Stick-Figure Anime

I was hanging out with ZMaro today, talking about random stuff, when the topic of anime emerged. I've never cared for anime-style cartoons or video game cutscenes, because they're so.......weird. The way characters don't move their mouths in accordance with their speech, the manner in which they move their bodies, the corny "camera" attention and facial expressions -- ugh. And when they are fighting and zoom at each other, yelling like drunk teenagers as the world streams by in multi-colored lines, the sweat drips down their faces, and there's a close-up of a guy whose eyes are growing bigger and bigger as his mouth twitches in the same spot for five secondsandthenBAAMMMM!!! the guy flies 40 feet backward and slams into a wall so hard the bricks shatter and he's stuck there; that is, only until he's through acting totally unrealistic for a short piece of dialogue, at which point he flies off the wall and does the same to his opponent. Who would watch such stuff??

ZMaro said he finds anime hilarious because it's so dumb. It's only good purpose is being an object to make fun of. I jokingly pointed out that it also serves as proof that we who can only draw stick-figures are better artists than many Japanese people. "Anime? Blech. I can draw STICK-FIGURES!"

When we began making silly doodles as a result of that conversation and ZMaro drew a stick man planting a gargantuan fist into another stick man, I suddenly had a brilliant idea: stick-figure anime! If we ever become good enough artists to make good animations, we'll create a series with characters doing all those stupid anime moves and pulling those corny expressions in what is supposed to be some great, dramatic moment -- in STICK-FIGURE STYLE!!

A brief mention of religion and science ...

"... the elements will be dissolved by fire ..."

These words were heard in the second reading on the second Sunday of Advent (and are, regrettably, the only subject for blogging that I can remember now that I can actually blog again...). When I heard them, I couldn't help but laugh inwardly at what I began thinking: what would the ancient Greeks have thought of this? They believed fire was one of the elements! "Let me get this straight: fire will destroy earth, water, and air, and then it will burn itself out? That's a rather meloncholy way to end the world."

With today's science, on the other hand, this passage kind of makes sense. Fire is a combustion reaction in which molecular (and sometimes atomic) structures are broken down and re-arranged. So when the day of the Lord comes and Heaven and Earth pass away... Um, how will fire destroy Heaven? I guess I'll leave this up to St. John.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make here is that religion and science are not enemies. This is very limited example, to be sure, and perhaps St. Peter was being metaphorical, but take it for what it's worth.

Spiff Hack Update

Being the end of the week, I've had time to continue (resume?) working on my hack of Solar Jetman. I figured I'd announce where I am and where I'm going at this point.

Changing the graphics of the pod is proving to be a slow and difficult process. The pod turns 360 degrees while corkscrewing so that you see the top when it faces up and you see the bottom when it faces down. This makes everything in between hard to draw and smoothly connect, especially since Spiff's ship is a saucer and I have to work with a solid red unless I decide to take extra liberties.

Since graphics work was tiring, I decided to look for a utility for overall level editing; I found none. In order to change the level layouts, types and positions of enemies and items, what makes you go where, and so forth, I need an editor. These kinds of things are rocket science to change via raw coding, and if one knows enough to do so, they might as well create a utility to make it easier. Rather than devote my entire computer life to such a thing, I'm going to wait, and possibly ask, for such a program to be made by a ROM hacking veteran. Unfortunately, this could place restraints on what I do until such ability comes into my hands, as I won't be able to fit planet names with planet environments and such all at once. In fact, if I finish this hack in every other way, it may remain a visual hack only, depending on my interest to come back and rework the level designs once I possess the requirements to do so.

So what can I change right now besides graphics? Text. Text hacking is a category unto itself due to how it is stored in a ROM. There are graphical tiles for each letter and number, and the game uses strings of hex numbers in which one number translates to one tile. This makes the hacking a matter of locating the hex strings that represent text. But how is this done, and how do you know what number corresponds to which letter? I viewed this as a complicated problem in the past; in fact, this is the first time I've done it. I once again (I had tried once before) read a tutorial on the procedure, and since I could not get the recommended DOS hex editor (Hexposure) to work properly on the computer, attempted it with the editor I have, differently though it works.

A table file, containing the key for hex and text, is needed to locate and change the right data. Since none existed for Solar Jetman, I had to make my own (I believe this is where I said "forget it" in the past, since Hexposure wasn't cooperating and I didn't know how to use the Zelda table I found with my favored editor). Opening the ROM in a debug emulator, I called up the tile viewer, found the text tiles, and wrote down their hex values in Notepad. After saving the key as a ".tbl" file, I opened it in my hex editor along with the ROM. All the hex numbers in the ROM were displayed on one side and, thanks to the table, the corresponding numbers and letters (where applicable) on the other.

A given hex number may appear several times in the data, and an editor will show it as a text graphic wherever it crops up, regardless of whether it is text or not. Finding the actual text was the easy part, though. I just had to scroll through the data until I found actual words from the game. Then all that had to be done was change the hex numbers so they made the text I wanted.

However, Solar Jetman had a catch. Each planet's name was missing the last letter in the editor, with one untranslated hex number in its place before the text for the next planet. I had to tinker with this on my own in order to figure out how to deal with it. Experimenting with planet 2, I first tried replacing the untranslated number with the hex for "D;" but when I opened the game I found that "2 MEXOMORF" (the F was missing in the editor) had become "2 MEXOMORD3 OMEBRU." The text had been squished together with planet 3's. I could draw two conclusions from this: the unrecognized hex contained the missing letter, and it also served as a sort of break or finisher, ending the line of text. I made certain of this by replacing the number in between planets 1 and 2 with the one in between planets 2 and 3. Sure enough, this made "1 PRELUDON" say "1 PRELUDOF." At this point I began to jot down the values for these "letters and breaks" in my table file, and suddenly noticed that if I filled in the rest of the letters of the alphabet that the game's planets didn't use, I would have sequential hex for every letter followed by one of those breaks. The last question, then, was whether or not I could use the resulting table to end a planet's name with a letter that the game never did. I tried it, and it worked!

