kitten wrote:^^ a bunch of words to bil about ninja gaiden :p i'm gonna spoiler tag it cuz i typed too dang much and don't wanna clog the thread.
You're starting to remind me of Edmond circa 2013, kitten. Reams of theory peppered with objective misinformation and built on a questionable understanding of the game itself. All the same, I'd much rather you leave these reponses unspoilered, rather than inflicting long-winded and circular posts on me via stealth. :[
kitten wrote:BIL wrote:That final ledge-guarding machinegunner? Just wait until he's approached the ledge and jump over his head. Same thing happens at the end of Act 3 with the machete guy guarding the exit.
is this not in direct contradiction to always pushing forward? in 5-1, there is a bat that spawns -only- as you get to the very tip of a ledge. if you kill him and then jump, you've respawned him and jump straight into him. if you jump straight across, you fly straight him into him. a speedrunner has to briefly pause in mid-air, slash him, and then continue moving forward, which requires even more severe rote memorization. my complaints are not that these segments are unsolvable or impossible, but that they are
deeply unintuitive and sometimes even contradictory in what you're meant to do. as you say just after this -
That bat? Wait for him to get close, kill him, then proceed. Just like the 5-2 exit eagle, he won't respawn. If you're on some breakneck 1337 speedrun, yeah, you'll need to do some voodoo. See every speedrun ever?
Like any good action game, there is a dynamic at work here. No, not every single ledge should be barreled over - if something spawns as you near its end, that's a good indication to be careful (or use Jumpslash). Yes, sometimes (see below) it's a good idea. In the latter situations, you'll have time to land and deal with whatever's on the other side. Again, I've gone over this game looking for its fabled catch-22 instakill spawns. They don't exist.
That's two spawn points I've had to correct you on, now - you even had me believing your incorrect data on 5-2, until I checked back for myself!
kitten wrote:BIL wrote:And yeah, I'd definitely assume jumping under that runner, killing the ledge-guarder in the same sweep, is the way to go. His height beats mine by an unassailable degree - why wouldn't I use that to slip under him?
cool, now i approach a dangerous ledge by recklessly pushing forward because i should instantaneously intuit that as i keep moving forward, the guy who spawns near the end of the ledge will jump over me. in the previous example, i must know to pause and then jump over the bat (or do a brief, weird, mid-air pause to hit the bat), in this example, i just blindly push forward. should i "look before i leap" near the edge of the ledge here, i am met with infinitely spawning guys jumping right onto my stupid noggin'.
The runners are way up at the top of the screen, too high to connect without pausing and making a deliberate effort. They're misdirection. My intuition would be to ignore them and focus on the ledge guarder who'll stop me from safely landing my jumps, but even if you decide to stop and deal with them, you won't be punished. They're not "jumping onto your noggin."
if i back up to reset the gunner's trigger to make the relentless jump (followed by another, so much for looking before leaping), i'm stuck eating eagle pie. and then, immediately after taking two very quick, relatively blind jumps at the end of ledges where you advise to not pause, i am met with a jump where you advise pausing to wait for the guy to move. these are two completely opposite reactions to "what the fuck is going to be at the end of this ledge and will it kill me?" that both require preemptive knowledge of the situation. far from the only contradictory pair of reactions to similar situations in the game.
You've managed to turn a simple sequence of three jumps into an absolute theorypost nightmare.
Jump 1: kill the ledge guarder, deal with the enemies on landing.
Jump 2: kill the ledge guarder, deal with the enemies on landing.
Jump 3: ledge guarder is in the way, let him move before jumping.
All three give you all the information you need prior to making a jump. Quit whining about your faulty intuition and deal with reality.
kitten wrote:BIL wrote:Aggression and proaction are generally the best solutions in NG1.
proaction that requires knowing what is ahead, aka memorization.
