A Strange Object

Perhaps a chest or a cloak

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I stand in awe of what this person has accomplished. For real, check this shit out.

...

My hat is off to Reditt user 30223481

I can't even imagine. The struggle to keep going after the first couple of enchiritos. How heavy that would sit in the gut afterwards, a mix of shame and taco sauce. The devastating knowledge of what you are truly capable of once you leave the strictures of civilization behind. And the image that they posted... there are no words. They should have sent a poet.

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Elfandriel

I played in an impromptu tabletop one-shot today and I was pleased with the character I came up with off the cuff. The system was Pathfinder first edition:

Elfandriel is above all things a liar. She is a fairly inexperienced Rogue who bills herself as a professional Charlatan. The only thing that can be said about her definitively is that she is in fact an Elf. Most everyone she knows simply calls her Elf or Elfy. She insists that Elfandriel is her actual name, and she is quick to mock anyone who questions her about her name, accusing them of being crudely ignorant of the glorious intricacies of Elven culture. This dismissal also includes other Elves and people who speak Elven. She generally talks in a refined manner and has dropped oblique hints that she might be part of some kind of Elven aristocracy and that she is simply taking a few decades off slumming it. It's hard to say, but this might actually be a double bluff and perhaps in truth she really is just crawling her way up from nothing. Either way she pretends to be a staunch Monarchist.

Her first line of defense in any situation is bluffing, which is her Skill Focus. She is a Natural Born Liar and generally anyone who falls for her lies becomes more likely to be suckered in again. She is quite good at Coaxing Information from her marks. She is fairly smart and a bit charming and is able to use most Rogue skills against her targets. She arrays herself well in elegant dresses but tends to pick accent jewelry that is more befitting of bandits or of monstrous species. She is educated and knows a bit about Arcana, Dungeoneering, Local interests, Nature, and Nobility, as well as speaking Goblin, Gnollish, and Sylvan beyond the typical languages an Elf would know.

When lying, planning, sneaking, and disguises wont cut it, she is quite proficient with the Rapier, relying on her exceptional Dexterity and the Finesse Training that the guild has provided to her to strike fast and deep. Her main strategy is to feint and then attack. As with other types of lying, a successful feint makes future feints slightly easier for her. In a pinch she is just strong enough that wielding her Sap is worth the chance of attempting a knock-out blow against an oblivious target. If Elfandriel has any weak points it is that she is not a woman endowed with the typical Wisdom that most people possess. If she has a second problem it is her off-putting and intentionally needling personality. Beyond her posturing she is surprisingly stab happy and is quick with threats, as well as being willing to pull off quite vicious cons on her marks. For all her faults she is mostly well meaning and agreeable in her own untrustworthy way, and she has no stomach for wanton murder or other such brutishness. She takes great pride in being a thief and wants to be respected as such, and that means competence and professionalism. Or maybe it's all just a big lark to her, but she's having fun pretending anyway.

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Gwimbly Games Pt. 1

I was bored the other night and decided to play through as many Gwimbly games as I could get my hands on. I probably should have known better. Here's an overview of what's available, and some thoughts on the experience.

Gwimbly 2600 port by Moth Entertainment

This game is apparently the most notable, but only in the sense that video game websites bother to list it at all, compared to the absolute obscurity afforded to the other Gwimbly offerings.

The game itself is a single screen Atari 2600 game that has a very similar sprite set to the E.T. Atari game.

The player collects cans of creamed corn, worth 10 points each, and jumps over simple obstacles, and that is it. There is no ending or win state after reaching 100 points and hitting the right side of the screen. The music for the game is a Chocolate Rain chip tune remix for some reason. The whole thing is sort of fun but a little low effort, although infamously it was made in an hour, so I guess that tracks. This is from the pre Insane Groundbreaking Games days of Gwimbly. Best part of the game was probably its cover art.

2. Gwimbly: The Cream of the Crop port by aldegator

This game is more commonly just known as Gwimbly CD-I due to originally being released on the Phillip CD-I. It looks great for what it is but is awkward to actually play, which pretty much comes with the territory.

