Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[Squire Grooktook]

Also even to those not participating in the above convo: after rewatching some of my old videos, suddenly I really want to replay this game again.

If I was playing on the superior default difficulty (charge attacks, 3 hit combos), used buster, and didn't play like a coward (running away from the pink boomerangs intsead of going under like a real man), could probably nail him in half a second or so. Still a wonderfully nervy rng moveset on that guy.

Also for the record: I'd never argue that Zero, X, or anything in the series is a truly masterful action experience: arcade perfect blasters like Daimakaimura, Ninja Spirit, Gigantic Army, Metal Slug 1, Contra 3, Metal Storm, etc. stomp them thoroughly in terms of level/boss design and game structure. But the better installments are very solid little games with some unique strengths of their own. X2 and Zero 2/4 being particularly joyful in my opinion.

Honestly my biggest complaint about the entire franchise is structure: they're a pain in the ass for single-sitting play sessions due to the combination of length and difficulty curve from the 8 selectable starting targets. Like I said, not arcade style, more for kiddies to work through at home with full use of passwords. That alone is what keeps me from ever ranking them in the same tier as something like Contra.

[Sumez]

I doubt I am ever going to 1LC Gimmick. Way too much random shit that just kills me. Biggest offender so far is when your momentum is so high that you lose footing on slopes and miss an important jump, spiraling into your death like a noob. Not a fan of that. I absolutely love the game though.

i don't feel like there's anything random - all that stuff is quite learnable, it just has a very (very) high skill ceiling. you get a serious intuition for how these things work with repeated plays, though. watch a speedrun and observe how the player will get the treasure in the first few seconds of the game, and then practice doing that yourself. intensely difficult, but can be reliably done and is revealing of how non-random the movement is. most runners have specific spots and timing with which they will do star rides, all of which are reliably imitable with practice. i still don't have that beginning superplay jump down for the first treasure, but i practice it until i get it with every time i boot up the game. sometimes, it's the first try. sometimes, it's the tenth. i consider it a very good warm-up for when i've not played for a couple of months to practice in a safe environments some of the finer nuances of the game's movement.

I'm not talking about random shit as in RNG, but as in occasional bullshit spread throughout the game. I know it's all possible to manipulate, but stuff like what I mentioned just feels very counter-intuitive, and there's no way I will ever complete a run of Gimmick without losing at least a couple of lives to a situation like that.

That said, you're correct in everything you said of course, I appreciate how the game has a very low (albeit still demanding) entry barrier, making for very easy clears, but so much depth to the way it controls that there is almost no limit to how much you can potentially improve at the game, endlessly adding more flashiness to your runs. And that's based on very minimal experience on my part. I only just tried going for all treasures and made it to the real final boss yesterday. Although the final stage is extremely lovely I was kind of let down by not having to face one final amazing challenge of a stage.
The final boss, though. I made it to him with like 12 lives or so in reserve, and wasted almost all of them trying to learn how to fight him. I feel like I only made it through by sheer luck as I randomly flung stars at him hoping for him to make a jump that would open him up for a hit, while focusing on being ready to dodge his two ranged attacks. Even though I got a slight feeling for his pattern, I never figured out how to abuse it. How do you guys approach this guy?

[kitten]

Doesn't skip the levels at all: Just moves through them very quickly.

it absolutely skips most of their hazards and enemies! i struggle to understand what they're even there for, at times, when playing these games. long expanses of (effectively) nothing to skip and then tedious boss fights. this is a horrible sense of pacing. do you want to spend two fucking minutes fighting wheel gator without his weakness, or stun-chain and trivialize him with it? that is the summation of the entire game: you breeze past everything at lightning speed with pretty low effort or it is slow as molasses. despite all the things you can theoretically do to make x2 go faster, glossing over much of its design in the process, the speedrun for regular old mega man 2 is minutes shorter and just as many stages thanks to a little thing called pacing.

one of my favorite things about how fundamentally garbage x2's boss fights are is that the speedrun has you 100% the game so that you can speed-kill them all with the shoryuken. you go far out of your way to waste your time getting all the secrets, just because the bosses are so heinously lengthy that the ability to skip them by doing so is worth it. sheer comedy. at least you get to watch their exaggerated intros and death throes for annoying chunks of time as they die instantly.

Select button completely skips cutscenes, and talking to Ciel is pretty much a universal start to the next mission.

wrong! this depends on the game and i'm certain there are portions in each that are a massive exception to that.

first speedrun i looked at - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvyteMTPRo0&t=2m58s - click the time stamp. wow. more than a minute and thirty-five seconds before he is even given back control, and then not until 7:25 he's actually in a mission. there's also an opening cutscene before the brief stage he plays. you can listen to him explain how much of the game's systems he's trying to abuse and gloss over to get through the game as quickly as possible while you blow three and a half entire minutes essentially watching him be unable to play the game. this is a speedrun! i believe he also talks about how the first game has glitches you abuse during the speedrun to skip otherwise lengthy bits of dialogue/cutscenes.

these games are filled to the brim with shit that is demonstrably action-gaming cancer. there is not some amazing action-platformer underneath, and these things are not the sprinkles on top you can safely ignore but rather what the designers considered integral parts of the game's experience. "you can ignore all the cutscenes, dialogue, collectibles, grinding, farming, min/maxing, and metagaming and then somehow it's a good game." you know, this isn't something that impossible, but 99 times out of 100 it is not the case, and i can say having played the games quite extensively that i absolutely don't see it as such. in a 2d action game, these are not harmless things that get stacked on top of good games to pad them for the masses, they're design cancer that indicates corruption throughout.

No idea what you're talking about.

same, obviously

BIL, i strongly regret to inform you of this, but the fc/nes version of image fight is the only one i've really played. i'm very sorry.

I'm going to kill myself

;____; i said i was sorry!!

I'm not talking about random shit as in RNG, but as in occasional bullshit spread throughout the game. I know it's all possible to manipulate, but stuff like what I mentioned just feels very counter-intuitive, and there's no way I will ever complete a run of Gimmick without losing at least a couple of lives to a situation like that.

hm, what do you mean by bullshit?

Although the final stage is extremely lovely I was kind of let down by not having to face one final amazing challenge of a stage.

i love the last stage! very trip world-esque gimmick is as fun when you're blowing through it as high speeds as it is when you stop to smell the roses, and the true final stage is a wonderful reminder to do the latter.

