Book Learning

I’ve mentioned it in passing on this blog probably many times now, but I don’t know if I’ve ever really written about how over the last five years, I’ve been oh-so-slowly working towards my Accounting certificate. You know, so that I can finally own a paper that says I’m qualified to do accounting.

And while I don’t know for sure when or how I’m going to get said paper, as of December 22, 2020, I handed in my final project and officially finished the program. Hooray me! I did something meaningful with my life!

I could probably write about the long journey, or where I go from here, but I don’t want to. Instead, I’ll just leave this little tidbit: In the last course that I took, I somehow got perfect marks on the gigantic research project. This if baffling because halfway through said project, it was already confirmed that I passed the course, so I half-assed the rest of it. Quarter-assed even, in some parts. And then I got perfect marks. INSANE.

My hypothesis on how this happened is this: The project was supposed to be a group project, but since COVID-19 forced the course to be changed to online, the project was also changed to be completed individually. I think this had the net effect of making the instructor grade the projects a little more leniently, since they were designed to be completed by a three- or four-person team. I’ll gladly accept the grade that I’ve been given, but I don’t actually believe that I earned it.

A Knight’s Quest – The Buggiest Game of 2020

Well, the buggiest game that I played in 2020, anyhow. It was actually released last year. And I have no intention of ever playing Cyberpunk 2077.

A Knight’s Quest is a game that I’d had on my Switch wishlist for a while, since it looked like a fairly decent Zelda-like. I bought it in June when it went on sale for a decent price, but then didn’t play it until December, due to an overloaded SD card. I can’t say I feel overly strongly about this in either direction. It’s perfectly fine. Kind of like what you would get if you wished for a GameCube-styled game that mashed up a Zelda knockoff and Mario knockoff.

But this isn’t a review. Oh, certainly not! This, my friends, is simply a round-up of every bug and glitch that I’ve experienced while playing this game. Let’s start!

  1. Right off the hop – you can control Rusty (the main character) during the first cutscene after the intro sequence. While an in-engine scene is showing Rusty waking up on a beach after being washed ashore, you can mash buttons to have the actual player character version of him run and jump and swing his sword. If you’re lucky, you might actually run him into the camera’s view. I’m seeing double – four Rustys!
  2. Not long after you “gain control” of Rusty, you’ll probably wade into the water and learn that he can’t swim. Like in Zelda games, he’s supposed to void out and respawn on the most recent solid ground that he stood on. Except one time when I jumped off the pier into what I thought was shallow water: Rusty drowned and voided out, only to respawn… in the water. where he drowned and voided out again. And again. And again. And probably would have continued to do so forever, until I paused the game and quite out to the main menu. It’s worth noting that the game only auto-saves, and only when you move between areas. Don’t take any unnecessary risks, kids!
  3. Sometimes if you have Rusty jump onto a weird surface, like the back of a bench, he won’t be able to find his footing and get stuck hovering over it in his falling pose. If you can’t move him off the object somehow (which is surprisingly likely), he’ll simply die and void out after a while, as if he had fallen out of bounds. Today’s lesson: don’t try to stand on the backs of any park benches. They’re apparently quite deadly.
  4. Remember how I said that manual saves are not an option, and the game only auto-saves when transitioning between two areas? Well sometimes, if you’re really lucky, the game will just crash in that transition instead of, you know, loading the map and saving. Hope you didn’t just come from exploring one of the bigger maps!
  5. You can buy or find pickaxes to mine specific rocks in the environment to gather valuable ores. Nothing new, this is video games in 2020, after all. What is new about it, is that sometimes when you mine a rock, you get nothing for your trouble but a pickae is still removed from your inventory. These rocks are supposed to give you exactly one ore per visit to that map, then respawn once you leave and return, so it’s not as if you just didn’t find an ore that time. No, sometimes the game is just bugged and steals a pickaxe (or five) from you.
  6. Occasionally, you’ll be walking along, and Rusty will sort of randomly float up slightly off the ground, as if there’s some invisible geometry below him. It also counts as unstable ground, so if you can’t wiggle him back to solid footing fast enough… see note 3.
  7. Taking damage in battle will very rarely cause certain unfortunate “status effects” like: Not being able to use magic while holding the block button. Rusty becomes entirely unresponsive until he gets hit again. Rusty goes into T-pose and can’t do anything but hover around a bit until he gets hit again.
  8. If Rusty ever takes damage from anything while airborne, be it an enemy attack or an environmental hazard, he’ll go into a ragdoll mode and flop to the ground. Several things can go wrong at this point. The funniest one is when the ragdoll physics mess up and Rusty goes flying into space as if he took a hit from a Skyrim giant. The more frustrating one is when Rusty flops to the ground and becomes completely unresponsive until he gets hit again – and if there’s nothing around to hit him… hopefully the last auto-save wasn’t too far back.
  9. At one point, textures on some environmental objects disappeared, leaving said objects covered in a grey checkerboard pattern. Fun!
  10. I don’t know if it could be considered a bug, but one of the boss fights is so poorly designed and frustrating that I can’t imagine it was made that way intentionally. Either somebody missed something during QA, or Sky9 Games just didn’t give a damn that it’s an awful experience.

