Glen-i

Never did find a Seregios called Steve... But yeah, Stories is a lovely little RPG, and it's remarkable how natural Monster Hunter translates to it. It doesn't lose that gameplay style. It may be turn-based, but it still revolves around learning the attack patterns of monsters, as well as the grind to improve equipment. It just works. I'm amazed the series is getting more of a second chance now after the 3DS version flopping flat on it's face, but it deserves it. The sequel's great too, even if it is very much "more of the same" with a few minor new mechanics. Although 2 player co-op quests are a lot of fun! Anyway, important question, please tell me you used "Brachy Blow", more people need to see that attack. Right up there in my "side-splitting laughter" moments alongside Phantom Uragaan.

It was a good match with a spectacular 1-on-1 finale. Yeah, I was flailing about randomly, because I completely lost track of you there, only for the trampoline to give you away. Very good effort! Made me really work for that win.

One more update for this week. We got a bottle, so up Mt. Crenel we went! Turns out that because we have the Cane of *very unfortunate name*, we could actually get to the dungeon there without the Grip Ring, a pleasant surprise, because I forgot about the built in shortcut there. So, dungeon spelunking go! ARGHHHHHHH! Looked like we might need the shield after all... But still, might as well try all the items we have... Turns out bombs flip them over! Phew! But I had a brain wave! The Cane of *Very unfortunate name*! I never thought about that before, but it makes perfect sense! Eventually though, we needed a second key, but maybe the chests here would come up trumps? Bugger... Can't even get close to that dungeon... Oh well, bit of a bust for now. Let's try Temple of Droplets. It had the White Sword straight away! Score! Still need one more upgrade to double our Links, but more damage is nice. *Insert bus analogy here* Well, that was much better! Even with early lantern and the appropriate Boss Key, we can't actually finish this dungeon, because of the neat twist with how the boss is reached. But can't complain with that result. With double Links, it's off to the swamp, no Pegasus Boots or Bow, but Roc's Cape let's us bypass quite a bit, which was great, because I remembered that there's three well hidden one-time rupees underwater. Well, that's where the Bow was in this randomiser! Typical... Still, more of the swamp opened up with that. But sooner or later, the Roc's Cape wasn't enough to reach the end... Or so I thought... There's one bit where deep water is directly connected to the swamp, and on the seam of that connection, the game treats that as solid ground, which means that we could jump from it! So we don't need the Pegasus Boots for swamp exploration at all! Nice! The water element was there, finally got one! Anyway, turns out that you can jump anytime you're in the swamp. I figured that out right at the end... Would've made our life a lot easier. Still, we can get to the Palace of Winds because of that. Lots of decent stuff there, nothing huge, but more Kinstones and keys. And the Fire Element was there! Speed upgrade for Mole Mitts as well. Anyway, time for more Kinstone fusing... Well then... That was fortuitous. None of it was immeidately useful for progress, but the third element was there. We're getting quite close to the final dungeon, especially with the 31 figurines we currently have. (The Power Bracelets were a trap, because @Dcubed likes that recurring option in Zelda randomisers. Thankfully, we already have those) Anyway, our current roadblocks. The Three Sword - Obviously, we need this to eventually get the Four Sword to beat Vaati, but getting the Three Sword will let us go to the Cemetary area. We have a lot of keys for that now, so a possible hoard of items there. The Pegasus Boots - OK, so we didn't need it for the Swamp, but there's a lot of hidden Minish stumps that can only be uncovered with these. This will also get us to the key for the cemetary gate. The Grip Ring - Still haven't found it, but it's not a huge deal for Mt. Crenel with the Cane of *very unfortunate name*. We do need it for the library and Veil Falls though, so still a big block. It's quite remarkable how quickly we got three elements, I thought we'd have Dark Hyrule Castle open via figurines, but it could be either way now. The Four Sword is looking to be the last block here.

OK, bit of weirdness of me not showing up on other people's friend list. Had to reset.

Next Friday at 6 seems like a decent time.