I am very pleased with this accomplishment; maybe I'll be a great ROM hacker yet.

My brother: historical encyclopedia and practical joker.

My younger brother sure pulled a fast one on me today. I was in the basement playing Solar Jetman when he walked into the room with an expressionless face and a sullen tone, informing me that it's become awfully easy to assassinate people. I thought he was bringing grave, political news that I had failed to hear because I was downstairs playing video games; immediately pausing the game, I turned to face him and demanded to know what had happened. "BANG!" he yelled, pointing his finger at me.

I've been avoiding direct politics within T.H.I.N.G., but that doesn't mean I haven't been following the issues. With all that's been going on lately, I was somewhere between worried and exasperated at the thought of an assassination. Man! I don't think my brother had any idea what was shooting through my mind as he did that. Well, I'm grateful that it was a false alarm.

Hey, Obama's Tux Cat's are still all I've truly mentioned here about the election. Hooray for me!

We only have fractions of the Hylian legend ...

Wow. Ever since I saw a blurb on a Zelda fan site about the "Ocarina of Time Beta Project," I've been trying to find out more about it. At first I thought it was just some attempt to make a debug ROM playable or something, but when I read the blurb and saw that it was about the discovery of the graphic for a sword-beam (a classic ability never used in a 3D Zelda except for the Fierce Deity's Mask in Majora's Mask), I realized that there were some big possibilities hidden in the game's data. "But what exactly are these people chasing after?" I thought.

I can't be entirely sure, but I believe that this is the answer. The N64DD (see my previous post) would have been able to do some pretty unthinkable things had it not been a failure. A lot of the N64 games out there were initially being developed for it but were later moved to regular cartridge releases, including Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. In fact, the two Zelda titles were originally going to be a single one; and if you gathered all the stuff that got thrown out, you'd probably have a third game! I haven't been able to find much direct info on the "Beta Project," but it's probably an attempt to unearth everything buried in the ROM and eventually piece together the original Zelda game in its full awesomeness.

A couple of quick notes about the page I've linked to:

1. The writing is pretty bad as far as grammar goes. It's followable, but it looks like the person(s) who wrote it was either tired or slightly drunk.
2. At the end there are some tidbits about Master Quest, under the heading "Zelda: Master Quest on the GameCube." These are about Master Quest, NOT Ura Zelda (the original project), even though the writer says a couple of things like "I’m probably about 50% to 60% of the way through Ura Zelda, and to this point, the -only- changes are inside the dungeons. The overworld stuff is all exactly the same as in Ocarina of Time." Let's face it: he couldn't write well to begin with, so he could have gotten mixed-up pretty easily. With that in mind, there may be other areas where he got the two confused, but none jump out at me (perhaps the bit about Miyamoto commenting, in 2000, that "Ura Zelda has been completed for some time now," but that may very well be accurate).

N64 Add-on -- Changed plans

This sure explains things. Ever wonder why Ocarina of Time: Master Quest was made in the first place? Why the later Final Fantasy games went solely to the PlayStation? Why Metroid was never seen until the GameCube? Why Nintendo never pulled through with so many projects, now the objects of internet rumors or attempted fan recoveries? Take a peek at the list of intended games after reading the article.

By the way, I've made a small update to my arwing cameo post.

Update: I'm here, just pretty busy ...

It's been a while since I last posted, but I'm not just sitting around doing nothing. I finally got an opportunity to beat Megaman 9, and I have a long post on it waiting to happen, but I haven't had the time. The other day my dad asked me when I'd blog about something besides video games. I actually found non-game material that day and wanted to post on it, but I couldn't get on the computer, and I'm too preoccupied to do it now. I've had many ideas swirling through my head lately, between philosophy class, game ideas, an idea for another blog, and a piano piece I'm writing from an NES game called Shadowgate. I've felt that if I managed to snag enough time to post on even one of these things, it would sort of do an injustice to the others that I'd have to confine to my thoughts for longer; hence this general post.

Bad Megaman Art

Looks like the box art for the first Megaman game has finally met its match.

Why can't they draw Megaman as a robot? And Dr. Wily is not Dr. Weil (from the Megaman Zero series), but this will make fans go all over that idea again.

Ocarina of Time Cameo: Arwing

There are a good number of beta objects in a variety of games, and any video game fan should already know of the great abundance of cameos -- that is, appearances in a game of something, such as a character, from a different game. By far, though, this is the most intricate one I've ever seen. With a gameshark code (81242E66 000981242EF4 013B81242F02 0000) you can unveil the presence of a fully functional arwing that flies around and shoots at you. This may be a cameo that was never made use of in the final production (a beta object), but the thing that really raises questions is the fact that it's so complete. The level of interaction, the sound effects used nowhere else, and the special camera attention given when you enter the forest make this a cameo you'd never expect to see. (As a side note, what the code does is replace an existing object with the values for the arwing, which probably include the "instructions" for the camera coverage. The proof of this is a bush that you cannot cut, lift, or do anything to -- namely, the bush that a Kokiri child is trying to pick up. The kid is gone; guess where he went!)



