Hello and welcome to my last post before I go on an indefinite hiatus. Since I knew for a while this would be the final post I would be making for a while, I decided to go all out for the finale. For the finale I decided to do the hardest video game challenge that I know of. Super Mario Galaxy 2’s The Perfect Run. First things first though, just to unlock this challenge you need to collect all 120 Power Stars in the main campaign, 120 total Green Stars from every level, and you need to have beaten ‘The Ultimate Test’ which is a level that tests everything you’ve learned from playing the game. The Perfect Run is the same layout as ‘The Ultimate Test’ but you only have one point of health and no checkpoints. You’ll have to be perfectly prepared for this behemoth of a finale. Now if you’re watching someone play through this level you might think it’s easy, but that’s just what the game wants you to think. You have to do the entire gauntlet with one health so of course it looks easy. Actually beating the level is another matter entirely. In both Super Mario Galaxy games one of my biggest problems is I over or underestimating my longer jumps, so this gauntlet is a nightmare. The final part of this challenge involves a gauntlet of Hammer Bros which lead to the final three Boomerang Bros you need to defeat to end the level once and for all. If you don’t deal with the Hammer Bros on the way to the Boomerang Bros the Hammer Bros will still be attacking you while you’re trying to deal with the Boomerang Bros and that is a lot to deal with all at once. I would only recommend this challenge if you have obtained all 242 previous stars and studied your route multiple times using the easier version of the level.

Hello and welcome to my bad idea of the week. As I said back in my ‘Low Dex’ Run of Pokemon FireRed, you might have expected me to do the classic Pokemon Nuzlocke someday. You’ll be glad to know that today is finally the day I do a Pokemon Nuzlocke. For those that are unaware, a Pokemon Nuzlocke is a special rule set that can be used to make any run of a pokemon game much more difficult. The two main rules are that if a Pokemon faints, it’s considered dead and cannot be used for the rest of the game, and you can only catch the first Pokemon you catch in each area. There’s a plethora of extra rules one can apply if they desire to modify the experience. In the past I only played about half of a Pokemon Pearl Nuzlocke up until my main damage dealer had fainted and I didn’t feel like grinding my Pokemon to catch up. Level grinding and knowing the biggest challenges a game has to offer are two of the most important things you need to form your strategy. For example, if you pick Charmander in Pokemon FireRed, you should either make sure you have a pokemon with a fighting type move or overlevel your charmander to the point where it can sweep Brock’s entire Rock type gym or your run will end right then and there. For my run today I’ll be playing Pokemon Emerald and using Mudkip because he’s a viable pick for the entire game. In retrospective I should have added the No Duplicate Pokemon clause so I didn’t get three Poochyenas in a row. Overall I think it’s a fun playstyle if you want to mix things up for your next pokemon run.

Hello and thanks for taking the time to answer my poll last week, after collecting the feedback I have an idea of how I want to move forward with this blog. Now for this week’s round of suffering, Super Mario Brothers 2. Now at first glance you might be thinking, “Oh the game where you can play as Toad and Princess Peach while throwing turnips? That’s not a challenge at all, what are you trying to pull here?”. Well stop those thoughts right now because it’s time for a Nintendo history lesson. You see, there are actually two versions of Super Mario Brothers 2. One is the turnip throwing version which is globally known as ‘Super Mario Bros 2 USA’. The version that I’ll be playing today is now referred to as ‘Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels’. Originally, the Lost Levels was supposed to be the true sequel to the original Super Mario Bros, designed for players who had mastered the mechanics of the original game. However, Nintendo of America deemed it too hard for American players, so we got the version of Super Mario Bros 2 that most are familiar with today. If you want to play the Lost Levels today, it is available on the 3DS and Wii U Virtual Consoles, along with Nintendo Switch Online’s NES game library. While I do consider myself at least decent at 2D Mario games, I will admit this one intimidates me a bit because of its legacy. I personally stopped somewhere in world two out of the game’s eight worlds. If you really want to try it out I would highly recommend using the Nintendo Switch version so you have access to the rewind feature.

Hello and welcome to this week’s bad idea. This week I’m going to ignore one of the most iconic lines in gaming history “Gotta catch em all”. That’s right, it’s finally time for some Pokemon  challenges. If you’re a follower of my blog and are a Pokemon fan you probably would have expected me to do a nuzlocke as it’s the most common type of challenge run within the community. Well have no fear, that day will come in early April 2020. For today, we’re doing what’s called a ‘low dex run’ which means I’m going to complete the game while catching as few Pokemon as possible. I got the idea to do this run because a youtuber called Alpharad played through the entirety of Pokemon Emerald with just a Mudkip. This time I’m planning on playing through Pokemon FireRed. I decided to start my playthrough by choosing Squirtle as he is very bulky and can learn Surf, which is both needed for for overworld navigation and is a good move to use in battle. Unfortunately, I will need to catch at least one other pokemon to use the HM moves Cut, Flash, and Strength. Squirtle can also learn a set of moves that is tailor made for taking down the Elite Four and Champion at the end of the game. As I went through this run I realized how easy the early pokemon games really were if you could overlevel our starter to insane levels by the endgame. When I first tried this run out over the summer of 2019 I believe that I had beaten the Champion with a level 79 Squirtle. If you want to mix up your classic Pokemon experience I would highly recommend giving this run a try.