The final boss, though. I made it to him with like 12 lives or so in reserve, and wasted almost all of them trying to learn how to fight him. I feel like I only made it through by sheer luck as I randomly flung stars at him hoping for him to make a jump that would open him up for a hit, while focusing on being ready to dodge his two ranged attacks. Even though I got a slight feeling for his pattern, I never figured out how to abuse it. How do you guys approach this guy?

i have never tried to fully understand him, but have gotten a pretty decent intuition for his pattern, at this point. it's very hard to explain. if you want to kill him quickly & easily, you can stand almost inside of his hitbox and drop stars right into his chest in a chain. with a potion, you can frag him in no time doing this. it's what speedrunners do. imo i always try to fight him without using healing potions OR abusing that close-up chain hit, which makes him really exciting and difficult.

you can also trivialize the stage 6 boss by staying in the doorway like a gigantic baby because he can't go in there. super boring. that guy is a sheer, exciting delight to get used to fighting without that.

[Squire Grooktook]

it absolutely skips most of their hazards and enemies! i struggle to understand what they're even there for...you breeze past everything at lightning speed with pretty low effort or it is slow as molasses.

It's not breezing though. Pulling off all those enemy shots and skips takes a really satisfying amount of assault-course style finesse. For instance, wall jumping over the last scorpion before wire sponge feels fucking great, but if you're off by a pixel you lose time. There's similar amounts of little risk/reward gambits throughout where a bit of stringent timing or a nervy jump can shave time and look and feel cool as hell while doing it.

Also about the boss skips at the end: honestly even if the bosses took half the time with a buster, a move like an srk would still be a time skip because you have to kill 8 of them. And it kills the final boss. Not a great bit of proof. Honestly, outside of a few clunkers, I enjoy most of the boss fights, with a few being genuinely great (love fighting violen). Wheel gator is complete crap, but every game has its missteps.

wrong! this depends on the game and i'm certain there are portions in each that are a massive exception to that.

Hmm, guess you're right on that one. I know it's in Zero 3 onward though, and I have the most experience and replays with 3 and 4.

Anyway, I still never cared about Cyber-elves from the beginning. They're basically glorified hp potions and room clears. When something feels that trivial and extraneous to the experience, and clearly exists just to give lesser players a helping hand (similar to grinding in an rpg), I really don't understand judging the game by it. But eh, whatever floats your boat.


Regardless, I guess we're not going to see eye to eye on this. Oh well.

[kitten]

It's not breezing though. Pulling off all those enemy shots and skips takes a really satisfying amount of assault-course style finesse. For instance, wall jumping over the last scorpion before wire sponge feels fucking great, but if you're off by a pixel you lose time. There's similar amounts of little risk/reward gambits throughout where a bit of stringent timing or a nervy jump can shave time and look and feel cool as hell while doing it.

lol this is part of why i hate speedruns. "what's REALLY fun is all the ways you skip how the game was intended to be played and most of its hazards and enemies." oh, hm, yes, this is a deliberately designed action game triumph.

Also about the boss skips at the end: honestly even if the bosses took half the time with a buster, a move like an srk would still be a time skip because you have to kill 8 of them. And it kills the final boss. Not a great bit of proof. Honestly, outside of a few clunkers, I enjoy most of the boss fights, with a few being genuinely great (love fighting violen). Wheel gator is complete crap, but every game has its missteps.

okay, let's try this experiment: add the amount of time it takes to get all secrets in x2 to mega man 2 (not x2, 2) and then subtract the time it takes kill all the bosses in the last stage. guess what! i will guarantee you that the game is now longer. so, yes, this is kind of a damning proof of shit bosses in x2 with their pacing gone out of wack. getting the secrets in x2 is time consuming and boring and requires stepping into tubes and watching long animations and skipping dialogue (that, again, is an intended part of the game's design for you to enjoy while playing). yawn. yaaaaaaaaawn.

bosses in 2 naturally go quickly whether you're good at them or not by design. bosses in x2 only go quickly if you abuse weaknesses/chaining exploits, otherwise their intended patterns and invincibility/avoidance stages drag on for-fucking-ever.

Anyway, I still never cared about Cyber-elves from the beginning. They're basically glorified hp potions and room clears. When something feels that trivial and extraneous to the experience, I really don't understand judging the game by it. But eh, whatever floats your boat.

yes, it is extremely extraneous the way there are tutorials for how they work and how they're intrinsic to the game's story and opening cutscene and every single enemy in the game drops crystals that you can feed to them and that they drop out of enemies and have pop-ups telling you that you got a new one in each instance. also there are hidden ones with powerful effects.

extremely tiny little bit of easily-ignored fluff and definitely not an intrinsic and shitty part of the game you have to force yourself to ignore. silly me for even bringing them up. btw, i began ignoring them on replays, too, but that doesn't stop how much of a part of a game they are and how they effect its pacing and balance, but if you want to pretend your hack and slash heaven exists in some kind of vacuum divorced from all the frivolities weighing it down, then please be my guest.

[Squire Grooktook]

lol this is part of why i hate speedruns. "what's REALLY fun is all the ways you skip how the game was intended to be played and most of its hazards and enemies." oh, hm, yes, this is a deliberately designed action game triumph.

I generally agree, but X2 feels better about it due to having more zakos that can be instantly blasted with a well placed charge shot rather than skipped altogether. Enemy types like the Scorpion are best skipped, but I'm fine that you can actually jump over them with a nicely timed wall jump, unlike the clunkers in X1. Feels closer to the Alien Soldier style rampages that we've discussed.

extremely tiny little bit of easily-ignored fluff and definitely not an intrinsic and shitty part of the game you have to force yourself to ignore

Enjoy your health potions that the game actively penalizes you* for, then

*(even in-story, poor cyber elves die yo)

You better get milking infinite respawns in Contra/Castlevania too then, since obviously you can't skip something that every zako gives you.

