Welcome to Rupee Shards, my own little world for whatever I feel like writing about. (Gosh!) For those who don't know me, I'm an administrator of OtakuBoards and a theOtaku chat moderator, and I've been hanging around here since September 2001. I'm an avid gamer and anime fan so most of what you'll see here will relate to one or the other.
Nintendo WFC Friend Codes
Wii Number: 8387-7566-7057-0450
Super Smash Bros. Brawl: 1504-5385-2566 (Des)
Rock Band 2: 4667-9521-5706
Mario Kart Wii: 4124-7294-7708
Animal Crossing: Wild World: 4553-2727-4864 (Desbreko in Kakariko)
Well now, I never thought I'd care enough to make this fight happen with no damage but here it is. Since all the previous strategies I'd come up with required a large amount of luck to pull off no damage with, I never cared to spend the time replaying it over and over again until I got a perfect fight. (Also, I just don't like this battle; I was willing to spend over six hours on Ridley because it was a fun fight and entirely skill-based but this one is rather boring.) Some recent comments on my other two Phantoon videos, though, got me thinking about different strategies for the fight. Thus, after a few hours of pondering, testing, and practice, I ended up with this video.
The main difference between this video and my previous one is how I deal with Phantoon instantly appearing after being invisible. There's no way to predict where Phantoon will appear, which means no way to avoid it if it happens to appear on top of you. This was the big sticking point that kept me from pulling off no damage before.
Now, the main tip I've seen for avoiding Phantoon's instant appearances is to keep moving. This advice is worthless, however, because without being able to predict where Phantoon will appear it's just as likely you'll run into Phantoon appearing in front of you as you are to avoid Phantoon appearing where you moved from. I'm not sure why people think this is a good idea because I've tried it and the number of hits and dodges were pretty much the same as standing motionless.
A tip that actually makes sense, on the other hand, is to minimize the area where you can be hit by making yourself smaller – you can do this by rolling into a ball. Assuming Phantoon's appearance location is completely random, taking up one third the space while morphed into a ball would result in getting hit a third as often. I tested this idea and found that it works very well; while morphed into a ball, only very, very rarely did Phantoon appear low enough in the room to hit me.
So, having found a viable strategy, I gained the motivation to sit and practice enough to pull off a no damage fight. There was still some luck involved, since there are still situations where Phantoon can trap you with too many flames to avoid, but little enough to be tolerable.
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Phantoon beaten without taking damage. Played in real time on Snes9x v1.43+.
Phantoon is the hardest boss in the game to avoid damage on due to the amount of luck required to avoid some of its attacks. The strategy shown in this video minimizes your chances of getting trapped by unavoidable hits but it's still not entirely consistent.
Phantoon's normal attack pattern is fairly simple: It will drop flames for a bit while visible, then open its eye -- during which time it's vulnerable to attack -- while sending out a ring of flames around itself. After that, Phantoon will be invisible while dropping flames until it appears with its eye open, along with a line of flames that will drop from the ceiling. Phantoon will continue appearing with lines of flames until it's damaged, at which point its attacks will reset to the start of the pattern.
Now, the first thing you need to know is that the flames Phantoon drops from its closed eye won't hurt you until they've touched the ground or a wall. And the second thing you need to know is that you can use the Charge Beam to pass through all its flames unharmed. Simply charge up a beam shot and spin jump through them. This will save you from vast amounts of damage.
It's also important to know how Phantoon will react to certain attacks. If you hit it with a super missile it will cause Phantoon to appear at the top of the room and send eight waves of flames down at you, but these are easy to avoid by using the Charge Beam. If you hit Phantoon with a charged Ice/Wave/Spazer Beam shot, it will immediately disappear. If you hit Phantoon with a charged beam shot with only one or two of the other beams equipped, or with a missile, Phantoon will fly around the room for a bit, during which time it will be vulnerable to attack but will also damage you if it runs into you. Afterwards, Phantoon will always restart its attacks from the beginning of the pattern.
Yes, I'm jumping on the bandwagon, but I'm doing things a bit differently. Because everyone loves my screen shot spam in the chat, right?
Also, fair warning: SCREEN SHOTS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Minami-ke: Okaer...
