raocow's talkhaus

These are the times that try fan's souls.
In the course of our LPer's history.
The people of talkhaus have spoken vainly,
Whenever the concerns of fans have been ignored.
Today, an old headbanger has arisen:
Some French-Canadian dude
Better known as raocow
Is attempting to play a burdensome level before the population,
In the form of one more leveling.
Talkhausers, hear me out!
This could be seen by you!

Well, let me tell you of the story,
Of that guy name raocow.
On this tragic and fateful day,
He plugged his controller in his PC,
Said, "Hey there everyone!"
Went to play a game on the Internet.

Well did he ever learn?
No, he never learned.
And his fate is still well-known. (What a pity)
He will play forever,
Through the games of talkhaus.
He's the man, who never did learn.

raocow pressed on that A
On the worstest stage (TM)
And he saw that Eerie generator.
When he got there his stubbornness told him, "One more goal!"
raocow couldn't get out of that level!

Well did he ever learn?
No, he never learned.
And his fate is still well-known. (Poor ole raocow)
He will play forever,
Through the games of talkhaus.
He's the man, who never did learn.

Now all day long
raocow plays through the level
Crying "When will it ever end?
How can I afford to end the vid on a sour note?
Or not having that which I sought?"

Well did he ever learn?
No, he never learned.
And his fate is still well-known. (Shame and blunder)
He will play forever,
Through the games of talkhaus.
He's the man, who never did learn.

raocow's fans go down
To the Youtube channel every day*
At quarter past seven,
And through the open comments
They scream at raocow, "No!"
As the fool goes charging forth.

Well did he ever learn?
No, he never learned.
And his fate is still well-known. (He will play forever)
He will play forever,
Through the games of talkhaus.
He's the man, who never did learn.

Type it, haus-y
... (kinda hurts my fingers)

Now you denizens of talkhaus,
Don't you think its a blunder
How the viewers have to cringe and cringe?
Fight the third level!
Yell into the past louder,
Get poor raocow out that fourth level!

Or else he'll never learn,
No, he'll never learn.
And his fate will remain the same. (Just like Xelpud*)
He will play forever,
Through the games of talkhaus.

He's the man who never did learn.
He's the man who never did learn.
He's the man who never did learn.
Et tu raocow?

---

*Couldn't think of anything better. Sorry.

hello. how r u. i missed u despite being discord friends with u and also being on the falcom discord (#gagharvcoastbeastcoast). im trying to find out how to edit and export eiyuu densetsu 3 white witch pc's text, thankfully i have esperknight's c++ port of the legend of xanadu 2 decompression code on hand, as falcom has proprietary compression that they seem to use for most of their games, but i need to make it accept slightly largeish files (9 and 13MB iirc?).

i have peeked on snowman to check the assembly and c++ code of the game and the run value does seem to be either 12 or 15, which is what's on the xanadu 2 decompression (run += 0x06; run = 0x0E), so i shouldn't have to alter routines too much. also gonna hand convert it to c# because i havent really gotten the chance to use c++ seriously yet. hope they set up the control codes to good hex values else i might have to do some finagling to separate the shift-jis and ascii from control codes. im very much new to this lol

I've been observing your gameplay a lot in the past few months (as I mentioned yesterday), and one thing I noticed is that a lot of your weakspots are things that you don't have muscle memory for. Wind is a physics change which varies based on level. Green springy things are slightly better now that you've practiced enough to understand them, but they're still a weakspot. Throwing things is inconsistent for you, in part because you've never practiced with them and don't need to do it a lot. And this level basically destroys any attempt at making muscle memory because the number of coins you have changes your physics. (Unless you get to there with the same number of coins each time.) The times that strike me most with this is when you're startled that you didn't land about half a second after you miss, especially when you had a cape or double jump and just didn't use it. (That might also be input/video lag.)

Sure, muscle memory helps everyone, but I just think you're more reliant on it than a lot of gamers, maybe even most. I'm not better than you at most games. With Celeste, my death counts were roughly tied with you on the first two levels and worse on most of the rest of them, despite having done the B-sides as I unlocked them. But on level 4, the one with wind? Only about 60% of yours. Why? I'm guessing I'm not as good at automating my actions, but to compensate, I'm not as reliant on that, either. And wind, especially when it's not always the same strength, requires you to relearn jump distance and such.

Being reliant on muscle memory helps in a lot of the kinds of games you play: In fighting games, you need to spend less time thinking about how to react to an attack (and or worse, how to do an attack) and more on what comes next. In dammaku games, you can't be overwhelmed by the huge number of bullets on the screen, but rather learn to dodge each pattern based on what's around you. In other shmups, muscle memory still helps get you through a lot. And in platformers, usually you don't have to worry about more than a handful of physics changes, which is compounded by you playing a lot of older SMW hacks where they rarely added more.

I also think this partially explains your aggressive playstyle (apart from impatience): Not only do you not get good at a game by playing like a coward (like in Mario, where not holding run normally results in a massive difficulty spike), but you've learned to play aggressively. This may also explain why you often get myopia with how to solve something: You're used to trying and failing, until you learn the precise way to do it. You're also not used to thinking backwards (I need to get to the goal, and to do that, I need the switch to be off in the end, so how do I hit the switch while I'm beyond the blocks where it needs to be on?), because you don't play games backwards. And it's easier to get myopic when you're focusing on what you're doing than when you're focusing acting than on how to solve something.

And it might even be why you're good at solving harder puzzles: You're not as used to thinking in algorithms, and the tricky puzzles usually require you to not use the algorithms you already built up. Those of us screaming at the computer on easy puzzles quickly learn how to solve basic problems and try to solve harder ones by piecing those together, so it's tricky when it looks like we need them but it doesn't work. I was really struck by this in Sonic Hopping level 27, where you didn't seem to notice until the end that the solution had to be symmetric. But there were other puzzles where I thought I had a solution, but I expected a step to work that didn't, because I relied on an algorithm.