While I'm talking about Ocarina of Time, I'll mention something else: Ocarina of Time: Master Quest, the more difficult and puzzling version released on the GameCube is still an N64 game. The Master Quest, as well as the GameCube ports of OoT and Majora's Mask, are technically emulated on the GameCube. As a result, Master Quest has been successfully dumped as an N64 ROM and is fully playable on an N64 emulator.

Ike's Suicidal Final Smash

It's a pity I can't post a pic or, better yet, the video I took of this on Super Smash Bros. Brawl (well, I could, but it wouldn't be worth the effort). I was wondering what would happen if you designed a stage with a wide enough gap in the middle that Ike has nothing to land on when he executes his final smash. So I built just that. I recorded a 1-stock battle of myself, as Ike, fighting a CPU Marth. I got the smash ball and hit Marth with the Great Aether; they soared up to the top of the center of the stage, Ike clobbered Marth, and then down they shot, straight to their deaths, at exactly the same time! This is one of the very few occasions (and definitely the easiest) in which you will ever get sudden death on stock mode.

Solar Jetman hack: Spaceman Spiff

This is a hack I am working on, as of a few days ago. I got the idea some time before, but never sat down to experiment with it. Now I have Spiff's graphics completed, including palette changes, and am working on his ship. It's very time-taking to redraw every frame of the ship turning 360 degrees and sort of flipping upside-down in the process (if you've played the game you will know what I'm talking about), especially with a saucer as opposed to the original egg shape of the pod. What's more, I can't get as 3D a look as I'd like, because the ship and the spaceman share the same color palette; having only 4 colors per sprite to work with in the first place, the ship can only have one color other than yellow, blue, or transparency, all of which are needed for Spiff. This means that the saucer must be a solid red instead of the 3D shading you can see in the screenshot.

This will take a long time to complete, especially since I won't be spending all my time working on it. Technical issues may arise and ideas for the game may change, but I don't intend to abandon this endeavor. Eventually this should join the ranks of fan creations as "Spaceman Spiff: The Hunt for the Flying Tiger!"

A Squared Circle - I'm a Nerd

My philosophy teacher likes to use circles and squares to illustrate contradictions in nature. There's no such thing as a square circle; the essence of a circle cannot be present in a square, and vice versa. Even God cannot square a circle, not because of a limitation on his part but because of the definitions of the two shapes.

When he answered somebody's question today he referenced the "squared circle" example. I doodled on my paper for two seconds and once again proved I'm a nerdy smart-aleck.

Jetman

Wow. I just found out that Solar Jetman, a neat game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, is the third in its series. The first game was Jetpac, the second was Lunar Jetman, and both of them were released for an 8-bit PC back in 1983. Judging by screenshots, the first two games look like platformers as opposed to the space-flight gameplay of Solar Jetman. All three games are by Rare, although Jetpac and Lunar Jetman were released back when Rare was known as Ultimate Play The Game. I never would have guessed.

Obama's Economic Plan

During the debate last night I thought I heard one of the candidates misspeak, swapping the vowels in "tax cuts." I suddenly got the idea for this picture:

Ah, the digital age of political cartoons... Don't worry, I do not intend for this to become a hobby. I just thought this would be funny. Feel free to spread this around; maybe by the end of the election the internet will be littered with it. I wonder how it feels to be responsible for for the mass presence of something like this...

Sims' City

If we have any freak hurricanes, floods, or monster attacks, I'll blame this guy for turning "disaster mode" on.

The Accuracy of 8-Digit Calculators

I just finished my last chemistry problem for this week's homework: find Avagadro's number using blah-blah-blah data about an 8-atom silicon cube. I wanted to get A's # as accurately as I could, so I decided to do the whole thing by hand. I thought, "My calculator can only work with 8 digits, so I'll do this with a pencil, take up a whole page, and get the answer as precise as possible!" The first step was converting X picometers to X centimeters cubed. When I finished multiplying 12-digit numbers, I went to the back of the book to check on my progress, get an idea of where I should be, and use the rounded numbers in the back of the book to see how precise the book's answer would be. I saw that I was 0.04 x 10 -22 off, but I figured that it was due to my superior decimal places. Wrong-o. My final calculation came to 6.10etc. instead of 6.02etc. I realized that my quantity of 0.000000000000000000000158151477991 cm3 was worse than a rounded 0.0000000000000000000001602 cm3. The extra precision I shot for was lost, probably to a single mistake, within the 12-digit multiplications that took me so long. Go figure.

School subjects make for fun conversations.

I was at a late start-of-the-school-year homeschool picnic all day -- the one that was scheduled for the day hurricane Ike hit. I ate my fill, played volleyball and cornhole a bit, and overall had a good time. What I enjoyed most, though, was chatting with some other teens -- about school. We discussed science (one girl was working on biology homework at the time), teachers, languages, etc. When the topic of Latin classes came up, and we were complaining about the memorization of what declensions do what, I was able to share the creation of the phrase "Latina avibus est," which translates to "Latin is for the birds." (I gave up on learning Latin shortly after my dad came up with that.) I talked a bit about Mr. H's classes (theology, logic, philosophy, and ethics) and how they come together, the past knowledge getting better and clearer when you take the next course. For the laughs, I mentioned how I gave him the answer for something once and he asked how I knew it was true, to which I replied, "You told me." His response was, "Oho! This is philosophy class; that won't work any more!!" That led to the discussion of teachers, their personalities, and so forth. So many people don't enjoy school, but I find it to be a great subject for ice-breaking conversations.

