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alexplayssimsnstuff · 4 years

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Bella Goth Disappearance FINALLY Solved!

Back in the day, I had originally subscribed to the theory that Bella was abducted by aliens that were set on her by the Caliente’s who then murdered her when she returned, and so I went in the game to do a walkthrough as to how I came to that theory. That’s when I found that I WAS WAYYYY OFF, there is a whole ass rabbit-hole here, and like a total Alice, I fell in it.

And, after 16 years of wondering and imagining different scenarios, I finally found out the truth. Turns out, we were ALL wrong, and the truth has been staring at us in the face the whole time.

Just as a warning, this is VERY dark and bleak and depressing. Bella wasn’t dealt a good hand, guys. What happened to her was all sorts of MESSED up.

Just for clarity, I do base this off of events that happen in the official sims storyline, because while the game is ultimately up to us to live life as we like, go ahead and do whatever with your game, there IS a story being told here, but in a way that doesn’t conflict with our own free will. It’s ingenious, really. This goes with the main Sims games released for PC and Mac. However, the console versions do provide a lot of insight to further details and situations. Specifically the Sims 2 for PSP, and the Sims 3 for the Nintendo DS.

So, first off, it has been verified what happened to her: In 2014, Twitter held an AMA for the SimGurus just before the release of the Sims 4. Someone asked the following question, and SimGuru Sarah responded.

It was later confirmed that Bella Goth of Lunar Lakes IS the Bella Goth of Pleasantview. She does look like the rest of the ghosts there with pale skin and yellow hair and eyes, and with that in mind, you can see for yourself…

That’s her, alright.

Okay, if she died on Lunar Lakes, there are still questions that need answers:

1. Did she ever go home?

2. Does her family know what happened to her?

3. How did she die on Lunar Lakes?

Well, she died of old age, that can be found out easily enough, but I found the answers to the other two: Kinda and no.

So, just to recap, I’m gonna review Bella’s life as we know it canonically.

Bella was born to Simis and Jocasta Bachelor of Sunset Valley. She grew up the road from her childhood best friend, and later, husband, Mortimer Goth, with her older brother Michael. She always had a sense of the macabre and dark and was known as “the best dressed girl in town.” Even then she wore a red dress. A more child appropriate red dress, but a red dress. She just came from an average suburban family who had a fascination for the not average. She’s still a child, and not a Goth yet. She still goes by the surname Bachelor.

Twenty-five years later, she shows up in the Sims 1 with her childhood best friend and now husband, Mortimer Goth, and they have moved into their own home, and have a daughter, Cassandra. Her in-laws moved out of their home in Sunset Valley and moved into what would later become the Goth House of the Sims 2 in the beginnings of what would be known as Pleasantview. Unless you got her a job, she was a housewife, and she was known to be athletic, elegant, and friendly towards her neighbors. I remember her often being the first to come and say hello to any new Sims I’d move into the neighborhood. Her brother, Michael, is also in town, however, there is no acknowledgement of them being siblings. A family tree system didn’t really exist in the Sims 1, and I’m sure they didn’t even think to make them siblings back then, but the fact remains that they have no relationship at this point in time. The only reason why it’s known that Cornelia and Gunther Goth are Mortimer’s parents is because it straight up says so in the bio. That and their names are the same, but anyway.

So far, things are simple.

That’s because in the 25 years between the Sims 1 and 2, a series of events occurs that really makes things interesting.

Michael joins the science career track. One can assume the reason why he settled into domestic living years after Bella had done so was because he was at grad school. Because he was graduated from grad school, he gets a jumpstart in the career and climbs the latter a lot faster than Mortimer does.

1. Scientist Sims contribute an invention into the Sims world. Michael’s invention was cloning technology. He cloned himself, and a test subject: Skip Broke.

a. Even though he died before it happened, arrangements were made so Brandi could be the next test subject and the first female subject, and when you start Pleasantview for the first time, she is pregnant with her own clone. The baby is always born a boy.

b. Michael’s clones have a 100% rate of being male, genetic identicals to those they were cloned from (Brandi’s just being a boy rather than a girl) and so far, a 100% rate of dying at the same time as the original. They are genetically identical, but wear different clothes.

2. Michael and Bella don’t really have a relationship in their adult lives because Michael leaves Pleasantview early on while Cassandra is still a child and moves to the city.

3. Mortimer follows after Michael, and invents the age reversal serum. Bella is the first test subject, and, the day of her abduction, she takes the serum until she reverts back to being a brand-new adult. Probably to allow herself to fit in her red dress as strikingly as she does, I don’t think an elderly woman could pull that off.

4. Cassandra enters private school.

5. Around this time, Gunther Goth dies. Bella, Mortimer, and Cassandra move out of their home and in with Cornelia to be with her in her last stages of life.

6. Michael marries Dina Caliente. It is speculated that, because of the age gap, they only marry for Michael’s money. But it is worth noting that Michael was Dina’s first serious relationship and she didn’t begin to cheat on Michael with Don until years later just before Michael died.

7. Alexander is born.

8. Shortly after Alexander’s birth, Cornelia dies at the same time Michael does.

9. Dina inherits Michael’s estate and moves in with Nina. They then move to Pleasantview.

10. Don follows them and moves the next day.

11. Bella goes to introduce herself to her new neighbor, Don. They get along, and Don gets the wrong idea and puts the move on Bella. Bella rejects him. He then runs off to go be with Kaylynn and is not there when Bella is abducted by aliens.

12. Bella is never seen again, but shortly after her abduction, a UFO crashlands in Strangetown, and reports that Bella is in Strangetown start rolling in. But, spoiler alert, that’s not the real Bella.

Then, after Bella’s abduction and before you start Pleasantview for the first time, the following happens:

1. Mortimer and Dina hit it off rather fast, and marriage is definitely in the picture when the game first starts.

2. Cassandra, Mortimer, and Alexander all age up on the same day 2 days after Bella disappears.

3. Cassandra goes to Don’s house to find out what he knows about what happened to Bella (jack squat since he wasn’t there) and that’s where they meet for the first time. Don tries to seduce her, probably not knowing who she is, and Cassandra, as much as you gotta love the girl, is naïve as all hell and thinks she won the jackpot and falls for Don quickly.

4. Alexander goes to private school

5. Mortimer retires

6. Cassandra gets engaged the VERY day the game starts.

That is an important thing to note because people like to speculate that Don had something to do with Bella’s disappearance because he made the moves on her mother and they were engaged and he didn’t want to jeopardize that by Bella opening her yap. This is NOT the case because Cassandra was still a teenager when Bella vanished. Don may be a hoe, but he isn’t a pedo. Chris Hansen doesn’t need to be called for this one.

Another important thing to point out is that it’s not known if Dina and Nina knew Bella. At least, not well, since it can’t be established if Michael and Bella had a relationship at all. Despite the fact that they were friends when they were younger, Mortimer has no memories of Michael, and neither do Cassandra or Alexander. They never met their uncle.

ALSO, yes Dina and Nina do have alien ancestry. Their father was a result of an alien abduction pregnancy. But he was born human, so they’re not part alien. Which means they didn’t order ANY aliens to go and kidnap anybody. Why would they? They don’t know her. Not even normal alien sims do that, y’all are just racist.

It’s also worth noting that Mortimer is COMPLETELY fine with Bella being gone. He’s not heartbroken and he isn’t desperately trying to find her like the game tries to suggest. He’s strangely cool about it.

Why is Mortimer fine with Bella being gone?

Because they are no longer married and haven’t been since around the time Alexander was born.

And THAT, guys, gals, and nonbinary pals, is the BIGGEST part that y’all need to just remember. If you can only take one thing away from this part, take away the fact that they’re divorced. It’s S U P E R important.

Now, it is possible to bring Bella back with the Tombstone of Life and Death. She’ll only stick around for a short while because she has a death token that activates when you save the lot, go into Pleasantview, and reload the Goth House. She’ll disappear. Interesting to note that if she’s in the middle of doing something, like talking with a sim or cooking food, she doesn’t disappear completely until she’s done. She does turn see-through and it kinda glitches out…it’s really creepy. Give it a try, you’ll see what I mean. But when she’s done, she’ll disappear, and you’ll get a notification saying she died somewhere else and her spirit has returned to where she was buried.

However, if she dies this way, you cannot resurrect her with the resurrect-o-nomitron. It doesn’t matter who tries it, where they are, or anything. Grim acts like he doesn’t know anything about Bella being dead and even if the Sim COULD resurrect a sim, Bella is not listed.

Since we know Bella is buried in Lunar Lakes, this means she died sometime between the week of her abduction and Cassandra’s wedding where the game starts.

However, while you have Bella in your household, you’ll find she’s brought back with no personality points. She has no memories besides what happened to her children after the first load of Pleasantview. So let’s say that between loading the game and bringing back Bella with the Tombstone, Cassandra gives birth to twin boys. Bella will come back with memories that Cassandra had twins, and she will even know who her grandchildren are. (I use this example because in my most recent Pleasantview playthrough, Cassandra had twin boys named Hendrick and Caspian with Don Lothario.)

Bella will have NO relationship at all whatsoever with Mortimer. You can see before you bring her back on the Goth family tree that they are not married at that point, and Mortimer and Bella start their relationship over as acquaintances. If you let them progress their relationship naturally with no cheats, they actually fight a lot and do not get along at all.

Now, any townie and NPC created before Nightlife will have their turn-on and turn-offs randomized. But it seems to constantly make it so that Bella is never attracted to Mortimer and Mortimer is RARELY attracted to Bella. This is a consistent thing. Interesting to take into consideration.

It’s clear to me, at least, that there were some problems boiling up for some time before Bella vanished.

--they get divorced at around the same time Alexander is born

--they do not get along at all

--Mortimer is completely fine after Bella’s disappearance and isn’t the frantic husband he’s marketed to be at this point in time.

--Mortimer gets into a relationship with Dina Caliente extremely soon after Bella vanishes.

--If Bella does come back and Mortimer is still alive, they naturally do not get along at all.

Which is weird, right? They were always shown to be this desperately in love couple who couldn’t live without eachother. I remember them having a good relationship in the Sims 1.

Also worth noting, Bella is a romance aspiration sim. In the Sims 2, they tend to hoe around a lot. There are a few other adult sims in Pleasantview who are also romance aspiration sims.

1. Don Lothario (the epitome of the romance aspiration)

2. Nina Caliente

3. Daniel Pleasant

4. Skip Broke was also a romance aspiration sim when he was alive.

What is interesting is that while for the most part, romance aspiration sims like to hoe around, there is one exception to this rule so far: Nina Caliente. Nina Caliente’s only romantically involved with Don Lothario. Unless you have another sim start putting the moves on her, then it’s a whole other story. If it were a thing back then, Nina would have been a soulmate romance aspiration while the others would have been serial romantic aspirations.

Bella COULD have been the same way, but that wouldn’t make any sense with the myriad of problems with her relationship with Mortimer.

So, in conclusion, Bella had an affair. Mortimer found out about it, which caused them to, at the least, separate for a while. Then, Bella became pregnant with Alexander, which would have brought up an important question—who is Alexander’s father? Once Alexander was born, and as he got a little older, it becomes clear that he resembles Cornelia, therefore verifying that Mortimer is indeed his father. This would have caused them to try their relationship again, and Bella would have turned down Don in good faith to Mortimer.

Who did Bella have an affair with?

Don wasn’t in town yet, and they hadn’t met. Neither did she meet the Caliente’s yet. Which leaves two possible contenders for Bella’s secret lover: Daniel Pleasant and Skip Broke.

On one hand, Daniel was Bella’s neighbor. She knew the Pleasants, and was friends with Mary-Sue. Daniel had an affair with Kaylynn going on, so he definitely could have some action on the side with Bella, too. My only reservation on that would be that I couldn’t imagine her doing that to her best friend. But then again, she did have an affair on her husband, so who’s to say what her morals are.

Then, there’s Skip Broke. This one makes the most sense to me, personally. While she wasn’t close with Michael, that doesn’t mean she completely avoided him altogether. She would have heard about Michael’s cloning experiments and could have met Skip that way, or she came to say hello and that was how they met. There is a theory going around that Brandi found out Skip was cheating on her, and that’s why she killed him and took his insurance money.

Maybe I’ll do another thing on that because the Skip Broke incident happens to be another rabbit hole altogether.

So, we know that Bella had an affair with Mortimer and things weren’t going so well between them at the time of her disappearance. We know that the Calientes and Don are completely innocent, at least as far as her disappearance goes. (And Nina is innocent altogether, she just loves Don and is completely oblivious to the fact that he’s doing her sister and two other women. She is ALSO a victim here, you guys. Give some love to Nina Caliente, she needs it.)

She dies sometime in the week between her abduction and the first time the Goth household is booted up from old age on Lunar Lakes despite the fact that she was a brand new adult again thanks to Mortimer’s reverse age serum.

Then a UFO crashlands in Strangetown and shortly thereafter reports of Bella Goth being in Strangetown start swarming around.

And yes, this Bella is a clone—there are subtle facial similarities, she is not in the family tree at all for the Goth house, but other than that, she’s structured exactly like the Real Bella goes as far as her outfit, her personality, and her aspiration.

(The Wiki says it’s her despite the fact that it’s been verified she’s not, and it also has MANY discrepencies, saying she’s related to the Curious Family and they appear on her family tree, which is incorrect because Strangetown Bella’s family tree is COMPLETELY EMPTY.)

So, clearly, when Bella was abducted, something went wrong. But what?

Well, why would the aliens even abduct her in the first place?

They tend to go after sims who are wealthy, high-skilled, good-looking, popular, anything like that. Bella was ALL of those things. She was the epitome of the perfect sim to the aliens. They practically worshipped her and their queen took her name and appearance. (This is referenced several times, specifically in the Sims 3.)

So, if something were to go wrong, why would the aliens worship her unless she had been being watched for some time before her abduction?

And what went wrong that caused her to lose her memories, her skills, her personality, her youth, everything?

Aliens also do not abduct children, the elderly, and pregnant sims because their experimentation could go drastically wrong.

She wasn’t a child, and reversed her age so she wouldn’t be an elder for quite some time—

So the only thing that’s left is that she was pregnant when she was abducted and that was why things went wrong.

She wouldn’t have known this, and neither would the aliens—it’s possible that the baby was conceived that day, which helped Bella in the case where Don was hitting on her—she wouldn’t go cheating on Mortimer if she were trying to rekindle their relationship and they had made it to woo-hoo that day.

Also worth noting is that there IS another Goth on Lunar Lakes who happens to look exactly like Bella.

Anyone recognize her?

This is Mathilde Goth.

She is the long-lost third child of Mortimer and Bella Goth.

No, they don’t appear on eachother’s family tree, but they wouldn’t if Bella died shortly after giving birth to her and Mathilde was put in the orphanage.

Mathilde looks almost identical to Bella with the exception of her blue eyes. She also has a preference for blue where Bella preferred red.

Mathilde has no idea where her mother came from and the fact that she has a family on Earth who is just as oblivious to her existence as she is to theirs.

What happens to Cassandra and Alexander after they find out about Bella’s death?

Remember how I said scientist sims end up inventing something?

Cassandra’s invention is time travel. She makes a time machine and the first use is to send Don to the future after her, Dina, Nina, and Kaylynn find out that he was playing all of them. She then goes on to live her life. We don’t know how that looks yet, but she never finds out what happened to her mother and that she has a younger sister.

Alexander is greatly affected by his mother’s death. He has no memories of her being abducted by aliens. Normally toddlers remember things like that so it’s odd that he doesn’t when the rest of his family does. What he does remember is her disappearing, Mortimer being okay with it and getting together with Dina really fast after she vanished, and then finding out that his mother was dead.

Alexander is a child prodigee. He’s a smart kid. So, he would go with any other conclusion someone would go with that limited information: he believed Mortimer killed her.

Well, Cassandra still has her time machine after she uses it to get rid of Don. And as we all know, Alexander’s name shows up in the Sims 3 a few times despite the fact that he doesn’t exist yet. And, according to the Goth family tree, it’s not a family name of an ancestor of his, he is the only Alexander Goth.

Once again, we’re going to reference a console game. This time is the Sims 3 for the Nintendo DS. Alexander actually makes an appearance, and this time, he’s not alone: he’s married to a woman named Cecelia. The family bio says that their gloominess is BECAUSE of Mortimer. Alexander dyed his hair orange. Probably he was trying to bleach it and didn’t know what toner was. He doesn’t have that great of a relationship with Cecelia, as a matter of fact, she has a better relationship with Don Alto than she does her own husband.

Back in the realm of the PC games, Alexander wrote two books when he went back in time to the continuity of the Sims 3:

Baron Graff Van Gold, which comes with Supernatural,

And then there’s the one that appears in the base game.

Murder in Pleasantview.

To string it altogether, Alexander remembers her being gone, then learning she died. He suspects Mortimer was the one to do it but he never actually talks to his father about it. He doesn’t know anything about the abduction, if anything thinking it a ridiculous rumor. He grows up, gets married, and decides at some point in time to go back in time to try and prevent his mother’s death. So he and his wife go into the time machine and try to go back to when it happened, but instead get sent back wayyyy too far to when his parents are still children. What happens to the time machine? It breaks. He’s stuck in a period of time where Time travel wasn’t a thing and no one really knows how to help him and he sure as hell doesn’t know himself. Effectively, he’s stuck there.

So, he writes A Murder in Pleasantview to tell the story of what he thinks happens to his mother. He doesn’t know it’s really all for nothing, but at the same time, it is because of what ends up happening as a result. A result he probably didn’t even know would happen.

See, A Murder in Pleasantview is a best-seller. It blows up the world of 50 years before his time. Every bookshelf has a copy of this book, standard-load. Sims would have read this, and would be influenced accordingly. They would have made better decisions, not wanting this tragic thing to happen to them.

And yes, it does literally take the world by storm. Better decisions in the past truly make for a better future.

This is where the Sims 4 comes in. It is a different continuity, but it is different because they are aware of what Alexander believes to have happened to Bella. This would be why their personalities are so completely different, why the age gap between Cassandra and Alexander aren’t so extreme, why the Goths are so much more reclusive.

