Tired of one-third of all raids being G-max Alcremie for the past month? Good news! Now half of all raids are Milcery, plus a chance at the item that turns them into… (wait for it…) G-max Alcremie.

Sitting at home sick yesterday and today, I’ve gotten at least sixteen of them so far. In fairness, the pre-evolved ones all had strawberries, and this event is handing out all the other candies, so you can fill out the full set of 63, if you’re into that sort of thing.

It appears that this is heavily biased toward low-level characters, and people who’ve finished the story won’t see quite as many of them. I had whimsically decided to level up a second profile in Japanese far enough to catch some Dittos, so I’m drowning in マホミル.

Unrelated, in anime news, Funimation belatedly realized that a show about men screwing whores was about men screwing whores, and ran away screaming. Interspecies Reviewers is no longer streaming legally in the US, or some other related streaming services internationally (apparently Sony bought up a lot of them).

Since I burned out for a while on Breath Of The Wild, I’ve bought a number of other Switch games, including a steeply-discounted copy of Diablo 3, which made a nice holiday diversion (reached GR89 in season 19 with a one-button monk). Now I’m alternating between that and Pokémon Sword, as illustrated in the most recent cheesecake post.

I am not of a Pokemon generation. I never watched the shows or played the games, and in general, I’m only slightly more acquainted with its memes than I am with Zelda’s. I briefly played Go because some friends were into it, but while I understand it’s more of a game now, at the time there just wasn’t much to it.

(this also means that I was blissfully unaware of the “dexit” “controversy” surrounding this game, until the DLC was announced and people found even more ways to complain that Orange ’Mon Bad; note: don’t try to explain it to me, I don’t care)

Since the primary functional difference between Sword and Shield is a list of semi-exclusive “mons” that I have no prior attachment to, my decision was based on the fact that the exclusive minor human character is a cute karate chick in Sword, and some sort of weird radioactive mutant boy in Shield.

So, what do I think?

• Fully half of the time it takes to finish the main story is spent waiting for the screen to change. Not “watching animations and cutscenes”, but literally waiting for sleep(1) to finish (sleep(5) before you set the text display to the fastest speed); without the obviously artificial pauses, you could finish the story in about two hours once you knew your way around. I expect most speedruns will use a hack that eliminates these delays.

• Your remaining play time is divided pretty evenly between shaking berry trees, fighting squirrels, collecting watts, dressing up your avatar, clicking through cutscenes that occasionally offer “choices”, repeatedly clicking to get in and out of menu screens, playing the slots, beating up Chloe for her lunch money, waiting out the start-of-battle animations, clicking through the end-of-battle text boxes and animations, battling the raid/trade matchmaking system, sorting through your inventories, and (finally!) grinding levels battling actual pokemon.

• The only way to interact with other players is to grief them in raids, cheat them in trades, or put up a tent and silently ruin curry together.

• Terrified of the potential liability from allowing players to exchange offensive words, the game instead encourages creatively offensive and unchangeable character and pokemon nicknames.

• Don’t bother clicking on the “players” you see biking around the Wild Area when you’re online; they’re just NPCs that drop curry ingredients, repetitive dialogue, and your frame-rate.

• Multi-player raids are so broken that the advice on how to get in reads like a cargo-cult airstrip manual, and is about as effective.

• The official explanation is that you need to open a fulltime firewall hole passing UDP ports 1-65535 to your Switch, which is a spectacularly bad idea; it’s also not true, although it gets a bit less unhappy with you if you disable port remapping (“type B” NAT on Switch network test; A is for wide-open binat, D is for “out of the box with every goddamn router on the planet”).

• The draw distance on the 3D engine in the Wild Area is really, really poor; not only do things pop in right in front of you (especially if you’re online), empty raid dens appear full of watts until you’re close enough to realize you’ve wasted your time biking over to them again.