I think too much.

My brother and I watched some behind-the-scenes features for Raiders of the Lost Ark lately. The movie-makers encountered some difficulty filming the scenes with the snakes in the Well of Souls, because the snakes didn't behave the way they wanted. There was a clip of Spielberg holding a snake and talking to it, saying, "You like fire? You love fire... In the script you're supposed to hate fire. Why do you like fire? You're ruining my movie!"

I thought, "Well, yeah, they're cold-blooded. Fire would be a source of heat." Then I started thinking about the probability of the situation in the first place. Here we have a temple that's been buried for hundreds or thousands of years, and it's filled with snakes. Why would it be filled with snakes? Being cold-blooded, the Well of Souls would not be an ideal place to live. It's underground, providing insulation from the heat of the desert. When Sallah looked into it, his line should not have been "Why does the floor move?" If there were any snakes there, they would not have been moving. The temple would have been a hibernation ground, or something.

"You're thinking!" my brother said. "You're thinking! Stop thinking!" Hey, at least I don't think this much when I'm actually watching a movie, or I wouldn't enjoy movies.

Zelda meets Peter Pan

*All of the following screenshots are results of using the levitation code*

They'll never find me up here.

Aw, how did you know?

Pick me up, mommy!

Uh, that thing had better not be my spirit...

Ah, garden baths.

That would be a figment of your imagination.

Um, Zelda? Ganondorf's sent half the castle to the fifth dimension. What now?

Any fries with that?

Spider Link, Spider Link...

The king sure is acting odd these days...

Me, scared of Ganondorf? Don't be silly. Um, is it safe to come down?

I feel like I'm in the clouds...

Rockman 2 Hacks

Somehow, I was able to play Wii but not get on the computer last Saturday, so I started MM9 and reached Wily's fortress. Then I wasn't allowed to play Wii Sunday or during the school week, so I managed to snag enough free time to get on the computer Wednesday night and finish a Rockman 2 hack, but had to wait until today to blog about it. I am enjoying golf lessons, but together with doctor appointments on the same days, they sure take up a large block of time. Anyway, I have the time now, so I'm going to do a post on two great hacks of Rockman 2, the Japanese equivalent of MM2.

Rockman No Constancy

This was done by an expert Japanese hacker who had such talent that all the changes make for what could almost be an alternate MM2. There are totally new stages, and various enemies act differently (the crabs have shells that explode in a line across the screen!). All of the weapons have new looks and/or behaviors, and for those that are used the same way, things are still quite different because energy use, firepower, and enemy weaknesses are totally overhauled. The 8 robot masters are whole new monsters, with altered attack patterns at least (at most, you have Quickman turn into a little flame and bound around the room shooting eruptive fire all over the place). To top it off, the music is all different and feels like it was meant to be there. Besides these and a quickened buster, the game's mechanics are pretty much the same. The normal difficulty level is higher than hard mode in MM2. I think a fair comparison would be with MM9's stage difficulty; a bit harder in enemies and definitely in bosses. Now, if you use the patch for the hard version, Megaman has no post-hit invincibility time, the enemies take many more shots, etc. The hack's appearance is very cool, different, and coherent all at the same time. Some of the stages are meant to resemble environments from other games, but don't look out of place at all. Not one tune is unchanged, having been adapted from other games. While any hack might give a game a new look, few of them are as smoothly connected as this: from a specific standpoint, the tunes suit their stages; from a broad standpoint, the different stages and weapons complement each other. In fact, the hack's sole fault lies in two boss doors that simply sit as edges to the walls of their stages, blocked off and purposeless. Whether these were left in accidentally, due to ease of hacking, or by a telltale result of imperfection in the patching, I don't know. What I do know is they don't stick out too much and in the long term an esthetic view of the hack dismisses them, as they are of a less esthetic nature than a technical one and don't disrupt anything in the latter regard.

In conclusion, this is an awesome hack that achieves one of the greatest feats in the world of ROM hacking: everything is new, yet it feels like more of the same stuff. A Mega Man fan could almost forget it's is not an official game. I highly appreciate this completeness.

Rockman Deus Ex Machina

This hack changes more than Rockman No Constancy. A different hacker concocted this, but the music is remade by the creator of RNC. Like the previous hack, this one has everything from new weapons and stages to altered enemies, as well as stuff you've never seen before, like a room that reverses the boss's position when you set foot in it's half of the screen.

There are several different patches, and after a brief analysis, here are the differences I could find just by entering a stage:

• Rockman-Deus Ex Machina- -- This is obviously the "normal" patch. This is the one I played and am reviewing.


• Rockman-DEM-(easy) -- I couldn't distinguish this from the previous patch.


• Rockman-DEM-(hard) -- This makes the stages worse than ever, with added pits and such. To compensate, when Megaman gets hit, he hurts/destroys the enemy, and there's no recoil.


• Rockman-DEM-(static) -- I'm not sure what this one does compared to the "normal" one other than leave your buster unchanged; all of the above patches hack the buster so that it moves a bit slower and 4 shots can be on the screen at once.


• hard-body -- This one gives Megaman the bodily attributes he has in the hard version, and can be applied to the original game / most other hacks without problems.


• FW;DEM -- I don't know what this does other than add "FW DEM" to the title screen.

