Janurary 21st, 2021

This was the last blog post from the old site before work started on the new version of the site. There are minor changes to it to fix some incorrect information I had put.

Hey all, Alan here! I hope you've all been safe since I haven't been posting all that often. I'll try to keep up.

I recently fixed my PS2 disc drive. It's one of the fat PS2s, which are more likely to have their lasers die out. It was a long and tedious process, and a lot of the videos online were fixing a different model of the PS2 which had a different looking mechanism too. After I got the new laser installed, it worked for a minute and stopped working. That was extremely worrying.

It turns out it was because it was taking in too much power. After some fine tuning, it started to work! I haven't had any issues yet, so I guess I'm finally done with this project.

It's been a long time since I have seen that icon.

I got a pop'n music controller from Gamo2. It had a very hefty price tag but I wanted it so I can actually play pop'n music without being restricted to 5 buttons. After a few weeks of sending multiple tracking emails, it arrived. It's LOUD as heck which wasn't too much of a problem... but then some of the buttons started getting stuck! This wasn't cheap and it was having issues.

Size comparison with a fat PS2. It's huge!

I bought some Samduck buttons to replace the buttons since I heard that they're pretty good alternatives. I don't know when they'll be coming in, but I'll be sure to make a post when they arrive. I haven't seen any instructions on how to replace them, so I assume it'll be easy to do.

I just jinxed myself, didn't I?

Despite the button issue, Pop'n Music is extremely fun, even if it's hand brusing tool disguised as a cutesy rhythm game. I'm pretty garbage at it, I can barely finish 9 button stages at around level 20. I see myself getting better and better though. I hope I can reach somewhere around level 30.

Anyways, If I like something I just have to buy merchandise, right? I bought a few soundtracks and one of the character art books.

I have no space on my desk for photos anymore!

I don't know what to really say about the CDs. Pop'n Music Request Best comes with the OBI but the Pop'n Music 10AC 8CS soundtrack doesn't. Not too torn up about that. The Pop'n Music Request Best album also came with some cool looking art.

Well-Done looks like an angry baby.

The artbook is alright, but unfortunately, it seems like the art book got a bit of waterdamage during shipping. You can only really see it in the later part of the book and not the page that matters (32).

A relative found an Xbox 360 at a Goodwill for like $20. It doesn't come with any cables, but it's a model with HDMI and I already have a wired controller, so I think I'm good on those parts. It doesn't come with the power brick, so I can't use it right now. I thought it would need a normal power supply that every 360 used. How foolish of me believing that, I need a specific brick from a selection of five!

If anyone wants to know, it's a Zephyr model, which I heard has varying degrees of reliability. So not only do I have to find a working power brick, I'm gonna have to pray that the system actually works. Isn't that hilarious?

I bought SmileBASIC 4 for Switch a few days ago. I put so many hours into Petit Computer, which was the old DSi version. I wasn't able to make a whole lot back then because I didn't want to learn BASIC and you had to type stuff using a touch keyboard.

SmileBASIC 4 let's you use a USB keyboard and it's so much more better. I'm not too knowledgeable in BASIC yet, I have been making small demos experimenting with graphics. I hope I can make something resembling a game soon.

I have finally completed all of We Love Katamari! I completed the collection, getting every present & cousin, completed every level and got every meteor. The whole process took almost 7 years, but I had a lot of fun all the way through.

My final items for my collection were rolled up live in my first livestream a week ago. I didn't really bother with the collection because I thought I had so many items I didn't roll up. After a while, I decided to bite the bullet and do it anyways. I had a lot of categories in my collection already completed, but there was less than 50 items remaining. I used a guide the entire way through and after spending ages on the Cowbear and Exact stage, I finally did it!

The collection Katamari on the top-left corner gets a bit of a shiny makeover!

I didn't think the game would reward you for completing the collection! You get a set of Bunny Ears, only unlockable by completing the collection! That's not the only thing I managed to complete though.

