The Blog (yapping area)

Turns out having to manually format a separate HTML every single time I want to write something short ends up taking away from my motivation to actually write in something short. So back to the old ways - this should kind of be like what was a Journal page on my earlier versions of the site, where I make small updates or notes I'm thinking about for the sake of not having them bottled up forever (and give this site some sort of use again, since I haven't updated it frequently since June).

August 2026

alright now it has been too many light gun games, good grief (Aug. 9)

TL;DR: Time Crisis 3 (plus one attempt at Rescue Mission from the PS2 port), Time Crisis 5 twice (once first time and feeling it meh, second revisit skipping all scenes I kinda liked it more), then Time Crisis 4 (using PCSX2x6, ehhhhhhh idk what to say about it), then Jurassic Park Lost World (the model 3 arcade game - neat in some ways but also got a lot of cheap gotchas), then revisited Time Crisis 1 in MAME - now THAT's some good shit

Then the final highlight, or well maybe second to final, since the last thing I played today (note that the TC marathon and Lost World were like one to two days ago) was Virtua Cop 2 emulating the Saturn Mouse, which worked far better than emulating the Light Gun on Mednafen due to its imprecision (although the mouse movement is slightly delayed, input delay I guess) and also more consistent than VC2 on Flycast because the Reload sometimes would just shoot instead of reload, on a game that always requires you to have ammo in hand. But that makes for a good segway to go into THAT evil highlight I suffered to get: House of the Dead on Saturn, completed on emulator emulating the lightgun (with flashes patched off) that also suffers from misalignment, only on default settings with a max of 4 continues due to RetroAchievements having achievements that REQUIRE you to stick to default.

Like that one boss from Crisis Zone (arcade) would say..."Never before...AND NEVER AFTER" because hoo boy I'm NOT touching that port again with how the lightgun misalignment from the crosshair (when you aim away from the center) AND the Saturn version's chugging framerate always making it a gamble sometimes to hit enemies in time, and particularly having to practice Hangedman and Magician in Boss Mode so that they didn't eat up all my hit points due to missed shots when going for the full run. I would say more, but I feel like right now I should just turn off my head from thinking about this any further with how exhausting it was (a lot of frantic clicking the mouse, and maybe 5-6 attempts total between days when I tried that would always die at Hangedman or even at the Chariot rematch - until today where I FINALLY got rid of it all).

Also did the Boss Mode achievements of beating the bosses in record time (except for Fight All, no thanks) but only Magician is really worth mentioning because I basically sacrifice my first two hits just to end his first phase in one cycle (he throws two fireballs twice, then he charges up four fireballs - I aim to make him change phase as he does the charged attack) and then hope for the best when doing the rest, including to end his healthbar when he's doing the big charged fireballs to sky attack (needing to defeat him before he does that a second time).

oh and small addenum to last entry regarding ggstrive - I did the ungabunga video, although using less material than what I had available to not leave that on the oven for too long. it exists, it doesn't have as many edits as the original GORILLA GEAR +R, and it hasn't caught real traction at all so far, but it exists.

Okay so I played a bit more light gun games again...and revisited Guilty Gear STRIVE (Aug. 5)

Well yeah, I wasn't giong to leave that Confidential Mission game win just because yesterday I failed the final minigame and got the bad ending- ohhhh wait right I didn't mention that here...yeah I thought on checking that one out when I saw it had a cheevo set. Today I fixed my mistake with another run, AND went the extra mile to unlock Another World by doing all the agent academy missions - those were way tougher than I expected but pulled it off at the end.

And since I had a chance to reinstall Guilty Gear Strive just to see how it is today on a PC that can run it decently, I gave that a shot and...well that was a lot of funny baloney. I lost around 4-5 sets overall but I ended up placed in Iron and made it to Bronze in ranked - there's so many times I got away with something stupid like throwing Tyrant Rave up close or even a few times the Dragon Install Grab super (whatever its called) and cashing out because the opponent pushed a button when I did TR/supergrab. Strangely enough I didn't run into one player who actually got to jump over it, but I know you can for obvious reasons. But in any case, it was pretty funny. Maybe one day I'll do a video about those stupid moments just like how I made a video with +R clips (Gorilla Gear +R) because unga bunga badguy never dies

Maybe I played a bit too much lightgun stuff for a couple of days (Aug. 4)

(2:30pm mini update: just got carried away and played HOTD2 Naomi on Flycast start to end despite what I said here lol)

it is what it says on the tin, maybe I burned out earlier than I expected and now not sure if I want to go the full mile for HOTD3 if only because trying HOTD remake before now makes me hard to unsee HOTD3 creatures SOMETIMES being annoyingly more durable than they should just like in hotdremake - got 6 credits now in there but it's still a bummer having to burn through a whole playthrough just to get a new life up or credit in the wii port until you actually can beat it.

also did some gunblade ny and la machineguns, biggest surprise is a clip of lamachin getting some traction on twitter but otherwise it is what it is - was fun to revisit both after so long though. before these, i was tryin time crisis as i mentioned on that one post about TC2/TC3/CZ that I'm sure almost no one soul on earth read, but recently I gave Ghost Squad quite a lot of replays to level up the missions, and also revisited Time Crisis 1 arcade version now that i found a no flash code for it.

if you do fancy watching my currently uploaded hotd runs, here's a playlist of latest pbs on each: HOTD1 Arcade (model 2), HOTD2 Wii, HOTD1 Windows 95 PC Mode and HOTD4 on LinuxLoader (cheap ass bosses) - link

hotd3 is the only one absent because again, i still have to COMPLETE it because wheel of fate is stinky. at least hotd2 and hotd3 can be fun to try with gyro aiming usin the phone, dsuremote and dolphin, but in hotd3 recently it did get my wrist and thumb tired from the incessant mashing just to try making sure the boss weakspots actually die and die again and die once more and I SHOT YOU 12 TIMES YOU CANT' JUST SAY "NAH I'D WIN" AND HIT ME ANYWAYS- ouhghhhhhhh yeah that's what i meant when hotd remake now brought that image to mind from hotd3 with how blatant it was in hotd remake compared to hotd1, yet hotd3 still has some slips like that if you aren't getting perfect headshots every time.

if you couldn't tell, i'm kind of writing this in a bit of a frustration about wanting to pour this out SOMEWHERE, half overthinking about wanting to have it be somewhere, half being aware that the chances that someone reads this are practically none so i'm just writing all of this here anyways just to drain the words out of my brain and hoping that if i keeep using this stupid blog html page then it will be to bring more small updates on things i try but in a more calm manner so that it isn't a trillion words- well that's something for self awareness