[kitten]

Enjoy your health potions that the game actively penalizes you* for, then

*(even in-story, poor cyber elves die yo)

You better get milking infinite respawns in Contra/Castlevania too then, since obviously you can't skip something that every zako gives you.

lmfao my favorite part of contra is the unskippable cutscene where it's explained to me that i can exchange my points for extends and how to do so. i also like when npc's ask for points during sidequests and how i can go into menus to spend these points. i also like it when only some of the enemies drop the points at all, and how i have to walk over their body to pick the points up.

by the way, zero 4, which you celebrate, does not kill the cyber elves when you use them and has other advantages that can be manipulated in the pause screen during levels. they're an even more intrinsic part of it. these games actively reward you for pursuing the secrets and actively and explicitly encourage you to through dialogue and menu screens.

don't be a useless ass and pull these total bullshit comparisons, come on, you know damn well your comparison is absolutely stupid.

[Squire Grooktook]

don't be a useless ass and pull these total bullshit comparisons, come on, you know damn well your comparison is absolutely stupid.

I'm sorry dude, but you're starting to get a bit insulting, it's already a bit more heated then I find comfortable, but if this discussion is also going to get virulent then I'd rather just bow out.

I didn't say anything I don't believe: I honestly find cyber-elves completely extraneous. I've never used them, never found them interesting or worth using, and I've never found the experience was harmed by not using them. I honestly do find cyber-elves are as extraneous and inconsequential a part of the experience as score is in most console titles that included them just for the sake of it. And I find their negative effects on the game to be as inconsequential as the extend farming that exists in those games. *shrugs*

I like these games reasonably well, and if you don't that's fine. But please let's not get zealous about them and start name calling. Surely it's not the end of the world if we disagree?


TBH, I actually think the idea of putting power ups in off-the-beaten-track areas as a crutch to lesser players is a wonderful design compromise that I completely respect. It's like grinding in an rpg to strengthen yourself, but even more interesting since you're actually doing something interesting (exploring) rather than just killing the same enemy over and over. There are points where I draw the line, but for the most part I'm fine with it so long as the game doesn't go overboard and leaves me the freedom to pursue a playstyle that suits my tastes. Ignoring things that are uninteresting, and pursuing what part of the game I enjoy most.

[kitten]

I'm sorry dude, but you're starting to get a bit insulting, I'm not sure I can keep up such a virulent discussion if it's also going to get disrespectful.

genuine apologies (seriously and honestly, grooktook, if i upset with what i said i will edit and remove it from my post. for the record, i'm off-the-cuff like this in arguments with close friends, as well), but comparing the cyber elves in zero with the extend system in contra is completely ridiculous to me and i expected better reasoning than deflection like that from you.

you are telling me that i can merely ignore the laundry list of poorly designed parts of the game, to which i'm responding that not only can you demonstrably not do this, but that it effects the game's design and balancing. "just don't play it that way" is a very weak argument when not only is the option there, but the game is encouraging me to, explicitly, and over four entire installments in increasingly different and complex ways.

TBH, I actually think the idea of putting power ups in off-the-beaten-track areas as a crutch to lesser players is a wonderful design compromise that I completely respect. As long as I have options to play a game in a way that I think is interesting, that's fine with me.

it is almost without exception that this harms the game's focus and design when having to account for players getting these things. putting stuff in your game that should be ignored to play the game as intended is typically not a good move.

[Squire Grooktook]

genuine apologies (seriously and honestly, grooktook, if i upset with what i said i will edit and remove it from my post. for the record, i'm off-the-cuff like this in arguments with close friends, as well)

All good and forgotten ^_^

but comparing the cyber elves in zero with the extend system in contra is completely ridiculous to me and i expected better reasoning than deflection like that from you.

I'm going to be honest: I think it's even worse in Contra.

The idea that I can sit at the start of stage 1 and rack up 30 extends in a survival focused game that's supposed to have set resources to clear with irks me much, much more. Not a serious issue, but if I could remove either cyber elves or the extend farming in Contra with a genies wish, I'd choose the latter.

it is almost without exception that this harms the game's focus and design when having to account for players getting these things. putting stuff in your game that should be ignored to play the game as intended is typically not a good move.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I don't see it as "a thing meant to be ignored" but more a way of giving different options to different players. The kiddies can have fun exploring and making the game easier for themselves, while the real men can show their mastery and dominate it without ever getting hit in the first place.

I've encountered people with this viewpoint of "I must make use of everything the game offers". It's not uncommon. But like I said, I just take the "optional stuff is optional" approach. As long as the part of the game I enjoy still feels fun, I'm good.

[Immryr]

i don't think "how the developers intended you to play" the game is a very good yardstick for judging a games worth. it becomes spurious to the point of stupidity when you try to suggest that skipping dialogue is somehow "not playing as intended".

i skip the dialogue in basically any game i've played more than once, i'm sure most people do.

[kitten]

I'm going to be honest: I think it's even worse in Contra.

The idea that I can sit at the start of stage 1 and rack up 30 extends in a survival focused game that's supposed to have set resources to clear with irks me much, much more. Not a serious issue, but if I could remove either cyber elves or the extend farming in Contra with a genies wish, I'd choose the latter.

score eventually stops giving you extends, entirely

I don't see it as "a thing meant to be ignored" but more a way of giving different options to different players. The kiddies can have fun exploring and making the game easier for themselves, while the real men can show their mastery and dominate it without ever getting hit in the first place.

then why would it force it rather than tuck it away in another portion of the game? why not simply have one character mention "there might be a way to make your troubles easier, but at a cost," and then have you safely ignore that for the entire game? hell, why not tuck them away in an "easy" mode? your points here are an optimism i once carried into judging games of similar design that i later discovered simply do not deserve this benefit of the doubt: their design is intrinsically warped by these additions and they are most certainly not mere handicapping for beginners.

i don't think "how the developers intended you to play" the game is a very good yardstick for judging a games worth. it becomes spurious to the point of stupidity when you try to suggest that skipping dialogue is somehow "not playing as intended".

i skip the dialogue in basically any game i've played more than once, i'm sure most people do.

i do, as well, (i'm going to be honest with you, i often skip it even on my first playthroughs, but is this not irritating or poor design?) but it's a deliberate decision by the designer to not make it easily skippable. when i played spriggan mark II on pc engine, the game gave me the option to completely disable cutscenes and dialogue from even playing at all so that i could get right to the game. why do other games not do this?

