diamonds from ash

sunday morning i woke up and finished a goal i set some time ago. but like everything, there’s more to achievements than just the victory screen; there is always a tale of work and progress that often goes untold.

and who is going to tell my tales if not me?

when i was very young, i started gaming on an old graybox nes. but the next systems i had after that were a gameboy and a super nes, and darius twin was one of the few cartridges i owned for the latter. well, ‘the family’ owned them (my parents); i didn’t own anything until after i got a job and had money of my own. but that’s another story with its own lessons. point is, kid me played darius twin, with all the delight – and frustration – that came along with it.

back then i didn’t think of leaderboards or achievements or contests or any of that; the structures for those weren’t really in place yet. i played games to have fun, and in hindsight, also to escape reality. so easy to just zone out and be immersed in a game world, even if i’d done it so many times before. it was comfortable, familiar; i knew what was expected of me and i could do it, if not perfectly, at least well enough. and i spent long enough doing it that at one point i no longer had to bump up the number of lives in the options menu just to finish a game – most of the time.

as the years went by and life aggressively happened to me, i occasionally poked at the game with emulation (i never got a super nes of my own), but not seriously. i’d already beaten the game before; there wasn’t much point to doing it again, i thought, with so many other games out there, so many other things to do.

but now at this stage in my life, i no longer have to spend energy on things i don’t want to do for the sake of money just to survive; there are very few demands on my time at all. i sacrificed a lot to get here and i wouldn’t recommend my path to anyone, but again, that’s another post for another time. the main point is i have the freedom to do things like this now, whereas i didn’t previously.

i should note that i’m not the sort of person who likes achievements, as a general rule. or i wasn’t, i suppose. back when i played world of warcraft and they first got added, there was a definite shift in a lot of the player attitudes from ‘play the game and have fun and do stuff’ to ‘get achievements as fast as possible, nothing else matters’. i won’t say it’s the only thing that soured me on the game, but it was a significant component of it. but the real issue is that group achievement hunting invariably causes friction when the entire group isn’t on the same page, and that’s true no matter what game you’re playing; ultimately my group was doomed from the start because our goals were too different. i just didn’t see it back then, sadly.

so by the time i got it through my head that solo achievements – if properly crafted – could add something worthwhile to a game experience, by offering challenges a casual player might not otherwise consider attempting, i was in the right position to engage with retroachievements when i found out it existed. i still didn’t immediately jump on it, because i knew i’d spend far too much time chasing after the satisfaction of ‘number go up’. even now, the temptation to do so is there.

but the journey to darius twin mastery was more than just a steady linear grind. it was exhausting. it was a test of endurance, and pacing, and analysis. and as such, that achievement really means something to me when i look at it.

the first issue i ran into was literal physical endurance. most of the time you just hold down primary and secondary fire, which is certainly better than rapid tapping; but the price of that is the cumulative stress over the course of a run. i have rsi and the beginnings of carpal tunnel syndrome from old work trauma, and so my endurance threshold particularly for the wrist and finger area is pretty low. this means i’ve got a hard cap on how much i can do before fatigue turns into actual searing pain that lasts well into the next day. i can’t go for day-long intense clawgrip gaming sessions like i used to when i was a kid. (i’ve gamed for whole days at a time before, but not for shmups or other input-intensive games.)

so i had to work with a limit of about three full runs per day, from orga to darius, and that was that. i shaved off some time by using fastforward here and there, but one of the things i key off for remembering enemy patterns is the music – and if you pause the game, the music keeps going and desyncs from where things ‘normally’ happen. so the only rest periods i got were between enemy groups and between planets. most of the time i just blazed through as fast as possible so i could rest after the run, with maybe a break on the planet selection screen if i needed it badly.

the three-run limit meant trial and error learning was limited as well. i’m working on retroachievements as a mostly personal challenge; especially for games i played as a kid, i avoid looking up hints or secrets or someone else’s video on how to do things (unless the achievement is particularly obtuse). thankfully the darius twin set is fairly straightforward, as sets go: level up all your weapons, clear all stages, clear all stages deathless, beat the game on easy and normal, and then the one that eluded me the longest: beat the game deathless using a specific route (well, one of two options).