This should, by no means, be considered a complete list. I’m sure that there are plenty of other bugs that I either didn’t encounter or weren’t significant enough to remember/write down. And to be fair, most of the bugs that I did encounter were mere annoyances at worst. It was only the game crashing coupled with the inability to save manually that really gave me a lot of anxiety. I was super lucky that it only happened (twice) while passing through areas. If it had happened after, say, completing a dungeon? Probably would have chucked the game in the bin right then and there.

But that didn’t happen and I played A Knight’s Quest all the way through to the end. Hooray!

The Most/Least Memorable Xmas

So 2020 was bad. And the worst part of it, bar none, were the people who would deny that COVID-19 exists, and the people who just couldn’t give a damn and totally defied any efforts to suppress the virus. It’s because of those people that I’m expected to spend Xmas day completely alone.

On a merrier note, I have a “gift” of sorts for you, dear reader. You may have (but probably didn’t) noticed that I didn’t post a Top Ten Video Games of 2019 list at all this year. The truth of the matter is that I wrote it all out, and then decided that I didn’t like what I wrote, and instead of re-writing it all, I just left it to die in Google Docs.

But I’ve changed my mind! Having gone back and re-read it, it’s actually not so bad. Still not good, but not materially worse than anything else that I write. So I’ve gone and stealth-posted it back in January, when it should have originally gone live. Go have a look-see.

I know that’s not a very good gift, but it’s 2020. You should be very much used to disappointment by now.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 24: Rudolph’s Tipsy Spritzer

It’s here. Finally, this stupid thing is over. Every year that I do this, I always come to regret it by like, Day 11, but I always push on through because it’s too late to stop at that point. Sunk cost fallacy and all.

So I’m sick of writing blog entries, all stressed out by having to think up 24 things (it’s a lot, right?) and then write something passably thoughtful about them. What’s the best way to forget your troubles? A severe head injury!

That’s probably not an avenue that you want to pursue, though. I don’t particularly fancy the idea. I do have an alternative suggestion, though: alcohol! Yeah, that’s much more plausible. You probably won’t actually forget your troubles, but if you drink enough, they’ll be replaced with a whole new set of troubles. And that’s… something.

Specifically, I want to mention a concoction that my mom has been making on Xmas day for the past couple years now: Rudolph’s Tipsy Spritzer. I’m not sure where she got the idea -probably Pinterest- but a quick Googling reveals that there are dozens of recipes with that name, so I’m just not going to credit anyone. How about that?

I’ve never watched it all come together, but my understanding of the ingredients is this: Vodka, 7-Up, vodka, orange juice, vodka, and maraschino cherries. It goes great with breakfast, and is the only cocktail that I’ve ever really grown attached to. Probably because it’s a once-a-year thing and is attached to happy memories of spending Xmas day with my family. Also, it’s the one time a year I have an excuse to be wasted by breakfast time.