the harder it is to skip dialogue, the greater the suggestion that it's an intrinsic part of the game and a part of its pacing. to enjoy mega man zero games purely as action, there are solid minutes of this type of content that happens to be unskippable. this strongly suggests (and all but 100% confirms) that these aren't supposed to be snappily paced games, as does the downtime and optional content in the player's base of operations. the ranking system later comes with a retry option, as well, suggesting that these are not supposed to be marathon games but bite-sized chunks you replay to perfection. again, another strong suggestion of slower, more methodical pacing and confused design.

although you can certainly enjoy a game outside of designer intent, the suggestion that the most enjoyable way to play it involves ignoring massive chunks of work put in really puts a huge question on how well designed it actually is. good games typically don't get made by accident, you know, and the zero series grew even bigger in its story and optional content with each passing title.

while an idealized, perfect game would accommodate all players, the reality is that attempts at this all-accommodating style of design weaken it, all-around. without even having been part of this forum for very long, i have already seen many on here agree that making a game for both beginners and experts is a fool's errand, and a game is better when focusing on one or the other.

[Squire Grooktook]

]I don't see it as "a thing meant to be ignored" but more a way of giving different options to different players. The kiddies can have fun exploring and making the game easier for themselves, while the real men can show their mastery and dominate it without ever getting hit in the first place.

I think this is more related to the modern game issue of "let's explain every little thing so the dumb dumbs don't miss it" instead of letting players figure out for themselves, and thus a different matter altogether. The X games didn't find the need to explain E-Tanks or Heart-Tanks either.

I understand where you're coming from, but for me this is a case where it doesn't in fact warp/corrupt the game.

If it was like the classic euroshmup shooter/brawler + rpg frankenstein, where attempting to ignore the grindy rpg time-waster elements results in a horrific experience of 2 hour boss fights and zako waves that can't be scratched, it would be one thing. That's an example of such an element that really does interfere with the core appeal of the genre due to the developers ignorance.

But that's not the case. Here, it really does feel like something that exists purely for the sake of another audience entirely and is isolated enough from the action that hardcore players can safely ignore it with no change or detriment to the experience that they would be having if it weren't part of the game.

[kitten]

But that's not the case. Here, it really does feel like something that exists purely for the sake of another audience entirely and that hardcore players can safely ignore with no change or detriment to the experience that they would be having if it weren't part of the game.

if it were, i sincerely believe the game would have been thoughtful enough to include a mode without all the extraneous stuff for players who dngaf right off the bat, like hard corps uprising (which is an abysmally terrible game that i also believe was hurt by similar additions, but at least had the courtesy to include a somewhat fluff-less mode available to the player immediately).

again, you also demonstrably cannot ignore this stuff. there's dialogue, tutorials about how to use, pop-ups when you get new items, etc. even if you don't use it, the game does not ever give you the opportunity to fully ignore. these kinds of additions are extremely dangerous design poison and the notion that inti creates of all the incompetent designers in the world somehow understood how to add in this stuff without it intrinsically hurting the game is a completely ridiculous notion, to me. far better designers have failed to do so!

[Squire Grooktook]

I feel like we're on the verge of going in circles here, but like I said, it's not an "idea" for me that inti (or the original X series developers, since as I see it Cyber-Elves are in the same class as heart and e-tanks), it's literally a case where I play the game and I enjoy it because it simply doesn't harm the things I like about the game. Doesn't make boss fights take 2 hours, doesn't make my weapons feel powerless, doesn't ruin the difficulty curve, doesn't take away abilities or mechanics that I enjoy using, etc. it instead plays exactly how I would expect it to if these optional bonuses were never present in the first place.

Is an easy mode a better design option? Maybe for us hardcore gamers. But in todays market there are drawbacks to that too. Mike Z of Lab Zero once told me some interesting things about playtesting and the reactions people had to optional difficulty modes (and by that I mean horror stories of people getting mad at the game for being too hard on the hardest difficulty but refusing to pick anything lower), and why many developers today (including himself) don't use different difficulty settings and instead opt for mastery as the "hard" option with clearing a game being easy. It's not something I necessarily agree with, but neither is it something I hate. Merely a different design philosophy on "survival vs mastery".

Anyway, in conclusion before calling it a night, I'll say that I enjoy the games and have never had any issue with the optional, out of the way items. I think it plays perfectly well when they're bypassed and gives me exactly what I want out of the experience. And for me, that's all that matters.

[BIL]

when i played spriggan mark II on pc engine, the game gave me the option to completely disable cutscenes and dialogue from even playing at all so that i could get right to the game. why do other games not do this?

I value this blessed option so much, I keep a running mental tally of games with it (or similar). Gley Lancer, Vampire Killer (though not the far wordier Hard Corps ಠ_ಠ), Cotton 100%, probably others... it should be industry standard.

Mike Z of Lab Zero once told me some interesting things about playtesting and the reactions people had to optional difficulty modes (and by that I mean horror stories of people getting mad at the game for being too hard on the hardest difficulty but refusing to pick anything lower), and why many developers today (including himself) don't use different difficulty settings and instead opt for mastery as the "hard" option with clearing a game being easy. It's not something I necessarily agree with, but neither is it something I hate. Merely a different design philosophy on "survival vs mastery".

Ooof, Christ. I remember you mentioning this once - great anecdote, especially the bolded.

As an aside, I think you can tell a lot about a person by their reaction to a beating. (fair or otherwise!)

[kitten]

Anyway, in conclusion before calling it a night, I'll say that I enjoy the games and have never had any issue with the optional, out of the way items. I think it plays perfectly well when they're bypassed and gives me exactly what I want out of the experience. And for me, that's all that matters.

and i feel it doesn't and feel like i have pretty measured and experienced responses as to why i feel that way. as a reminder, it was not me who started this disagreement or began the offensive, i was explaining (to someone else, entirely) why i didn't like the gba, to which you immediately seemed to assume as instigation or "fighting words." :p

(an aside i should have brought up sooner, but i'd really rather not be called "son" or "dude," please)

i have always been baffled by forum etiquette of criticizing almost anything not pre-established as an acceptable target as instigation. alternatively, praising something (other than the established targets of criticism) is typically seen as benign and much less commonly challenged. i don't like the gba, and agree with me or not, i have put significant time and thought into why. if you want to hear my thoughts, fine, but i'd rather not get wrapped up in another disagreement like this. i don't have infinite energy for explaining myself and feel as if i very demonstrably have the tenure for my opinions being quite thought out, in the regard of mega man games.

