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frankenfreak posted:Amazing show here. I was yelling "Speed. Speed! SPEEEEEED!" and "Noooooo!" along with you. haha, I wasn't yelling during that episode, but the very last second there got me to suddenly bellow at my phone before I cracked up laughing.
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Oct 18, 2018 22:48
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| # ? May 16, 2024 02:23 |
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 Episode 06 - The Most Amazing Attack
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Oct 19, 2018 23:06
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Given how some Megaman games are built to have bosses beaten by weaknesses that make for easy targeting as well as element, and that ice tornado is aimed at guys overhead, I'm gonna guess it works well against Torch Man who kept hopping over you for jumpkicks. Disclaimer: this is honestly a guess. I haven't a clue how this game goes.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:21
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Dang, that was a stylish boss! I'll be getting this game at some point for sure now. Anyway, I notice that even though you have 2 upgrades that let you 1. recharge the lowest weapon you got when picking up energy and 2. recharge all your weapons when picking up energy (did I read that one right?), that you still bother to switch weapons to pick up energy for them.
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Oct 20, 2018 00:49
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The one gripe I have about this stage is something you guys also noticed, that it takes a few seconds for the wind to pick up at that final speed-jumping section (especially because it doesn't seem to be periodic, as far as I can tell once it's going it doesn't stop). I died quite a few times there before I realised what was going on. It's mostly inconsequential because killing the rabbit can almost delay you enough, but if you're a bit too fast and don't realise... right down the pit you go. I don't know why they didn't just have the wind be constant there. Tundra Man's style and personality are great though. Bruceski posted:Given how some Megaman games are built to have bosses beaten by weaknesses that make for easy targeting as well as element, and that ice tornado is aimed at guys overhead, I'm gonna guess it works well against Torch Man who kept hopping over you for jumpkicks. Right in one. Though honestly it's easier to just use the screen-clear mode against him.
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Oct 20, 2018 01:01
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I think Torch Man's my favorite boss in Mega Man 11 as far as "being a fun boss fight" goes, but Tundra Man definitely is my favorite when it comes to design/personality. That being said, I really hate that room right at the end of his level. It's a massive difficulty spike made up of a bunch of tight jumps in an otherwise fairly easy and forgiving level. Though it uses the wind and ice gimmicks, the way in which it uses them feels out of place and it even stands out aesthetically. Pits instead of spikes and low ceilings mean you have few places where Rush Coil can be used, the lack of enemies combined with the choice of pits also means you can't use invincibility frames, and it's the only windy area where you're asked to make precision jumps while avoiding a low ceiling. It probably wouldn't be too bad if it was placed near the start of the level, but it being at the very end means you need to go through half a level of relatively easy rooms for another attempt every time you die and through the entire level if you get a game over.
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Oct 20, 2018 01:12
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Tundra Man and Torch Man were probably BFFs before being captured and reprogrammed by Wily. I can see Torch Man as a robot WWE star and even played the part to most people just because he was a big tough guy, but acted like a big time drama queen when nobody was looking. Only Tundra Man could understand him.
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Oct 20, 2018 02:41
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This is an incredibly fun thing to witness. Your rapport is great. I'd kill to see y'all do a blind run of magmml 2 or 3.
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Oct 20, 2018 03:26
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Remember while you can't charge boss weapons. Power Gear is effectively an instant charge for them.
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Oct 20, 2018 06:10
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Shitenshi posted:Tundra Man and Torch Man were probably BFFs before being captured and reprogrammed by Wily. I can see Torch Man as a robot WWE star and even played the part to most people just because he was a big tough guy, but acted like a big time drama queen when nobody was looking. Only Tundra Man could understand him. According to the gallery in game. Torch Man was actually a wilderness fire safety robot. He made up a Martial Arts style as a hobby.
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Oct 20, 2018 06:18
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Catching up on this and I am glad to see the Torch Man experience was what it was for you. By pure chance I happened to decide to start there on my first playthrough so I wanted to see someone else have that experience.
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Oct 20, 2018 14:11
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I feel like having the extra lives from the shop is definitely A Good Thing, rather than wussing out. It's a good way to cut down on the tedium of replaying the same stuff quite as much.
