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Watching this at .25x speed I see why I loathe how the bouncy balls so goddamn much.
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Oct 25, 2018 00:13
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| # ? May 16, 2024 02:53 |
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Bounce Man's level was the first one I ended up playing (not counting the demo) and, while I definitely wouldn't call it my least favorite level (that honor goes to Acid Man), I do think it encapsulates the main issues I have with Mega Man 11. The balloons, the springboards, and the hand things are all decent gimmicks and the level does blend them together well enough, but it just doesn't know when to stop. You're unlikely to die from anything except instant death and possibly minibosses unless you'e playing on the highest difficulty, yet so many of the rooms contain no danger outside of two or three enemies. There are so many single-screen rooms that contain nothing except one or two of the bouncing ball enemies and maybe a few balloons that it's absurd. The hands are neat and I like that they use them both as something beneficial and something to avoid, but they're so frequent that it gets tiresome waiting for the countdown. The springboards aren't overused, but missing one or hitting your head on the ceiling on the way up means slowly climbing all the way back up to try again. Many of the rooms are also very vertical in nature and missing a jump or hitting your head on a balloon's oversized hitbox (I hate that E-Tank room) means you end up wasting a ton of time jumping your way back up with absolutely no danger along the way. Not all repetition is inherently bad, I really like how the balloons change up the second fight against the miniboss while the boss itself remains the same. However, a whole lot of Bounce Man's level feels like it's wasting your time with "nothing" rooms which are neither introducing something new nor challenging the player and with rooms which do build upon previously established concepts, but do so in exceedingly minor ways (now there are metal balloons your charge shot can destroy in the empty room with two bouncing enemies!) or in ways which add tedium more than challenge. It really doesn't help that the music in this particular level, while not bad on its own, gets really repetitive fairly quickly and this is one of the longer levels in the game. To be clear, I do like Mega Man 11 overall, but I also think it has a fair number of rooms which feel like they're wasting my time and, with the exception of the level I put in spoilers above, I think Bounce Man's level has more of these rooms than any other. It never outright frustrates me the way some parts of Mega Man 10 can, yet I do wish it was a tighter experience and to some degree I wonder if some of the levels are way longer than they need to be as a way of justifying the $30 price tag. On a side note, did anyone else end up going into Options to turn up the music and turn the sound effects way down? Maybe it's just me, but I felt like the sounds were so much louder than the music that I could barely even hear it whenever I was charging until I adjusted them.
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Oct 25, 2018 00:54
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I quite liked Bounce Man's stage the first time or two I played it, the silly-fun aesthetic mostly works and it tends to be a forgiving stage at least in the sense that messing up tends not to kill you outright. I thought the bouncing puzzles were fun to sight-read, and I do like the vertical segments where you need to drop down from sufficient height to bounce up. I mostly find it annoying to replay, though - especially in challenge mode or when I was going for the speedrun achievement, this is probably the stage I enjoyed the least. Once you know what to do, a lot of it is just tedious. (I think this is mostly a pacing issue, honestly, because all the bouncing slows things down; the devs definitely knew this, because the challenge mode time limits are a bit longer for this stage.) Still probably better than Spring Man's stage, admittedly, and what frustration there is is of a very different kind to, say, Torch Man. Hooray variety? I do enjoy the Bounce Man fight. It's a good execution on a simple concept, and there are some interesting novelties in the way he reacts to being hit by different things (in the video you saw how charge shots knock him back, but he also has a unique reaction to being hit with his weakness that changes up the fight a fair bit). He's not the most exciting or interesting boss in the game, but he's not bad at all. The reward's pretty good though, the weapon is very solid for being a barrage of rubber balls. The aiming and spread both make it pretty versatile. Then again, most of the weapons in this game are pretty useful; there are only one or two I don't like using, and even if some can be a bit situational, the quick-change stick means it's not punishing to use them when situations warrant. About that one area where you were surprised not to find a secret (sliding under the block next to the ladder): there is a W tank further left, but you need Rush Jet or Impact Man's weapon to reach it. Minor trivia: Bounce Man is one of two bosses in this game who got name changes in localisation, apparently he was Rubber Man in Japanese.
