pyromagnestir

@mooseymcman: huh, didn't notice that.

@mooseymcman:

I kept using it accidentally, I didn't want to waste it on a stupid group of lizalfos or minor test of strength guardian but kept doing so because I couldn't figure out if there was some way to cancel out of it or something.

@mooseymcman:

Completion percentage doesn't seem to show you until after you "Defeat Ganon" and load up the save that has a little marker on it that indicates you beat the game, then when you check the overworld map the game shows you a completion percentage in the bottom left above the time/temperature. In the quest journal it also seemed to give a ratio of completed quests to total quests for each category, which I don't think was there before. So I know I'm missing 5 or so shrines but only 2 shrine quests.

The fucking lynels still mostly kick my ass. The only reason I ever kill them is I have a ton of healing and attack up items which means I outlast them, and the urbosa ability you get hits them pretty hard. Basically the only difference between them is the higher tier they are, the longer it takes to outlast them.

Sometimes if I am enjoying a game so much that I don't want it to end, I will occasionally just stop playing the game so that it doesn't end.

So basically you could say the problem is I don't want to stop playing a game and my solution is to stop playing said game.

When this happens I will usually get around to finishing it at some point, probably a few months but in some instances maybe even a year or so down the line, and in some instances I haven't yet gone back to finish it at all many years after the fact., though that seems to happen if the game doesn't have much of a story.

It's like I need time to make accept the idea that something so good will be finished. I don't often play games multiple times and even if I do, it's it's a different experience from playing something for the first time.

Most recent example I can think of off the top of my head is Metroid Prime 3. I played it several years after it was released, maybe around 2012? and actually it wasn't that I necessarily loved Metroid Prime 3, I thought it was fine but though I enjoyed it I was mildly disappointed it had less of a focus on the nifty puzzles previous games had and more of a focus on shooting than the first couple games, at the time I was just a bit bummed about how it seems very possible that it could be the last new Metroid Prime game I'd ever play, and I really like the Prime games. In that case I only held off a month or so before finishing it.

Oh, now that I think about it I actually more recently did this with Earthbound, which I played for the first time a couple years back. Started it around February 2015 and played it like crazy, but then when I neared the end I stopped. Finished it around November later that year.

This could have happened with Zelda but I was too addicted so couldn't actually make myself stop playing and it got to the point where I'd done so much and had so little left to do that I didn't have much choice but beat the game if I were gonna keep playing. So I did.

@mooseymcman:

I actually hadn't read your blog earlier because I hadn't finished the game yet and wanted to read it all in one go after I had.

Well now I have, and I pretty much mostly agree with all that you say.

I too found it odd that some shrine quests with long buildups lead to shrines with puzzles inside while some that you could seemingly accidentally stumble upon lead to a shrine that basically just said "hey congrats you did it here you go!"

I too felt the dungeons were a bit underwhelming, or at least had a serious case of diminishing returns after the first one as I also went from "oh man this is cool!" while doing the first one to "eh I wish there were a real dungeon or something a bit more different" while doing the later ones. The build up to reach all the dungeons felt formulaic, which isn't how I felt about most other parts of the game. And the fact that boss fights were even more disappointing than dungeons was a real bummer seeing as Zelda games have always had clever boss fights. Surely they could have found cool ways to use the climbing, jumping, and various other abilities you have at your disposal and turn them into something interesting. And not only were they not clever, they weren't challenging. I heard them mention this on the bombcast, I too had much more trouble with the fucking lynels than I did with even Ganon. The only clever boss fight was probably that one you do after the stealth sequence.

Which leads me to I guess the biggest difference which is the stealth part gave me no trouble, beyond me not finding the not even-really-that secret exit, where my own confusion lead to me wandering back into the room full of enemies then getting caught and having to do the whole thing over once.

Also even though there aren't any cool secrets as far as I know I still think the mere presence of the dragons is cool. But yes surely they coulda done something more interesting with them, too. I was hoping I'd get to talk to them at some point. Maybe there will be some dlc all about dragons and bears and doggies?! I'D LIKE THAT.

And of course there's a long list of things that I could nitpick if asked, but despite the minor and more major annoyances, qualms, and disappointments I was still so absorbed in this game and it was a truly wonderful experience that I kinda wished didn't have to end. The only reason I actually beat Ganon was I was running out of shrines to do. I completed 114 of them and for the most part don't have any clue where the ones I'm missing could even be. Also did a fair amount of the side quests and found 180 korok seeds. Yet according to the game I'm only 36% complete. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?! Besides of course the fact that there are a looooot of fucking korok seeds.

@fatalbanana: You could also freeze the guards with the upgraded stasis power and run right by most of them. That's how I did it.

They didn't stay in stasis for long, but it seemed long enough to run past and there was only one room that had more than one of those patrol guys near each other and you could pretty much just go up a ladder and walk across some high platforms to skip right by most of them, so alls I had to do was freeze the last dude guarding the exit door.

Then I didn't see the hidden exit in that room, went back into the main room thinking "is there another exit I missed?" and got caught trying to sneak back in to see if there was... But I figured out what I missed the next time I did the sequence.

@mooseymcman: It wasn't bear murder if anything it was involuntary bearslaughter.

Man if you could find a copy of NBA Street Vol 2 and sit those kids in front of a PS2 you'd probably be all set.

Even my friends who hate hip hop and basketball ended up having fun with that game back in the day.

I wish they'd make a new NBA Street game...

Finished a couple books yesterday.

Finally finished Che Guevara. It was quite interesting. The guy certainly did not have a boring life.

Also finished Station Eleven. I liked it, but I didn't like it as much as I hoped. It had an odd structure, it jumped around a split story line that had some parts taking place before a super flu kills most of the people on earth and another that takes place in the dystopian world after, and I think my biggest problem was I didn't quite see the point of the pre flu story line. Now I'm a very shallow reader, so I didn't really try to dig too deep for any sort of message or meaning to it, but even if it did have some meaning it just wasn't as interesting as the stuff that happened after and the way it mixed both stories together by jumping around the timeline quite frequently made the pacing of the story a bit off in my opinion.

Now on the fiction front I'm gonna start a novel called Under the Udala Trees, which apparently is about a young girl who is a Nigerian refugee sent away during a civil war who meets and falls in love with another girl. The past couple years I've been trying to read more that falls outside my usual comfort zone of fantasy/sci fi/historical fiction/horror/some combination thereof and this book certainly isn't just another one of those books, so now I'll give it a shot.

And for nonfiction I'm waiting for my library to send me a copy of Hero of the Empire about Winston Churchill during the Boer war.

Someone activated Drew. It probably had something to do with the meme.