Monday 9 September 2013

Thoughts on Crystals for Life 2014

Somehow last time I wrote I neglected to mention anything about Crystals for Life. I had an excellent time at the event this year and I want to go to next year's event too. To this end I have submitted two runs for consideration, and I'll talk a little about them both here.

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss is the greatest game ever made. The marriage of first-person dungeon crawling and a creative and engaging setting, with the reliance on the intelligence of the player to actually finish results in a beautiful game. I never tire of this classic. I started practising this for AGDQ2012 but it was not accepted into the final line-up, and there have also been some route changes since I learnt the game, so I have some work to do before it's ready. Hopefully, being a short and confusing RPG, it's a perfect fit into Crystals for Life.

Dark Cloud is very different. It's still a good game in its own right, but it is mainly remembered as a cult classic and as the prequel to a better game. Also, this run is perhaps 8 hours long with randomly generated dungeons and items to deal with. The route is almost finalised and I did a single-segment play-through on my stream not long ago. My personal best can obviously be vastly improved but I feel little impetus to practice it simply because the game is so random. Once I do another run through, any future time will be mostly affected by how nice the RNGod feels that day.

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