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Oct 20, 2018 16:20
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Seeric posted:I think Torch Man's my favorite boss in Mega Man 11 as far as "being a fun boss fight" goes, but Tundra Man definitely is my favorite when it comes to design/personality. That being said, I really hate that room right at the end of his level. It's a massive difficulty spike made up of a bunch of tight jumps in an otherwise fairly easy and forgiving level. Though it uses the wind and ice gimmicks, the way in which it uses them feels out of place and it even stands out aesthetically.
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Oct 20, 2018 22:34
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"Is that a robotic dinosaur in the background?" You know what killed the robotic dinosaurs?
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Oct 20, 2018 23:15
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frankenfreak posted:You know what killed the robotic dinosaurs? Nothing. Robots aren't alive.
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Oct 20, 2018 23:35
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frankenfreak posted:"Is that a robotic dinosaur in the background?" Robotic meteors?
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Oct 21, 2018 01:08
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frankenfreak posted:"Is that a robotic dinosaur in the background?" Megaman, in various past games.
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Oct 21, 2018 01:12
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I think the robot dinosaur and several other parts of that level are references to Freeze Man. it looked a bit like Tundra Man didn't move until you did at the start, which is another Freeze Man thing.
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Oct 21, 2018 03:47
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Robo-saurs could also be a reference to Skull Man, whose level had robot dinosaurs in the background a few times.
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Oct 21, 2018 05:28
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Discendo Vox posted:This is an incredibly fun thing to witness. Your rapport is great. I'd kill to see y'all do a blind run of magmml 2 or 3. Aw thanks very much! And that's certainly something we can look into.
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Oct 21, 2018 12:40
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I think the problems with this game can be summarized with this old idea: Ammunition, Guns, Alcohol. You can mix 2, but never 3. And what I've seen and experienced they just replaced those 3 items with "extra long stages" "enemies with too much health/ too many i-frames/shields" and "way too few resources without resorting to the shop" At least with Normal difficulty.
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Oct 21, 2018 18:04
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FeyerbrandX posted:I think the problems with this game can be summarized with this old idea: that's not how math works
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Oct 21, 2018 19:26
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We had a bunch of these discussions in the Boogeyman megathread since the release on the 2nd. Oddly enough the thread all, or mostly, agreed that the drop rate of bolts compared to the cost of lives and tanks created a good balance for personalizing your masochism. That's also why I was asking Nat20 how extensively they'd use the shop earlier on.
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Oct 21, 2018 21:51
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From what I've seen so far I'd say that the main hurdle is just that the game expects you to use the gear (this is good), but it takes some time to internalize that as a tool you have available rather than some odd last resort thing. Also low-ceiling jumps; the only reason I can figure they still exist in the Megaman series is because people assume they're necessary to feel like Megaman, like yoku blocks.
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Oct 21, 2018 23:08
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redacted
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Oct 22, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 02:46
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Seconding that buying lives is just reducing tedium (for yourselves if nothing else) rather than reducing challenge. Lives are an obsolete concept that doesn't belong in a game released in 2018 anyways. Maybe in hard mode for the
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Oct 22, 2018 14:09
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 Episode 07 - Well Handled Tea
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Oct 22, 2018 23:04
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When I have time I'm going to do some sort of super-essay on this set of questions, which I've thought about way too much due to other projects: What do you think is the satisfying part of difficulty in platform games (or any game)? Is patience a factor in enjoyment? What is the role of randomness in difficulty? How can something be random and yet be fair? If something is "fair", how can it not be boring? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 00:03
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I forget who is next?