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Oct 25, 2018 00:57
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"You beat balloon guy! You get..." "Well this is gonna suck-" "SPREAD SHOT"" "What." "BOUNCY SPREAD SHOT" "Whaaaaaaat." Or so I assume is the common logic process in getting that weapon.
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Oct 25, 2018 01:26
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The only other way I could see you outmaneuvering Bounce Man's Speed Gear is to slide like your life depended on it.
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Oct 25, 2018 02:33
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Your constant refusal to use the charge shot boggles my mind. How many balloons did you facetank without figuring out that a fully charged shot would break them?
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Oct 25, 2018 04:13
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There's logic behind the boss weaknesses. Tundra Storm isn't an ice weapon, it's biting cold wind. Perfect for blowing out Torch.
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Oct 25, 2018 05:04
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 Episode 09 - Game Are You Serious? Natural 20 fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Oct 28, 2018 |
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Oct 26, 2018 23:35
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That barrier attack looks more effective than the shield attacks from previous MM games that you were dependent on you ramming enemies. Unlike the barrier moves that you could use as missiles, these ones I felt there was an equal chance you'd sustain damage as much as the boss would, especially when you were expected to use them against bosses who were weak to it.
Shitenshi fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 02:33
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Protip I'm sure you've already found out: The barrier only stops projectiles, and does not damage enemies unless you have the Power Gear active.
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Oct 27, 2018 05:18
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Lazy Bear posted:Protip I'm sure you've already found out: The barrier only stops projectiles, and does not damage enemies unless you have the Power Gear active. Protip addendum: you can still shoot with the shield up.
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Oct 27, 2018 05:23
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I'm glad you started to  Also while it turned out well thankfully, I really think you should have used an e-tank when you and Acid Man were both practically one shot from dying. Otherwise from the Men you've fought his speed gear attack seemed the most dodge-able without matching speed yourself. And finally, the backstory of the gear system seems kinda... silly? I mean even ignoring the fact that you could have sapient robots using the gears intelligently (as seen in Mega Man himself), the gear system that put too much strain on robots was just a prototype. Further r&d may well have been able to solve that problem. Or just do regular maintenance checkups on the robots. Like they already do. As to abuse of the gears for evil means, the cat's already out of the bag. Realistically, people would have heard of this gear system and other research labs would be happy to fund Wily or steal his research and reverse-engineer it. May as well have supposedly good guys work it out first.
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Oct 27, 2018 06:25
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"In order to elevate robots above being seen as just tools we must make them human." "In order to elevate robots above being seen as just tools we must give them enough power to rule humans!" It's cheesy and idealistic, but that does work as an example of their philosophies throughout the whole series.
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Oct 27, 2018 07:59
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Bruceski posted:"In order to elevate robots above being seen as just tools we must make them human." FTFY
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Oct 27, 2018 08:40
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Dr. Thomas Light: we must give robots the capacity for reason and not too much power. Also Dr. Thomas Light: My finest work, a robot paralyzed by ethical dilemmas and the capacity for infinite power growth.
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Oct 27, 2018 12:54
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You bought all those E-Tanks, why why why do you refuse to use them?!
