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)
New video project, yay! I decided to play through Zelda: A Link to the Past again (for, like, the fourteenth time) and record walkthroughs for the dungeons. The first dungeon here is easy, to the point that I rarely even get hit in it, but you gotta start somewhere. Once I get into the Dark World dungeons the videos should be a lot more interesting.
I'm also now encoding my videos so that there will be high quality versions available.
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Zelda A Link to the Past - East Palace
My complete East Palace walkthrough for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Played in real time on Snes9x v1.43+ with re-records used to optimize video length.
Equipment checklist: 5 Hearts, Magic Powder
To obtain the magic powder, go to the Lost Woods, find the mushroom, and bring it to the witch living across the river to the east of the graveyard.
[00:13] Running the gauntlet
Duck into one of the side alcoves if a large ball comes out.
[04:33] Anti-fairy into fairy
Sprinkling some magic powder on an Anti-fairy will transform it into a normal fairy, which can be a great source of hearts in dungeons.
[05:23] Boss: Armos Knights
Use your new bow and arrows on the Armos Knights and they'll die in three shots each. Retreat to a bottom corner of the room to avoid getting hit when they spread out into a ring and punch a hole through their formation when they form a line at the top of the room.
I also have another no damage video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA57EPQxoaY
While playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl with people online I've encountered what I've dubbed YES moments, after Dane Cook's line in his Struck by a Vehicle routine. The bold and underline are important. They happen when I see a setup and just know what the other person is going to do a couple seconds in advance, letting me counter and pull off a big smash.
The best examples are with meteor smashes, used to spike people into the pit while they're trying to jump back to the platform after I've hit them off. Sometimes I'll see the angle of their trajectory as they fly off and will immediately be able to predict where they'll be as they recover. This is important because most meteor smashes have a delay on their activation and/or they only last a short time, so you have to be very precise in both positioning and timing to hit with them. So, when I send someone flying, I'll get that YES feeling, jump out to intercept, and pull off a perfect meteor smash to KO them.
It's hard to describe the sense of satisfaction I get when I pull off one of these moments but it's totally awesome.
I also have an amusing little SSBB-related story that happened a couple days ago: I was lying in bed, waiting to fall asleep, and was imagining various scenarios of playing Samus vs Wolf and ways to get back onto the platform against his edge guarding. (Yes, I think about these things even while not playing.) One of them ended with me landing right on Wolf's up-smash and being sent flying into the air (note to self: don't jump directly off the edge over Wolf). And then my left index finger reflexively curled, in the same motion as if I were pressing the L button to do an air dodge and slow my flight through the air. It made me pause as I realized what had just happened and then I laughed at how ingrained Smash Bros. is in my brain.
Yes, that's right, I made cupcakes last night. They are delicious yellow cupcakes with home made chocolate frosting. Are you jealous? I bet you're jealous.
In other news, my What Color Link Are You? quiz is back up. It was lost during the transition to Version Vibrant so, when the site started accepting quiz submissions again, I decided to fix it up a little before resubmitting it. Almost all of it has been rewritten to be clearer and funnier, and I made new image results as well.
Someone asked me about this boss in the comments on my D-Rex video so I decided to make a video for it. I hadn't played Mega Man X in quite a while so I was a bit rusty at first (accidentally doing regular wall jumps instead of dash wall jumping got me killed a fair bit...) but playing through the first two Sigma levels to reach Rangda Bangda got me back into the groove. Though it helped that this boss doesn't require especially fine control.
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Mega Man X - Rangda Bangda - No damage
Rangda Bangda beaten without taking damage using the X-buster. Its weakness is the Chameleon Sting.
Rangda Bangda is made up of three parts—two eyes and a nose—which will take turns attacking. While one is active the other two can neither take nor cause damage so don't worry about them. And, while there's only one life bar on screen, each section must be destroyed separately. Rangda Bangda's attacks themselves are not very powerful or hard to avoid but it's instant death if you get knocked onto the spikes in the center of the floor.