The difficulty level is sky-high, particularly through treacherous stage designs. The 8 robot masters behave more closely to their originals than they do in RNC, although that doesn't make them easy. More of the weapons have been altered in bigger ways (with the exception of Quickman's, which RNC entirely redid), including the three items, which now make you "fly" and turn invincible. Some of the enemies are changed a lot, and a couple of the bosses in Wily's fortress are fought in conditions you'll never forget. The final boss is a fast, deadly terror with no particular weakness, and you may run through half your weapons by the time you blow him up. For the record, it is possible to beat him without the turbo-button; but success via button mashing requires you to shoot about as fast as the turbo anyway, so go ahead and "cheat" rather than get carpal-tunnel.

(As a side note, Mega Man X fans will appreciate the final boss. I'll say this much: if the final boss wasn't a hologram [I don't think anyone's bothered changing that] and Megaman was destroyed by it, this game could be the bridge between the MM and MMX series. I don't know what the storyline to the hack actually is, because I can't read Japanese!)

The only thing this hack lacks is that feeling of coherency. Between a happy-feeling, music-note-throwing Metalman here and an NES-quality rendition of FF6's boss theme there, the diversity of this hack's contents seems a bit like mixing LEGOs with Lincoln Logs.

If you're an old-school Mega Man fan, you should definitely try these. Rockman No Constancy is a quality hack that anyone who wants a Mega Man 10 already should check out. I don't recommend Rockman DEM if you found MM9 difficult, but if you're up for a challenge, go for it!

There's So Much Going On!

I was recently thinking about getting a job, but do I really have time for anything more?

This week I had my first two golf lessons. I will be having them every Tuesday and Thursday for a few more weeks. Why am I taking golf? I don't really know. My mom signed me up for it along with my siblings. I'll admit I need more physical activity, and maybe golf would be ideal for me since I'm not generally an active, hyperventilative sports person. Still, I'm not really interested in golf, although everyone says I'll grow to love it... Do some addictions begin with reluctance?

Philosophy and chemistry are going well, and I'm managing to keep up with math and Spanish. Not much to say here.

The computer's internet safety system decided to start blocking blogger because an offensive blog had been updated recently and was thus being linked to from the sign-in page. This prevented me from blogging for a few days, and it was quite frustrating because I couldn't figure out what it was blocking until I had my dad look at it a little while ago.

Last but not least, Mega Man 9 has finally been released! The Blue Bomber's first game since the Playstation is a downloadable title for the Wii (and other internet systems, I believe, such as the Xbox 360) and is designed to be like an NES Mega Man. I got around to downloading it today, and my first impression is: WOW, COOL, GREAT, YES! (retarded, I know.) The graphics are pretty much identical to an NES title; the music and sound have the same, awesome "low" quality of the originals (complete with sound cancellation); and the gameplay is just like it always was! You cannot slide or charge your weapon, but for the really old-school MM fans like me, that's no problem. The only bit I've seen yet that was never present in any form in the NES games (although I haven't seen much yet -- my mom kicked me off after forty minutes) is the lab; you can take screws to Roll and Auto in exchange for items, like in MM7, although there are especially cool, useful, and fun ones this time around. In addition to the regular game, there are some extras and mini-games to unlock, a whole bunch of challenges to fulfill, and a downloader for any add-ons that may be released in the future. Creating Mega Man 9 in the first-generation style is definitely the smartest move Capcom has ever made, and MM9 itself may become the greatest in the series.

So, with all that on my plate, I'll be pretty busy for a while! MM9 is going to steal as much of my free time as my mom allows, although I need to finish Wily's Fortress in a Rockman 2 hack so that I can write a post on it and another like it. That said, I'll probably finish the hack and review the two hacks first, enabling undivided interest in the new title. Between that and my mom, I'm likely to be the last person to beat MM9, but when I do I'll still review it, 'cuz I love the classics, and this is a brand-new classic.

Oh yeah -- the "Something Man" boss names tradition has finally been broken. There are 8 Robot Masters, but one of them is notably different from any other -- it's a she. Yup. Splash Woman. = ) She's a hostile mermaid. Reminds me a bit too much of Leviathan from Mega Man Zero, actually, but I'll let that slide. Besides, she was built by Dr. Light, not Dr. Wily (Ooooohhh.....!? I won't mention the storyline yet because I only know the beginning).

Limitations of Vocabulary

A large vocabulary can make you look smart. It can also confuse people. Or it can make you seem improperly educated.

Yes, I said improperly educated. How? Simple. There are those out there with smaller vocabularies. What difference does that make? Well, those people may not have the full knowledge of a word that you do, and they can think you are using a word in the wrong context.

For example, I said that my literature teacher appraised my paper as college level. My mom thought I was using the word incorrectly -- You don't "appraise" papers. You appraise diamonds. But she looked it up and found that it means to "assess, determine the value." Now the term is growing on her. But how many others would read such a sentence and consider it wrong, or at least awkward?

It's one thing to have to explain stuff to those who do not understand, but it can get annoying when you must defend your works from incorrect, accusatory judgements.

SM64 Codes

Ever wanted to ride a spiney, put the camera on any object, move the trees where you see fit, play as a rabbit, control the race timer, or create coins when you pound the ground? This is the place for you. The creator of this site has made all of the above and even more possible in Super Mario 64. He has such an extensive knowledge of the game's programming, he can change the graphic or behavior values of practically anything. Want Mario's ground pound to shake the screen like a thwomp? No problem! How about throwing a risk factor into collecting red coins by having them spawn chain chomps instead of displaying the number you got? Sure thing! With the codes this guy has made, the game has never been more fun.