Mike Z of Lab Zero once told me some interesting things about playtesting and the reactions people had to optional difficulty modes (and by that I mean horror stories of people getting mad at the game for being too hard on the hardest difficulty but refusing to pick anything lower), and why many developers today (including himself) don't use different difficulty settings and instead opt for mastery as the "hard" option with clearing a game being easy. It's not something I necessarily agree with, but neither is it something I hate. Merely a different design philosophy on "survival vs mastery".

Ooof, Christ. I remember you mentioning this once - great anecdote, especially the bolded.

As an aside, I think you can tell a lot about a person by their reaction to a beating.

imo, games should have integrity and not dilute themselves without explicitly telling you when they're doing it. i still firmly believe the zero series is diluted and damaged because of it, on top of being a plainly incompetent action game made by poor designers when played proficiently and ignoring the extraneous.

i respect furi a lot for telling you that its lowest difficulty is for people there purely for the story & aesthetic. i also like that it aptly names it "promenade." games should not compromise their design for those whose ego is viciously maimed by a game over screen or being told their chosen difficulty isn't the real experience. i'm sympathetic to people wanting to make a game as far-reaching and money-making as possible, but i hope they're equally sympathetic to the notion i am allowed to criticize them and even dislike their game for compromised principles & design. if you sell your art to mcdonald's and they force you to put a smiling man eating a burger on it, there's a good chance i'm going to think that detracts from the art. mega man zero's attempts to accommodate completely obfuscate and dilute an already imperfect core.

[Squire Grooktook]

and feel like i have pretty measured and experienced responses as to why i feel that way

Same ^_^

I can respect your opinions. Just afford me my own, of course.

to which you immediately seemed to assume as instigation or "fighting words." :p

To be fair, I was light-heartedly ribbing with that line and didn't expect it to become a big thing. Wouldn't have bothered if I had conceived it would.

(an aside i should have brought up sooner, but i'd really rather not be called "son" or "dude," please)

Sure, sure, no problem. I just do that sometimes to be cute lol.

[BIL]

Dracula Densetsu (GB) Oh god damn it. DD1 has a touch of Holy Diver's Disease. This is the tragic affliction that causes the buttons to not register when the d-pad's state is changing, in this case when one stops walking. Or in DD1, "walking." Must've been an epidemic of this shit in 1989. Just when I was starting to warm up to the judderingly slow take on Methodical Melee Action™.

Great OST as ever, at least. "Death Fair" is a jam. Reminds me of the series' definitive "sup motherfuckers?" tune Opus 13 from Rondo/XX.

[Immryr]

i know this is off topic, but it was mentioned here a couple of pages back, anyone know how many levels each quest has in cave noire? fun game!

[Mortificator]

Great OST as ever, at least. "Death Fair" is a jam.

It was disappointing that Adventure Rebirth (which I like) went with more well-known tunes instead of remixing this soundtrack.

Yeah, I think the GBA is my favorite handheld system, honestly. There are absolutely standouts on other handheld systems (someday I will get around to trying GB Bionic Commando and Mega Man V), but I don't think I've found any handheld library that interests me quite as much, between games like the Mega Man Zero, Metroid, and Fire Emblem series, plus Ninja Five-O and Mother 3.

Same here.

Kagami no Daimeikyuu

I appreciate how this didn't dilute Kirby's style or imitate Metroid's when it made a big explorable world. I'd put it on the tier below Super Star, with Kirby's Adventure and Kirby 64.

[BIL]

Kagami no Daimeikyuu

I appreciate how this didn't dilute Kirby's style or imitate Metroid's when it made a big explorable world. I'd put it on the tier below Super Star, with Kirby's Adventure and Kirby 64.

Aww sheeit, I enjoy all three of the latter and was wondering about his GBA stuff. Good time to check this out, thanks!

edit: OH GAWWWRD, I'm at last free of the temptation to actually buy Dracula Densetsu. My superhumanly fine-honed gamer senses could not help noticing all the Holy Diver-esque Dropped Inputs During Clutch™, this time around. Grinding slowness alone I can handle, but not this and that! This or that = OK! This and that = DQ. See you around DD1, I'm sticking with your more agreeable sequel. Which I got for a tenner brand new! Now GIT OURRA MAH FACE, YA WEE FANNEH

[__SKYe]

i know this is off topic, but it was mentioned here a couple of pages back, anyone know how many levels each quest has in cave noire? fun game!

I think there are 10 levels per quest, for a grand total of 40.
By the way, not sure if you are aware (of if it matters to you), but there's an english patch available. Not that there's much text to translate, but it's nice anyway.

EDIT:

Forget those wimpy Final Fight lifebars too. Wanna know if the enemy's dying? Don't worry, you can tell when they're no longer able to defend themselves.

Haha, BIL, you're one brutal individual. Have mercy on them goons.

[Blinge]

Dracula Densetsu (GB) Oh god damn it. DD1 has a touch of Holy Diver's Disease. This is the tragic affliction that causes the buttons to not register when the d-pad's state is changing, in this case when one stops walking. Or in DD1, "walking."

Haha, yeah I mentioned some input woes in the castlevania thread I think.?
spamming jump while holding a D-pad direction sometimes results in a neutral jump instead. Not very helpful for falling platforms..

[BIL]

Previously...

Since I've now gotten myself a Panasonic 3DO I am playing games made for real graphics whores. Or should I say, R.E.A.L. GRAFXWHORES

ING pls tell me about this Shin Shinobi Den has robbed me of the ability to judge a sidescroller by its stunning digitised sprites!

[Sumez]

Decided to get Hebereke out of my backlog today. Not really fit for this thread, lacking mostly in the action (it scrolls plenty, in all directions...), but it's definitely a SunSoft masterpiece, and probably the closest you will find to a second Gimmick game aside from Trip World. Though nowhere near as deep or polished, it definitely channels the "stopping to smell the flowers" aspect from Gimmick, with plenty of character and delightful charm.
A short game, but very fun to play for an evening where I wasn't really feeling for anything challenging. Incredible how similar it is to the majority of modern indie "metroidvania" games, probably much more so than any of the Metroid or Castlevania games that were supposed to have inspired those. It's too bad it never saw a proper sequel, instead of a bunch of pointless spinoffs.