Yes? I just finished saying a few posts up that superior NG1 play requires you to identify its various chokepoints, then break them outright with targeted aggression. That's the game in a nutshell. Again, you've misidentified it as some Gun-Dec free for all, when it is in fact as methodical as Castlevania despite the much higher game speed and more flexible character. Work on that. You complain endlessly about your "intution" being foiled - chances are your inutition for this particular game is woefully misguided.
near the end of 5-3, where there's a gap you have to cross to kill a machine gunner, you
seriously freeze up with what to do here. why? because you know (from experience and likely quite a few deaths) that if you kill that guy across the ledge with your subweapon, he's just going to respawn, and that if you jump at the wrong time, you get stuck on that horribly obnoxiously placed pillar - you even get shot back into it, once. after him, you know to pause before a ledge to jump over a bat, and then also to jump over a cheetah that spawns. the speed at which you react to jump over the cheetah combined with your slow fumbling just before tends to heavily imply you knew it would spawn and had that jump ready, because that portion of the game is shitty and a bit memorization intensive.
Beating up on my rusty old kusoplay to score points? We really are into Edmond territory now. -_- That snag was all on my bad playing, bud. I arrived with the situationally useless updraft, wasted time pondering and ultimately rejecting the shuriken on offer while the gunner fortified his ledge, and was left with a godawful predicament of my own design. So rather than, I don't know, bumbling ahead like it's Gun-Dec, I admitted defeat, backed up (take note:
this is a situation where you might want to back up and reset a spawn), then came back and killed him with my sword.
Lesson Learned: if you're not packing a strong horizontal reach for that section, don't waste time before hacking the gunner down.
you probably also knew that slashing at the cheetah is something you're not really given enough time to do and that the jump is much safer. it is piss easy to get through that segment when you know what to do, there's really not a hell of a lot to the execution here when survival is priority, but you gotta know what to do, and it's hardly what one would have the intuition to expect. that is my primary complaint with the game - not that it's too hard, but that its teaching is horrible. a lot of these jumps also require seriously conscious awareness that if you do it at the wrong time you cling to a pillar that you for no conceivable reason would ever want to fucking cling onto.
More theorypost mountains out of molehills. Those bats spawn well in advance of the jumps - obviously I'm going to let them get into prime position, do you think I'm an idiot? Since nothing can enter the screen without my input, and there are no nearby threats, why wouldn't I sit pretty for a few frames? The cat - relatively cruel placement
by this game's standards, but as usual, calibrated so you'll have landed before he gets close. Killing him is the much cooler, more dangerous option, but this is a sloppy no-miss banged out in 20 minutes on demand.
How anyone who rates Dynamite Batman as a respectable sidescroller can single out this game's design as particularly onerous baffles me. I think I have an inkling of why you would, though - as you said, DB's stages are short and death doesn't set you back much. NG1's stages are long, and death can set you back some ways. It sounds like you've got a way higher tolerance than most of us for sloppy design that can be eventually barreled through, and a much lower tolerance for calculatedly cruel design that demands practiced technique.
also during the playthrough, you have a pretty decent idea of what's in each candle and which are too dangerous to bother with the mild retracing your steps you'd need to do to get one (because it reactivates a bunch of spawn triggers). you also have the ideal subweapon for dealing with the (imo real shittily designed) jetpack ninja star guys, and know to move just a bit forward (so they don't respawn), pause, attack (jump and attack if you lack the subweapon), repeat for each new one. watching you play that segment looks like anything but exciting, relentless action - it looks like someone who has memorized a shitty part of a game and burned in what to do in reaction to it.
Are we talking about 6-2, the game's infamously cruel difficulty peak? I can understand the flying ninjas bit looking stilted to a spectating theoryposter, but no,
I find that bit one of the game's most enduringly scariest with its combination of drifting projectiles and precarious footing. Ideal weapon? Yeah, Jumpslash is the ideal weapon for the whole game, at the cost of crippling your leaping forward slash. It's also provided to you before the aforementioned section. Again, what kind of idiot do you think I am to turn it down?
if that is not memorization, then it is at bare minimum having to be extremely proactive about dealing with the game's very strict respawning quirk (which can spawn guys in walls and falling into pits in a few rare areas, or even despawn enemies, and i still very strongly maintain is something that was not what they had wanted be a part of the game). it is a really weird and unintuitive behavior to move a bit forward before taking a calculated attack, and yet it is what you do very frequently. your forward motion is repeatedly, briefly halted, and your play is filled with a lot of calculated, slight retreats or pauses, but almost entirely during segments where it's safer to do so and after you've advanced the screen juuust enough to have that enemy you killed not respawn.
