MOT'S WORDS

think of this as a blog of sorts. i'll talk about whatever's on my mind on this page, so check back often to see what i've been thinking about.

11/4/2024, 2:25 PM

THE COOKIE CLICKER COMPLETIONIST EXPERIENCE

(an exercise in futility)

everyone in 2020 had more than enough time on their hands to pick up some new hobby. some people picked up speedrunning a game, some of my friends started drawing for the first time, and my new thing of choice was Orteil's Cookie Clicker. well.. it technically wasn't a new thing for me, i actually played a ton of Cookie Clicker back in 2014 or so, but it was usually just to pass the time in school. no, things in 2020 were different, now i was playing Cookie Clicker to pass the time at school at home. listen, i don't like idle games. like, at all. they're just an exercise in patience and there's pretty much no gameplay in the slightest. but i've always kind of had a soft spot for Cookie Clicker specifically, probably just because i played it a ton as a kid, but also it just seems to have a lot more of a personality than most other idle games. i follow Orteil on tumblr, and the dude's got a sense of humor i really mesh with. plus, i feel like every idle game after Cookie Clicker was just trying to copy it, and it just don't feel the same man. CC also has a lot of genuinely great artwork and tons of unique ideas that actually give it some iota of Real Gameplay, compared to other games where the whole thing is "buy more things to watch number go up!" plus, CC doesn't fall into the trap of even offering microtransactions, which is nice. maybe i'm just biased, but CC is just about the only idle game i can stomach. so much so that during my brief stint with it in 2020, i thought to myself, "i should really just bite the bullet and go for 100% without cheats someday."

this was the first of many mistakes.

about a year later in late 2021, CC gets a Steam release and i'm instantly all over that. i import my save from the browser version, and suddenly it's the only thing i've played for like a month. i'm shredding through the shadow achievements, i'm racking up the prestiege, i'm... VERY slowly working my way through the farm achievements, everything's going great. and then i stop for a bit. and then i fall off the game for another 6 months. this happens several more times in summer of 2022, winter of 2023, and spring of 2024. this curse just keeps coming back, and it'll never leave me alone.

so here i sit, nearly four years after starting this save file, sitting at 95% of the achievements and 11 shadow achievements for extra garnish, and nothing to show for it. i've gotten the Shiny Wrinkler, i've clicked 7,777 golden cookies, i've gotten the Juicy Queenbeet, i've seen it all. except for the things i haven't.like i said, 95% of achievements, i'm sitting at 596/622 right now and those last thirty or so achievements are gonna be the end of me. but we're not here to talk about those right now. no, instead i want to go over the parts of this whole journey that have made me want to give up, go home and take a cold shower. here's the worst Cookie Clicker achievements, just for you.

1.) A WIZARD IS YOU

(man, what is this, some sort of battle pass?)

i don't like having to wait. i especially don't like having to check back on things every so often while waiting. this achievement drove me nuts because it requires so much of both of those things. A Wizard Is You is achieved by casting 999 spells, and it's simply just misery. at least with Black Cat's Paw (clicking 7,777 golden cookies) there's a sound to notify you that a golden cookie has appeared, and you can use a garden setup to make the golden cookies more frequent. with spells, you have to wait for your mana to recharge, and there's no way of knowing exactly when it's back up to full without just checking on it. and if you wanna be efficient, you have to use Haggler's Charm to get the most out of that mana meter. but that chooses a spell at random to cast for half its cost, with a higher chance of backfiring. and the worst part? all the spells in this game are ass!! there's not a single good one! they all either barely do anything to affect you, or are way too punishing! like, dude, i get a 2% discount on upgrades? what is this, the employee discount at GameStop? this one took me eons to get, and it's only going to get worse from here.

2.) KEEPER OF THE CONSERVATORY

(with infinite time, dedication, and patience, anything is possible!)

i have such mixed feelings on the garden. on one hand, it's a super unique and fun mechanic that lets you give yourself buffs that are (mostly) set and forget when you're just letting it do its thing. on the other hand, when you're going for specific plants (say, trying to get a certain achievement,) it becomes extremely tedious and annoying to wait several hours at a time for ticks to go by, only for your plants to not mutate, wasting all of your time. some of these plants take a comically long time to mature, like the Cronerice or the Duketater. and good lord, even when they are mature, there's a very real possibility you'll not be paying attention, and they wilt away before you can harvest them, wasting all of your time and forcing you to restart the whole process. and of course, there's the dreaded Juicy Queenbeet. this achievement took me well over 3 years to finally get, and it was a grueling experience all the way through.

3.) GASEOUS ASSETS

(dump it)

man, fuck the stock market. i hate the economy. money can go to hell, i think we should go back to a system of trading and bartering. and this achievement required me not only to remember the economy exists, but interact with it too! come on Orteil, why you gotta do me like this? all jokes aside, this is a simple achievement. have your stock market earnings surpass a whole year's worth of CpS, or $31,536,000. but do you realize how much that is? for selling a day's worth of CpS, you get around $100,000, and that's usually when the stocks are sitting somewhere around $120 per stock. with very few exceptions, stock values very rarely ever go any higher than $200. this means that, with the BEST of luck, you're selling a full set of stocks for $200,000, which if you've been keeping track, is 1/15th of what we need. but more realistically, you're gonna be selling stocks for somewhere more around $50,000 for a full set, and that's not even factoring in that you actually have to buy them in the first place, which makes your profits sink down a little. the strategy i employed was to equip the Supreme Intellect dragon perk (yes those are real things that exist in this game about baking cookies) so that the stock market is a lot more chaotic. then, i waited for a stock's value to go down to the single digits, then bought the max amount i could. then i waited for it to go all the way back up, and sold it for a huge profit. but this takes a long ass time, because stock prices only change ever tick (60 seconds) so it can take hours for prices to rise to a sellable amount. it's agony, and one of the most infuriating achievements in the entire game, even if it is a shadow achievement.

11/03/2024, 7:44 AM

SOUNDTRACKS THAT MADE ME PLAY GAMES

(your #1 ticket to getting catfished into playing Michelin Rally Masters for PS1)

i really do think the art of the videogame soundtrack is severely underrated. ever since i was a kid, my dad always told me, "videogame music isn't real music. it doesn't have the same structure, and loops too much!" well, DAD, have you ever played Crazy Taxi? yeah, get back to me when you're done coping with the fact that you said The Offspring, one of your favorite bands, isn't real music. emotional baggage aside, i do love videogame OSTs, and there's even some games that i wouldn't have played otherwise if i hadn't heard their soundtracks first. so today, i wanna go over a couple examples of those. but first, some ground rules.

1. no rhythm games.
   we could talk all day about how amazing the tracklist for each Pop'n Music or Rhythm Heaven is, but in the end i feel like that's just cheating.


2. i have to have actually played the game for it to make it here.
   no Hotline Miami or Dungeons of Dredmor, sorry fellas.


3. it has to be a soundtrack i listened to a ton before playing the game.
   sure, there are certain songs i'd heard before playing the game, like hearing Earthbound's music in Smash, but that wasn't my main motivating factor for playing that game, it was because Earthbound is a masterpiece.

with those rules set in place, i think it's about time we got started with our first case, and probably the most important of em all: Street Fighter III, specifically 3rd Strike. if you know 3S, it's for one of two things, either Evo Moment #37, or its insanely good soundtrack. composed by Hideki Okugawa in collaboration with Canadian rapper Infinite, the whole OST oozes with hip hop funk and flavor, and it was unlike anything i'd ever heard at the time. i'd probably say this was my first introduction to jungle and DnB, which eventually lead to me getting into Electronic, arguably my favorite genre of music now. the first song i'd heard was Killing Moon, Akuma's Theme, and i was addicted to that track for months. before this, i'd always seen Street Fighter as a generic, complicated fighting game about regular ass guys fighting, and i couldn't figure out how to throw a fireball like the computers did. i was a Smash baby, as unfortunate as it is to say, i didn't know what a quarter circle or frame advantage was. hell, i still don't entirely understand that latter one, but that's besides the point. i'd only seen Street Fighter II and maybe a few snippets of SF4 at this point, and they both looked just kinda... boring to me. but after hearing the SF3 soundtrack and seeing what the game looked like, i was almost instantly hooked. everything was so fresh, so snappy, so smooth! there weren't any of the boring guys from SF2, instead there were all these completely original characters, and weird ones at that! i gravitated towards characters like Twelve, Necro and Q, i loved how insanely satisfying it was to even land a single hit, and oh man, the sound effects! Necro saying "Let's get it on!" or "Outta my way!" have been forever grafted onto my brain, and not to mention the legendary Parry sound effect. and hey, parries are in this game! before becoming a staple in pretty much every tough-as-nails indie platformer trying to become the next Pizza Tower, SF3 was doing the parry thing in 1999, and it's killer here. everyone can do it, and having it be mapped to a simple tap forward on the stick means that even if you're not super great at the game (like me) you'll hit an accidental parry every so often, and it feels great every single time. SF3 is by far my favorite fighting game, and i don't think i'd have ever even considered giving it a shot if not for the banger soundtrack.