Alexander did something that inadvertently changed the future, eliminating himself and his circumstances entirely. He vanished suddenly, probably in a series of events identical to Back to the Future, where he is then allowed to live his life as a child with his mother in the picture, having no idea what he believed happened to her, nor knowing the truth. He erases his little sister altogether, but he can’t be blamed for that since he didn’t know she even existed.

What happened to his wife? Did she get erased like Alexander did?

No, actually she died. She tried repairing the time machine, failed, and was electrocuted to death as a result. She died young and is buried in the Goth mansion’s graveyard, confusing future generations because no one knows where she comes from because she has the surname Goth but they can’t find her on their family tree.

Lolita Goth was the wife of Alexander Goth.

Yes, it says she’s single, which means one of two things happened:

Either she tried repairing the time machine one last time after Alexander vanished and died,

Like Alexander’s marriage to Cecelia, they didn’t have the best relationship and they ended up getting a divorce, then, possibly with Alexander still around, did the same and died.

She clearly wanted to go back home to her time and wasn’t happy with Alexander for being stuck there.

And it makes sense that she would have been electrocuted with the time machine because there are no other objects in the Goth Mansion that would result in her electrocution.

Which would ALSO explain why the Goths of the Sims 3 can’t figure out who she is. You can’t list a descendent and their wife on your family tree if they don’t exist yet, can you?

Tragedy is just par for the course in the Goth Family, it matches their dark and dreary macabre air. But Bella’s story is just really extra sad. Imagine trying to repair your failed marriage, going to meet a new neighbor only for him to put the moves on you without invitation, then get abducted by aliens where their experiments go wrong, causing you to lose your memories, your personality, your youth, and then you find out that it went wrong because you’re pregnant, which you didn’t know about that either, and your kidnappers take a tissue sample from you, and then drop you on a strange planet far from home where you have no way to communicate to them that you’re there, but you don’t remember anyone but your children anyway, leaving you to have a baby you didn’t even know existed when you were abducted and live just long enough to name her?

The truth has been staring at us in the face since 2014, but we all missed it. Me included for the longest time. It’s been 16 years since Bella went missing, and we all had theories and ideas, but THIS is the truth, and it’s really. Messed up. Yeah, I found out what happened to Bella, but do I like it? No, not at all. Bella deserved better, and so do her children. Mathilde especially. She grew up in an orphanage never knowing she had a family who would have loved her so very much, only to become a mailcarrier on her home planet. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a mailcarrier, don’t get me wrong.

Dina Caliente is innocent, but seriously? Bye.

Nina Caliente is innocent, and really deserves better.

Don Lothario is innocent, but yet he sucks.

Mortimer Goth used to be my favorite out of the Goth family, yes, even over Bella. But after learning everything about him I have mixed feelings about the guy. I don’t blame him for not trusting Bella, and I don’t blame him for wanting to move on, but jeez, at least show a little genuine emotion, Morty, she was your childhood best friend, and, if nothing else, the mother of your children.

There was no plot to get rid of her and swipe the Goth fortune.

It was just poor timing on the alien’s end, and bad luck altogether.

So, yeah.

That’s what happened to Bella Goth.

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fostersffff · 4 years

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Bursted my way through a bunch of smaller indie titles that I had been accumulating on my Switch, so here’s a brief review of all four of them!

Creature in the Well: This actually came out nearly a full year ago now, but I only just picked it up. It’s a nifty little action game themed after pinball: you control a robot who’s charged with re-powering a mountain-sized weather machine, and you do this by hitting balls of energy into de-powered pylons. Re-powering pylons earns you energy points, which you can to open the way forward and, if you find the right materials by hunting for secret rooms by completing trickier pinball puzzles, power up your robot so that it hits harder and faster. My biggest complaint is that the “dungeons” are all made up of identical rooms, but shuffled around and palette swapped, so an already short game is made to feel even shorter by how samey everything is. A fun romp, but there’s really not much else to say about it.

Panzer Paladin: Sorry to say that this was definitely the most disappointing game on this list, especially since this was the one I was most hyped for after demoing it at PAX a few times. It’s a platformer that takes nearly all of its design cues from Mega Man, except that instead of a robot with a projectile, you control a robot with a laser whip who pilots a giant mech who picks up all sorts of swords, spears, and clubs from the enemies they beat. The weapons the mech acquires all have durability, but they also have an associated spell, and you can manually break them to do things like boost your attack and defense, heal yourself, enchant your weapons with a beam attack, and a few other fun niche abilities. The problem is that despite taking its design cues from Mega Man, it executes worse than the original Mega Man on basically everything. There are too many stages, and they’re all too long and homogeneous with bad checkpoints and sudden difficulty spikes, typically right before a checkpoint. You have a stage select, but it ultimately doesn’t matter because the only thing you get from beating any particular boss is a weapon with a higher attack, durability rating, and unique appearance, but are otherwise functionally identical to all the other weapons you get. Even its neat original ideas don’t hold up great: you can hop out of your mech and platform with your much smaller and much more fragile main character, but the only reason you’d do this is if the game requires it or if your mech loses all of its HP, and you might wind up in a situation where you get to a checkpoint but can’t actually use it, because checkpoints have to be manually activated by your mech giving up a weapon, so most of the time if you find yourself without a mech, it’s easier to just take the L and throw yourself into a pit. Ultimately, the best thing about the game is its character design in cutscenes, which is very much inspired by late 70′s/early 80′s anime like Captain Harlock and Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

Raji: An Ancient Epic: Raji was the game that caught my attention the most during the recent Nintendo Indie direct, both because the game and the story behind it seemed neat. The development team is almost entirely from India, a part of the world not particularly well known for game development, and certainly not action-adventure games with an emphasis on combat. It was also rescued after a failed crowdfunding campaign, and is currently being featured as a timed exclusive for the Switch, so I was rooting for it as soon as I found out about it. You play as Raji, a circus performer in ancient India who sets out to rescue her brother after he’s abducted by demons. The game is narrated by the Hindu gods Durga and Vishnu, who also grant Raji boons in the form of weapons and elemental blessings so she can hold her own against the demons. The adventuring part of the game is pretty simple, mostly just contextual button presses, and you’ll occasionally arrive at very simple rotation based puzzles, or murals depicting Hindu mythology that you can interact with for context. The combat is the more interesting part of the game: you have a series of three light attacks, heavy attacks, and dodges that chain into each other infinitely (compare to other action games where you have defined combo strings that force some kind of pause at the end unless manually interupted), which is pretty necessary how many enemies you can be put up against at once and how much wind-up your attacks have and how little hitstun the enemies suffer. It’s definitely different than what I expect from combat, but not necessarily bad. The game does have a number of issues, including (especially) technical performance on the Switch, difficulty completely falling off once you get your last elemental blessing, and a story that ended so abruptly that I thought maybe I missed a true ending requirement somewhere along the way- ultimately, all the kinds of things you’d expect from a crowdfunded game from a brand new studio. I’d say the game is worth giving a shot, but you’d probably be better off waiting for it to come out on other consoles or PC. It’s not the worst Switch port I’ve ever played, but running better than Bloodstained isn’t too high a bar to get over.

A Short Hike: Easily the best game on this list. As the title implies, A Short Hike is about hiking up a trail to get to the top of a mountain. You can choose to take the direct route up the mountain, or explore the campground and do some other activities, such as collecting seashells, boating, or parkour racing. Based on that description, you might think the game is just a walking simulator, but the critical addition of simple mechanics like jumping, gliding, and climbing instead result in a game that feels like Breath of the Wild set in the low stakes world of Animal Crossing, complete with big eyed animal folk who look almost exactly like Animal Crossing villagers. The controls are nice and tight, and it runs as smooth as butter on the Switch thanks to the simplistic art style, which is best described as “3D on a Nintendo DS”. My only strike against the game is that it’s writing feels very... “be gay do crimes”. That’s probably the wrong way to describe it, but that’s the phrase I think of when every piece of dialog in a game feels very quirky and saccharine and absolutely nothing else. It’s not a bad tone for a game like this, and I did have a few laugh out loud moments, but I wish there was just a bit more variety in that respect. Even so, this game is absolutely in the running for a spot on my personal Top 10 of the year (even though it technically came out on PC last year).

#Creature in the Well #Panzer Paladin #Raji #Raji: An Ancient Epic #A Short Hike #video games #long post

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crystalmaeson · 3 years

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Official Readme by Maeson

Pokemon Crystal Maeson - Public Version 1.0 - Internal Version 15.0.3

IT IS RECOMMENDED TO READ THIS WITH NOTEPAD++, BUT YOU DO YOU.

o--------o |Sections| o--------o

[1] Installation [2] Introduction [3] General List of Changes [4] Patch Differences [5] Pokémon Changes [6] Type Changes [7] Move Changes [8] Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits [9] Mechanic & Gameplay Changes [10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns [11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House [12] Visual Changes [13] Credits

o-----------------o |[1] Installation| o-----------------o

Patching a game is usually a very easy process, specially with IPS Patches.

There's a variety of programs that work with IPS files, but the most famous one is named Lunar IPS, also called LIPS.

This hack is to be patched on a Pokémon Crystal 1.1 ROM file.

More specifically, this rom: Pokemon - Crystal Version (UE) (V1.1) [C][!].gbc CRC-32 : 3358E30A

You open your patcher, and then point to it to the IPS patch and the original, unmodded ROM. It will apply it and inform you when it's finished, it should be quick.

Now, there's two versions of this hack, and each one has also two varieties.

CHOOSE ONLY ONE. To know which version you want, check the details at the not-surprisingly-named "Patch Differences" section.

And yes, the patch weights almost 75% of the original game.

o-----------------o |[2] Introduction| o-----------------o

Hola, welcome to another ridiculously long readme of mine.

I go by the name Maeson and I made other hacks for a handful of other RPGs. For the most part what I usually aim for with these hacks is to create a different experience, tweaking what I can to give games that I've played time and time again a gameplay facelift to keep them fresh for me, sometimes also trying to improve aspects of a game that I think could make it more fun, varied, better paced or just more challenging after many playthroughs and knowing stuff by hand.

These hacks are made for me in first place, so they're shaped in a very personal manner and of course through my own tastes and ideas, but it should goewithout saying, I hope.

But anyway... What can I say about Pokémon?

My feelings toward the main series of Pokémon have changed a lot since its inception. Just like millions of other fans of video games, I lived the Pokémon craze back in the day, and I grew playing most of those games. I was there without fail up until the fifth Generation, then I started to get tired of the series gradually, and I sort of stop caring with time.

Thing is, I really didn't stop liking the Pokémon themselves, and I still enjoy spin-offs like the Trading Card Games or Mystery Dungeon games, and some like Pokémon Conquest and Pokken are quite cool crossovers, so there's still some appeal to me, even if it's waning with each day.

And hey, then you get things like Pokémon Snap, which it's one unique and very memorable game, one of the very, very few games about photography. it's a really chill, fun time overall.

...What it does not appeal to me all that much since a long time, though, is Game Freak and The Pokémon Company. The choices and "philosofies" they've been doing and following for several years now have been some of the most frustrating ones I've seen besides Square Enix, and their interviews equally leave some wonderfully baffling pearls of "wisdom".

They've done a remarkable job at making me wanting to distance myself more and more throughout this last decade, to the point that I lost pretty much all my appreciation for the franchise.

And it's not just with the main games, their choice of pushing aside console spin-offs for more and more mobile based Games As A Service (that usually failed and died quickly) also left us without many interesting games that could at least keep us somewhat happy.

And the less we talk about the lies, misinformation and the worrying use of younger audiences as a shield to deflect criticism from their business decisions, the better.

I... Just can't support or stand that anymore. I feel drained.

And I would have been completely away from this franchise, barring some old games, if not for one day finding that a collective of people were working on disassembly projects of older games.

I found them to be really interesting, and my mind kinda played with the idea of having a version of one of those old games with changes that I've been wanting and waiting to happen for many years. Who knows, I could even *attempt* to improve what was already there and even add more stuff to it.

Checking the available games with disassembly, I chose Pokémon Crystal, as it seemed the most complete and evolved project of all, in combination with also being one of the longer games thanks to the large post-game it originally had, plus being an earlier Generation game also gave me more room to do changes and improvements.

So little by little, with no idea of assembly, I kept hitting walls and messing around for a time, and what you downloaded is the result of spending the free time I had working in it... For quite some time. In fact it has been over 2 years of constant work, this started in 2018.

The aim of this hack is simple:

Create a new "balance", make the game more challenging, and iron out stuff I find could be improved, or I have the ability and knowledge to do while I add more value to certain aspects of the game. Make a version of Pokémon that I'd like to replay and have every monster be a fun addition to the team and a foe I just can't roll over with little to no thought, so I want to try all of them.

If you were expecting a new story, or a new region, or whatever pipe dream that most probably would end up incompleted and not stable, sorry to disappoint, but you won't find it here.

And no, I don't really care if this hack doesn't have an "epic" name. There's so many other more important things to care than that...

o----------------------------o |[3] General List of Changes| o----------------------------o

Here you have a quick list with some of the biggest changes all around, but there are sections for most of them to talk more in detail.

· Attempt to reach a new balance. This has been said above, but what it actually means is that elements as Types, Moves, Pokémon Stats and such have been changed deeply to move away from the conventions of the original games, making many species feel entirely different gameplay-wise.

Among other things, this means no more disappointing creatures with bad typing and many weaknesses, or low Base Stats filler. It also means parity between the Types, with each one having the same number of Weaknesses and Resistances. The intent is for every Fully Evolved Pokémon to feel useful or, at the very, very least, usable in a way where you don't feel handicapping yourself to the point you ask yourself if it is even worth doing it.

· Moves and TMS have been changed a lot in order to accomodate the Physical & Special Split, each Type now has both Physical and Special moves of different Power tiers.

Many old attacks have been removed and many others have been added. What moves each evolutionary line learns also has been changed, in order to make all Pokémon have decent movesets depending on what their archtype is.

· DVs (IVs on later generations) No longer matter on Stat Calculations. This means that every member of the same species will have the same potential. This also means you can have female Pokémon with good Attack, and Shiny Pokémon with good stats, what a novel concept.

This way any monster you come across will be equal, so you can focus on having fun, while still having to care of it by training, feeding him vitamins and fruits, choosing the best moves for it in a given situation, making a balanced team, and you know, the actual RPG bits instead of the RNG ones.

If you liked the eugenics experiment experience the original games give you, sorry but that's not here. I apologize for nothing.

· Trainers changed all around. Better AI than in the original game, more varied teams, their Pokémon have Stat Exp, meaning that the further you go, the better trained their Pokémon are, and better trained your own monsters should be. I also removed several limitations imposed on NPC trainers to make them factually inferior to you. This is made trying to make the game more challenging instead of the usual cake-walk.

There's no ridiculous stuff like giving Hyper Beam to everything or illegal moves for NPC trainer's Pokémon (although bear in mind, many Pokémon have changed types, and many have changed movesets so their moves are the new "legal" moves, but again, nothing impossible for you to have or to add fake difficulty).

If you're asking yourself this, no, in this hack NPCs do not change Pokémon constantly, that tends to drag the game too much. They still do it occasionally, but not at every time Type matchups that go against them.

· Quite a few changes related to Items, from how strong some Healing Items are, to changing Kurt Balls, changing the effect (or power of the effect) on several Held Items, new types of berries, and others.

Healing items are no longer useable in battle, neither for you or the NPC Trainers. Battles must be won only with your Pokémon, their held items, and strategy.

...Or well, over-levelling through mind-numbing grinding. We can't exactly get rid of that.

· Added a whole LOT of improvements here and there to make the game flow, feel and play better.

Things like changing how Item Storage works to have more space overall, much faster egg hatching speeds, making every monster available in this hack, having the Pokédex show you a bit of meaningful game information, as now it shows a species Base Stats and also the Shiny variations, make saving a faster process, making TMs infinite (but not abusable), improving the scrolling while moving around making the game feel and look much better, large improvements on the Battle Tower, expanding the Trainer House to be more interesting end-game stuff, adding Rematches, making PokeGear rematches better, a way to change PC Boxes remotely, move tutors and quite a few others.

There's many things more, but that's what the individual sections are for.

o-----------------------o |[4] Patch Differences | o-----------------------o

Now, there are four patches, so let's explain this quickly.

First, we have the Original versions, and the Alternative versions, these last ones offer a tweaked experience in case you want to play this hack again with some differences.

In which ways it is different?

Well, the Starters have been swapped, so when you begin a new game, you get to choose between Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle.

MUCH bigger difference, though, is that all the Gym trainers, the Leaders, other important NPCS and the Elite Four no longer have their teams limited to following the thematic "Type" standards.

Other trainers such as the Rival also have different teams, (and like the original patch, he develops a different team depending on the starter they steal).

Without that restriction each of those trainers have way more varied teams, making the game less predicable because you can no longer coast on the Type disadvantages most of the Pokémon of a Gym Leader share.

This of course changes how you make your teams. You no longer "have" to bring "this or that Type" because later on the road there's a Gym weak to it. It's more about making a team that you feel it can withstand anything it may come.

The order of certain Ingame Trades have also been changed.

There's other smaller changes to make the bigger ones sit well, such as small text edits or change the order of the Pokédex.

But Original and Alternative are divided in two too, one that I'll call "Intended Versions" and the other two are "Items in Battle" variations.

The "Intended Versions" disables healing Items in battle and it forces Set options, meaning you don't get free switches after knocking out a foe Pokémon. You can't change the option, because it's not even there anymore.

That's how I'd like people to play my hack, but knowing how some people can be, there's an extra patch, "Items in Battle", that gives you the possibility of using Items and to change the battle option, but there's a price to pay.

If you choose to play with enabled Items/Switch in battle, a few Items will be unavailable to you, the price of several Items will increase, and the HP they restore will be lowered. Also, NPC Trainers will also use Items.

That's simply because Items can be easily abused, and that is the opposite of what I wanted in this hack. If you choose the "right" to abuse Items during battle, then I have the right to make adjustments to annoy you with your choice.

It's not like Hyper Potions will heal 1 HP or anything crazy like that, but because in my hack you can't use Items in battles, they're more powerful than the usual vanilla items so you could recover better between battles.

The items you lose access to are all new, by the way. A set of consumable Held Items that raise a stat whenever the holder is attacked or under other circustances, similar to the berries in the Third Generation, albeit they're activated differently.