Gwimbly has to save the family corn factory from the evil Count Groxia. RIP to the founder, John "Jonathan" Q. Gwimbly, 1886-1969. He faces off against a wide variety of foes such as Throrilla, Pterodraculus, and the ever intimidating Hand Job. Defeated foes drop ears of corn, which allow Gwimbly to throw cans of creamed corn in the final boss battle.

One of the funniest things about this game is that after the player loses all their hearts, instead of dying, the heart bar starts filling up again to the left of where it normally should be with negative hearts.

From the cutscene it is clear that Count Groxia is supposed to be defeated by throwing cans at him, but it isn't all that hard to just get close and punch him until he goes down instead.

After his victory, he and Mr. Millipede share a laugh and Gwimbly does his iconic victory dance. Good game.

3. Gwimbly's Adventure 3000 ported by SamuraiDev

Gwimbly's Adventure for the Game Boy Advance is the most ambitious of the Gwimbly games I played. Unfortunately, It is also unenjoyably difficult.

Following his fight with Count Groxia, Gwimbly has run out of creamed corn. What is worse, the nefarious Dr. D. Dibbleton has spread his deadly Booty-Blastin' Hot Sauce all over the place, which can easily burn Gwimbly to death. Seriously, there's like a whole opening cutscene going over the plot.

Each level ends when Gwimbly finds the creamed corn at the end of the course and does his victory dance. There are no enemies, but the hot sauce is everywhere and is spread out to be as annoying to deal with as possible. There are three worlds, a grasslands, a cave, and then finally the Dr.'s castle. Each world is two stages long, with the second stage of the castle being the final boss fight.

Once the player gets to the cave area they unlock Mr. Millipede, who acts as a double jump. The jumping feels slippery, the hitboxes are sloppy, and the game suffers slowdown over time which only makes the other two issues more pressing. Dying sends Gwimbly back to the start of the stage, and the game is right there on the edge where I'm not fully convinced it is possible to complete. I got about halfway through the castle level but there was a jump I couldn't even begin to figure out the precise angle of double jump to get through, especially with how punishing it was each time to get back to that spot. If it is beatable, it feels like it would take hours more beyond the effort I have already put forth in attempting it.

Luckily, SamuraiDev had a work-in-progress version of the game on a different website, and that version is able to be edited. This version already has the hot sauce collision turned off, and between that and manually boosting Gwimbly's health, I was able to complete the game.

The final boss, Dr. D. Dibbleton, is an absolute tank. Gwimbly having a gun is way less of an advantage than I had assumed it would be and it barely does any damage per shot. The boss actually has an impressive array of attack patterns, but the whole thing feels as unfair and imprecise as the rest of the game. It's honestly exhausting how much health he has. Having to constantly hammer the S key to shoot while trying to control with A and D certainly doesn't add to the experience, nor to Gwimbly's survivability.

That's it. That's the victory screen. Strangely, there's a secret ending too...

The second stage of the cave area has a hidden syringe of steroids on the far left side of the map, in the opposite direction from the exit. Getting it gives Gwimbly a palette swap and I think a little extra health. Once the player beats Dr. D. Dibbleton again like that, the true ending is revealed...

So that's Gwimbly's Adventure 3000! This has gotten long, and this is a good stopping point. I'll cover the rest of the games and some other related media in a follow-up post.

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Dream Journal: Wizard Phone

In the dream I had an ancient flip phone, seemingly from the late 2000's, and it had an app on it where every time I opened it a Wizard would mutter at me cryptically.

That was it.

The Wizard didn't actually say anything useful, but he also didn't repeat himself. I had doggedly held onto this phone over the years because modern smart phones weren't able to run this app, and I liked being able to open and shut my phone repeatedly so that a Wizard voice doing a bad Ian McKellen impression would fire off a whole string of puzzling horseshit non-sequitors.

The only bad thing about the phone was that the Wizard would also talk randomly while I was using it. Normally this was fun too, but I found the effect far less enchanting at the ass end of dawn where I've got this Wizard yammering away at me while I struggle to shut off the phone's clunky outmoded alarm clock function.

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HELLO WORLD