as most of you know, i really love the Mother series. the first game is my favorite game of all time, despite its issues, and a large part of my love for the series is the soundtracks. Mother 1 and Mother 2 were both almost entirely composed by Hirokazu "Chip" Tanaka, and the guy is a total trailblazer in terms of Chiptune. he worked on a lot of classic NES soundtracks, such as Metroid, Kid Icarus, Dr. Mario, and of course, Mother. but there was another game he composed for on the SNES that also had a strong relation to the Peanuts, and that's Snoopy Concert. on first glance, this game seems like a really strange... thing. it's a first-party developed point and click minigame collection for the Super Famicom made by Nintendo themselves, and it's a licensed Peanuts game, of all things. on top of that, it wasn't released anywhere except Japan, and is like, really polished and good?? i mean, what less would you expect from a first-party Nintendo game, but they did not need to go as hard as they did here. i first found out about Snoopy Concert through its soundtrack, of course, which is SNES remixes of classic Peanuts tunes from the animated specials. you know, Linus and Lucy, Benjamin, Little Birdie, the works. is it a good time to mention i'm a big fan of the Peanuts? because i am. i had this big anthology of the original comics as a kid, and i've watched the animated specials about ten billion times each. i love Schulz' art style, especially the way he animated, it's unrefined and messy, yet soft and cozy all the same. but back to Snoopy Concert, the first song i heard was Theme of Linus, and i almost instantly thought, "wow, this sounds a lot like Earthbound's soundtrack. i wonder what the rest of it is like?" and then went and listened to the rest of the soundtrack. no less than two hours later, i've already downloaded a rom (with no English patch because i was a dumb kid who couldn't figure Lunar IPS out) and am playing Snoopy Concert with a controller. yeah, i was also too stupid as a kid to figure out SNES mouse emulation, so i settled for the dirty way. i said earlier that this game is a minigame collection, but i don't know if that's quite right. you have three stages where you play as Woodstock, and by clicking (or pressing A) you can tell Snoopy where to go, like a point and click adventure game. Charlie Brown's stage is the closest to that kind of game, you go around town, talking to people, seeing what's troubling them, and trying to find items that might solve their issues. it's a little basic and feels mostly like a list of fetch quests you need to do, but i still find it fun and charming all the same. Schroder's stage has you solving a lot more puzzles, and i think this is where the game shines the most. there's tons of charming scenes whenever you put together a solution, and it's full to the brim with creative and challenging puzzles. then there's Linus' stage, which throws out all of the adventure game DNA and turns the game into a tight 2D platformer. now, i know what you're thinking, a platformer that you control with a mouse sounds fucking miserable, and that's what i thought too. but like... it honestly kind of works??? i said you lead Snoopy with Woodstock earlier, but there's actually more to it than that. double clicking makes Snoopy run, and clicking diagonally from Snoopy's position makes him jump. you preserve your speed when you jump, and it feels super satisfing to build up running speed, jump at just the right time, and just barely make a jump. if anyone could make a 2D point and click platformer featuring Snoopy on the Super Famicom, it'd be Nintendo. if you ask me, Snoopy Concert is a hidden gem on the SNES, and the soundtrack is a huge part of that for me. (personal track recommendations are Theme of Peppermint Patty, Rerun's Runaway Stroller, and Lazy Gym)

before we get into the last game i wanna go into depth with, let's do a quick lightning round of smaller examples. i got super hooked on Shin Megami Tensei IV's big boss theme about 3 years before my big SMT revelation, and i'd guess my prior experience with the OSTs is what pushed me to try the games out. Lisa: the Painful was a similar situation, i was addicted to Boy Oh Boy for the longest time and finally decided to bite the bullet and figure out what this game was all about. turns out, it's one of the best RPGs i've ever played in my life, who'da thunk it? MadWorld on Wii was a game i knew about for a long ass time, but only within this year did i finally check it out, and it's because i heard Look Pimpin'! on SaltyBet, and got so into the soundtrack that i burned it to a CD so i could listen to it in my car. i found Knuckle Sandwich by sifting through Nelward's backlog on youtube and listening to Side Street Step and Back Street Beat a million times. i then ended up following the game's development for like three years, only to discover the two songs i loved so much only played in one specific battle each in the whole game. (the entire game is great though, go play Knuckle Sandwich if you haven't yet, it's like a mashup of Earthbound, WarioWare and Australia, my three favorite things) i'm always embarrassed to tell people how i discovered Space Funeral, one of my favorite games of all time, but i'm a brave demon and i think i can handle finally telling the story: i was rewatching Markiplier's playthrough of Five Nights at Fuckboy's, (yes, really) when i heard a cool song using a double bass, one of my favorite instruments. i sifted through a playlist of the soundtrack on youtube, and while the song i was actually looking for was Faster Does It by Kevin Macleod, i saw another song called One-Eighty-One in the playlist with this weird image of a bloody, green face as the thumbnail. fast forward a few hours and i'm downloading Space Funeral onto my shitty 2013 hand-me-down Acer laptop, and trying to find the RPG_RT.exe for the first time in my life. so yes, i discovered Space Funeral, the game that forever changed my outlook on game development and art as a whole through a Markiplier lets play of a FNaF RPG Maker fangame where Springtrap is angry he didn't get invited to an orgy. life is pain, i hate, etc etc. (cool fun fact though, that game does reference Megaman Sprite Game, officially redeeming it in my eyes)

alright, here's the last big one. around 2021, i was starting to get more into DnB and acid jazz because of the aforementioned SF3 thing, and a friend recommended me a song from a PS1 racing game called Ridge Racer Type 4. the song was called Move Me, and it was unlike anything i'd ever heard before. the whole composition was so complex, there were so many layers, it was fast paced and almost magical, i loved it. i knew i had to listen to whatever else this soundtrack held, so i instantly listened to all of it and fell in love. a couple months later, i watched a friend play through the Grand Prix mode, and realized the game was more than just the music. the menus were so striking, it had all these visual effects i didn't even know the PS1 could do, and there was even a story mode?? and the story mode was good and had interesting characters??? i was surprised to say the least, but i didn't really end up dipping my feet into playing the game until just last month. i dunno, realistic racing games always kinda scared me. i'm good at Mario Kart Super Circuit and CTR Nitro Fueled, put me behind the wheel of a stock car and we'll end up in a ditch somewhere. but finally, in October of this year, i got a physical copy of the Japanese version and that finally gave me the push to check this thing out. and like, it's called one of the best PS1 games of all time for a reason. R4 may be intimidating at first, but once you realize that drifting is as simple as lifting off the gas, tapping brake, and then pressing the gas again, it really starts to melt into your hands. i love the look of this game too, it has some of the most beautiful landscapes out of any PS1 game i've ever seen, especially the stages that take place at sundown. there's all these cute references to Namco's old arcade games sprinkled into every corner, from the different racing teams being based on Pac-Man and Mappy, to there being Dig-Dug animations on the electronic signs at the beginning of each race. it really does feel like a labor of love, and the soundtrack is doing a ton of legwork here. and again, the story mode!! nevermind the fact that it's there in the first place, but the story mode is like, actually really good! i remember especially liking the story of the Pac Racing Club captain, Shinji Yazaki, which i experienced while watching that friend i mentioned earlier, but i also quite liked the story of the R.C. Micro Mouse Mappy team captain, Sophie Chevalier, which is the team i played on for my most recent playthrough. i won't spoil anything, but there is more depth to them than just "oh, we have to win this year, do your best!" and i love that. there's also time trials, which i'm a fiend for as always, a custom logo creator which is extremely funky and cool, and my Japanese copy even came with a bonus disc that has a PS1 port of the original arcade Ridge Racer?? which is so cool??? the game isn't very fun to play but like, it's awesome that it's here anyways??? overall, i love R4, and it's part of a genre that i would have never considered even looking at if not for its banger soundtrack.

so yeah, soundtracks are wicked important. i think they can be that push someone needs to finally check out a game they've had their eye on for a while, or even convince someone to check out a series or game they would have never otherwise. still won't ever get me to play a Sonic game and enjoy it, though.