The eyes have three ways of attacking, which you'll be able to tell apart by their color when they open. Blue means that it will fly out in a straight line towards you, which is easily dodged. Green means it will shoot a single fireball directly at you, which is also easily avoided but doesn't allow much time to counter-attack. Red means it will shoot a spread of three fireballs at you and sometimes also fly towards you at the same time. There are a number of ways to dodge the blue and green attacks, depending on where you are in the room, but for red attacks you should always stay on the opposite side of the room so you'll be able to slip between the fireballs.
The hardest part of the fight comes when the nose attacks. It will close the walls in on either side of the room so that the only floor left is covered by the spikes, forcing you to cling to the wall. It will then move around in one of two patterns. To dodge it as it moves, stay in the top-right corner and watch the direction that the nose moves in first. If it moves left first, immediately drop down to a lower position on the wall and then jump back up after it's vacated the corner you were in. If it moves right first, stay up in the corner until it bounces off the wall below you, then drop down until it's bounced off the right wall again before climbing back into the corner. There are a few different times when you can attack it during this, though I find it easiest to fire as I drop down from the corner.
While all three parts are alive, Rangda Bangda's attacks are fairly random so watch the eyes and walls carefully to see what it will do next. Once one eye has been destroyed the other will almost always use red attacks. If both eyes are destroyed, the walls will close in permanently until the nose is destroyed. If the nose is destroyed before both eyes then the walls won't close in anymore.
Contrary to my low posting frequency, I actually think of subjects I could write about somewhat often. I'm just too lazy to bother most of the time. So here's an assortment of the recent ones all at once:
Aria Love +1
Aria the Origination, which aired last season, finally finished getting subbed and with that the Aria series ended. It's a beautiful and wonderful series and, like Dagger, its ending had me alternating between grinning like an idiot and crying tears of joy.
Aria the Animation (the first season) got licensed and is being released in a sub-only set with all thirteen episodes for about $40. This is totally for the freaking win because, like, I can actually afford it since they aren't price gouging with single DVD releases and making me pay for a dub I don't care about. It's being released in September and more of the series is supposed to follow after that. The only reason I haven't pre-ordered it yet is because I'm trying to decide if I should pick up some of the manga at the same time to save on shipping.
Zetsubou Fight!
Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei also finished getting subbed recently. Anon releases had been trickling out for a while but I hadn't bothered watching any since I was still holding out hope that a.f.k. would continue subbing it. My patience finally dissolved when the last episode was released so I got them and picked up at ep5. Amazingly, the anon subs were actually pretty good.
I really missed the insanity of Zetsubou Sensei—it was my second favorite show from last season, after Aria. I'm still hoping a.f.k. will continue their subs at some point but going ahead and watching the others was totally worth it. Here's to hoping for a third season.
Speaking of Hatsune Miku, I've been hunting down a few more songs. This one titled echoes (Nico Nico, YouTube) is my favorite out of the latest ones I've downloaded. Though a torrent popped up on one of the sites I watch for new anime releases with a Miku song titled マケナイワタシノコイノウタ (Makenai Watashi no Koi no Uta) which is also pretty good.
I've been watching Magic Knight Rayearth in between new releases and catching up on shows from last season and I came across this:
Last time I had to add both the lazer and the caption. This time, only the caption. The prospect of this pattern continuing excites me.
MP: 0/90
I haven't played FFIV any more since my previous post about the Dark Elf. I've been distracted by a free, month-long reactivation of my PlanetSide account and I've also been playing Guild Wars more often again. Apparently PlanetSide is undergoing a server merge later this month, which will result in there being only a single US server instead of two, for east and west. (And I think there used to be three US servers in the past, before I started playing.) The game's community always had plenty of doomsday prophets predicting its demise ever since I started playing but now I'm starting to think they might be right.
The Tower of Zot is up next in FFIV which, in my experience, tends to be one of the harder dungeons in the game. It's just barely scraping half way through the game but a sudden jump in monster strength combined with not having a dedicated healer in your party really does a number on you. You've got Tellah who, while he knows pretty much every white magic spell, is capped at 90 MP and thus can only cast thirty Cures or ten Curas before he's out; and you've got Cecil, whose Cure spells are really weak. If I'm really on top of things I can make it between save points without resorting to using Ethers (yay for Tents) but it's very difficult.
