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Kitten ClanClan
Joined: 15 Dec 2011
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 Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2012 8:25 pm |
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| 108 wrote: |
| megaman 9, on the other hand, straight-up has enemies which jump straight up out of pits, hit you, and knock you back. so yes, the solution is to jump outward a tiny bit, then pull back as the enemy starts to rise, land on the ledge again, wait for the enemy to be on the way down, and then jump. |
are you talking about these guys? they don't show up often, and you can clearly see when they first show up that if you try to blindly jump over the pit, you take a hit. i guess you can fault the game for having a "gotcha" moment making you lose a fractional amount of health, but the danger these enemies are meant to present are to make platforming more intimidating, not to make you take damage. if you hit one mid-jump over a pit, you fall and die. mega man has frequently used enemies popping out of pits to add tension to small jumps that would otherwise not be particularly difficult. they are always infinitely spawning (or in mega man 5's case, invincible).
the pits they come out of are generally telegraphed ahead of time by being ones that are really easy to jump over. before they're a known element in a stage, i guess they serve a single gotcha moment to take a couple life points away, but after they're a known element, their placement is generally pretty obvious and they tend to serve a purpose in later (wily) levels in making otherwise simple platforming more challenging.
mega man 1 had an enemy like this. it was a pill that would pop out of the ground in bomb man's stage and would then explode into four pills. they later reused that enemy in the 2nd wily stage. these enemies have always served as being only slightly challenging to overcome in the robot master stage they appear in, then much more challenging once they come back in a wily stage or two... and i've always felt they serve that purpose well. they only disrupt momentum slightly (no more than stopping to shoot any other enemy) and they're a good way of testing a player's awareness of the level design. i can't think of any game where an enemy like that pops out of a pit over a particularly difficult jump aside from maybe III on the game boy.
the ones in mega man 4 are particularly interesting. they pop straight up out of the ground like the others, but float slowly downward in a zig-zag pattern. because of their slow descent, if you kill them on the way down, another will pop up by the time you've killed the first and decided to make the jump. you'll die. you have to kill them on the way up, which forces the player to focus on shooting before jumping, thus adding tension to jumping over a pit the player would otherwise hop over without even stopping to think about it.
admittedly, i don't remember 2 or 3 having any enemies like these, but 2 does have those guys that have relatively difficult to predict spawn times that will infinitely spawn out of holes in the wall. in heat man's stage in particular, these will give you a lot of trouble near pits in a very similar way to the aforementioned enemies, because of their holes often being positioned over them or near them (to where if you were to collide with one, you'd still fall into lava/a pit).
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the old megamans were purposeful in their difficulty man :-/
the point about megaman 9 is especially sharp for me because, to celebrate megaman 9's release, me and my bro stabo played through megaman 1-3 the day before! so! |
i am sick of hearing this from people who say "1-3." really, really sick of it. it is the most tired rhetoric i get out of mega man fans to be dismissive of the latter half of the nes games but put the third game up on this pedestal. 3 is a mean game with a lot of mean design decisions. the 8 robot master stages hold up pretty well, but literally half of mega man 3 is lazily, cruelly designed and some of the very worst material mega man has to feature on the nes.
it's a game where they had to deal with the director leaving during the project, and the scramble to make it the best it could be while leaving tasteless homages to its predecessor really show they knew they fucked it up (the doc robots don't even copy the mm2 patterns properly). why it is so highly regarded is often confusing to me, but if you actually beat mm3 right before you hopped over to mm9 and didn't consider 9 a breath of fresh air after the horrible doc robot stages and phoned in wily stages from 3, you were either wearing some serious goggles or have something wrong with you.