10/28/2024, 3:41 PM

RETRO GAMES ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND WHERE I LIVE

(geez mot, we've all got problems)

i know, before you say it YES, i really am complaining about this. it's been something that's just been driving me nuts lately, and i need to talk about it. without doxxing myself, just know that i live in an area that, while not completely countryside, isn't exactly in the city either. nothing's ever been in reasonable walking distance to my house, but it's probably only a ten minute car drive. specialty stores are a rarity, and that is especially true when it comes to games. you got one option, and it's GameStop. as a former GameStop wageslave, i've got a lot of choice words to say about them, but i'll at least give them this: due to the way their tradein system works, they're the only mainstream retail chain in my area that sells any kind of retro games. but that comes at a cost, it's slim pickin's at GameStop. nevermind the fact that someone has to trade in those old games, GameStop only takes certain retro games to begin with! now, i'm not one of those people who always needs to have the case or the manual or whatever, especially when it comes to Gameboy and DS stuff, as long as the game works i don't mind the condition it's in. but if you do care about that kind of thing, you'll know the horrors of shopping at GameStop for retro games. most of em are missing their cases at this point, especially DS and 3DS, and since the employees don't usually have the hardware to test those older games, 90% of the time it's a gamble on if it'll even work or not.

so, GameStop clearly isn't ideal. what other options are there? i've heard of people all over the country i live in talk about how they've got mom and pop game stores that are full to the brim with old stuff, but i just so happen to live in the exact place where all of those are at least an hour away. one of the only options that's under an hour is (without saying the full name because that'd dox me) VGT, and that's nearly 50 minutes away from my house. VGT's been on my radar since about 2018, and they're pretty good all things considered. their selection is alright, their prices are... FINE. some things are a little unreasonable, i saw Super Mario Land 1 for GameBoy for 25 dollars there. have you seen Super Mario Land 1? i mean, i like that game, but not spend-25-dollars-on-it like it. (that being said i did use some birthday money one year to buy it for myself like an idiot) and don't even get me started on the GameCube prices, those are fucked. plus, in recent years their selection has gotten more and more whatever, often times their Gameboy section is just full of junk, and anytime there's something good, the price is jacked up to an insane amount. the other option i've got for retro games is a place called CCS. instead of being a normal store, CCS is a place where peoplle can set up stalls to sell whatever they wanna sell. you can find all sorts of stuff there, mostly trading cards and collectibles which are pretty whatever to me, sometimes people sell artwork and stickers which is really nice, but those people aren't there all the time, and of course you got the retro game sellers, which is my bread and butter. it's sort of like a convention hall that's open every weekend, it's nice. the selection and prices are usually a lot better than VGT too, since there's usually more than one stall dedicated to videogames. the only issue with CCS is consistency. with VGT, you know videogames are gonna be there, no matter what. with CCS, it's only open on the weekends, and you don't know who's gonna be there each week. still, it's a good option.

and that's it! those are my only specialty store options, which means my remaining options are thrift stores. those are often the last resort, because games are pretty hard to come by, nevertheless good games. i talked about it in my Goodwill review, but often times the only things that end up here are the dregs that no one else wants. you know the drill, old sports games, Wii shovelware, old PC CD-ROMs, like you can find good stuff, but i wouldn't bet on it. and other than those, everywhere i look is just card shops. i'll type "game stores near me" into google maps and tons of things will pop up, and then i go there and it's just trading cards!! like, no! that's not what i asked for! then you got the places that say they sell videogames, but their selection is a tiny section of a bookshelf in the corner of the establishment, and then the games they have are Anthem and Disney Infinity 3.0, game only. this is astonishingly common, believe me.

of course, i know what everyone's been saying for the past 3 paragraphs. "oh mot, you naive demon. why don't you just buy retro games online? that's what everyone else does! hell, that's even what you do, going by the Doubutsu no Mori double pack Thing entry!" well first of all, aren't you the observant little cherub, remembering the Doubutsu no Mori double pack Thing entry. i'm proud of you. second of all, yes, i CAN and HAVE done that, quite a lot. buying second hand games online is by far the easiest way to find retro games in this day and age. but like... uuuuugh, it's got its own set of problems. case #1: shipping! online sellers love hiding high prices in the shipping tax, and it's so annoying to see what you thought was a good deal turn to a ripoff as soon as shipping is added on. plus, that's extra money i wouldn't have to pay if i just got it in person. and speaking of which, the internet is full of liars! every game collector's worst nightmare: the fabled bootleg cartridge. now, i'm not one to look a reproduction cart in the mouth. as a kid, i didn't have a whole lot of money, but i still liked to have the real cartridges, so i would buy a lot of repros. they got the job done, even if they tend to... wear down over time. now though, i do really prefer to have the original cartridges if possible, so it's kind of important to me to have that. plus, if it's a console game like the PS2 or Wii, i really like to have the original case, and so many online sellers will use misleading images on their listings. back in 2019, i bought a fairly affordable copy of 1080 Avalanche on eBay, and got CATFISHED. in the picture, it had the case. it was delivered to me in the cheapest jewel case i think ive ever seen in my life. to be fair, this lead to me getting one of the most unique things in my collection. also in 2019, i bought a copy of the PS2 game SIREN, and i guess it was a copy used for rentals at Blockbuster, because in the jewel case it came in was its original Blockbuster rental sleeve. i wouldn't give that thing up for the world. my third point against online orders that i just don't like waiting for em to come in. sometimes they ship fairly quickly, maybe within a day or two of ordering, but some people just take EONS to ship stuff. and even when it does ship, that doesn't mean it's getting to you soon. i've had times where games take MONTHS to arrive, to the point where i completely forgot i had ordered it. none of these things are an issue with buying games in person, there you don't have to deal with shipping, you can see the games right in front of you, and you get to take em home that day.

and i KNOW i could just emulate games, or play em off a modded console, and i do actually do both of those things a lot. but i've already talked about the importance of playing on original hardware in another entry on this site, and while modded consoles are great for that, i simply just... like having the physical games. picking the game out of a stack, sticking the disc in the console, hearing it whirr as it spins in the drive, and then watching it boot up is an experience you don't get from just picking a game from a list on a hard drive. maybe i just like that kind of esoterica too much, but having the real deal is a part of the experience for me.

10/02/2024, 10:57 AM

MOT'S RAMBLE-O-RAMA #1

(so many things to talk about, so little time)

"wow!" i hear you saying. "i can't believe it, a real mot update! how long has it been?" far too long, that's how. so i'm formally sorry for making you wait so long for an update. as any neurodivergent person knows far too well, i tend to work on something non-stop for a short period of time, and then suffer serious burnout. not only that, i've also just been busy with a lot of other things (work and school, as always) that just have been sapping up all of my motivation and time. now, with that said, i've had a lot of things on my mind, so here's a little lightning round of things i couldn't make a full Words entry for, but still wish to talk about.

C++ IS HARD AND WEIRD

(what the hell is a header file and why can't i find any good info about it?)

one of the main classes im taking right now is C++ Programming I. due to unfortunate circumstances last semester, i'm having to retake it this semester, and while it isn't totally kicking my ass like it did last time, it's still been a huge hassle. i know quite a bit about programming, i know my for loops and my if-thens and all that jazz. but doing stuff outside of the console with any language outside of HTML and CSS is something i haven't quite wrapped my head around yet. same goes for compiling things, for the most part all the programming classes i've taken have used their own compiler that automatically does all the compiling for me, so stepping into the world of using Visual Studio on my own was a bit of a culture shock. and good lord, for whatever reason i have an insanely hard time processing literally any info people post about C++ online. i'll be struggling with something, decide to look it up, find someone else who has the exact same problem as me and find a solution, but for some reason i just can't process the solution given or put it into action. for example, i spent around seven hours (of on and off trying and failing) trying to figure out how the hell Header and Source files worked. for whatever reason, no matter what i did, no matter which example i looked at, when i tried implementing it it just would not compile. i did eventually figure it out, but it was wholly unsatisfying. all i did was rewrite everything exactly the same as i did the first time, except it was in a new set of files, and for whatever reason it just worked that time. is this user error? almost certainly. but that doesn't change the fact that it was still a grueling seven hours of typing something, it failing to compile, me making a slight change, and it giving me the same error, over and over. and again, this point is also almost certainly user error, but for whatever reason i just can't parse any of the info that's on cplusplus.com. i'll stare at it and reread it several times, and i simply just don't absorb any of the information. that could honestly be because they expect everyone who's reading something there to already know a good bit about the fundamentals, but with the way my brain processes information i need every step to be listed, and they simply just don't do that. fair enough, i don't think the site is made for a simple student like me, but it's still frustrating since that's the main resource everyone points me towards.