Damn it, @BowserBasher! You're not a sword! Go away! So, probably against my better judgement, @Dcubed has egged me on to play a randomiser of The Minish Cap. I've mentioned this before, but Zelda games are generally great for randomisers. (Not BotW though, that would be miserable) You're given the cap itself at the start, and the goal is to get the things needed to start and complete the last dungeon in order to deliver extreme stabbity justice to Vaati. Now I can't precisely remember what I actually need to get through Dark Hyrule Castle, but it'll probably need most of the items like Bombs, and the Bow, etc. I'm pretty certain the shield and ocarina aren't needed though. To even start Dark Hyrule Castle, we would need the 4 elements that are normally given at the end of dungeons, or the randomiser offers another way... Note the 6/35 in the bottom left. This refers to the number of figurines we've found so far. Yes, Dcubed has shuffled 70 of them into the item pool. Why? Mixture of a neat idea, and the fact he wants us to suffer. See, this setting he used is cool in that, if we find 35 of them, then Dark Hyrule Castle will open up automatically, and we won't need the elements at all! I think we have 12 currently. We will defo need the Four Sword, the bow, as well as the Cane of *very unfortunate name*, because you need them to beat Vaati. It was a rough start though, because the item pool does include Kinstone pieces, and Dcubed, being the evil git he is, turned off the ability to have them randomly drop from enemies and grass! So we spent about 2 hours with this. Completely utterly useless! It has made Green Kinstones, the usual lame colour of kinstones, real MVPs in a randomiser, because well, they open up a lot more things, and being a randomiser, they could lead to anything! Thankfully, it started to snowball once we finally found a green one, leading to stuff like the sword, and the mole mitts pretty early. Ironically, the sword barely opened up anything we couldn't do with the Lantern (Which we found first) already, but it's nice to have because it's the main method of attack. Speaking of getting things way too early! Awwwwww yeeaaaaahhh! Quite a few shenanigans we did with this, including breaking apart the first dungeon. Pool of water blocking the way? Just jump over it! We couldn't complete it proper because we don't have the boss key, so there's still 2 items there we can't reach, but yeah. Even easier dungeon with the Roc's Cape and Lantern to bypass stuff. We found the Bomb bag and the Gust jar in there as well, pretty great haul! We still have a couple of big leads. With bombs, we can now explore some of the south west portion of Hyrule, as well as go into the Temple of Droplets (Having the Lantern already might mean we can get decently far without a key by sequence breaking, maybe, we'll have to see), but there are a few big roadblocks in our way. A bigger wallet - This is a consistent one in every Zelda randomiser from OoT onwards, it's not been so bad in this one, because the shops have been pretty lame this time, but it does pain me to constantly find big rupees in chests and throw them away, because we can only hold 100... What a bargain! The Two Sword - We have a sword, but that doesn't open as much as you'd think. Sure, it's convenient, but powering it up so we can make copies of Link will help solve a lot of puzzles. We're gonna need the Four Sword anyway, so the sooner we find those four other upgrades, the better. Pegasus Boots and the Bow - Can't explore the swamp fully until we get these. The Roc's Cape is great, but it can only help us cheese so much. We have a quiver upgrade, and the speed upgrade for arrows, but no bow... Typical Zelda randomiser... The Grip Ring - Kinda forgot this was a thing. We can't climb stuff until we get this! It dawned on us when we found the three library books, turned into a Minish, and realised we couldn't even climb them. Mt. Crenel is mostly blocked off until we get this. A bottle - Can't even get up Mt. Crenel without this. Not to mention all the fireplaces in Hyrule Town! Some more hearts would be nice as well. 4 hearts and no bottle is kinda dicey in some areas. Anyway, some humourous moments include. Finding the bottle of dog food. "Alright! If we just feed the dog that, we get to keep the bottle. Only to realise that the bottle you get from that counts as a seperate item, and therefore, was randomised as well. It was a Kinstone Piece... The disappointment was palpable. That scroll behind the shop counter? We got to it! What was it? It was the Peril Beam, the one completely useless sword technique in the game! No wonder it wasn't on sale... We forgot the Jabba Nut was a thing. We went to the elder in Minish Village, and he said "Go get the nut". What the hell is he talking about? And then we realised we can't understand the Minish! Thankfully, that doesn't affect Minish everywhere else due to it not being programmed that way. That said, we don't need it now that we have bombs, but still funny. I couldn't do the Cuccoo minigame because we needed to cross the river. Even with Roc's Cape, it took me a few attempts to throw it over though, that timing is really tight! There's an underground section which requires bombs. We didn't ever think that it was actually gated behind having an upgraded bomb bag. You need 12! We got jammy though, and a block we blew up dropped bombs! Right, that's all for now.

Stock matches tonight from 7:30.

Balls, you only unlock the extra music for Combat Simulator by doing each mission on Solo Campaign. Still, thanks to the stuff I learnt playing with @BowserBasher, I have managed to get past G5 Building by myself for the first time ever. I'll see how far I can take that before having to beg @Dcubed to do it for me. Still wanna finish it in co-op, mind. It's a lot more fun.

When I claim I'm pretty mediocre at this game, I damn well mean it! I'm Player 1 on the left. @BowserBasher is on the right. You can just tell when laughter stopped him from playing for a brief moment. He was Player 3 then. Man, it's surreal playing the N64 version of Perfect Dark in Widescreen and Hi-res and it running so smoothly, that's completely impossible on original hardware! Just gotta fix the blur effect and the fact the N64 controller icons don't disappear in Widescreen, and it'll be perfect!

Right, @S.C.G, whenever you're ready, just hop on to our game and you'll get to watch Simon and me flail around randomly. Then when we fail or succeed, we'll play some Combat Simulator with DCubed

Look, I love me some hand drawn box art, but you need to get some really high quality artists there, because, well... What's wrong with your face?