• Speaking of the bicycle, you can spend hours dressing up your dollie, but everyone wears the same pajamas and helmet when they’re on a bike, which is 99% of the time.

• Speaking of online, it requires a paid Nintendo Online subscription for each user profile, which means buying a family plan even if there’s only one person with one Switch.

• Despite this, the game does not support cloud backups, so you can’t switch Switches; your save file is tied to one device.

• To solve this problem, they’re creating another paid subscription for transferring your pokemon between games. On the bright side, I’ll finally be able to do something with that old Pokemon Go save file…

• If you’re not interested in dressing up your dollie, play the male avatar, which has very little customization compared to the female.

• Despite the third-person camera view, this game avoids the common problem of “staring at your avatar’s (pre-teen) ass for 200 hours” by giving you a huge honking backpack.

• That said, if you dress a girl in the water-gym uniform, her raid animations are pure pedo-bait. Dock-owner Ryu’s famous “damn I’d like to see you in eight years” comment definitely applies.

• Put at least one pokemon into each of the 8 inventory bags and exit the menus to unlock bags 9-16, then repeat until you have 31-32 bags; you’re welcome.

• Now move all your favorite critters to high-numbered boxes and change their names and backgrounds to help overcome the crude inventory management.

• Leave box 1 empty, because while newly-caught pokemon go into whatever box was last open, ones returning from jobs always go into the first available empty space, which is annoying as hell.

• When the berry tree starts shaking fast, you can only shake it one more time without triggering a squirrel attack; you’re welcome.

• When you reach the Wild Area the first time, run straight through to the next town, go past the Onix, and talk to the black NPC outside the record shop to enable the volume control settings; you’re welcome.

• You don’t actually use the item he gives you to disable the music adjust the volume; it just adds options on the settings menu.

• Divide most of your early time between solo raids for loot and farming trashmons for XP, then hit the next gym battle and repeat.

• The only difference between NPC Martin and a classic online PC troll is that he doesn’t insult your mother before trashing your raid.

• How bad is the raid NPC AI? So bad that you’re thrilled when Isabella shows up with her Magikarp, because you know it will at least attack rather than sit there and buff itself until it dies.

• Related, I’d like to see some fan-art of Patricia, whose NPC model and animation don’t seem to show up outside of raids. She’s cute, grown up, and spends the entire raid shaking her ass. [update! just found her on the road to Spikemuth, and hanging out in one of the pokestops; no ass-shakingdancing, though]

• On the subversive side, this game celebrates capitalism as you work to earn three separate currencies, and enforces heteronormativity with two fixed genders that are required for breeding.

• Unless you identify as a Ditto, in which case you can fuck anything.

• There are only three random NPC spawns in the Wild Area; pay Fisherlady and Digbro 100 watts every time you see them, and beat up Chloe’s starter collection until you’re crazy strong and flush with cash (find the Amulet Coin in the Motostoke Outskirts or buy the Luck Incense in Hulbury to double her cash drop).

• The other two Digbro slot machines are more expensive and tedious, but can eventually drop all four fossils needed to finish off your pokedex, along with some other useful stuff.

• Most of the other fixed-spawn NPCs who look exactly like Digbro are curry-related; the most important item to buy from them is the Food Tin, which you’ll need 12 of for your currydex (6 to trade with people who bought the other game).

• Spend the rest of your watts on Quick and Repeat balls when they’re available, at least until you reach Wyndon and find the one store that sells them for cash. Those and a bunch of Nest balls will speed up the catch-em-all portion of the game.

• Don’t waste watts on Wishing Pieces; between world drops and the Digbros, you’ll get plenty.

• Sell most treasure drops to any vendor, but save one of each for the guy in Stow-on-Side who pays more than double for one item per day.

• Forget about all those distinctive-looking NPC models from the crowd scenes, and get used to seeing the same dozen over and over and over again; if you’re lucky, they sometimes have a different name.

