Gotta tell ya folks, I’ve had a rough week.

“What plagues you, dearest Dylan?” you ask. The simplest answer I can come up with for you, friends, is “Technical Problems”.

I’ll save you the whole story, but let’s just say I have had to do a LOT of very technical work with not a lot of help from the folks I was working with.

However, I can tell you, for a gamer, there is nothing more therapeutic than going home at the end of the day, starting up your latest game and laying waste to each and every challenge that game puts in your way. There’s just something so satisfying about it. It allows you a sense of progress, as feeling of accomplishment when you’ve had nothing but walls put in your path for 4 FREAKIN’ DAYS!!!… Sorry, I flew off the handle there.

I have to say, though, when someone blocks a gamer’s ability to do that because of more “Technical Problems”, that is just about enough to send that gentle soul into a SCREAMING RAGE!!!!!

Just thought I’d let you guys know.

Problems suck.

That is all.

Ok, so back when I was but a wee young Dylan, I (as most young people did) owned a Sony Playstation. I owned a great many games, so at one point, I decided to start keeping them in a CD binder. I have recently started thinking about some of the games of my past so I decided to dig up the old binder and give it a good once-over. As I scanned through, I noticed something that reminded me about how absolutely immature 15 year olds (and, much more interestingly, game developers) can actually be.

(Pre-Warning! Parts of this story contain dirty language. Sorry, it is necessary to tell the story.)

The year was 1998, and I had purchased a game called Machine Hunter, a fairly middle-of-the-road, top-down, shooter. The game itself wasn’t terribly complex, wander through mazes, find keys, rescue hostages, find the exit. The hook of the whole experience was with the titular machines. Throughout your adventure, you come across various machine like enemies, all with new and interesting weapons. As you defeat these enemies, you can take them over and use their weaponry to complete your mission. All in all, pretty fun for the time, but really doesn’t hold up these days.

But you folks don’t want to hear about that analytical sounding nonsense, you wanna hear swears, gosh darn it! Well, all right, I will move on.

As I said, the game is pretty straight forward and anyone armed with a password or two could get through it in about a week, tops. Now, since I was all of 15 years old and I didn’t have much money, I had to replay games several times until I could afford new ones. Since I had done this many times with Machine Hunter already, my friends were, rightly, sick to death of it. This lack of amusement lead us to create what I now like to call the “Guess the Password” game.

This game (as most did at the time) contained a password feature. This particular password containing 10 letters, numbers, symbols or spaces. Now most of the passwords were your typical fare, random smatterings of code to push you to the last level (QQDNIDEAIQ) or, if you needed help there were cheat codes that were sillier, more sensical phrases (2UNLIMITED, for example, will get you unlimited weapon upgrades). As I said before, I had pretty much explored everything that this game had to offer, so my friends and I decided to start trying out random phrases to see if anything stuck.

Naturally, we didn’t expect anything to actually be accepted, but we kept plugging away anyway. We tried every phrase we could imagine, none of which worked and all have been lost to time and poor memory, except one. One of my friend suggested a phrase that made all of us wriggle with immature giggles, the phrase was (sorry, mom) “PUSSY FLAP”. We entered it and laughed as we pressed start. The laughing immediately turned to victorious cheering as the game accepted the filthy phrase!

As it turns out, that particular password will start you in a two player game, both players having full weapon upgrades, on level 11 (The Undercity Sewers), with player in Ro-vac and player two in the Centurian VT-200 (yes, I did have to look up all of these facts).

Someone seriously coded this. This particular phrase actually works to enter you into the game, with, quite frankly, not all that great of a payoff. The full game has 18 levels, so this puts you at just past half of the game with not even that great of equipment. Sure, I said that the weapon upgrades are full, but the fact about those is that they are basically on a limited ammo system. You can only use those a finite amount of times. And in a run and gun kind of game, that tends to be a bit of a deterrent.

However, I digress. The main fact remains that someone, sitting in front of their computer, got so bored working on this project that they decided that they needed to slip in this little bit of anatomy to their password system. As far as I know, no one else has found this (yes, I’ve checked, I don’t suggest you do the same), and I figured I needed to bring it to light. Here you are, universe, the filthiest password I have ever seen. You’re welcome.

Transmission: out.

So… this happened to me the other day… Just thought I’d share.