Managed to beat the game without any translations, but never figured out what good the extra heart containers were for.

[Obscura]

Since the Mega Man games have come up, here's your reminder that Mighty No. 9 is the best "big screen" Mega Man game ever made, and you should all play it if you haven't. Addictively kinetic in a way that no big-screen Mega Man ever was.

Just do your research on platforms first -- the PC version works fine, but a lot of the other versions have either unbelievable loading times or, in the case of the Wii U version, don't run at full speed at all.

[Immryr]

i know this is off topic, but it was mentioned here a couple of pages back, anyone know how many levels each quest has in cave noire? fun game!

I think there are 10 levels per quest, for a grand total of 40.
By the way, not sure if you are aware (of if it matters to you), but there's an english patch available. Not that there's much text to translate, but it's nice anyway.

Thanks, yeah I know about the English translation. There is also a translation of the manual online - which is honestly more useful.

I've done the first five levels of each quest so far and the difficulty has definitely started ramping up, I can imagine this getting really tough towards the end.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

zas is a pure delight. did you happen to catch my review linked earlier in the thread? i usually forget to attach those to my backloggery posts and have been trying to remember to do that more often.

zero mission feels like super metroid lite. each of the original trilogy of metroid games added tons of new things and ideas and took the series in new directions, zero mission's mechanics and progression are borrowed almost entirely from super metroid, wholesale, even many of its bosses. aside from the useless, stupid ledge grab, of course (thanks for your big innovation, fusion!).

imo the metroid games are honestly kind of poor when taken as action games and are meant to be more contemplative, intimate games not played to death (i find the time limit reward a misleading, ancillary attachment there to extend play life or help the playtesters not go insane). zero mission adds absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to the series, unless you consider extremely poor stealth to be a series addition. there's also a veritable ton of really stupid shinespark puzzles.

part of what makes super metroid so great is how much of an amazing awakening it is the first time you learn the off-the-wall jump and how much that can open the game up both on your current play and on replays. it is rich with environmental storytelling and unique situations, too. super metroid is a big GOAT for me, but it has been poorly or rotely imitated so many times that i would consider it one of the most toxic influences to ever happen to gaming. its worst elements are superficially copied almost endlessly.

super metroid stood for incredible attention to detail, refinement, and innovation. its imitators (like the dreadful axiom verge, which i also wrote a review on) and sequels stand for using its same old base formula until the world ends and completely forsake the finer things. can we please finally agree that lock-and-key design was the worst and easiest part of super metroid and get rid of it in future games "inspired" by it, please? a "successor" to super metroid would follow the original trilogy's tradition and not play all that much like it.

Mega Man 9

also a decent game, at best. kind of bad. i was no. 1 on the global speedrun leaderboard on 360 when it came out, too, and had the wii and ps3 times beat for a while. then i quit and someone else took over (when things like that concrete man exploit were discovered) and many people who took up the mantle slowly surpassed my time due to a meta and discovered exploits.

inti creates fuckin suuuuucks

I did read it, yeah! It really seems like one of the most exciting Game Boy games, so I'm looking forward to giving it a shot sometime.

I agree that the Metroid games aren't very interesting as action games, but only in the sense that combat in them isn't very interesting compared to games like Contra or Gimmick (enemies are simplistic, bosses have awkward patterns that you're often just expected to tank through). But I think the Metroid games nail fun movement mechanics (especially Super, I prefer its handling of inertia to the GBA games), so I think just maneuvering through the game's obstacle courses, trying to beat the games quickly and managing battles with less items is satisfying. Not that I care to truly nail the games down and speedrun them, though. And I do think the games are a bit less replayable than pure action games since yeah, a lot of the fun is just working out where to go on your first playthrough - but there's still enough depth to the games to make replaying them to improve satisfying, too. I think for that reason the hidden shortcuts in Zero Mission shouldn't be written off; they enable the player to continue discovering new things and reward exploration and clever play even after the initial playthrough is complete.

That said I agree that the GBA Metroids don't do enough to advance on the Super Metroid formula. It's why I can't really be too bothered that Nintendo doesn't seem very enthusiastic about putting out a new 2D Metroid like so many series fans want - even though I like the GBA games, I think any more iterations on that formula would start to bore me. (And ZM's stealth mission definitely sucks.)

What do you think makes Mega Man 9 worse than the NES games? I've always felt like its bosses (who all have properly dodgeable patterns and are fun to fight even with the buster, something I don't think the NES games nailed) and weapons (all of which are actually useful) put it soundly above the originals.

[kitten]

To be fair, I was light-heartedly ribbing with that line and didn't expect it to become a big thing. Wouldn't have bothered if I had conceived it would.

i'm (very) easy to rile up, grook :B lol a lot of people who know me deliberately get me flustered for amusement

sorry for clawin' at ya!

i know this is off topic, but it was mentioned here a couple of pages back, anyone know how many levels each quest has in cave noire? fun game!

i want to say that it's 9? maybe it's 10? i think you get a credits roll when you get everything to either 5 or 6. i remember getting the credits roll, but only taking two of the quest types to their final stage.

Decided to get Hebereke out of my backlog today. Not really fit for this thread, lacking mostly in the action (it scrolls plenty, in all directions...), but it's definitely a SunSoft masterpiece, and probably the closest you will find to a second Gimmick game aside from Trip World. Though nowhere near as deep or polished, it definitely channels the "stopping to smell the flowers" aspect from Gimmick, with plenty of character and delightful charm.
A short game, but very fun to play for an evening where I wasn't really feeling for anything challenging. Incredible how similar it is to the majority of modern indie "metroidvania" games, probably much more so than any of the Metroid or Castlevania games that were supposed to have inspired those. It's too bad it never saw a proper sequel, instead of a bunch of pointless spinoffs.

