A fishy situation

I’ve been trying to focus on writing articles lately, and I think it’s been working out well enough. I published five of the things in just under a month, and I don’t feel like quality even took a hit for the increased pace. Not that I’d set the quality bar very high to begin with.

That said, I think that the article blitz is over. There are still a few in the works, in various states of completion, but I don’t have any sort of set time frame for finishing and launching them. I’ll probably write a thing about Picross e2 next week, since that’ll likely be what I do this weekend. Will there be enough material for a whole second article? Who knows? Not I.

Anyway, the reason I logged into WordPress is mostly to put into words my bewilderment at my own incompetence. What incompetence, you ask? My total inability to fish in Animal Crossing: New Leaf with the sound turned off. Weird, I know. As someone who has endlessly talked up how much time he spends fishing in that game, it’s striking to me how bad I am at it without the audio cue.

If you’ve never played Animal Crossing, here’s how it works: You equip a fishing rod, walk up to the water, and press the A button to cast. If there’s a fish swimming around (represented by a black shadow), it may notice your lure and start nibbling at it. It’ll swim up to the lure up to five times, making little “tick” sound effects, each time with a random chance of actually biting. When a fish does bite, your bobber is pulled underwater and a big “bloop” sound effect plays. Depending on the rarity of the fish, you have about second or less to press the A button again to land the fish.

Sounds really easy, but you’ve gotta have a pretty good reflex, especially with the rarer fish. The problem, it seems, is that while I can generally land fish pretty well while the sound is turned on, I just can’t do it without the audio cue. I was playing on the bus this morning while listening to Retronauts and couldn’t catch a fish to save my life. Compounding the issue were the facts that it was early in the morning and raining, which are both conditions that rarer fish will appear under. So not only was I unable to catch anything more than a few worthless barbel steed, but I was most likely missing out on some rare catches too (rare fish usually sell for lots of cash).

Oh well. It’s mostly just interesting (to me) that I respond faster to aural than visual cues. I would never have thought this, because my hearing isn’t exactly great to begin with. And that ends my little ramble for today.

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