Wire. Awesome. You can make traps, spawn health giving hearts, or, as you can see in my above example, build a Bird Engine to spawn jellyfish, slimes, skeletons and goldfish so I can farm their drops and sell them for great profit!

But there’s a bit of an issue.

As you can see, it's fairly complex.

Now, here’s my problem. I really want to have the block for the birds and the spawner triggers be on separate switches. However, when the wires are too close, like within one block’s distance,  they connect, fusing them together into the same circuit. Now, one thing that could operate differently would be to move the whole darn thing away from its current location. But, if you haven’t guessed, it was kind of a lot of work to get it to the point it is at now. All of my problems would be solved if they introduced a wire of a different color (blue, perhaps) that would work exactly the same as red wire but wouldn’t interact with red wire systems. That way, I could have intersecting point of wire that could trigger completely different operations.

So… There’s this really great piece of equipment, right? It’s called the Cobalt Shield. It allows you to take damage without any knockback (for the lay-person, “Knockback” is when you are hit by something and you are pushed backwards by the hit). Now, that’s pretty awesome, mainly because it will allow you to keep your footing whilst in deep caverns, traversing lava filled areas, and when dealing with damaging floor tiles. Got it? OK!

My next point: There is a resource in the game, available after you enter Hard-Mode, called Cobalt. Cobalt is the lowest grade resource you can use for crafting weapons in Hard-Mode. So, naturally, it is quite abundant.

Here’s the rub, you can only find Cobalt Shields in treasure chests found in dungeons.

WHY!?!

It is quite clearly listed as COBALT Shield. If I have a bunch of cobalt sitting around, I should be able to make a Cobalt Shield. It looks like it would require maybe a single bar of gold to make the cross on the front, but other than that, it should definitely be possible. Now, if the designers really wanted to create something we couldn’t put our greedy little hands on easily, they should rename the item. Call it an Azure Shield and no one would question it at all and they wouldn’t have to change the image for it. If not, it should be craftable.

I admit that, while making this list, I tried to avoid things that would alter the way the game itself plays. However, I find this particular issue to be a constant annoyance. Whenever there is some sort of attack on my NPC houses, all they can do is casually saunter off in a direction that will, hopefully, get them out of trouble. Usually, this ends in them finding their way into a pit that is located a little way to the right of the housing area that is quite difficult for them to get out of, forcing me to reload my game if I want them to be able to make it back to where they belong. Now, I’m not saying that they need to be able to wield Excalibur or anything, perhaps just a short sword, or better yet, NPC specific weapons. The Guide can use a bow and arrows, Arms Dealer uses guns, the Dryad uses the Thorn Chakram (maybe it doesn’t need to be this specific, but you get my point). In any case, it makes it so that Blood Moons aren’t quite as annoying when all of your NPCs die and you can’t get anyone to come back because “This housing is suitable”.

So, when you create a character, you can choose a gender. This will determine what sounds you make when you get hurt and how your clothing and armor looks. Is it too much to ask that your death messages become gender specific as well? I don’t much care to be addressed as an androgynous slab of meat in each and every death message I see. “___ fell to THEIR death.” “____  had THEIR innards become outards.” Sounds and looks are well and good, however, it would be really nice if the ridicule you receive from the game could at least recognize whether your character has a Y chromosome or not.

I have built a series of houses for my NPCs to live in. However, there is one very, very lonely house. When I try to assign my NPCs to that particular house, I get a message that says “This housing is suitable.” OK, so lets have someone live there, shall we? Oh, I can’t? Why? You said yourself that the place is suitable. So what are we getting hung up on here? This text obviously comes up when something is wrong with the place I’m trying to put someone, but it is so non-descriptive it might as well say “No”. Please address this issue in future updates.

This is something that occurred to me very early on in my experience with the game. For a very long time, I had no need, what-so-ever, for money. I never bought anything from the various merchants that would occupy the houses that I built, so I would amass a large amount of gold, silver, and copper coins. What I was hurting for, however, was resources. I was playing a MediumCore character, which meant that every single time that I died, I would lose all of my equipment. Having a misplaced step into a pit or a really relentless Eater of Souls deep into Corruption territory would make for at least a good half hour of equipment retrieval. However, I did have a LOT of money, if only there were some way to convert that into the material needed to craft new armor so I could get a leg up on getting my stuff back.