#thenarfwreck

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part 1: my tabletop dm sent me one of his favorite shitpost tracks and somehow i actually think it was an incredible lead-in on the title screen. already we begin me experiencing emotions they haven't named yet

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also ive been talking about how i really came to feel a lot about zebesians after interacting with them in these runs. this blocking attack motion is so interesting to me. early game it makes them feel a little scary and impressive cuz they're often immune to tons of stuff

but when they're no longer immune to your attacks the vibe totally changes, y'know? when it fails to deflect an attack, it stops being fighting game guard coded and becomes, like. someone cowering as you kill them. esp with ice beam cuz you have to finish them off after. and it happens so fast dude. poor mf got a second to react and then died. it was almost an afterthought as far as samus was concerned. she might as well have been moving in slow motion against her

shit's crazy man

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ill probably write an article on my website soon explaining exactly how i set the run up and the tool i used to make assembling the music easier in case anyone else is interested, i found a really nice mp3 to pcm converter that names the files properly for you. for now, my settings were... custom.

this is the seed's page for as long as that stays up ig

i think the main defining factors were the item settings difficulty wise, the random area assignment to allow for big tourian and wrecked ship, the wild map with random starting location and beam doors, and area themed + area paletted rooms. plus the difficulty minutiae of course

the difficulty was mostly a medium run with the occasional tech i knew how to do or wanted to experiment with from hard.

the biggest fucked up combination was the frozen enemies + tricky jump + suitless in maridia stuff. at this point i almost want to go back and turn off the suitless water stuff lol if i do another hard one, but maybe it's ok if i just let myself savestate practice those tricks with long runbacks.

one difficulty setting that's legit more interesting than it looks: i didn't get this one until i played, but it's stuff like, you need to jump and do a morph unmorph or you get trapped in water lol

anyway basically to convert the music files once i collected them i used the tool this guy links in this video. they don't fully understand how it works so they don't realize you can add more entries on the template array

like this which makes it easy to do a whole soundtrack at once. it was useful. pcms are HUGE (this ost is like a gigabyte) but you can delete them after you're done playing the game anyway so w/e

in fact you know what? here's a preset json i made for the pcm maker tool with the track numbers and what they correlate to in the game. that way you don't have to look up what each track number is for and where it's used

ill talk about music more later. as for what msu emulator i used as a linux freak i just always use mednafen

and i learned that if you use -force_module faust, it implements msu1 support. so i just put the pcms in the folder with the game, made their names the rom name with "-X" where x is the track number, and ran it

there are other snes emus that support msu1 though and it comes prepatched into the maprando stuff which is why i decided to go for it. i don't know if you need a manifest file from the original msu1 packs but i assume not? i should test that

anyway i need to take a nap

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i had forgotten how to fight the elite metal pirates. they're honestly really cool, like, as i mentioned i've come to respect zebesians a lot this run. it made me feel weirdly sad

the overall impression was like, the pirates had a bunker they'd built b/c they were scared of me all game, and in the end i cleaned it up. these two put up a solid fight and would have killed me if i was normal, but, i had too many e tanks. it made me think of an mtg flavor text

I just had more health.

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the last objective walling off mother brain was defeating the plasma pirates in deep maridia. it was a little melancholy of an experience.

it's strange, you know? neither half of maridia was too hard, but the upper half felt propulsive and triumphant. whereas here, the piano had such different vibes. there was like, a little pirate base of sorts generated… the plasma pirates here, and then, baby kraid's room? i like, forgot he existed. everyone there was just so weak by this point. in the end i had a fairly length fight with the elite martial arts pirates who were two rooms away…

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it took literally the entire game to get the equipment needed to hit upper maridia. so of course it felt absolutely crazy to finally get there. seems everyone there got caught up in some.......

.......STORMY FUCKIN' WEATHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

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fear not john you may be disappointed that emiya only played for 30 seconds in the final scene but it was the music for half of crateria. was pretty cool to collect the final real item in the game with my full loadout to

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im so glad that even this late in the run i could get to areas and just be earnestly puzzled/fascinated by hearing a track in the context it was in. it's so good tho.

since this area of crateria was mostly just expansions and the escape ship i think of it as being the 7/8ths of the game my character reflecting on their struggles and feeling like they have a way forward song.

THEME OF HANGING OUT WITH THE ETECOONS AT 1:09 BTW