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Kitten ClanClan
Joined: 15 Dec 2011
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| Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2012 2:56 am |
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| 108 wrote: |
| Kitten ClanClan wrote: |
| i am sick of hearing this from people who say "1-3." really, really sick of it. |
i don't know if it was "goggles" that made megaman 9 seem unfairer than megaman 3 so much as it was experience with rote memorization of megaman 3 that made megaman 3 easier. so whatev
btw i have always liked 4-6 myself |
try playing 9 a few more times. it's a little excessive on the platforming gimmicks, but i think it's one of the fastest mega man games you can learn. on my 2nd attempt at playing it (ever, and after having died a pretty fair amount learning the ropes the first time) i didn't even die, and i only used a single e-tank on wily's last form. 10 is a total piece of shit, though. don't play 10 if you haven't. it's amazingly bad. 9, even though it's well designed, does several things i don't like (both aesthetically and mechanically). i really think it's a good game, but it's far more of a fangame than a real sequel.
i've been playing all the games a lot recently (finally cleared them all w/o dying or using an e-tank, something i'd never really bothered with before other than on 2) since i usually only play 'em once every couple years once or twice each.
mm2 actually very briefly has those invincible fish that pop up in the wily stages that appear out of large pits, and while 3 technically doesn't have anything that pops out of a pit, it has my most hated "enemy that vertically and horizontally slowly homes in on you," the fucking screw that puts itself together, often appearing over pits. there's a segment in spark man's stage where these things will only appear just as you're about to jump over pits that already have pretty difficult jumps, and they'll try to trap you. they are total "haha gotcha" bullshit that completely disrupt momentum because you can't even shoot them until they're done assembling.
this is the only video i looked at on youtube that DOESN'T have the (incredibly, incredibly, destroys all platforming difficulty version of) rush jet (that is only in 3) fly over this shit, and this person's videos are rehearsed by their own admission to a ridiculous degree. nearly any mistake here is any instant death, and if you jump into a screw or get hit by the end that flies from the left side of the screen, you're dead. i think there's a worse part in the doc robot stage with these, but i don't feel like looking it up. i mean, nothing pops out of the pits in 3, but it has more awful, unpredictable than any of the other games.
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Kitten ClanClan
Joined: 15 Dec 2011
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| Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2012 6:51 pm |
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| 108 wrote: |
| i . . . might not actually like megaman games. i don't even know anymore. |
i think you're just tired. mm3 has way more bullshit than others. at first, it's mostly isolated (like that bit of spark man's stage), but it becomes completely out of control in the doc robot stages, especially when fighting the doc robots. they're poor man's copies of mm2 robot masters (most of them don't copy the patterns just right) with enormous hitboxes that do extra damage. if you don't go in there without knowing their weakness or prepared to use an e-tank you are going to die on almost all of them. also the stages are completely insane and clearly designed around rush jet.
i really think one of the reasons the game's platforming flaws are so overlooked is because people just abuse the hell out of rush jet when they play it. there's one segment i never do without it involving those platforms that nearly instantly drop you when you jump on them in shadow man's stage revisited.
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| maybe i like megaman x. i should try that again. |
the x games have excellent presentation, but once you've played enough action platformers, they're just way too easy. too much freedom of movement removes platforming difficulty and you start the game as a steamroller that eventually becomes an invincible wrecking ball.
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| though yeah: it's really not that fun to watch people play megaman! i'm discovering that today. |
for the most part, i really hate watching people play mega man. almost every video of the classic series on youtube is by awful players who either fumble tremendously or have rehearsed the game so many times before uploading a recording that the material is stilted to the point it hurts to watch - there's nothing organic about it. there's very little where people know what they're doing and actually play the game both well and as it was intended to be played.
usually, the nes games are extremely well balanced and model nes games - there are only a few rough patches here and there. i often come back to them years apart when i've forgotten most of the important nuances to all the levels, and i can still beat them using minimal to zero continues and no e-tanks just because they're so well made. mm3, on the other hand, has a ton of problems, yet it's mysteriously hailed the majority of the time as either the 2nd best or best of the nes mega man games.
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Kitten ClanClan
Joined: 15 Dec 2011
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| Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2012 12:19 pm |
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oh sorry i'm mostly just referring to the snes games. i... guess you can include x4 in there. i like to pretend x5 and forward don't really exist.
