Boss

Member
  • Content count

    18
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Posts posted by Boss


  1. Honestly, knowing the game (series) we're talking about, you're not missing much if you're worried about spoiling the story. Same with Pokemon I suppose, do people really play that for the story? I wish you could skip more of Sun/Moon's story.

     

    Posting a recent video to show how crazy the difficulty has become at this point. The next video in the series, Eater Adam / Arata, should be a highlight of the run, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep Hard Mode switched on for it. We'll see what happens, we'll see. 


  2. Literally or merely "literally"? I'd love to prove you wrong, but it doesn't look like the tools to make the run possible exist yet (if at all). I've done a 0 exp run in Drayano's Fire Red Omega before (granted, the two are pretty damn different but I had a rule that demanded I play on Set battle style, so that ought to account for something). 

    It seemed to me that the wild Pokemon levels & representation are adequate to the challenges on the way? I'm curious what you see the roadblock for a 0 exp playthrough would be. 


  3. On 10/4/2017 at 1:38 AM, Lockirby2 said:

    As long as you're respectful, you're more likely to set a reputation record in the other direction. :P And I'd encourage you to do so, if only so that you actually play the mods to begin with.

    Yeah but I'm a pretty blunt dood, and speaking of things I lack connaissance of wouldn't have a warm response among people who have spent way more time engaging in said activities. 

    I guess I have a sort of appreciation for "challenge" edit mods like no experience and the like? Might be obsessive-compulsivity, but it's hard to make me to play something that doesn't play like the original thing, as flawed as it may be. Such attempts didn't go far, and that was back in the age when I was basking in free time. 


  4. On 10/8/2017 at 9:04 PM, zombero said:

    Approximately zero creativity would go into making this type of mod, so there isn't much incentive to make one.  Pretty much the only reason to make one would be if you really wanted to play it yourself:  enough so to actually do it.

    I can agree with that... Whenever I start a new Pokemon 0 experience challenge, I routinely go through a ROM of the game myself and edit every single base exp value to 0, which is usually enough to prevent levelling for the entirety of the challenge. I'd be pretty hard to convince me to repeat the same actions if I didn't want to do the challenge immediately afterwards... want a lot to be precise. As simple as the edits were, I wouldn't have figured out what programs to do the editing with (in the case of the 3DS games, the logistics involved were especially complicated for me) if that desire hadn't been strong enough. 

    On 10/8/2017 at 9:04 PM, zombero said:

    That's not really the case.  The amount of time it could theoretically take may not be too bad (hard to say), but all of that time would be spent working on assembly, which is the most intensive part of modding, and few modders would have the necessary skills to make those kind of changes to a PS2 game.  

    Thanks for clarifying; point taken. Couldn't imagine how much time it would take; couldn't imagine what assembly is like at all actually. 

    On 10/8/2017 at 9:04 PM, zombero said:

    So among those few modders, you'd have to find someone who wants to put in a fair amount of high intensity effort into an entirely mundane pursuit.  And putting effort into mundane pursuits is what paying jobs are for.

    Also true I'm afraid. The whole JRPG community that a lot of us belong to in one way or another has been in a decline, in my mind. When new games are released, there's really not much rush to publish high quality FAQs (you may end up without a good one for an extended period of time), with people well known and respected for such work in the past doing things like mass-uploading low effort YouTube videos in the past instead (as you say, it pays). The re-releases of classics like FFIX and FF12 TZA scarcely inspires any discussion about ways of playing the game well. For instance, TZA's board mostly revolves about trolling and speaking about the female cast in a lustful way, while the best gameplay-related discussion you can hope to see will be an exchange along the lines of "A: Class 1/Class 2 is better than alternative builds. B: No shut up nobody takes you seriously; repeated multiple times in various threads". 

    Some appeal to utility to "a dedicated playerbase" could be made, but one doesn't really exist anymore. Seeing the failure of Breath of Fire 6 essentially spelled out we're a dead generation of grown men (whose kind has gone extinct) who aren't even good at (or probably just invested in) coming together to discuss and do things together anymore. Nobody caters to us, and we are too self-absorbed in the things we ourselves care about (time limitations being much more pronounced than 10 years ago) to cater to each other. 

    So in FFX's case, I should probably suck it up and acknowledge it couldn't happen unless I myself knew how to do it, of which there's no chance happening. I don't even know if I could soft-mod my PS2 to play it anyway, if it magically existed, I guess... 

    On 10/8/2017 at 9:24 PM, Emmy said:

    Some modders have made cutscene skips as part of all the changes that they have made (such as in FF7 New Threat), or things that speed up the ability to mash through display text (the "cross skip" hack for FFT).  I'm sure if skipping cutscenes is a feature of a mod you've played, that the smaller hacks used to do that are available (or could be made as so if you ask the mod creator nicely).