Another change is limited access to a team-healing item that I made, and restores all your Pokémon to perfect shape. Intended to be used in a pinch, like being lost in a cave, or between hard fights, but you can only have in small amounts. In the Original patch, you can carry 3 of them, but only 1 on the "Items in Battle" versions.

You're free to choose how to play. Of course, you only apply one patch.

If for some reason you started a game with one version, for example, with the patch for Items in Battle, and you later on want to go to the No Items in Battle version, you can actually use that save file and not start again.

But I recommend you to save first in a Pokémon Center before doing so. Once you did that, patch a clean ROM and rename the .SAV file into whatever the new patched rom is. Now you can continue with your game. Remember to always make backups before doing anything of this sort.

I do not recommend changing between the Original and Alternate versions.

Lastly, trading and battling with vanilla Pokémon Crystal is not going to work. Not only many of the fixes made already impossible to be compatible with Vanilla Pokémon Crystal, but the gigantic load of changes I made to the game would render any attempt become a glitchy mess.

But you can trade and battle with other copies of this hack, and the four versions of the patches should be compatible with each other for both trading and battling. I'd recommend using the No Items versions because it gives you access to those extra Held Items, though.

o--------------------o |[5] Pokémon Changes| o--------------------o

Probably the most obvious and central change, these creatures are the core of the franchise after all.

As you may imagine, there have been changes to most aspects of them. While some of those have their sections to talk about, Base Stats are probably the most important one here.

That is because for the most part there is parity in Base Stat Total for all evolutionary lines in this game.

Pokémon to me has become a rather painful series of games to look back, because there has never been that much of an interest to improve or balance out their creations to make a more varied, balanced and fun experience, and when they try to do something is more on the lines of "adding" to fix instead of improving what's there already.

And don't get me wrong, trying to get "perfect balance" is impossible with such a large amount of creatures, but at the same time, Game Freak has done very, very little in this regard, most other developers would at least try something, specially if they had the decades of game releases Game Freak has had.

But back on track. This is why in this hack, almost every non-Starter, non-Legendary fully evolved monster has a Base Stat Total of 650, making each all of them feel have the same potential overall.

This means there will be no "early useless Pokémon", nor so called "Filler".

And yes, this means your beloved Tyranitar, Dragonite, and such have the same potential as a Raticate or a Wigglytuff. On the other hand, this also means you don't need to train a Pupitar or Dragonair to ridiculous levels to have them evolve into their final forms.

If you ask yourself "why such high Base Stat Total", well, its simple: The higher the roof, the more space you have to scale stats. The more space you have to scale stats, the better you can "personalize" stats for the different species.

Besides, the Base Stat Total stops being important when everybody is at the same "level".

Now, that's for "normal Pokémon". The first two Generations had two trios of "pseudo-legendary" monsters, those being Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, and Raikou, Entei and Suicune. These critters have 660 Base Stat Total.

Starters also have a total of 660. This is mainly because starters are usually the back bone of most player's teams (although I usually roll without them), and I saw fitting for them to be slightly stronger. But fear not, because those extra points don't really make much difference, as they're used to make them more well rounded instead of just dumping them on their highest stats.

Finally, true Legendary Pokémon keep their 700 Base Stat Total of the original games. To this day I never used legendaries beyond wanting to see their back sprites, never cared about them, so they have the least number of changes, really.

Some other changes are:

·Many Pokémon had their overall archetypes changed besides their Stats improved. Furret is now a Fast Special Attacker, for example.

·Almost every Pokémon now has a 50% Male/Female Ratio, except for the Nidorans, Tauros and Miltank. Pokémon like Blissey, Chansey, or the Hitmon-family now can be both male and female. Magnemite, Voltorb and such are still genderless.

·The two Legendary Trios have genders and can in fact breed, thus they can be seen almost as normal Pokémon.

·The Pokédex had the entries for each Pokémon modified. This is because now it shows actually useful information instead of the continuously repeated "scientific" info that usually is full of lies and ridiculous stuff that could make an Indian Elephant have a headache, but hey, it may not be the Pokédex info, it may just be a bit too close to a Magcargo and it's experiencing how one feels being next to the Sun.

Happens to us all sometimes.

Now, the first page of each species shows its Weaknesses and Resistances while the second page of each one now points out the Base Stat spreads it has, which is a much, much more useful ingame data, specially when this hacks aims to change heavily most things related to battling and "the RPG elements".

Oh, and by the way, if you press Select while looking at a Pokémon's Data, you'll activate "Shiny Mode", and every Pokémon shown will be seen with their Shiny Colors!

·Talking about Shiny Pokémon, those are far more common. While I personally don't care too much about them, specially nowadays when they've become so... Uneventful and common, not to mention how much they've been related with hacking and cheating, Pokémon being shiny lost appeal to me, yet they're still a big thing for many players, so why not make them easier to obtain?

The means for finding a Shiny Pokémon in Generation II were rough. REALLY rough. With the way it works now, you should find quite a few of them throughout your adventure, and also finding female shiny Pokémon should also be a more common occurrence than before.

You're bound to find a fair share of them. This being a modded game, it doesn't really matter if they're not as rare or hard to find.

NPC trainers will have Shiny monsters here and there, so you should also have the chance!

·As you already know, wild Pokémon may be holding items. In the original game, many species had nothing with them. Now, most species have them, and the variety is much, much bigger. Not only that, the chances for finding Pokémon with items has increased.

Now there's a 50% of not having an item, 40% of having a "common" item, and 10% of holding a "rare" item. Better than the 2% on the original.

Lastly, I've made another improvement in held items. Now, whenever you battle with a wild monster that has an Item, an little icon (similar to the one in the party menu) will appear on the enemy's HUD. Specifically between the Pokeball icon that appears when you fight a monster that you already have in your Pokédex, and the Gender icon.

Again, only for WILD creatures. If monsters have items in trainer battles is a secret to everybody!

·A big one, already mentioned in the introduction: DVs (or IVs, if you rather call them that) NO LONGER FACTOR INTO STAT CALCULATIONS!!

This means that now only Base Stats and Stat Exp matter in each Pokémon statistics. Oh, and by the way, the formula to calculate stats has changed very slightly. Remember that +5 bonus at the end of the calculations? Now it's a 6. That means that a 100 Base stat (Not HP) of a fully trained monster is 300 and not 299.

This also means you can now have Female Pokémon with good Attack power, and Shiny Pokémon no longer are weak, two rather big things for me at least.

No more you will have to waste hours of your life breeding and abandoning dozens if not hundreds of Pokémon for good DVs (what a great lesson!). NPC Trainers also get good Pokémon too, making things better for everybody.

·Evolution has been streamlined and homogenized. This means that Pokémon that evolved by trades, special events, and such have simpler, more direct ways to do so now. But also, all Pokémon evolver on similar levels.

After all, if they are supposed on equal footing in Power, they should also be on the same level on this matter too.

Here's a few examples:

Pokémon with three stages evolve at levels 20 and 32.

Pidgey evolves to Pidgeotto at level 20, and to Pidgeot at level 32. Chikorita evolves to Bayleef at level 20, and to Meganium at level 32. Dratini evolves to Dragonair at level 20, and to Dragonite at level 32.

Pokémon with two stages evolve between levels 22 and 24.

Rattata evolves into Raticate at level 23. Venonat evolves into Venomoth at level 24. Rhyhorn evolves into Rhydon at level 24. Hoothoot evolves into Noctowl at level 22.

Of course, there are a couple of exceptions. Caterpie and Weedle are still the fastest evolving lines, and of course Pokémon that evolve through stones can do so anytime you want.

Oh, and by the way, in this hack, you WANT to evolve when Pokémon want to. You won't get much from stopping an evolution, and with Pokémon that evolve through stones and such, you should do it before too late.

This is because many species learn better techniques at the same level they evolve, and it would be a waste to not learn them.

You can find at which levels are recommended Pokémon to evolve through stones in the specific Pokémon Stat list txt. But if you want to make it easy:

If the Pokémon has two evolutionary stages > Use the stone at Level 22 or 23. If the Pokémon has three evolutionary stages > use the stone at level 30 or 32 (to reach the last stage).

That said, if you feel like not evolving for whatever reason, you've not lost everything. The game has a Move Reminder, and you'll be able to remember freely any move from a species learnset.

Oh, and the Time Capsule seems to work as long as you of course follow the rules. But a few notes:

Any Pokémon you bring from Generation 1 may have their moves changed upon arriving your game. The moves may turn into a very uncharacteristic one for the Pokémon, because I repurposed many moves into new ones.

The stats of the Pokémon will change from Gen 1 to Gen 2, and most notably, the HP of any Pokémon that reaches Gen 2 will not be fully healed, because of the change in stats, but there's no problem at all as far as functionality, just heal.

That said, have in mind there's NO NEED to use the Time Machine. You do so under your responsibility.

o-----------------o |[6] Type Changes| o-----------------o

Yet another big shake to the, in my personal point of view, rather badly balanced formula.

I'm not going to discuss or waste time with this. This is how it works here:

Defensive wise, each type now is weak to two other types, while resistant to three, one of them being itself. There are NO immunities. Every type is equal as far as weaknesses and resistances, except for Normal.

Normal has no weaknesses or resistances, period.

Offensive wise, each Type is effective against two Types, and is resisted by three, one it being itself. Normal does not hit for Super Effective damage nor does it get resisted.

So, among other things, Ghost will get hurt by Normal and Fighting moves, Normal will get hit by Ghost, Dragon is no longer weak to itself, and Ice is not such an awful and pathetic defensive Type that exists to be mocked.

Oh, the Fairy Type has been added too, but how it works doesn't exactly resemble the original game, just like the other Types.

Now, because I know how certain part of the community can act (and let's not kid ourselves pretending it doesn't happen), to make myself clear and blunt:

I don't care if you think Type X should be weak/resistant to type Y. I don't care if you don't want to learn new Type Matchups. I don't care what Game Freak does with types now or in the future.

I'm not Game Freak and I have made this wanting to break away from their norm, I don't have to follow any rules, not theirs, not yours.

Making a more even ground for all types, trying to make each monster good, so I could play with all of them and have fun was one of the important things for me, and to reach that goal I made as many changes as I saw fit.

You're free to stop reading and go look for another hack if this will bother you that much.

End of the "serious" moment. Good? Great, let's continue!

With this change, every Pokémon will always have more good points than bad points, not to mention that the maximum number of weaknesses a Pokémon can have is 4, and if it has 4 weaknesses, to compensate it will have 6 resistances.

Another thing I want to point out is that the number of Normal Type Pokémon has been lowered. While there are still a bunch of them, it's a way lower number, making many of these previously Normal Pokémon have completely different Type Combinations. I mean, I'm sure you won't miss all the Normal/Flying types. I hope so at least.

If you think Normal Type not having weaknesses could be "broken", far from it, specially since, as I said, in this hack having *more good points* is a given for any non-Normal Pokémon. But of course that's just talking. They can make for great members, in one of my several test-playthroughs, a Furret was one of my best Pokémon all thoughout the game.

There is an image in the RAR file with a Type Table to show you how Types work now, but beyond that, in Violet City's Pokémon Academy, there are two books that teach you the differen Types and their strong and weak points.

And then, if you're so lazy to figure it out, the weaknesses and resistances for each individual species is listed on the Stats text file.

And theeen, if you're even lazier than that, you can also check the Pokedex Entry of a given *captured* Pokémon, as it gives you useful info such as this.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that you have a number of ways to find out how types work. Use them to your advantage.

Oh, lastly, in this hack there are NO Pokémon with double weaknesses. I've never liked them to be honest, and to me just show how unappealing some types were designed to be that they make such awful combinations.

I still remember how excited people were for Aurorus until they saw its typing, and then it all turned into either jokes at its weaknesses or pure disapppointment.

No fun.

o-----------------o |[7] Move Changes| o-----------------o

Alongside the previous two changes, the Moves have been changed A LOT too.

Instead of just "copying" what Game Freak has done in later generations, this hack had in mind to actually modify moves in ways to make them more interesting based on the limitations of the GBC games, and also another little thing:

There is a Physical/Special Split in this hack, so one of the big changes of this hack was to give each Type a number of both, Physical and Special moves to cover different Power levels so Pokémon can have good STAB moves that go along with their stats.

After all, that was probably the best thing Generation IV did for me. While it took some toys from some Pokémon (like Elemental Punches from Alakazam), it really was a big change for the better for most species.

So for example, we have Rock Slide for Rock Pokémon with high Attack, and Rock Launch for Rock Pokémon with high Special Attack. For this, many old moves were removed and reworked into new moves, mostly moves that were redundant and exactly the same as other moves (Like Whirlwind and Roar, or Wrap and Bind, they're the exact same thing).

While this gives every type and every Pokémon solid Stab moves, the limitation of 254 moves makes it so I can't add many "wild" and unique moves, but oh well, it's already much, much better than what it was originally on Generation II.

...No, really, I forgot how rough and unfair the move list was in old Generations, with some Types having almost no good moves at all, or moves that Pokémon couldn't take advantage of because their Stats and their Types didn't match. Hoo boy...

Another big change is that most attacks now have secondary effects, and very often, the lower the Power of a move, the higher is the chance to inflict those secondary effects.

For example, Fire Breath (New move) has a 15% Chance of causing Burn and 70 Power, but Flamethrower only has 10% chance of causing burn and 95 Power. This makes moves with lower Power a bit more useful.

As you may imagine, Pokémon Movesets have been changed tremendously, not only for those critters that had their Types and Stat distributions changed, but also to accomodate all the modifications related to Moves.

Movesets in this hack are in no way attempting to copy later generations of official games, specially since Generation 2 Movesets were incredibly sad to look back.

Instead, they're focused on attempting to give what that certain species needs. So no Pokémon will be let without good STAB moves, and you also won't see Pokémon that are obviously Physical attackers getting Special moves or viceversa.

A handful of moves also got their priority changed.

Safeguard, Haze, Mist, Transformation and Bide now go before other moves. This change actually shakes up battles a bit, it was fun to see the AI read my moves from time to time and prevent Status, and hey, with Transform having priority now Ditto is more usable too!

A list of the moves, what they do, and their other data is in its own TXT file, although with ingame descriptions, it is not necessary.

As far as TMs and HMs, things also have changed.

TMs no longer get consumed when used, so they have infinite uses. The Moves they teach have also changed for the majority of TMS, with most of them teaching both Physical and Special "end-game" moves. There's also a total of 55 TMS now.

None of them can be found in shops, you must find them by exploring or obtained from an NPC.

HMs have also changed a bit, making them more useful. Cut now is a 70 Power Normal move with a High Critical Ratio, and Fly is a strong move with 110 Power that causes Recoil damage. Flash causes damage and can lower Accuracy. Strength is now is Fighting type and causes Flinch. And Whirlpool is a bit more powerful and now takes more HP at the end of turns, so its a rather cool combo alongside Toxic on bulky Pokémon.

Also, HMs can be forgotten like normal attacks, so you can swap attacks easily in case you want, and unlike in Gen. 1, because you can't drop them, you can't get stuck.

Or rather, you wouldn't get stuck, because there's another change. These moves:

Headbutt Rock Smash Cut Surf Strength Waterfall Whirlpool

Don't need to be known by a Pokémon to be used in the overworld! You only need a Pokémon capable of learning such move, and the needed Medal in the case of the HMs.

That only leaves Flash and Fly out of that list, right?

About Flash:

I also added an item that will let you light dark caves so you don't need to have a Pokémon with Flash, but you get it quite a bit later than the HM. Just look around Mahogany after things calmed down.

It can be assigned to Select for quick use, too!

About Fly:

There's a small sidequest you can do later in the game that will net you a special object. This item will let you use a different version of Fly. Mechanically, it's the same, you can fly to places you've explored. Animation-wise is different, though.

Because all of this, you no longer need to have any HM on any Pokémon unless you want it (because most of them are actually respectable attacking moves), which gives much more freedom to parties and movesets!

o----------------------------------------o |[8] Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits| o----------------------------------------o

TLDR VERSION: Use Vitamins, use Fruits. They improve your Pokemon's stats, and you need to take care of your team to withstand other trainers which have properly trained monsters. Use them intelligently, don't waste them with Pokémon you don't want to have in your team, at least early on when you have limited resources.

Vitamins are no longer as limited in effect, or as expensive. Fruits are new, and are twice as good as Vitamins.

Pokémon games have a system in which, through adquiring certain points through different means, a creature can improve its Stats. In Generations 1 and 2, these are called Stat Experience. This is a system Game Freak has never informed the players about at all, and the games never came even close to mention it in any trully useful detail, so bare with me if this is your first time with this stuff, although I doubt you found this hack knowing nothing about it.

Stat Experience points can range from 0 (Empty) to 65535 (Maximized). Unlike later generations, In Gen. I and II, you can maximize the experience of all the stats.

Stat Experience points are divided and exclusive for each stat. HP, Attack, Defense and Speed have their own Stat Exp Table. Special Attack and Special Defense share the same Stat Exp Table. So reaching 65535 Stat Exp in each Stat will make your Pokémon perfect stat-wise. Even Pokémon at Level 100 can get Stat Experience, but to gain the effects, they need to be stored on the PC so their real Stats can get updated with the current Stat Exp. they have at that moment.

The ways you get Stat Exp are these:

By battling -Each time one of your Pokémon defeats another, the Base Stats of the enemy's species is added to your Stat Exp in each stat. This is the slowest way, but it's also free, and will raise your stats by just playing through the game.

If you defeat, let's say, a Caterpie, it has these Base Stats:

HP 75, Attack 60, Defense 70, Speed 95, Special Attack 90, Special Defense 70. As I said, Special Attack and Defense use the same Stat Exp Table. The game takes the Base Stat related to Special Attack, so in this case, your Pokémon will be awarded 90 Special Stat Exp Points, alongside the rest. Training only through battles is not only pointless when you have other means, but also incredibly tedious. While in my hack Pokémon have higher stats that make training this way faster, battling for Stat Exp should only be relied on when you've already fed your Pokémon Vitamin and Fruits, to get those last Stat Exp Points needed for a Perfect Stat.