He also has loads of neat information, from how to do things like he is to the beta* objects he has uncovered. Even my friend Zoron Maro, the Mario buff, didn't know that the lava-dwelling creature called Blargg was originally going to be in the game; thanks to our code-writing friend, you can now put Blargg into action! Or what about the use of the Boo-related key that is buried in the game's unseen data? We may never know. But we wouldn't know this much if there weren't people like this, exploring games' innards and writing codes to bring them to surface.

*Things that were worked on but then never put into the final game are known as "beta" things: objects, graphics, etc. from the game's beta stages of production.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

I'm sure there are many of you out there who watch movies and nitpick, not the plot lines, but the physics. Well, here are some really smart physicists who give summaries of movies mixed with scientific explenations of why things wouldn't work. This site goes into a lot of detail on the small number of movies they currently list, and it's a good place to learn something and get a laugh at the same time.

The Purpose of Literature

One of my friends was remarking that, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain should have taken some sort of action to avoid or leave the situation of attempted enticement by Bertilak’s wife. It was her opinion that Gawain did not make much of an effort to avoid the near occasion of sin.

Though it might sound like one of those simple solutions that would render a movie too short, there is much to be considered here. Gawain was a very skilled conversationalist, and he turned aside all of her [Bertilak’s wife; she was never named that I recall] smooth-talk flawlessly and without the least rudeness. This went fine for a while, and Gawain trusted in Mary to help him, but his hostess was determined to test his willpower to the max. Eventually Gawain fell to coveting, accepting the girdle that she pressed upon him, finally succumbing to her attempts to deter his righteousness in one area or another.

In many ways, Gawain managed the situation quite well. He kept his purity, which is obviously important. He also remained courteous to his hostess, but at what cost? His fault lay in taking the girdle, which belonged to Bertilak, and Gawain kept it secret from him despite their agreement to exchange what they won each day. This was a violation of their pact and the relationship between host and guest. He later confessed and despised his sin, but he lived on with the knowledge that he was as predisposed to corruption as the rest of humankind.

Could Gawain have handled it any better? Possibly, although the book says that “... he must needs either refuse her with offence or her favours there take.” It could be argued that rudeness is a better alternative to some other forms of sin. On the other hand, a sin is more or less grievous depending on the person and the circumstances, and he could have both done and suffered much more damage by disrespect than by what he did do. In any case, the fact remains that he was not perfect.

But that is what the story is about! While I disagree with my friend to the standpoint of Gawain handling the event foolishly, I have no problem with posing alternative possibilities to what occurs in a book. This is what literature is for. It is an art that depicts the issues, ideas, and happenings in the life of man, exposing what is hidden and provoking thought. With history, they say, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” Literature is much the same way. Above the level of entertainment, we can and should extract what is contained, measure the depths, analyze the philosophy, and ultimately learn something for the betterment of our lives!

So how could Gawain have acted differently? What consequences would another action have had? Or did he handle it to the best of his ability? Could you have done any better? Was the writer trying to convey how we should or shouldn’t go about such a thing? Perhaps he was demonstrating the courtesy we should have, and at the same time displaying its limits? There is so much to ponder on so many levels that I have barely scratched the surface here!

And this goes for books besides your classic literature, as well. Even talking mice and men battling aliens to save the universe have meaning disguised somewhere. Such things are only worth reading because they relate, in some way, to us; since man is the center of creation, literature employs his philosophy, ethics, and emotions. We can find our questions, desires, problems, solutions, and mysteries within pages of writing. It is a tool for learning about ourselves from an outside viewpoint, always changing, logging beliefs from times past, and illuminating the shadows of the future. That is the purpose of literature.

Site: The Mega Man Home Page

For a Mega Man site with everything from info to entertainment (sans online games or anything), this has got to be the best. This site is by a fan of the Mega Man universe (a woman, believe it or not) who has compiled and tested as much data on the different series as you may ever find in one place. She doesn't give step-by-step guides for the games, but she's reviewed them, has lists of where to find items, and has my kind of sense of humor. I had no idea there was a strategy MM game released only in China until this site -- that's how much she knows. And aside from the games themselves, she's even writing her own MM fiction*. She's not a bad artist, either. She could make a blog out of her "Musings" section (unless she has a blog already -- I haven't checked). Gee, what else...? Just go check the place out!


*Okay, I know some of you may think that's typical for a fan, but her books hit me somewhere.... I probably like them a bit extra because they remind me of the Adventures of Link that Shakespeare's Cobbler and I were trying to write some years ago. Some notable similarities are the humor, attitudes of the characters, and the presences and roles of unrelated characters from other games.

Ocarina of Time: Disorder of Events

I've been playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time with various cheat codes so that I can have all the equipment at the beginning and do things like levitate and see just how much of the game I can jump around. After fooling around a bit, I decided to skip as much of the game as I could (short of turning into adult Link with a code) and do everything else out of order. I started with all the usable items and the levitation code, but left out the important quest items such as the Spiritual Stones required to get into the Temple of Time, the ocarina songs, and the Golden Gauntlets. Besides, since some such items trigger events, it is possible to run into serious hang-ups because the game registers that Link has an item, but the part of the game played to get said item has not been completed. (As you will see, I encounter some such instances anyway, but they are larger, more complete areas; the programming is not sliced into so deep that a set of closely related affairs becomes problematically detached.) The Ocarina of Time might be one such item, because a special scene in which you learn a song ensues the moment you get it; the Fairy Ocarina, on the other hand, has no special purpose other than playing a few songs to proceed through the game before you acquire the Ocarina of Time. That said, I also left my inventory devoid of an ocarina so I could get as far as possible without one.


So here's a humorous summary of the game as it happened for me.


