Oh, Cave. “Peaceful Death,” indeed.

Dear Cave:  Why must this game be so awesome and so painful at the same time.

I’ve been using the red ship (the fast one, I think?) and what the game calls the “expert” shot type, which gives a boost to both spread and focused shots but cannot carry as many bombs.  This is fine by me, since I dislike bombing to a fault and often die with unused bombs in Touhou games.  I see overabundant bombing as taking the easy way out, and think that resorting to bombing too easily will hamper my ability to learn how to deal with a situation the normal way.  So even though my reluctance to bomb means that I’ll probably game over more quickly, I feel that in the long run I’ll learn faster.  Still, this game is hard as nails and I’m already seeing my hesitation with the bomb button start to melt away.  I’m starting to get used to the concept of hypers and it’s awesome to be able to wield that much firepower for a surprisingly long time if you don’t die or bomb prematurely.

I’ll probably still focus more on SA for now, but this game is actually quite refreshing to me because Touhou carries a fair amount of mental baggage at this point.  It’s nice to just go “WAAAHH BULLETS DODGE DODGE RAH” again.

Hey, why waste it.

I used to play RO rabidly.  It’s eaten a depressingly large chunk of my life, and I have a depressingly encyclopedic knowledge about it.  But anyway, RO is where the Unlimited Fail Works idea came from (the poem rather than this blog), so I need to explain a bit of backstory for it.

The group of friends that I play RO with have long had this thing about MVP hunting.  We comment on how they’re always ridiculously hard to find if you’re actually hunting them, but tend to jump you on the spot if you’re just wandering around on some newbie character that cannot take them on.

Anyway, at one point when we were hunting for Fallen Bishop Hibram, we simply could not find him so we started shouting out loud about how noobish and lost we were, and how horrible it would be if he showed up.  And of course, within two teleports I spot him.

Amusingly enough, this worked pretty often on subsequent runs, and we joked that we should put together a set of these lines using the Unlimited Blade Works format.  I was bored, so I toyed with the idea now and then until I had an RO-oriented version of the poem thought through in my head.  I was originally going to put it down as a forum sig or something, but seeing as how that server’s shut down and that I’m not likely to play RO again (hopefully), I’ll just write it out here.

 

I am a noob at my char.
Frail is my body, and thin is my blood.

I have lagged out over a thousand times.

Known to grind.
But known to death.

Have withstood pain to hunt many items.
Yet, these hands have never found anything.

So, as I pray, Unlimited Fail Works. 

Too much L4D?

Random thought: Coffee = pain pills.  It helps, but only for a while… unless you’re playing Max Payne.

Eh.

I’m on the last two weeks of my co-op work term and I’ve been kind of gloomy as a result.  It’s not that I’m getting fired or anything but I can’t help but feel like I’m slowly floating my way towards the headsman.  It’s been a nice place and a nice experience, though I’m still not sure if I want to actually make a career there.  But then I wonder if I’ll ever look at something and decide something for certain.  I generally dislike burning bridges.

Up to the end of Stage 4 in SA so far.  After some practice with Stage 3 the other day, I just picked it up today and took a crack at it to see how far I would get.  Ended raking in my share of stupid deaths in the first three stages, so I’m actually pretty surprised I made it through all of stage 4, but then Stage 4 was never really that intimidating at lower difficulties.  It finally started to seem scary at Lunatic but I think I can handle it with some practice.

So far I can’t decide is SA is easier or harder than my previous serious Lunatic running in Imperishable Night.  I tend to gauge difficulty by “life theatening” patterns  - that is, patterns that I am likely to die or bomb in even though I know what’s coming.  Let me explain.