• Once you unlock fast travel, the only reason to take the roads is to check for hidden unique items you may have missed the first time, complete your pokedex, and shake berry trees.

• By the way, berry trees can drop Leftovers, one of the most useful held items for a beginner; you’re welcome.

• Items that claim to reduce trashmon encounters don’t do jack shit; fortunately you can almost always just run away and avoid the extra sleep(1) delays.

• After finishing the story, use the speed rental team to quickly get through level 4 of the solo battle tower; this unlocks “IV” quality display in the inventory.

• Always catch the flaming pokemon; free watts, and when you unlock IV display, you’ll finally find out how much better they are than the others.

• Using an item on a pokemon applies its effect immediately, while having one hold an item does nothing unless there’s an associated trigger event; that’s an hour of trying to evolve an Applin that I want back.

• I have no idea what a shiny is, or what pokerus refers to, and don’t really want to find out.

Final report: 8/10, would catch again. First half of DLC comes out in June, second in November. By then I’m sure to have stopped playing for long enough to be willing to come back and try out the new areas.

(list of well-known link-trade codes after the jump; you’re welcome)

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The single most useful feature of virtual desktops in Windows 10 is getting out of crashed full-screen games:

Win-Ctrl-D
Ctrl-Alt-Del
"End Task"
Win-Tab

It’s a pity that when you beat the Big Bad in Breath of the Wild, you don’t get to live in the world you’ve made (unless you count the sequel that’s coming next year…). Like all soldiers returning from war, Link has picked up some behaviors that don’t translate well to peacetime, and mastered many skills that there would no longer be much use for. I figure Zelda will quickly become so exasperated with him that she’ll welcome the next catastrophe:

Habit Is A Cable

“Link, no! I just bought that vase!”

“It might have rupees in it.”

“Link, stop! Those crates are filled with supplies!”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Link, that belongs to someone! And you already have four of them.”

“I need five.”

“Link, those apples are offerings to the guardian deities!”

“...and darn tasty.”

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Whoever approved licensing Munchkin to the company that produced Munchkin Quacked Quest should be fired. Out of a cannon. Repeatedly.

It came out for the Switch this week, and based on the franchise, I was willing to overlook the fact that the gameplay trailer was light on details and voiced by someone who on a scale of RandomYoutuber to VoiceActor was around a 2.

Launching the game, the first warning sign was the prominent “Version 0.70”. This ain’t a Steam early-access game, kids; don’t just shove it out the door as soon as it stops crashing.

The second warning sign was that the spinning “loading” cursor was choppy as hell. Not just on the initial load, but loading the actual (tiny) dungeons, too.

The third seal was broken by the “DM” voice, which constantly repeated a small handful of lines that weren’t funny, with all the talent and wit of a third-string politician misreading a teleprompter.

Turning that off, however, simply highlighted the fact that the game isn’t any fun. And is to Munchkin the card game as the film Starship Troopers is to the novel it swiped a few paragraphs and character names from.

Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is a third-person open-world exploration/puzzle/combat game with some elements drawn from RPGs. There’s some variety in playstyles, but no real choices that would differentiate one person’s save-game from another’s. Once you’ve progressed past a certain point, you can do anything that anyone else has done in the game, simply by swapping in the appropriate gear.

Assuming you have the twitch reflexes and well-honed console skills to pull it off, of course. Personally, I suck at precisely-timed button/button/stick combos, so many of the “easy strats” you can find on gaming sites and Youtube are almost impossible for me to pull off reliably, while a straightforward sword/board/bow-focused slugfest worked just fine for getting me through the main story and the major side quests.

Since I went through the main quests methodically, I saw a generally sensible progression in difficulty. Puzzle and combat shrines started off easy, outdoor fights that were obviously too hard were avoidable and could be returned to later (much later…), and most problems had multiple solutions. Creative use of the special powers you pick up along the way makes it possible to cheese your way through situations where your gamepad skills aren’t up to par.

