Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
And now for content that's not endlessly arguing over politics:I am starting to get the hang of more serious short-charging of shinesparks in Super Metroid.
I savestated at a convenient sequence of rooms in Super Metroid Arcade. Both of them require short charges to get across, and I was previously able to do a slightly-shorter charge but then I figured out a rhythm to get a "real" two-tap short charge, albeit with 5 taps. So I went and chatted with some people at a Super Metroid discord and they helped me figure out that I only needed two taps for that.
Now I can semi-reliably do two-tap shinesparks.
I think Ghost 1.0 is a metroidvania that takes after Maze of Galious directly. It's from the same dev as Unepic, which is also this. The reason this is noteworthy is because Maze of Galious is one of the more obscure old metroidvanias; most metroidvanias take after any of the seven metroidvania-style Castlevania games and/or the Metroid games, as the name implies. Maze of Galious became more famous thanks to La-Mulana being very strongly based on it, but you don't often get a game that goes for that style but doesn't take direct influence from La-Mulana.
I don't know much about Forgotten Anne.
I bought ES4 Oblivion for a friend almost eight years ago, and I'm finally picking it up for myself now. Couldn't decide between Oblivion and Morrowind but both are currently super cheap.
TL;DW
1. Low percent speedruns prioritize lowering percent over lowering playtime, so they can allow for absurd situations.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has a low% speedrun record that takes an absurd amount of time.
3. It involves a glitch that takes an absurd amount of time to execute.
This video is not a speedrun of commentary, though. On the contrary, it takes its sweet time for the introductory material.
This Zelda: Twilight Princess run is just a particularly absurd example among video games. Some of the better-defined examples come from the Metroid series.
For example, in Metroid: Zero Mission, at one point in the game you are tasked with fighting metroids, which normally require five (regular) Missiles to kill. Enemies can also drop ammo refills in Metroid games, and the rooms where the metroids appear have other enemies that can do this. So it's possible to complete the game on Hard difficulty with picking up only a total ammo capacity of four missiles (and no super missiles). One could say it's tedious to have to refill after every four missiles, but it's not only doable (within just an hour and change, not much more than a normal speedrun), it's considered entertaining enough to have been featured on GDQ:
Basically it's watching someone pull off a series of death-defying stunts (and quite possibly dying in the process), and the result was quite well-received.
For games where multiple different low% categories are possible (and actually run by people), it's actually common for them to be more meaningfully split between up between different categories. A game with a robust speedrunning community tends to get this.
Often, glitches may be involved, leading to splitting between no-glitch categories (or no-major-glitches categories) and categories involving glitches.
For example, here's the Super Metroid speedrun leaderboard: https://deertier.com
There are separate categories for low% no major glitches (which basically bottoms out at 14% with multiple possible routes) and low% major glitches. If you click into them, you'll notice that there's far more activity on the NMG low%, while the other one can go down to 0%.
The Twilight Princess low% this video covers obviously involves a very, very significant glitch.
In short, if you have enough people actually speedrunning a game, people tend to sort out what the different speedrun categories ought to be, and it's not necessarily just "get as few items as possible and trigger an end state".
Nowadays I think I'd spend my time better watching/playing video games, watching shows or whatever rather than plain browsing the 'net.
video 1 of 3: MissingNo.'s Glitchy Appearance Explained
video 3 of 3:
incredibly informative. Especially the first and third videos.
But I think some people were having trouble claiming it, because of some weirdness, probably on Humble's end but I dunno. It worked for me when I posted it.
(Warning: may have spoilers for some Castlevania games.)
I have three reactions to this.
3. Ooh, I could incorporate some features from this Legion boss fight into my ideas. Also I noticed that it combined an element from CvHoDiss's Legion (saint) into a modified version of CvSotN's Legion.
2. I'm surprised they managed to make platformer controls work on a mobile device.
1. It seems that something about mobile games lends them to being frequently chock full of many, many details, such as character stats, game features, item types, buffs and tweaks, etc., which are often described in the form of ornate pictures and large amounts of text including a variety of terminology.
