SecretAsianMan

Lately I've been getting into watching A Link to the Past Randomizer races and it's reached the point that I want to try this myself. For anyone unfamiliar, ALTTPR takes the base game and randomizes all the items among the chests in the game. This means that any item could be anywhere (with some exception, there is a logic in the randomizer that prevents unbeatable scenarios). There's also a number of variants that shuffles dungeon keys as well or requires all dungeons to be beaten or requires the use of major sequence breaking glitches/exploits. There's another randomizer that combines it with the Super Metroid randomizer and makes you jump back and forth between the two games. Since I'm a baby I'll be starting with ALTTPR on easy difficulty (I get more hearts, all items are available, enemies don't hit quite as hard, the randomizer logic won't require me to perform any major glitches or exploits). I even went as far as getting a USB SNES controller. If anyone wants to watch me get lost and confused, I'll be streaming it as well. https://www.twitch.tv/secretasianmann

I forgot that I also watched Mission Impossible Fallout. I don't get why people liked this movie so much. I think it was ok, but it's the same movie that the last 2 have been with some slightly different characters. Those weren't bad movies either (I actually liked 4) but at this point I can barely tell them apart.

I watched a bunch of movies recently on a trip to/from China. Deadpool 2 - more of the same but less so. I liked the first one but this just felt meh Venom - not bad for a B-movie, very bad for an actual blockbuster Ocean's 8 - I liked 11, 12, and 13 (well parts of 12) but wasn't into this. The all lady cast was fine but the story lacked any of the pizazz and charm Ant-Man and the Wasp - As someone who thought that Ant-Man was just ok, this didn't seem any better Ready Player One - oh god this was dumb. Lots of nerd candy in the visuals and references but almost no real characters or story to speak of.

I recently watched Venom during a flight back from China and I think it's not terrible... IF you view it as a B-movie. It's got all the trappings of one: nonsense plot, shallow villain, terrible acting (though Tom Hardy was pretty good), bad dialog, etc. I'd put it on par with other cheesy sci-fi flicks but as a tent pole major motion picture yeah it's bad. Relatedly, I also watched Deadpool 2 on the same flight. I liked the first one and this was mostly more of the same but much less satisfying I think.

Did you use a tracker for your Keysanity run? I'd be really intimidated to try one without a tracker, I've become so reliant on the thing even during normal rando. I've yet to try Keysanity as I want to get more familiar with the base randomizer before dipping into the variants. I've watched several Keysanity runs though and they do look interesting. I think I've only had one pedestal required run so far. If I remember correctly it had my boots which I needed to get the Fire Rod from lumberjack tree which meant I also had to beat Aga1. That was a painful run. The Bow is required for Eastern Palace and Palace of Darkness. It is possible to beat the game without using Silver Arrows but the logic will never make this a requirement if you're playing No Major Glitches (I think anyway). I know the theory of how to do silverless but I've never attempted it. I think I've only ever gotten silvers before bow once and I've done about a dozen runs so far. There's only a handful of dark world chests that can be opened without the Moon Pearl and getting dark world access in the first place requires at a minimum the Power Gloves plus some combination of Titan's Mitts, Flute, Magic Hammer, Flippers, and/or Hookshot (unless you beat the first Agahnim fight which most people try to avoid if at all possible since it's very little reward for such a big time sink). I think part of what I'm loving about ALTTPR is that it turns a very linear Zelda into a Metroidvania.

Does six degrees of Kevin Bacon still work? If not, who's the new Kevin Bacon?

