games

Haven't actually played anything so far this weekend, but I've been bashing my head up against Malenia on and off for a few dozen hours over the last few weeks. I'll get there eventually (I'm being very stubborn--no summons, no cheese strats, just me and my trusty katana), but man, it's really testing my patience. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not great at Elden Ring, but I'm at least competent enough that I managed to get past every single boss up to this point without too much struggle (maybe spent 2, 3 hours max on the worst ones?). Kinda baffling to me that they've left the encounter in its current state; I saw some pretty compelling evidence that she was originally a Sekiro boss, which would explain why her flurry attack doesn't mesh well with the Elden Ring playstyle. In the last few hours of gameplay I switched from just trying to be super aggressive and hope that I can down her fast enough to avoid her most broken attacks (got very close a handful of times but it felt like pure RNG) to mostly parrying (among other things, playing more defensively makes it easier to interrupt her flurry with Freezing Pots), and while it's a bit of a learning curve it also feels way more consistent and fun.

Also, this isn't playing a game, but I worked through this nice little introductory tutorial on reverse engineering GBA games today and had a lot of fun with it! I really want to contribute to one of the many game dissassembly/decompilation projects out there but it's pretty intimidating, so I'm trying to get the basics under my belt so I don't have to be coddled too much by the main contributors. I don't really like writing programs from scratch that much (I just write some basic utility scripts to automate things), but I love figuring out how things work and I'm detail-oriented, so reverse engineering seems like a perfect fit.