’s watching). It’s the third game on our David Cage binge after heavy rain and beyond two sould and it’s seems to be the best one so far (we’re only half-way through). It actually comes way closer to delivering on the promise of complex branching story lines with meaningful decision making than the previous two. QD definitely came a long way since Heavy Rain, which we found very hard to take seriously
One thing I don’t like is how anti-android people are portrayed. The game clearly decided to circumvented the debate around androids being sentient or not, and just painted the anti-android movement as a bunch of angry racists or religious fanatics. There are even clear parallels to actual historical racism - androids having to stand in the back of the bus and such. It would be nice to see some better arguments besides “they took our jobs” type stuff
besides that, I’ve been playing a lot of EU5 this week. I haven’t played since before the version 1.1 due to all the bugs. I’m playing as Novgorod and it’s been a lot of fun. Current version (1.2.5) is a big improvement, though there is still a ton of UI jank and the mercs are absolutely insane - I haven’t even reached 1600 and many wars in Europe already have WW1 level casualties due to all the mercs everyone’s hiring. Thankfully they’re reducing the number of mercs for the next patch. I think I’ll wait for the next patch and finally try out England
Finished all the new content worth playing in Warframe (I will not play SP Railjack for no reason), just waiting on a few things to finish crafting so I can get the mastery done. I cannot believe they put the new incarnons in the fucking circuit, Rebb why. Put one incarnon token in Descendia and give Cavalero a shop that rotates between half of them a week like Eleanor, please.
Started playing the Devil May Cry series in release order with the HD Collection. This is from the perspective of someone who has played a few character action games (old God of War, Metal Gear Rising) and is only going to play the games once on normal difficulty. Overall: skip 1 and 2, play 3. DMC1 is fine but I’m shocked it was able to spawn a large fanbase. You have to fight 4 of the 5 bosses 3 times each, and the best one by far is Phantom, the first boss. Nero Angelus is fine (but easily cheesed with DT Ignis which kinda ruins it) but Griffon was boring as hell (and mostly got shot to death, which is apparently the thing that makes DMC2 unplayable?) and Nightmare, well…
For anyone unfamiliar, to damage Nightmare you have to damage one of two orbs it reveals when it attacks. Every time you hit an orb X number of times (note: it’s HIT based not DAMAGE based), it upgrades in color (blue->green->red) before breaking, each iteration of which makes the attacks associated with that orb harder to dodge. The hit counter is reset once per fight if you get grappled by it when the lights are off and sent to the shadow realm, but phase changes to the orbs persist across all fights, and there is no way to know which resulted in my getting to the third fight with both of the orbs red and wondering why it’s way harder. In order for it to do the attacks that let you hurt it, you have to hit panels around the room with a combo of hits to turn on the lights, but oops the game’s fixed camera and auto-lock on will make this as difficult as possible.
DMC2 is bad but not much worse than DMC1 imo. It adds a lot more enemy variety and much more varied levels, as well as some new things that’ll appear later in the franchise such as wall-running, a dedicated dodge/style button, hot-swapping between weapons (ranged only here, but still), and multiple playable characters. The story is like 30% less comprehensible, but people only “like” DMC1’s story because of one famous cutscene with a terrible line read, and while Dante is less “quippy” there were only like 6 cutscenes in 1 so I think this is mostly people looking back from 3 onward. Enemies are fine, and about half the bosses are clearly unfinished with broken AI but nothing is close to as bad as Nightmare in DMC1. Lucia’s campaign is generally better than Dante’s because the story is actually kind of explained, and rather interestingly seems to be hated for including underwater levels, which were both more prominent and worse in DMC1.
DMC3 is the first game I’d say is actually worth playing and not just a historical curiosity. This is clearly the game where the over-the-top tone and Dante’s personality are firmly established, with him riding around on an RPG for like 30 seconds after the second level, and the multiple Lady gunkata cutscenes. I’m only about halfway through (just beat Nevan). Something I find rather funny is that the first two major bosses are also victim to the biggest criticism of DMC2, that you can just ignore melee and shoot everything to death. Cerberus, who is a very hard first boss if fought properly imo, can be cheesed by just sitting back and hammering away at with your pistols, and same thing for the Gigapede (while I fought the former properly and took 5 or 6 attempts, I didn’t realize you could ride the Gigapede because the one time I tried I got hit by something). Camera angles are the best in the series so far but not good, and it’s extremely funny that they’ll give you control of like 15 degrees in certain rooms but that’s it. Quick highlight of other major bosses:
- Agni and Rudra are a tedious 2v1 fight because the camera sucks that is imo only possible due to (admittedly well-designed) audio cues.
- Vergil was an interesting fight but he only has one attack that’s trivial to dodge, at least in Trickster, so he’s very, very easy. I only got hit once!
- Leviathan is like a better version of Nightmare imo. Perfectly fine but not good.
- Nevan was just about learning her tells, which are again excellent audio cues. She’s a good fight which is ruined by the fact that once wounded enough she spams the kiss attack, and the first time I got hit I lost almost all my HP while she recovered to full because apparently you can cancel out of it by pressing attack while you’re getting hit or something but IIRC that has never been a thing up to this point.
E:
- Beowulf was just kinda tedious
- Geryon was even more tedious
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