The SM/LttP run was really great. It's what finally got me to start looking into playing the game myself, although I'm not close to trying that particular iteration yet. Despite my love for SM I'm not nearly as familiar with the layout of the game as I am with LttP. I'm also extremely lacking in the technical proficiency required. You've probably already learned some of this by now but I'll go over what I know anyway. Easy is a difficulty setting rather than a category. Difficulty impacts things like how hard enemies hit, frequency of item drops, and how potions work, among other things. It impacts the logic a bit in that easier difficulties put more beneficial items in the pool while harder difficulties do the opposite. For example on the easy difficulty you start with 6 hearts instead of 3 and there are 8 swords placed in the item pool instead of 4 (if you find a sword location after getting the gold sword then you get rupees instead). Expert limits you to the Master Sword and no mail. Most of what I know about the randomizer logic comes from the mouths of runners and there's still a lot I don't know. I only play on the no major glitches (NMG) setting so I have no idea what the glitch logic is. Major glitches are categorized as things that allow major sequence breaks in the normal game, mostly things like wall clips. There's a couple minor glitches like fake flippers and hovering that can also allow some sequence breaks but I don't think they're considered major glitches because you can't skip entire sections of the game, just get a few items early or bypass a single puzzle. These will never be required by the logic either though. One of the bigger blocks to things is the dark rooms that require the lamp. I mentioned it before but NMG will never require these rooms to be traversed without the lamp. For example, in the regular game to access Death Mountain you have to enter a cave where you escort an old man. The old man will give you an item which is in the randomizer but because he's located in a dark room he will NEVER have the lamp. But if he has something like the Fire Rod and Turtle Rock or Skull Woods is a crystal dungeon, then it means the lamp is a required item. It is still possible to get through the dark rooms without the lamp if you know what you're doing and many runners suggest learning how to do at least some of them. Doing this puts you outside the randomizer's sequence a bit but won't break it wide open. Other always required items include the Master Sword, Bow and Silver Arrows, the Moon Pearl, and either the Lamp or the Fire Rod (not necessarily both). There are ways around those things (such as fighting Ganon without silver arrows, a technique known as silverless) but again these will never be part of the logic. The sword, gloves, and mails are progressive items. When you find one of these items, the game gives you the next upgrade in sequence. Taking the sword as an example, the first time you find a sword it will be the Fighter's Sword, then the Master Sword, then Tempered, then Gold. It will always be in that order no matter when you open chests. Dungeons will always contain a big key, map, compass, and all the small keys. The boss holds an item and it might include a dungeon specific one. This means it's sometimes possible that you can't open every chest in the dungeon but if that's the case it means you won't need to. As an example here neither Skull Woods nor Swamp Palace require the big key to access the boss so it's possible the big key is inside the big chest. If you know how many items are in a dungeon and you find everything except the dungeon items then you know there's nothing else there and you can leave if it's a blue/red pendant dungeon without missing anything (unless it's a pedestal seed). Alternatively if you find the dungeon items right away then you know that every other chest will have items. That's already a lot of info and there's a ton of other subtleties that I'm still learning such as how to "read" the logic. Like if the game gives you early flippers, hookshot, and moon pearl it's probably pushing you toward completing Swamp Palace even if its just a pendant dungeon. I'd actually love to make another video where I explain a lot of this but there's are so many people with way better knowledge than me. I'd probably end up getting a lot wrong.

If you're playing on the no major glitches setting, then the logic will never require you to traverse a dark room without the lantern. That means that if an item is required to progress is hidden behind a dark room then the lantern will also be required and can be found outside them. Some of the better runners know how to navigate the dark rooms without the lantern which lets them sequence break a bit but I'm not there yet. The one that always bugs me is the boots. Finding them last means you spend the entire game walking instead of running. As you get more familiar with the chest locations you soon learn how to route things for efficient item gathering but even then the game can still mess with you. I think that's why I like it so much, it's a fun puzzle to solve that changes every time you play. It's "I need the hookshot to beat swamp palace but the hookshot is in the library which needs the boots that are on the island in the lake which requires the mirror and the flippers..."

Literally every item is not where it's supposed to be and the ROM is based on the Japanese 1.0 version which includes some glitches/tricks that were patched in later versions. The randomizer generator requires this version and it's the preferred one for speedrunning anyway because of the tricks. One example is the thing I do where I perform the spin attack then touch a staircase and move very quickly. The randomizer really only appeals to people who either played the original game or like speedrunning; in my case it's both. I could do additional runs and explain more things but that probably wouldn't make it any more interesting to watch. I highly recommend anyone try the original game if that's something you can do because it's a fantastic game. If someone is interested in trying the randomizer I could help get that going too. I'm not an expert by any means but I know enough about the base game and the randomizer that I could definitely get you started. Also the randomizer includes about 70 sprites you can substitute for Link. For my first run I chose Pride Link in support of a friend. In my current game I'm a Squirtle.

Last part. Hopefully the audio sucks less. I also got a better tracker. I'm going to keep playing but I'm not sure I'll record any more unless someone wants to see it.

Part 2. Almost done. I need to do something about my audio levels.

I should probably explain about the tracker a bit. It's not part of the randomizer itself, it's a script running in a browser window that lets me keep track of what I have and where I can go. I have to manually add each item when I get it as well as check off the locations on the map. The version I'm using also automatically indicates what areas are accessible based on my equipment which is nice for a newbie like me. The abbreviations on the bottom two rows above the map are for the dungeons. Swamp Palace, Skull Woods, Thieves Town, Ice Palace, Misery Mire, Turtle Rock, Eastern Palace, Desert Palace, and Tower of Hera. Misery Mire and Turtle Rock require medallions to access in the vanilla game, but those too have been shuffled around which is why they're on the tracker. The green pendent is tracked independently of the other two because the green one lets you get an item from the old man near Eastern Palace (the boots in vanilla LttP). The fifth and sixth crystal are also significant because they unlock the big bomb in the dark world which you can use at the pyramid. One thing about the tracker I'm using I don't like is it doesn't track items that don't unlock things like the bug catching net or the cane of byrna. It's not a huge deal but I can see myself forgetting I have those things when they might be useful.