But of course, any Stat Exp gained through battles is benefitial, just don't battle *only* for the Stat Exp unless, as I said it's to finish Stat Exp training! By the way, there's a special condition named Pokerús, which is a benefitial virus that will double the amount of Stat Exp you get from battles. This is very rare to get, and you will be noticed by a PKMN Center Nurse. The games don't tell you what it does exactly either...

It can be very useful, and it propagates through your Pokémon team, and disappears after some time. If you ever get Pokerús, try to keep a Pokémon with active Pokerús on your PC so you can pass it to other Pokémon. But as I said, it's very rare!

By Vitamins -Vitamins in the original game were pretty useless. They raised very little, and they could only be used up to some point, which is less than half way the Stat Exp total.

In this hack, though, they're much better, and even necessary, as the people living in Johto and Kanto have *actually* trained their Pokémon properly and they have Stat Exp, so they'll be stronger and more challenging, and after a certain point, all trainers you'll find will have maximized Pokémon, like any trainer worth their salt would be doing.

Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp Points per use, and they can be used until the Stat Exp of the Stat that you want to raise reaches 51.456, at which point, the Pokémon wont get any benefit from it (it won't be wasted, so don't worry).

To make it easier to understand, let's put it this way:

An untrained (either just catched, or just hatched) Pokémon will have 0 Stat Exp on everything. If you feed it HP UPs, it will be able to eat 6:

10.240 1 HP Up 20.480 2 HP Up 30.720 3 HP Up 40.960 4 HP Up 51.200 5 HP Up > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one. 61.440 6 HP Up > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized! You can get the rest by battling.

If you're used to Effort Values from Gen 3 onwards, let's make it even easier:

The way it works, each modern EV means 256 Stat Exp, so if it's easier for you, just divide Stat Exp by 256:

Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp, that means 40 EV. The limit of Stat Exp is 51.456, that means 201 EV.

So with a Pokémon without EVs, you can go from 0 to 240 EV through vitamins.

You can obviously give Vitamins to a Pokémon you've been battling with no problem, but an untrained Pokémon is better to use as an example.

Their price is much lower so you can keep up with enemy trainers, although they cost enough to make each purchase a bit of an investment early into the game.

By Fruits - Fruits are almost exactly the same as Vitamins, but they give twice the Stat Exp.

Each one gives 20.480 Stat Exp (Or 80 EV if you want it that way), and the limit is 41.216 Stat Points (or 161 EV). This means that your Pokémon can eat up to three Fruits in a stat to jump for 0 Stat Exp to 61.440 (or 0 to 240 EV) and almost maximize it. Let's again use an example of raising HP with Fruit now:

20.480 1 Salty Fruit 40.960 2 Salty Fruit > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one 61.440 3 Salty Fruit > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized!

Thus, fruits are much better overall than Vitamins, but they're scarce, and should be better used for Pokémon you know they have little to no training in a certain Stat.

You can combine Vitamins and Fruit without problem, but if you do, first use your Fruits, then the Vitamins so you don't waste Fruits unnecessarily.

Why the limit - If you're asking why the limit is 51.456, or 240 EV for Vitamins, and 41.216 or 161 EVs for Fruits, it is simple to answer: If you feed a Vitamin/Fruit to a Pokémon in a way that would go over 65535, a bug would happen and the Stat Exp of that Pokémon would roll back to 0. I think it's obvious why that would suck. So, by putting these limits you're safe from that to happen, but you also get very close to maximize a stat. It's the best balance I could achieve.

o--------------------------------o |[9] Mechanic & Gameplay Changes| o--------------------------------o

Already said that under the hood, there are many, many other changes. Some (not all of them, not by a long shot) changes are as follows:

· The Clock Reset function now has a much easier button combination to open it. The combination is like this:

1: Hold Select + Down 2: Release Down while holding Reset. 3: With Reset Held, now hold Up too. 4: Release Select. The Reset Clock menu will open.

It requires less buttons, making it easier to do, or able to do at all depending where you are playing. You still need to input the password, though, removing that would let you abuse certain things very easily.

· Prices for several things have been lowered on the "Intended" Versions of this hack. Because you no longer can abuse Items to progress, I saw no real reason to make you pay as much as usual. You're still going to need them, because the need for healing between battles is still a thing.

Another reason to do this is because you will also spend much more money than usual on Vitamins and other stuff to properly train and prepare your team.

· Catching Pokémon grants you Experience now! The Exp. is the same as if it was defeated, and every Pokémon that fought in said battle will get a share of it.

· The Odd Egg will always give you a Shiny Pokémon between 7 ramdonly selected species, and both genders. Each Species get a unique move, instead of all of them getting the same (now non-existing) move.

· Talking about Eggs, Pokémon now hatch much, much faster, so there's less walking up and down through Goldenrod. Not only that, but Egg Moves also changed all around. Pokémon also lay Eggs faster, and Nidorina & Nidoqueen can now breed, alongside both "legendary" trios.

Now each basic species has between 3 or 4 Egg Moves for the most part they are different from vanilla, and basic Starter Pokémon have 5 Egg Moves.

· Trainer AI has been much improved. Now they know much better what they do, and they can priorize stuff like Status Effects, they take better advantage of weaknesses and resistances.

They also carry Items with them, if you play with the patch that lets you items in Battle, of course.

Trainers also have properly trained monsters, with Stat Exp increasing throughout the game. Feeding your team vitamins and fruits is now important to stay on toes with them. Of course, there is more variety in species of monsters used by NPCs, their levels are higher, and team sizes have increased a bit.

Making each trainer a full 6 Pokémon team would drag the game, though, and probably couldn't fit, I already was suffering the lack of space with what I added, because when adding Stat Exp, custom Movesets, and such the space gets used way too fast.

Also, the game was very, very unfair to the NPC trainers. Not only were they hard-coded to fail more often, have mediocre AI, and Low-Level Pokémon, you also got your Stats and Types boosted as you got Badges, so they became completely inferior and disappointing... At least, if you want to have any challenge.

That's why any bonus that Badges give you was stripped down. No Stat Boost, no Type Boost. This will make the game far more fair and chalenging, in turn making it more enjoyable if you look for having to think and put a bit of effort, which is, you know, the point of this entire hack.

Another thing changed is the money that many types of trainers reward you by beating them. In this hack you have many more things to buy as mentioned above, from Vitamins, to Held Items, to Decorations, and more Healing Items because of the higher difficulty, so a better income was needed.

On the other hand, if you lose, which is much more plausible now, you won't get your money halved. Instead, you lose money depending on the number of badges you have, like more recent games. It's much more fair early on, specially in this hack since it is expected of you to buy vitamins and held items for your monsters as you go through the game, besides all the other items.

· Stat increase percentages have been changed.

Stat-improving moves like Accelerate or Meditate, and Stat-decreasing moves like Growl or Scary Face can go from Level 0 (normal stat), to Level +6 or -6, depending if it increases or decreases a stat.

Before o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 | |Perc. 25% 28% 35% 45% 50% 66% 100% 150% 200% 250% 300% 350% 400%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o Now o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 | |Perc. 25% 30% 35% 45% 60% 75% 100% 130% 160% 190% 220% 250% 300%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o

This has been changed for one main reason: to make better balance between critters, Stats are now higher. With stats being higher, stat-increasing would get too broken, specially with +1 bonus being a whole 50% increase. So bonuses are softer now, but so is stat-reducing -1 Level, so it's not too harsh.

· Item Storing Changes

For starters, there's two new pockets, one for Berries and Fruits in which 13 kinds of items go in it, the already known berries, plus the new Fruits used for powering up your monsters. Fits all of them.

The other new pocket is for Battle items, specifically Held Items. There are several dozen of them, and having such type of items be mixed with consumable and healing items was a bit of a mess, even more if you have an organization obsession and want everything neatly grouped.

Every item of this type fits in this pocket, that's over 50 different types of Items!

Apricorns are now stored in your Ball Pocket, and there's space to have every ball plus Apricorn, so they will never become a nuissance to you by filling your bag like before.

Item Pocket now can store 35 different objects instead of 20, and because Berries/Fruits, Apricorns, and Held Items do not take space in this pocket anymore you have much more freedom.

There's one catch, though, now you can only store 30 types of items in the PC, instead of 50. It won't be much of a problem because you don't need to store any Berry, Fruit, Apricorn, Ball, or Held Item, so I think it's a good compromise.

Another change is, as mentioned above, about wild Pokémon. Now, many different species will hold items. These range from Berries and Fruits, to sell-able Items, Apricorns and a few others.

This not only will make getting new monsters more interesting, but will also make way, way more useful the move Thief, and also the new Peck, which also has the effect of taking the item the foe holds.

· The Pokegear Map has seen a huge facelift. Not only is a bit prettier to look at, it's also more informative, with standout places or landmarks pointed out in the map. I even added different little icons to quickly see which poblated areas are Towns or Cities, just because why not.

· A new Building in Goldenrod has been opened. This place will sell to you all the Decoration items you previously would get through Mystery Gift or through your Mom.

Some of the dolls also have been changed, to offer something new, because the game now is not limited to the original Pokémon icons for the Party Menu. This is also true for the bigger dolls.

Talking about that, your Mom will no longer buy you Decoration items, and the items it buys are now much more useful and simply put, better than Super Potions and such.

· A Move Reminder has been added to the game, but unlike how Move Reminders work in vanilla games, here it will let you remember moves from a species, as many times as you want, for free.

This is because this hack, having higher difficulty than your usual Pokémon game, may require you to reshuffle your Movesets or try different strategies, and I WANT you to do so, punishing you with constant farming of Items to change Movesets so you can try different things sounds very counter-intuitive to me.

To make this even more useful, each fully evolved creature can remember a number of Moves from prior evolutionary forms too.

The types of Moves they'll retain from earlier forms are usually moves related to Stat changes, Status Effects, and Attacks that may have special traits or effects.

Basically, Pidgeot won't be able to remember Wing Attack, which is a simple, straightforward Attack move, but it will remember Quick Attack and Peck, the first one having Priority, and the second one having the new effect of stealing Items from other Pokémon.

You can find the Move Reminder in both Johto, and Kanto. In Johto, he lives with the other useful NPCs, Name Rater and Move Deleter in Goldenrod. In Kanto, you can find a similar group of NPCs in Lavender Town.

· Pokegear Rematches are now much stronger, they have more Pokémon and more varied, and often enough their Pokémon have nicknames.

To give you an idea, many Pokegear trainers will end up with teams of Lvl 80 Pokémon! So be very careful when fighting again these trainers, they may surprise you!

Also, a big change in how they work: Originally, if you didn't rematch a trainer and you kept playing, when you came back to it, it would challenge you with a very outdated team.

This is because they only get better if you fight them earlier each time. This is no how it works anymore. They upgrade their teams as you advance through the game, and you could very well meet them for the first time after battling them originally and find out they have a full team of very strong Pokémon.

This makes Pokegear rematches far, far more interesting and better paced.

Talking about rematches, I added end-game rematches to the game. Once you beat Red for the first time, a whole bunch of new battles gets unlocked: The Pokémon League levels get bumped, with some changes on their teams. Counting your Rival's rematch, levels range from 80 to 85.

All Gym Leaders end up their training, and they await you to fight in Lvl 100 Rematches. If they didn't have originally, every Leader will have a full team, and all of them have some changes to their teams.

The default trainer in the Trainer's House in Viridian City also goes from Lvl 70, to Lvl 100. And there's a few extra Lvl 100 battles that I'll let you discover, although they're not precissely hidden!

If you ask yourself why Lvl 100, well, that's to make sure you don't win by overlevelling them. Once you beat Red, you also unlock a way to Level Up your Pokémon much faster. Just check the Battle Tower once you do so, although be warned, it requires some effort!

· Buena's Password had its rewards changed, now it's more useful overall.

· Ingame Pokémon trades are different, and they ask for hard-to-get monsters, but give you very nice ones in exchange, I hope you like them.

· Bill's grandfather has seen some neat changes. His time killer of seeing Pokémon you bring to him stays, but not quite the same as it originally was. Now he'll tell you riddles that talk about a certain Pokémon, and if you guess them correctly by showing him the right species, he'll gift you some very neat Held Items for your pals! He put quite of effort in those riddles, they even rhyme!

· Fishing has been tweaked a bit.

Now the chances for Pokémon to bit are higher (who wants to press Select several times for nothing?) and the Pokémon available by fishing are much more varied, yes, even the Old Rod.

Levels are also higher. Old Rod ~10, Good Rod ~20, Super Rod ~40.

Talking about the Old Rod, now you can get it sooner, before even getting the first Medal. The Fishing Guru has moved to the gate that connectes Route 31 with Violet City. This expands which Pokémon you can get early on, and more options is better.

...Unless you're me, then it just makes it harder to choose which monsters you want to have.

· Fruit Trees now give 2 Berries/Fruits/Apricorns each day!

· On Violet, Azalea and Goldenrod cities you can find the new Berry Scouts. These green-cladded folks will sell you the basic Status-Healing Berries, in order to help accomodate you a bit on the higher difficulty of this hack compared to the usual stuff.

The price on the "Items in battle available" patches are a bit higher.

· While there's absolutely zero intention of creating a new "story" or "region", there are new maps here and there. For Example, there's an actual Viridian Forest again, with trainers, Items and such, even!

Other maps got extended a bit here and there, maybe to hide something...! Some areas also have changes made to look or feel better to explore. Others have been extended to feel more like a full place.

The Gyms also had changes. It's interesting how... "small", and simple most of them where. I expanded most, give some light puzzles to most of the ones that didn't have anything going on (I even rescued unused map movement for one of them!) to make them slightly more interesting.

Of course, please don't expect Zelda-level dungeons or anything like that. ...Although that could be a pretty cool thing as its own game!

· Because I made quite a few changes in the Types of the Pokémon, I reformatted Bill's PC a bit. Now when browsing around your monsters, you can see their types on the upper left side of the screen.

· I changed a few textbox frames, some to fix them up a bit, and two of them are entirely new. I like Frame 5 myself.

· The order of the Pockets in your Bag differs when youre outside Battle and when you're in middle of one.

This is to make the Poké Ball pocket right next to the default Item pocket, instead of being 3 pushes away to the right.

· Status Effects no longer are shown with 3 letter "words". Now they have their own little Icons, which make things cleaner both in Battle and specially on the Party menu.

· Of course, I decapitalized all the text I found. What a tedious thing...

· Smashable Rocks now can give stone-type Items alongside being a way to find certain Pokémon.

· Once you heal Moo Moo, one of the twins opens up a little shop!

She'll be able to make Berry Juice for you, and you have two ways of doing it, for convenience.

Talking about Held-healing Items, RageCandyBar have been also reworked to be eaten during battle.

They're more powerful than Gold Berries, but less than Berry Juice.

· Many things have been fixed. For example:

Daisy's Haircut was buggy and could in fact reduce Happiness, has been fixed. Magikarps in Lake of Rage were in fact smaller than normal and not bigger, and other Magikarp related bugs also existed all around. Fixed. A bug where Defense could be lowered by attacking a Substitute with a -Def move existed, now is fixed. A bug where Mirror Coat and Counter would damage foe after they used an item existed, now is fixed. A bug that made supposedly fleeing Pokémon not able to flee is fixed. Now Fast Balls are more useful. A bug that made a foe under Nightmare's effect still be hurt if it was healed with items is fixed. A bug where the HP Bar would deplete way slower than intended existed. Yes, you're reading right. The speed at which the HP Bar emptied, specially at higher levels, was not intentional, making high level battles way, way slower. This has been fixed and is much better, albeit not Gen. 3 "fast".

Other bugs and stuff has been fixed too.

There's more things I could put here, but when you spend so long doing something you start to forget each individual thing...

o-------------------------------------------------o |[10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns| o-------------------------------------------------o

Yes, every Kurt Ball has been replaced. Why?

Well, actually, for the first year and a half of "development" of this hack, Kurt Balls were pretty much as they were originally, with exception of changing one for more utility, improving their effects to make them overall better and fixing the quite-a-few glitches related to them.

But during the many tests I (and a few friends) did, all the feedback I got is that they did not use them much, if at all, because how situational they are, and because you can only get them in limited amounts.

So I decided to create a new set of Balls with very simple yet very effective effects. Each of these new Poké Balls offer a x3 Catch Multiplier if used on a certain Type of Pokémon, with each new Ball being useful for 3 different Types each.

For example, the Poké Ball made with Red Apricorns (named Red Ball to simplify things), will work best while trying to catch Fire, Fighting or Ground Pokémon! Other example would be the Pink Ball will do so with Poison, Psychic, or Fairy ones.

There's no tricks, nor complexities. If the types match, you get a stronger effect than an Ultra Ball. This makes each one way more versatile, every Apricorn as useful as the rest.

Descriptions of each new Ball points to which types are most effective.

Now, because I want people to use these Balls more often, there are a few more ways to obtain these Items. The first and most simple is getting Apricorns from Trees, from which you get two for every one each day.

Pokémon themselves also carry Apricorns, as many species hold them randomly.

But I also added a new face to Johto, a traveling monk! He's easily recognizable thanks to his sandogasa (a traditional traveling hat). Because he travels around Johto, each day you'll find him in a different spot, and each day will offer to trade 5 Apricorn of a certain color for one specific Item. The Items he ask for can be obtained from wild Pokémon, and sometimes found somewhere lying on the floor.

For Red or Green Apricorns, he asks for a Tiny Mushroom. for Blue, Yellow or Pink Apricorns, he asks for a Pearl. For White or Black Apricorns, he asks for a Stardust.

Tiny Mushrooms can be held by Pokémon such as Paras, Ledyba, Oddish, Vulpix and others. Pearls can be held by Pokémon such as Shellder, Horsea, Seadra, Octillery and Corsola. Stardust can be held by Pokémon such as Geodude, Jigglypuff, Phanpy, Staryu and Tentacool.

Of course those are just a few examples, there are more. I hope with all this, Kurt's custom Poké Balls are more useful all around.

o--------------------------------------------------------o |[11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House| o--------------------------------------------------------o

The Battle Tower was the first time Game Freak offered anything sort of similar to a Challenge Mode inside the main games. We got Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2, which were great little things, designed to be a battle simulator, with different rules and difficulties, among other things like mini-games.

But the Battle Tower was a bit... Lacking. And HARD.

