Volteccer_Jack wrote:Being a bit of a fan of Aero the Acro-Bat back in the day, decided I should finally go and give a try to that spin-off, Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel. And it's another Sunsoft-but-not-developed-by-Sunsoft-game-which-has-Zero-in-the-title, weird that there's 4 of those now.
Never played he or Aero's games BITD, but I always thought Zero was a neat character design (ah, those innocent pre-internet days, when "furry" conjured nothing more sinister than a basket of kittens 3;). And now I think about it, kinda subversive...? A ninja musasabi decked out in Imperial Japanese regalia (rising sun bandanna, "Zero" the "Kamikaze"), rounded out by a veritable symbol of the empire's doom: a bomber jacket.
Shoulda called his kidnapped GF Enola the Gay Wombat.
BEAMLORD wrote:Good afternoon, gentlemen.
Quick question regarding Batman (NES) - is Joker able to one-shot you? I beat the game today for the first time, and I'm sure he did this to me. Possibly with his cane-gun. Either that, or I was wearing my n00b goggles.
Top-tier shit, anyway. I actually picked up Kabuki Quantum Fighter yesterday, but it just put me in the mood for Batman
IIRC, his gun does a brutal 3HP a pop, so if you reach him in rough shape, he might appear to 1HKO you. However, you get a free lifebar refill after Firebug, so that technically shouldn't happen. Unless... it's been a few years, but I dimly recall FB not respawning if you kill him, die to Joker, then redo the clock tower, with FB's lifebar refill bonus also going away? That could definitely see you one-shotted by Mistah J.
In any case, congrats on the clear! An arcade-concise and rigorously tough gauntlet I always enjoy wrestling back under control. Stage 5 is a model finale, a stern test of everything you've relied on up to that point. And the FB+Jokester showdown is one of my favourites across not just FC scrolling action, but the entire canon at large. The ageless visual contrast of vivid detail to inky shadow plus Naoki Kodaka's pummelling goth-rock OST are most welcome, too!
Purely academically, I do wonder how deliberate FB+Joker's battle designs were. With their extreme aggression and slightly obscure solutions, both will inevitably splatter new players, and bulldog intermediate ones, giving the impression of a damage race.
At the same time, not only is evading all damage eminently possible - it's also hand-in-glove with authoritatively swift takedowns of both, thanks to the lynchpin of hitbox cancelling, plus good PVE balance. FB will massacre you on the ground, but can't touch you in the air. Jokester is a solid wall of death at range, but pitifully open at pointblank. Both can undo your advantages by body-ramming straight into you, with the former's Tiger Knee and the latter's deceptively quick sprint - but neither attack can connect while they're in hitstun, instead sending the boss sailing haplessly through Bats, resetting the field.
So a fraught pursuit ensues, with their volatile movement and fast, deadly attacks keeping even the most seasoned player on high alert for sudden swerves and shock upsets. Quite unlike the typical evade-at-all-costs model of the time, where players confronted with a moving boss typically have to give way or suffer the consequences.
While it's one of those cases where the end result is so good it wouldn't matter either way, I'm willing to give the designers the benefit of the doubt, given how exceptionally well the competing demands of attack and evasion are dovetailed via that always-welcome hitbox cancel. See also ActRaiser II, another masterpiece of technical hardcore, and Jaleco's
Ninja Kazan, which while not as distinguished as Sunsoft and Quintet's games, predates both and plays with some notable smoothness.
Cornered? YE RIGHT *PBLTHHH* *2xmiddlefingers + EAT PUSSY SIGN* (`w´メ)
A quality mechanic I'm always happy to see, with it enabling a particularly sleek razorline of risk VS reward. Now you can leap straight at that ledge-guarding enemy, or that charging bruiser, aiming to kick 'em square in the teef! But if you miss your attack, it'll be your ass instead!
Who could resist such swashbuckling derring-do.
THAT LEDGE BELONG 2 ME (■`w´■)
Super Edgy n'
X-TREEEM Technical Bonus: How many games of the era require the victorious player to manually direct their character over to the vanquished foe, so that an extrajudicial BAT-PWNing may commence? MGS3 beaten to the punch by some fifteen-odd years.
I like to go for the
BIG BAT-KNEE OFF THE TOP BAT-ROPE
I think Kabuki would've made a fine Bat-runnerup at the
FC Scrolling Athletics Meet: Walljump 2 Tha Top, if only it'd had a final gauntlet comparable to Batman's immortally tough clocktower. Its own penultimate stage is maybe 70% of the way there, but it never hits that critical point, peaking around where Bats is still warming up.
CHEEKS OF STEEL
Still, a quality epigone I like having around, particularly with it being a tiny little micro-subgenre. I would also file Hect's Moon Crystal under this banner - it's not as mechanically similar, but the balance of arcadey immediacy to cinematic grappling and climbing is unmistakable. Neat game - the bosses are largely damage races (possible but unnecessary to no-hit most), but the stages are quality. And as this thread's namesake and spiritual anchor attests, sometimes that's enough.