I just had to save this epic moment in the Anime Club tonight. It contains a spoiler for Lovely Complex, though, so you might not want to read it if you plan on watching the show.
Screen shot plus log on the next page.
...
What have I been doing the last few days? Typesetting Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2. And, um, more typesetting. And... that's nearly it. There's three chapters in the episode and the first one was a horrible pain to typeset. Unlike ep1, where there got to be more and more typesetting as the episode went on, ep2 starts out incredibly thick and gradually thins out.
This lovely little screen shows exactly how much of a pain it can be trying to find space for horizontally written English among vertically written Japanese. Or, rather, it shows how it can sometimes be flat out impossible. Have fun turning your head sideways and squinting at that schedule. I know I did.
I think this screen must take the cake for most subs on screen at once in the entire history of anime. The Japanese text in the background is moving in a spiral pattern around the kanji in the center, which is basically impossible to replicate with soft subs so we get a wall of text instead. On the plus side, they're soft subs so they can be turned off to see the original scene in all its spiral power glory if you really like.
Shots of newspapers, when they actually have real text on them, suck. They suck hard. Not only do they have tons of text, it tends to be crammed together with little or no space to fit in the English translations. And, in this case, it's at a funny angle and curved.
I don't like to do overlays and replace the Japanese text with the English typesetting but there was no other good, no decent, not even a bad place to put the list on the left. (But, again, that's the beauty of soft subs; you can always turn them off.) Getting the overlay to look decent also sucked, by the way. The lines between the text are actually a bunch of em dashes (—) in a row, using the box border setting to fill in all the space between them with black background, clipped to display only in the area of the original list and rotated to get the angle and spacing right. (And that's the simple way to go about it; if you want to use the ASS format's vector drawing features it can get even more complicated.) Then the text was placed in separate subtitles on top of that.
Thankfully most of the typesetting in the second chapter is very easy and there's relatively little in the third. I think there's only two or three scenes left that I'll end up raging at while working on them.
What I feared yesterday has come to pass. I woke up this morning with a sore throat that somehow manages to feel both dry and like there's gunk from my sinuses running down it at the same time. Joy. I'm not sure if I actually have a fever, but if I do it's at least not a bad one. I've been a slight bit dizzy at times but that could just be the sinus congestion throwing my balance off. My sense of taste is also a bit off.
Anyway, rhythm: I has it. I moved up to medium drums in Rock Band 2 yesterday after playing a few songs on easy and figuring out what the heck I was doing. Lots of five stars so far, with the occasional four creeping in. (WTF is with Tangled up in Blue by Bob Dylan? The actual beats in it are simple to play but there's not a steady pattern anywhere to be found in that song.) Sometimes it takes me a bit to pick up the beat, but once I figure it out I can usually stick to it consistently. Like, 600+ note streak on a song without having played it on drums before, consistently. I figure I'll finish out most of the tour on medium to refine the muscle memory and get better at fill transitions—I still accidentally hit the edges of the drums instead of the pads sometimes lol—then move up to hard. I may just end up enjoying drums more than guitar.
If anyone wants to take a look, I made a profile on rockband.com. Not much there yet but it's got a picture of my character. Yes, I made him look like Link. I was browsing through the various clothes and happened to notice this particular combo. I dunno if I'll keep him that way but for now I find it amusing. It's just too bad that there's no pointy hat to go with the rest of the outfit.
Jester is my brother's character. I have serious doubts about his taste in headgear.
My 21st birthday went well, better than I thought it would. I kind of expected to have to crash at my friend's place for a day or something to avoid my brothers trying to get me drunk. The two oldest returned home to the Bay Area before that, though, so nothing ended up happening. In fact, the whole thing was rather uneventful other than having some friends over Friday night to play RB2. But that's fine by me since I don't like making a huge deal out of my birthday.
Work on Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2 is slow but continuing. I'm currently waiting for more sign translations from Dagger so go poke her if you're impatient. :p
And speaking of anime, the new winter season shows have started. Shin put up another thread on OB for talking about them and I listed the ones I'm interested in. I haven't seen much of them yet but once I do I'll probably post more thoughts in there.