This is because, for one, the trainers you met here had a quite low variety of Pokémon, so it kinda became a bit boring (I guess Game Freak knew most Pokémon had middling stats!).

On the other hand, the monsters here sported pretty much PERFECT stats, and with strong moves along with them.

This last sentence is worth noting because in older generations, training your Pokémon to their fullest potential, A.K.A. giving them the max Stat Exp. was a total pain and a ludicriously slow process. And trying to get good DVs (old IVs) was a much, much, much worse process than that.

You couldn't make use of ANY mechanic to get Pokémon with good DVs, they were random, and unlike more recent Generations, you could not improve a Pokémon DVs by using items or such. You had no control besides soft resetting ad nauseam. If it sounds bad it's because it is.

So to have a chance not only you needed High DV monsters (pretty much impossible by normal rules), but also fully trained and with the best moves possible. And you only got ONE SINGLE TM for many moves, and Pokémon learnsets were for the most party pretty lacking if looking at them from a competitive point of view, so you were screwed there, as you may imagine.

All in all, it was often seen as unfair and just not very fun. And if you wanted to try it anyway, add to that that the rewards were laughable. Vitamins that you could buy, and didn't help you at all because they became useless quickly, they only helped for less than half of the Stat. Exp total!

But here's the thing: I love the concept! The idea of having 3 monsters each, with the same level, where only your strategy, knowdlege and adaptibility can take you out of trouble, sounds great!

Even more, maybe if you got something worth your time as a reward it could be even more fun!

That's why a good chunk of the effort of this hack was about trying to balance types, moves, Pokémon and such. And also why the Battle Tower got so many changes!

So let's list the changes:

For starters, each of the ten Levels of the Tower got their Pokémon changed, both to update the new stats, but also to give much, much needed variety to the types of monsters you would see, as originally the game sported just a small number of different species.

Instead of 7 battles per round, now you have quicker rounds of 3. This makes for a much more brisk pace, a far less frustrating event if you lose, and easier to pick up and play.

About difficulty, it should still be a good challenge, although this time, there is some balance, as now you can properly train your monsters through vitamins and fruits, TMs hold a good selection of high-Power moves and they're infinite and of course DVs/IVs are the same for everybody.

Oh, and you can remember old moves, too!

There's also two Shops available for players, in which you can buy a selection of Held Items so you can prepare yourself to challenge the Tower, or to progress through the game, as trainers will start using Held Items more and more once you reach this point in the game.

Up to that point is the basic stuff... But the Battle Tower has also opened several shops and services, and there's even a bit of a progression system built into it, too!

Whenever you participate in the Battle Tower and come out victorious, you'll be rewarded a new type of Item: Battle Medals!

You get three for each victiorous round (so each three battles).

These objects are, basically, the coin of exchange for almost any service inside the Battle Tower. They are stored in your Item Pocket and can be used in a variety of ways.

For one, they're pricey objects, each one sells for 12.000P, thus they can cover costs for training Pokémon. Selling all 3 you win nets you 36.000P, which is pretty good if you realize you can buy enough Vitamins to fully feed a Pokémon in three different Stats (or four if you use Special Atk/Def Vitamins!).

So two good rounds of Battle Tower lets you set up the Stat Exp. of a Pokémon really, really quickly! Or you can buy other stuff with it, too. But that's just a bonus compared to their real use!

In the Main Hall of the Battle Tower, a new Receptionist hangs out close to the Battle Tower's usual lady that takes you to the battles themselves. This new NPC can reward you with a Silver or Gold Trophy in exchange for a number of Battle Medals. They're shiny decorations for your room... And hold some use.

The Battle Tower has been expanded and now there are new rooms that host several services. One of them, and one I'm rather excited to manage to put in the game is a Reward Shop that exchanges Battle Medals for Special Eggs!

Do you remember the event Pokémon from the Stadium games?

They were gifted to you after accomplishing something, and in Stadium 2, they had moves they couldn't learn normally. It was a nice little thing, and always made me feel curious about Pokémon with Moves that couldn't learn normally. You know, what new strategies could I come up with and such.

This service is located in a room behind the Main Hall. There, a Receptionist will take one of your Battle Medals and will gift you an Egg with a special Pokémon that knows a unique move!

There's a total of 50 different species you can get through these Eggs, and the one you get for each medal is selected at random. And every species has the same chances, no dishonest stuff like 0.0001% to get a certain Pokémon, like a Gatcha game.

Oh, and if you're one of those, don't waste your time resetting trying to get Shiny Pokémon from these Eggs... Believe me, it won't work.

Another service is the inclusion of Move Tutors!

There are two Tutors and each one can teach 4 Moves each. Seven of those are unique to Tutors, with an Eighth Move being Toxic, a TM you get veeery late, so I added it for earlier access, as some Pokémon (like defensive ones) do benefit from it or need it to work well.

Tutor Moves can only be learnt by Fully Evolved Pokémon, and you can do so only in exchange for one Battle Medal.

The move selection is composed of Non-Damaging moves to give more utility and so they can be applied to all Pokémon in one way or another, unlike damaging moves, and I would have liked to have more, but I hit the limit before the entire game gets corrupt, so these will have to do!

Both of these features not only offer much, much better rewards for your victories in the Battle Tower, ones that not only can be enjoyed throughout the rest of the game making it more entertaining, but also give you a chance to get a few monsters earlier and gives new possibilites to make teams to challenge the Battle Tower too.

...And that's not all you can do here now!

Besides normal Move Tutors, the Battle Tower has also hired a very special NPC: The Egg Elder... Or in other words, an Egg Move Tutor!

Basically, in exchange for 3 Battle Medals, this old man can teach a Pokémon an Egg Move that its evolution line can learn through breeding with other Pokémon!

And yes, any member. Pidgeot and Pidgeotto can learn moves that a bred Pidgey could hinerit, so no worries on that front!

This way you won't longer feel like your early-game teammates (or any Pokémon for that matter) feel gimped or "lesser" because don't have this or that move only available through breeding.

In a way it's like every species has its own specific Tutor Moves!

But let's continue.

The receptionist in the main hall (the one who gives trophies) also offers a new Key Item: The Box Changer. It does what it says, it gives you the ability to switch the Box on Bill's PC anywhere you want. Just remember that you still save your game when changing boxes this way.

Once you reach the "endgame", meaning, after defeating Red, two other Receptionists will open up new services. And are neat ones!

The first one is a Rare Candy shop! You will be able to exchange one Battle Medal for 5 Rare Candies. This will let you manage the Levels of your Pokémon faster, either to battle the new Lvl 100 Rematches, or to Level up your monsters to reach the Levels required for Battle Tower Rooms.

The other, it's quite different but way more interesting too.

You see, a new group of candies capable of changing the Level of a Pokémon to a fixed one now exist! There's Candies for Levels 10, 30, 50 and 80!

No matter what Level the monster is, it will change into the Level of the Candy!

If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 4 Pokémon, it will become Level 30. And If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 82 Pokémon, it will also become Level 30!

This is mostly for a reason: To be able to use your favourite pals in any Level of the Battle Tower!

Once a Pokémon Level goes up, it no longer can access the Battle Rooms of lower Levels, and if you wanted to use a monster of a specific species you already raised, you were forced to train another one. But no longer you will need to do that!

Now any Pokémon can battle in any Battle Room by using these new Candies in combination with Rare Candies, and you can perfectly control the level of your team for this challenge while also needing a bit of a resource (Battle Medals) to make use of it.

Not to mention, Level 80 Candies can make HUGE time savers for training Pokémon for those Level 100 Rematches, specially if we're talking about bred Pokémon, or Pokémon from Battle Tower's Special Eggs!

Now, be warned, you CAN NOT make use of all these features from the beginning!

Remember those Trophies I talked about? Yeah, they do more than look nice in your room. Each one unlocks features of the Tower!

Once you win the Silver Trophy, you unlock: Move Tutors (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Rare Candy Shop (You need to beat Red too). Level 30 Candies (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 50 Candies (You need beat the Elite Four too).

Once you win the Gold Trophy, you unlock: Egg Move Tutor (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 80 Candy (You need to beat Red too).

So yeah, you must prove yourself and get the Trophies to use all the Battle Tower has to offer.

But don't fret! There's not really much grinding to do. You'll see that the number of Medals needed to obtain each is pretty reasonable for what they unlock.

The game does not ask for hundreds of them for each, not even close! I know how tedious is to collect Battle Points for an Item or one-time use TM back in Generation IV.

And hey, if for some reason you still need a bit of a push, you can win Battle Medals by participating on Buena's Password.

They cost 2 points, you can get one Medal every two days. It's a much slower pace than actually fighting, but it certainly adds up if you play often.

And you also get a handful of them in Kanto, a certain NPC will gift you a bunch if you manage to do something, and some Gym Leaders will gift you one too.

Lastly, also in Kanto, there's the Trainer House.

Originally it was a cool little feature in which you could battle the Pokémon Team that a friend had when you two did a Mistery Gift.

Because I don't expect people going around doing IR connections with a Romhack, the Trainer House has been changed around.

I really don't want to say much, but here's this:

Normally, you can battle a special Trainer daily in this building. But once you've beaten the strongest trainer in all the land, levels are raised, and you can take Lvl 100 battles... With the difference that the Pokémon used in these new battles change depending on the day of the week!

And if you win, you also obtain Battle Medals!

It's a little extra end-game thing alongside the other end-game additions.

o-------------------o |[12] Visual Changes| o-------------------o

Many, many visual changes have been made throughout the game to make the world a bit more cohesive, to make Pokémon look better, or to simple improve stuff here and there.

Pretty much every Pokémon not named Unown got their colors changed, for ones that look better, closer to the original colors of a particular species, and also got their sprites touched up and cleaned up.

Because the games were originally designed to be displayed on the tiny screen of a GB, the graphic artists would try and take advantage to use the 4 colors available to a Pokémon sprite to give it more details. With the advent of the GBC, now they could use colors too, and because the screen wasn't backlighted, they needed to use stronger, more saturated and often darker colors.

The issue is that nowadays these games are pretty much always played on backlighted screens that are also much, much bigger than the original Game Boy's screen, so these graphics that originally looked fine now I don't find they've aged as well with the ways we play them today.

Now, let's be fair here. This is not a criticism for the sprites or the artists. These sprites were made to be seen under a specific hardware, and they worked with what they had, and the gigantic jump in design quality from Generation 1 to Generation 2 is to be applauded.

But at the same time, I think it's fair to say that there's nothing that says they can not be revised and/or improved. That's why I took the horridly tedious job of cleaning up every single sprite (and each of their animated frames) to make them look more clean when played on bigger screens.

I also took the liberty to tweak many of the colors used for Shiny Pokémon. This is something I've seen many people point out throughout the years, and it's true that the use of color for Shiny palettes leaves quite a bit to be desired, with many Pokémon being painted with what I saw called "Puke Green", and others having really dark and simply not appealing combinations of colors that sometimes would make the sprites look worse.

Several of those examples could be Blastoise, Raichu, Aipom or Golbat, and this last one even gets its shading screwed up. Or something like Rhydon, that looks exactly like the official art, while its normal color is much darker; with Pokémon like Phanpy, Sunkern, Xatu, Scyther and others looking very similar to their default colors.

Just have in mind I'm working with the limitations of the GBC and 4 Colors per sprite, so I do what I can do, although it's surprising what nice colors the GBC can display compared to the ones they used, but of course, I'm not doing this to be seen on real hardware, so I do not have that limitation.

You can check a couple of examples in the pictures inside the RAR file for both, sprite improvements and Shiny changes.

I also improved all the Back Sprites too, to keep consistency. And some Pokémon got entirely different sprites, such as Mr. Mime, or Wigglytuff, as there was better designs elsewhere, like Mr. Mime's Silver sprite. It's so much better in my eyes. And yes, they have animations.

Oh, and a handful of Pokémon got redesigns here and there. Don't panic, the changes where made only to humanoid Pokémon to remove incoherent stuff like Machoke and Machamps' underwear or the boxing gear of Hitmonchan.

This is because as time has passed it "snowballed" into a gigantic ball of nonsense. Now, it's not that I hate Pokémon with human-made things on them, for example we could make logical arguments on why they have them in the first place.

Very early Pokémon (back when it was Capsule Monsters) had a lot of very... morally dubious stuff in it. Trainers had whips, the monsters were sold in cages and there was a pretty clear aura of animal abuse in it all. The artwork was intriguing... And a bit worrying.

When you find out about that stuff it can make sense that humans would put things to restrict their Pokémon like the "strength-reducing" underwear for the Machop tree. Who knows, maybe that's why Pokémon such as Primeape have what looks like shackles on their limbs too.

And back in generation 1, there was only ONE Hitmonchan, given to you by a human. We can simply think the objects it wears are given to it by that person, and it would make sense. Jynx is also another Pokémon which can only be received once, also given by a human and looks like one, maybe there's something going on too.

And all those examples would be fine but then they're turned into nonsense when you can find these Pokémon living in nature with all that stuff on them, or they magically appear when evolving. It just feels... dumb to me, it is something that I could see other developers adress in different ways, but here they just where completely forgotten.

Because this thing is tailored-made for me, I decided to change it.

And talking about Jynx, when the beta sprite leaked from Red & Green leaks among others, it was pretty exciting to see that this Pokémon once upon a time was very different, with more of a yeti-like design, which can be traced to japanese Kaiju tv shows, like many early Pokémon designs such as Nidoking (look up Baragon). It apparently had a name that was a very easy to see nudge at Ultraman.

You can read about it here (and also see a bit of the darker Capsule Monsters stuff I mentioned above, but you can also search for early concept art):

https://helixchamber.com/2019/02/16/what-dreams-may-come/

During the development of the hack I went so far as to create sprites to change Jynx into this Yeti-thing, but as time went on I did not feel very satisfied, it felt like a random addition that felt out of place.

I thought of going back to the original Jynx, but I ended sending the entire evolutionary line away and substituting it with another Ice Pokémon from the third Generation.

...Anyway, moving on from that, each species has its own unique icon on the menu and the overworld too, which is a great thing to give flavour to the game, and seems like a new standard for Pokémon Crystal hacks (with good reason).

The overworld also got some big changes to improve visually, and sometimes, gameplay wise. Besides visuals, some places also changed in design a bit, for a number of different reasons.

For example some Kanto cities had their design changed to look more on par with Johto, as if you compare maps between places, and Gen. 1 and 2, you'll see they kinda look off and weird, as if it didn't have the same time and effort put into it compared to Johto (they didn't).

Places like Celadon and Fuchsia City for example look rather different, although they keep their overall structure, they just got a bit more going for them.

Also there's a few improvements on sprites. For example, I drew new sprites for when you're surfing, similar to those in Gen 3 with your character over a undefined Pokémon. And yes, they're different for both the male and female player characters.

There's also HUGE CHANGES in how information is displayed in several points, with the biggest improvement being the Pokémon's Stats Page. It took me quite some time to get it to look nicer and more organized / easier to read, and I even expanded it by adding a fourth Stat Screen to show some extra "for fun" info.

The font was also changed for a thin yet wider one, to make it less empty between letters, and also more consistent with the different characters, like numbers.

Also, HUGE, HUGE thanks to HyperDriveGuy's amazing work and effort, a way of improving the scrolling and movement on the overworld to make it much more smooth and, to be blunt, less disgustingly choppy if you're used to smooth scrolls.

This change to me is like magic, it makes the game feel so much better! To be fair, finding this improvement refueled my interest in continuing this hack, so thanks again HyperDriveGuy, your work is not just great, it also really did drive this guy forward, pun no intended... Or maybe a bit.

That said, coding this introduced some bugs, some of them harmless, and others being progress-halting or even game-breaking. But fret not, as I managed to fix them all with a bit of work, some trial and error, an a lot of luck, but it was all worth it because the result is a much more fluid experience that translates into a more fun game.

Overall, the game uses much less aggressive colors too, because 99% of the people that may play this (which that would make a total of 4 to 5 individuals, probably) will do it on a lighted screen. Also there's little touches here and there.

Another tiny change that makes a bit of a difference in the long run is battle effects. Most of them on Gen 2 used the same palette: Gray tones! Well, that's not that way anymore.

Most of the effects now have color added to them, and make battles look a bit more fun. A few effects were changed visually, even. For example, Pokémon no longer see "chickens" when confused. Now Pidgeys fly around their poor heads!

The Trainer's card also got a bit prettier, specially the Badges section. Oh, I also added a third page to your Trainer's Card, showing your progress through Kanto's Gyms. You only need to press Right while on Johto's Badge screen when you get at least one Badge from Kanto!

Asymmetrical Badges also spin correctly. Funny enough, the game has coded that function in, but it is only assigned to a medal that was symetrical (Clair's badge). Sounds silly, but once you start seeing Game Freaks coding it's... Actually par for the course, in a way.

o-----------------------o |[13] Tips and Questions| o-----------------------o

Tips: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What type of beginning you want? Each starter is going to change your early hours.

Taking in mind how things work in the Original version of this hack, Cyndaquil would make your first steps more easy than the other two, as his Fire/Rock typing would make him effective against the first two Gyms, while Chikorita's Grass/Ground typing would make it a bit harder than normal. Totodile, with its Water/Ice typing would be a medium difficulty.

But of course, the point of the game is to make more friends and balance your team! You could also ignore the starters and make your team without them. That's how I usually roll.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You can get an Exp. Share very early on.

Once you brought the Egg to Prof. Elm, and you're ready to go away on your adventure, go back home and leave 2.000P with your mother. Once you battle once (With Youngster Joey on Route 30), she will call you, telling you she bought something for you. It can come in handy this early!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about saving with your mother, she will buy many useful items, so it's in your best interest to send her money from the beginning!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ During your first few Gyms, look for people in green clothes near the towns and cities' main Sign. These people will sell to you Berries to heal Status Effects!

They will come in handy to prepare against the trainers and leaders there!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't waste your Fruits and Vitamins without having in mind what team you want! This becomes more important the further you go, because NPC trainers will have trained Pokémon either you've raised your own properly or not.

As you get more money, or get more fruits you'll be able to quickly prepare Pokémon, but early on you need to think ahead.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about team, while I tried to make all Pokémon good and be on the same Level, that doesn't change the fact that having a balanced team can make things smoother.

