The Truths of Earthbound
As Mars and I continue to collect information for the Earthbound Encyclopedia, it seems that with each day that goes by, we become more and more able to look at the game as if we'd programmed it ourselves. It's quite a phenomenon, really. I'm taking a pastime I love with all my heart and delving deeper into it that anybody's ever been before.
When we first started this project, we realized that there were hundreds of possible ways the game could've been coded. In a previous article, Mars noted several bugs in the game that had gone unnoticed for the longest time. At first, we were only excited because there were elements of the game that had never been identified before, and we were the first to find them. Soon, we also found that the scenarios we forced the game into, which weren�t anticipated by the programmers, also gave us insights into the very heart of the internal workings of the game. Thanks to such glitches as Paula's Pray during Poo's Mirror, and performing certain actions with a confused party member, we�re well on our way to being able to actually RECREATE the battle engine.
Unfortunately, there are certain elements of the game that rely on chance, that we just can't directly find (such as the odds of receiving an enemy's present) without collecting thousands of data points. In cases such as these, in the interest of being able to finish sometime in the next hundred years, we're just going to approximate those values. And anyway, knowing these values is just a matter of statistics, and not fundamentals of the game.
With each time we play through, we learn more. It's an intricate puzzle that requires creative solutions. We have the tools, we have the initiative, and we have the expertise. The answer to the puzzle will come in time.
As Mars and I continue to collect information for the Earthbound Encyclopedia, it seems that with each day that goes by, we become more and more able to look at the game as if we'd programmed it ourselves. It's quite a phenomenon, really. I'm taking a pastime I love with all my heart and delving deeper into it that anybody's ever been before.
When we first started this project, we realized that there were hundreds of possible ways the game could've been coded. In a previous article, Mars noted several bugs in the game that had gone unnoticed for the longest time. At first, we were only excited because there were elements of the game that had never been identified before, and we were the first to find them. Soon, we also found that the scenarios we forced the game into, which weren�t anticipated by the programmers, also gave us insights into the very heart of the internal workings of the game. Thanks to such glitches as Paula's Pray during Poo's Mirror, and performing certain actions with a confused party member, we�re well on our way to being able to actually RECREATE the battle engine.
Unfortunately, there are certain elements of the game that rely on chance, that we just can't directly find (such as the odds of receiving an enemy's present) without collecting thousands of data points. In cases such as these, in the interest of being able to finish sometime in the next hundred years, we're just going to approximate those values. And anyway, knowing these values is just a matter of statistics, and not fundamentals of the game.
With each time we play through, we learn more. It's an intricate puzzle that requires creative solutions. We have the tools, we have the initiative, and we have the expertise. The answer to the puzzle will come in time.