PORTAL IS A MASTERPIECE

(and so is portal 2)

my recent obsession (gamewise) has been the Portal duology. i don't think i'd ever do these two justice in a review, so i'm just gonna ramble about them here. Portal 1 is soaked in an oppressive and isolating atmosphere that does everything in its power to make you feel alone. and then, oh man, the turn it takes midway through is just perfect. half of the game is simple and pure puzzle solving with the first 19 chambers, and then the second half makes you totally rethink the way you need to go about navigating spaces. it really nails that feeling of "i'm not supposed to be here, but i'm still finding my way around" and i live for that. not to mention, the game is pretty short and doesn't overstay its welcome. it makes it such a fun game to blast through in an afternoon, and is a tightly packed, all-killer-no-filler experience that i adore. and that isn't even mentioning the bonus maps and challenge mode! i recently replayed the game via the Nintendo Switch port, and there were actually some bonus levels in that version. i think these were first included in the Xbox 360 Live Arcade release, Portal: Still Alive, and they were graciously included in the Switch port as well. it was my first time ever seeing these, and it was a surreal experience playing new Portal 1 levels. it's pretty interesting, actually, since despite predating Portal 2 by nearly two and a half years, it includes things like the Hardlight Bridges, Laser Grids, Crushers, and even the Edgeless Safety Cube. (though to be fair, Advanced Chamber 17 in the base game also includes those, but whatever) the challenge mode is also a ton of fun, it makes you think in some seriously creative ways to minimize time spent and portals created, and getting those gold medals is endlessly satisfting. what i don't enjoy, however, is the least steps challenges. they're dumb, i don't like them. the game's criteria for what counts as a step is extremely loose, and i'm not enjoying my time getting the gold medals here so far. but besides that small blemish, i love every single inch of Portal 1, and it's earned its spot as one of my favorites of all time. (i kinda ran out of time to talk about Portal 2, so maybe that'll get its own spotlight at some point...)

MY BIRTHDAY HAPPENED RECENTLY

(i'm now, as you say, "older than i've ever been")

yeah! my birthday was last Monday. i got a couple articles of clothing, (including an official Action Button Boku no Natsuyasumi shirt, a pair of brown cargo pants that are obscenely comfortable and very stylish, and a set of Halloween themed slightly-above-ankle socks) a replacement battery for my laptop, (which previously had a battery that could barely hold a charge longer than an hour or so) and a new, powered AV splitter (which i was in desperate need of, since my old AV splitter would basically cut the quality of both outputs in half and it looked like dogshit on both sides.) i also got about 50 bucks from my parents to go thrift shopping with, and picked up a lot of good stuff using it that i'll almost certainly be posting about in the Things section at some point in the future. it was a very laid-back birthday, and i must say i much prefer things that way. i mean, i've never really been one for cake if i'm being honest. sugar as a whole just isn't my favorite anymore, it makes me feel so tired and sluggish now, so i'm fine with doing away with birthday cake. no party either, since i've never been big on those. i just got a day to hang out with my roommate, and that was really all i needed.

09/26/2024, 7:18 AM

THE LINUX UPDATE

(why wouldn't i just use windows for this?)

as of now, i'm one week into my Pop!OS experience, so i thought i might post an update on my thoughts. how is it? well... i'm pretty mixed. let's start with the good; Linux is so much less intrusive than Windows has ever been. it doesn't reek of "i'm made by a multi-billion dollar tech company that only wants to sell you stuff" and i really appreciate that about it. it feels so much more homegrown, and that rocks. i will always appreciate open source software like this way more than something like Windows or Mac, since it's giving power to the people, instead of being this completely closed off, "do things our way" sort of thing. but... that's kind of where my compliments end. i dunno, it could very well be the fact that im using a version of Linux that's designed for beginners, but everything feels so similar to my normal Windows experience, except with more bugs and less support. it leads to me saying to myself, "why wouldn't i just use Windows for this?" since i know for a fact it'd work there.

first, those bugs i just mentioned. what are they? i've run into a lot of weird issues using Pop!OS so far, but the main ones are freezing, disabling my keyboard, and not waking up. i'm running Pop!OS on my laptop, and one of the main features of a laptop is putting it to sleep when you close it. understandably, i expect it to, you know, wake back up when i open it. but sometimes it just... doesn't. no matter what i do, wiggling the mouse, pressing every key, closing it and opening it back up, pressing the power button... i'm pretty much forced to just power it all the way off, then start it back up again, which is not a very good thing to have to do considering i'm using my laptop to work on things like schoolwork and this very website. i've also found that sometimes, for seemingly no reason, my comptuer will freeze for about 10 seconds, and then continue like normal. i mean, i guess it's not that big of a deal, but that's not something i've ever run into with Windows.

something a little less dire (but still pretty annoying) is that sometimes when i boot up my laptop from a shutdown, i'll find that my keyboard just... doesn't type. i can still use it to do things like change the brightness or volume, but typing is completely disabled. or sometimes the mouse won't work, and i can't even select the password textbox to type in my password. usually all it takes to fix this is a quick restart, but it's still not great that i have to do that in the first place.

finally, let's talk support. this is the main caveat most people have with switching OSes, and it's what made me so reluctant for so long. but overall, the support with Linux has been fairly good so far. it runs VSCode, OBS Studio, Firefox, Firealpaca and Kdenlive, all of which are the main "tools" i use on my computer to make stuff. OBS is a little weird with the way it handles video capture devices for some reason though, it doesn't have any option to capture audio in the source itself. i'm assuming that you're supposed to use another source specifically for the audio, but i don't know that for sure since i haven't messed around with Linux OBS for more than a couple minutes yet.

it's once you start getting into games that support starts getting really iffy. now, i don't use my laptop for all that much in terms of games, i prefer to save that for my desktop or consoles, but i do boot up a few from time to time. the two games i've tried out are Knytt Underground and World of Horror. according to its Steam page, Knytt Underground is natively supported on Linux. so i downloaded it, started it up, and it works great. certain areas suffer from some weird slowdown that isn't on Windows, but other than that it runs perfectly. but then when you try to alt-tab out of the window, you just can't interact with anything else. not only that, but it gets really hard to navigate your way back to the Knytt Underground window. to get things outside of the game to work normally you have to fully close out of the game, which is kind of annoying in a game that you can easily get lost in, making a map or a walkthrough a very helpful tool that you just don't have access to. the other game i tried was World of Horror, which actually isn't natively supported by Linux. instead, you can use something called Proton to get it running. Proton is a thing made by Valve that helps Windows programs run better on Linux. at least, i think that's what it is? operating system stuff is a really big blind spot for me when it comes to tech, if you can't tell. all i know is that it uses Wine, a Windows emulator, to run Windows games on Linux. which just begs the question, "why wouldn't i just use Windows for this?" that question becomes especially enticing when you realize that World of Horror's Proton support is a little iffy. sometimes the game freezes up for no reason, sometimes it refuses to even start, and crashes are not out of the question.

now, i'm fully aware that judging Linux gaming by two very niche games that either have iffy native support or no native support at all is a bit loaded, so take that last paragraph with a grain of salt. however, so far i've noticed a common theme with Linux. it is more capable, it has the potential to do way more than Windows, but to get to that point you really have to put in the time and effort to get it there. Linux ain't some out-of-the-box solution you can just install and do everything on immediately. but, at least for the things i use my computers for, i don't think Linux is worth the extra effort for me. it just doesn't do what i want or need it to do so far, and while yes Microsoft and corporations as a whole are smelly and bad, Windows just does what i need it to do, no questions asked, and that's what i like about it. who knows, maybe i just need more time with Linux, but as of right now it's not looking like it's gonna be my main squeeze.