as a kid i almost always picked noemu. that was on the top route, and as far as i could tell, it was the easier one. enemy group placement feels more forgiving, there might even be fewer of them; i’m not sure how much of that is just me being used to them. but i can say with certainty: the whale boss of horolain is an absolute monster compared to the turtle boss of noemu. i may have attempted horolain once or twice as a kid but that whale just flattened me every time. so i stuck to noemu back then because hey, i wanted to win the game; that was the whole point, right?

but retroachievements said no, you don’t get to skip the whale. you have to do the level, and you have to do it deathless, if you want to master the game. and so i did. i learned whale boss in an afternoon, because as it turned out i mostly just needed to not die to the initial drill missile(s) and hail of bullets. whale boss is still not easy by any means; you’re likely to take at least a couple shield hits while you’re dodging bullets and those damned homing anchors. but the better you pilot on horolain, the more shield integrity you have to help you clear your final challenge: darius itself.

and darius is a planet with no scenery but stars and no enemies but a flood of minibosses – and the squids. those damned squids will haunt my nightmares. so many deaths to a left edge spawn at precisely the wrong time, as if it was planned to ruin the optimal damage spots. the final boss is a pushover compared to the surprise-hitbox soup of the level; even as a kid i could easily dunk the boss, the challenge was just getting there in the first place. and i certainly never did it without the loss of a ship or three back then.

so that was the part that held me up for an entire week of the 11 days 12 hours it took to master this set: going from deathless horolain into an attempt at deathless darius. the single-planet deathless achievements weren’t an issue, except for darius itself and also sabia, because i never went to octopus boss as a kid and i had to learn it from zero. but doing the entire route without dying through horolain and then going into darius? that’s a lot of built-up fatigue. and doing it hardcore meant no savestates, so each attempt was a full run from the start.

for some reason i was able to either one- or two-shot the deathless run through noemu (ABDEGJL as my routing). i think enemy patterns on darius may be different depending on which route you take, but it’s also possible that’s not the case and i just got very lucky with my dodges the first time around. but the horolain route (ACDFIKL) was nightmarish. death after death on darius, and after three tries, that was it for the day, because i didn’t want to risk physically damaging myself – and also, i’d get distracted, or have other things that needed to be done around the house, or whatever. i may not have a job but life keeps happening.

so i kept trying. because mastery is a sweet trophy, and when there’s only one box left to check, it’s painfully hard to resist. it was a rough week; i got sick, had the occasional migraine, had some minor anhedonia, dealt with friend trauma, dealt with my own trauma. normal life stuff, just a little extra. focusing on a game, especially one so taxing to my hands and wrists, was more exertion than i’d like to admit.

but i did it.

i figured out, after a little post-death reflection, that the second crab of the level (apparently the official name is ‘radiator’ but it is in fact based on a hermit crab) was my main nemesis when combined with the squid spawns, and that avoiding damage at that point – or some of the damage, at least – would provide enough buffer to last through the rest of the stage.

as darius titles go, darius twin is remarkably forgiving in that you keep your powerups on death (apart from your shield), so the real challenge is avoiding both projectiles and contact damage; and as previously noted, darius (the planet) is a mess of both of those. so to complete a full run, to go through an entire route, and to emerge from the mess of minibosses unscathed – or at least with a scrap of shielding left to prevent the final boss from killing your run – is simply not a small task. it would be even harder if i didn’t have ancient muscle memory and memorized attack patterns from hours upon hours of playtime long ago.

sunday morning i woke up with a sinus headache and took some meds, and then rolled up and started a run. it ended right at second crab, assassinated by a squid once again, because i got greedy. and i was about to stop there out of frustration and get some breakfast, or an energy drink, or something, but – i had just been so close last night. and one more try surely wouldn’t hurt.

second try, i stopped halfway through my damage cycle on second crab and moved away from the left edge, and finished it off with secondary weapons. should’ve done it days ago, but things are easier to recognize in hindsight. and despite some dicey moments and some bad hits to my shield, it lasted all the way to the final boss – and then one stray shot, while underneath, took off my remaining shielding, leaving me bare (and a little nervous).

but i’d done this before so many times. compared to the planet, this was a cakewalk. and so i finished off the outer boss, then executed rather sloppily on the inner boss; i’m not proud of that, but it was good enough to finish the job and that’s all i needed.

and so now darius twin is mastered, and i can finally move on to something else. i’ve still got a few incomplete games to finish, as well as a couple on my want-to-play list. but this was an experience i wouldn’t have had – a little mountain i wouldn’t have even attempted to climb – without the incentive of retroachievements; and i’m glad i did.

it was worth it.