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Oct 23, 2018 00:13
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MonsterEnvy posted:I forget who is next? Bounce Acid Impact Fuse Block
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Oct 23, 2018 00:44
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Blast Man's level definitely has my favorite aesthetic (and favorite miniboss) in the entire game. I think it's a really solid level gameplay-wise as well and it's probably my second-favorite in that regard. In regards to the questions at the end of the video, I rarely care to go back to a game once I've beaten it, though the Mega Man series is a rare exception and I think that's because there are so many different ways to go through each game. Going through a Mega Man game the first time blind is a very different experience from going back to it when you have a better sense of how to use each weapon and which bosses you want to tackle first, which in turn is very different from attempting to go through with only the Mega Buster. It's not just a matter of difficulty, it's a matter of needing to radically alter the way you approach each enemy type and every situation because the tools at your disposal are completely different and make for very different runs. A blind run is enjoyable because of the sense of exploration and discovery as you poke around at the levels figuring out which ones are the easiest and hardest of the set and figure out new ways to use the weapons you've obtained, an "optimal" run is enjoyable because you get a sense of constant flow as you overcome one challenge after another with little to no pausing, and a Buster-only run is enjoyable because suddenly everything has a lot more weight when you can't power through with E-tanks and abilities that block projectiles, clear the screen, or freeze time. Concerning checkpointing and life systems, I do think lives are archaic, at least when it comes to games with checkpointing systems. There can be some fun in attempting to get through content in a game without dying as such a thing increases the importance of enemies and hazards which otherwise deal trivial amounts of damage since it all adds up in a more significant way, but I agree that I hate feeling like I'm being forced to redo content that I've already overcome just because I died too many times on a later, unrelated challenge. I do disagree with the Dark Souls example though because I'd argue that the "difficult enemy" and the "trivial enemies" leading up to it can all be viewed as part of a single "challenge". You're unlikely to jump directly from dying to the easier enemies to effortlessly killing them without a scratch. Instead, you're more likely to gradually get better at the easy content until you beat it and then reach the hard content with little remaining in the way of health and resources and quickly partially due to low resources and partially due to not knowing the fight at the end. The easy content doesn't exist in a vacuum, but rather as part of the overall challenge; you're not expected to die to it (at least not often), but you are expected to "lose something of value" to it which will make the final challenge harder to overcome. If you can repeatedly, effortlessly overcome 90% of a challenge without a scratch yet keep failing at the final 10%, I'd say that that's a matter of poor balancing regardless of the game or situation in question. Ideally, you get better at the easier parts while also getting better at the harder parts (and in an action RPG you're also getting experience and/or loot along the way for raw number-based progression) and it all comes together before any extensive part of a specific challenge starts to feel utterly trivial. Balancing is very difficult, and not just for action-oriented games. For example, think of a typical RPG dungeon with a boss fight at the end. Do you let the player heal outside of the boss room or don't you? If you don't, then presumably the boss and the dungeon are all one combined "challenge" where the boss is balanced under the assumption that the player isn't going to be at full Health/MP and loaded up with healing items by the time they reach it. However, unless the dungeon was very short, then dying to the boss is mostly going to feel annoying as it means going through the entire dungeon all over again. On the other hand, putting a healing point right before the boss can reduce tedium, but it brings into question what the purpose of the dungeon itself was. If normal encounters in this theoretical game are threatening that's one thing, but if there's little to no chance of dying to normal enemies and you get a full heal before boss fights, why do those enemies (and the dungeon itself) even exist at all? The presence of any sort of rest location before a boss or other major challenge effectively divides the content into two distinct challenges rather than a single, extended challenge with multiple parts. I guess to summarize, I think the way for something to "be fair without being boring" is to first view all the content between checkpoints as a single, cohesive "challenge". Next, the easier parts in this challenge should still have a noticeable impact upon your performance in the harder parts by making you lose "something of value" such as health, mana, or consumables or, conversely, serving to help with the harder part such as by providing new gear/consumables/stats. Ideally, there should never be such a difference in difficulty within a challenge that the easy parts become utterly trivial to a player while they're still struggling with the hardest part. Finally, while it's fine for some hazards/enemies to exist as matters of attrition (i.e. they're intended to weaken you for a bigger threat rather than to kill you on their own), attrition should never be the primary source of difficulty in and of itself; a 1000 floor dungeon in a game is likely to be difficult, but only as a battle of attrition and if you run out of resources on floor 950 and die you're probably not going to want to attempt it again simply because it is far too boring.
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Oct 23, 2018 01:06
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Seeric posted:Blast Man's level definitely has my favorite aesthetic (and favorite miniboss) in the entire game. Same, the stage seemed to be a length comparable to previous games (so short for this game), the gimmicks didn't outlast their welcome (I think the detonating boxes would only cause certain death in one or two points, compared to torch man's constant wall of instant doom). That one exploding car that would kill you if you linger was early enough in the level that if it was your last life, the exploding flying car would be too awesome to cause too much anger. Also yes, the best miniboss since yes, once again its an rear end in a top hat that has way too much time rendered invincible, but also you can time killing the bomb guys to launch into the cart and kill it by splash damage, not just timing the attacks on the curves.