    This got me really curious and I did some quick research on the latter. It sure is nice of Xifanie to provide a mod for the cross skip alone. Since YouTube searching yielded nothing; you don't happen to know of a video of said cross skip being displayed in action? I routinely replay vanilla FFT quite a bit and might try to convert it to PSP-PSX to be enjoyed in comfort. 


  5. I'm fine with the idea people mod games and apply a variety of changes to them and that the thought process involved can be intricate and reflect what the player may feel is lacking in a game, and all that. However, a lot of the time, the one thing that I feel one of my old imperfect favourites could use is the same as always - a way of skipping cutscenes entirely. This may not be such a huge problem when playing on an emulator with a powerful turbo function, but whenever that is not the case, I really feel the pain. 

    A case in point: Final Fantasy X. Remastered multiple times for what seems like three different systems, and not a single time with an option to skip the story and focus on the glorious gameplay. I do imagine that if such an option were present, it would be very hard to stop me from playing this game for months on end and play something else. But with the way things are, I'd rather play anything but FFX whose storyline I'm already too familiar with and which distracts you from gameplay too much, especially when doing a luck-reliant or difficult challenge. 

    I'm sure many other games could use such a mod, not only FFX. 

    So has anybody tried making such edits? Does anybody even care? I imagine the requirements are incredibly meek compared to ambitious difficulty mods people have been making. 


  6. I was invited to post a challenge of mine here (something that my interest for never exhausts) and here's one I've been spending the most time on lately.

    Playlist link on YouTube.

     

    I had a traumatic experience playing Digimon RPGs for the PS1 as a child, and ever since I've been looking for one that's not an eternal soul torture. I always enjoy the experience of Digital Card Battle, but among JRPGs, this one has to be the best one I've played (still need to try the DS games though). I even bought a PS4 so that I could play it (and Persona, and some other stuff too). 

    I suppose a No Digivolution run is a variant of the no experience Pokemon playthroughs I like doing in that your team keeps growing obsolete and you can't keep training the same mons and expect to succeed, so you have to catch, or in this case, scan new ones. Also, since you're unable to digivolve and de-digivolve back and forth like you would in a normal game, the level caps are much lower than they would be in a normal playthrough. I've never once had a Mega with a level cap of under 99 in a normal file, but they all cap at 60 on this run.

    Since this gameplay here resembles Shin Megami Tensei's mechanics of "use buffs retard" with stackable buffs/debuffs (albeit with no press turn), with the Vaccine/Virus/Data triangle being incredibly dominant as a type advantage makes you doubly good at dealing AND taking damage, the Bug negative status being the only way to get around being at a type disadvantage. The common Eater enemies / bosses are outside the triangle and require other tactics than switching to a hard type-based counter. 

    The video I linked shows what is probably the most difficult battle in the run yet, as a full party of Vaccines couldn't handle Machinedramon's Infinity Cannon. Since it powers itself up before using it, it OHKOs in spite of the type advantage. I ended up using a Bug strategy against it because Data-types were far better equipped for survival against its attacks (the bulky Knightmons being lifesavers). 

    The game has two difficulty mods - Normal and Hard. The former is too easy, while the latter is notoriously unbalanced among its players. It's not uncommon for bosses in the second half of the game to get an obscene number of turns against your party and completely overpower you. So far all of my battles have been fought on Hard Mode, but I do not know if this can be carried on until the end of the game. 

    Check it out!

    • Upvote 3

  7. Just ended up deleting Cheat Engine after various programs identified it as a potentially unwanted program. Not sure if that's a false alarm, but better not take any risks. Not like I was capable of doing much with it. 

    I guess that's the end of my little adventure trying to set up a 0 exp playthrough in Insurgence... I suppose a no exp mode being added in a later patch would be the only way to go about it. 

    Welp. 


  8. On 9/23/2017 at 0:48 AM, Lockirby2 said:

    So are you Moogleboss, or are the names just a coincidence?  I never knew you frequented ID if that's the case.

    EDIT: nm, you're obviously him. :P

    oh hai

    I signed up on ID early on upon Arch's invitation, and the idea was that we'd have a challenge section there, and in a way we did. There was a short period of time when people posted those "100% recorded" SSCC runs for FF Tactics and while I followed Arch's and Bastard Poetry's at first, it became impossible to watch every every new 40 minute long video when every member of the community started their own SSCC and posted a thread for it. I think I was the only one at the time who chose to upload highlights instead, in the Oracle SSCC that I gave up on because resetting 300 times to get good RNG got old eventually. 

    Since then, I was pretty difficult to notice on ID because I periodically checked the challenge section to see if it was getting any activity - it wasn't most of the time. 