Making a team of only slow, defensive Pokémon, or only quick but frail monsters can make things harder for you at certain points. Although, of course, you could just play with your favourites and tough it up. That's what I usually do.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Take advantage of Pokémon such as Meowth or Spearow, capable of learning stealing moves! They will help you to get ahold of many items, that you can either use or sell to make a profit.

Also, be aware of said Pokémon, as they may steal something you have!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Experiment! Because TMs are infinite, HM moves can be forgotten easily, and you have access to the Move Reminder freely, you're given the chance to try all sorts of combinations for a given species. Not to mention, the further you advance through the Battle Tower, the more options you'll have through Move Tutors and the Egg Elder to teach new moves, thus increasing the number of strategies for each species!

You'll only need to watch out for "Event" moves, such as the Odd Egg Pokémon, or the Special Eggs gifted in the Battle Tower, as each have a unique move and you cannot remind it if forgotten.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check the Game Corner on Goldenrod when you arrive!

They've expanded the number of prices you can get. For one, you can get HP restoring Berries there, with Golden Berries being really useful early on, and they're not that expensive.

Even more, new species of Pokémon have been added, and they're Pokémon hard to come by during the early parts of the adventure! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Can you get every single Pokémon in the game? How can I get Mew?

Yes, of course, what would be the point of a Pokémon Hack if you couldn't get every monster available in it by yourself?

There's a lot more variety early on, both so you can get your team-making juices boil sooner, and because different people like different monsters, and having a bigger variety helps with making more people happy.

Although for Mew, you'll have to buy my exclusive and new Park Ball Plus and send it to your game through my exclusive Park Ball Plus-To-GBC Link Cable(tm), or upload it to my exclusive service PokéMaeson Hostage Holdings, previous payment of course, and then you can connect your game magically to it through Infrared connection.

Really, it just works. Wait, are you going to play this on an emulator? Tough luck then, no Mew for you.

...Nah, it's somewhere in the game, you just have to find it, like the rest.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Are you going to do more Pokémon Hacks?

Niet. Nee. Ahneo. Tidak. Nej. Nope.

...What I mean is, don't count on that. The amount of time I put into this is so big that I could have made several other things, the testing has been killing me the most. I have reached the point of burnout, I've been working on this almost on a daily basis for years. You can't imagine how many times this thing has been reworked and changed over time. Beyond that, my love for the franchise has pretty much being forced to disappear.

And even if I wanted to do more, I wouldn't be able to use any other disassembly project thanks to current DevkitPro versions being incompatible with 32 Bit systems; I'm not going to get a new computer only to do more of this, and going back to the older "Hacking Tools" is not a very welcoming idea, mostly because they're so much more limited and risky to use.

So, sorry but no, I have no intention, I have no energy, I have no passion for it anymore. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

o------------o |[13] Credits| o------------o This wouldn't exist without a lot of people involved with the Pokémon Rom hacking community.

Thanks and Credits to every single person on PRET, a community dealing with disassembly for many Pokémon games. These projects look like THE WAY going forward, how awesome they are.

Check it Here: https://github.com/pret -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to Rangi42, and all people on places like the Skeetendo and Pokecommunity forums, and many others that shared their findings and information about ASM, going so far to make great tutorials to teach stupid people like me how to do do a whole lot of things, fix several of the bugs in the game, and many other things.

Check it here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal https://hax.iimarckus.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh, and of course, credits and thanks to Rangi42 again for Polished Map, an amazing utility for map editing, very complete and absolutely essential.

Check it here: https://github.com/Rangi42/polished-map -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to the TPP Anniversary Crystal 251 Project to create the code for the Move Reminder, which I adapted to my hack. I couldn't even have known where to start with it, and my hack is only better thanks to it. Also for giving me an idea of how to make Caught Data be shown in the Stats Page. My approach to how the information is displayed is different, but again, without TPP I couldn't have know where to start.

Check it Here: https://github.com/TwitchPlaysPokemon/tppcrystal251pub -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to HyperDriveGuy for its example and implementation of "60 Frames per second" project, which created a new way of programming a Run Button, but even more incredible, it made the scrolling of the game as you walk, run, and ride so, so much more smooth. It's amazing.

Check it here: https://github.com/hyperdriveguy/pokecrystal-60fps-example -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Chamber, Soloo993, Blue Emerald, Lake, Neslug and Pikachu25 for their Pokemon Icons. While I did a number of them myself, I also used a good amount made by them, and also remade some of them from their initial work, so they deserve the credits!

You can see their work here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal/wiki/screenshots/minidex.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/pret/pokecrystal/screenshots/minidex.png

Also, if you play my hack and find any of the icons or tweaked sprites I made good enough to use it yourself, go right ahead. Just give credit and you're good to go, don't even ask. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits and Special thanks to Vice04 for helping me test my hack over the years. May you never be assaulted by Level 168 Slowbros ever again.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music Credits:

Credits to FroggestSpirit for "Hoenn Wild Battle" and "Hoenn Trainer Battle" themes.

You can find FroggestSpirit music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/froggestspirit -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm for "Hoenn Rival Battle", "Route 101", "Cipher Peon Battle", "X/Y Rival", "Hoenn Champion Battle" and "Shoal Cave" themes.

You can find Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to TriteHexagon for his Night Theme music for cities and his tutorial on how to implement them in the game. His ASM files and his Soundcloud can be found here:

https://pastebin.com/u/TriteHexagon https://soundcloud.com/user-930339535 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope I'm not forgetting anyone, it's way too much people hacking around the world!

#Pokemon #Crystal Maeson #ROM hack #Maeson #RPG

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gamescare975 · 3 years

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What to look for when buying a 4k tv for gaming

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estirose · 4 years

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Is My Time at Portia similar to Fantasy Life? (for Fantasy Life fans)

Someone on another social network asked me if My Time at Portia was similar to Fantasy Life. This doesn’t surprise me, because I often see one recommended for fans of the other. Some of my thoughts below cut, because this got a bit lengthy.

(ETA: I will put this before the cut: Fantasy Life you can save pretty much at any save point; My Time at Portia saves only at end of day, even for the Switch and consoles. Keep that in mind if you’re thinking of buying it.)

I've seen quite a few people recommending My Time at Portia for Fantasy Life fans, actually, and I think it's really going to really depend on what you enjoy about Fantasy Life. (I’m going to just say “Portia” for My Time at Portia for the rest of this, because it’s faster to type.) I think I've seen Portia mentioned as "Stardew Valley as a crafting RPG", and I believe it's a good way to describe it. It's got elements that it shares with Fantasy Life (and with Rune Factory 4, which I'm also familiar with), but its biggest influence is Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley. (I will note here that my experiences are with the PC version, not the consoles, so I can't comment how close the console versions feel to Fantasy Life.) Lives: Portia is like Stardew Valley in which you have one Life instead of switching between 12. I'd liken it to a game where you spend most of your time advancing in a hybrid Carpenter/Blacksmith life, with some Woodcutter/Miner, and little bits of Angler, Tailor, Alchemist, and Cook. Combat is closest to Mercenary with a bit of Paladin thrown in. There are some ranged weapons in this game, similar to the Wizard's basic fire spells, early-mid game. I don't use them myself because of Reasons.

(I might mention here that there are no Masters. There are tutorials, especially at the start, but not as much as Fantasy Life has. There is also no equivalent of Flutter/Butterfly.)

Advancement: Like Fantasy Life, you can gain experience doing a variety of things, from gathering items to cutting down trees to fighting monsters. In fact, most of your early story, you will mostly be gaining experience by cutting down trees/mining rocks and ruins/building things. To advance the story, you build things, which will sometimes allow you access to new areas. Most things you build for the story have no deadline (a few do, but that's far less common). Essentially, this is both the equivalent of the story portions of Fantasy Life and the stars you get for doing things in a certain Life. (Interestingly enough, Portia's first two major mining materials are copper and iron; however, you have to progress the story first to get iron, unlike Fantasy Life, where you get access to both without any story blocks.) Crafting: It's not at all like Fantasy Life's minigames. That being said, for one part of the crafting, as long as you have it in storage of some kind, it doesn't have to be in your backpack. (The other variety of crafting, for large items, does require you to have the item on hand.) You craft machines that do a lot of the basic ingot-type/beam-type/cloth-type work for you. Be aware that you craft pretty much everything in this game, including your initial tools; no masters giving you your beginning tools here! Bliss: Not a thing in this game. You expand your backpack with the game's money (gols). Expanding storage requires you to craft boxes to hold items. Shops don't suddenly expand what they have for the most part, though some of them will change what they offer depending on the season. Instead, you’ll find more shops After you complete a certain quest, you can rent, and eventually buy, horses. (There are other mounts you can get other ways.) I might note that you don't get multiple houses, but you can expand your yard and get a bigger house. Fast travel is accomplished by building a certain item instead. Fighting and dungeons: Like Fantasy Life, there are areas where most creatures are passive except for a few. There are a few areas where everything is aggressive and will charge you. At some points in the story, you will be required to navigate dungeons. There are also optional dungeons that you will find yourself going into because they're the only place you can reliably obtain certain items. Relationships: Almost completely unlike Fantasy Life. There are some weird situations (mostly during the plotline) where you'll raise a relationship with someone by taking them along on your adventures, but it's rather rare otherwise. Portia is very much like Stardew Valley in this regard, up to and including marriage. And friendships matter too - you often get discounts for becoming better friends with different people around town. Requests: There are two kinds of requests: ones that you do for money/workshop prestige (the closest to Fantasy Life's), and ones you do purely to raise relationships. Both of these kinds of requests have time limits, unlike their counterpart in Fantasy Life. Plot: I really love both games' plots. They are both fluffy, though I'd say Portia's can have slightly darker moments than Fantasy Life's. In Fantasy Life, you're saving the world, while in Portia, you're building up a town into a better place to live. (Somebody else already saved the world for you.) Portia is less epic, but I don't enjoy it less.

DLC: There is some for Portia! Instead of a new area like the Origin Island DLC, you can get clothes for yourself and some of the NPCs.

What do I enjoy about Portia? Well, I love the plot. I love seeing Portia grow and know that I had a great deal to do with the revival. It’s kind of the same feeling when you finally manage to craft that really hard armor/wardrobe/item of clothing in Fantasy Life. While Portia doesn't have Fantasy Life's humor, I do like interacting with the various characters who are fun to deal with in their own regard.

#fantasy life #My Time At Portia

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variety-toaster · 5 years

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I fucking hate Hanzo, and I hate what he has done to Overwatch.

Ok, so, I’m gonna rant about game balance for a second, and I say some angry swearwords here so if you’re not cool with that, you can just scroll by. Now, I’m not sitting here and getting mad without having a theoretical solution to the problem, so just sit for a second, hear me out, and think about it from the perspective of the healers and tanks this bow-toting fuck-wit hero has shredded within less than a second for just a moment. I’m going to explain the problem, why it’s a problem, and how it could be fixed. If you play on console, this doesn’t really apply to you. Ya’ll are a whole different ballgame than the speed of gameplay that PC reaches. Keep that in mind.

FUCK. HANZO.

He is the singular most UNBALANCED piece of shit in an already suffering game. I hate him so god damn much. The ability to INSTA-KILL is already bullshit outside of ultimates, but he is the fucking WORST with it. He's a "pseudo-sniper" who can do sniper level damage without scoping, which is one thing, but his rework and the lack of balance they’ve applied to it??? FUCK. THAT. NOISE. There is NO reason that a SNIPER should be able to 1-shot at ANY range, and by that I mean close range on top of their already extensive distance options. At least Widow has to scope in, and landing close-range shots is not easy. Ashe, same thing, although her dynamite gives her some options, but she can damage herself with it. Ana is a fucking healer. Hanzo doesnt have to zoom in, and can KILL in 1 FUCKING SHOT from ANY distance. It's BULLSHIT. His basic attack is a fucking 1-hit KO move. There is ZERO excuse for that shit. He can RAPID FIRE arrows too with Storm Arrow! and they do MASSIVE damage! enemy DPS? full of holes. supports? already dead. Tanks? Dead in < 1 second. Fucking garbage. Ok, yes, you have to aim and shit, yeah, and it takes some amount of skill, but on PC, aiming is a tad-bit fucking easier with a mouse than it is with a controller. He can just spam arrows down a choke and the whole team can get ripped apart! He does loads of damage, and can actually MELT shields! So pushing through chokes is EXTREMELY hard when the rest of the enemy team is firing through their own. On attack, his high mobility makes it easy to drop in behind the healers, rip them apart before they have time to fucking react, and then everyone else can just come barreling through. Yes, counterplay exists in Overwatch. But hard-counters in any game are fucking bullshit and we all know it. Game-balance should allow for characters who are being countered to continue to hold up against their counters to some degree. Because it’s called BALANCE. Meaning they need to be EQUAL, in various ways. The dev team has not been doing that well at all lately, and the game has very much become a game of rock-paper-scissors. It’s not fucking fun. Using skill and teamwork to defeat your opponents in combat fairly is both rewarding and fun. Losing because your teammate is paper when the enemy chose scissors and won’t switch to rock fucking isn’t.

Hanzo isn’t countered by many, if any, heroes. Don’t fucking hand me a list of “Hanzo counters” because we’ve all seen a Hanzo main make that counter-hero look like roadkill with ease. This recreates the “Junkrat double mines” problem we had before. If you recall, when Junkrat was given two landmines in his arsenal, they did massive damage, the moment they hit the opponent. Didn‘t matter how far you were from the explosion, they did the same amount of damage as they would on a direct hit. Now they’ve fixed that, and distance from the center determines damage, but for several months, Junkrat was a highly popular pick, and fighting him... just felt unfair. For everyone. Squishies just popped instantly, and tanks went down without much of a fight. People left the game altogether out of frustration with the lack of balance. Fighting him wasn’t fair, and there wasn’t much you could do to stop him without some serious teamwork. It wasn’t fun to fight him. People would just leave games altogether when the enemy had a Junkrat. I watched it happen. A quick comment in the chat saying “Junk is fucking bullshit” and “[player] left the game”. It was consistent, too.

Hanzo... is just that, again. It’s not fun to fight against him. There’s no real way to stop him. He’s become really popular because of this, and the more he’s played, the more skilled people become, and while yes, more skill means greater reward for any hero, it also means more unfair insta-kills on heroes who cant do anything about it, unable to fight back, in every game. It’s not fun. It just isn’t.

This isn’t helping balance changes to other heroes either.

Healers and tanks are still only seeing minor changes and adjustments (mostly nerfs), and DPS heroes are getting buffed left and right, just to put them at the same broken fucking level as Hanzo.

Maybe it’s more of the balance changes being made entirely based on the OWL, which was already a goddamn problem (very small percentage of players of extremely high skill causing devs to make gameplay changes that drastically effect everyone else), because my theory is maybe they’re trying to make games move faster, so making DPS kill everything faster while the killcam looks great for the OWL cameras... But that’s just a personal theory, and it’s probably not that.

Hanzo is continuing to be a fucking problem, and playing Overwatch, even in quickplay, where I should be able to enjoy the game casually for fun, has become frustrating. It’s not fun to die in one shot because you stepped one millimeter around a corner, or because your tank’s shield broke in a shorter time than it takes your Guardian Angel ability (as an example, since it has a 1.5 second cooldown) to recharge.

Yes, there ARE other heroes who can oneshot. Doomfist is fucking annoying, yes, I’ve heard that plenty. But at the very least, there are ways to stop Doomfist. Stuns and boops affect Doomfist, because he physically has to be in close range. Hanzo can tear you apart at ANY distance. Those things aren’t effective if you’ve already taken just one arrow and died, or if your healers have been wiped out because he climbed over a wall, and stuck a few rapid fire shots at point-blank range into their skulls.

It’s not fair, and it’s not balanced. There’s no way to kill Hanzo in a way that matters. He’ll just come right back to rip your team a new one every time. At the very least you can take a Doomfist down a few notches by being more careful, and swapping to heroes who can keep him from breaking your face. Hanzo can just... change his distance, and keep killing you. A lot of that has to do with his way-increased fire rate and projectile speed. His damage is way more consistent, and nothing else was brought down to make up for this sudden increase in overall damage output during his rework.

It’s not about skill.

“Oh I kill Hanzo-mains all the time, it’s not that hard. Just get good.” Then you haven’t been paying attention. Maybe you don’t see it, but your healers see it, and your tanks see it. Because if you’re killing Hanzo “with ease,” you’re playing DPS, and I told you at the beginning to consider it from the perspective of the other classes.

He could EASILY be balanced, that's the worst part. It would be so simple yet so effective. He’s a sniper. Reverse damage drop-off. For everyone else, the farther an attack has to travel, the less damage it does, with a few exceptions for certain heroes. This is called Damage Drop-off. Hanzo could be balanced by having the opposite applied to his attacks. The CLOSER he is to his opponent, the less damage he does. It would force the SNIPER to actually be a fucking SNIPER. It’s a simple, yet effective strategy. No more walking through Orisa’s shield to shoot her in the face. No more hopping around through Rien’s barrier to fill him full of arrows. He’d have to put some distance, and focus on his aim. It would make him require MORE SKILL, since while he still does massive damage from distance, he can’t scope in. He can still defend himself close range with storm arrow and lord knows his wall-hacking sonic arrow could alert him to danger. He literally has a “jump away” lunge ability. He’d be fine, playing as a sniper like he was intended. He can still shoot and look around without being scoped in. Flankers will have just as hard a time getting in his face as before, except now, they might stand a fucking chance without having to have like a thousand hours on Genji or Tracer, and I don’t know, counter him in some way. Game balance is so crucial to the enjoyment of a game like Overwatch, and it has been WAY TOO LONG that this Hanzo rework has gone overlooked by the devs.

If it isn’t fun to play AGAINST a hero, it shouldn’t be fun to PLAY that hero. The goal of a game is to have fun, but it’s not fun when you get sent to the spawn room 8 times in a row no matter what your rank is or how long you’ve been playing. It’s frustrating, and it’s one of the issues people aren’t articulating when they talk about how winning in Overwatch doesn’t feel like a victory and losing feels aggravating, and leaves you in a sour mood, even though you’re just... playing a game.