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Oct 23, 2018 01:37
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"The reactor is running unusually well today" - this message means you get a 20% discount on most consumables (specifically: lives, E/W/M tanks, Eddie and Beat). It's dependent on your system clock; I think it happens on specific days of the week, but I'm not completely sure. One thing I'm definitely coming to think is that MM11's boss difficulty is tuned a bit off - I think, with a few exceptions, most of them are very tough to fight buster-only but complete pushovers with the weakness (to the point you can kill most of them in under 10 seconds). This wouldn't be the first Megaman game to be like that, not by far, but I think it's more noticeable here because the bosses have more varied attacks and multiple phases thanks to the gear system and with the weakness you usually see none of that. (This tends to be the case with the mini-bosses too, notice how quickly this one went down to Tundra Storm versus tending to be quite a drawn-out battle otherwise.) Blast Man's stage is fun, it has a lot of character and the gimmick works well enough. Since you didn't try it, it might be worth pointing out that the boxes can also be set off early with Torch Man's weapon, which can be useful in a few places and is also how you get the W-tank. It is definitely one of the easier stages though, along with Tundra Man's stage, so I can understand the feeling of whiplash after having done Torch Man first. About the questions on difficulty: I don't think I have much insight into what makes for satisfying difficulty in games, but there's definitely a lot of good conversation to be had around there. One thing I do think I can weigh in on, though, is life systems. I think I said something about this earlier in the thread, but fundamentally the question (to me) seems to be how much the game respects the player's time. I'm not going to write off everything as "fake difficulty" as some people do: marathon levels and attrition are real kinds of challenge, and there are probably people who like them. It is legitimately more difficult to get through a level in one go than it is with x checkpoints, even if it's exactly the same level, because the player has to go longer without making a mistake (or a sufficient number of mistakes). That said, all things being equal, if you increase the number of checkpoints, you reduce the amount of time the player needs to spend replaying content they've already proven they can beat. Too much of this and they get bored and frustrated, not to mention spend less time practising the parts they actually need/want to practise to move forward, which adds to the frustration. (And the more bored and frustrated I am, the more likely I am to stop paying as close attention and make sloppy mistakes, which compounds the frustration further. But that's me, I won't overgeneralise.) Finite lives make this worse, because in essence they say "we've given you a checkpoint, but if you mess up enough later on we're going to take it away and make you replay content you've already mastered". This is just a waste of the player's time, which I find I have less and less patience for as I get older. Getting rid of lives also means individual sections' level of challenge can be more carefully tuned (and even made harder), specifically because the designer can know exactly how much the player will have to redo if they fail. Games with finite lives do have their place - in arcades, for instance, or games trying to recapture the arcade experience (e.g. they have a scoring system and the goal is not, strictly speaking, to complete the game but rather to compete for high scores). I just think this is a far narrower design space than is generally thought, and that life systems tend to be included in games as a default (or because the series has historically had it) rather than because the designer put thought into it and decided it was right for the game.
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Oct 23, 2018 02:05
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Do I replay MM games? I'm 100% achievements on XLC1, close on XLC2, nowhere close to that on LC1 or LC2, and 48/50 achievements on 11. Been my favorite franchise for roughly 30 years.
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Oct 23, 2018 04:11
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"Are lives needed? Is it oldschool without lives" reminds me of a game I still need to finish. "The Messenger". It has a death tax that some loading screens joke "It was this or a lives system" Then I realized during one loading screen by the time I got to a mid point said "You have paid like, 200 dollars to the death tax system"... and the upgrade to halve your death taxes was $400. Not counting the fact the little demon will get bored and leave after a few screens. As showcased in a large spike in deaths I suffered involving stretches of laser filled screens without any money for it to take from you. Or the fact since you went back to a checkpoint, they are only "stealing" money you already gained the first time through, and could often end up with a net positive in cash for your deaths. When you step back and think about it. It may as well not be there. Yet the general mentality of gamers means they must have felt they had to add some kind of "Penalty" system, lest people cry it is not oldschool enough, I guess? Could be worse. When Freedom Planet (A sonic clone) came out, the Devs asked "Hey guys. We've notice death spikes of literally 200 deaths in the last levels. Help us solve this." Suggestions to add Sonic the hedgehog style mercy invincibility to prevent people being air juggled to death by machineguns, full screen lasers, and the final boss pulling a bad break street fighter combo for 90% of your live bar were met with "You don't GET Oldschool sonic games!" Because obviously, adding a QoL from an actual oldschool sonic game will mean it's not as oldschool as a real sonic game 
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Oct 23, 2018 04:30
