#PastebinMonday 03/04/2019 In the Doldrums of the Grind Edition

In the Doldrums of the Grind Edition

Hey guys, how’s it goin?

I get the feeling that highlights on the YouTube are going to be slow going for a while. Puzzle Challenge Easy mode is starting to get to the point where it may get depressing to watch if I’m not getting anything done. I look back through my VODs from the past week and I can find nothing that struck my mind as something worth re-watching. That said, I am a man on a mission. I will spend multiple months on this if that is what it takes. This mode is so luck-based, it may actually take that long to find an improvement. I would also likely need to fit in some GDQ practice in there, too…

GDQ submissions close in a few days, but I don’t have the time to record any others at this point so I will stick to my two games of Pokemon Puzzle Challenge Intense and Tetris Attack V-Hard One-Handed. I like my chances with both of the games, especially if edobean is going to join me for the one-handed race. I had two other ideas, but they both fell through.

I wanted to submit Winnie the Pooh’s Home Run Derby to beat Tigger, but I could not work out how to make backup saves and use them during the run without relying on an external website to run the game. For marathon safety, flash games really need to be run on a local copy and not one hosted on another website. The problem I could not overcome was that no flash player I could find could save progress if the game were to close suddenly. Without that, a run could be mercy-killed in 15 minutes—and that’s the last thing I would want to happen. I simply lack the technical knowledge to make it marathon-safe.

The other game I was also considering was Battlebots: Design and Destroy for the GBA. I spent precisely one day with that game last year. I have no reason to believe that it could not be a consistent 20-25 minute run full of robot fighting that people can get behind. As I got to really thinking about it, however, I also have no reason to believe that I could produce enough commentary for 20 minutes to sell it as a speedgame. At the end of the day, you put yourself in a corner and mash buttons for 15 minutes and hope that good things happen. I would need more time to figure out how to sell it. Maybe next time.

It’s at this point that I realize that I don’t really speedrun too many games that 1. a GDQ audience would want to see; and 2. I could do the most justice in front of a GDQ audience. I’m okay with that. My taste in games has always been strange compared to everyone else. I don’t gravitate to the same stuff that everyone else does. I’m also at a point where I don’t want to add more speedgames right now. I’ve shown a tendency to drop games for a while, only to want to revisit them much later. I’m not getting any younger so I want to get into the position where I actually want to retire from certain games and move on to other things I want to try.

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

--Cards