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From the thumbnail I thought it was mustard.
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Apr 20, 2017 21:33
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Crazy Achmed posted:Who was it that said (in this thread, I think, or even in one of the videos?) that the poor/lazy way to increase the difficulty of a level is to define a very narrow path through it and reward any deviation with failure? I'm pretty sure that was me, talking about the MMX1 hardmode hack. But I'm also pretty sure I was just cribbing from some other source elsewhere, so I won't lay claim to any great original insight.
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Apr 27, 2017 18:19
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The real question is, why are the scores using average instead of median? 
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Apr 27, 2017 18:43
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magikid posted:Is this why every Fixed that for you. The fighting is so bitter because the stakes are so small.
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Apr 27, 2017 21:38
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FPzero posted:Let's stop this before it goes further. Oh yeah, I was doing an LP in this thread. Seriously though, work has picked up the pace lately, plus I started replaying Exile 3 in my spare time. But, just for you, I spent a couple hours mashing out another update!  Part 3: Poor Life Choices 
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Apr 29, 2017 04:19
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ManxomeBromide posted:I find myself with two major questions after this update: Grey doors open under one of two circumstances: either you kill everything in the room (not possible in that room, as it has an infinite crab generator), or you kill a boss in the same area. In Eris, all the bosses are in the "same area" because it uses a single map for the entire game, but it's not unreasonable for a player familiar with the game engine to think "okay, I just killed some bosses, I should go check that door again." Off the top of my head, the only uses of this trigger in the vanilla game are for the boss's treasure rooms (Kraid's Varia, Draygon's Space Jump, Ridley's energy tank, etc.), "re-enabling" doors in the Wrecked Ship after Phantoon dies, and to enable a shortcut and access to plasma in Maridia after Draygon dies. Note that for that latter, the game forces you to go past the now-unlocked door on your way out, which lessens the "spooky action at a distance" effect. The grapple beam is either amazing or useless, because the things it hurts always die in one hit (excepting the Draygon script kill), and as a corollary, the things it doesn't hurt take no damage from it whatsoever. Most small enemies can be killed by it; conveniently, they're also the most common enemy type in the early game. And since you start with such an underpowered main weapon, compared to the health that enemies have, the grapple beam comes in very handy for the early game. Notice how it took four uncharged Spazer shots to kill one crab. Some hacks modify the Grapple Beam to cause it to deal thousands of damage to Samus if she hits a vulnerable enemy with it, presumably because the game would be too easy otherwise.  EDIT: incidentally, the Golden Torizo fight can be a pain if you don't cheese it. The bridge I walked across while first entering the room is made of "destroyable by enemies" blocks, which means that GT will turn the nice flat arena into a series of pits with lava in them. It's far from an impossible fight, primarily because (as you probably notice) GT doesn't have its beam spam attack, so all it can do is try to walk on you or throw item orbs at you. I probably should have fought it fairly, but I stumbled onto the staircase cheese and couldn't bring myself to not use it. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Apr 29, 2017 |
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Apr 29, 2017 15:26
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PurpleXVI posted:That fire flower seemed a bit pointless. Did you even get to hit anything with it? He'd've had a fireflower much earlier if he didn't keep jumping into footballs. There were plenty of powerups throughout that level, that was just the last one. Ninjis would have been better than footballs though.
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May 1, 2017 21:15
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Something I found kind of baffling was having two paths that both go to the same goal, with neither being an explicit shortcut or bonus area. As far as I can recall, that only happens in one level in the original game, and that's the Chocolate Island one where having multiple paths is the entire gimmick. The Eris LP will be back in...a bit. I'm a bit distracted by trying to upgrade my computer's GPU to something that's less than 8 years old. Unfortunately my first purchase was only able to communicate with the DVI port without crashing.  I may end up transferring the master encode and my scripts to my laptop so I can continue working on it while my desktop is Frankensteined on.
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May 15, 2017 16:28
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Cattail Prophet posted:You might want to try equipping Zepeli with that fake mustache, actually, assuming you haven't already. The command changes that relics grant have also been randomized, so it could actually turn one of his commands into something useful! So the question is, is there a command Zepeli could get that would rescue him from the junk pile? ...I guess Goner would do it.
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May 26, 2017 04:13
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Come to think, Mario games in general don't have much in the way of sewer levels, do they? There was one in SMRPG, I guess, and of course there's pipes all over the place, but not much that you could look at and say "yep, that's a sewer level." I guess Nintendo is smarter than your average game developer.
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May 30, 2017 20:56
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Hey, remember this thing? I sure don't! It turns out that having access to the other 80% of your games library that only runs on Windows (when you normally run OSX) is super-distracting. Also, nuDOOM is a great game. But it's not Super Metroid: Eris, which is why we're here! Part 4: Quantum Thermodynamics  The bots guarding the powerbombs respawn if you kill them, and have ludicrous amounts of health, which is why I Ninja Pirates have always been easy if you know the trick.
