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ZogrimAteMyHamster posted:
I still can't believe they chose "GUTS MAN" of all possible things in #1. The trio of ice, electricity, and fire seem good. Cut (blades), bomb... sure. Then... GUTS MAN (he real big oh yeeeeeee)
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Feb 22, 2023 06:13
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EconDad posted:I still can't believe they chose "GUTS MAN" of all possible things in #1. Guts Man's weapon is Super Arm which allows one to throw big rocks. Which Cut Man is weak to. Rock beats Scissors  Fake Edit: also the first 6 Robot Masters were built to actually have utility, so Guts Man is basically a big earthmoving/construction droid
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Feb 22, 2023 06:47
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ZogrimAteMyHamster posted:
I think the bosses got super dopey and you could tell they were just throwing poo poo at the wall. Snake man? Not nearly as cool as wood man. The problem got worse as the games went on, with the x bosses being hilariously dumb
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Feb 22, 2023 14:32
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The Automator posted:I think the bosses got super dopey and you could tell they were just throwing poo poo at the wall. How dare you insult the rich legacy of Vanishing Gungaroo!
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Feb 22, 2023 16:29
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The Automator posted:I think the bosses got super dopey and you could tell they were just throwing poo poo at the wall. I still don't know what the gently caress a Kuwanger is or does. Something something beetle man.
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Feb 22, 2023 18:44
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MonkeyforaHead posted:I still don't know what the gently caress a Kuwanger is or does. Something something beetle man. It’s a perversion of Kuwagata which is Japanese for stag beetle. For some unfathomable reason the Japanese X robots all had their names made into something weird, eg “Gravity Beetbood” instead of “Gravity Beetle.” The English versions made the names slightly less ridiculous but left Kuwanger intact for some reason.
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Feb 22, 2023 23:55
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EconDad posted:I had 2 and 3 growing up. It's hard for me to pick which one I like more. 2 feels much more nostalgic (metal man kills almost all), but... 3 has some things in it that were neat (the snake man stage with all of the dang bubbles, the little mini bosses where the guy jumps around and stuff). Hey I also had 2 and 3 as a kid.  I get why 2 is thought of so well because it feels like the real starting point of the series, but there's still a little jank here and there and I don't think it had totally crystallized until #3. MM4 always stuck out to me in a good way. I like the boss music the best of the original 6 NES games, and it has a couple of secret areas, which is neat. The arsenal is the most interesting of all the games too IMO. Only Drill Man and Dust Man's weapons are "thing shoot forward" and even they have a minor quirks. I also love charging up Pharoah Man's weapon and just using the mini sun overhead to kill enemies. Fun and doesn't even drain the power bar. Conversely, MM3's has some rough spots. Top Spin obviously, which is ONLY used against Shadow Man and even then kinda sucks against him. Spark Man's is just "thing shoot forward." And then you have Needle Cannon which is literally just your regular plasma shot only It's rapid fire and you can run out. 
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Feb 23, 2023 00:20
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What the gently caress was Crash Man's design all about in-universe anyway? Fucker just leapt about flinging magnetic mines.Quiet Feet posted:Conversely, MM3's has some rough spots. Top Spin obviously, which is ONLY used against Shadow Man and even then kinda sucks against him. Spark Man's is just "thing shoot forward." And then you have Needle Cannon which is literally just your regular plasma shot only It's rapid fire and you can run out. MM3 had a troubled development involving various stops & starts along the way and project leaders leaving on more than one occasion, and IIRC the dev team often floundered around saving whatever they could from constant meddling by Capcom's higher-ups while also struggling to meet deadlines. It was not a smooth time or a good time. Poor old Top Man had to be reimplemented from scratch after a power cable was accidentally unplugged, with a day's work being instantly lost. Stuff like this explains why MM3 feels a bit stitched-together and incomplete; because in a way, it is exactly that. As for the weapons, Spark Shot and Needle Cannon do indeed objectively fuckin' blow but Top Spin does have a use against the second phase of Gamma for a superfast final boss kill if you time it right, so it's not all bad news. In any case, MM4 was overall the best of the NES series -- the Charged Buster, secret areas/weapons and interesting (if odd) bosses with varied stage themes & gimmicks all coming together for the definitive NES MM experience  Okay, so Toad Man is only interesting in the sense that he is top-tier "why the gently caress are you even a boss??" material, but it still counts!
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Feb 23, 2023 01:33
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When I was a kid, I loved the Mega Man games. Not so much anymore. Replaying them now has shown me that my reflexes have gone way downhill since then. I used to ace those games but now I can barely get anywhere. They're hard as gently caress. Getting old sucks. 
