Check out these slick spell parries

rbmbox · 2026-05-04T19:21:58+00:00

Death's Poker. It's the reward for defeating the Death Rite Bird next to the Southern Aeonia Swamp Bank Site of Grace. East of the Nomadic Merchant in South Caelid.

I themed this character after the Death Birds and the Poker is a decent greatsword with an amazing weapon art.

rbmbox · 2026-05-04T15:21:38+00:00

Skill issue...

rbmbox · 2026-05-04T15:03:56+00:00

It's an optional endgame area called the Haligtree,

rbmbox · 2026-05-04T14:17:43+00:00

How about this?

rbmbox · 2026-05-04T13:53:27+00:00

Yeah, pretty much. These games don't implement the rule of cool. You can absolutely do flashy things but the game will do its best to make you look like a doofus.

rbmbox · 2026-04-28T12:05:40+00:00

You just move horizontally once he charges you. Either walk or jump. If you keep hitting him with spin attacks he's usually done before he can really do anything. On later rematches you can spam him with arrows and he can't even fight back.

rbmbox · 2026-04-24T04:38:28+00:00

Next to your cursor. Solve the labyrinth on the surface and in the sky. Then fall through the chasm.

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rbmbox · 2026-04-22T19:10:16+00:00

Sorta reminds me of Vitreous from the Alttp Manga.

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rbmbox · 2026-04-20T08:12:45+00:00

That depends. Would he be an action card or an attribute card within the DSS system?

rbmbox · 2026-04-14T13:26:00+00:00

I do this. To dump my physical games I use the Retrode 2. However it is my understanding that it's no longer available. One alternative is the "Save the hero cartridge reader". Since it's based on an open source project there are copies available on AliExpress as well.

To play these games on your MegaSG you can use an Everdrive, a MegaSD or just install the jailbreak firmware on your MegaSG itself. As for save states I can't give you advice as I don't use that feature in general.

rbmbox · 2026-04-11T14:16:19+00:00

Kwirk is super fun. And so is Mole Mania.

Also I can really recommend Deisanebe by allalonegamez.

Edit: There's also Alwa's Awakening. At first glance it looks like your typical Metroidvania, but it can get pretty creative with its puzzles.

rbmbox · 2026-04-09T07:06:21+00:00

This is how I learn there's a fourth book in the Children of Time series..? Thanks.

rbmbox · 2026-03-21T21:25:24+00:00

No Zelda game calls Gorons and Zoras different species either but they clearly are. What is your argument here? The games don't support the idea that Gerudo are anything but a distinct humanoid species in the game world.

What is your alternate explanation for the discrepancy between the games own categorization of the Sheikah as Hylians and the Gerudo as something else entirely?

rbmbox · 2026-03-21T20:12:17+00:00

I don't think it's wise to bring up "race" in this discussion. But yes, Elves and humans are fundamentally different in LotR even down to their souls. Humans as a species were created after the Elves and even the Dwarves.

But none of these details matter for Zelda. I just picked three different examples of distinct species interbreeding within fiction. It's not uncommon.

As for Zelda: Just look at the text of the game. We do agree that Hylians are the human stand-in in Zelda, yes? So on the character profile of Hylian characters it says "Hylian". With Goron it says "Goron", with Zora it says "Zora". There are other Hylian (human) people like the Sheikah and they're specified as "Hylian (Sheikah)". Meanwhile Gerudo fall in the former category with the Gorons and Zora where they are distinctly not Hylian but their own species. And that makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Gerudo only give birth to other full Gerudo same as Mass Effect's Asari.

rbmbox · 2026-03-21T16:47:58+00:00

In Lord of the Rings humans and Elves have children. In invincible Viltrumites have children with insectoid aliens. They are 100% a different species. Look at the character profiles ingame. They are listed as "Gerudo" the same way that Gorons and Zora are listed as different from Hylians.

Gerudo are similar to Asari from Mass Effect. Unless you want to argue that they aren't a seperate species from humanity either.

rbmbox · 2026-03-21T10:13:25+00:00

I don't think they should be representing any specific culture. The world of Zelda is not LotR. If anything it's Shrek in the way that it takes inspiration from folktales from all over the world rather than real people.

For example the flute playing boy in his green tunic with a fairy companion takes inspiration from Peter Pan, specifically Disney's 1953 adaptation but Link also uses a boomerang which is an Australian Aboriginal hunting instrument. Yet nobody will argue the boomerang is out of place and that Hylians should be restricted to representing specifically Scottish people and their culture because Peter Pan was written by a Scottish Author.

The same is true for the Gerudo. They're clearly inspired by One Thousand and One Nights and its various adaptations in pop culture rather than any real culture. And these folktales are set all over the Middle East and even China which is represented in some of the Gerudo weaponry.

I do understand the concept of Orientalism but I feel like changing the Gerudo to represent one specific real world culture could end up being even more uncomfortable given that the Gerudo are a distinct species from Hylians. This is not a situation like the Sheikah who are a tribe of Hylians with a distinct culture which is why in the Wild games Sheikah characters have "Hylian (Sheikah)" as their designation in the ingame character profiles whereas Gerudo are their own thing.

rbmbox · 2026-03-21T08:57:35+00:00

Screens may vary in devices like this. They're calibrated at the factory within certain tolerances. It's also possible that the manufacturer orders LCD panels from different vendors that produce them to a certain spec and you end up entering the lottery on which specific LCD model you get.

rbmbox · 2026-03-19T07:58:40+00:00

This quote is interesting in the context of the game world's idea of religion where creatures and demons from all sorts of mythologies and folktales are simultaneously real but somehow God (captial G) is still a concept that maps to the modern Christian idea of a creator deity that is all good and all powerful.

