Total play time = 2 years, 156 days, 20 hours, 36 minutes, 39 seconds

Couple friends and I started playing back in April 2017. The progress isn't deliberately slow, it's just that we playing a half-hour or an hour here and there, once in a while and it's a proper full-length RPG. Furthermore we made a best effort to play it spoiler-free with as minimal outside help as possible.

I never beat this game before. SoM is in the category of "played as a child by repeated rental, wanted to own, couldn't get a copy".

It is hard nowadays imagining "not being able to purchase something" but was the situation here. If no video or toy store in our city had it then out of luck. There were also toy catalogs where you can phone or mail in an order, but they weren't a whole lot better in terms of the video game selection. The one place I could find that had Secret of Mana had it for rent. So I rented it repeatedly. I still had to take it back at certain intervals and some jerkface wiped my save. After that I became demoralized and moved on to playing something else (Uncharted Waters 2)

Fast-forward to today and I have every game in the world. This one has a lot of critical acclaim, and still has some love today (it got a remake last year), it deserves playthough to the end.

Originally I thought I'd move onto the remake after finishing this, but after reading some reviews, maybe not 🙁 It's just as well, initially I was kind of turned off by the graphics. When early gameplay came out I recall telling people it looked Bad. Like some free-to-play MMO from ~2006. It reminded me of Audition Online. I don't know what's up with the art direction. Apparently there are problems with the soundtrack and gameplay also... How did they mess this up? I may someday play it anyway but give it a while.

This game had a lot of positive qualities, it deserves to be on all those top-10 lists. 
- The soundtrack is very strong
- Large sprites with nice animations
- Many cool concepts for bosses, large enemy artworks
- Willingness to make a three-player SNES game represents a lot of technical initiative

The one thing that was almost a problem- it is borderline on the "turn based games disguised as action games" genre. 
You know. Practically very MMORPG does this. The combat works like: you and the enemy can both be freely positioned in the world, and can attach each other, but the attacks always land regardless of how you are positioned. Why have the positioning mechanic at all, then? Why not just have a menu? If they shoot an arrow or something it's not like you can move out of the way. I know why they do it in MMOs, but I'm less on board in any locally-played action game.
I suppose this bothers me because it encourages you to waste brain cells in combat trying to move around the map when you might as well just stand there.
Fortunately, this game doesn't 100% do that, it's only for certain attacks. Some experimenting helped figure this out. For other ones, you can move out of the way, sometimes outside of a hitbox that seems rather big.

On a whole I loved playing this game, and getting the chance to play it co-operatively even though it's long after the fact.

Finished 7 Billion Humans (PC) + all size+speed optimizations, all achievements

This is a programming-themed game, similar to Human Resource Machine, where you have a drag-and-drop interface to program in a pseudo-assembly type thing.

The big difference is 7 Billion Humans is "multithreaded". You program the actions of not just one worker, but many (sometimes, dozens) that all run the same program concurrently. There are some instructions "tell" and "listen" which help synchronize. For example one worker can tell another "Coffee time!", unblocking another worker that has stopped, and is listening for Coffee Time. Workers can be in eachothers' way, and you may want to avoid them taking paths where they collide with each other. Certain workers have resources dedicated to them, that others cannot use or else BOOM they explode (literally).

Compared to HRM and most computer assembly languages, 7BH has some conspicuously powerful instructions.

When optimizing for speed you come to learn about how the game computes "performance cost" since it is not totally intuitive.

For example,
if (X == 5 and Y == 3) or Z == 12342
is the exact same cost as
if (X == 5)

Also,
"Take two steps to the left"
can (in, at least some circumstances) be the exact same cost as
"Find out where in the room the nearest printer is- it might be around a maze of hazards, obstacles, whatever- and go to it"

The latter, you'd think would be an expensive and complicated path-finding operation but the game gives that one to you for free. Maybe, with the idea that you've got enough other things to deal with and it is probably right about that.

My solutions are in this GitHub repo
https://github.com/clandrew/7bh

Finished J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (SNES)

This is an action-RPG based on the book series, pre-Peter Jackson movie IP.

This game has some cool moments and good atmosphere and potential to be good. Still, it was held back by many technical problems. This game ended up being a rabbit hole into something else.

A couple weeks ago, I cleared the last boss, the Balrog using the full party (minus Gandalf, since having him in your party prevents you from beating the boss; also Boromir is E_NOTIMPL) and finished the game but didn't get such a good ending because Merry and Pippin died in the boss fight. They die really easily.
So last Saturday, I booted up the game with the intention to resume at the boss fight, attempt it again and keep them alive.

However the password I had written down was rejected by the game. I swear to goodness I wrote it down correctly. I went upstairs to my computer, reproduced the situation with an emulator. It turns out, the game will indeed give you invalid passwords and that's what happened here. So I went about trying to figure out how to "fix" my password.

The password system itself involves encoding a bunch of the game state in a certain way with a checksum. This game is a bit unusual in that there are no saves to the cartridge, it hashes together literally all the state into a 48-character-long password. It took a bit of effort, but I figured out how to derive the password. From there, how to un-glitch my password and preserve the progress I had (items, character stats, door open+close state) while letting it be accepted by the game. With this, I was able to re-attempt the boss fight and get the good ending!