I also got every superclear! If you don't know what that means, it means that you made the best katamari possible for the stage.

You know what you get for superclearing a stage? You get a shinier planet!

That's literally all it does.

It's really nothing special. Some of the goals are pretty hard though. If you want a guarenteed superclear, it's almost always below meteor time, meaning you got to beat the stage as quickly as possible and use whatever time you have left to make it grow bigger.

The underwater stage's time trial mode requires you to beat it in under a minute. It might seem easy, but remember that the Katamari has water physics and can be pushed by almost anything at the start. I developed a route to beat it, but I had to make sure the fish were at the right spot at the right time. If I got pushed even slightly from my route, I would've have to restart. All that planning made me get a 53 second run, amazing!

The superclear for that was to beat it in under a minute. I got exactly a minute, but I didn't get the superclear! I hated how once I started to roll up toy train tracks, that they would make my Katamari go over items I needed to roll. I thought this would be the hardest stage to superclear. I managed to get from that 1 minute record to 54 seconds.

The last stage I had to beat was the Crane stage. You're set inside a school full of origami cranes and you have to roll up all 1,000 cranes for a superclear. It wasn't painful, it was just pretty boring. It got aggravating when the stage was almost over and there was only a handful of cranes left.

I don't know if I'm done with We Love Katamari. I got everything. I had a goal set where I would finally be done with the game once I reach 9,999 stars on the Roll Up the Sun stage, but I'm actually not sure if I can do it in a reasonable timeframe. I swear I remember watching a video where someone reached 9,999 stars. I can only seem to find a video of someone reaching 7,300 stars though. I might be misremembering that video.

Here is an old thread from Katamari on the Web, a pretty old Katamari fan forum. It was a person's thoretical documentation on how stardust worked. They explained that the game seems to start putting stardust out of reach of the playing field at around 7,000 stars. I'm not sure if I should take this as fact as this was 2006 where there weren't better methods to figure out game mechanics outside of playing it a lot.

That should be enough Katamari for now.

I've been playing a lot of the older Crash games way more than the new Crash 4 game, it's kinda odd.

I finally completed the entire original Crash trilogy! I had fun. Crash 2 and 3 were pretty easy, but Crash 1 was extremely nerve-racking. It wouldn't count me out if I used a GameShark to give me some extra masks at start of levels... would it? I tried out Crash Bash, but it got way too boring so I just stopped. I was in the process of Crash Team Racing, but doing some of the Time Trials got tiring. I was pretty close to completing the adventure mode, but whatever.

I was also trying to do Wrath of Cortex, a game most people would agree was either mediocre or awful. I thought they were sort of harsh back then, but now I can see where they're coming from. This game DRAGS. I got to around 80 percent before giving up. The game is too slow to play through sometimes, the speed Crash moves on the monkey bars is so slow. One of the stages literally starts out with almost 50 seconds of just climbing. Getting the relic on that stage is horrible, if you die, you have to go through the monkey bars again! It killed the entire experience for me.

I don't really bother with buying new cameras now that I'm pretty much set on what I have, but a relative found some Sony cameras and bought them anyways.

One of them is a Mavica! Pretty bad. It's older than my main Mavica, so that should be expected. Here's a photo of a Toad plush I picked up a few months ago.

This is the best looking photo I could get with this thing.

The other is a little bit more recent. It's a DSC-S750. It's pretty good, way better than my main Mavica. Here's a test photo!

Click on the photo for the full image.

I might redo some of the site layout, not sure... I'll say this and never get to it, just like how I always do it! I really do like working on this site but I know you can believe me when I say I do not have the drive to do anything! Has it really been almost a year of staying home? Painful.

I'm hoping to start getting my blogs at a more steady schedule, it seems like I'm starting to get more to talk about. Maybe I'll change up the blog formula?

Then again, It's the end of this post. I talked a lot about completing games, huh? I'm really proud, even if it's just a game, it was fun the whole way through.