But hey, that’s my personal idea as to how to fix this hero. I’d love to hear your ideas too! I’ve had a lot of people I’ve talked about this with tell me they’d rather the devs bring back old Hanzo with the scatter arrow than leave him how he is right now. What do you think? Do you agree with my idea, or maybe the return of Scatter Hanzo? Or maybe you have another idea? Constructive criticism is totally welcome here, or feel free to just let me know if you agree or disagree. However, if your response is something like “lol umad?” or “he’s balanced. shut up.” (without any real argument) kindly fuck off. Thanks so much for reading! Have a nice day! (drink water or something, btw)

#hanzo shimada #hanzo overwatch #Overwatch #Overwatch hanzo #Overwatch balance #Blizzard #Blizzard games #blizzard overwatch

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biscuitreviews · 5 years

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Biscuit Reviews Final Fantasy VIII Remastered

Final Fantasy VIII has finally received the remaster treatment. This was the last entry from the PS1 and PS2 era that had yet to receive a remaster. The reason it was constantly left out was because during the PS1 and PS2 era, Square didn’t have much of an archiving policy. This meant that the source code for Final Fantasy VIII no longer existed. If this story sounds familiar then it does as the original Kingdom Hearts also suffered the same fate.

Final Fantasy VIII was my entry point into the series and seeing that remastered announcement trailer gave me alot of feelings and a lot of joy that the gaming community would give this game another look.

Now, I’ve already reviewed Final Fantasy VIII for this blog already. This review is mostly going to focus on the remastered edition as well as cover some points I didn’t address in the previous review. I’ll be talking about what changed as well as what improved and what didn’t improve.

Let’s get the obvious change out of the way first and talk about the character models. These new models are absolutely gorgeous. They look like they belong on PS2 game. The details on the new models show more than the original PS1 models. For example, you can now see the Garden Insignia on the Garden student uniforms and you can see Squall’s necklace, both which weren’t as prominent previously. These models go to not only the main characters, but some side characters, NPCs, monsters, and bosses. Almost everything got a nice new coat of paint and pop out more than ever before. Even the weapons that each character wields have more fidelity to them making them stand out in their own way.

One drawback is that the environments look blurry at times. It gives a weird feeling that the models are just running in a background set piece rather than their actual environment. It sort of reminded me of the first Uncharted how the characters looked way out of place from the environment. The world map also looks really rough. Textures look patchy at places and the road is just a big gray line with details popping in and out.

As for battle maps, it’s sort of hit or miss with the remaster. Some battle maps, such as the Galbadian Garden battle map, Edea’s float battle map, and D-Prison battle map, look like they got a nice touch up. Other battle maps such as the battle maps from the world map look incredibly ugly like they got no sort of treatment at all.

One thing I do want to address is the “censorship” issue some people seem to have regarding Rinoa and Siren’s new models. Honestly, I don’t have an issue with their new models. In fact, Rinoa’s new model is actually more closer to the FMV model which gives her more consistency throughout the game. As for Siren, her changes really didn’t bother me. I wish I could add more for Siren’s case, but I don’t have anything, I don’t feel one way or another. The only feeling I do have is if you are a person that has an issue with it then just stick with the PS1 version or the original PC version.

Speaking of FMV’s, they’re a bit on the blurry side. Most of them are not that bad and perform well but is a bit disappointing that they weren’t fully smoothed out. The intro FMV is probably the worst performing one as it’s incredibly slow and does suffer from frame rate issues in a few areas in that particular FMV. At least that seemed to be the case for the Steam version, I’m not sure how the scene plays on consoles. It’s something I hope Square does patch at a later time because this was the main shining point for Final Fantasy VIII which were these very cutscenes, especially with the very first scene having performance issues.

I think some new dialogue might have got added in as well as I ran into a line that I know wasn’t in the original version, particularly the Dollet SeeD field exam where Galbadia soldiers will make a comment that they’re fighting kids. Now the original Final Fantasy VIII did make references to this further in the story, particularly the Timber section. But, to have a new line that has these soldiers questioning and even state outloud that they’re fighting kids does make it more prominent that Squall and the gang are trained child soldiers which further amplifies an interesting subject matter that there is an organization actively training child soldiers with some areas of the world seeming ok with that!

Like the Final Fantasy VII and IX remasters, cheats have been included. These cheats include turning off random encounters, maxing out your health (which for some reason is only available in the Steam version), having limit breaks always available, acquire all cards, and speeding up the game. Now, those cheats might sound like they’ll make the game easier and they can, but turning off random encounters could also be challenging with how Final Fantasy VIII’s Junction/Draw progression system works.

I have to say, speeding up the game cheat was a great addition to this one as Draw farming can be a very mundane task. Now instead of spending 20+ minutes on a single encounter to Draw magic, you can just turn on the faster speed cut your farming by a significant amount. This goes for GF summons as well, no more having to sit there watching the long animation over and over again when you can just click the speed up button and get right back into the battle.

As for random encounters, I never turned them off. I can see how this cheat might actually be more challenging than helpful under the right conditions with how Final Fantasy VIII’s progression work. I can see this being an added layer of difficulty to no EXP challenge runs. This could make it to where you have to play Triple Triad and go to Draw Points to get the spells you need. This could also have your GFs learn abilities at a much slower pace causing you to be a bit more creative with some of the game’s Junction exploits to still fight effectively.

That’s another thing I wanted to discuss, now this isn’t bad, but it was something that I did hope that Square would address for this remaster which was retooling the Junction/Draw progression system. They didn’t change anything which isn’t bad as it maintains the system, but also bad because you can still heavily exploit it. This can be done by having your GFs learn item refinement abilities early and playing a lot of Triple Triad to where you can have what is traditionally late mid-game stats within the first five hours of the game.

Enemies are also still dependent on Squall’s level. This means you can stay at a low level to just kill enemies and even some bosses in one hit with how you can increase stats with the Junction system. That was another thing I hoped Square would address also to make leveling up Squall more meaningful.

I also wished that Square fixed it to where the game didn’t un-Junction your characters at specific points in the story. I get it, make sure you’re equipped and prepared to go, but damn it, why do I still have to double check to make sure the game didn’t decide to be a dick right before a boss fight to un-Junction everything.

You might be wondering with the pros and cons that I listed if the game is worth it. Honestly, yeah I think it is. For $20 USD, it’s a pretty good price for some updates and having the speed up cheat a very welcome addition for the GF summons and Draw farming.

Yes the game still has a somewhat rushed romance, the second half of the story falls apart, and the Ultimecia still feels disconnected to the story as a villain. But to me, that’s part of Final Fantasy VIII’s charm and this is a game that I still love to bits to this day.

In my review for the game a couple years ago. I didn’t give it a review score as I didn’t think I could be objective enough to give it one due to how much this game means to me and what it did for my educational development. However, looking back now I think I can be objective enough to show the differences between the original Final Fantasy VIII on its own and the remastered version. So for this I’ll score Final Fantasy VIII the game as is as well as a separate score for the remastered version.

Final Fantasy VIII receives a 4 out of 5

Final Fantasy VIII Remastered receives a 3 out of 5

This one I’ll admit was tough but I feel the Remastered version could have done a bit more to give it a remastered feel. There were issues in the original that were ripe for Square to fix this go around and they didn’t take that opportunity to fix them. However, despite me giving the remastered version a 3, it’s still a fantastic game and worth the $20 price tag. I’m glad that this game finally got some attention and even opened the door for new Final Fantasy fans to finally take a look at this game.

However, if you’ve been curious about the Final Fantasy series and is someone that is possibly looking for an entry point, Final Fantasy VIII is not a good entry point. Take it from someone whose entry point was this game. Yes, the Junction system is easy to exploit, but it does take time to understand the system to make it easily exploitable. You have to know how to properly train your GFs to get what you need at certain points in the game, know how to make skills you learn from GFs help you with progression, mastering a card game to help you get cards that can lead to items to make you stronger, learn what spells are good to Junction to which stat, and tinkering with Elemental and Status Junctions to better fight enemies with elemental weaknesses. This is better to play when you’ve had a few other Final Fantasy titles under your belt.

If you want recommendations on a good entry point, Final Fantasy XV serves a good entry point as it has all the modern conveniences of games today. Final Fantasy VI and VII also serve as good entry points as both have compelling stories and fun combat. Final Fantasy X is also a great entry point as it has a good mix of both modern and classic and one that I personally recommended as being a good “first Final Fantasy.” Then again that could also be my bias showing as it is my favorite Final Fantasy.

#Final Fantasy VIII #Final Fantasy VIII Remastered #FF8 #FFVIII #video games #video game review #game review #gaming review #gaming #Biscuit reviews #Square Enix

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mysteryprof · 6 years

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Do you have any tips or strats for Hanzo that some players might not know? I'm a Mercy main with 300+ hours on her but I recently started playing Hanzo a lot (with maybe 26 hours on him now?) and I feel like I could be doing better.

I DO!

I HAVE A WHOLE GUIDE

hopefully this helps you o uo)/

- Last Updated: 5/29/19 -

A lot of stuff is gonna sound really basic here, but I want to cover EVERYTHING and approach it like playing for the first time

Sensitivity: > PC- I personally play Hanzo on 6.8, but that’s all dependent on the DPI of your mouse (different number determines how well your mouse is gonna respond to your sensitivity is kinda the best way I can explain it??) and your own preference. For example, I have a very basic Logitech M510 mouse with 1000 DPI (Sidenote: I recommend a mouse with side buttons if you don’t already have one). Another Hanzo Main friend of mine has a 1600 dpi mouse and plays at either 4 or 5, but like I said, whatever works for you; whatever helps you track moving enemies better outside of the technical jargon. A solid sensitivity will really let you get used to landing Flick Shots. > Console - I play on PC only, but from what I’ve heard it’s best to just set his sensitivity on both the horizontal and vertical axis to max.

Primary Fire- Hanzo’s arrows are Projectile, not Hitscan.- HITSCAN DEFINITION: Characters that have Hitscan have no travel time for their weapon. As in, as soon as you fire the crosshair over someone, you’re hitting them. That’s why characters such as Soldier 76 and McCree (even though he has Falloff Damage) are great counters to Pharah.- In Hanzo’s case, you’ll be aiming at where people are GOING TO MOVE instead of ON them. Lead your shots; let them run into the arrow. You’re golden once you get used to- something like a Tracer’s blink pattern. Even better would be getting familiar with Recall and being able to tell where she’ll reappear. Prediction is key.- I’ve noticed that a lot of Genjis like to go into a Swift Strike at the end of their Deflect… The timing is super tight, but you can land the killing headshot right before they hit you.- The ultimate test of leading your shots is against flying Pharahs. You gotta give quite a bit of leeway with them depending on the distance; it takes quite a bit of practice. I personally kinda picture Pharah as a box and you wanna shoot at her corners depending on if she’s ascending or dropping; more often than not it’ll be at her feet. Storm Arrow should make tracking her a little easier now.

Flick Shots- I honestly recommend looking up a video on these; it’s a lot easier to understand if you see it in action- Here’s a really good post my friend made about them- Flick Shots are far more viable on PC. It’s a lot harder on console even when both horizontal and vertical sensitivities are maxed for Hanzo.- Not much I can give advice on these for except: practice, practice, practice. Start yourself on the bots in the Practice Range, then move up to AI.

Storm Arrow- Great if you wanna just chip at the enemy team if they’re in a cluster- WORKS AMAZING WITH GRAVITON SURGE; follow up with after Dragonstrike if you want absolute overkill- Absolutely use it to chip away at barriers- A Bastion in turret form’s worst nightmare; a full volley will kill them- The temptation to spam all six shots when being confronted/in a panic is high, but you’ll do better if you take the time to focus and aim- The amount of damage a full volley can do through Amplification Matrix is delightfully disgusting. 840 Damage. >:3c

Sonic Arrow- Its radius is 9 meters- Go for unexpected Headshots when people come running around the corner.- It’s a good idea to always a Sonic Arrow up whenever you can; it benefits everyone for possible ult coordinations when the enemy groups up to make pushes.- You can catch invisible Sombras running through with a Sonic Arrow as long as she stays within its range.

Lunge- Just moving towards a point and using Lunge when available will get Hanzo there a little faster than normal walking- Get hooked? Lunge backwards. Incoming Death Blossom? Lunge. Deadeye? Lunge to cover. - Lunge can be combined with wall climb. If you’re climbing and haven’t reached the max height, you can lunge to another surface and finish climbing up that. - Lunge lets Hanzo get around his sniper perches with much better efficiency… Like, there are some crazy corner jumps he can make now without having to hop on the ground and climb back up on the other side.

Dragonstrike- One of the most important things to know about Dragonstrike is that it’s still a projectile arrow when fired for a quick second before it turns into Dragons. This is why Genji can deflect it and Dva can absorb it with her Defense Matrix if you are close range.- The Dragons are no longer effected by Nano or any other damage boosting ability. - This one is a bit irrelevant, but it doesn’t hurt to know that Dragonstrike does 200 damage per second and has INFINITE RANGE.- Combo with Zarya or Reinhard when you have the chance- tbh you’re probably gonna kill off a Baptiste bc he’ll completely nullify Dragonstrike. DS doesn’t damage the Immortality Field either.- Much like Dva’s Self Destruct, Dragonstrike is a good point clearer to drive the enemy away.- Don’t forget to use Sonic Arrows to see if you’re viable for a good cluster of kills because half the time you’ll be shooting that bad boy through a wall. Keep it up whenever you can.- Honestly? lead a little bit with Dragonstrike bc people are gonna either see or sense it comin’ and they’ll be able to get out of the way. Sometimes you’ll get lucky enough that people’ll just walk into it.

Reticle- Reticle is honestly just a matter of preference; all of them are viable in my opinion. I currently made the switch back to Hanzo’s default after two years and I’ve found that the form it changes into for Storm Arrow helps me aim it better. But also! I’ve grown to like the triple line for a solid sight on where arrows are going if they aren’t fully nocked. - I’m still going to leave my old Crosshairs setting since it’s really paved the way for me. I liked having the additional top/bottom arms for aiming apart from just the left/right on his default. This might put you on the path for finding something you’re comfortable with.

Practice- I personally like to do a custom match skirmish for practicing if I’m coming out of a long Overwatch break- You have just yourself and 6 other AI with every skill deactivated (I personally use 6 Anas) and it’s a great way to practice leading your shots. The AI will just unpredictably run around bc they have nothing else to do. - Once you feel more comfortable, take down the amount of AI, activate some skills, switch around the hero type of the bots, see if you feel any better against them. If not, go back.- I’m also all for practicing in vs AI. I play it all the time when I wanna chill; I used to play it exclusively. It’s just hard to sometimes practice correctly since the AI comes at you in a cluster and they go down pretty easily.

#anonymous #Askin' Percy

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registryloading276 · 3 years

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Xencenter For Mac Os

Citrix Hypervisor is the leading open source virtualization platform, powered by the Xen Project hypervisor and the XAPI toolstack.It is used in the world's largest clouds and enterprises.

Sep 02, 2020 Citrix XenCenter allows you to manage your XenServer environment and deploy, manage, and monitor virtual machines from your Windows desktop machine. The program enables you full virtual machine installation, configuration and lifecycle management, access to VM consoles, host networking management, including VLANs and internal networks, bonded and dedicated NICs.

Nov 12, 2013 Hi there I was wondering if there is a version of Citrix's XenCenter (to manage Xen Servers) for Apple Mac? Or would anyone have an idea? Roght now I am using a Windows Server via RDP but display is very slow.

Citrix Workspace app for Mac is compatible with all currently supported versions of the following Citrix products. For information about the Citrix product lifecycle, and to find out when Citrix stops supporting specific versions of products, see the Citrix Product Lifecycle Matrix. A universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems. The term globally unique identifier (GUID) is also used, typically in software created by Microsoft. When generated according to the standard methods, UUIDs are, for practical purposes, unique. Their uniqueness does not depend on a central registration authority or coordination between.

Xencenter For Mac Os Recovery Tool

It does not look like Citrix have done any work to make Mac OS X an officially supported guest operating system for Xenserver. This does not mean it is completely impossible but it does mean as you have found that your on your own.

This contrasts with both VMware ESXi which does officially support Mac guests in ESXi running on a Mac, and Parallels Server. Both do this by doing two important things, firstly enforcing Apple's license conditions which only allow this if run on real Mac hardware and secondly by emulating the extra hardware that makes a Mac a Mac rather than a PC, they only get Apple's permission to do the later by agreeing to the former.

Hint - the issue that is preventing you running OS X in Xenserver is the same as that which prevents Virtualbox from running OS X.

Ignoring technical issues the Apple licensing terms allow you to run up to two virtual Macs on a Mac and this is only for Mac OS X 10.6 Server, or OS X 10.7 Lion (client or server), or OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (client or server), or OS X 10.9 Mavericks (client or server). You are not allowed to run Mac OS X 10.6 (client).

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Citrix xenapp free download - XenApp Manager for Windows 10, XenApp Manager for Windows 8, Citrix PartnerMobile, and many more programs. View all Mac apps. Popular iOS Apps BeautyPlus - Selfie.

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Mac Os Mojave

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joh-gaming · 6 years

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Why is this affecting me so much?

This is probably going to be an incredibly long post, one that I don’t expect many would read but that I feel I have to write. If not for Epic to read it at some point, then for myself, to remember this and why this game was so important.

I will have a lot of personal opinions, unfair comparisons and highly critical comments in those comparisons that may or may not be accurate. There will also be speculation as there’s more going on than what they’ve been willing to say.

If you care, then please, click on Keep Reading to continue.

How did I learn about it?

Honestly, I have no idea and that’s an issue that lead to its current situation. This is what I remember hearing back then. Paragon is a new game by Epic Games, creators of the Gears of War series (which I’m not really a fan of) and the Unreal Engine (which has always fascinated me) It was going to be a MOBA (which I hate, don’t like any MOBAs except Paragon but I’m getting ahead of myself here)

youtube

Clearly the above isn’t enough to get me to try it, on the contrary. So what was it, I must have seen something that made me think, this is worth a try. As great as that announce trailer was, none of the heroes in it speak to me, not even Sparrow whom ended up as my first mastered character and the one I own the most skins for. It wasn’t a gameranx before you buy thing which to this day I haven’t seen nor plan to, nor Angry Joe’s first look which again, I have no interest in watching. I’m not being critical of those channels, it’s just that I already experienced the game, most if not all of its iterations, so I really don’t care what they had to say about it.