I don’t really know how Xmas is going to pan out this year, but the plan was for my (immediate) family to get together and just hang out and spend the entire day drinking, eating, and napping. It sounded like a perfect Xmas to me, but the current public health orders restricting people from entering a house that is not their home are kind of spoiling that. Whoops! Looks like I’ll just have to spend the Xmas long weekend all alone in my condo!

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 23: I Hate Everything

Not me. I don’t hate everything. In fact, I quite like the YouTube channel called I Hate Everything. They’ve got a lot of fun videos, typically about why all sorts of things are terrible. I particularly enjoy the series on bad movies called The Search For The Worst.

Within that playlist (that I have watched front-to-back twice now), are a few entries on holiday movies. Specifically, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, and The Gummy Bear Movie. These aren’t necessarily the most entertaining TSFTW entries, but they’re still absolutely worth watching. Even the worst of IHE’s videos are pretty good. Honest critiques of terrible films are right up at the top of things that I want to be watching on YouTube. And also I find IHE’s sense of humour aligns very well with my own.

If I were to recommend only one of the above? The Gummi Bear Movie, hands down. From the shoddy editing to the insane plot to the mind-bending fact that it even exists, this is a fascinating film. Well, at least from the perspective of someone who is pointing out everything that’s wrong with it. I would never actually want to watch the movie itself, but I’m more than happy to watch an English fellow tear it a new one over and over again. I’ve embedded it below for convenience, but I absolutely recommend that you check out the channel and at the very least, watch some more entries in the Search For The Worst series.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 22: Pop-Tarts House

We’ve already had one gingerbread construction project disaster. How about adding another edible construction project to the list of my Epic Holiday Failures? Sound good? Rest assured, it is not.

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Okay, I wanted to just let it breathe, but I have to talk about this.

My video content, admittedly, does not have a high bar to clear. It’s mostly been just raw footage with a little cutting to smooth out the rough(est) spots. Lately I’ve been adding a little more love – taking close-up shots, adding music, splicing in images and end cards, so on and so forth.

The beast embedded above is, at this point in time, my pièce de résistance. I’m actually rather proud of what I’ve put together here. I was going to add “despite the ridiculousness of it all” to the end of that last sentence, but that ridiculousness was kind of the point all along. I did a thing that was gleefully silly, and put in an awful lot of time spit-shining it in an effort to make it more presentable.

Normally I don’t much care about how the general public sees my content -I do all of this for my own enjoyment- but I actually hope that people like this one. I think I might actually be a little sad when nobody watches it.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 21: Light Drive

That title is… not the most descriptive, is it?

What I mean, is to take some time to just go for a drive to look at the Christmas lights and decorations around your neighborhood. Or maybe a different neighborhood, if you find your own to be lacking in this particular type of holiday spirit. Obviously, this kind of thing is best done at night, but daytime works too, if you’re more interested in the kind of decorations that don’t light up.

Point is, it’s nice to just boot around with no real goal other than to simply appreciate the work that others have put into making their houses light up all pretty and such. Take an hour or so to just go out and appreciate the beauty of the season.

I don’t know about other places, but there’s an annual tradition here of a huge festive lights display that’s put together just outside the city limits, made specifically for people to drive through. I’ve heard that people were complaining online about it being cancelled in 2020, but the website seems to suggest that it’s still happening? My parents took me once as a kid, and all I remember is being bored to tears. I’d probably enjoy it more as a mature adult who doesn’t simply long to get home to his Nintendo, but this isn’t the kind of thing that I care to pay real money for. Also, driving all the way to the other side of the city is not on my to-do list.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 20: A Muppet Family Christmas

Continuing on with the vague theme of “puppets” from yesterday, today I will recommend watching A Muppet Family Christmas. I have no idea if this one is classified as a movie or a TV special or what, but it’s appropriate for the season and has Muppets in it, so I’m all aboard.