Reams and reams and reams of theory. I'll point out, yet again, you've misconstrued how this game works. You don't barrel along sponging up damage and bullshitting your way out of trouble ala Gun-Dec. It's a methodical action game with uncharacteristically fast pace and an unusually flexible character. As said above, I'm sure it
looks halting to an uninvolved spectator, but like I said - I don't care about uninvolved spectators.
something i want to get out, real quick: i seriously don't understand why this game doesn't let you move and attack (without jumping, which in many areas will cause you to fly into a pillar you don't want to grab), as it would demonstrably aid in making the game faster and accentuate relentlessness. dealing with the attack pause -and- that you need to be constantly pressing at least teensy bits forward with each new enemy on the screen is pretty mean and seems to go against the game's whole point. i also don't understand why there is a very short delay before your sword even comes out all the way (which is really shitty on some of the dashing enemies) or why its hitbox is so far away from your character (which lets many enemies repeatedly hit you unless you've ingrained that slashing in response to being hit is not a good reaction).
You might as well be complaining that Castlevania doesn't let you move and attack, or that it has startup frames on the whip.
you also do some serious conserving of the whirlwind slash during the last level, which gets you out of quite a few situations. you even abuse the down+slash bug to make sure you can safely refill your power without ever using it.
In other words, I conserve the ammo for my subweapon wherever possible - gotcha. Citation needed on the down+slash empty hand being a bug, btw.
watch how extremely safe you play around spawn triggers
at this time stamp because you are preemptively aware of the massive clusterfuck ambush involving multiple of the worst enemies in the game that area becomes if you misstep. you have a strategy well before entering, as you do at many, many points, and it's one that requires having become accustomed to the game's unique and punishing quirks as well as just memorizing "okay, this is a serious danger zone, don't fuck around."
It's definitely a pretty mean spawn, but also extremely out of the ordinary, and heavily compensated for. Ignoring that those hunchbacks will miss an advancing player, a time freeze is right there, you've just gotten a life restore, they can only do 1HP per hit, and the boss rush will restore your life to max.
In other words, it's mean and clearly the designers getting their jollies with a ridiculous ambush right before the game's end - but given its singularity and the associated compensation, it's nothing I'd knock the game down for. You're making a tiny bit of questionable design sound like a microcosm of the game at large, yet again.
another good example would be
right here. you take a couple of steps back to take care of that green guy, and then hop on a platform. you've stopped to take care of problem eagles at multiple points in the game, but instead of doing so, here, you absolutely do not take so much a single smidgen of an inch of a step back on that platform and charge forward, because you've likely had it burned in that that means it will spawn -from the fucking ceiling- a hopping guy from behind who will kill you (when i say this game's enemy placement is "litter," this is a good example of what i am referring to). you take a backstep to kill the green guy because you know it's safe, and then suddenly refuse any backward movement at a spot that will kill you if you take the same safety with the eagle - the change in behavior likely because of rote memorization of what i would feel very comfortable to describe as an unfair punishment. just a step back to adjust to that eagle, and you are
fucked.
In other words, the game punishes retreat. And yet no, if you do retreat, the ninja won't instakill you - he's much too far away. Yet again you've conjured up a fanfiction murderspawn.
The eagle itself? Like I said in a previous post, they're relatively harmless without momentum. I let that one struggle over to me, then move to safer ground unopposed and deal with him there.
I know the situation, as I know the situations of every game I can play decently, but it's hardly what I'd call "rote" - drawing the eagle in, making the jump and killing the ledge guard, then finally taking out the now-accelerating bird are all fraught with technique. You mentioned totally being able to 2-ALL Metal Storm, but just never bothering because you felt it beneath you - if we're going to play internet shrink again (groan), I'd suspect you tend to hastily write practiced techniques off as "rote" without mastering them yourself.
during the second part of the final boss, you accidentally get the homing shots coming back at you, but fortunately only at the very end as you only need to smack him one more time to kill him. during that, you take nearly half your life's worth of damage to his really poorly programmed attack despite playing conservatively into his pattern, which you have memorized a good portion of the quirk to. isn't this, i don't know, kind of bad design? the boss's pattern, single attack, and single frame all reek of cheap & shitty, both in visual and mechanical design.
Oh wow, you've
really misconstrued this. I lose half my life due to my own
recklessness and lack of control. "Poorly programmed?" That boss is a masterpiece of economical design. Every attack you make needs a clear entry and exit point. Rashness is punished hard. It's superb.
heck, st5 boss is intended to be killed through attrition, that is just out & out bad design.
