Just a gaming pastebin for fun

Been thinking about what kinds of challenges or speedruns I still want to get to while I've got time. It's been about 2 years since I went on the 2 year hiatus from speedrunning, and since coming back all I've done so far was Mega Man 8 and Dragon Warrior IV/Dragon Quest IV, and that's been on purpose. And a little detour for DWM last RPGLB (with a run I'm very satisfied with). I wanted to take time between each one so I wouldn't burn out and it's been pretty good. I've been thinking what else I want to get to. The highest priority is Mega Man 5 which I've been derusting now and I think around the time I finish the Elden Ring DLC I'll go in on trying to get a 33. I put too much time into learning MM5 to not have something to show for it, and I want to get a decent NES Mega Man time, I just never really tried yet. 

The only thing I really care about is feeling good about the runs that I put some time into and although that's mostly already true, a few of them I could maybe patch up a bit. So other than MM5, I still kind of want to improve my DQIV PSX time and my DQVI SFC time, but they're both long, especially DQVI, and I've got to be in the particular mood for it. But both of them, if I didn't end up getting back to, it'd be alright from here, but they're the ones I care about the most. I boot up DQIV NDS for a little bit not too long ago and just decided it wasn't going to happen. I also thought about DQIII a bit and I just don't the juice is anywhere close to worth the squeeze. I had a good time playing DWIV NES, got my sub 7 and I was out- I didn't really vibe with that version for speedruns but I always wanted to learn it so I'm glad I did. There's a part of me that wants to play Rockman Zero 2 again, but I'm not sure if my hands can handle it anymore, but we'll see. 

I did one attempt of a casual 94 robot masters run and I had high hopes for it, and although it was fun it was way, way more exhausting than I thought, and actually strangely disorienting visually (swapping consoles & games) in a way I wasn't expecting that made me nauseous. So maybe not this one, but basically I liked entertaining the idea of some casual speedruns where there wasn't so much pressure. Also SaGa 2026 is in the mix, you know how it is. A casual RS3 run possibly. Speedrunning should be fun and not have so much pressure sometimes, right guys. Guys?

On a different note, Pokemon has been pretty good over the years since I started playing VGC (doubles). I generally enjoy it, but I go through pretty big waves of ups and downs on motivation. I made Master Ball rank for 21 seasons (months) in a row for Pokemon Scarlet/Violet (basically just means you hit an arbitrary rank that reset per month, usually takes a few hours of matches, sometimes a little more), and I always had a good time. 

I started to lean into playing Pokemon a lot more as something competitive because I felt that I could play it basically indefinitely - there are a lot of good aspects about it. It's basically zero stress on your hands, so that'd never be a problem over time. Any individual match doesn't take particularly long, so you can queue up and play as much as you want without too much commitment, so depending on your flexibility you can really just go whenever you want. That might sound basic or obvious but it's a big plus. 

But I've started to think over time that without something like the draw to actually play in a tournament setting, it's a very casual, random game. Closed team sheet ladder (basically just queuing up in game) is both kind of fun and also.. something that's hard to take very seriously. It's hard to describe, but if you know you know. And open team sheet tournaments are very intense, they're exhausting, but very rewarding. But unfortunately they come with none of the nice benefits of "play whenever", because they're super committal on time. You might be out a full weekend for some of them. 

So I kinda feel stuck where I really enjoy battling but unless I willingly sign up for tournaments, I have a hard time locking into it very seriously. Playing the RPG guessing game of what your opponents has is fun to mess around with on ladder to make Master Ball rank but there's a limit. I've been to two regionals (in person events), which were great but yeah man, not for the faint of heart. A full weekend+ of travel, exhausting gaming and a kind of stressful weekend altogether, playing a video game. There's just heavy pros and cons to it all.  

Champions is off to a pretty good start. I've got some reservations about the whole thing but the fact that it exists at all and is easy to boot up and play is pretty good by me. 

Fighting games scratch a similar itch but I have much to learn. My hands are good for now but I definitely are concerned for them in the long term. 

On the casual side of things, Elden Ring DLC's pretty grood, I'm not too far in. I've been thinking about a spectrum. Check out my cool diagram:

<X-----------------------------Y>

X = Kind of person who plays a lot of different games once
Y = Kind of person who plays a few games very deeply

I'm about here:
<-------------------------Z----->
Z = Me

And I don't really care to change that pattern, you know? Sometimes I think about booting up different games to experience them, and I do of course, but I also think I generally get more fun out of feeling like I really know the ones I like inside and out. I'm not really trying to say anything contentious. It's just something I think about, everyone's different. So Elden Ring is a good example where it's awesome, but maybe not in my normal kind of shtick, but I gotta boot up because it's good. Tunic, Inscryption and of course GOD HAND over the last few months were very much the same. 

There are some games I wanna check out though. Shmup arc is coming. And I still have a special stage to beat for Touhou 11. Making my way through Sonic games has been good but it's been on a little hiatus. Maybe Secret Rings just has that impact on the series. I'm gonna try to get to FF7 Rebirth this summer (which I guess is soon huh). 

Different topic, I've been posting about it, but I've been working hard on the Dragon Quest VI SFC -> SNES English patch revision. Pretty much all of the hacking is done (which was hard af and I frickin nailed figuring it all out, no hube, L bozo). It has a lot of text and it's been testing my Japanese a lot. But this is the kind of project that I will feel really rewarded by once it's done. This one in particular I've wanted to do for years and I just kinda kicked it down the road. But it hit me about a month ago to shut up and just really scope out whether or not I could possibly do it, and after some mad science Python and SNES assembly days I managed to break through and it seemed very achievable of a project, even if it took awhile. I've been working on another main dev project for a long time now, but I take breaks from it to do stuff like this.

That's about it. See you out there