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Jun 6, 2017 02:04
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FPzero posted:Evasion might just be a gimped Screw Attack but back in 2009 it was freaking awesome to have a hack release with a "new" item in it. Hell, even today new upgrades are few and far between. The latest I've seen is a fully functional Spider Ball created by a Japanese hacker. The english speaking community is attempting to work with him to make the upgrade public. Yeah, as a player Evasion is great and fits in well with the other mobility improvements in the hack (being able to respin mid-jump, and retaining runspeed when you land). And let's face it, OG Screw Attack was overpowered. What Samus says is not always what I personally feel about the hack.
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Jun 6, 2017 14:18
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FPzero posted:It's turned out to be a much longer series than I thought it would be but I guess that's what happens when there are nearly 120 levels to play in it. You're giving me and liquidy more time to finish our respective projects, so I for one appreciate it. And yeah, you're doing good work. Not just the content, but the expert analysis of the levels is great. Thanks for the LP!
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Jun 6, 2017 18:08
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Part 5: Cuteness Through Murder  It's pretty easy to get lost in this section. There's plenty of loops and barriers that require powerups to proceed -- for example, if we didn't have Spring Ball, then we wouldn't have been able to get Wave Beam. In the interests of keeping the video flowing well, I don't show off the entire area here, mostly just skipping over some connecting passageways. The "gravity jump" section is probably the most "ROM-Hacky" section of the game, in that it relies on a glitch that a) is pretty cool game-mechanics-wise, and b) is really nonobvious unless you hang out in the Super Metroid community. The gist of it is that when you're underwater, you decelerate unusually slowly. This can be used to jump really high if you're able to enter the water at high speed. In the original game this trick can be used to enter Lower Norfair without having Space Jump, by jumping, then immediately pausing and unequipping the Gravity Suit.
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Jun 14, 2017 04:58
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Crazy Achmed posted:Eris seems really impressive but it's just so visually busy I have a hard time telling what's background, what's on the same layer as the player, and what's foreground. Are there many custom sprites? It seems like they make really good use of the available assets, anyway. Custom sprites are limited to bosses, I believe, but there's plenty of custom tiles all over the place. EDIT: get that OUT of my face posted:I remembered that the Eris LP restarted and tried to watch the third episode, but I could only take so many item placement fakeouts and blocks that were indestructible with the weapons and items you had at the moment. I mean, that's part of a Metroid game at some level: you need to see the barrier before you get the item that lets you pass the barrier. There's more such barriers in Eris than in the original game, granted -- and you also have considerably freer movement in Eris, as the game rarely "locks you in" to a subset of the overall map. It turns out that making a Metroid map with similar quality as Super Metroid's map is a really hard problem, especially considering the movement capabilities that Super Metroid gives you. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jun 14, 2017 |
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Jun 14, 2017 14:25
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The morphball tunnels / other secret passages are almost always clued somehow, most often either by a "broken"-looking tile (like the one leading to that room with the four item hiding spots, three of which were fake) or by a conspicuous dead end. The clues can be pretty subtle though, and I've been erring on the side of speed rather than detail so I haven't exactly been giving you much time to see them before I break them open. That said, there are absolutely a lot of Super Metroid hacks out there that don't do a good job of cluing secret passageways; I remember playing one where the mandatory path included divining that a huge, completely blank wall had a single breakable block in it. And if you're going to get lost or stuck in Eris, this is where you'll do it; the density of mandatory secrets is highest here. I'm not a fan of the water though. A lot of the sections in this video didn't make use of it in any meaningful way. If DMantra just wanted to convey that the area was wet, he could have accomplished that by placing the occasional "puddle" instead.
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Jun 14, 2017 20:28
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dis astranagant posted:New Redesign makes suitless Maridia your punishment for chickening out on the hell run. Redesign remains far too colossal for me to want to bother with. Compare the Redesign map (spoilers, obviously) to the vanilla map. Norfair alone is about twice the size of a single zone in the original game. Plus the game is filled with morphball mazes (and they reduced morphball rolling speed by a ridiculous amount), gates that have to be unlocked somewhere else in the map, an IIRC completely-unclued Lost Woods-style maze, a massive Prime-style scavenger hunt to unlock Tourian, and oh yeah, Tourian itself is like 80% morphball tunnels. Pacing is a vital aspect of any game, and Redesign just becomes a slog by the time you've done the first Norfair trip...at which point I don't think you're even a third of the way through the game. Coincidentally, that's about where I quit when I tried to play it. And I've played other big hacks, like Super Zero Mission and Phazon.