Hey everyone, I’m taking a break this week to guest blog on Newlong’s Blog to mix some Nintendo content into his normal PS4 and PC content. This week, Ryan is filling in for me with some Halo gameplay. Ryan typically writes about the latest happenings in tech so if you’re interest in the latest in technology go check out his blog!

Newlong’s Blog: http://blogs.uww.edu/hmonglorrydergaming/
Ryan’s Blog: http://blogs.uww.edu/todaystech/

If you grew up playing Xbox, you most likely know the fear that trying to complete the Halo campaigns on the most difficult level, legendary. Halo revolutionized the way FPS are made and played, it makes sense that the game is still held to a high esteem. With all of the Halo games that have come and gone, the hardest one, by far, in my opinion, is Halo Reach. The game was the fifth installment of the franchise, and the prequel to Halo Combat Evolved. The game itself is pretty hard to beat, but it is not impossible. If you invite friends to campaign, the game scales to the number of players in the squad, meaning if you have three members in the squad, the game is three times harder. But the real difficulty comes when the player plays the campaign on LASO or Legendary All Skulls On. One of the skulls, the Iron Skull, forces the player to beat the mission with zero deaths or saves. This means if the player dies in the last part of the mission, the player has to repeat the entire level from the beginning. I tried to complete the 10-mission campaign on LASO. With all 13 skulls activated, it took me 6 hours to get to the 9^th mission. The mission that caused me the most trouble, was the last one, where I died over and over again. That mission alone, took me over 2 hours. I could not complete the mission, there were many places I died. I gave up after 2 hours of being stuck on the level. I have completed the campaign the before, but I have never tried to complete it solo with all skulls activated. I can easily say that this was one of the hardest game challenges I have tried.

Hello and may your heart be your guiding key towards my latest bad idea. After babysitting a gnome amidst zombies and aliens, I decided to play something completely different. This week I decided to hurt myself by playing one of the most joked about release dates in gaming history, Kingdom Hearts 3. I first got into the Kingdom Hearts series when I played it at a friend’s house when I was around 5 years old. It wasn’t until a few years later after I had gotten a PS2 for Christmas when my family were going to a K-Mart that was having a going out of business sale that I saw a copy of Kingdom Hearts sitting in a clearance bin and I knew I had to get it. At the time I only recognized it as the game from my childhood as Sora is known for having oversized yellow shoes that stood out on the cover. Since that day I’ve been a huge fan of this series despite the… questionable writing decisions by Nomura. Recently, Kingdom Hearts 3 had released a big DLC pack which included a FastPass and Black Codes which are modifiers that make the game easier or harder respectively. If you’ve been reading my blog you already know I’m gonna crank on all that extra pain that the Black Codes offer. I’m going to start on a New Game Plus simply for the fact I need to at least have a chance of winning and getting OathKeeper in my last run will help me smooth out the process. Now I should let you all know ahead of my playthrough that I do not recommend this in any way to someone new to this series or who wants to get into challenge run. I barely made any progress in Kingdom Heart 2 Final Mix’s Critical Mode because I was really bad at pattern memorization. After just barely scraping by the tutorial boss, I realized two important things. One is that the critical mode in this game is very doable and is something I plan to play though when I have more time. The second thing I realized is that I never want to use those Black Codes ever again.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of me having bad ideas and acting upon them. Last week I attempted to beat Super Mario Sunshine without jumping which ended rather prematurely to say the least. So this week I decided to try something that was within the realm of possibility. This week I am going to play through Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones on the highest difficulty available, which is Hard Mode. For those unfamiliar with Fire Emblem games, they are a series of turn-based tactics games that could be compared to a giant game of chess by some. I personally found the series in high school when a friend of mine at the time told me about this cool game he had found for Game Boy Advance. It was actually the seventh game in the series, Blazing Blade. However that eventually led to me eventually picking up many more games in the series later in life. However, I never got around to trying Sacred Stones until recently. When I asked one of my roommates what game in the series I should do this week, he said Sacred Stones because it’s his favorite game. The run itself isn’t going to have any special rules like last week. After all, I would like a chance to actually finish the game this time. I’m going to play however I want to on the highest difficulty. Overall I felt my run was lot easier than I was expecting it to be. For the maps I played I honestly had more difficulty with Echoes on a lower difficulty than I had had with this game so far. I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a challenge but you don’t want something too insane for a challenge run.