(TL;DRI made a short Pokemon fangame that gives you the experience of catching a certain Mythical Pokemon! And no, it's not Arceus.)
What? Who's this?
It's Arceus!!
And it's a real, not-at-all-hacked one. I got it back in 2017ish (holy hay that's eight years ago now) from my ex, when we were still close. They had been talking with one of their coworkers and found out that that coworker had an event gen 4 Arceus from Toys 'R' Us way back then. They weren't interested in Pokemon anymore so they traded it to my ex who traded it to me, because Arceus is my favorite Pokemon (tied with Swoobat). And I'm like omg I have a legitimate fateful encounter Arceus![^2]
One of the reasons this is Awesome is that, well, back in 2017 you could not get Arceus without attending an event. Nowadays you get one for fully completing Pokemon Legends: Arceus, and then another one in Brilliant Diamond / Shining Pearl if you've finished PLA. But there's another reason this is Epic, and it's because having an Arceus in HeartGold / SoulSilver actually unlocks a secret area that cannot be otherwise accessed.
Back in 2018, I was really into Celeste. It was pretty decidedly my favorite game at the time; the gameplay is fun, the music and art are beautiful, and the depiction of mental health issues was very striking. I highly recommend it, in case you've somehow made it this long without playing it.
One of the things that I got pretty invested in was the Golden Strawberries. Once you get far enough into the postgame, you unlock a special golden strawberry at the beginning of each stage, which you have to escort to the end without dying. In the past, I've tended not to enjoy deathless challenges because they felt like pointless difficulty padding, but there was something about Celeste that made it feel achievable, like you'd be able to get there if you just practiced hard enough.
There were 24 levels in the game at that point, and I made it my goal to get all 24 golden strawberries. I wrote about my progress as I went, and posted little video clips when I could. One of my favorite moments in this was practicing 6-a while sitting on the sofa at the office on my lunch break, and then suddenly realizing I was almost at the end. I can still remember the befuddled face my coworker made at me when I collected the berry. I managed to conquer all of the A-sides, all of the C-sides, and the first four B-sides, which meant my next task was 5-b.
So, a little time has passed. Seven years, in fact. Trying to get the 5-b golden strawberry proved too difficult for me back in 2018. The cycles and the spinners and the Theo section are all pretty intimidating. I even learned the spike jump skip in the second checkpoint so I could skip a room, but I still barely made it into the third checkpoint most of the time. I gave up on it eventually, and took a long break from Celeste.
The Witness was released on January 26th of 2016 at 5pm UTC, and by the end of the day, it had already been patched twice. It would, in fact, receive another 7 patches before the week was up. None of these updates changed the content of the game, of course. They were all about fixing bugs.
This is not uncommon when it comes to video games in the modern era. No matter how much you test software before release, there are always issues that quality control misses. Sometimes this has to do with the different technical environment that release puts your game in, and sometimes it has to do with gameplay bugs that only a wider audience can reveal for you.
Speedrunners have an interesting relationship with game updates. A game is usually updated in good faith, with the goal of bettering the casual player's experience. Stuff like lag reduction and increased leniency in difficult portions of the game are generally considered positive by everyone. But there are some changes that are beneficial to casual players which hinder speedrunners: most notably, the removal of useful glitches.
Today, on the nine year anniversary of its release, I will be talking about how The Witness has changed for speedrunners over time, and the history of New Version vs Old Version.
Disclaimer as per usual that this post contains a lot of spoilers for The Witness, including major mechanic reveals and also some full puzzle solutions. It's also long; I'm talking 13,000 words long. It got so long I had to widen a database column and split part of it into a separate post. Have fun!
Well folks, I really did it this time. My propensity for prolix loquaciousness and overly comprehensive tutorialization has aggrandized to a heretofore novel level. I was working on a post about the history of updates to The Witness and how they affected speedrunners, and it got so long that it overflowed the database column (it had a max of 64kb, which I hit at about 11k words). I've resized that field now, but I had been considering breaking out some of the content into a separate post anyway, and I took this as a sign that I should get on that.
Old Version has a bunch of cool quirks and glitches, but there's one trick in particular that I spent a disproportionate amount of time talking about. It makes use of a glitch that no one thought was useful, it prompted discussions about whether you could mess with game files during a run, and research had to be done into the game's internal workings, the results of which ended up being important beyond just this trick. And also I was "at the scene of the crime", as they say.
There's a game called Lingo that I am both an avid player and modder of. It's like a cross between The Witness, Antichamber, and word puzzles. You're trapped in a maze of non-euclidean hallways filled with word puzzles and you have to figure out the rules to those puzzles yourself. There's also way more base game content than you'd expect. You should play it! There's my spiel.
In fact, if you have any interest in playing this game, you may want to give at least the first level a good try before reading on in this post, because towards the end I spoil some of the puzzle mechanics.
Anyway, I said that I both play and mod this game. I've mentioned in a previous post that I'm involved in a randomizer project called Archipelago. It's an open source framework for randomizing multiple games together, and I maintain the randomizer for Lingo. It's been a lot of fun to work on over the past couple of years, and I've continued adding features to it long after release. One of the features that people have continually asked for since the very beginning is new puzzle generation.