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Oct 27, 2018 17:23
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Acid Man's level is one of the ones I find rather underwhelming, honestly. The water-to-acid gimmick is pretty cool, but you need to mess up so many times before it actually matters, and then the acid still does so little damage you barely need to care (or might even find it preferable so it kills the spiders). That said, it's a lot more frustrating if you're going after the achievement for never letting any pools change. It's also a pretty sedate level most of the time with some random interruptions of very tight death spike jumps, which I found more irritating than, say, Torch Man (where the entire level is death traps so at least it's consistently paced). Then there's the fact that it's hard not to think of the coloured water as urine or kool-aid respectively. I don't think this is how chemistry works, game  Acid Barrier is an interesting new take on a shield weapon, and it ends up being pretty good, especially because you can fire while shielding. It does have its downsides, though - it takes the energy up front and shrinks over time, you can't attack when the shield isn't up, and sufficiently strong hits (touch an enemy with the normal version, or touch an enemy too strong to one-shot with the power gear version) will pop the shield meaning you can blow through energy really fast if you screw up. It's still really strong and can completely trivialise areas where the difficulty comes primarily from enemies or projectiles, though with the shrinking and time limit I don't think it's quite as good as Jewel Satellite. Most of the weapons in this game are pretty good, honestly (though you still haven't gotten to my favourite). I find myself using them a lot more than I usually do, though I'm not sure how much is due to them being good and how much is because the right-stick mechanic makes it really easy to swap to whatever is appropriate to the situation. About the gear system's balance issues: I agree it's a lot easier to see the utility of speed gear than power gear, and I found myself rarely using power gear at first also (and I still see little reason to use it with the buster, speed gear and rapid fire does tend to be better; that said, there's actually yet another level of power gear buster charge you guys haven't seen yet and it's nuts). The thing is that the power gear versions of special weapons are very strong, and if you just tap the gear on, fire your weapon and immediately disable it, it barely affects the gear meter. As I've gotten more familiar with the levels I find myself needing to use the speed gear less and less, while the power geared special weapons become more attractive for efficiency purposes. I think it's a better balanced system than it appears at first glance, though that may not become apparent until repeat playthroughs. One interesting tradeoff (spoilered mechanics talk) is that with power gear, weapons tend to use twice as much energy. But if you don't have enough energy left, it will still let you fire one shot regardless of which mode you're in. For example, with a full meter you can use Tundra Storm 8 times, or 4 under power gear. But even if you only have one energy pip left, you can still use power gear and blow up the screen once. All of that said, I love seeing you guys using the Double Gear and actually making it work, because I never found a situation where it helped me. I use the gears in short bursts so often that being locked in for the entire duration really doesn't feel good to me, and having power gear while things are slow never felt like enough upside to compensate. I always end up screwing myself over by using it, so I just stopped trying. Clearly, though, this is very play-style dependent.
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Oct 27, 2018 17:56
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Commander Keene posted:You bought all those E-Tanks, why why why do you refuse to use them?! They cost more than lives so given the choice between losing a life an losing a tank I'll choose the life.
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Oct 27, 2018 18:02
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Why waste something you already bought to save on buying extra lives, when you can sacrifice a greater cost in lives lost because they are cheaper? *taps at head*
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Oct 27, 2018 20:32
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Scalding Coffee posted:Why waste something you already bought to save on buying extra lives, when you can sacrifice a greater cost in lives lost because they are cheaper? *taps at head* We need to graph the opportunity costs of lives vs e-tanks related to normal mode checkpoints or the sunk cost fallacy of bosses.
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Oct 27, 2018 21:15
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I agree that Acid Man's level feels underwhelming, it's the one I like the least. I like the boss fight, the weapon is my personal favorite in 11, the music's cool, and I even like the acid gimmick in concept. The acid mostly reminds me of a slightly different take on the oil and fire gimmick in Flame Man's level, though I think the oil was more interesting. I think the biggest issue is until you get to the red section you're unlikely to ever get to the point where it turns green as long as you're using the Speed Gear. It probably would have been better if they tiered it more; yellow already carries the risk of hiding the jumping spiders, red could deal damage, and green could be either way more damage or instant-kill. The other problem is that the final "underwater" stretch of the red segment is a massive difficulty spike above the rest of the level - nothing else even comes close and it being at the end of an otherwise fairly repetitive and nonthreatening level makes it extra obnoxious if you don't have a good number of lives saved up. This level might have actually been one of my favorites if they cut out some/all of the non-underwater sections and they spread out all those hard rooms crammed into the end between the various checkpoint sections. On the plus side, Acid Barrier might be the best shield in Mega Man. Jewel Satellite is still the strongest of the lot, but it's overpowered to the point of being broken. Acid Barrier is powerful without being overpowered and it hits the balance between defense and offense that they tried to achieve with Pump Man's weapon in 10.