I've never really been a fan of complex skill/crafting/etc. type of stuff, in JRPGs or in MMORPGs, and given that they show up on mobile, that's probably a good thing for me since that's one more reason for me to avoid them.
Like, the vanilla series is a Second World War grand strategy game, but modders have turned it into as-crazy-an-alternate-history-as-you-can-come-up-with grand strategy game.
(I'm posting on basis of TVT, tropers still in the game seem to really like them. It feels like entries on various mods are each longer than the entry on base game itself.)
To begin with, there is Kaiserreich. Germany won the First World War, but apart from the almost-inevitable up-to-five-or-six-way second civil war in the US and the infamous Baron von Ungern-Sternberg (read up on the guy and you'll know why alt-history loves him so much), it's not really that crazy.
Then, take The New Order. On the surface, it's another Nazis-won-WWII type of story, with its own take on post-Hitler infighting among top Nazis. Then it turns out the leftovers of Russia is run by warlords. Lesser-known historical figures like Andrei Sakharov or minor Soviet officials, turned by alternate history into so many warlords. Like, two minor NKVD officers here are running a secret fortress, where they keep gathering forces under a plan to start a global nuclear war and wait out the destruction to cleanse the world of Germans. Or Trofim Lysenko ruling Magnitogorsk from his hollowed-out-mountain mad scientist lair where he runs his pet project of breeding Soviet Super-Soldiers. Or fucking serial killer Andrei Chikatilo as a leader of a literally Satan-worshipping black metal warband calling themselves the Gods of Death. Or fucking, fucking Karol "The Pope" Wojtyła as the leader of Polish resistance.
I mean, it's so, so insane it's a work of art.
Then there is Red Flood, where that's not even a metaphor, as the premise of it is that there is no clear winner in the First World War and as a result, France gets overtaken by an insane totalitarian ideology that grew out of radical art circles and whose leader is a guy so bonkers that historically he was literally institutionalized. And yes, you can also play as the fucking Ungern-Sternberg and go to war with Rasputin.
my Evil Detector is going ding ding ding and my Chaos Detector is currently singing Disney showtunes. is this bad y/n
From TVT quotes section. (I'm actually thinking the first quote was delivered by a separate character, but close enough.)
edit: oh, and the shit going on in Red Flood can perhaps best be depicted graphically (linky), since folksies went apeshit with the premise. There is an anarcho-primitivist France and a shieldmaiden taking over the Prussian government.
https://www.gog.com/game/prison_architect - free game
https://www.gog.com/game/prison_architect_cleared_for_transfer - DLC for free too!
This is a thing again lately; it was removed from Steam last year.
Meanwhile, I will continue to buy from them when I see fit, since they continue to deliver DRM-free versions of games, which is why I buy from them.
Meanwhile, with the impending end of Flash, I just realized that some games I played many years ago that I thought were Flash games are actually Java games. It took some finagling to get it to work, but I finally reinstalled Java and, with the help of a non-Chromium-based browser, was able to play Nobby Nuss again. Maybe I'll look for the rest of those games later. All I remember was that they were on freearcade.com .
While looking at it I noticed I claimed Hitman ages ago but never played it (or anything else for that matter), that's a game that's been getting my attention for a while so maybe I should get around to playing it.
I think we all need to get used to every company kowtowing to China now. I would like to rave about how terrible that is, because it is, but otherwise we live like hermits.
LEGO at this point have a giant foot in China. Not just making stuff there, but actively targeting the market. It's easy to forget but when it comes up I feel weird.
And on this note now I feel weird about buying those Overwatch figures.
Free game
I enjoyed this JRPG and I recommend it. The story gets pretty interesting, and the dialogue is entertaining.
https://joshua-keith.itch.io/knight-eternal (DRM-free here)
Also available on Steam.