Yea it's been 2 months since I did one of these. That's mostly because I haven't had much to talk about really. I mean I did end up going out of town kind of last minute a couple weeks ago and had a few days without videos but it was so last minute that I didn't even have time to write one of these, but I did get that update video up eventually. Anyways, channel important news first and that's that both Dark Souls 2 and Wind Waker are going along smoothly. I didn't get time to record Wind Waker this week so I'll probably run out of videos before I get a chance to record again. In other words, probably no videos going up on Sunday and possibly Monday as well.
That being said, I've so far lived up to my claim of being active on that pixelmon server, and have logged on for at least a couple hours on an almost daily basis over there. Honestly there's just something relaxing about spending hours ev training random pokemon and leveling them up to 100 for no real reason other than to have options for tournaments.
So, where does that leave this update? I kinda arbitrarily decided over a year ago to focus this blog mostly on the youtube channel and my gaming stuff and alienate all talk of anime/manga but I'm not sure I want to continue running my blog that way anymore. I mean, there's just times where weeks go by and I literally have nothing to really talk about so it just doesn't get updated. There's also the fact that this blog is in serious need of being upkept if I'm gonna keep LP statuses here but I really only come here when I have something to talk about so what ends up happening is stuff just falls into disrepair pretty quickly.
One thing I can talk about that is gaming related is I found this site called game-oldies.com, which has a ridiculous amount of older games for multiple consoles available to play online for free. I prefer to use emulators, but just browsing the listings for SNES games found me an old game I used to own but could never get too far into. JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings game for SNES isn't an amazing game by any means, and it certainly isn't any Chrono Trigger, but nevertheless I've always wanted to go back and beat the game once and for all. So I spent about 4 hours playing it, before hitting a progression breaking bug. Because the game saves using a stupid password system and I hadn't saved before hitting the bug I basically lost all progress. However despite the game being not great I did enjoy the nostalgia of it, and will probably restart and continue it using a ROM so that I have more control over the saves. I did more looking into the game and it turns out that because the game sold so poorly there were never any sequels made, so part 1 is the only part that exists. It's not a great game but it isn't overly terrible, far worse games exist for sure, but yet it saddens me that it never got a sequel because I'd be down for playing more of it. Sure the hit detection and enemy/ally AI needs lots of work but despite these problems there's a decent game beneath them and one that I'd rather enjoy playing.
That being said, the game is borderline unbeatable without a walkthrough because there's a few key items you need to be able to advance into the final dungeon, and not only that but you need another set of key items to even be allowed to get to that area. This wouldn't be an issue in a smaller scale game, but caves in this game are literally labyrinths designed to test your patience and as you would expect the key items are indeed hidden inside these labyrinths. Not to mention the halfway point of this game is the Barrow Downs, which are a hell unlike anything I've seen since the 64 floor teleporter dungeon in Phantasy Star 2 (which for the record that game at least came with a full map of each dungeon, but the Lord of the Rings game does not). To set the tone for those who aren't aware it's around 16 screens, each screen containing around 2-10 caves, some of these caves link to other areas while others are just dead ends with items, and others yet are dead ends with key items required to make progress. Keep in mind each cave is a miniature maze in and of itself, so navigating the area is bound to be a test of trial and error as well as patience because most of these caves are multiple screens large. Not to mention the area introduces poisonous snakes into the game, and if you get poisoned only the moss found in certain caves can cure it, which means that if you aren't lucky enough to stumble upon some moss you're basically screwed. On top of that once you leave that area you still have more forests to trek through before arriving in the town of Bree. Personally I'd never been able to pass beyond Farmer Maggot's farm as a kid, and now that I've played 4 hours into the game about 19 years later I can see why. I'm actually amazed I even got through Hobbiton to get on the road to the river crossing at age 4.
I'm actually considering getting good at clearing the game, and then possibly attempting speedruns if I can clear the game quickly enough. The main issue would be getting every item required to enter the final dungeon and remembering the path to get them all. Mainly I'd need to have a mental map of every area of the game and that's a daunting task because from all that I've heard the Mines of Moria themselves are an ungodly maze on a level far beyond the Barrow Downs, and the Barrow Downs are already downright absurd.
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