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Feb 23, 2023 01:42
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...! posted:When I was a kid, I loved the Mega Man games. Not so much anymore. Replaying them now has shown me that my reflexes have gone way downhill since then. I used to ace those games but now I can barely get anywhere. They're hard as gently caress. The modern Mega Man retro collections you can pick up for like $7.50 on sale have a great rewind function. I've finished a few of them thanks to that feature. (As I said years ago in this thread, I owned 4 and 5 as a kid and rented others a lot, but I was too dumb to realize I could've written down the password grids as a code. So it was basically me playing individual levels, again and again, without ever really progressing through them.)
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Feb 23, 2023 04:24
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JethroMcB posted:I was too dumb to realize I could've written down the password grids as a code
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Feb 23, 2023 06:38
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There's a small handful of enemies that are explosively weak to Top Spin.
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Feb 23, 2023 14:00
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John Murdoch posted:There's a small handful of enemies that are explosively weak to Top Spin. A shame it tends to bug out when interacting with an enemy it doesn't one-shot. If you fixed that it would probably just be plain good, though certainly unusual (a point in its favor, IMO). Needle Shot, well....it's better than Spark Shot.
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Feb 23, 2023 20:45
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ZogrimAteMyHamster posted:
Whoa hey toad man has the best hip shake in all of gaming
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Feb 23, 2023 20:54
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I always thought the first three MM games were the best, hitting a sweet spot at 2 or 3. My main issue with later games is that figuring out which weapon was best against which boss became less rewarding. It went from “this weapon can wreck the right boss” to “this weapon does a tick or two of damage more than a regular shot.” It’s better for balance that way, but I missed the ability to mulch bosses if I did the stages in the right order.
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Feb 23, 2023 21:08
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ZogrimAteMyHamster posted:What the gently caress was Crash Man's design all about in-universe anyway? Fucker just leapt about flinging magnetic mines. That's interesting to know. It's funny because I still feel like 3 is the one where it all comes together. quote:Okay, so Toad Man is only interesting in the sense that he is top-tier "why the gently caress are you even a boss??" material, but it still counts! I think he's intended as the "use the mega buster, newb" boss. You can prevent him from ever attacking if you time it so you just get your charged shot off right before he does the rain dance. I can see new players coming in from MM3 and just blasting away with standard shots at everything and you'll take damage if you try that against him. It also makes him a boring boss but hey, whaddayagonnado?
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Feb 23, 2023 21:22
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Quiet Feet posted:That's interesting to know. It's funny because I still feel like 3 is the one where it all comes together. In the middle of a Mega Man series playthrough (currently done with all the NES and GB games) and MM3, while I like it has... problems due to it's rushed development. Especially the Doc Robot stages (good Lord, Doc Quick Man). Toad Man I actually find easier to defeat with rapid uncharged buster shots and just pivoting as he keeps jumping over you. So far my favorite games are IV and V for the Game Boy, tbh, and 4 for the NES shortly after that. IV and V just go for it with a level of effort I'm kinda impressed by with the presentation and design. Wish I could find more out about the Minakuichi Engineering team who did most of the GB games...
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Feb 23, 2023 21:40
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Lance of Llanwyln posted:Needle Shot, well....it's better than Spark Shot. Oh well, at least Spark Shot was fixed in Mega Man III for GB i.e. you can stun something, then switch out to a different weapon and kill the fucker.Silhouette posted:Whoa hey toad man has the best hip shake in all of gaming  Genpei Turtle posted:I always thought the first three MM games were the best, hitting a sweet spot at 2 or 3. My main issue with later games is that figuring out which weapon was best against which boss became less rewarding. It went from “this weapon can wreck the right boss” to “this weapon does a tick or two of damage more than a regular shot.” It’s better for balance that way, but I missed the ability to mulch bosses if I did the stages in the right order.  Quiet Feet posted:I think he's intended as the "use the mega buster, newb" boss. You can prevent him from ever attacking if you time it so you just get your charged shot off right before he does the rain dance. I can see new players coming in from MM3 and just blasting away with standard shots at everything and you'll take damage if you try that against him. It also makes him a boring boss but hey, whaddayagonnado? gourdcaptain posted:Toad Man I actually find easier to defeat with rapid uncharged buster shots and just pivoting as he keeps jumping over you. ...
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Feb 23, 2023 22:40
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I always started with toad man but thought his level was pretty hard. The wind really sucks
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Feb 23, 2023 23:21
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Personally, MM2 cannot be the best one because it has Boo Beam Trap in it.
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Feb 24, 2023 04:23
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John Murdoch posted:Personally, MM2 cannot be the best one because it has Boo Beam Trap in it. 
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Feb 24, 2023 04:51
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Makers of MM2 finalizing the last two robots… “Ah okay… FLASH man… and ‘errrr yeah CRASH man. Yep. Both make total sense roll it!”
