SB’s Gaming Memories: Crunching HP

Today’s memory is more of a funny one than happy one.

See, when I’ve been attacking away at a boss and it still hasn’t died yet, I start wondering “Just how much HP does this guy HAVE???.” I devised a somewhat low tech way of finding out one day while playing the original Paper Mario.

At the time, we (my sister and me) had rented Paper Mario for a weekend, and on the second day of our rental (you could keep them for three days), we had made it to Flower Fields (Chapter 6), and were getting set to face the boss, Huff N Puff.

To set up the rest of the story, some context is in order:

Huff N Puff spawns cloud bits every turn. He can either eat these to cure himself, or send them at you to drain your HP, so it’s important to take them out quickly. On top of this, he has a super attack that can do 10-16 damage.

Knowing this, you can likely imagine we were having a lot of trouble, and despite all the damage we did, we wound up dying every time we fought.

Finally, I decided to give up the rest of my shift (we were playing in shifts, like we usually did on long games) and went to find some way to determine how much HP Huff N Puff had, since we hadn’t put on the badge that displays HP. Nor had we a computer with access to GameFAQs in easy reach…so I came up another idea: why not use a calculator?

So I went and “borrowed” my mom’s calculator…while it could only do the four basic operations, that was all I needed.

Armed with the calculator, I began adding up the damage we did in an attempt to determine his HP. But somewhere on the way, I must’ve added wrong, as my final answer wound up totally wrong.

Finally, we looked up the correct answer on GameFAQs: 70 HP. Our next bout would involve me subtracting the damage we did from that number until we hit zero or a negative number. On that round, we finally won.

Thankfully, I haven’t found a need to crunch numbers since then.

Happy gaming,
SparklingBlue