I didn't grow up playing Legend of Zelda games. I was strictly about Mario and Pokemon games. I don't even think I knew Zelda was a Nintendo franchise, as a kid. It seemed so much darker and edgier than the games I was used to playing.
Because of this, it wasn't until 2018 that I actually played a Zelda game. I can't remember what I played first; it was either the original Legend of Zelda, or it was Breath of the Wild, which is funny because that's literally the widest possible range of Zelda games that existed at the time. I didn't really like either of them. The original Legend of Zelda is very obtuse and difficult. You basically have to look stuff up in order to know where to go, and the difficulty is very punishing. Breath of the Wild has a similar directionless feeling, and I really couldn't stand the fact that weapons would break on you. They're both excellent, critically acclaimed games; they're just not for me, per se.
The next Zelda games I tried playing are probably not ones most people would automatically think of: Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons. They're a paired set of games for the Gameboy Color, intended to be completed in either order, and playing one gives you a password for the other game that allows it to act as a sort of continuation of the other. Playing both games gives you access to the true final boss, and ties the story together. I'd read online that Ages focuses on puzzles while Seasons focuses on battles, so I decided to play Ages first, as I like puzzles more. And I loved it.
Hey all, I'm here to talk about The Witness again. When it comes to speedrunning video games, it's uncommon for players to play the game just as the developers intended. Speedruns usually incorporate tricks that allow you to do things faster than you're supposed to or that allow you to entirely skip doing something ordinarily required. And very often, these tricks take advantage of glitches in the game, to achieve something that goes past the boundary of the laws of the game.
The Witness, for a very long time, was almost entirely glitchless. The only real exception was Windmill Cycle Skip, which was discovered within the first couple of weeks of the game's release, and saved some time in 100% and 99.8%. I'll talk about it more when I talk about Windmill. But other than that, we were really just playing the game as intended, as quickly as possible.
There were a few tricks we used that seemed like glitches, like Jungle Wall Skip and panel sniping. Even Latch Skip is arguably not a glitch, and rather just an exploit of the game's error correcting functionality, although people will argue you on this one. People had definitely discovered things that were glitches, some of which would become very important later on (e.g. the Theatre Pause Glitch), but at the time they just seemed like random bugs with no real use.
And then everything changed when we found out that walls aren't real.
How many of you here have personally witnessed a total eclipse of the sun? To stand, one day, in the shadow of the moon is one of my humble goals in life.
(Spoiler warning for The Witness)
Most of the people reading this blog probably know that I am fond of a video game called The Witness. "Fond" may not be a strong enough word -- it's my favourite game I've ever played, and I've been speedrunning it for over three years at this point. If you don't know what it is, it's a puzzle game set in a 3D environment, where you solve grid puzzles on screens scattered across a deserted island. It's all about epiphany-driven gameplay; the game doesn't tell you anything about how the puzzles work. You have to figure it out yourself, and when you do it's usually a really satisfying moment.
Now, I've been playing this game for a long time, and I've memorised the solutions to every single puzzle. Most of the time, speedruns of this game are pretty straightforward. You have to solve certain sets of puzzles in order to get to a specific goal, be it the main end of the game, or the secret end, or the post-game level, etc. And in order to be fast at that, you have to 1) know the solutions to the puzzles, and 2) be skilled at inputting them. Both of these requirements allow for you to get gradual improvement the more you play, while allowing for a high skill ceiling. And that's it!
I've been talking on Twitter a good amount about the fact that I'm making a Mother 3 fangame. I get a lot of questions about it, so I figured it was time to make an FAQ!
if flint doesn't have anything nice to say, he shouldn't say anything at all. i implemented yes/no prompts in my game. #mother3pic.twitter.com/1FAqCsem6K
I love top 10 lists, and I love Super Mario Sunshine, so I've been watching a lot of people's top 10 hardest Shine Sprite videos recently. While they were enjoyable, I found myself disagreeing with some of their choices. So, I decided to do my own! This is really just a top 5 list, though, because while I could find 5 other Shines that I found difficult to do, I didn't have as much to say about them as these 5. So, without further ado, here are the five Shine Sprites that I considered to be the hardest to get in my playthrough:
5. The Runaway Ferris Wheel
There's some difficult platforming to be done here, but you won't be seeing much of it.
I don't usually get angry at video games, but this level made me angry. Not because the platforming was too difficult -- it wasn't easy, but had I been unencumbered I'm sure I would have found it a welcome challenge. No, the problem is that the camera refuses to allow you to play this level. No matter what you do, no matter how high up the back of the Ferris wheel you get, the camera will be fighting you the entire time, trying to rotate around to the front of the structure. The problem with this is that you are then completely blocked from view. This can happen at any moment, and falling all the way back down to the beginning of the section just because the camera randomly swiveled away is completely infuriating. Regardless of how difficult or easy the actual level is ignoring the camera, the camera is part of gameplay and here is treating itself as a game mechanic.
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