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Feb 24, 2023 05:03
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I like how Flash Man has the power to stop time, but would rather just run forward and eat Metal Blades instead.
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Feb 24, 2023 05:19
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I like any of the Robot Masters that have set patterns, with some being easier to abuse than others. Toad Man's already been mentioned, but Skull Man (doesn't do anything at the start of the fight until you either move or fire a weapon) and Heat Man (will stand there and throw little fire spouts up until you hit him, at which point he prepares his charge move, rinse and repeat) also come to mind. Mega Man X had similar AI quirks you could abuse (Spark Mandrill always goes into an attack immediately after shaking off being frozen by Shotgun Ice, Sting Chameleon always goes back to shaking down spikes after getting knocked down by Boomerang Cutter).
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Feb 24, 2023 20:35
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On one hand, MM4 is where the robot master weapons begin to get repetitive. On the other hand, they're mostly improved versions of the originals from that point (e.g: Skull Barrier persists when you move unlike Leaf Shield).
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Feb 25, 2023 02:26
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Lance of Llanwyln posted:Top Spin is pretty decent. There are a lot of aerial enemies that it mulches, making it really convenient in certain sections. Instead of waiting around for an enemy to come into range of something else, you can just go without worries. Needle Shot lets you finish Gemini Man's stage if you used that trick to give yourself infinite health that also takes away your normal buster shot
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Feb 27, 2023 10:20
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEQTLUwduTI I continuously tried to play this as a child, but only because the music was fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zZl6ZMBH_M Ultimately my dad liked the game more.
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Mar 8, 2023 04:30
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Not exactly retro. Well, maybe. I dunno. Could be argued either way, I think. World of Warcraft in 2004-2006. The original, vanilla version, before any expansions. A lot of the player base, myself included, had never played an MMO before. I was also rather new to PC games in general, only dabbling in them for a few years prior on lovely hand-me-down (mine) or store-bought prebuilt (my former partner's) PCs. I didn't know it beforehand, but I basically built my first gaming PC just to play that single game. Anyway, none of us in my guild knew what the hell we were doing. We also had shittier internet back then. I remember just dying constantly, like all the drat time. I'm amazed we made it as far as we did (most of the way through the penultimate raid dungeon). There were no strategy guides for this sort of game. Well, there were, but by the time they were actually published, the game had been patched with a slew of changes so they were never accurate. Even the loving manual that came in the box was full of outdated BS. Most of the gameplay tips were rumors and guesses, a lot of which were flat-out wrong. But we had no idea at the time. The community was blown away at how easy the game was when Classic released in 2019. At least, easier than we remembered it. That's because in the many years between Retail and Classic, people had basically solved the game by playing on reasonably-accurate pirate servers and sharing knowledge amongst those communities. Also much better PCs and internet connections certainly helped. Being on the ground floor for that particular gaming zeitgeist sure was something though. Wandering this absolutely massive (for its time) alien world, not knowing how to do anything. It was wild. I'm sure EverQuest and UO players felt similarly when those games were new. WoW was a step beyond because the player base was so much larger in size. Ofecks fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Mar 13, 2023 |
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Mar 13, 2023 05:29
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Ofecks posted:Not exactly retro. Well, maybe. I dunno. Could be argued either way, I think. It cannot be overstated how opaque WoW was in the beginning. Combined with the lack of a wiki that even small games have now, people just didn't really know what to do at a high level.
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Mar 13, 2023 20:44
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Name Change posted:It cannot be overstated how opaque WoW was in the beginning. Combined with the lack of a wiki that even small games have now, people just didn't really know what to do at a high level. wheres mankirks wife
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Mar 13, 2023 21:12
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My stomping grounds were in City of Heroes, but it was much the same there. The quaintness of the early days, obsoleted manuals, bad strategy guides*, it even had its own version of Mankirk's wife! *It took a bit longer for Prima to put out guides for CoH, and even then they managed to get stuff wrong or be immediately outdated. They had a scheme where the guides were in binder form and they'd sell update packs as time went on so you could expand and presumably update them with new info. Naturally they made two base guides and then never produced any of the extra packs.
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Mar 14, 2023 01:16
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I forget if I ever posted this before but there was a game on the Spectrum back in the day called Dark Sceptre. In it, you were in charge of a faction of vaguely medieval-fantasy guys. You had a couple dozen units spread out over a huge map. You could give them individual commands to go to certain places, to seek out objects, to kill specific other units. There were four or five factions altogether. One of the computer factions possessed the Dark Sceptre and the goal of the game was to get it. I never had a goddamn idea what I was doing. At *all*. The sprites were gigantic for the Speccy.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE_6tpkIvgo
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Mar 18, 2023 16:17
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Zereth posted:wheres mankirks wife Hahah. The Alliance equivalent of that* was "anyone seen the messenger?" I think around the time that I started playing (Summer 2005), the databases like Alakazam and Thottbott were a thing, and they helped tremendously, especially the user comments on stuff. I didn't know about them until I was nearly max-level, though. * in Warcraft games, there are two warring factions: The Alliance and The Horde. You have to choose one and they have different campaigns.