09/19/2024, 8:20 AM

THE LINUX TESTRUN

(the beginning of an experiment)

i've always had a passing interest in Linux, but growing up strictly on Windows always made me kind of scared to try and dig my teeth into it. when you've used nothing but one operating system for 20+ years, it's always gonna be kinda hard to make the switch. but last year, i decided, "you know what? i'm gonna commit to this." and got pop!OS installed onto my laptop. my roommate is really knowledgable on this kinda stuff, and she helped me get it running.

cut to almost exactly a year later, and i haven't touched it since. UNTIL NOW. this time i'm actually gonna commit to it, and i'm making this post as a way to hold myself to that. i'm gonna run nothing but pop!OS for the next month (until October 19th, 2024) and see how it goes. now, due to certain Reasons, mostly school related ones, i'll need to switch back over to Windows to run some things, but for everyday purposes it's gonna just be Linux.

that isn't to say i don't already have some thoughts on Linux so far, and i wanna go over that. i really enjoy the versatility and customizability of Linux, it's way less overbearing compared to Windows and it feels very freeing. i've been using some funkier programs too, take for example Newsboat. it's an RSS viewer that you run in your terminal, and it's suuuuper nifty. i'm kind of a sucker for text-only programs, i'm one of those freaks who actually enjoys text-based adventures after all. and SPEAKING of text only programs, Lynx! it's a text only browser that's super low-profile, and i love it to bits. whenever i'm reading something in a browser, i tend to have a bit of trouble just because i get distracted by any extra little thing, so Lynx is actually kinda helpful when i'm reading a big block of text. (hey, if you've got Lynx, try lookin' at the site using it! it's a really cool experience!)

in terms of other things i want to try in the future, i've heard of a Linux only tool for creating TASes, or Tool Assisted Speedruns, called libTAS, which can be used to create TASes of any Linux program. i've had a passing interest in the TAS scene for the past 8 years or so, and i've always wanted to dip my toes into it. (technically i did give it a shot once in 2019 when i made a TAS of Blue Chamber for DS, but... that barely counts.) besides that... i'm not really sure what else i wanna look into yet, i guess i'll just let Linux take me wherever it so desires. if anyone has any suggestions for things i should check out, i'd love to hear it.

anyways, i guess we'll see where i'm at with Linux in about a week or so. hopefully i don't forget about it like last time!

09/12/2024, 2:19 PM

THE PSP BATTERY ESSAY

(a classical piece of Mot literature)

back in June or so, i was having troubles with my PSP-3000's battery, which i had recently replaced, and was wanting to document my struggles for those who were having the same issue as me. so i did as any normal demon does and took to tumblr, wanting to make a big long post about PSP batteries, what to buy, what to avoid, and how to take good care of your battery. i was pretty proud of that post, and since i don't really plan on using social media all that much anymore, i figured it might be a good idea to transfer it on over to here. so if anything seems to sound weird or off, that would be why.

(original post date: June 14th, 2024)
ok hi ive been struggling lately with my psp battery i bought at a retro game store near my place. its been doing a lot of weird things so today i finally decided to run some tests relating to its true battery life, and got some weird results. heres my findings

first, some background knowledge. i have a psp model 3000, it's the newest (exclusing the psp go) model of psp, and came stock with a 1200 mAh battery when it was sold. i had a hard time finding a common consensus on the battery life of a stock psp 3000 battery, but it seems to me that it would last around 6 hours when not doing anything intensive, and around 4 hours if you're playing a game or something.

the replacement battery i bought was an aftermarket battery for the 3000 by a company called xyab, and this battery was advertised at being 800 mAh, and somehow would provide "up to 6 hours of extended gameplay", according to the packaging. yeah, sure bud.



well, when i got home and put this thing in my psp, it came with a full charge and was working great. then, when my friend was playing it, it just randomly shut off, even though it didnt seem to be at low battery or anything. (i hadnt done any research on psp batteries at the time so the 800 mAh capacity didnt raise any red flags to me yet) then, when i was at work one day, the same thing happened again, and it appeared to be at 2/3rds of battery capacity when it happened. (this time i was the one playing it, so i had first hand experience.) usually, when a psp's battery is low, the green battery light will flash a bit, indicating that you need to charge it. when it shut off this time, it hadn't been blinking at all, so i figured something must have been up.

today i finally bit the bullet and ran some tests on the thing to make sure i wasn't nuts. i recorded my psp on the battery info screen, let it sit without being plugged in, and checked back on the footage later to see the percent it was at when it shut off. like i'd suspected, it shut off when it was at 38%, or around 1/3rd of its supposed battery. it lasted around 4 hours, and didn't flash the green battery light at all around the time it shut off. so, yeah, an 800 mAh battery was a scam, to say the least.



afterwards, i decided to record it charging the battery back up for a bit, and it was even funkier than when it was running the battery down. it would sporadically jump from 0% to 8%, then to 23%, then at around the 30% mark it just rocketed up all the way to 60%. i had stopped recording at that point, but then something funny happened.



uh, charging complete? you sure about that, man? yeah, it said this around the 66% mark, which solidified my theory that it was just a normal psp battery with about 2/3rds of the capacity it was supposed to have.

in conclusion, if you're gonna buy a psp replacement battery, dont buy one that says it anything under or above the 1200-1400 mAh range. if its under, you're gonna have a bad time like i did, and if its over, its literally a lie because, at the size normal psp batteries are, they literally cannot contain something with, say, 3600 mAh, which is what my old psp battery was, and it's most likely a scam. if you want to read up more on info about getting replacement psp batteries, i recommend this reddit post that i referenced when looking for a battery to replace this current one ive been complaining about this entire post.

pretty much this is all just to say, fuck this stupid ass battery it made my psp shut off when i had been playing persona 1 for a long ass time and i didnt save and it made me lose like 2 hours of progress

(back to present-day mot commentary)
so as you can see, the xyab battery is really shoddy and not good at all. so if that's the case, what's your best option for a new PSP battery, if your old one is scuffed? well, after posting that back in June, i decided it might be a good idea to order a new battery. i ended up buying an Ostent 1400mAh PSP battery from Amazon, and though i really don't like giving money to Jeff Bezos by using Amazon (ebay all the way (but dont use the global shipping program (i mostly just mean buy stuff from other people and not through a colossal megacorporation like amazon))) it did end up working like a charm, and it's the best PSP battery i've seen so far. so there's my recommendation.

09/10/2024, 7:04 PM

AN ODE TO COHOST

(we hardly knew ye, but ye were the best)

as of yesterday, (Monday September 9th, 2024) social media site cohost.org has announced it'll be going read-only on October 1st, and will be shutting down entirely by the end of the year. shutdowns of social media sites are never gonna be a fun time, but this one hurts real bad for me specifically. i personally migrated over to cohost due to the fact that tumblr, my previous social media of choice, has an extremely transphobic staff team, and as a trans woman i simply wasn't ok with supporting that. cohost felt like a safe haven in that regard, it was completely independent, the staff weren't bigots, it wasn't made by some tech bro startup looking to make some cash. it was made for the people, by the people, as they say. free forever, no ads, support only if you want. but because of that philosophy, it became harder for staff to run the place due to lacking funds, as well as burnout and lack of motivation. which, to be fair, i totally get it. it's hard to keep something up and running when, y'know, you kinda need money to do that. but sound reasoning or not, it's still heartbreaking to see such an awesome site have to go like this. as of right now, you're still able to view and post to the site if you already have an account, but you can't sign up anymore. for me, the worst part is going to the section where you can sign up for cohost plus, the premium subscription that helps (or i guess, helped) support the crew, and seeing all the hope in the promotion for it. listing features you'd get, as well as features that are yet to come... and now never will. there's something about that that makes me want to cry. maybe i'm too sensitive, but something about that just... breaks my heart. let it be known, cohost may not have lived a very long life, but it was and always will be the best social media site. in an ecosystem where corporations are constantly using users to gather and sell data, cohost was willing to break the mold by not being run by total scumbags.

so... thanks, cohost. we'll miss you.

