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Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Scales of War

Hey, Mike here.  Since Julian left (Our old button-monkey), I've been voted in as the new one.  It's only fitting, seeing as I play Lance, the greatest most important character in all of Final Tear 3.  But this left me with a problem; now I have to deal with the slow walk speed, long battles, and large burdensome maps that are so masterfully crafted by the fine Stevie V.D. Laar himself.  Well, damn.  Now that it was me bashing my head against the keyboard, something had to change.

This meant war.

So I got to thinkin'.  All the game really needed was a little bit of the old balancing act.  Why should I spend tiresome hours grinding when all I really wanted was the superb story?  I decided to get to the root of the issue; character level.  Pulling up my trusty memory editor (called T-search, for those who care) I quickly found and modified the game's variables for character level, and Presto!  Instant level 99's.  No more hours of grinding, and best of all, no more spending 90% of our time in random encounters fighting!  My outlook on life was suddenly a whole lot cheerier.  Or less dismal.  Either way, things were looking up.

Yet our problems were not all solved.  We still lacked good gear, it still took ages to cross those desolate stretches of map that went as far as the eye could see, and we were still plagued by terrifyingly frequent random encounters.  So, I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.

Getting the maximum money wasn't exactly difficult.  The way T-Search works is that you search for a specific number inside the memory being used by the game, and it returns the list of memory addresses that are currently storing that number.  Unfortunately that list is usually around the 6 or 7 digit mark.  Thankfully it also allows you to then search within that list for a specific number (If you know the value has changed and you know what it has changed to), or only show those that have changed at all, or haven't changed, or have increased, or decreased, etc.  Through trial and error, mostly error, I quickly found the money stat.  Suddenly we accidentally 999,999 GP.  Cheers all around!

Stopping random encounters would be trickier.  In order for me to find and change the rate, I would need to know what it was to begin with.  This proved too great a challenge for my T-Search tactics, and I had to put it on hold.  Thankfully, we soon encountered an item in a shop that supposedly protected us from random encounters for 30 seconds per use...

Bullocks.  At best, it somewhat reduced the chances, for a length of time that might be as long as 30 seconds if we were lucky.  Winning the lotto lucky.  But at least it helped mitigate the problem, so we had to settle for what we could get. 

Worse yet was the movement speed; we had no way of changing it and Stevie seemed pretty intent on keeping it at whatever inane crawl it had always been.  Since it didn't change, we really couldn't find the variable to change it to our liking.  We had all but given up hope when suddenly the impossible happened: we encountered a puzzle that intentionally increased our movement speed!  We all stared in shock and awe; had Stevie accidentally done something fantastic?  No, I soon discovered.  The new speed made precise movement nigh impossible.  What was the puzzle, you ask?  Why, precisely move over these five buttons!  But wait, there's more...a few seconds after pressing a button, it will reset.  You need to press them all before the first resets.  Now it all made sense.  The movement change wasn't to make us happy...it was to make our lives a living hell.

Yet with each action comes an equal and opposite reaction.  Now that the move speed changed, we could find it.  We could change it.  We had the technology.  A few keystrokes later and we had our Eureka moment.  Move aside Stevie, the Lancemobile is goin' pedal to the metal and trusting the bumper!

Quite frankly, I'm shocked we didn't get a noise complaint for all the cheering we did about it.

As I thought, the game was quite a bit more enjoyable after our "re-balancing".  No more grinding out levels for half a day before each boss, no more crawling along like an elderly sloth over the vast maps, and no more enduring hours of wretched combat between every line of dialogue.  We had dreamt of re-balancing the game since the beginning, I simply had the pleasure of making it a reality. Finally, the scales tipped in our favor.  The battle was won...and the war was begun in earnest.

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