Hello and welcome to a challenge that isn’t Pokemon for a third week in a row. This time I’ve thought up a challenge based on an anime I really enjoyed. The Rising of the Shield Hero stars Naofumi who has been transported to another world as the Shield Hero. While having no attack he has incredible defense and is aided by his companion Raphtalia. Since I really enjoyed the anime I decided to do a run of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild with a custom rule set. Following the anime’s example, Only shields are allowed to be used for combat, any other tool like sledgehammers and torches can still be used as long as they aren’t being used for combat. As soon as I leave the Great Plateau the plan is to get a horse, appropriately named Filo, and make my way towards Kakariko Village so I can unlock the amiibo rune for the Sheikah Slate as soon as possible. With the amiibo rune and a Wolf Link amiibo I can summon Wolf Link to act as our version of Raphtalia of the run. If ‘Raphtalia’, she can’t be resummoned for 24 hours, so your best bet is to act like the Shield Hero you were meant to be and defend while ‘Raphtalia’ attacks. I think this is a great way to change up how a casual playthrough of Breath of the Wild is. Normally you could easily focus on attacking and defending yourself at the same time, but now you’re forced to defend your only viable offensive options. I’d also recommend watching the anime for the Rising of the Shield Hero or reading the manga if my minor plot summary interests you.

Hello and welcome back to my latest bad idea. Sticking with last week’s Pokemon trend, I decided to make use of something I picked up a gaming convention last year for this week’s run. If you ever get a chance to go to the Midwest Gaming Classic in Milwaukee I would highly recommend going. This week I’m going to be playing Pokemon Green. Now what makes this game a challenge is the fact that it was only ever released in Japan. So with almost no knowledge of Japanese I only have my knowledge of the game and the attack animations to serve as a guiding light. I’ve played fully through the Kanto region through various games so I have a pretty good idea how to get around at this point. Since I’m playing the very first Pokemon game there are tons of exploitable things I can do to make my run easier. The first thing is that I’m going to pick Charmander and primarily use him during the run. I’m doing this because Charizard learns Slash at level 36, and slash is a high damage physical move that almost always lands critical hits in Generation One. The second thing I’m going to do is write down what level my planned team knows certain moves so I don’t accidentally skip learning a move I need. Third is catching Articuno and Zapdoes when I have access to them because it will help me cover my weakness in the Pokemon League. Fifth and finally I’m going to get a Nidorino that knows Horn Drill, a low accuracy one hit KO, and buy a bunch of X-Accuracies to exploit the glitch that allows Nidorino to have 100% accuracy when using Horn Drill to defeat anything Charizard, Articuno, and Zapdoes can’t handle, my final two team members will just be there so I have Pokemon that can learn the HM moves needed to navigate through the game. While these strategies could be applied to a normal playthrough of Pokemon Red or Blue, it’s an interesting challenge to see if basic reading ability is truly needed to enjoy a game like many boxes suggest.

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.

After taking a nice long break I’m ready to get back into the swing of things. However, I realized I didn’t want to completely torment myself this time around so I decided to do a more light hearted challenge. This time I’m going to be doing a speedrun of my favorite 2D Mario game, Super Mario World. To be more specific, I’m going to be doing an 11 exit glitchless run, which means I’ll be beating the game by clearing the game by doing the absolute minimum number of levels. Luckily I’ve been playing this game since I was in elementary school, so I have more than a few years under my belt. I know speedrunning is on a whole other level when compared to casually knowing the game like the back of your hand, so I know I shouldn’t set my expectations too high. Personally I have always wanted to give a real speedrun a try, but I’ve always been intimidated by the low times and how many of my favorite games are either mastered to the point of near perfection or they are games that are simply too long for me to want to sit down and run. The only exception that really comes to mind is Cadence of Hyrule, but that’s because every run is always a bit different so it’s fun. Overall I would say that Super Mario World is a game that is both fun from a casual perspective and a speedrunning perspective and I would recommend playing this classic if you haven’t played it.

Hey all, if you liked the content that Ryan posted for his blog, you should take a look at more of his content on his blog
http://blogs.uww.edu/todaystech/

Now that I’m back from my guest blog, I decided I wanted to be a little more social despite the effects of COVID-19 by playing a multiplayer game online. I decided to play Team Fortress 2 with a couple friends of mine. I’ve been playing this game since 2013 and I still play it to this day. As of right now I have over 1300 hours of playtime built up over seven years. Seeing as I had to cause myself some kind of torment, I decided to play the game without jumping as Scout, the class whose biggest appeals are jumping and speed. The only way this is going to be remotely doable is if I use the Force-Of-Nature, a weapon with enough kickback to launch Scout in the air. At first I felt confident in my years of play experience that I would be able to adjust to my jumpless life easily. I clearly did not learn anything from my jumpless run of Super Mario Sunshine. I had to completely rethink how I was going to play through the game. Worst of all, I had to try and learn my new navigation methods but I also had to deal with other players shooting at me. I went on a map that had objectives disabled for the sole purpose of learning how to do this yet there’s always that one person who’s there to ruin someone else’s day. Once me and my friends decided to go into an actual game it was not a great time. Since everyone was playing without any kind of handicap it made it a lot more difficult to contribute to my team. However, the fact that I was slightly buzzed while playing probably didn’t help either.

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.

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 fellow gamers and welcome to the first ridiculous endeavor I’ve decided to try out! Super Mario Sunshine without jumping. I figured what better place to start this series off with than one of my favorite games of all time combined with a ridiculous challenge attached to it. Super Mario Sunshine was one the early titles for the Nintendo Gamecube and sadly hasn’t been remastered since. In the game Mario is falsely accused of covering Isle Delfino with a mysterious goop and has to clean all of it up. To help him clean the island, Mario meets FLUDD, a hi-tech water gun that even has a hover function. As I’m sure you can already guess, FLUDD’s Hover Nozzle is going to be the primary way of rising up in a world where Mario’s most iconic trait is not allowed. Now, those of you familiar with the game are likely aware of the obvious roadblock of the secret levels which restrict FLUDD from being used. My answer to that is to clear the stage normally once when FLUDD is banned, and immediately redo the stage once FLUDD is unbanned. It’s not a perfect solution but it stops the game from being unfinishable. So this run is also considered a minimum jump run. For the sake of not subjecting anyone to pointless cutscenes, I edited out the very long cutscene at the start of the game. Personally I think this was a great way to learn the game even more in depth than I already had from my years of experience. I already knew what my limitations were but the real challenge and satisfaction for me was trying to use everything within my reach as I tend to pick the speediest ways nine times out of ten. It felt great finding that one platform I needed to make everything work together well. I think my favorite missions were Ricco Harbor One and Three because of how much I needed to use the map layout to my advantage to finally reach that Shine Sprite. In the end, I only managed to get 9 Shine Sprites truly with no jumping required. Someday I would not mind giving this run another shot now that’s I’ve figured out some of the optimal routes for the early game.