Crossword: 20:44 (1 Google)

5:40 a.m.
Pretty good Saturday time. Felt more like a Friday. I spent an amount of 4/20 drifting a bit. I fell asleep for s few hours, woke up at 9:30, made a throwaway post, and I'm up still.

I used to run the midnight prerelease. In New York City, it was never a real problem, with 24-hour eateries and 24-hour transportation. It was also easier when I was in my twenties. I still ran a few when I first moved out here, but I cnt really handle that shit anmore. I'm really looking forward to Dominaria, but if I went to a midnight prerelease, it would probably be finishing up right about now. And then what? Walk home? Go back 4 hours later and do it again? I lose my whole week. A midnight movie, I can still handle. A midnight tournament, forget it. Even with free cookies.

Thursday: 16:32
Friday: 23:58

Ah, April 20th, the one day where I can smoke pot all day and not feel like a total failure.

Monday: 6:21
Tuesday: 7:17
Wednesday: 11:12 (16 x 16 grid)

I should just not watch the Mets. When I first checked the game, we were down 3-0. I looked again later and it was 3-2, so I tuned to a stream. The Nationals promptly hit a lead-off triple into a sac fly. I wandered off to the store for a bit, and returned to the fading cheers from Yoenis Cespedes hitting a grand slam, capping a 9-run 8th inning. I missed everything.

Crossword
Sunday 53:22 (I did this one-handed, lying on my side in bed because I was lazy or high or something)

So, mostly good puzzle. Nothing too bad, and then you come to 39-Down: Proceed well enough. Answer: GO OK. See, but there's no space in the puzzle. It would have been trivial to turn those squares into MOOK, changing the linked AGENT to AMEND, and the OCT linked to the end to OCD, and avoid having a straight-up racist slur in your puzzle.

Crossword
Saturday 24:42 (1 Google)

Whew. Solved this one just a touch faster than Thursday and Friday, so a weird week for times all around. This puzzle worked pretty well. Nothing too obscure (I had to look up Urania, one of the Muses) or forced. If I were in charge, I would have swapped this week's Friday and Saturday. But they like to show off flashy grids on Fridays (because many fewer people attempt the Saturday puzzle), and yesterday did have a neat grid and a very low word-count.

Crosswords
Thursday: 26:02
Friday: 25:45

Thursday was a rebus puzzle with four boxes containing cable TV channels (AMC, HBO, BET, USA). Woe to the person who finds the USA first. They've done USA rebus puzzles before (answers like medUSA, for example), so the cable channel theme would be elusive. I found BET first (uglyBETty crossing gloBETheater), which also led me a little astray, but recovered with dreAMCatcher and the rest wasn't so bad. Friday had the excellent clue "High points?" for UMLAUT. Good misdirection and a false plural.

FNM tonight, still on Ixalan. Dominaria next weekend and I can't wait.

Crosswords
Tuesday: 9:07
Wednesday: 9:33

Puzzles are not progressing normally as the week goes on, or at least Monday-Wednesday are all around the same time (I didn't mention it at the time, but Monday was abnormally hard for its slot). A good deal of the extra time today can be attributed to the gimmick, which used a lot of cross-referenced clues.

I took a break from FF4 to run through FF9 again. I wanted to do the super-chocobo run. Using the fast-mode assist, you can run super-fast around with your chocobo in the hot-cold game and dig super-quick as well, yet the counter runs down at normal speed. I was getting limit bonuses almost every game. Initially, I was thinking I'd get a Robe of Lords just playing in the Forest, but I ran out of Chocographs to find and wanted to progress. I did have enough points for a Robe of Lords before the Desert Palace, though. I've upgraded chocobos to Ocean-walking pre-Desert Palace before (you can't get Sky until you acquire the airship), but early Robe of Lords is mighty sweet, especially against the Dragons at Mt. Gulag (it negates Wind damage, and the Dragons like to cast Twister. I usually stick an Octagon Rod on Vivi, who is a required to be in your party for the area. Octagon Rod absorbs Wind damage (and also teaches the -ga level elemental spells). In the latest run, all my other guys got killed in one of the battles, and they'd almost die again right away if I took time to revive them, but the Dragons constantly healed Vivi with their spells, so he took them down alone with physical attacks, very very slowly (a similar thing sometimes happens against the Earth Temple boss when you're wearing Gaea Gear, allowing you time to steal). But it's nice to keep everyone alive for the Exp. and AP boost. Quina can actually learn Twister if you manage to eat one.). Other Chocographs as well as Dead Pepper locations get you some other stuff way early, like Freya's and Dagger's best weapons, plus a really good one for Amarant, White Robe (Holy to Eiko), Black Robe (Flare to Vivi), and Light Robe (Half MP for everyone) and famous Genji Armor.

