(no subject)

[kjorteo]

I... I'm so happy.. ;_;

Edit: A confession: before X7, I had told davidn (with a surprisingly large amount of pride) that, unlike him, I have never had to pause an operation in any Trauma Center game for the sole purpose of calming down. Sure, I paused a lot in both games, but mostly for things like working out the wire maze in defusing that bomb, committing Nous and Tetarti to memory, etc. After X7, I can say that I still haven't had to pause just to calm down/catch my breath or anything like that, but I did have to take no less than four breaks to readjust the grip on my stylus and wait for my hand to untangle itself.

It's my grip, you see. I have a somewhat gnarled and gimpy way of holding anything pencil-like due to my teachers' having catastrophically failed to teach me the proper grip in elementary school. They came on much too strong (they called me to the principal's office over the PA system and everything!!) and made it sound like the "proper" grip was a draconian because-we-say-so-or-else establishment ruling, sort of like the policies that caused so much trouble for left-handed people back in the day. Therefore, in my childhood wisdom, I decided to stand up to the man and deliberately not learn a remotely normal grip. Now that I'm 27 and used to the abomination I've been employing all these years, it's far, far too late for me to change.

I have to give UTK2 credit for being the first game I've ever played that actually made my stylus grip feel like a handicap, though--while their difficulties were certainly insane, I somehow made it through Elite Beat Agents and even UTK1 without feeling like that. I was even fine throughout most of UTK2, but something about X7 (and X6 as well, damn you Sige) has this distinct way of making my hand cramp and the stylus start to point dramatically inward (rendering anything that requires precision impossible, fortunately that only describes absolutely everything) unless I stop and recalibrate.

Comments

[davidn]

Bugger me, you did it. I mean, congratulations :) And the XS is a surprise...! Were you going for that, or did it just happen as a side effect of being able to complete it? I think that's one of the operations where it's said that if you can even finish it, you can XS it, but... I didn't. Well done!

Your grip does appear to be rather zombie-like... I kept getting hand cramps on anything intense lasting more than a minute until I built up some sort of resistance to the game, and I think my hand position is relatively normal. There was talk of me being put into extra handwriting classes in school because mine was so appalling anyway, but I don't think they would have done anything.

[kjorteo]

No worries; that first sentence was more or less my reaction to actually beating it as well. :) I was going for the XS because it was a small enough goal beyond just winning in the first place that I may as well, primarily because I didn't want to have to do X7 ever again after having beaten it once! It's a lot like X-Pempti in that regard.

There is slightly more difference between an A and XS X-Aletheia run than there is with X-Pempti, but still little enough that if you can beat it, you may as well at least try to XS it. In both cases, lack of access to the Healing Touch until the end makes it more or less the same operation all the way throughout. For X-Pempti, the only difference is that you just need to not use the Healing Touch when the core goes unstable and still win to get the XS. For X-Aletheia, you just need to mind the time limit and chain on the way. Pempti has a much greater jump in difficulty for those critical few seconds at the very end if you're actually stupid enough to attempt the XS condition, but Aletheia is much more difficult everywhere else, so they balance out. If I had to rank them, I'd say Pempti has the smallest difference between just winning and XSing it out of any of them, with Aletheia a close second... but Aletheia is harder. Which is saying something, because obviously Pempti is pretty damned hard....

[sethimothy.livejournal.com]

Wow. That is awesome.

[kjorteo]

Thank you! It really is... that was not easy, at all.