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Oct 29, 2018 00:04
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 Episode 10 -Yeah, No.
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Oct 30, 2018 01:49
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I think Wily poached the robot designs of Dr. Light in some of the Mega Man backstory for the first game so yeah, our boy Thomas is not a saint by any means. Speaking of Roll, I don't think we've seen Bass or Proto Man yet. That's kinda weird. In retrospect maybe the Speed Gear upgrade does help, it's just that you can become overconfident with it and be tempted to make even riskier moves. Shitenshi fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Oct 30, 2018 |
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Oct 30, 2018 02:39
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Maybe get some Beats instead of going all in on lives.
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Oct 30, 2018 03:43
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A common theme/interpretation of the series is that Wily is straight up better at every single area of robotics/science he touches, and can create circles around Dr. Light with far fewer resources...except the original idea for independent thought. Alternate accounts do a hedgehog/fox thing, where Wily knows a lot about every area, but Light understands the importance of letting robots exist and think for themselves. I still owe y'all a  of a difficulty essay.
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Oct 30, 2018 04:41
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Hmm. I remember finding the speed gear upgrade really gamebreaking, but I guess it depends on your mindset and what you try to do with it. And I've definitely been in situations where it got me killed (especially trying to dodge boss projectiles like Torch Man's fists, they're spaced to give you openings at normal movement speed but if you slow them down but not you... well, sometimes you screw yourself over), though aside from those situations I didn't mind it. Switching from one speed to the other once you've gotten used to it can definitely be jarring, though. And I guess it depends what you're trying to do; until Tea said something about it, it didn't occur to me that deliberately slowing down Megaman could be seen as advantageous. On the other hand, you can utterly humiliate Torch Man's stage with it.
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Oct 30, 2018 06:01
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On the flip side, I thought the speed gear upgrade made Impact Man's stage way harder when you don't get the extra hang time. As for Torch's stage, with the amount of practice those two got, they should be able to run it fine with minimal gear use. That's how I learned it: Constant death from poor gear management and over reliance. E: HA, it was Impact Man's stage. I wrote this comment before I had a chance to watch the video. Andrigaar fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Oct 30, 2018 |
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Oct 30, 2018 07:09
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On the topic of weapon ammo in MM10...you do remember that you had autofire turned on for the majority of that game? Which burned through much of that ammo because everything was unnecessarily triple-casting?
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Oct 30, 2018 09:23
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The real hilarious thing is how they bought the Energy Balancer Neo and yet somehow aren't spamming Power Gear Tundra Storm at everything they see.
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Oct 30, 2018 15:54
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It's rather funny that Dr. Light's research actually led to way more trouble down the line. Reploids were a sentient race and yet they were created to serve under humans. If anyone acted out, they could be labeled Mavericks and killed by the Maverick Hunters. The Maverick uprisings also led to the Earth getting hosed up over and over. And that's not even getting into what happened in the Zero series. By comparison, Wily just wanted to give machines the ability to overclock just so it can do more work at the risk of overloading itself.
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Oct 30, 2018 16:47
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amigolupus posted:It's rather funny that Dr. Light's research actually led to way more trouble down the line. Reploids were a sentient race and yet they were created to serve under humans. If anyone acted out, they could be labeled Mavericks and killed by the Maverick Hunters. The Maverick uprisings also led to the Earth getting hosed up over and over. And that's not even getting into what happened in the Zero series. Definitely this. But then again, if my Doctoral Thesis or whatever was "Imma make a robot, but, like a double robot" wouldn't endure a thesis defense. Whereas "I'm going to make a huge mistake, but at least it'll be properly written and cited" does endure a rigorous challenge.
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Oct 30, 2018 18:39
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I thought that was just because some guy decided to deal with an entirely different field he has no experience in and that was the start of the problems with Reploids?
