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.
If you're looking for information about the Anime Club chat rooms that I host, check out the Watercooler or OtakuBoards posts about them.
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)
I had this single from Momoi Haruko sitting in my Downloads folder for months and never got around up unzipping and listening to it. Yesterday I finally fixed that – and then laughed as I listened to the Nyan Myan Ver. of the song and realized that, yes, it's a whole 1:20 of Haruko just making cat noises in place of the lyrics. Of course I immediately thought of Miss A. But then I was disappointed that it wasn't on YouTube, for convenient Nyarolling, so I had to upload it.
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Click the HQ button for stereo sound.
Nyaa~
Title: Chicchana Bouken (Nyan Myan Ver.)
Artist: Momoi Haruko
Album: Chicchana Bouken - PRISM ARK Chibi Kagura no Bouken Theme Song Single
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.
I've been working on Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2 lately. Here I thought encoding the raw to use in the subbing would be easier this time, since I actually know what I'm doing now instead of learning on the fly. But, no, there were complications.
Simply getting a decent raw to encode from was a small learning experience. For ep1, Freelance-RAWs put a DVD image up on Tokyo Toshokan so I grabbed that and was able to encode directly from the DVD source. This time, they put up a 1280x720 upscale, leaving me going, "WTF mates? ^^" (For those that don't know, DVD resolution is 720x480 which then gets stretched out to 853x480 for 16:9 widescreen videos.) I messed around with it, downscaled it back to 848x480, and re-encoded. It ended up looking okay but not great.
After a couple days of still no DVD image showing up on Tokyo Toshokan, I decided to go hunting for one myself. Which involved learning how to use a couple Japanese peer-to-peer programs. I tried Perfect Dark first (no, no relation to the N64 game of the same name) and found two upscaled raws, one of which was the one Freelance-RAWs had uploaded. Apparently people upscale the DVDs for playback on the PS3, since it was labeled "PS3 upscale" or something like that, though I have no idea why. Then I tried Share and, lo and behold, I discovered a DVD image! This made the Des happy but I'm still wondering why the heck Freelance-RAWs uploaded the crappy upscale but not the DVD image this time.
So now I've now got my pretty new encode which kicks the crap out of the other one I did from the upscale, with the OP and title screen subs done.
Earlier I also did styling and scene timing for the ED subs, but I still need to do the karaoke timing for them. Which will have to wait until Dagger gives the ED a look (hint hint ^_^) since I just grabbed the romaji and an English translation off the net to have something to work with and am not sure if it's correct.
But enough ranting. I know what you all really want are some juicy screen shots.
Hopefully we'll be able to get it released some time next month.
And, since I probably won't get around to posting again until after Christmas...
I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Ear!
I'm sure most people have already seen this linked in the chat but I have to post it here anyway:
As soon as I saw that scene in Tales of the Abyss ep7, I knew I had to extract it to mercilessly Jaderoll Gome with. It was just too perfect.
In other news, I went through my ImageShack account just now and tagged all my images. So now you can sort them by anime, video game, specific series, etc. Finding stuff I'd previously uploaded was getting to be a pain, what with the ever-increasing number of images in my account, but this should alleviate the problem.
Last night I also got Adam to fix the bug with sorting World posts by tag. Now, when you click one of those shiny links up in the intro to view only posts with that tag, you'll be able to browse through all the pages of posts instead of having the page nav links reset the tag filter. So yay for that.
This is it! The last one! It wasn't quite one video per day (did anyone seriously expect me to keep that up?) but I am happy that I managed to finish this project in a timely manner. Now, if only I could get paid for doing this...
The climb up Ganon's Tower from 2F is definitely the hardest part of the game other than Ganon himself. Even when you know the best strategies for getting through each room, actually pulling everything off correctly is extremely difficult.
I had a couple close calls with the red Goriyas at the start where I was surprised I didn't get hit by their fireballs. And then the Beamos rooms... Those are just evil. I practiced those a lot and I still had to resort to using Bombos in the last one. It's just ridiculous.
The Lanmolas are actually a lot harder with that fireball turret thrown in. The timing on the fireballs match up way too well with the dirt clods from the Lanmolas and makes it really hard to find openings where you can hit them without a fireball nailing you right afterwards.
Wizrobes continue to be a joke.
The spike room with the two masked beetles and two fireball turrets is annoying. Again, the fireballs always seem to come at the worst possible times in there. I stepped on the spikes to get the key because I just didn't care.
Moldorm is really easy the second time because you can kill it without letting it speed up. The platform is also bigger, making it easier to dodge. I'm not sure how this one was supposed to be harder than the original fight in the Mountain Tower.
Agahnim also continues to be a joke, especially after having beaten Trinexx earlier. The two clones do make it significantly harder to beat him without getting hit but, unless you're already on the verge of death, he does so little damage that you're unlikely to die.
The majority of the run's re-records were spent on part 2 here, mainly in the Beamos rooms. In fact, five or so of the twenty-one total were spent just attemping to find a good way to clear the last Beamos room until I got fed up and decided to use Bombos. The Lanmolas also gave me some trouble but not too much.
And thus Desbreko did pwn A Link to the Past once more.
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Zelda A Link to the Past - Lv8 Ganon's Tower - Part 2 of 2
Part 2 of 2 of my Level 8: Ganon's Tower 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: 20 Hearts, Golden Sword, Silver Arrows, 1/2 Magic
- The Golden Sword and Silver Arrows can be obtained by buying a super bomb at the bomb shop north of the Swamp Palace and using it to blow open the cracked wall in the Pyramid. Inside is a fairy pond where you can upgrade your sword and bow.
- The 1/2 Magic upgrade can be obtained by jumping down the well next to the smithy's shop in Kakariko Village and sprinkling some magic powder on the statue within.
[00:13] Goriyas
The Mirror Shield can block the red Goriyas' fireballs, which makes killing them in narrow spaces much easier.
[01:46] Beamos
The Mirror Shield cannot, however, block Beamos' lasers so be careful around them.
[02:12] Ice and conveyor belts
Go through the center of this room, don't try to run around the outside on the conveyor belts.
[02:35] Miniboss: Lanmolas
The good news is that the Lanmolas only take two slashes from the Golden Sword to kill. The bad news is, there's now a fireball turret in the room, which makes things a lot harder than you might think. Remember that the dirt clods fly out diagonally until there's only one Lanmola left, at which point they fly out in all eight directions.
[04:57] Miniboss: Moldorm
There's no difference to this fight the second time around except that the platform is a different shape. Two spin attacks from the Golden Sword will kill the Moldorm without ever letting it speed up.
[05:38] Boss: Agahnim
Agahnim is back and this time he has two clones with him. You can tell them apart by their faded color so position yourself to hit the fireballs back at the real Agahnim. You won't have to worry about lightning attacks this time but the real Agahnim will still occasionally throw a blue fireball ring. Hit it with your sword as usual to split it and then hope your shield blocks it. Spin attacks can be useful for reflecting fireballs from multiple angles.