Navi comes to Link to tell him to go see the Great Deku Tree. Link has other ideas: he goes to the Lost Woods and uses the bombs he's not supposed to have to blast his way through a shortcut into Goron City. Stepping out onto Death Mountain, he bombs open Dodongo's Cavern, proceeds straight to the boss, and promptly beats the giant lizard up. When he exits the cave, the Goron leader, whom Link had neglected to ever meet, comes down and thanks Link by giving him the Spiritual Stone of Fire, the Goron's Ruby; then he goes back inside and immediately shuts himself in until the messenger from Hyrule arrives to help with their Dodongo problem. Poor amnesiac.

Next Link heads up to Zora's Domain, which he cannot open the entrance to because he neither knows Zelda's Lullaby nor has an ocarina to play it on. He does, however, possess the ability to fly; he floats right over the sealed waterfall, [down through the area where the top never needed to be drawn because it was never going to be seen,] and casually strolls into the cave.

Our young lad flies over the Zora King, who blocks the way to Zora's Fountain, without so much as telling him who he is or that he is about to save his dear little princess. Link gets swallowed by the fish (whale?), Jabu-Jabu, and heads for the parasite residing in its stomach. Link kills the mutated monstrosity and joins up with the the Zora Princess as he leaves the ichthyoid's gut. The grouchy piece of royalty expresses her reluctant gratitude for saving her by handing over the Spiritual Stone of Water, the Zora's Sapphire. Link, knowing full well that she has no idea who he is and might not trust him, decides to go back into the fish (whale?) and double-check things. Sure enough, he finds the Zora's Sapphire sitting down there in another area, but when he discovers that the Zora Princess is there as well and appears to have never seen him before, he decides to leave with what he's got and hope for the best.
[The game gives the message that I have collected all three Stones at this point. It is possible to legitimately get the Zora's Sapphire before the Goron's Ruby; when I tried this once with cheats and got the Zora's Sapphire first, the game said I had one more to go, and when I got the Goron's Ruby it said I had all three. However, the game would never recognize that I was missing the Kokiri's Emerald, because it's not supposed to be possible to leave Kokiri Forest until you have acquired it. You also must actually have all three in order to trigger a cutscene and enter the Temple of Time.]

Having met one princess, Link thinks he'll pay a visit to another: Princess Zelda of Hyrule. After flying over the oblivious guards, Link arrives in the courtyard where Zelda is spying into a castle window. Upon seeing Link, she becomes excited, believing Link is the one from her vision: the "figure holding a green and shining stone." She eagerly asks if he has the Spiritual Stone of the Forest, the Kokiri's Emerald. Well, no, Link doesn't, and he tells her so, but she has such a severe case of cynicism that Link finally gives in and lies that he has it. Zelda is overjoyed at this and proceeds to tell him about the Sacred Realm, the Triforce, about Ganondorf, and about the use of the three Spiritual Stones along with the Ocarina of Time.

Zelda sends Link off to find the other two Stones, and Impa, Zelda's caretaker, escorts him out, but not before teaching him Zelda's Lullaby. As she plays the notes, Link whips the Ocarina of Time out of nowhere and follows along. Only when he is finished does he realize what he is holding, but he has no time to think about it because Impa is trying to show him the way to Death Mountain to get the Goron's Ruby.

Feeling rather annoyed at the two royal women, Link goes back to Kokiri Forest to get the one stone they thought he already had. He and Navi, who has been urging him all this time to see the Great Deku Tree, head for the ancient guardian of the forest ("Great Deku Tree, I'm back!" Navi says). The tree tells Link that the time has come for him to begin a quest -- or, as Link interprets it, it didn't hurt that he left the forest for some adventuring on a whim. The Great Deku Tree allows Link to venture inside him so that he can defeat the evil within, and he does that in about two minutes. When he emerges, the Great Deku Tree thanks Link but says he was doomed before Link even started (well, gee, you lasted this long, didn't you? I think you and that spider were living in symbiosis if you're only dying now that it's gone). Before he passes, he tells Link that Ganondorf put the curse on him (nah, he cursed the once-gentle spider, if you ask me) because he wanted the Kokiri's Emerald, which the tree then gives to Link. When the he finishes relating to Link everything Zelda already had, he says goodbye and ceases to live.

Possessing all three stones, Link heads back to Hyrule Castle to meet Zelda, but as soon as the drawbridge lowers she and Impa come shooting out on a horse, fleeing the castle. Zelda throws the Ocarina of Time back into the river, and as Link follows it with his gaze he sees Ganondorf right outside the castle. Ganondorf demands to know which way Zelda went, but Link draws his sword and shield instead. Simultaneously amused and angry, Ganondorf blasts him with some dark magic and gallops away.

Link rights himself, retrieves the Ocarina of Time from the river, and suddenly goes into some sort of trance in which Zelda teaches him the Song of Time. When he finds himself outside the castle once more, Link pockets the Ocarina and makes for the Temple of Time, wondering if the mysterious vision has any relation to his mysterious momentary possession of the Ocarina some time ago. At any rate, he opens the Door of Time and draws the Master Sword without delay.

After listening to a long speech from Sage Rauru explaining that, a) drawing the Master Sword unsealed the Sacred Realm, allowing Ganondorf to steal the Triforce (gee, maybe we shouldn't have done this. Maybe we should have just waited 50 years for Ganondorf to die.); b) it sent Link forward in time seven years to his adulthood; c) Princess Zelda is safe; and d) he (Rauru) and five others make up six Sages who can help Link defeat Ganondorf; Link finds himself back in the Temple of Time and is quite ready to leave and go anywhere else. Before he can do so, he encounters Sheik, who talks more about the six Sages and tells him where to find and rescue the first one. Finally able to go, Link exits the temple and steps out into the desolate place that was once the kingdom of Hyrule.