Managed to beat the game without any translations, but never figured out what good the extra heart containers were for.

personally, the only sunsoft games i would consider masterpieces (or 4/4 star games) are trip world, gimmick, and battle formula. i say this as a very big sunsoft fan. i will make this forum play battle formula if it kills me, and they will all recoil and go "kitten, what the fuck are you thinking?" and i will have made myself even more sad and alone.

hebereke is pretty good, though! maybe even great! it also thoroughly trounces metafight/blaster master's fumblings as an exploration game, as far as i'm concerned. there are potions that you can manually consume in the game, iirc, sumez. taking them after you get a heart tank will allow your health to go over the previous maximum. there's a potion near o-chan's segment (where you gotta freeze guys over lava) that will restore you completely to maximum. hebereke is by no means a tough game, but i'm a little surprised you didn't figure this out, i imagine it made a couple of bosses a little more annoying.

i like to imagine a perfect world where o-chan and hebereke became bigger mascots than sonic, and sunsoft didn't drop the ball so hard during the 16-bit generation.

Kagami no Daimeikyuu

I appreciate how this didn't dilute Kirby's style or imitate Metroid's when it made a big explorable world. I'd put it on the tier below Super Star, with Kirby's Adventure and Kirby 64.

Aww sheeit, I enjoy all three of the latter and was wondering about his GBA stuff. Good time to check this out, thanks!

edit: OH GAWWWRD, I'm at last free of the temptation to actually buy Dracula Densetsu. My superhumanly fine-honed gamer senses could not help noticing all the Holy Diver-esque Dropped Inputs During Clutch™, this time around. Grinding slowness alone I can handle, but not this and that! This or that = OK! This and that = DQ. See you around DD1, I'm sticking with your more agreeable sequel. Which I got for a tenner brand new! Now GIT OURRA MAH FACE, YA WEE FANNEH

drac densetsu is real bad. you can very nearly make the game crash in the last level if enough enemies choose to spawn behind you rather than in front and you just keep walking past them! one of the biggest technical problems with the game is that parts of the HUD and candles are actually sprites in the game instead of part of the background, which is hilariously incompetent for konami, even considering the game's early release date. it's why it is so plagued with slowdown.

i'm a bit of a kirby fanatic, and my living room is decked out in kirby toys and plushes. kirby is absolutely the cutest, they're just wonderful. however, i am very far from your average "all kirby is good" type of fan. my general ranking for the kirby games goes: sakurai's games > new guy's games >>>>>>>>>> shimomura's games > flagship's games

kirby superstar is my favorite despite some aesthetic jankiness because of its incredibly delightful 2-player co-op, but kirby's adventure is far and away my favorite sp experience and without question the most visually impressive of all kirby games. kirby's adventure's palette choices and delightful background art ties well to its foregrounds for a shockingly colorful and absolutely pleasant experience. it has a very pleasantly seamless world. despite only running on the MMC3 mapper, KA is arguably the best looking game on the entire nes/famicom, sans gimmick, and it's very heavily because of undeniably masterful usage of palettes. check out TCRF's entry for KA sometime to observe how many unused palettes there were and how much effort went into picking the absolute best ones. kirby's dream land is also a great first entry, and it is interesting to see clear progression in mechanical design between each of these three games. sakurai was very smart at identifying the strengths and capitalizing on them. K:SS can almost be considered a single plane brawler given its diverse moveset, grabs, and combos. it is no surprise he went on to make a fighting game with a similar control scheme (smash), after this.

the new guy's stuff (i can never remember his name, i'm sorryyy) started out a bit rough and poorly paced with return to dream land (much improved with one friend, a bit hectic with two or three), but triple deluxe was a clear improvement and robobot refined his type of design to what i'd call excellence. it is - without any question - the best kirby game since super star. the biggest thing it does is improve the pacing and trim a lot of dead air or overtly breezy bits out of levels. kirby is at its best when it has a rollicking pace and tons of fun toys in its many playgrounds. i feel each of his games have good art direction that get progressively get better across titles, too. he also brought kirby's visuals back to strengths the earlier games capitalized on and ran with it! it's delightful to see 3d games bursting with such life and color. i can't remember if he worked on super star ultra, but that was a pretty decent remake (though i prefer the visuals of the original).

shimomura's games are all bad. dream land 3 is the worst of the bunch, dream land 2 is only marginally better, and kirby 64 is maybe the only time he scrapes getting close to decent, but it is still abysmally paced, uses stock checkerboard assets in its art design, and features repeated bits where you have to backtrack and use trial and error to uncover a secret required for the good ending and actually finishing the game with a proper fight. shimomura's weird obsession with gating secrets behind specific powers is like he looked at the end of yogurt yard and beginning of orange ocean in kirby's adventure and went "wow, i like how you're forced to carry hammer through multiple levels. what if we obfuscated whether it was hammer that worked and had way more stages like this?" dream land 3 is often hailed as one of the most visually competent kirby games, but i would without irony place it among the lower ones. the sprite art is unquestionably good, but the levels are absurdly bland, repetitive horizontal stretches with drab, faded pastel coloring. a very screenshot-friendly game and one with certain assets that are gorgeous, but it is deeply ugly and almost depressing for me to play. i do not understand his ridiculous obsession with "combining" things to make unique powers (the animal friends were doing this before 64), but also making all the powers annoyingly useless or limited and kirby's movement so dreadfully slow. a single power in K:SS is more useful than 4 powers from any of his games put together.

flagship's games are just awful. ugly, thoughtless, single-layer parallax backgrounds against equally ugly and disconnected foreground. frequently poor or ugly tilework, too. a lot of snes games do this, but gba games do it even worse, and it makes me feel like i'm moving around on a 2-dimensional cut-out superimposed in front of a windows 95-era desktop. the sprites feature vivid animation and artistic competency, but i have a personal dislike of how they shade them that makes them look weird. kirby is supposed to have strong, bright, vivid colors rather than lots of rounded shading. they feel like they're copying super star's art direction, but without the usage of color or creativity that made it so charming (and also without the excuse that these visuals were novel and impressive during their time). most of the powers are gimped compared to their best iterations, and they also share the shimomura games penchant for backtracking (albeit without as many potential powers to have to figure out that you need through trial and error). amazing mirror is deeply directionless and feels almost completely undesigned, does nothing at all to deserve the conceit of being a metroidvania. squeak squad is painfully dull.