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Oct 30, 2018 20:20
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Scalding Coffee posted:I thought that was just because some guy decided to deal with an entirely different field he has no experience in and that was the start of the problems with Reploids? Though I do enjoy the simple fact that every problem not down to wacky super science viruses, is because "Morality check on start up? That takes too long, skip it"
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Oct 30, 2018 20:51
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 Episode 11 -A Tough Stage.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:02
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 "TURN AND FIRE, DAMNIT, JUST TURN AND FIRE! Oh, come on..." Congrats. Sort of.
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Nov 1, 2018 01:01
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Regarding the MMX pickaxe guys, I consider the MMX ones more annoying for one reason: Fuckers laugh at you when they hit you. Now, these are more irritating because they'll snipe you from off screen, or they're shoved in inconvenient places. Also they're "balanced" in this game to account for power gear, which means a normal non geared charge shot isn't enough to kill them.
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Nov 1, 2018 02:24
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FeyerbrandX posted:Regarding the MMX pickaxe guys, I consider the MMX ones more annoying for one reason:
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Nov 1, 2018 02:35
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About stage design, it should be tough, but fair. For example, that one slow platform ride where anything and everything is trying to kill you where you guys use the acid barrier, even though the enemy missile direction is completely random and depends on how good you are at picking off the homing attacks (and the rear end in a top hat Mettaurs especially) beforehand so that you're not clustered by a whole bunch of random bullshit all over the screen, I could see you getting good enough to beat that section without the acid barrier no matter how unfair poo poo got. It's also nice that as soon as you progress after a certain point as the screen scrolls on, I think the Mettaur bullets stopped coming after even if you left them alive, and while the slow homing attacks didn't, at least they look easy to pick off. At the same time, some of that stuff with the drills I on the platform section over all those spike pits after the miniboss I think it was could be described as poorly designed. It almost expects you to use the speed gear and it's upgrade or gauge the exact second to jump when the drills come at you or you're gonna take a hit and considering the knockback, that's enough to rattle anyone's nerves. It doesn't help how big those drat drills were and from what it looks like, their placement is essentially random. And I seriously wonder how the hell Capcom expected you to dodge the reverse ram attack of that miniboss or even defeat him without Torch Man's power.
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Nov 1, 2018 02:53
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Shitenshi posted:And I seriously wonder how the hell Capcom expected you to dodge the reverse ram attack of that miniboss or even defeat him without Torch Man's power. The ram is dodged with a normal jump as soon as it starts charging. Often while releasing a charged shot to kill the cone-guy on top. If you aren't going buster only, a certain weapon will kill the boss in 2.5-3.5 seconds. If I'm exaggerating, then the TTK is 3.5-4.5 seconds. No, seriously.
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Nov 1, 2018 03:01
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| # ? May 16, 2024 02:53 |
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The Picket Men in this game are definitely one of those nostalgia whiplash things, or at least they were for me. "Wow, these guys! How long has it been since I've seen them?" quickly turned into "AUGH NO gently caress OFF STAY AWAY". As for the rest of this stage... Acid Barrier helps a lot, yeah, but I found the real trick was blowing through the more enemy-packed rooms with (power geared) Tundra Storm. This is definitely a stage whose difficulty comes primarily from the enemy placement, I think (aside from those couple of dick moves where the knockback from getting hit tends to send you down pits). Honestly, I think the hardest part of this stage is the digger miniboss, with its tiny hitbox and the way a lot of its attacks can box you in. Block Man's weapon with power gear makes it a joke, but otherwise I've never not found it a pain. Impact Man himself is actually one of the easier bosses to fight buster-only, I think (and actually one of the trickier ones to use the weakness against, because if you're not careful about timing he'll pop your barriers and waste the energy)... once you learn how to read his moves, which took me a couple of lives. And his power gear attack is pretty unforgiving. I find it very tough to avoid without speed gear, and to make matters worse, if you get hit or stunned at the wrong time you can easily get trapped in a corner and stunlocked to death. Pile Driver is definitely my favourite weapon, I think. I'm not sure it's the one I actually use the most, but there are just so many tricks and skips (and emergency saves) you can do with it.
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Nov 1, 2018 03:06
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