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Apr. 5th, 2025 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarlingonei did not go to the protests today; i used up my mobility spoons for the week earlier, and also i am actively avoiding being at places where i have the slightest risk of being detained, because if i don't get back to the shelter by 11pm i lose my bed and they throw out all my stuff.
i have also not been playing much pokemon. i switched over to breath of the wild, which would be easier if the shelter wifi didn't block all video game related websites including the interactive map i use to check off the collectibles. (it doesn't block youtube for some reason, so it seems unlikely to be a question of bandwidth, just "nobody on the resident wifi here should be able to access ign or gamefaqs because clearly then they'll be lazy Bad Homeless and never leave" or, you know. something to that effect?)
(like most games with large maps, botw has a somewhat obscene number of minor collectibles to encourage you to explore every nook and cranny. notably, there are 900 mini-puzzles that each grant an item called a "korok seed". they're usually some sort of simple deal where you complete a pattern of natural objects like rocks or apples, but if you're trying to go for all 900, you *really* want to track them as you go so you don't wind up with 899 and no idea where to look.)
i don't feel especially like doing a lot of combat right now, but handily if you have the botw dlc (which i do) you can get the majora's mask wearable item pretty much immediately after the tutorial. rather than making you megalomaniacal or doing terrible things to the moon, it causes most common enemy types not to attack you. so i've been running around doing korok puzzles that would normally be much more inconvenient because there are enemies around. also opening up the enemies' treasure chests and yoinking their precious bundle of five fire arrows or whatever. (some enemy camps have treasure chests that won't open until all the enemies are dead, but i'm basically ignoring those for right now.)
it's... a very big game. just, extraordinarily large. a correct size for what it's doing, but there are people who've played it for thousands of hours and not seen everything. i originally picked it up because, well, i had bought a switch so i could play animal crossing with leia and we could visit each other, and i felt silly having an entire console with only one video game. and everyone spoke highly of breath of the wild, and while i usually avoid things that seem overhyped, i knew my favorite part of mass effect was driving the mako around on random unexplored worlds, so i figured i might enjoy a game whose selling point was "THE open world game". which it turns out i do!
(i also enjoy the spinoff, age of calamity, which is not open world at all but does use the same world and characters in a prequel story which, spoilers, turns out halfway through to be an everybody lives AU and also pulls off the only really earned "harsh parental figure Actually Cared and is forgiven" I've ever seen -- not only was I not screaming "let the bastard die unmourned" at the screen, which is my usual reaction to attempted redemptions of harsh parental figures, I actually bought the game because I couldn't stop thinking about that arc specifically. It's the thematic and emotional center of the game and it utterly works. God, what a game. It's really hard to explain why my favorite game of all time, dethroning mass effect trilogy after a solid decade, is a combat-centric spinoff most people probably never heard of, but it's like the other half to Breath of the Wild's story.)
(i haven't picked up age of calamity in a long time, because it is all combat apart from the cutscenes -- it's what they call a "musou", "hack and slash", or "Warriors-style" game, the type of fighting game where you take out a dozen minor enemies with each sweep of your sword and most of the gameplay revolves around unlocking and mastering roughly twenty different playable characters with unique movesets. it reminds me a lot of mass effect 3 multiplayer, which i miss dearly, in the grindy base gameplay loop and the ways you can mix and match playstyles on different battle maps, so it's a deeply comforting game for me even before you get into the story aspects, but i'm in the mid-to-late game and i've just unlocked some character kits that take a good deal of focus and thought to use well. focus and thought are things i do not have in reliable supply lately. also because i love it so much, i can't play it with the sound off like i do most games, i have to actually pay attention. the voice acting is all superb and so is the music.)
anyway so in botw i'm working on a challenge that is definitely not the intended way to play but doesn't take too much effort to incorporate. see, you have your postapocalyptic quasi-medieval world where a hundred years ago everything went to shit, and you have a few villages of humans and other sapient species interspersed with a whole lot of camps of monsters. the monsters have a respawn mechanic called the "blood moon" where every 3-6ish hours of gameplay (it's 3 hours of time spent in the game world outside of menus, conversations, cutscenes, or other clock-pauses), the moon rises blood red and at midnight all the dead monsters and weapons respawn. since weapons can break and you need monster loot drops for various purposes, this is a handy way to make sure you never run out of either. but there's a very simple save-reload glitch that bypasses the blood moon and keeps everything from respawning while telling the game to give you another 3 hours of gameplay before the next blood moon.
so my eventual goal on this savefile is to have a world where all possible enemies have been killed and not respawned. there are a few enemy types that will always spawn in randomly, like skeleton monsters at night, so you can't have a 100% peaceful world, but you can get pretty close.