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Kitten ClanClan
Joined: 15 Dec 2011
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| Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2012 2:25 pm |
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smithee -
i think the guy guarding the armor in x1 looking like auto was just a coincidence. mm7 came out a decent amount of time after x, and it was the first time he ever showed up. think of mega man like you would the peanuts universe - no one ever grows up, everyone always stays roughly the same to continue having fun adventures. x is more of a hypothetical future than an actual sequel to the classic timeline, and the only official thing establishing the timelines together was published in the rockman x complete works book, iirc. and, even then, it involves a pretty hasty and bizarre explanation, and i'm pretty sure it doesn't say that x is the canonical progression of the classic universe. they're mostly independent of each other with a few recurring things.
they released that book in english, but i haven't picked it up yet. it sells for a lot online right now (and most are listed around $400 but no one buys those), but udon is planning to reprint it early next year, anyway. will need to remember to pick it up. lots of comic stores are still stocked up on 'em, but i live in bumblefuck, so i don't really have luck with that. it was cheap when i bought mega man complete works, but i didn't feel like getting it at that moment.
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regarding x1's quality, i'd definitely put it up for consideration in being the best of the 3 snes games in terms of presentation, but it's a really mechanically dull and mediocre game to an extent far greater than either of its sequels.
also, x3 has some cause and effect, but it's sometimes more subtle than x1 was about it. here's what i can recall:
beating the 2nd miniboss in blast hornet's stage (requires picking up the ride armor, it's the one that is loading boxes onto a plane) will cause gravity beetle's level to no longer be filled with boxes. i think this lets you grab a heart tank.
beating gravity beetle's stage has a subtle, but really cool effect in that it changes an enemy you see in most stages. gravity beetle's stage apparently produced cannons for (and repainted?) these guys pictured below. the doppler stages will have them back in their upgraded, red forms, and the change hardly effects how you fight them, but it's neat.
if you beat volt catfish, the street lights in blizzard buffalo's stage will be on and flickering. this also activates the lights in the part of his area that is underground (just before a pit you can secretly slide down to go in a teleporter to vile). it will also activate the elevator's in vile's mini-stage, which makes it a lot easier (especially when escaping).
when you fight bit and byte, they both have two different weaknesses. if you strike the blow on them that ends the fight with a weapon they're weak to, rather then escaping, they'll die right there on the spot. if you leave just one alive, you'll get different dialogue when fighting the first doppler stage boss (which is a combined form of both of them, even if one is dead). if you defeat both of them, you fight a different boss, entirely.
when you fight vile for the first time (IF you fight him at all), if you finish him off with a weapon that he's weak to (like bit and byte, he has two different weaknesses), he'll die there. if you don't finish him off, he drastically changes the second doppler stage, which will now look like someone went on a psychotic rampage through it. enemies will be different in addition to the stage looking different, and the miniboss and boss of the level will not appear, having already been destroyed. when you get to the end, you'll fight vile, again, but he'll be using a different ride armor and it will be a very different fight with new dialogue.
during the doppler stages, zero will also help you out a bit. he'll fight the 2nd part of a miniboss in the first stage, he'll teleport in and tell you he's going to destroy the master computer or some shit in the last stage, and he'll save you during the ending (instead of doppler sacrificing himself to save you).
i wanted to mention all this stuff because x3 tends to get a harsh rep, when i really sincerely believe it does a lot of cool stuff.
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Kitten ClanClan
Joined: 15 Dec 2011
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| Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2012 4:44 pm |
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benren, fuck off.
you've followed me into nearly every thread i've posted about mega man in (which is a lot of threads) among several other threads, and then said something obnoxious and directed at me in response. knock it off. i've made it pretty fucking clear i don't want to be bothered by you, and ignoring you still leaves your comments visible whenever i preview a post i'm about to make in one of these threads (which is often).
seriously. stop. this is the first time i have ever responded directly to you, and i really hope it's the last.
edit:
http://i.imgur.com/gGntU.png
some examples of going after me so ya'll don't think i'm crazy. almost all these posts were made with him knowing i have him on ignore. this was all done on a really quick search, i could dig up a lot more, and that's not counting shit lost to being deleted in the axe. there's a bizarre precedence here and i really want it knocked off.
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