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Mar 18, 2023 16:32
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When I was about 4 we got an Amiga 500. Commodore were a really well-run company so the Amiga always came with some kind of themed pack of solid 1/10 games. I think our theme must have been movie tie-ins cos we had several dreadful Ocean efforts with no instructions. Thus it came to pass that one of the first video games I ever played was Nightbreed, based on a movie I'd never heard of and still haven't seen. Nightbreed was mind-alteringly bad. You chugged around a brown little map in a stolen car between little proto-Warioware minigames which invariably ended in death or institutionalisation. You'd get ventilated by the cops at a roadblock, have your neck ripped out by a dude with snakes for hair while trying to QWOP away through a graveyard, or just randomly smash cut to your guy screaming in a straitjacket. I played this quite a lot even though I was scared of it. Eventually I beat a couple of minigames somehow and stumbled into a platforming/action type bit where I got domed by a guy with a red-dot sight and never touched the fucker again e: we also had Archipelagos, which I *had* instructions for in I think an early issue of Amiga Power my brother bought? and I still had almost no idea how to beat a level or indeed how to pronounce the name. that game was genuinely strange, you were a disembodied force floating around procgen island chains trying to purify them by blowing up obelisks while sinister trees spread the contaminating blood of the ancients through the ground and darkened the skies Shogi fucked around with this message at 21:31 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 21:23
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E.T. on the Atari. I think I beat the game, but I don't know. You just wander around, and have to throw yourself into pits to find objects, and I wasn't sure why I needed them or what they were for. As a little kid I just kept beating my brain against it in spiteful determination to figure out what was going on, instead of just ejecting the cartridge and playing Yars' Revenge instead. I might have played this game more than anyone else alive. I don't even like the movie. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Jun 1, 2023 |
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Jun 1, 2023 22:52
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Halloween Jack posted:E.T. on the Atari. I think I beat the game, but I don't know. You just wander around, and have to throw yourself into pits to find objects, and I wasn't sure why I needed them or what they were for. I 100% get this and understand it, because I had the same experience as a kid. As an adult though, E.T. 100% suffers from a case of 'read-the-manualitis'. If you actually sit down to read it (Flaw #1 - what 5-year-old actually reads a game manual?), it's actually... A pretty basic game that's straightforward and relatively easy to beat? You'd still be better served by playing Yars' Revenge, though.
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Jun 22, 2023 17:24
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LuiCypher posted:(Flaw #1 - what 5-year-old actually reads a game manual?) I never played ET but I definitely read the manuals of games starting around age 4-5. You think I'm gonna figure out Solar Jetman without a manual??? hell nah. I especially remember reading the manual for the original Legend of Zelda over and over again, even though that's a game that has far less RTFM-itis.
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Jun 23, 2023 00:43
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From what I recall, ET still has some pretty obnoxious control/hit detection issues, but I suppose that ultimately puts it on part with a lot of other games of its vintage. It's certainly not as outright wretched as its infamy implies.
John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 01:47
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...! posted:When I was a kid, I loved the Mega Man games. Not so much anymore. Replaying them now has shown me that my reflexes have gone way downhill since then. I used to ace those games but now I can barely get anywhere. They're hard as gently caress. i thought this too but then i just buckled down and played a lot. now i'm much better than i ever was as a kid. the only thing kids really have going for them is time, and having a fully formed brain is a much bigger advantage if you're patient enough to redevelop your skills - and mega man in particular is not really about reflexes, it's about game knowledge. there are some reflex challenges for sure but mostly it's about pulling out the right weapons at the right times throughout the stages and learning the bosses. everything feels like a reflex challenge the first time through but as soon as you know what to do that aspect goes way into the background
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Jun 23, 2023 05:16
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John Murdoch posted:From what I recall, ET still has some pretty obnoxious control/hit detection issues, but I suppose that ultimately puts it on part with a lot of other games of its vintage. It's certainly not as outright wretched as its infamy implies. ET only really has one major issue, with getting out of pits. You hold up to float out of pits, but once you’re out, continuing to hold up will cause you to fall back into the pit. Once you know that though getting out is pretty easy. And yeah ET is not nearly as bad as its reputation would suggest—it’s better than most of the 2600’s library (but only because of the sheer number of titles that were garbage shovelware)
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Jun 23, 2023 18:37
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