I have almost certainly talked about Metroid Zero Mission before, so I won't go into too much detail, it's still my favourite 2D Metroid, and part of that is how much the game encourages sequence breaking. Hell, the game expects you to do this if you want to see all the ending screens. Anyway, here's a few. Try them next time you play it if you haven't. Early Super Missiles is a bit tricky to pull off, but it utterly destroys the game in hilarious fashion! Amazing what 6 extra Super Missiles can do. Anyway, here are my play stats. Zero Mission laughs at my glacial 100% clear! (Seriously, you have to do it in under 2 hours, on both difficulties!) Moving on... Chico and the Magic Orchards DX is an adventure game developed by Daikon Games that released in 2022 for the Switch and PC. Despite the "DX" moniker on it, it's not an enhanced version of any previous game, but much like the entire game, is a throwback to the Game Boy Colour. Chico the Chipmunk accidentally steps into a portal which teleports him into a magical world with massive nuts! Walnuts, that is. Chico has to get them back to his home in the forest, because what else would he do? Like I mentioned before, the game is a massive throwback to the Game Boy Colour. It plays a lot like a top-down Zelda, except there's basically no combat (Outside of the handful of bosses). Instead the game focuses on the puzzling aspect. Each of the levels has a walnut that you can roll around, and your goal is to utilise that walnut to reach the end of the level. It's a simple concept, but it's executed well. It is quite short, but it costs less then 5 quid, so I can't say I didn't get my money's worth. The presentation is great! It really captures that Game Boy Colour feel. From the optional dot matrix screen, to the many colour palette options available, the developers here know what they're doing. But yeah, @Hero-of-Time is right. This is a delightful little game, and well worth spending some loose change on.

Mario Kartma at it's finest!

And your choice of track didn't show up once! And nothing of value was lost. So proud of myself! Yeah, not quite "Suddenly, Bananas!" because it didn't hit me, so this is the term for that now!

Oh balls. I want Mario & Luigi, but I'm still on the fence about Zelda until I'm certain it's not an open world! Might be time to browse the eShop... EDIT: Nope, nothing I want that I don't already have. Great, now I run the risk of buying a voucher and having nothing to use it on...

I defy anyone to claim that isn't a change for the better. Basing something off of the coolest animal, and then going with that design is a crime.

Well, at least the playable character actually looks like a bloody chameleon this time!

Player's Choice tonight at 8pm.

Well, if we figure out when you lot are usually free, then we might be able to get a group together. So, like Dcubed said, I'm basically free all day Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The only exceptions are Thursday at 8pm (UK Time). I play Mario Kart for about an hour then, I'm up for it before or after that though. And Saturday from 7:30pm is when I play Smash, that goes on until 10, so unless you're a real night owl, it would have to be before that. If you lot (and @Ashley, if he's interested) say what day and times you're free, then we might find some cross reference and get a game going.

I used some of it during the main playthrough. Mostly, the arena. It was a relatively short time investment for a tangible effect. But if I was a few Bond Fragments short of getting someone up a bond level, then I'd do something else once just to get me there. Ironically, when I boot Engage up to play around with Relay Trials now, I spend time waiting for other players by fishing. By the time I'm done, the mission I played would probably be done and I can collect the rewards. For that same reason, it's why I use the Training Grounds in Three Hopes, slap some units there, click Successive Training, and mash A. Cook up some buffs per chapter, and that's about it. I never went around talking to everyone or giving them gifts. Couldn't be bothered. Shez naturally builds support just by being mandatory in important battles.

Well, Little Mac doesn't have that problem in Ultimate, so someone has to do it. It's kinda subtle, but if someone's winning in Time, they'll give a brief flash every now and again.

Precisely the reason. It's why I prefer Engage as well. Three Houses is just too much in between faffing around stuff for my liking. It's also not as useful in Three Hopes, partly because you recruit other characters through the battles themselves, not by trying to win them over during the school sections. So if I chose to ignore it, it didn't feel like I was handicapping myself. There's no planning school sessions for the students, no fishing minigame. It's a lot more straightforward, and not nearly as integral to success. Three Hopes's "hub" area is also far easier to traverse, I got lost in Garreg Mach a lot, but the HQ is easy to find stuff in, and they give you a way to jump between facilities super early. I don't mind preparation in Fire Emblem, but when it feels like that makes up more of the game then the actual battles themselves, well, it's not the main draw of Fire Emblem for me.

Me, after getting Wolf, on voice chat: "Don't side B, don't side B, don't side B" *Proceeds to immediately Side B to try and catch someone off-guard, only for them to jump, and watch me plummet off the edge because I miscalculated the distance* Not my finest moment there... EDIT: Here it is, for those who want a cheap laugh.

Would you perhaps say that, personally, you prefer the air?

It's worth noting that of all the Alphadream employees that worked on the Bowser's Inside Story remake, the majority of the ones we know of are now at ILCA. So I imagine this is more of an educated guess. Here's where they all are based on looking at the credits of games after BiS.