Here's the first part. I'm really rusty at this game.

And speaking of all that nonsense, I got my controller today. I have OBS setup and everything is ready to go. I plan to stream some tonight and I'll upload the recording later. I'll make a new thread so I don't overtake this one.

There's some great variants and tournaments that randomizer allows and I love it. One of my favorites to watch is crowd control where the chat can actively mess with the runners by doing things like upgrading/downgrading their weapons, taking their ammo, making them have ice physics for a while, etc. Another randomizer variant is called keysanity which not only mixes up the items but also all the dungeon keys. This means that you can find something like an Ice Palace small key in Link's house or the Turtle Rock big key in the Swamp Palace. The game will tell you what the key unlocks when you pick it up but it still requires a super intimate knowledge of the game to complete and I'm just not up to that yet. If you want a LTTP/SM run specifically, I recommend the one from GDQx. It's not a race but a co-op run where on person played the Zelda part and another played the Metroid part, passing the controller back and forth. If you want good races, it's hard to recommend specific ones because they're frankly all really good. There's inevitably a moment that comes where both runners need one or two more items to get to "go mode" (the point where they have everything necessary to beat the game) and since you never know when that's about to happen it's always exciting when it does. That said, there was a summer keysanity tournament for LTTP and games 1 and 3 of the finals were amazing. Perhaps not coincidentally it features the same two runners who performed the LTTPR race from AGDQ 2018.

I actually have considered streaming my inevitably disastrous attempts. I've watched enough runs that I think I know the theory but putting it into practice is another thing entirely. I'm supposed to get the controller this weekend so I'll probably give streaming a try at least once.

I've just ordered a SNES controller. Someone stop me.

Over one year without random thoughts! I've been watching a bunch of A Link to the Past randomizer races lately to the point that I now really want to try getting into this. I've generated a random seed (albeit on easy mode) and picked up an item tracker. But I really don't want to play with a keyboard and none of my controllers (360 and Steam) are well suited for this type of game. I'm really considering getting a USB SNES controller. As an aside to this, I started getting into these races because I was watching stuff from GDQx which happened a couple weeks ago. I completely forgot to mention it at all but one of the better runs was a Link to the Past/Super Metroid randomizer. If you're not familiar with that, it's a combination of both games where all the items are mixed between the two so that it's possible (and indeed extremely likely) to get SM items in LTTP and vice versa. Certain doors act as transitions between the two games allowing for some creative routing.

She's having some ups and downs lately. I won't get into detail since it's not my place to discuss her personal life but I've been trying to help her out as much as I can.

I haven't watched any of the shows since the Defenders, except for a handful of Jessica Jones season 2. From what I hear Daredevil season 3 is the one to watch though so I might pick it up. Is there anything from the other shows that I need to know about first or is it self contained?

I feel naked without my cute nose laser blasting reindeer, drawn for me by a long gone forum member who I still talk to on an almost daily basis.

Anytime a new AAA game from a big studio comes out I expect to see almost nothing except that game covered for at least 3 days, but yeah it feels like RDR2 has way more exposure then normal. Maybe it was the long lead-up time, maybe the reception of the first game or the evolution of the hype cycle but it feel very unavoidable in a way that other games this year haven't been.

I feel like the only person in the world who is not remotely interested in RDR. I tried playing the first one but it did nothing for me. I didn't hate it but at the same time I never felt a motivation to keep playing. It doesn't help that westerns are maybe my least favorite genre or that Rockstar gameplay in general seems really janky to me. I'm not going to suggest it's a bad game. It seems very well made with lots of thought put into it and attention to detail (maybe too much from what I hear). But it's another AAA game that I don't care about in the least. I probably didn't need to intrude into this thread just to say that. I guess I'm just a grumpy old man who likes to complain.

I fully endorse reminiscing about our favorite Thumbs moments. One of mine is only tangentially related to the actual cast. In one of the pods with Steve they spent a good chunk of time talking about the Heavy Rain demo and how you could make the character do some ridiculous looking stuff. A friend of mine didn't have a Playstation but was interested in trying out the Heavy Rain demo so he came over one day. Right after playing it normally I put on the podcast bit and we proceeded to do it again but with 1000% more hilarity. He said I ruined the game for him but he also loved the podcast and became a reader so I'd say it was worth it. On a more egocentric note my favorite moments are when I get mentioned on the cast. I have a private YouTube playlist of all the moments that I got name dropped, mostly due to candy but occasionally to other things as well.

To clarify, I'm not trying to put down Slack or the people who frequent it. There is 100% the merit that jenna and gorm mentioned. It's just not my style, at least not in that large of a group setting. Although I do admit that if my workplace allowed it I would probably hang out in the Slack all the time and get nothing done so it's probably better this way.