Nobody in this thread likes NG1's boss roster - Jaquio aside, it's regularly acknowledged as the game's weakest link. And everyone agrees Malth is especially weak as fuck. Please don't dress these things up as pearls of wisdom for our benefit, it's embarrassing.
and yet there are ledges where you blindly rush off of them, using foreknowledge of previous plays that you're going to be safe. is that 5-1 bat not a near-unforgivable piece of shit? you have to seriously step really, really goddamn close to the tip of that ledge to spawn him (in your play, you are literally positioned with a foot in mid-air).
We've been over the 5-1 bat, who you've theory fanfictioned into some sort of Kaizo Mario gag. It spawns well before you're in any danger of falling off the ledge. No misinformation, please.
who on earth behaves in such a way that every time they approach a ledge a game, they crawl out, halfway off of it, and then stop to wait to see if something flies out of mid-air? you definitely don't in your play. heck, on the immediately previous ledge which is nearly identically tall and far from the next platform (it's easy to confuse them), do you make such a stop to see if it would spawn something there? no, because you already know (via the power of memorization) that it is safe.
If that same bat had appeared on
that safe ledge, I'd see it, stop, and deal with it likewise. What you are saying is "BECAUSE YOU DIDNT SEE A BAT, YOU JUMPED. BECAUSE YOU SAW A BAT, YOU STOPPED!" Yes, and?
so, how am i meant to play? precisely fast or stop-and-go every time a ledge pops up? you do a lot of stop-and-go with enemies, too. i understand a game is meant to have little bumps in its pacing to add variety, but ng's tendency to only spawn enemies on the edges of the screen and extreme punishment for hesitation in some instances but equally strong punishment for not taking a second to wait in others just feels discordant, confusing, and poor.
As with every action game ever, you're meant to play the hand you're dealt.
if your play is meant to be instructive, i feel like i should actually take a less aggressive approach in many cases. you seriously do pause briefly to take care of enemies very, very frequently in the later levels. this is not at all some stupid cheap shot at your play, i respect you a lot as a player and your advice clearly comes from experience and love for the games, but there are a lot of bits where i typically rush in where going slower or taking pauses is more reliable.
As with the 6-2 flying ninjas - I'm sure it looks stop/start. In reality, at the controls, I never stop plotting my advances. I'm not even going to bring up the replay's stated rustiness, here - if you think a seasoned NG1 player not
literally scrolling the screen forward at all times is playing at all defensively, rather than positioning themselves to launch their attack, you've completely misconstrued what I mean by "aggression." I'm sure you
are having a hard time of things, if you took this to mean you're to charge ahead at all times. What you should be doing is apprehending each situation, from a pause if need be, and breaking it.
maybe!!! >:O
seriously, we'll see. i'm gonna expect a little payback, here, tho! i've given TNWA a real fair shake and you've still not played batman: tas!!
and here i am playing ninja gaiden, a game i already knew i didn't like, all over again just to butt heads with ya.
I think you've misunderstood this thread slightly, tbh. I've always described (and run) it as a relaxed discussion thread - I'll get around to recommended games, eventually, and I'll evaluate stuff where I think I've got something to say, but for the most part I'm not interested in intense theory and criticism, and definitely not in butting heads with anyone. It's more of a "what are you playing lately" deal.
btw, in writing this post, i did play through the game again. twice. i'm going to keep playing for a little and see if i can get a no miss clear (though i sadly still lack tools to record) out of the way. my last play only had like two continues and i feel pretty close.
Two credits is shameful. >:3
slowing down being a thing that kills me is something i am usually fine with, going off-script and getting killed because of the game's absurd spawning mechanic i am absolutely not fine with. enemies don't even naturally scroll onto the screen, they just appear when you've moved the camera over their scripted point, whether you're moving left or right. one of the reasons i prefer ryukenden 3 and gun-dec is because of their slight dead zones for the camera scrolling which allow you to move a couple steps back without scrolling the camera off of points for the hyper-aggressive enemies to pop out of. in ninja gaiden, there are points (at least one of which i mentioned) where the slightest correction of your step results in instant death.
If you're talking about that 6-3 ninja again, then no, again - he's not an instant death. He's a punishment for running away, definitely.
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I may even have been in my drawers 
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