It’s interesting that the DVD cover specifically calls out that it features “Fozzie and friends.” Was Fozzie the most bankable name in Muppets at the time? What’s that about? I guess we’ve come to the point where I have to make a big confession…

Full disclosure: I haven’t watched this special since I was but a wee bairn, presumably at a party of some description, as my only memory of it takes place in someone else’s house. I remember it only vaguely, and have no idea what it was really about. All that I know for sure is that it leveraged the combined might of the Muppets, Muppet Babies, Sesame Street, and Fraggle Rock all into a single special. Can you imagine such a thing!? I suppose that living in the age of Super Smash Bros Ultimate and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s maybe not such a farfetched idea.

More disclosure: I’ve been writing all of these entries ahead of time, since it would be a massive pain to actually try to write one a day, so I still haven’t actually watched this special. I plan to, however! It’s going to happen. I just don’t intend on coming back to this blog post to add my thoughts on it. I have no idea how it’ll hold up after all these years, but considering my adoration of all things Muppet, I have a pretty good feeling that I’ll get at least a little bit of enjoyment out of it.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 19: Gremlins

Here, we have another classic Christmas-adjacent film. The really great part is that given the horror theme and Christmas setting, it’s completely appropriate to watch during either the Halloween or Holiday seasons.

Also, it’s friggin’ Gremlins, so it’s appropriate to watch during any season.

If you haven’t seen it, this is the classic feel-good holiday tale of a boy that receives a pet for Christmas. Only, this pet is a strange creature called a mogwai, which will inexplicably spawn more mogwai if it comes in contact with water. And also they will transform into monsters if fed after midnight. Of course, both of those things happen and the monsters go on a spree of mayhem and murder around the town.

Listen, I know that the mogwai rules don’t make any goddamn sense. How does a creature keep clean without getting wet? If it drinks something, are its insides exempt from the wet rule? And how does it know if it’s being fed after midnight? What about time zones? What about daylight savings time? At what time in the morning does the transformation rule no longer apply?

Please, don’t think about it so hard. Gremlins is such a fun, silly movie, that you’re really missing the point if you try to apply logic to it. That said, it also has a surprisingly dark side, what with all the murdering and such. Most of the time the tone is fairly well-balanced, with the gremlins being a mix of evil and goofy, which takes the edge of and makes it sliiiiiiightly more family-friendly. There’s one particular scene, though, where a character’s backstory is revealed, and it’s just straight-up horrifying.

Here’s a fun little trivia tidbit that I’ve pulled from the Wikipedia page: originally, the plan was to dress up moneys to play the gremlins. The plan fell through because the test monkey freaked out when the cast strapped the gremlin head to it. Fun! I think it worked out for the best, but I may be biased because I’m a big fan of puppets.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 18: Drink!

Alright guys, this one’s easy. It’s the last Friday before Xmas Week, and you’re probably more than a bit stressed. I mean, maybe not for the same reasons as you would be in any other year, but the lockdowns and restrictions are getting us all bummed out. Next week is going to be… well, probably relatively quiet. But imagine that it’s not 2020 and we’re heading into the whirlwind that is the week before Xmas.

Back to the point: It’s Friday! Tonight, your only job is to sit back, put your feet up, and get yourself sloshed. Okay, maybe not sloshed, but get yourself a nice buzz-on and let your troubles melt away. Pop on some of those holiday specials/movies that you’ve picked out, and just forget the world for a while. Unless, of course, you have issues with alcohol. In which case maybe just brew yourself a nice cup of tea or something. It’s not quite the same, but it’ll do in a pinch.

Me, I’ve got a big box of beer to work through. It’s been a really long time since I bought a case of beer, and Lockdown Xmas seemed like the perfect time. Even outside of this time of year, it feels so nice to crack a beer or two on a Friday evening to celebrate making it to the end of another week. Knowing me, though, I’ll probably spend most of my night nursing the first bottle and pass out on the couch by 9:30.

Continue reading 24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 18: Drink!