Well... funny enough it was Overwatch the reason I gave Paragon a try. While Paragon is relatively older than Overwatch, it was in closed beta for the first few months. After trying, and falling in love with Overwatch’s beta, I felt the need to fill that void but with another, hopefully similar game. Then I saw the announcement of Paragon’s own free open beta weekend

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I don’t remember if I took part on it or not, the next thing I wrote of Paragon after that was Digital Foundry’s graphic comparison of the game on PC and PS4 vanilla (at the time, the only PS4 there was) praising how a console game let you use mouse and keyboard.

Now, going back to Overwatch for a second, there are a few things you should know. 1. I have a friend that is part of the Overwatch team 2. I bought the game myself, no free keys and it was the PS4 version 3. I didn’t have enough money to buy it at launch, I ended up buying it late June or mid July, can’t remember and it’s not THAT important right now. 4. I tend to prefer cartoon like graphics as they are pretty much timeless

With that being said, this was my first impressions on Paragon, having tasted Overwatch.

“I feel really bad for the artists working on Paragon. Clearly a lot of effort was put into the design and modeling of the characters but good God they're so damn boring. The maps are also bleh with a palette that doesn't help things at all. Animations feel like over a decade old with awkward jump and run. I will be surprised if this game is actually successful 'cause it's a MOBA and what's the most important part of a MOBA? The damn heroes.“

I’ve been wrong before, but this is probably the top one. The map in question is what we now call Legacy. After spending a long time in super colorful maps in Overwatch, I found myself in this semi realistic map with ruins and a jungle that looked old and boring. Movement was too slow and I’m not sure what I was talking about with the animations, maybe they were bugged at the time ‘cause Paragon’s animations are impressive. Some of the best work in gaming.

Needless to say, I had a rocky start with Paragon, mostly because I didn’t understand it. I don’t know how long I tried it before I deleted it but that’s what I ended up doing. I got frustrated and instead of doing research I just quit.

So, going back to Overwatch for another second, how long was my honeymoon after I bought it? It lasted for about a month, after that I started seeing all the issues the game had and has (most of them are still there) especially on consoles. Broken heroes, Play of the game that encourages nonsense, the “scoreboard” that highlights the wrong things, lack of content, lack of heroes, easily exploitable on certain maps, etc. So I guess, thanks to Overwatch, not only did I dare to try Paragon, but fell in love with it. (btw, I did check, bought Overwatch mid June and by mid July I was sick of it, only made worse in August trying to get the limited time skins I wanted) And that’s not even talking about how Overwatch popularized Loot Boxes (yes, they have existed for a long long time, they just made it seem OK in a full priced game, ‘cause it was $60 on console)

Now, I couldn’t find this anywhere but I remember I returned to Paragon when Lt. Belica was announced. Gave it another go but again, failed to understand the character and gameplay. I will get more into the true problem for new people later on, but for now let’s go with why did I delete the game a second time. Well, it wasn’t out of frustration this time, rather than HDD space on my PS4. At the time it didn’t support external HDD. When did I return in a more permanent manner? When Countess came out.

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She became my main for a while, which is funny ‘cause part of her kit was taken from the hero that would completely grab me forever. I started understanding the design decisions of the characters and the graphics, I got past the part where they wouldn’t last a few years, I was wrong about that too. I think they found the right balance between realistic and somewhat cartoonish to make the graphics last. That and they weren’t shy on retouching characters later on.

On November 2016 I said this

“Now I have a better understanding of the game, mind you that if I were to read about it I MAY learn it faster, but I prefer to learn from my own mistakes rather than trying to play like someone else that is probably more skilled. I can accomplish a similar standard just playing with things that work for me rather than what is "optimal". Or that word that gets on my nerves, the META. Fucking meta...”

Funny, I still agree on that.

Paragon growing on me

I’m going to quote myself again, but I’m going to edit said quote for context purposes, not trying to say something different than I said before. For instance, the post was made with a video that I won’t include here, so anything mentioning the video is out of context.

“The more I play Paragon, the more I like it, but at the same time the more I notice its problems. Paragon currently has 24 heroes with a new one added every 3 weeks. Only has one map and one game mode, but it's free and high quality so no complaints here. However if you're like me, you tend to pick certain characters based mostly on looks not on play style. This is one of the biggest issues in Paragon and even Smite for that matter. The character design in Paragon is on point but at the same time it’s dull and boring.

You have your human characters, your robots and your beasts. They decided to go with a semi realistic look for the game instead of doing the cartoon like design from popular and unpopular MOBAs. Which is fine I guess, you want to differentiate yourself, especially when now everyone that does it is instantly going with "an Overwatch look". On PS4 they had to lower the graphics quite a bit.

Paragon has a hero limit since launch and you can't switch heroes of course. The character selection process is completely random (I was the first to pick this time by pure luck) there are no rules for this other than what common courtesy SHOULD dictate. Personally, even if I get to pick first, let's say if the third player selects Countess before I do, I consider that a priority so I leave Countess open for him. You should learn how to play at least 4 characters. Game actually wants you to learn five characters, that's why you get 5 deck slots by default.

I prefer to play Countess, but I'm better with Sparrow and already have experience with Belica. That being said, the whole mastery system induces people to rage quit when the character they wanted gets picked by someone else. It starts off fine, but eventually leveling up your character becomes a chore and a grind.”

This was still back in November 2016.

On December 2016, I had this to say about the game

“There were a few things keeping the game from being as good as it could be. One of them being the learning curve. This wasn't your go in spray and pray your way to victory while you press a button to get a highlight at the end of the match to feel great about your awesomeness. No, in Paragon you needed to learn a lot about the mechanics, you had to build your character from scratch, and you had to find a way to balance your build to be ready for what's to come. It was amazingly refreshing to be honest. Sure it took me some time to like it, mostly 'cause I still feel the graphics aren't what they should be and the characters, while having an interesting design, they lack a palette that makes them unique.”

“This past Tuesday, Epic Games decided to upload Monolith. Basically Paragon is now a whole different game. Taking into account player feedback, mostly for how slow the game was, they applied a lot of changes to the mechanics of the game. Some of the changes would have been enough in the Legacy map to make the game nearly perfect, but no. Monolith is a smaller map than Legacy, character speed is improved but then it creates other issues when you fight other heroes. Certain classes are now having a tougher time. You gain less card power, forcing you to stay on the map longer rather than going back to base to level up. That in theory would be great if you weren't so fucking weak for half of the game. So what are people doing to combat this? They basically have the same builds. Build for attack speed and power, then some life steal and you're good to go. It's boring now, it's more like a shooter. “

I ended up that paragraph with something I regret and therefore won’t repeat. Even if it didn’t happen... I didn’t uninstall the game and have no plans to do so. Not even after it’s gone (unless it keeps affecting my health, more on that later)

“The simplification of Paragon, as a whole, made it more accessible to regular players, you know your regular multiplayer bro. So it's kind of funny to see the rage quitters because the early game is so painfully slow (in terms of levels) and how easy it is to die when you don't understand how minions and towers work. They changed more things in Paragon than what Massive changed in The Division. Paragon is like a different game, one that doesn't require you to be as smart as before. You now stack attack and go play. That's why I'm a little disappointed with the update. Thankfully they are listening to the feedback so perhaps they can find a middle ground between this version and the previous one, because both have great ideas, they just need to remove the bad ones. A match in Paragon is still more fun than a match in Overwatch though.”

2017, a roller coaster of emotions

Last year alone Paragon went through at least 3 big changes. Many think these changes lead to its current downfall but I don’t agree. In a community corner video (I may edit this if I find it again) they said (a bit arrogantly I may add) that Legacy won’t ever come back. Keep in mind that while at first I was one of those that felt betrayed by the changes Monolith brought to the game, I was still playing and having fun. Originally the thought was, “we don’t want to split the community” and at the time I agreed. But looking back I failed to see the same thing they missed, the community was already divided. Bringing Legacy as a mode, or a more strategic version while Monolith would be more fast paced wouldn’t be bad.

Look at Smite and Overwatch, both games that wouldn’t want to have a split community, now their games have plenty of modes. Keeps players in because if they tire of one thing they could test another ‘cause at the end of the day, it’s the heroes that will keep you coming back. So it wasn’t the changes, more like a pinch of arrogance and a lack of modes. The player retention they later complained about, was of two folds, lack of ranked mode and a poor tutorial.

What made Paragon different and special, besides the heroes I will come to love even more than those in other games, was the card system. You’ll find videos from ‘tubers that are now jumping to conclusions just to talk about the closure of a game they never even heard of. You’ll hear them say something about it being pay to win with buying cards and what not, which funny enough was true in 2016, nobody said anything about it then, but all of that was removed when they added the card crafting system so long ago that I don’t even remember when that was implemented.

Building a deck was crucial to success in Paragon, just as much as understanding minions, towers, your role, buffs, rotations and kills. For most of the 2 years, the jungle was crucial too, that was changed in one of the latest patches. Some say for the worse, I’m not too sure it was. If it was simplification they were after, then the current jungle makes the jungler job easier to understand. Farm, get some levels and skills, then go help the lanes. True that had it been a mode in Monolith with Legacy being the more strategic match, it would have been better received, or at least that’s my perception.

People don’t like to feel dumb, even less to realize they actually are. If what I’m writing here makes me sound dumb, then perhaps I am, but it doesn’t matter as this post has nothing but my sincerest thoughts on the matter, even if I’m trashing Overwatch along the way. I think Paragon was a great game, unique in a sea of MOBAs, that people just failed to understand and that the developers didn’t support correctly.

Was Fortnite the issue?

Epic Games is often accused of doing popular things then scrapping them, fad chasers is what they call them. Paragon started when MOBAs were a big thing, just like Fortnite started when Minecraft was a thing. Sure at the time you had Cliffy B on board so he wanted a gritty and scary thing in Fortnite. Fortnite was one of those games that went through development hell, a game that if not by PUBG catching fire (see what I did there) and they being able to rip it off, it would have crashed and burned by now. Fortnite was sold as an Early Access game

I clearly bought into Fortnite’s Early Access, hence the screenshot of the banner unlocked. What made me buy Fortnite when I knew it wasn’t done? If there’s one thing I learned from playing Paragon, is that Epic will change everything trying to find the best system for the gameplay. I wanted to be a part of that too, I wanted to see the game change and grow (keep that expression in mind) over time. I also wanted to thank Epic for Paragon, so I thought this would be the best way to do so.

I was aware of Fortnite before I knew anything about Paragon, I mean like I said, it’s one of those games that went through development hell. I was watching one of their livestreams when they were giving away keys to almost everyone, they didn’t give me one (at the time it was a PC only game) so I never got the chance to try it myself. Over time I stopped paying attention to it as I never got a key, nor even acknowledgement that I wrote them asking for one. Why was I interested in Fortnite? Well, obviously the cartoon graphics as I mentioned before, then there’s the whole building thing which I enjoy a lot (main reason why I like Fallout 4) and Orcs Must Die 2 is one of my favorite Tower Defense games. (Keep that game in mind too)

If I had known that everything they said about working on developing what is now a mode (Save the World) was a lie, I would never have wasted money on Fortnite. The game is as incomplete now as it was on launch. Sure they have had events but almost every resource is going into the Battle Royale mode. Again proving that they are indeed fad chasers. If you feel like I’m wrong here, that it was a logical business decision and that justifies whatever you’ve spent on Fortnite, then fine, that’s what you think. But personally, I can’t recommend anyone to spend money on ANY Epic Games game from now on. This will sound like Blackmail and maybe it sort of is, but I do mean this, if Paragon is completely closed (as in I can’t play it in any way, shape or form) to me, I don’t see myself giving EG money again in the future. I don’t just say things like that and change my mind when it’s convenient, I haven’t bought an EA game since they burned me with SimCity 2013.

The Heroes of Paragon

Paragon has a bunch of great heroes, my favorite hero would come out in May 2017. That would be Phase. I’d say it was love at first sight but it wasn’t, it was love at first try. Before Phase there was Aurora, a controlled type character that had the looks and mobility, not to mention damage output. I often play range roles or control types, while Aurora was melee, I felt she has more mobility than Countess plus her control abilities were great to set up team attacks. I never thought a support would be far more interesting to me.

Phase’s kit was amazing, actually it was too good to the point where she broke the game for some people. One thing is a good support, another is a support good at everything. Good at healing, dealing damage and controlling the enemy. She got nerfed a couple of times, with her healing being affected the most, she’s still my main. For whatever reason, Phase felt like a part of the Phantom Thieves in Persona 5. Granted that after reading her lore I completely understand why that was the case, but the fact that I thought about it without reading it says a lot about the work put into the character itself

There are so many nuances in her animations, even her new launch pad animation. While not as involved or defining as most of the characters’, it still feels like a Phase launch. Her relationship with Shinbi was explored later, it was interesting but it didn’t change what I thought the character was like. She is the character I’ll miss the most, but don’t think she’s the only character I like a lot.

1. Countess 2. Aurora 3. Lt. Belica 4. Sparrow 5. Dekker 6. Serath 7. Morigesh 8. Zinx 9. Drongo 10. Wraith 11. Yin 12. Gadget 13. Muriel 14. Twinblast 15. Murdock 16. Shinbi

I will miss all of them. There are a few I haven’t even tried.

The greatest game I couldn’t play

From September 19, 2017 to January 9 2018, I didn’t have internet access. Hurricane Maria had destroyed our infrastructure leaving many of us in a terrible situation. Originally I was OK, I was prepared for around 2 months of no power, let alone net access. My house held fine (or so it did at first) and my family was OK. Then it started, the following days it started raining what felt like non stop and the damage Maria did, was now evident. Water was pouring in, my things were getting damaged, first I lost my bed, then my desk, well to cut to the point, I pretty much lost my house. I don’t have the money to fix it and with the situation my country is in, I don’t think it’s even worth it.

All I kept thinking about was, man I wish I could play Paragon again. Sounds silly but everyone has something that helps them disconnect from whatever terrible reality they are in. For nearly 4 months that’s all I wanted to do. Late October I moved to my brother’s house, it had power, water would come later but at least it had power. I started playing some games to avoid thinking of what I lost and had yet to lose, as I couldn’t save everything important. Nothing clicked, all I wanted was to play Paragon. I would watch my captures of my game time, over and over and the “music video” I did of my first coop match playing her

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I missed the October event, I wanted that mummy Yin skin. I almost missed the winter event skins, got net back right when they extended the event 1 more week, so I was able to buy Morigesh and Aurora’s skins. Those weren’t the last skins I bought, no. The last skin I bought was the Panda skin for Phase. The day before they announced that Paragon would close.

So you see, the answer to my first question, why is this affecting me so much? well, after losing my house and some of my things, the game I wanted to play the most is going away too. It breaks my heart, I saw Paragon from almost every stage in development, highs and lows I loved playing it, I still do. There are terrible games that somehow are still up (Day Z comes to mind) yet this amazing game that is making so many people cry, it’s going away. Or is it?

Were we lied to?

It all points to yes, something happened that they can’t talk about. In their open letter they said

Here inside Epic, we’re talking about the future of Paragon in pretty much the same terms as you’re talking about it. The core challenge is that, of new players who try Paragon, only a small number continue to play regularly after a month. Though Paragon has evolved, no iteration has yet achieved that magical combination of ingredients that make for a sustainable game. (As an aside, the problem isn’t marketing or how to make money with Paragon. We have good ideas that would solve those problems if we can find a way to make Paragon grow.)

So, if the problem wasn’t marketing (which btw it was, it wasn’t even promoted 1/5 of what Fortnite has been) nor making money with it, the problem was making it worth the effort. At least that’s my opinion. Fortnite success came over night, so it was an easy decision to ditch their less popular game even though it is their superior product. But is that even the case here? While Paragon is going to close for us, in China it started its closed beta

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What the flying fuck is going on here?

It’s hard not to feel betrayed, it’s hard not to wish Epic Games failure (I try not to) but nothing is harder than seeing a great game close, with some relatively true explanation but no real logic behind it. Closing Paragon, even if it was to make development on Fortnite easier, is a mistake. Leave it in life support until you can come up with better ideas for it. The rank mode they were working on was never implemented in Paragon, instead it was moved to Fortnite. So don’t tell me you did everything for the game, it died because you didn’t support it Epic. It died because you killed it not because we left, I never left. As the final months are quickly going by, and I try to enjoy my final moments with it, in an analogy I rather not say, I feel myself getting sick. I get this massive headaches now, Paragon may have nothing to do with it but coincidentally, they come after playing a few matches. It hurts to know it’ll be gone and that I won’t be Phase anymore.

On the other side, I hope Epic Games have realized that Fortnite is more of a platform than a game. Quickly being able to transform itself from tower defense building game to a battle royale with building elements. I mentioned Orc Must Die series, well their latest game was one of the many MOBA attempts that kind of failed. They had to add the classic gameplay that made them popular in order to keep their fans, because they were bleeding players like crazy. Now, the current version has plenty of modes, kept the MOBA, (EDIT: They removed the MOBA mode) added the classic and created a few more. Fortnite can be Paragonized if they wanted to, they could even add some of the Paragon characters to Fortnite, I would gladly pay for Phase.

Soldier Class

1. Belica 2. Murdock

Constructor Class

1. Terra 2. Greystone

Outlander Class

1. Phase 2. Twinblast

Ninja Class

1. Shinbi 2. Kwang

And clearly, I’m not the only one that thinks that’s doable. naastika.deviantart.com

Final thoughts

I may be angry and disappointed, and I do mean it, that if I can’t play Paragon or Phase (mostly Phase) any more, that I truly won’t support any more Epic Games games, but I do appreciate the rare opportunity to play such an amazing game. I’m too old to like video games for the gamey aspects of it, I prefer the media side of it, the opportunities it offers as a story telling device that surpasses books and movies. I started my gaming on the Atari 2600, I’m done with jumping around for hours or shooting for no reason. It is extremely rare for me to get attached to a game with no narrative, and the fact that Paragon pulled this off, speaks to the talent working on the game.

Thank you for Paragon, and fuck you if you do close it.

#Paragon #personal thoughts #Epic Games

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