09/07/2024, 8:05 PM

THE IMPORTANCE OF ORIGINAL HARDWARE

(CRTs look better than you think)

this was originally gonna be a segment about how terrible scalpers are, but i didn't have much else to say past "these people are outsiders of videogames trying to profit on our passion" and then i just sort of got sidetracked. so instead im making it a whole segment talking about what i got sidetracked talking about. i've always been of the belief that, for the most part, the best way to play a game is on its original hardware. "oh but the Virtual Boy!" yeah i know. the Virtual Boy is a nightmare to experience and i'm not gonna say that the best way to play Virtual Boy Wario Land is by getting one. moreso, i think that for most games it's the best way to be. you see, a lot of games are designed to be played on their original hardware. understandably, i don't think the creators of Silent Hill expected me to be playing their game in widescreen on duckstation 25 years after it released. it was meant to be experienced one way, and thats on a PS1 with an original PS1 controller on an old CRT. the fuzziness of the CRT really masks a lot of the imperfections and makes things a lot more atmospheric than they would be if it were all pixel perfect and upscaled and stuff. another really good example of visuals being enhanced by original hardware Donkey Kong Country. this is the one that's pretty well known, but because of DKC's visual style being composed of 3D models being crunched down into sprites, it... does not upscale very well. but again, because of that classic CRT fuzziness, it blends everything together to make a more believable effect. i remember when i was a kid and i heard all about DKC being marketed as a "3D" game, and i never really got that. but after seeing it this way, it makes a lot more sense. it really does enhance the experience a lot. here's some reference pictures as to what i'm talking about.

these images are from a wonderful account on twitter called CRTPixels, and if you're interested in seeing more stuff like this, i highly suggest you check out their account. the resizing i had to do to get these to fit on my site really don't do it justice, so go look at it uncompressed on their account.

so yeah, it makes some games look better. but some people just want things to be upscaled to hell and want the best frames and want every single game in widescreen, fine. whatever. be that way. but some games are enhanced by original hardware in more than just the visuals department. take WarioWare Twisted, for example. being a Gameboy Advance game with a gyroscope built into it, it's notoriously hard to emulate, and has been giving people trouble for ages. sure, a patch for the game that lets you control the tilt with the d-pad exists, but... come on. if you're playing WarioWare Twisted like that, you've gotta be one sick freak. the whole reason someone comes to WarioWare Twisted is FOR the motion controls, and when you take that away... it just ain't the same, man. now, some crafty folks out there have figured out ways to emulate this game with the motion controls, and i'm included in that group. the way i first played the game was by emulating it on the PS Vita, which supports tilt controls with its built in gyroscope, and there's a lot of people who stand by mobile phone emulation as well. but recently, i got my hands on a copy of a real, original copy of the game, and it just... felt better. it felt so much more natural, and didn't have any of the emulation hiccups. and not only that, i also discovered that the game originally had rumble in it this way, which is gonna be something that's always gonna be hard to emulate. the rumble isn't necessary to play and enjoy the game, of course, but it does add a little extra pizzazz to the game that makes it even more special than it already was. there's also like, the entire DS library, for another argument for hardware. its dual screens and touchscreen have always been infamously hard to replicate on other systems, and while the Wii U came close, there's just no good screen setups for it. and once you get into emulating it on PC, it's pretty much over. i mean, have you ever TRIED to play Rhythm Heaven DS with a mouse? you haven't, because you've lived far enough to read this. everyone else died trying. and this is just my opinion (in an already pretty heavily opinion based topic) but i think that DS games look the best on the DS, as opposed to playing them on 3DS. the 3DS has a screen with a much higher resolution, but because of that the pixels don't scale perfectly, and as such everything just looks kind of muddy, and it just... does not look super great to me.

alright here's where the opinionated piece delves even deeper into opinions. you guys know the e-reader right? the GBA accessory that let you scan cards n shit? yeah i honestly fuckin love that thing. it's so weird and reeks of early 2000s Nintendo. a lot of people say it's dumb, and while i wouldn't say it's a revolutionary piece of technology, picture this. you want to check out the e-reader functionality for Animal Crossing on Gamecube. you have two options, you could emulate the game on Dolphin and do some emulator shenanegans to setup a virtual Gameboy that reads the e-reader files you downloaded from Archive.org, or you could play the game on console, plug up your Gameboy to your Gamecube using the GBA-GC link cable, plug in the e-reader, and swipe the cards through the card reader. which sounds more interesting? if you're like me, you probably said the latter. and i know, i know, doing things via emulation is probably easier, but that's not what i'm asking. at least to me, if something has an interesting concept or idea, i am much more tolerant to putting up with its garbage than if it were boring as hell. that's why i'm always so drawn to weird and obscure games, they just appeal to me more. and when emulating special features like the GBA-GC link cable or the VMU on the Dreamcast, you just lose a lot of what made that concept interesting in the first place. at least, that's how i see it.

09/05/2024, 12:21 PM

BIG STRIDES IN SITE UPDATE TECHNOLOGY

(i finally updated the background)

well howdy there. i don't know if i'm gonna keep updating the site daily like this for long, just because i tend to lose steam when i work on something like this nonstop for a long time, but i'm on a roll so here's an update post. to begin, as of yesterday the site is now live! yes, it's been in the works for a long time now but i finally worked up the courage to put this out for everyone to see. i wanted to make sure every section on the site had at least SOMETHING in it before making the site accessible, and some segments do that better than others. (look no further than the mostly barren gamedev tab, which is probably going to stay that way for a while since i have a famously wobbly drive to work on my games. i'll probably touch it up a bit at least, but... don't expect to see many links to other games for a while.)

next on the list of updates is presentation. i finally swapped out the background of the whole site to be what i wanted it to be from the start, the Diet Building from Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. specifically the room that Mot, my namesake, resides in. how could i not? it's perfect. for some reason this took me a really long time to get around to, it's probably just because going into an emulator and getting a really good screenshot of a late game area from a really specific angle wasn't really something i wanted to do... because that sounded kinda boring. shoutouts to my roommate for helping me get a PS2 save file from GameFAQs working on emulator so i could get that screencap, by the way. it's a little fuzzy, and that's cuz i had to zoom it in a little. it's surprisingly difficult to disable the HUD in SMT:N for some reason, i couldn't find a single cheat code that did it. after about an hour of fiddling around with several graphics settings we just decided to give up and try to crop out the HUD. and it turned out a lot better than we expected honestly! so cool, i guess that worked out. and i updated the window colors to be more in line with the colors in that background. your welcome, because it looked really rough with the gray windows. you might have also noticed the little textbox in the top right on the home page. please tell me you did. that's the random message box! it'll spit out random little blurbs of text every time you refresh the page. this was an idea i had really early on and wanted to implement, but i was struggling to get it to work since it required Javascript. i ended up just stealing someone else's code to get it to work for now, and i'll figure out how it works later. the point is, it works. every now and then i might add a couple new blurbs in there, so make sure to always give it a little peek. and no, i definitely DIDN'T steal this idea from starmen.net. i would never do such a thing. last thing i wanna address on the home page is that little window at the bottom that has a video in it. that's my newest video. i do make videos and put them up on YouTube (usually just about stuff that i've been thinking about or like a lot. which is sort of like this site, now that i think about it) so if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, go take a look at it.

last thing i wanna talk about real quick is future updates. what's next? well, i plan to keep updating the site tabs as always, and i'll usually try to push out big updates all at once, maybe near the end of the day, instead of incrementally updating it throughout the day. that just seems like the better option, honestly. as for how often updates are gonna happen, i dunno. like i said in the opening, it really all depends on just how into it i am, but generally speaking, the Words, Things, and Reviews sections are gonna be updated the most frequently, Artwork and Stamps might be a little less common, and Games is going to be the least frequent. i think also turning the navigation menu into a row of buttons might look a lot better than the current text setup i've got going on. there's also eventually gonna be more on the home page, it's just that i've been struggling to get things to sit side-by-side, which i think would look the best. and maybe, when the technology is there, maybe i could have a feedback system or an indicator to tell you if you've looked at new stuff on the site? maybe? that's pretty far in the future though, so don't expect that anytime soon. alright, that's gonna be all for today. thanks for reading, and thanks for checking in on the site!

