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.

Crystals for Life

So Crystals for Life is over now, and we raised over 33,000 CAD. I'm very happy with this! My own run went pretty well, and everybody I met was fun and having a good time.

While I was feeling a bit ill, I did a segmented run of Final Fantasy Anniversary Edition and got 1h40! Was very happy about this, then I hear that Lenophis has managed 1h27. Oh well.

I'm back in New York for now, there's a few days before I get back to England.

Also hahaha, Emily won the NES copy of Final Fantasy as a prize from C4L.