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Jun 16, 2017 15:38
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It gets back to pacing, really. If Rescue Mission actually had a good density of new and interesting content in all eight of those worlds, then it might be worth playing. But there's only so far you can stretch the vanilla tileset, and of course adding new powerups is extremely difficult. Which means those eight worlds would devolve into "navigating a bunch of samey-looking corridors, knowing that there can't possibly be anything interesting in most of them". Relatedly, to my knowledge, the only new powerups that have been developed for Super Metroid are a) turning walljump into a powerup. b) letting you equip all five beams simultaneously (it's broken as gently caress, mostly because the damage is ludicrously high). c) boost ball like in the Prime games.
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Jun 18, 2017 02:08
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On that note, let's go back to a game that does have a good density of variety to its setting. Perhaps too dense, really. Part 6: I'm Going to Blow This Planet Up  This video includes my favorite powerup puzzle and my, uh, "favorite" random bit of scenery. Oh yeah, Kraid's in it too.
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Jun 18, 2017 03:14
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FPzero posted:
Too much "whoops you retroactively hosed up" in that last level for my tastes. Didn't remember to bring a block with you? Jumped onto a fall-platform (whatever those are called) too early? You're now dead, you just have to wait a little longer before you can restart. I mean, you don't have to wait long, it's not like discovering at the end of a level that you should have brought a springboard from the beginning of the level, but it's still kind of rude. Also, yay, you're back!
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Jun 21, 2017 04:47
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What's the "1f0" tile? The second level was cool but the second half was too hard IMO.
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Jun 25, 2017 21:48
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I looked up GP Rain, and it's 2 damage per gil, not 1. So it's not as bad as it looks. And it is of course by miles the best thing Zepeli can do that isn't "leave the party".
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Jun 29, 2017 23:25
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Any level that lies to you about how to solve it is a bad level. I would be seriously steamed if I wasted 15 minutes trying to do the thing the level told me to do, only to give up and then have a later message box go "oh, that doesn't work? lol, try this instead."
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Jun 30, 2017 18:21
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Mak0rz posted:Ah, that's it. I knew it sounded familiar. As they said, it's from Minish Cap, one of the dungeons.
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Jul 10, 2017 19:34
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You really should've gone to get Mog so you could get Umaro. I think at this point he has to have the Tools and Morph commands, right? Or are not all commands guaranteed to be on all characters?
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Jul 14, 2017 18:40
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It occurs to me to wonder how many level vs. level comparisons (e.g. people answering "is Oh No! better or worse than PleaseHold The Line") would be required before you had a fairly decent ranking of the levels. You could farm out these questions to the broader community. You'd still need moderation to assign penalties, but moderators could be notified by the community instead of having to discover issues by playing the levels themselves. An approach like that ought to let you crowdsource the judging process and allow individuals to not have to play every level to participate in scoring, without then ending up with wildly inconsistent scoring metrics (e.g. one player that only ever uses the top 25% of the scoring range).
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Jul 18, 2017 20:18
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I mean, that seems to be a problem anyway, with highly-scored levels in this compilation that aren't very interesting when grayboxed. But yeah, that is the problem with the wisdom of crowds -- crowds tend to be dumbasses.
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Jul 18, 2017 20:38
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Part 7: One Small Problem  Draygon is kind of tricky to work with in romhacks. People who have mostly only played vanilla Super Metroid are often used to just killing Draygon with the Grapple Beam, and consequently never really learn how to fight her (him? her? I'm gonna go with her) properly. Meanwhile, experienced players that do know how to cope with Draygon tend to find her to be pretty easy to kill, because she's very pattern-based. Wait for her to start spewing gunk, lay a powerbomb, then run underneath her while firing. However, it's also really difficult to make her fight harder without making it frustrating at the same time. I've seen all kinds of poo poo pulled in the Draygon arena, most of it awful. Walling off the turrets (so they can still shoot you but you can't destroy them, let alone grapple them), cycling the water on and off so you're constantly alternating between water physics and air physics, scattering spikes everywhere, you name it. Eris goes for relatively tame modifications by just leaving you underwater and varying the terrain enough that you have to jump instead of running. Draygon's still reasonably straightforward under those constraints, especially if you've been at all thorough in getting powerups; note how much damage her tail does if she grabs you though. This fight is optional, by the way, but if you don't do it, you get to do some heat runs later. I'd much rather do the fight, thanks. Plus, the Chozen Armor is one of those rare armor palette swaps that doesn't look absolutely awful. It's kind of weird; Samus looks like she's encased in clay. But "weird" fits well with the hack's overall aesthetic. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Jul 20, 2017 |
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Jul 20, 2017 03:17
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AmiYumi posted:It's very "DeviantArt OC DO NOT STEAL", with the glowing red visor and otherwise monochrome palette. But at least the colors aren't horribly garish. I wasn't kidding when I said I've seen some awful color palettes.