Usually. There are certain things, however, that I just can’t pull off reliably.

1. Rapid headshots; there’s a significant benefit to hitting certain creatures in the head, and sometimes specifically in the eye. In certain situations you can slow down time long enough to line up a precise shot, but in real-time, I often miss, with messy results.

2. Perfect blocks; get it right, and your enemy takes all the damage from the attack he just hit you with. Get it wrong, and he gets another free shot while you’re rolling on the ground recovering. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got the timing down against Guardians, but then I’ll suddenly miss 80% of them, lose half my health, and break three shields.

3. Flurry of blows; this combines the precise timing of a perfect block with pressing the left stick in a specific direction. As a result, I think I’ve done it half a dozen times accidentally, and never when I needed it.

Mastering all of these skills makes combat much, much easier, leading to Typical Internet Responses for anyone foolish enough to ask questions about how to deal with situations those skills make trivial.

I went through a pretty standard progression, using a walkthrough just enough to expand my inventory and work around the weapon frailty system. That means I visited a lot of shrines to boost my health and stamina, wandered all over the map collecting things to craft food and upgrade my armor, defeated the four preliminary bosses, and then set the final boss battle aside while I acquired and upgraded the best gear in the game, until I was sure I could survive the fight long enough to win.

It was a cakewalk. Out in the world, I could still get my ass handed to me by carelessly engaging a group that turned out to have neighbors, overlooking a distant enemy that could stun or disarm me, taking on two guardians at once and suddenly having three leveled-up undead and two ninjas spawn, or, say, being spotted at long distance by a silver-maned lynel who has AoE arrows.

Main boss? I think he knocked me down once at the start of the fight because I was trying to take a picture of him. Then I just shot him with arrows until the fight moved outdoors, at which point I shot him with even better arrows (supplied by a special this-fight-only bow that can’t run out of ammo).

I checked the FAQs and walkthroughs, and there are all sorts of things that can happen in the big battle, but I never saw any of that; the only brief change was that right before he went down for the first time, he gained an energy shield, and kicking off Urbosa’s special took that down so I could shoot more arrows. I didn’t even use any specials in the outdoor fight; I just aimed where Zelda told me to.

I got into more trouble cleaning up outside the castle after it was over. I still have difficulty taking down lynel without suffering a ton of damage and/or breaking multiple weapons. But I could kill the Big Bad any time, just to show someone the ending scene, no problem.

I’ve got a bunch of shrine quests and DLC content to go through now, and now that I have some basic franchise knowledge and console skills, I may play through again on hard, but for that, I’ll stack the deck in my favor. Literally; I ordered a set of fake amiibo cards that shower you with loot once every 24 hours. (turns out I had just enough left over from that silly Paypal/Ebay gift card I got for Christmas a while back…)

In order to make Breath of the Wild less painful, after finishing the first two zones I followed a detailed FAQ to locate all of the currency (“korok seeds”) needed to upgrade the number of weapons/shields I can carry in my inventory, then followed another set of instructions to reach the place(s) where you turn them in. I can now carry 15 melee weapons, 10 bows, and 8 shields, which reduces the chance that I’ll have to fall back to torches, tree branches, and skeleton arms when everything else breaks. I immediately fast-traveled back to the place where I found a bunch of brand-new Traveler’s Claymores stuck in the ground and hoovered them all up.

I’m low on bows at the moment, though, from having to shoot parasitic eyes off of a dragon in flight at the top of a mountain in the freezing cold. As one does. Sadly, there are no weapon shops, so to restock, I need to go out and find things to kill that shoot at me, then loot their corpses. Also, the shops won’t restock arrows because I have “enough”, so it’s a good thing you can usually scrounge a half-dozen or so after you kill something that shoots at you.

I should also learn some decent recipes for healing and buffs, and take pictures of a variety of loot for my new scanner.

