#PastebinMonday 04/01/2019

I’m a Spreadsheet Dork Edition

Hey guys, how’s it goin?

Last week, the results of the Pokemon Puzzle Challenge / Game Boy Tetris Attack community emulator poll were made public. Specific emulators were chosen and runs not performed on those emulators were removed. I had to personally purge dozens of runs as a result of the rule change. The leaderboard will never be the same. N64 will be next… as soon as I figure up every single emulator that can actually load Pokemon Puzzle League. There are many emulators, but not that many that can run the game.

Speaking of Pokemon Puzzle Challenge, I will be resuming my Intense mode grind this week. I improved my S-Hard time by five seconds after getting back my other Scroll Off records. It’s definitely my most vulnerable time considering I just now have strats for it. In any case, after Intense, I will do the rest of the Scroll On categories, followed by the rest of the game’s categories, before finally moving on to Game Boy Tetris Attack. It’s been a while since I’ve spent this long on primarily one game.

In other stream news, I will also reveal what I will be doing on Saturdays now that I have no more incentives to do, at the moment. One of the games that was selected for SGDQ 2019 was a GBC game I last ran in 2015 and, as of today, still have the WR for in Rhino Rumble. Someone else took up that run recently, got within a minute of my time, and submitted it to SGDQ. I had always considered submitting it myself, but I didn’t think it had enough name recognition to get in and I did not have the confidence that I could de-rust it properly. It’s not super forgiving or marathon safe unless you enable the normally banned ten lives code. Even with that code, my confidence in finishing a run is low. That said, someone who runs the game should be on that GDQ couch so I will re-learn the game so I can help competently explain the game. Besides, I always wanted to cut 45 seconds off of my time.

In other gaming news, Sunday revealed to me just how much of a spreadsheet dork I am. I mean, I’ve published spreadsheets for Pokemon Puzzle Challenge, Game Boy Tetris Attack, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards, Monster Rancher Advance, and Beyblade G-Revolution, among other things, but to go so far as to spend four hours making a spreadsheet to solve a simple-looking 15 year old card battle game based on an anime for the GBA that was never released in Japan that I was only playing casually puts my spreadsheet dweebness at levels I never thought I would stoop to. The game, for those wondering, is Azumanga Daioh Advance. (Yes, someone made a game based on Azumanga Daioh. There are actually three games. And, of course, none of them were released outside of Japan.)

The game follows a simple premise. You have a deck of 25 cards, each with anywhere from 1-6 stars on them in various positions. In each round of play, you draw 5 of those cards and have 10 seconds to arrange them so that you line up the most three-in-a-row sets of stars horizontally and diagonally across all of the cards. You score points for how many stars are on your cards in total, each three+-in-a-row you get, and how many links you can “connect” across multiple cards. Those points turn into damage to your opponent. If you inflict 100 damage to your opponent before they inflict 100 damage to you, you win. Winning games gets you additional cards you can add to your deck for future playthroughs.

One of the game’s modes, a challenge mode of sorts, puts you through four loops against every opponent in the game in which both of you have the same cards every hand. At 32 stages in total, I could only get to stage 19 before getting frustrated enough to actually come up with a spreadsheet for it. I actually made my spreadsheet capable of giving you the highest scoring arrangement for any set of 5 cards so that you could never lose. It took so long to make because it has to consider 120 (!) permutations and many errors were made along the way. I’ll put it up on a Google Drive if anyone cares to see it. The game is fun and casual enough for Azumanga Daioh fans to play at least once. Kinda steep learning curve, though.

That’s my life story for the week. Until next time, everyone, thanks for reading!

--Cards

(Hooray, I went the whole time without mentioning my SGDQ snub. Wait, crap. Dammit.)