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Maybe it's the masochist in me, but for some odd reason, I like getting my poo poo kicked in over and over again, and forced to restart it. I'm not sure if it's healthy at all, but yeah, that's how I feel. The first time you play Devil May Cry 3 for example, it will probably beat you black and blue. And it did for me too, but I didn't grind out my skills when I lost to Cerberus the first time around to technically "cheat", I kept with it and played the game legit, for lack of a better word. Eventually I managed to beat it. As hard as it was, it's satisfying to be able to do it after a lot of struggle and knowing that you did it on your own. Come my second playthrough and I decide to go on a harder difficulty setting, I actually did better against Cerberus the first time around. Even when I played using Vergil, which involves a completely different moveset, I tended to do better. There's no way to describe it, I think the process goes beyond memorization and muscle memory, it carries over other processes too. Perhaps a big part of it is that you stop panicking and just roll with higher difficulty settings, and once you do that, you can actually focus on things. On randomness, part of me hates it, but another part wants to beat the randomness, to prove that I can be good enough to chump the system no matter what bullshit it tries. For example, getting max ranked in the Mega Man Zero games practically requires getting your rear end kicked a couple of times just for the sake of memorization, and even on your good days, there are some things which seems like you can't predict. Still, I watch single continuous unassisted VLPs of it where people manage to consistently S and A rank it without fail, and I want to be that good, which makes me convinced to that some extent that it goes beyond simple memorization, that people are that good. The same goes for when I watch people do level one runs in the latter two DS Castlevania games on stages beginning to end without dying once, a gameplay mode for those not in the know which goes beyond the oldschool platform games where you don't get stronger, where you're so weak that one hit will do you in and as you progress against the harder enemies and bosses, battles take longer because you'll only be doing double digit damage per hit against foes with thousands of HP, and the chance for you to panic or become arrogant, and break with what works and die becomes more frequent even if you got the pattern down to a T. I'm nowhere near determined, or dare I say crazy, to do that, as I tried it one time in Portrait of Ruin and was miserable for a long time, and even though I got to the second set of portraits, I had enough. As far as the lives system is concerned, I think that ties into the whole checkpoint thing and what I said above. I think it's tough but fair and allows for replay value, even if it's forced replay value, since you're restarting content when the game beats you around, and if you can't hack it even with checkpoints, then it is frustrating, especially when you go through levels that are ridiculously difficult (looking at you, final two stages of Mega Man Bass), but for me it's incentive to try even harder. IF you consistently die than I think that's more reason to try and improve so you can just do better on a general basis and maybe in preparation for future ordeals. Aside from complete bullshit difficulty that is so luck reliant it becomes not fun and impossible to really prep for and do on a consistent basis, I think it's a far more generous system than the Souls games' attempt at old school difficulty which go out of their way to penalize you without mercy, even with their checkpoint system, since you can lose a hell of a lot, and sometimes it feels downright unfair. Especially with some of the VLPs I've seen of it, where a lot of it relies on being flat out unpredictable, it feels the game is intent on punishing you for the sake of being punishing. The lives system where you will be forced to restart areas you've already gone at least respects you enough to expect you to do well on areas you've already cleared and in the case of Torch Man's stage, it forces you to get good from beginning to end. Actually clearing something like that where you've done it several times and failed before feels better than anything. On the boss difficulty and now that you've cleared the worst in Torch Man, you can still make it hard without necessarily handicapping yourself. You can always decide to fight bosses "legit" by refusing to use their weakness, and once they go Power Gear, then you cheese the absolute poo poo out of them. Fair is fair, right? If they're going to bring out the big guns, you should too.
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Oct 23, 2018 08:31
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If a game is going to kill me a ton in a particular stretch, then I want the inevitable practice to teach me more about the game in general, establishing procedural memory for situations that will come up again, or simply honing my understanding of the various systems and how to engage them. Just memorizing a single stretch and never having those situations come up again in any capacity is some bullshit, and that tends to be the result of cheap artificially difficult bits where a player cannot reasonably be expected to survive on the first attempt, even if they have godlike reflexes or something.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:39
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 Episode 08 - How in the Heck Did You Manage That?
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Oct 24, 2018 23:21
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Some guy sitting in a meeting room, "you know what needs to come back? Spring Man's stage!"
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Oct 24, 2018 23:41
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| # ? May 16, 2024 02:23 |
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I was promised supplemental boings.
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Oct 24, 2018 23:59
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