Eventually I’ll make it back to the upgrade place and get a few more slots (4/5 melee, 3 bow, 12(!) shield). By then I should also have at least 4x the health and stamina, making it easier to hunt for korok seeds. (I’ll need 4x health in order to survive acquiring the best weapon in the game; best meaning “unbreakable and gets its own inventory slot”)

Been a bit distracted from my usual pursuits by the acquisition of a Nintendo Switch (2nd-gen model with increased battery life, not the Lite). Right now I’m mostly alternating between Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and Cat Quest, with occasional excursions into a few other purchased and downloaded games.

My token JRPG is Tales of Vesperia, which was on sale on the Nintendo store; typical slooooooow start, sadly has save points so you can’t just save and exit to go do something else. Katamari Damacy REROLL was also on sale, which should be an amusing time-killer, and make use of the motion controls. Actual cartridge-based games besides BotW are Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, and Senran Kagura Peach Ball (busty ninja catgirl pinball-service).

I’ve played through all the Cat Quest content before, but it’s been a while, and the sequel comes out in a few weeks, so it was worth trying again on a new platform. I’m already up to the last battle in the main quest, and since it doesn’t look like they have achievements on the Switch, I should have all the interesting stuff wrapped up in time for the new one.

Having skipped all previous generations of Nintendo gaming (I used the DS Lite primarily as a Japanese study tool, and the Wii held my attention for about a week), I had no prior exposure to the Zelda franchise, so Breath Of The Wild has been an entirely new experience, marred by their decision to make all the weapons out of balsa and tinfoil. Combining a tiny inventory with weapons that shatter after maybe two encounters is jarring, and apparently new to the series. You can eventually expand your melee/bow/shield inventories to a reasonable size, and eventually find weapons that break slightly less often, but for the first N hours, it’s just annoying.

Seriously:

1. woo-hoo, found a bow/sword that does more damage.

2. no, wait, it broke in the middle of a fight and I have to use a crappy one again.

3. …which just broke, leaving me scrambling to pick up whatever the last mob I killed dropped.

4. that broke too? Time to run away while looking over my shoulder and dropping bombs. Which are free and unlimited and do good damage and are also better for mining, tree-cutting, apple-picking, crate-smashing, etc.

Adding insult to injury, some non-weapons take up slots in your melee inventory, forcing you to abandon really good weapons that you know you’ll need 15 minutes from now when the current ones break, just so you can light a fire, steer a boat, or apply kinetic energy to deserving boulders.

Probably will buy

• Rabi-Ribi; cheesecake bunny-girl side-scrolling platformer. “Retro” resolution for gameplay, full-res for cutscenes and dialogue. (technically I already bought this one, but can’t play it until Thursday)

• Cat Quest 2; really enjoyed the first one. (ditto, but can’t play until next Thursday)

• Munchkin Quacked Quest; 1-4 player roguelike set in the well-known SJG franchise. Release date unknown.

Might buy

• Gun Gun Pixies; tiny alien girls invade a women’s dorm to “study” them. And shoot them. For their own good.

Won’t buy

• Skyrim; I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into this one on the PC, and doing it all again without mods doesn’t sound like any kind of fun.

• Diablo III; loved the first one, thought the second was kind of meh, never touched the third one due to the cash-grab bullshit. Sounds like they’ve cleaned up their act a bit over the years and made it more game, less real-money auction house, but never matched the core gameplay that made the original so awesome (even with quirks like deleting your save file when DST started or when you changed your hostname).

• Witcher 3; own it for PC based on claims of an open world, never really got far enough into it to get off the rails.

• Civilization VI; III was best, IV was decent, I’m not sure I even own V, and VI was boring on the PC.

• Pillars Of Eternity II; never finished the first one.

• anything in the Mario franchise; they just don’t grab me.

• any sports, Disney, racing, “exercise”, media-tie-in, Pokemon, dance, etc.

• Jumanji; special will-not-buy for this movie tie-in game, because they made Ruby Roundhouse ugly in the trailer.