Still, the run was a little sloppy. I'm up to Hades in the last area, so I'm well past the point of no return. I missed a little early sidequest stuff in Alexandria, I missed two items in the Desert Palace, and there's no way to go back and get them again. Additionally, one of the items I missed there could have been bought, but now that area is blocked off. It's the only item that teaches Vivi Death. I'm past the point where Death is useful (Death can work on the Mt. Gulag Dragons, for one), but I like to get everything, as I've said. I might get a Rank-S treasure hunter after I finish Memoria, but I'm not sure (like it matters). I've had a very encounter-light run as well. I did the entire Desert Palace (although I probably saved a minute missing those items) with no encounters. I didn't turn off encounters, I just didn't have any. To be fair, I hate the encounters in Desert Palace, since Dagger is randomly useless at times, and there are annoying guys who switch weakness between physical attacks and magic. There's no bonus for a full bestiary, so I don't care too much. Everyone there has a level multiple of 5, so you can get Lvl-5 Death and win every encounter with Quina, but I like to take him/her with Zidane to get Frogs at the Qu Marsh on the Forgotten Continent.

I did go kinda deep on the card game and get some rare ones, but that especially doesn't matter. At all. There isn't even an achievement attached to the cards other than playing 10 games, which triggers once. It doesn't add to your Treasure Rank, and they doesn't get you the kind of thing that the cards get you in FF8, where they are crucial for maxing out (and some hard-to-manipulate rule variations can fuck everything up). At least the card game in FF8 is pretty easy to figure out. I'm still pretty confused about how the Tetra Master cards work, but you can get a few strong ones through chocographs and do well enough. I did some Hippaul racing too (though not enough to gain the achievement), which can get some rare cards. And I fought the optional Tantarian boss (though I cheated with battle assist), so my game wasn't entirely without swag. I did the friendly monster quest, so I could probably take on Ozma (like it matters), though ideally I'd like to get Angel Snack and Magic Hammer first (annoying at this point in the game, but I've done it before). Neither of these is 100% required, depending on your strategy. Angel Snack is mostly useful in removing Mini status from multiple characters at once. But Mini doesn't matter for Freya's Dragon Crest, which will deal 9999 every time once I kill a hundred Dragons (I've got ~50 now), and it's also not too relevant for your spell-jammers. Magic Hammer is an alternate kill, where you try to take all of Ozma's MP, which just kittens him. It's more of a "might as well" strategy, since after Zidane, Eiko, and Freya, your 4th character doesn't matter too much.

But the really bad thing is that I sold off some items I should have kept, and it's impossible to go back and buy them again. You need early stuff like Mythril Rod and Mythril Sword to synth for great items at the Black Mage Village at the endgame, but nobody sells them anymore. It's especially stupid because I've made this exact mistake many many times. The bookkeeping needed to avoid this is minimal, so there's not much of an excuse. I could forget all this and finish within a few hours. My characters are strong and leveled, but I really feel like giving it another go.

Crossword: 8:33

I had plans to do things today, grand plans. And then I did none of them.

Friday: 43:09 (wide 16 x 15 grid, 1 Google)
Saturday: 29:40 (3 Google, many errors)
Sunday: 38:28

The Times has been breaking out of the 15 x 15 mold quite a bit lately. Thursday's puzzle was also wide. Friday had two triple-stacks of 16-letter answers. Because the 15 x 15 convention is so ingrained, I'm not sure THATSWHATSHESAID has ever been in any newspaper-published puzzle outside of a Sunday, and probably none of the other grid-spanners have either. (Actually, one of them is "Do You Want To Dance," a popular song in 1958, but also popular later on for the Beach Boys and the Ramones, who covered it as "Do You Wanna Dance," which is 15 letters and has probably been in a lot of puzzles, so kind of new but not really.)

I feel like ranting about Trump, but it just takes so much energy. There's just too much, every day, it's overwhelming, and probably not good for my health. But fuck that guy.