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Jul 21, 2017 16:58
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As a kid, I always gave the Offering to Sabin, because he was in my party non-stop and had by far the highest Fight damage. I seem to recall him hitting for upwards of 30k damage with Genji Glove + Offering. Optimal? Not remotely. But as a dumb kid I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
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Jul 29, 2017 02:52
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Kurui Reiten posted:I really wish the palette stuff was more interesting. It seems like it just slaps everyone with some random green and purple mess every time I do it. I want poo poo like palettes that actually look like they're viable. Good palettes are really hard to do well, so it's no surprise that a randomizer would turn out lovely palettes. It'd probably have better luck if it just shuffled the existing palette assignments rather than come up with wholly new ones.
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Jul 29, 2017 03:16
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Part 8: Ol' Face Ship  I don't want to spoil this episode, but it has some pretty crazy stuff in it. The one thing I will note is that where we got an E-tank in this episode is where the Plasma Beam was in the original version of the hack. If I recall correctly, there's a one-way shortcut from it to Samus' ship (that little nook on the left side of the room).
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Jul 30, 2017 02:04
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FPzero posted:You didn't forget to get the map and story data through the gray door in the room preceding Crocomire's fight did you? I did not. I'm pretty sure you are required to go there to progress. (edit: to clarify, the door's locked right now; it will unlock later) TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Jul 30, 2017 |
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Jul 30, 2017 15:21
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I recorded the entire playthrough before I published episode 1. Don't worry, we're going in there. 
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Jul 30, 2017 15:36
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Aithon posted:I don't know if I already said it, but I love the narration and the attitude you give Samus. The hack alone is interesting, but it's also a really good LP! Aw, thanks!  My goal was to make the antithesis of what we got in Other M.
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Jul 30, 2017 19:13
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Let's go ahead and wrap this thing up before I go on vacation. Part 9: Get Paid First  I'm not sure I entirely agree with all of the references DMantra added to this hack, but I have to admit they do make the ending sequence quite unique. I'd like to give a special shout-out to this comment: FPzero posted:I knew this area got alien, but I forgot just HOW alien it got in places.
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Aug 1, 2017 14:31
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hanales posted:Does that thing you did count towards completion percentage or effect the ending in any way? Uh...I don't actually know! If I had to guess, I'd say the door out of that room is locked otherwise, but I admit I've never checked. And unfortunately it's rather difficult for me to go and check now.
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Aug 1, 2017 15:21
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hanales posted:Do you actually have to turn off plasma and wave or was that just for emotional impact? You do not. My working theory for how this was implemented is that it replaces the Varia suit (just like the artifacts replaced the Reserve Tanks), hence the change in graphics. It's just an item.
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Aug 1, 2017 15:51
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FPzero posted:At first I wasn't sure how your Samus narration was going to pan out but I have to say it really grew on me. Metroid isn't a series where you absolutely need to have someone talking over it all the time, and in a case like Eris, there's probably only so many times an LPer can say "well this room looks cool" before the viewer gets tired of it. The hack speaks for itself pretty well. Anyway, I really enjoyed the style you put forth in the videos. Thank you! I've honestly been wanting to do a Super Metroid LP for a long time, but the game is really oversaturated with LPs. Hopefully this is a unique take on the concept. quote:Second, somewhere out there is a soundtrack for Eris that DMantra composed himself and released alongside the game. He also remastered it when he remastered the hack in 2012. From what I remember it's almost all ambient, alien music to fit the game's atmosphere. No notes on where any of it would play, but it was a really neat extra that he made. The soundtracks were available on his website for a while, but he took them both down years ago for some reason. I think it's because a couple years back he worked with someone to create a pretty drat cool Limited Edition reproduction cartridge of Eris that came with all sorts of extras, including the soundtrack. Maybe it was to make the limited edition more special to those owners; I'm not sure though. Regardless, there's no link that I can find online and I'm not going to upload it against his wishes. The soundtrack's really pretty cool. Like, I could see it working as a soundtrack for a Metroid Prime game that used DMantra's worldbuilding style. It's a shame it's not accessible any more. quote:http://digital-mantra.com/SMV-Mimisbrunnr.png - Very large image warning Oh man, I love these maps. That looks pretty great; exploring the interior of a huge tree is a good concept for a Metroidvania IMO. There's a similar map that was done for Eris's 2009 version, but fair disclaimer, it is gigantic (9998x7693 pixels!). Here's the thumbnail; click on it to grab the full image. .PNG) I keep meaning to ask DMantra if I can turn it into a poster to put on my wall. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Aug 1, 2017 |
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Aug 1, 2017 16:55
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 22:00 |
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SystemLogoff posted:Thanks for playing through it, please consider fixing your playlist on youtube, since it has video 3 twice and the first three in the wrong order. Should be fixed now, thanks!
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Aug 2, 2017 04:23
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