That said I agree that the GBA Metroids don't do enough to advance on the Super Metroid formula. It's why I can't really be too bothered that Nintendo doesn't seem very enthusiastic about putting out a new 2D Metroid like so many series fans want - even though I like the GBA games, I think any more iterations on that formula would start to bore me. (And ZM's stealth mission definitely sucks.)

i feel like making your game a metroidvania is a tremendous conceit, because it will be damn near 100% assurance your game will have lots of backtracking and undesigned level portions that can always be bypassed by simply farming some health. it generally turns bosses into attrition, too. too many enemies and passageways in games in these genres are just nuisances or completely irrelevant. while you can beat super metroid without taking damage from any bosses, their patterns are often really confusing and most players will end up slamming into a lot of them repeatedly, urged to get more e-tanks and more missiles and come back when they're better equipped.

and, well, i feel like most games don't have the design chops or visual strength to take that conceit! it's a very easy genre to make a game in, but one of the hardest to refine to the point that i feel it can justify its amounts of wandering and tedious secret-finding. super metroid's inertial movement, designed sequence breaking, beautiful environment teeming with life, and other elements help to make it deserve its relative aimlessness and backtracking, but i feel most games to come after it (metroid in the title or not) are pale imitators simply taking parts or ideas from the game and then arranging them bereft of meaningful context. i can get almost everything out of super metroid's sequels and copycats that i want out of just replaying super metroid. there is no joy in discovery in these newer games of finding the next of dozen keys to the next of a dozen doors, and the design of most of the enemy encounters (boss or otherwise) are generally designed for attrition to be the key (again: you can fight them skillfully, but it is not the point of the game and they don't accommodate that super well).

staples like speed boost, off-the-wall jump, morph ball, etc. - these are all things i'm already familiar with. give me new means to interact with my environment, i am tired of the same old ones and each metroid game being treated like this similar progression. perhaps the existence of so many hard gates, at all, is really not that interesting, anyway.

What do you think makes Mega Man 9 worse than the NES games? I've always felt like its bosses (who all have properly dodgeable patterns and are fun to fight even with the buster, something I don't think the NES games nailed) and weapons (all of which are actually useful) put it soundly above the originals.

i believe most of the nes games have good boss fights, buster only. anyway, bullet pointed complaints:

- too many instant death hazards. the game plays like a gauntlet of different ways to kill you, instantly. many of them will get you the first time, but become dull when mastered and take up enormous chunks of almost every single level. the first time i played through mega man 9, i died probably more than a dozen times. the second, i didn't die once (but did use an e-tank lol, shame on me). when the majority of your level design is instant kill hazards, you start to strip away mega man's ingenious marathon-type design.

- vacant background art. many of the levels have almost nothing going on in their backgrounds. as early as the 2nd mega man game, backgrounds were constantly being filled up, often with very pleasantly detailed art or animated elements (think the waterfall in bubble man, the moving machinery in metal man, the trees in wood man). there was an obvious stride to make this game look "retro," without ever analyzing what that meant. there are genuinely good palette choices and color contrasts, but the levels are very boring looking.

- too much emphasis on its weapon set. while this does agreeably have one of the best and most diverse weapon sets in mega man history (i still like 4's better), it constantly forces you to use each of them for various hazards and the wily stages are notorious about this. many enemies are also particularly vulnerable to certain weapons and otherwise hugely obnoxious to fight with just the buster. when you start speedrunning, you begin to notice that many stretches of even the 8 robot master stages had sections meant to be trivialized with certain weapons. this type of design is somewhat inflexible and rigid, and i feel like it artificially suggests or later forces you to use weapons when you don't want to. each has a bit too specialized a purpose, and some of the very annoying-to-deal-with enemies feel like they're holding good pacing hostage until you figure out how to use the right weapon in the right place (which has its own disruption to the pacing in forcing you into a menu or awkward weapon cycling).

- the removal of charge and slide. charge shot i somewhat understand - i personally think it was a good addition, but it was exercised somewhat thoughtlessly (4 and 5 GB actually tried to do something about this) and becomes a beast of burden to the player. people start charging all the damn time when they don't need to, and it starts hurting the pacing for them. while i can yell at them that it's never something you need to, i believe the design allowing you to play it too safely and tediously is ultimately a fault of the designers. telling people they're playing it wrong by charging all the time doesn't change the fact that the designers put that in there as a valid method! slide, however, was purely a good addition to the game. it made level hazards more interesting and added some great potential to boss fights. its removal is blatantly a thoughtless retro throwback without any thought put into why they would make that decision. this was inafune going "mega man was better back when i had the least amount of involvement over its design in 1 and 2." how about you get akira kitamura on the design team, then, you stupid hack?

- the shop. why the fuck does this have a shop? you go for mother fucking nostalgia-goggles-level retro purity with your ugly, vacant backgrounds and removal of charge and slide, but you add a goddamn shop? the shop is a band-aid for bad players and a bad one, at that. it's hard to ignore because of enemies in the game constantly dropping currency for it, too. certain items from there seriously trivialize the game (a half damage item??? items to negate falls and pits? are you serious?) and it was a bad idea. why do we get two cool abilities that provably add complexity to the game stripped, but one of the most unnecessary additions to the series returning? none of the nes/fc games ever had a shop. the game plays fine without it, but it's a pretty big red herring to how the design might be intended and many stages put currency out of reach, suggesting it would be part of the game's entertainment value to collect them. only, well, the only place you can use them is the shop, which you shouldn't use. buhhh. this is a decided level worse than e-tanks, which i also consider to have been a bad addition to the series (that they only realized was bad when 8 rolled around).

- recycling stage mini-bosses in the wily stages. that flower miniboss is garbage and overtly tedious. all previous mega man midbosses were hurdle-like and straightforward, able to be crushed in a couple seconds with some timed jumpin' and shootin'. this one is very attention demanding and has long portions where you can't attack him and random movement. EXTREMELY not classic mm design, and the game making you fight it AGAIN in the wily castle is just fucking weird. it does not thematically fit in there, whatsoever, and was a bad fight to begin with. i forget the other midboss the wily castle recycles but it was also bad. yes, you can trivialize it in like two seconds if you somehow figure out it's weak to concrete shot, which it in no way indicates (good luck! some more trial-and-error "there is a best weapon for this bit" design from inti creates).

i mean, the game has some decent bosses, but the stages are pretty single-minded about their hazards, the marathon aspect of the game is shot-up, and it just doesn't feel like the classic games in terms of its design. i don't think it's awful, but it plays more like a decent fan-game than an authentic entry into the pantheon.