Crossword: 27:33

This puzzle was somewhat like a long Beethoven joke I know, but what I'm really high on right now is the diagramless puzzle officially published Sunday but online now. It has an asymmetric grid, but the clues are relatively easy to fit together. They outline the shape of a pipe, and the theme is Rene Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe). Magritte is one of my favorite painters, so naturally this is one of my favorite paintings. It's a rather crude approximation in grid form, but it's a perfect example of what a diagramless ought to be like. Figuring out the shape of the puzzle was itself another theme clue. Nice job.

Tuesday: 10:56
Wednesday: 14:51

Today's puzzle was co-written by Weird Al Yankovic. The theme answers are, appropriately, movies with cheese puns "Feta Attraction" and such. Kinda tricky otherwise, since that time is on the longer side for a Wednesday.

Crosswords

Wednesday: 13:39

Thursday: 17:30

Friday: 16:00

Saturday: 33:03 As an early April Fools, half the clues were entered backwards)

Sunday: 48:18 (1 Google)

Monday: 5:44 (crusht)

Love Letter to Metroid, Part 2

You might think that having certain areas locked until you get certain power-ups would lead to a linear game. You can play it that way, but some some people don't have to; some people are REALLY good. Places that are inaccessible due to not being able to jump high enough can be gotten around using bombs and wall jumps; with one technique, you can get Super Missiles without having to face the miniboss who guards them. Not that it's hard, but skipping it saves time.

The skill required to execute these tricks, and the number of times you need to use them, led to Super Metroid being one of the most popular games to speed-run. Watching serious speed-runners tackle this game is unreal. I can pull off a sequence break or two, but these guys are machines. There are 100% runs, but also low% runs, where the runner gets the absolute minimum number items needed to complete the game, which means skipping a number of things a casual run would consider non-optional.

Super Metroid's real innovation was something called the "shine spark." After acquiring the Speed Booster, Samus can run at super-high speed and start flashing. If you tap down while in this state, you will stop but remain flashing. You can then shoot yourself off in any direction, killing enemies or breaking blocks in the way. You "learn" this ability from an alien bird. It's a completely optional trick, and is only needed to get one missile expansion, but it's useful all over (it's a pretty fast way to beat the boss of Maridia). Wall jumping is another optional trick taught by aliens, and is also needed just for one thing, but is really handy.

Super Metroid became so iconic that its sequel, Metroid Fusion (for Game Boy Advance), had almost the exact same power-ups, and they remade the original game as Metroid: Zero Mission (also GBA), which greatly expanded and added Super Metroid's power-ups to the original game. Both games are larger than Super Metroid, with many more hidden items. In Super Metroid, you were almost certain to run into the animals who taught wall jumping and the shine spark while playing, but you always had the ability, even if you avoided them. But for Fusion and ZM, there are no mentions of either ability in the instruction manual, and no animals to teach it. Furthermore, neither ability is needed to win either game. Both ARE needed, however, to find all the items, and there are a LOT of items. I believe the first time I beat Metroid Fusion, I was shocked to find myself at under 50% completion. I had, like, 12 power bombs, but figured there were maybe 20 in all. There are 50. Zero Mission, in particular, has many items that require precise execution in holding a shine spark through multiple rooms. You can use a map and still not be able to get everything (In ZM, if you do manage to get everything, the final boss triples in power).

They recently remade Metroid 2 for the 3DS, but I don't have one of those. From what I've seen, it's very nicely done, with impressive graphics and all sorts of new stuff.

The only downsides to the GBA versions is that they are largely linear. There's a tricky break in Zero Mission, but in Fusion, a computer has a little too much control over the elevators that connect different sections, and you can't explore the whole game at will until the very end (and if you get one step too close to the very end, you'll reach a point of no return). It's especially annoying because you have no choice in this. It's impossible to get everything on your way. However, noticing the popularity of low% runs of Super Metroid, there's a special ending for sub-15% completion in Zero Mission.

I do like that in the 2-D games at least, there is a continuous plot. The lead-in to Super Metroid says that it is Metroid 3, and Metroid Fusion was Metroid 4. Unlike, say, Zelda. They released some book which did some backflips trying to put all the Zelda games into some sort of order, employing stuff like alternate timelines to fit them all together in the same reality, when it was clear Ocarina of Time was essentially trying to restart the whole story, which it accomplished splendidly. The Metroid Prime series has its own thing, and while there's some idea about where it lies in the story of the other games, they don't force the issue. Lots of things in 2D don't translate to the FPS world of Metroid Prime, and that's fine. The exploration aspect is still there. Metroid Prime 4 is due for the Switch sometime this year.