I class bullet pattern difficulty into several categories:

1. Total pushover.  It would take a brain lapse, involuntary muscle twitch, broken gamepad, or poorly timed pop-up MSN message to take a hit during this pattern.
2. No problem.  I have the hang of this pattern and know how to deal with it.  Barring a misexecution of a given strategy or doing something stupid (which happens depressingly often), this pattern doesn’t really pose a threat unless it’s a bad day.
3. Tricky.  I know what I’m doing with this pattern but because there’s very little margin for error, I have a fair chance of taking a hit.
4. Life-threatening.  This pattern is freaking hard and I will almost certainly die or have to bomb.  Definitely need to get better overall, or at least put in more practice to push this down into the easier difficulty levels.
5. Overwhelming.  Too many bullets, too many grids to track, too fast, too tight, etc etc.  Just can’t handle this at all and will possibly have to die/bomb repeatedly before it’s over.
6. Screw you, Cave.

And then there are all the miscellaneous patterns that I haven’t wrapped my head around yet and would eventually put into one of the above categories once I have some idea of what to do in it.

Anyway.  While IN’s first three stages are generally easier than SA’s, the number of scoring tricks that are available in IN ramp up the difficulty considerably until it’s hard to tell which one is harder, especially since each game’s style is so different.  Right now I’m finding them roughly even, though I haven’t really practiced the scoring tricks in SA while I used to spend a lot of time on the IN tricks, so that opinion may change soon.  

To me, for the first three stages, I remember  maybe 4-5 patterns that are in the Tricky/Life-threatening class in IN, if you don’t include Last Words and apply scoring tactics to all cards.  Right now SA has about the 3-4, though patterns seem to be going down in difficulty much more quickly as I’m not trying anything score-oriented just yet.

I should spend more time playing shooters but it’s tiring to do that after working all day.

All right, let’s do this.

Too many shooters out there, and ZUN seems to pump out games faster than I can clear them, which is really sad.  

So I’m finally gonna  go for that SA Luna 1cc (1cc = 1 credit clear – the equivalent of finishing an arcade game on one quarter) .  I’ll worry about score runs later for when I actually have some more Luna clears under my belt.  Maybe I’ll clear the rest of the Windows games and then pick the one that I like most, and then try to score run that.  I’ve been mentally biting off way more than I can chew anyway.

COD4 complete

Finally managed to clear the bonus plane mission in Call of Duty 4 on the highest difficulty.  I kind of gimped it by tossing a flashbang and running past a group of people to make the timer, but I suppose a clear is a clear (not really – I might go back and try to do a cleaner job of it later).  So that completes my jaunt through the single-player campaign.

I’m honestly surprised at how much I like this game.  I’ve generally hated “realistic/tactical” FPSes ever since CS left a very bad taste in my mouth all those years ago, but this game really is something else.  I suppose it’s like Freespace 2 in that it takes very familiar elements from the other games of the same genre and deliberately dropped everything boring while keeping everything good.  Now that’s not an easy feat in itself, but what really set both CoD4 and FS2 from the pack was the excellent mission design.  It wasn’t just “go from A to B and shoot everything in your way,” it wove so much more into its levels, and the resulting experience was tense, unpredictable and incredibly fun to play again and again, regardless of difficulty level.  I can’t think of very many games that have pulled this off successfully.

I don’t know anyone who plays this game in multiplayer, so I’m probably going to stick to the campaign, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I just picked it up and played it through a few times again even though it’s done.  It’s just that much fun to play.  Plus I’ve been meaning to try out video recording now that I have a computer that can handle it, so maybe I’ll toy with using that on this game sometime, too.

I have a bad history with blogs.

Welcome to my newest attempt at blogging.  I’ve tried keeping blogs on and off over the years, but have never gotten one that I actually updated regularly.   Since my life is honestly rather uneventful, I didn’t get a new blog to change this – I just the WordPress interface more than what I used back at Xanga.

Anyway.  For the sake of continuity, my old blog was here: http://akuun.xanga.com/  And I’m not likely to update that again.

I generally dislike talking about my personal life, but this blog will probably be put to use with random thoughts and for commenting on whatever games that I happen to be playing.

Aand… that’s that for now.