After trying many different passwords looking for patterns, I cracked the password algorithm. It was not too much more work to put it into a program in case other people run into the same issues.

I posted the program to Github https://github.com/clandrew/lotrpwcheck/ .

As for the ending itself it was pretty cool, there is a scene where you meet Galadriel and she shows you the mirror. Although they never released a Vol II for SNES, I can see the next one picking up where this one left off.

Finished story mode of Crypt of the NecroDancer (PC)

This game is "rhythm" genre mixed with "roguelike" genre.

When I first played it I thought they took a dart board full of video game types, threw two darts and made that game. The "disco floor" mechanic was trippy and strange, and it looked like a somewhat decent roguelike with an unfitting rhythm mechanic shoehorned in. Background: I do like roguelike games (Mystery Dungeon, Dungeon Crawler) and rhythm games (DDR, Stepmania, FF Theatrhythm) always just separate.

After a few levels I got into it and saw it was built from the ground up to be a rhythm game. Even the controls, all set as combinations of arrow keys, are geared so that they can be played with a dance pad. The gameplay and story are tightly integrated around the music themes. The rhythm game-ness adds an action mechanic where there wouldn't ordinarily be one, and there are gameplay elements ("multipliers") built around this mechanic. Every other roguelike I've played has been strictly turn based and I have to slow myself down because I'm freaking out at one thing or another. For this, it's the opposite problem where you have to make quick decisions and develop the right reflexes and it ends up being really rewarding.

(do not watch if you have epilepsy)
https://youtu.be/TH08jpNNcFg

The graphics use that usual pseudo-old-school-not-really resolution mixing to a level that is pretty offensive. I've come to just tune it out. I seem to be the only person who cares about this so at this point I'm tuning it out for my own personal wellness. #selfcare

The end of the game is involves a pretty tough zone with a combination of two bosses. I attached the replay of my run of the zone!
Comments
- Using Cadence the main character.
- Starting eq: normal broadsword + apple, purchased at Diamond Dealer
- The start was pretty rough. Made a bunch of mistakes, in one part I fell into a trap with no way of getting out except bombing myself.
- Wasted a bit of time on shop purchase, item indecision
- Dead Ringer went well.
- Necrodancer did me a solid and killed an ogre for me
- I always kill my multiplier for black skeletons.

Time: 11:33 Score: 432

Besides Cadence I finished zones 1+2+3+4 with Dove, I'm looking forward to playing a few of the other characters also 🙂

*there is an option in the game's menu to turn off the "Disco floor" if there is a chance of it causing problems

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Source: Boston Globe

Finished Brain Lord (SNES)

This is a SNES RPG, a top-down action RPG with some puzzle elements.

Like every great? RPG there are two towns. As this is a medieval-themed game, they would end up settling on town names that were something fantasy- and mystical-sounding. So of course, the first one is called "Arcs" and the second one is called "Toronto".

I don't think the phrase "Brain Lord" is ever mentioned in any part of the game.

The game incorporates some puzzle elements which were actually pretty cool. For example, a room where some text on the wall says:
"12 - 52 - Although greater in size, its equivalent is the same in time."
the answer is a three digit number. Maybe too easy?

Unique qualities:

1. Levelless system
2. AI pokemon fairy things that follow you and are a game mechanic
3. Fast travel
4. No love interest

Some people are quick with the comparisons to Zelda. Zelda doesn't have a monopoly on the puzzle-ARPG does it? It definitely is a puzzle-ARPG though.

It is valid 👏 to understand 👏 how a feature 👏 works 👏 and still 👏 not 👏 like it

This isn't real... is it? How would this even work?

https://sookocheff.com/post/process/zero-bug-policy/

It could have been posted a couple days late

Direct3D12 on Win7! (Used by WoW)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/world-of-warcraft-uses-directx-12-running-on-windows-7/?fbclid=IwAR0iVUGTQzxOXzTMol-RUqgKkxAhoLXNI49RveD6EB5LeSCFCA2ERwyF4mc

This might be an example of the old does it take longer to painstakingly solve a problem, or to create a tool to make it less painstaking?

I keep around a lot of ASCII art diagrams and charts-- some new, some carried forward from ancient times. For Aaezure Odyssey MUD, the game is played in ASCII and therefore so are all the in-game maps. In any case, sometimes there's a need to edit them by moving around regions of content. In a conventional text editor, this is a gigantic pain in the neck. Sometimes you can cheese it using special key characters with find-and-replace but it's not a great way to go through life.

I also thought that surely, there'd be an obvious choice for an already-existing text editor that supports this kind of diagramming function with moving around blocks of text. The best one I found was ASCIIFlow. I loved the UI of ASCIIFlow-- it's really cool and modern. However, it had a problem where the import/export was lossy. It'd take some characters, and replace them with other characters. Dealbreaker. Besides that, there's Emacs or vim but those tools haven't been part of my life thus far and I didn't care to investigate. And then there was one other option, Notepad++ which I knew to support column-based selections but there didn't appear to be a way to move around the blocks of text.

See I thought I could go through life without ever feeling motivated to make my own text editor. I've been liking the program, so while using it I added more features outside of what it was originally intended for-- supporting cut, paste, undo, and so forth. Besides the diagrams it's been good as a general purpose editor and I've already gotten a lot of mileage from that.

The program can be found on Github here.