9/04/2024, 8:00 AM

CRAFTING SYSTEMS SUCK, ACTUALLY

(aka mot complains like an old lady)

ah, the modern trend of crafting systems. ever since the boom in popularity of minecraft, crafting systems have been a staple of many modern games. and i think they SUCK ASS. who doesn't love spending 40 hours grinding to get all the items they need to make a brand new shiny thing that'll help them beat one part of the game, and then immediately become obsolete? okay, okay, maybe i'm exaggerating a bit. but i've never really liked this huge trend of every single game having some sort of crafting system for some reason. i find the very concept to be inherently grindy and time-wasty, and i've never really seen a game pull it off in a way i genuinely like. today i've got three subjects i'd like to look at, one bad, one tolerable, and one genuinely good. so let's begin with our first example.

i've gone on record saying that i'm not exactly the biggest fan of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and there's a lot of reasons for that. it was rushed and released in a barren and incomplete state, the writing is pathetic and boring, there's only one upgrade to the shop... the amount of customization is impressive, but honestly takes away from the aspect of "when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade." instead of making lemonade, you give the lemons right back to life, and life is just like, "oh ok, fine." and there's one huge part of ACNH that really sticks the nail in the coffin for me. the dreaded crafting system. ugh, this shit sucks. so in earlier AC games, on your first couple of days you'd be working towards getting new tools so you could get more money and get more done in different ways. this would incentivize you to check back every day for those first couple days, and it made actually getting those tools a lot more impactful. ACNH just throws this all out the window and says "what if you could skip that and make them all yourself?" but that would be unbalanced if you could just make all of them yourself, so they had to think of a drawback. so what did they do? they made every tool break after a certain amount of time. in earlier AC games, the axe tool would always do this, but there was a reason for that. it was to discourage cutting down trees, and made it so you only did it when necessary. here, there is absolutely no reason why tools should break. they introduced a new problem so they could "fix" it with their new feature. and because you never know when your tool is about to break, since there's no visual indicator or counter on how many uses it has left, you end up needing to carry around multiple tools at a time if you want to always have one on hand when you're bug hunting or reorganizing flowers, which takes up precious inventory space. and this is just in relation to the tools, because i take big issue with crafting furniture. you have to get these special little crafting recipe cards to learn to make new furniture, you can't just make it all out the gate. seems simple enough. but the issue arises when you want to make something specific that you have in mind, and you know what you need and how to make it, but your character doesn't know how to make it, since you haven't unlocked the recipe. and the way you get these things is dumb too, it's completely random. you can sometimes get them as gifts from villagers, sometimes you get them from bottles that wash up on the shore, sometimes you get them from balloon presents. but it's completely random which one you get, and you can get duplicates for some god forsaken reason. which just wastes your time even more. i guess it's to incentivise you to trade recipes with other people? but i don't wanna do that man. i just wanna fucking... get my stupid ass table. and during holidays or events, what would be just a simple gift item in earlier AC games from an event animal is now another stupid ass crafting recipe. which you have to get all the right items for, which takes even more time, and it's just... really stupid. i hate this aspect of New Horizons, it's so bad. the game has a lot of great ideas, i think the added detail in all the furniture and allowing you to place furniture anywhere you want around town is pretty cool, i think the posters are a great evolution of the portraits from earlier games and give each villager a little more individuality, i like the pattern designer (even if its clothing style options are annoying and super limiting at times) and overall, the game does look really good. but it just has all these little annoyances and asterisks on every aspect of it that just annoy the hell out of me. and the crafting system is the worst part of it all.

sorry i kinda went off the rails there. New Horizons brings out the worst in me. let's get back on track and talk about something a little more tolerable. Terraria! aka objectively better and more fun Minecraft. i've always been a huge fan of Terraria, i think it's full of charm and has a lot of great ideas and fun mechanics. it's also the game that has one of my favorite portrayals of yoyos used as weapons. (second only to Bridget of Guilty Gear) and in my over 10 years of Terraria experience, i've come to tolerate its focus on crafting. it's really just sort of something i put up with so i can get back to the fun part. (playing the actual game) its extremely rare enemies and drops are pretty annoying, and it does get really grindy at times, but unless you're playing modded Terraria it never gets THAT bad. i do think that it has some good ideas though, such as having certain bosses drop items and materials that you need to craft new tools that are needed to progress futher, such as Eye of Cthulhu dropping Demonite, which is necessary to make Demonite tools, which let you mine through Demonstone and access new bosses you couldn't previously. i also really like the Tinkerer's Workshop, a crafting table that lets you consolidate accessories and make room for new ones. it's a fun time experimenting and seeing what the game allows you to mix together. but while i couldn't imagine Terraria without crafting, it isn't something i'm always praising or thinking about as being the best part of the game or whatever. however, there is one series where i think that does apply, and what's funny is that it started WAY before this whole trend of crafting in videogames.

as im sure any observant peruser of my site probably noticed by now, i'm quite a big fan of the Shin Megami Tensei series of JRPGs, and there's one aspect of them that always keeps me coming back for more. sure, the stories and characters are always great, but i think their take on monsters and party members has to be my favorite part of every game in the series. because far before Undertale made the idea of talking to monsters cool (note: i love Undertale, don't take that the wrong way) SMT was having the player not only negotiate with demons, but having them recruit them and fight alongside the player as a party member is always so cool and adds so much to each encounter. it's like if Pokemon was cool and was allowed to say "Damn." besides being able to recruit demons, however, let's say that you have a couple of demons you had gotten in the early game, but now that enemies are getting stronger you don't really have a use for them anymore. what should you do with those guys? you don't wanna just get rid of them, you've had them for a while and are pretty attached to them. well, reader, let me introduce you to the Cathedral of Shadows, where demons gather! here, you can fuse any two demons in your stock (as long as they are compatible) into a new, more powerful demon. this can lead to so many new possibilities, as well as addressing one of my main issues with crafting systems as a whole. in most games, most items used for crafting have no other purpose besides being used in a recipe. in Megaten, the "ingredients" for the fusion are other demons that can be used in battle, or for skills like healing or navigational magic. they're multi-purpose, serving function in both fusion AND battle. so yeah, while you may want to recruit a demon because it's good and you want it on your team, you might also want to have it because it fuses into something good. and when that demon starts to get outclassed by stronger foes, it doesn't just go to waste. you can just fuse it into something new and better! not to mention, any demon you fuse can also pass on its skills or stats in some way, making you think about which specific demon would be best for fusion. and its when you start diving through the online fusion calculator to see what the best fusion chain to make the powerful demon that you want that it starts to get really fun. i think all crafting systems should be more like this, giving the player uses for items or other such commodities outside of just their face value use cases.

so what did we learn today? well, crafting systems are evil, Animal Crossing New Horizons sucks, and Shin Megami Tensei is awesome.

9/03/2024, 3:03 PM

MOT GOES TO DRAGONCON!

(and she forgot to bring her fun-having hat with her)

well hey everyone, Mot here! yesterday i did something ive never really done before,* i went to a convention! notice the asterisk. technically ive been to a few conventions before. one of them was a LEGO themed convention my parents took me to when i was around 6 or 7. i was real into LEGO as a kid, and so this was something that piqed my interest. i brought my favorite lego piece at the time with me, the lego die piece that was made of rubber and let you change out the sides. it came with the lego board games they used to do a lot, which i liked a ton as a kid. i remember losing that piece at this convention, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. the next con i'd attend was Dreamhack 2019. i was invited by the folks over at No Reset to perform a speedrun at the showcase they were having at Dreamhack that year. i was super excited about this, but the only game i ran at the time that satisfied all of their criteria was... Parappa the Rapper 2. not really the most exciting of speedruns. but as a blossoming high schooler, lil' ol' Mot had to take the shot she was given. and so she did. i went and did my run live, and it was surprisingly not the most obscenely boring thing in the entire world. i was lucky to have two people on the couch who were really nice and helped me to keep my thoughts and commentary straight, which was really nice. (shoutouts to Laurie and Cykette!) but because i was a special guest and was there just to do the run, i didn't really get to experience the event to its fullest.

all of that is to say, ive never really gotten the chance to have a full, complete con experience. not only was DragonCon the first con i went to with no strings attached, it was also the first con i'd ever driven to and attended without my parents. (my roommate did come with me and she was very good company) well, i say with no strings attached, but there is kind of an important detail i left out. because DragonCon tickets are really expensive, i got a ticket just for one day. not only that, i got my ticket for the last day of the event. so... it still wasn't entirely without caveats. and not only that, but DragonCon functions a little differently from most other cons. instead of being hosted in just one event hall, DragonCon is typically spread out among several different buildings in downtown Atlanta. and DragonCon is BIG. i mean, REALLY big. one of the biggest and most popular conventions in america type of big. so there were a ton of people, even considering the fact that it was the last day. so i understandably felt very overwhelmed and out of place. not only that, but a lot of the special events and activities were already done earlier during the con's runtime, so i was getting mere tablescraps. i saw a lot of people with little ribbons and tags on their namebadges, and it felt like i had totally missed out. it's like when you're put into a new class halfway through the school year, and everyone already knows each other, so you just feel super isolated and out of place. and that's pretty much how i'd describe my experience at DragonCon. out of place. i felt really stupid and like i didn't know what i was doing 90% of the time, and it didn't really help that a lot of the fandoms and topics the event covered (superheroes, comic books, anime, dungeons and dragons) are either somesthing im not interested in or are really big blind spots for me. again, i felt very out of place.