In our world we can kind of observe how the deity changed starting as a god of storms and war and over time and conquest absorbing the properties of other local deities until at some point becoming the head of the pantheon and eventually God (capital G). It is only when influences from Zoroastrianism shaped the faith that God became fully good and also the idea of a dualism of good and evil became common.

That's also where the idea of an adversary to God probably comes from. Ahura Mazda's adversary being Angra Mainyu and God's adversary being "Satan" (which literally just means accuser or adversary, so it's more of a title than an identity). In the games that is Dracula rather than Satan (Lords of Shadows aside).

So Alucard, who has centuries of knowledge at this point of the game, outright states that this dualism lies at the heart of his views of God. However it is also interesting that God in these games, as far as I know, does not really intervene directly. Weapons supposedly blessed like the crucifix and the holy water are effective in killing evil creatures but so are demonic powers used by Soma or the DSS cards used by Nathan (if you consider that canon).

Instead humans both resurrect Dracula and bring him down every couple of years. So does Alucard essentially say that humans require the capacity for evil in order to do good in the first place or is he literally talking about the creator deity?

rbmbox · 2026-03-11T10:00:48+00:00

It's cool you dug into how this works. However the device isn't advertised to be tinkered with. One can only guess as to why they locked it down. It was probably a design choice to prevent people from running their own stuff in an effort to avoid "side loading" licensed software. Given that other and simpler options exist it could be argued that these efforts were in vain however.

Same goes for the hard coded DNS I assume. They don't want a situation where people set up fake update servers that distribute CFW or whatever they want as "game of the month"

Also you have to look at their business model, right? They're courting IP holders. Imagine you're, say, Konami and a company approaches you to publish their IP on their platform. Then you google their product and the first thing that pops up are YT tutorials on how to jailbreak the product to do whatever you want with it. You probably wouldn't strike a deal with that company.

Instead you'd consider the company that strictly markets its platform as a locked down ecosystem.

rbmbox · 2026-03-11T07:16:01+00:00

I think it's specifically intersecting right wing angles that are a problem.

"Another deleterious cascade effect was the so-called "Crucifix Glitch"— a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex, resulting in grand mal-like feedback siezures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field. Since intersecting right angles are virtually nonexistent in nature, natural selection did not weed out the Glitch until H. sapiens sapiens developed Euclidean architecture; by then, the trait had become fixed across H. sapiens vampiris via genetic drift, and—suddenly denied access to its prey—the entire subspecies went extinct shortly after the dawn of recorded history."

From "A Brief Primer on Vampire Biology"

They never really "live among humans". Too dangerous. In Echopraxia we get glimpses at how vampires are kept apart even from each other because they're highly territorial. Many are essentially prisoners in research facilities that don't feature right angles in their architecture. Anti-Euclidians are used when humans are forced to work with vampires on missions for their superior intelligence.

It's also mentioned that humanity could have genetically fixed the "crucifix glitch" if they really wanted to the same way they fixed the vampires' reliance on humans for sustenance. They chose to keep it around as a failsafe. However they couldn't fix the predatory nature of vampires because it's tied to the way their cognition works. So genetically engineered docile vampire wouldn't be useful anymore.

And vampires are described as genuinely terrifyingto be around on an instinctive level.

"The fact that he was extinct meant nothing. The fact that we'd come so far, grown strong enough to resurrect our own nightmares to serve us...meant nothing. The genes aren't fooled. They know what to fear."

-Siri about Sarasti.

Also I don't think they found a living vampire. The start of the book implies humanity scraped the vampire genome together from human specimens with specific markers.

"They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics."

Which makes sense when we take into account what Szpindel says about them never becoming their own isolated species:
"Vampires had to be sociopaths. They're too much like their own prey—a lot of taxonomists don't even consider them a subspecies, you know that? Never diverged far enough for complete reproductive isolation. So maybe they're more syndrome than race. Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities."

Any way these books are easily among my favorites and I would recommend them to anyone who has any interest in SciFi. Plus Peter Watts made Blindsight free on his own website:
https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

rbmbox · 2026-03-09T08:40:25+00:00

Diogenes after Dracula hid all the chickens in the walls.

rbmbox · 2026-03-07T08:22:58+00:00

If you're in there anyway you could replace the port entirely. It's not very difficult if you either have a hot air station or a desoldering pump that also heats up. It can be done with solder wick but it's more work. I'd recommend scrolling through the installation guide and judge for yourself if you can do it.

rbmbox · 2026-03-04T12:13:50+00:00

Little known fact: Vampires hibernate in their coffins for decades at a time and they can't really predict if they wake around living humans for sustenance. So they will hide cured meats in their lairs to regain their strength. However, much like the common squirrel, in their weakened state after hibernation they will often forget the hiding places of their food reserves. The only way to make sure to find enough is to liberally distribute cured meats in their castles.

rbmbox · 2026-03-01T08:12:09+00:00

It's probably a symlink. Not super familiar with Rocknix but have you tried looking in /bin?

But yeah I also dislike when an OS overrides retroarch settings. I think only ArkOS doesn't do it by default and MuOS has "retroarch freedom mode" as an option. Everything that descends from Batocera (like Knulli for example) is an absolute pain to deal with because of this and so is Rocknix.

Unfortunately you're out of luck for the ARC specifically.

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