(the final boss also never stays dead, because zelda games are one of the categories with a "point of no return" just before the endgame where you get a save created, go beat the final boss, and then when you load back into the world after the credits roll, you're at that final savepoint so you can go do whatever else you didn't already complete. you get a little star on your savefile name denoting that you have beaten the final boss, and a couple of extra functions open up like the 100% map completion readout. i kind of want to do the final boss as the very last enemy, and it's really tempting to try to be so thorough that i'll have 100% map completion right afterwards, but i suspect it's far more likely i'll wind up with 99.6% or some such. but that's likely years down the line.)
i have also not been playing much pokemon. i switched over to breath of the wild, which would be easier if the shelter wifi didn't block all video game related websites including the interactive map i use to check off the collectibles. (it doesn't block youtube for some reason, so it seems unlikely to be a question of bandwidth, just "nobody on the resident wifi here should be able to access ign or gamefaqs because clearly then they'll be lazy Bad Homeless and never leave" or, you know. something to that effect?)
(like most games with large maps, botw has a somewhat obscene number of minor collectibles to encourage you to explore every nook and cranny. notably, there are 900 mini-puzzles that each grant an item called a "korok seed". they're usually some sort of simple deal where you complete a pattern of natural objects like rocks or apples, but if you're trying to go for all 900, you *really* want to track them as you go so you don't wind up with 899 and no idea where to look.)
i don't feel especially like doing a lot of combat right now, but handily if you have the botw dlc (which i do) you can get the majora's mask wearable item pretty much immediately after the tutorial. rather than making you megalomaniacal or doing terrible things to the moon, it causes most common enemy types not to attack you. so i've been running around doing korok puzzles that would normally be much more inconvenient because there are enemies around. also opening up the enemies' treasure chests and yoinking their precious bundle of five fire arrows or whatever. (some enemy camps have treasure chests that won't open until all the enemies are dead, but i'm basically ignoring those for right now.)
it's... a very big game. just, extraordinarily large. a correct size for what it's doing, but there are people who've played it for thousands of hours and not seen everything. i originally picked it up because, well, i had bought a switch so i could play animal crossing with leia and we could visit each other, and i felt silly having an entire console with only one video game. and everyone spoke highly of breath of the wild, and while i usually avoid things that seem overhyped, i knew my favorite part of mass effect was driving the mako around on random unexplored worlds, so i figured i might enjoy a game whose selling point was "THE open world game". which it turns out i do!
(i also enjoy the spinoff, age of calamity, which is not open world at all but does use the same world and characters in a prequel story which, spoilers, turns out halfway through to be an everybody lives AU and also pulls off the only really earned "harsh parental figure Actually Cared and is forgiven" I've ever seen -- not only was I not screaming "let the bastard die unmourned" at the screen, which is my usual reaction to attempted redemptions of harsh parental figures, I actually bought the game because I couldn't stop thinking about that arc specifically. It's the thematic and emotional center of the game and it utterly works. God, what a game. It's really hard to explain why my favorite game of all time, dethroning mass effect trilogy after a solid decade, is a combat-centric spinoff most people probably never heard of, but it's like the other half to Breath of the Wild's story.)
(i haven't picked up age of calamity in a long time, because it is all combat apart from the cutscenes -- it's what they call a "musou", "hack and slash", or "Warriors-style" game, the type of fighting game where you take out a dozen minor enemies with each sweep of your sword and most of the gameplay revolves around unlocking and mastering roughly twenty different playable characters with unique movesets. it reminds me a lot of mass effect 3 multiplayer, which i miss dearly, in the grindy base gameplay loop and the ways you can mix and match playstyles on different battle maps, so it's a deeply comforting game for me even before you get into the story aspects, but i'm in the mid-to-late game and i've just unlocked some character kits that take a good deal of focus and thought to use well. focus and thought are things i do not have in reliable supply lately. also because i love it so much, i can't play it with the sound off like i do most games, i have to actually pay attention. the voice acting is all superb and so is the music.)
anyway so in botw i'm working on a challenge that is definitely not the intended way to play but doesn't take too much effort to incorporate. see, you have your postapocalyptic quasi-medieval world where a hundred years ago everything went to shit, and you have a few villages of humans and other sapient species interspersed with a whole lot of camps of monsters. the monsters have a respawn mechanic called the "blood moon" where every 3-6ish hours of gameplay (it's 3 hours of time spent in the game world outside of menus, conversations, cutscenes, or other clock-pauses), the moon rises blood red and at midnight all the dead monsters and weapons respawn. since weapons can break and you need monster loot drops for various purposes, this is a handy way to make sure you never run out of either. but there's a very simple save-reload glitch that bypasses the blood moon and keeps everything from respawning while telling the game to give you another 3 hours of gameplay before the next blood moon.
so my eventual goal on this savefile is to have a world where all possible enemies have been killed and not respawned. there are a few enemy types that will always spawn in randomly, like skeleton monsters at night, so you can't have a 100% peaceful world, but you can get pretty close.
(the final boss also never stays dead, because zelda games are one of the categories with a "point of no return" just before the endgame where you get a save created, go beat the final boss, and then when you load back into the world after the credits roll, you're at that final savepoint so you can go do whatever else you didn't already complete. you get a little star on your savefile name denoting that you have beaten the final boss, and a couple of extra functions open up like the 100% map completion readout. i kind of want to do the final boss as the very last enemy, and it's really tempting to try to be so thorough that i'll have 100% map completion right afterwards, but i suspect it's far more likely i'll wind up with 99.6% or some such. but that's likely years down the line.)