another main reason i wanted to attend DragonCon specifically was because someone i'm a really big fan of was supposed to be there, that being chuggaaconroy. i've been a huge fan of his work for a very, very large majority of my life, and he's the main reason i got into making videos over on youtube. he's attended DragonCon nearly every year for as long as i can remember, and i always saw him post about it in his videos and the like. but i'd never been able to attend... until today! the future is now, and i have a car! and a licence! and money! so as soon as i heard he was gonna be attending this year i immediately bought a ticket with my main goal to at least get to see the guy with my own two eyes. but on the day of arrival, it took me a while to find out that he'd planned to be there... just about every day until the day i attended, September 2nd. i had missed him by ONE DAY. i had just bought the final day tickets since they were the cheapest available, and i figured he'd have been there for the whole event, but alas. i was (and still kind of am) pretty bummed about this. i also got misgendered a few times by several different people which stung a lot. and one of the main things i was excited for when it came to the Vendor's Hall (or Artist's Alley, as its called) was anywhere that sold any retro games. retro game stores are an extremely rare breed in my neck of the woods, the closest one to my house is about 45 minutes away when the traffic is good, so any time i get the opportunity to sift through some old games i TAKE it. out of all four floors of vendors, there were two stalls that sold old videogames, and both of them had absolutely terrible prices. for reference, they were charging 50 bucks for the Greatest Hits version of Final Fantasy VII on PS1. on ebay (at the time of writing) it's common to find that exact same game for around 20-30 bucks. and none of their other prices were any better. "ok, sure," you say, clueless. "well that's one of the most critically acclaimed JRPGs of all time. of course they're gonna hike up the price, and you're buying it in person, shouldn't that be worth the extra money?" well alright wise guy, then tell me why they're selling Brain Age: Concentration Training for 30 bucks, loose. that game is 12 at gamestop, loose OR in box! at the very least, i got to see a real copy of Rule of Rose for PS2 with my own two eyes. being one of two videogames ever made by developers Punchline, it's a game i've always been interested in. add on the fact that it's a surreal survival horror game and contains a story centered around lesbians and you've got my full attention. unfortunately for me, and every other human being on planet earth, Rule of Rose is also the most expensive and rarest PS2 game there is, and the only people who can ever afford to buy it are collectors with fuckoff amounts of money who are just gonna let it sit on a shelf and rot and never play it because "oh wahhh, it'll depreciate the value! boo hoo!" ugh. hate that kind of shit. it's the same story for an english copy of Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest for Gamecube and it just pisses me off. sorry for the little tangent, just had to get that out of my system.

so at this point you'd (understandably) assume that i didn't really enjoy my time at DragonCon at all. and while yes, it was more bad than good, there were still a small handful of highlights. i got a few really cool nicknacks from the vendor hall, including a few Pikmin and Animal Crossing pins, some stickers, and a really beautiful watercolor art print of the Onett map from Earthbound. there was also a really awesome arcade setup in one of the buildings, and i had a ton of fun playing the games that they had. my favorite rhythm game of all time, Pop'n Music, is best experienced on a real Pop'n cabinet due to the control layout, and the only arcade in my whole state that had a Pop'n cab unfortunately closed down a few years ago. (R.I.P. Stonecrest Mall Round1, you will forever live on in our hearts) sure, i have a makeshift USB Pop'n controller made out of a cardboard box by one of my buddies, but you really only get the full experience in the arcades. so when i saw that the arcade setup at DragonCon not only had a Pop'n cab, but had a Pop'n cab with the latest and most up to date version of Pop'n with all the songs included, i was in heaven. admittedly, it'd been a few years since i'd last played Pop'n, and even longer since i'd played on a real cab, so i was... extremely rusty, to say the least. but i still had a fantastic time with it, and it makes me want to return to the game and start playing it seriously again. there were a lot of other rhythm arcade games that i recognized, but one of them stood out to me the most, and that's Guitar Freaks. you know Guitar Hero, right? of course you do, you have skin and a brain. well Guitar Freaks is like that, but made by Konami, only has three buttons instead of five, has a track list less focused on the most famous of famous american rock songs and more focused on Japanese rock (as well as songs from other Konami rhythm games of the time) and it was made about six years earlier. Guitar Freaks is a ton of fun, and i had a great time playing it. at least for me, it's a whole lot easier to keep track of the notes when there's only three buttons to focus on, and not on the weird, angled track that Guitar Hero usually does. i didn't just play rhythm games though, because they had a ton of fighting games setup as well! no Third Strike unfortunately, since that's my forte, but there was a ton of variety and more unique games to be had. from what i recall, there was Marvel vs Capcom 2, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, Tekken Tag Tournament (i think that's what it was? i didn't look super close since Tekken isn't really my deal) Street Fighter 4 (an actual original cabinet of SF4!) and Skullgirls. there were actually two more cabinets, but i can't remember for the life of me what they were. i think they may have been a King of Fighters game and a Melty Blood game, but i can't be certain. the one i ended up having the patience to wait for an opening on was Marvel vs Capcom 2, and it was while a guy was sitting by himself playing arcade mode. it was pretty cool getting to have that experience of walking over to someone just playing by themselves in the arcade and hopping on to challenge them, just like it was originally intended in arcades. the guy who was sitting there had a friend, and when i sat down she was like "ooooh, you got a new challenger!" and that was such a fun little moment. now, i don't play MvC2 very much, and i tend to get very stressed out when playing against someone who's just absolutely beating me into the ground. but believe me when i say, playing against this guy was the most fun ive ever had while playing a fighting game, and he was totally kicking my ass. my go-to team in MvC2 whenever i have to play is Anakaris, Shuma-Gorath, and Amingo (because i just really like how they all look) and they're all pretty low on the tier list. i think the guy saw this and knew not to take it super seriously, because his team consisted of Guile, Juggernaut, and Servbot. and yes, he still beat me in every round, but it was SO much damn fun. maybe it was the arcade environment, maybe it was the shitty CRT in this old ass (original edition) MvC2 cabinet, maybe it was this guy's friend cheering for me, but i was just having a total blast. so shoutouts to Jimmy and his friend for making my day in that moment, you two rock.

alright, here's my final verdict on DragonCon. i think i way overhyped it in my head, and it would have never lived up to the astronomical expectations i had built up for it over the last ten years of hearing people talk about it. i probably should have done more research into the dates chuggaaconroy was gonna be there or how the con functioned so i could have planned accordingly. and i got misgendered an upsetting amount of times just because what, my outfit wasn't "feminine" enough for these people? what, girls cant wear baggy jeans and a captain's hat without getting labled as masculine anymore? Artist's Alley, while being full of many amazing creations by some really great artists, just didn't have a whole lot of options that appealed to my personal tastes, and had prices a bit too high for my barely-above-minimum-wage payrate. it was exhausting, and on the drive home i couldn't help but feel like i'd wasted my day and money. but after giving myself an extra day to think things over and give myself some time to reflect, i'm still glad that i went. it wasn't perfect and it wasn't going to be, it was my first time going to a big convention like this and it was bound to have some hiccups. but imagine if, instead of buying the cheapest last day tickets and having a bad time because i didn't entirely know what was going on, i had blown 120 bucks on one of the other days and STILL had that experience of "i don't know what's going on, im lost and confused." it was good that i spent less money on a "test run" day, because now i know how the con functions and i'll be able to plan a lot better for next year. this was what my mom told me when i was talking to her about my disappointment with the event yesterday, and it helped me look at things with a new perspective, which made me feel a lot better. and it's not like it was all bad, i still got some pretty cool things and had a ton of fun in the arcade. so yeah, i'm glad i went to DragonCon this year. i'm just hoping that future experiences with the event will be better.