The Professional Gamer - September 28, 2018

Hello, friends. This has certainly been a “special hell” type of week here. I’ve tended to keep politics out of this feed, because I want it to be more of a safe place. Or, at least a place that is less affected by the day to day events of the world outside, and we can just talk about things that bring us joy. Events this week have really intruded on that for me. I’m not going to write a thousand words about it here: people with traumatic experiences, and who are much sharper in their analysis and prose, have already (or will soon) talk or publish about it. All that I will do here is encourage you to register to vote now and turn out in November to vote.

That being said, let’s talk about what I did to distract myself from the doom and gloom that is my Twitter feed. I’m way late to the party, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time watching some of the charity speed-runs on Games Done Quick. Coming from the outside, I’m really interested to see the combination of players searching for ways to break games and others finding ways to string these exploits together to complete a game more quickly. One of the runs that I watched was a no-sword Legend of Zelda run.

Interestingly, in the original Zelda, there are counters related to killing enemies without getting hit, and one can manipulate these to ensure that they get needed items, such as bombs or fairies. Since the player was running without a sword, the bombs were the main weapon for the early parts of the game, and remained important throughout.

I haven’t done a lot of other things this week. My only notable gaming achievement was getting to 150 out of 151 Kanto region Pokemon. I haven’t managed to get into a Mewtoo raid yet, but I did hatch all of the region limited monsters. And, I have a friend who lives in New Zealand, so I’ve got some monsters to trade to folks here to help me earn the trading distance achievement.

And that’s all I have for this post. I’m heading off to California for a few days this week. I may have some time to read or play a portable game, but I’m not sure how much time I might spend out in the remote field areas. Have a great week and game on!