As he makes to leave the run-down market, Link takes a detour to Hyrule Castle, which has now obviously become Ganondorf's stronghold. He decides to check it out and see what he can do right now; he flies over the bridgeless gap and enters boldly. Inside he finds six branching passages that seem to generate the energy for a barrier around the central tower. Link heads down each of these in turn, and at the end of each he finds and dispels what sure enough are his hypothesized barrier generators. For each one he destroys, Link is paid a short visit by apparitions of whom he can only assume are the Sages, although he is slightly confused: Sage Rauru didn't need saving, and Sheik told him he would find one Sage in Kokiri Forest, so is he or is he not saving them when he dispels the barriers?

At any rate, he deactivates the barrier and heads up the tower, at the top of which he finds Ganondorf and Zelda, who is magically confined. Link has no time to feel irked at Rauru and Sheik for not having their facts straight, though. Ganondorf intends to recapture the entire Triforce, which split when he took it seven years ago, and Link suddenly realizes that he and Zelda now possess the other two parts. Ganondorf attacks, Link takes him down, Zelda is freed, the end. Or not. The tower begins to collapse and Link and Zelda flee just in time. The end. Or not. Ganondorf transforms into a dark beast and Link faces him once more. When he weakens Ganon sufficiently, Zelda and the Sages seal him in the Sacred Realm, where he will be trapped until A Link to the Past.

Having completed his quest at last, Link turns to Zelda, who more or less apologizes for his lack of teenhood experiences because of the abrupt adventure he had to go on. Taking the Ocarina of Time, Zelda plays it and sends Link back to the youth he had to postpone, telling him to enjoy his childhood now that Ganondorf is gone. When he finds himself a kid back in the Temple of Time, Link thinks he ought to give Zelda a piece of his mind: how is he supposed to enjoy himself? Ganondorf won't be gone for seven years! He makes his way back to the courtyard where he first met the princess as a girl, but before he can say anything, the world turns to stone and says "The End."

Aftermath of Ike

The power is finally back on here as of about half an hour ago. Ike stormed (no pun intended) northeast after smashing Texas, hitting the Ohio/Kentucky area very hard. The winds here reached 84 mph Sunday afternoon; there were trees, power lines, and house roofing ripped out all over, and over half a million people were without power (many still are). I'd go into more detail, but I'm exhausted, and there is cleanup work to be done outside.

Studies Increase

Yesterday marked the beginning of philosophy classes. I think it went quite well for the first day. Mr. H did three things: he talked about a variety of stuff to get our minds started up, initiated minor discussions and asked questions, and warned us that he was going to confuse and twist our brains as we got into the subject. Actually, he was pleased with how well we remembered and utilized what he'd previously taught us. Twice he mentioned that someone told him beforehand that we weren't going to get this stuff, but we were too smart as always!

Hopefully he and Dr. F won't fry my brain as they have both said they will, because I'm going to need a good amount of space for Spanish, which I also started learning yesterday. The Rosetta Stone method of teaching language is to match phrases with pictures, but I need to see if there is a supplementary book of rules that I can reference as well. Why, tell me, is an airplane feminine when a boy is on it, but masculine when a boy is under it??

If You Give a Hero a Hammer ...

The Megaton Hammer has more uses than it seems.

Play ball! I spent a lot of money on this bat, so don't zap it too hard, ok?

Or we could play "Don't Break the Ice."

Ganondorf starts the game.

Link surveys his options and takes his turn.

Ganondorf's move. Hey, hit the blocks, not Link!!

Look's like the board's clear. Ganondorf seems pretty intent on smashing that middle pillar down, though.

I'll say. The guy destroys his whole castle just because he loses a game!

Busy Week

I haven't posted for almost a week, as it was such a busy one. On the weekend we went to a parish festival and had more fun than the average day at King's Island (of course, we are not huge roller coaster fans). On top of the games and the food, there were some pretty good rides, the biggest thriller of which was the "Typhoon," consisting of four or five tripods that spun and rotated around the center like an eggbeater swing set. It was rather fun until the arms of the tripods went out almost completely horizontal. The favorite answer to the question "How was it?" was "Once is enough." Sometimes even I don't care when sentences don't grammatically correspond.

This morning my mom took two of my siblings up to see McCain and Palin at their Ohio stop. I was exhausted from the weekend and still had chemistry to do today, so I opted to stay home and get more sleep. They told me when they got back that they had to stand around in the rain for almost two hours to get through security, and when McCain and Palin came out they were not close enough to get a good view. Then, on the way back to the car, they found the roads closed off because the van transporting the candidates was going to drive off through that area. So, after all they went through to be there, three of my family members got to see McCain and Palin from four feet away as they drove by, and McCain even pointed at my sister's homemade signs!

And besides all that, I've been busy working on chemistry and playing a game to make a blog post (coming soon!), so it seems much longer than a week ago that I began "A Homeschooler's Pensieve."

Mario 64 -- NES Texture

Now this is one cool texture hack. This is a 90% complete edit of Super Mario 64's graphics to make everything look like one of the three NES Super Mario Bros. games. The YouTube video includes a couple of links for download, the codes to alter Mario's colors, and instructions on how to load the textures to your emulator. It worked for me, so try it out and take a look at those classic "BOMB" explosions the Bob-Ombs now make!