    In Pokemon Red, you get your first Poke Ball in Viridian Forest. Could use that to catch a Nidoran or something, making much of the rest of the game easier. You can also grind until you don't worry about using items to heal anymore (a problem I tend to have with Nuzlocke runs as well). 


  9. So I've been doing a little research on this, on my own as I haven't been able to get any help from anyone else, and it looks like I may have found something. 

    Apparently people have been hacking / cheating in this game using a program called Cheat Engine, which I downloaded but whose workings elude me as of yet (I have no familiarity with hacking at all, and whatever progress I'd made in the past was due to very simplistic deductions). 

    There are topics like this showing how Insurgence can be hacked. Nothing on exp editing however. 

    However, entering "pokemon insurgence cheat engine" into Google does bring up "exp" as the first prompt. I tried going with that, but to no avail. 

    There are a lot of YouTube videos on the relation between CE and Insurgence, but they don't seem even vaguely related to what I'm trying to do. The people seem to always "scan" for something using the program, apparently to hack a Pokemon or some missing item in. What I want to accomplish is every battle ending without exp gain, which would probably require different actions in the program (provided it works?). Not like I'm even sure how the scanning thing works to begin with. 

    I have a good feeling Cheat Engine could well be the answer I want here. I've previously used CEP, a cheating program that let me start 0 exp runs in PSX games - FF Tactics, Breath of Fire 3 and 4. CEP doesn't detect Insurgence being opened at all, but CE surely does; I just don't know what to do with it. 

    Does anybody here have any prior familiarity with Cheat Engine? I have a hunch that a seasoned hacker could easily get it work in no time at all. 


  10. 13 hours ago, Nowea said:

    Did you just assume my species?

    Actually, I was just referencing this

    No Mart sounds like it could pose some level of challenge, but probably not nearly enough? You can still go back and use the PokeCentre to heal up, and when the turbo button is fast enough I sometimes do that more often than heal with items to save myself the effort of clicking through a menu with what tends to be a bad interface. Being unable to buy PokeBalls may seem limiting enough, but you can get these by picking up items from the ground and as gifts. You don't really need very many Pokemon anyway, and as it happens, beating the games the fastest (in a speedrun let's say) involves soloing it with usually some combination of your starter and a lategame legendary. 

    Could be an interesting additional restriction to introduce to an existing challenge run however. 

    The Let's Play section seems fitting, though I dunno if anything I've ever done can be considered an LP? That's certainly the only section where it would currently fit in though. 


  11. Sup folks, Moogle from ID here. 

    Been checking the Insane Difficulty forums since about the time they were founded, and followed here when the forums went down. As happy as I was to see Arch post again hours before the boards' demise, I'm guessing it wouldn't be a stretch to assume he's not going to be appearing here anytime soon? That's too bad but oh well. 

    I came to see what this place is about and focus seems to be much the same as with ID, except without the inconvenience of having the person running the site not being around? Discovering Kyrios' Insurgence thread made me feel an intense range of emotions at all the goofy Pokemon typings so I figured I might as well register and stick around some more here. 

    If you bois ever have a focus on JRPG challenges on these forums somewhere, as was the case on ID some years ago, you can definitely count on my interest. The difficulty hacks are a bit out of my comfort zone, but I have a thing for replaying games I know with a set of arbitrary restrictions. 

    • Upvote 1

  12. I don't follow the Pokemon hacking scene very closely, but Kyrios's delta armour run topic on these forums peaked my interest, since I never played anything like this before, and the new formes of old Pokemon couldn't be more intriguing to do stuff with.

    Whenever I can, I like doing 0 experience runs in Pokemon games. Have a YouTube playlist to see what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbSv8zSDR9c1yFi5pg4zf5yWnbidDTm_l 

    Basically, with the help of a few simple edits (mostly routinely editing a ROM to change every base exp value to 0, sometimes a cheat code, gen 5 has its AP ROMs that make neither necessary), I prevent my mons from ever getting experience. I need to catch new ones not to be destroyed in battles all the times, and it results in some fun strategies at times without being excessively difficult most of the time. 

    In the past, I've done a 0 experience run in a GBA hack - Drayano's Fire Red Omega (and also Touhoumon lol). However, Insurgence isn't actually a romhack, since it's made with RPG Maker (could be wrong) and is launched as a program on your PC. I tried getting a response to this straight from the horse's mouth by PMing suzerain on reddit, but he either never read the message or didn't care enough to reply. 

    The question is, can we somehow hack Insurgence to prevent all experience from the game? I figured the people posting here are equipped with the knowledge to answer this question. It seems like an incredibly fun hack to do a 0 exp run in.