Cycomatix Reviews And Plays Stuff

I've just finished reviewing the entire Sonic series and have played through a few others as well. Check out my previous playthroughs in the link below.

[cycomatix]

Devil May Cry - Dante Must Die Mode

I initially started my Dante Must Die series of playthroughs with DMC 3 because at the time that was going to be the only game I was going to play through Dante Must Die mode on.  DMC 3 is my favorite of the series, and I was itching to really conquer that game.  After I did finish it (and we’ll cover it later) I still found myself in the mood for more Devil May Cry.  I shrugged my shoulders and began my journey through DMC 1.

The biggest challenge with Dante Must Die mode in Devil May Cry 1 is the fact that you don’t have as much freedom with your mission selection as you do in all the other games.  Devil May Cry 1 makes you play through normal first, then forces you to play through hard mode, then you have the choice to play through Dante Must Die mode or go back to normal or hard mode.  There also isn’t any mission select, so you have to play the entire game through that mode before you can go to the next one.

This means a first attempt at Dante Must Die mode takes some planning.  Hard mode isn’t bad, but it is a significant leap in difficulty, so if the player doesn’t take some extra care in looking for Blue Orbs and Secret missions to increase their health, Hard mode will give them a rough time.  Item usage is also very limited in this game, and you’re basically left to whatever you can find during a playthrough as far as vital stars, devil stars, and holy water.

For the first timer, you’re generally looking at a total of 4 playthroughs.  The first playthrough on normal so that you understand the basics of the game, the second playthrough on hard mode as it’s required by the game, a third playthrough on normal to allow you to collect extra items and finish up the secret missions and blue orbs, and then finally Dante Must Die mode.

Because the secret missions during your first playthrough might require you to have some items or abilities you haven’t unlocked yet when you first reach them, and some of them are far too difficult for a first time player in Hard Mode and especially on Dante Must Die mode, so you’ll be using that third playthrough in Normal to wrap everything else up.  You’re also collecting recovery items this go round, because this DMC is very stingy with what you’re allowed to actually buy from the Time God.

When you finally do reach Dante Must Die, you really have to think about how you want to ration your items.  Some bosses in this game are brutal, even with practice, and you’ll probably want to save an Untouchable Star for bosses like Nelo Angelo, Nightmare, or Mundus.  You can’t go back and farm items either like you can in the other games once you’re underway with Dante Must Die, so there is always going to be a worry that you’ll run out your first go round.

Of course if you’re opting to not worry about health and items, then you’ll have nothing to rely on but your own reflexes and experience, but this run through of the Dante Must Die difficulty is from the perspective of a first timer, not a seasoned veteran.

If there’s any good news about all these restrictions you deal with in the first game, it’s that DMC 1 is far far easier than the other games overall, and most bosses just require some knowledge about their general weaknesses.  Normal enemies in this game pose far less of a threat than later games as well, and can generally be taken out with a Magma Drive from Ifrit.  The enemies will also only use Devil Trigger on certain screens, and the game will display a countdown to when they actually can use it.  Enemies do more damage while triggered, but generally you’ll have them at low enough health where this isn’t really a problem.  There were only a few parts that held me up, and while I won’t say this game was easy, the vast majority of the game not involving bosses played as easy as normal mode once I knew what I was doing.

The first road block for me was the last encounter with Phantom, the lava-spider-scorpion thing.  In normal and hard mode, you can almost damage race Phantom down with Kick 13 combo from ifrit, but all that will earn you in Dante Must Die mode is a dead charred Dante.  The first Phantom encounter I was able to beat him by taking cover behind the pillars, shooting a few grenades, and then picking my moments to jump in and hit him.  The second full on fight with Phantom however doesn’t have any cover and Phantom himself likes to trounce you with his body and pelt you with lava rocks.

It is possible to lure Phantom over the skylight, and if he jumps on it enough times it’ll shatter and you can win the fight that way, but doing this means you have to stay on the defensive and it’s not quite as fun.  The strategy I ended up using against Phantom was using an Air Hike to double jump above him, and then slashing down on him.  If you do this while triggered, it takes a good chunk of his life, and Phantom has trouble hitting you in the air as it is.  It does more damage than Air Raid on Dante Must Die and was the key to my victory.

There was also Nelo Angelo 1 who wasn’t any more difficult than all the previous encounters with him on the easier difficulties.  I remember thinking how glad I was that he was going to stay so easy - but what a naive fool I was at the time.  I continued on and skipped the first Griffon fight.  Since you’ll have Ifrit when you first enter the courtyard outside the arena on your extra playthroughs, you can just complete the puzzle with them in that room and avoid having to fight one angry birdie.

But you still have to fight Griffon on the pirate ship.  Air Raid completely wrecks Griffon on Normal and Hard but is completely pitiful against him on DMD.  I wasn’t making any progress on this fight, so I decided to research some strategies.  

Griffon can be lured to the center of the ship, and he’ll stay there so long as you catch him in a pattern.   You have to not attack him while he’s in the air and kind of stay in the same area on the left side of the ship in the center.  Once he lands he’ll take off and land in that position after launching some easy to dodge attacks at you so long as you stay in that area.  From here, it’s a simple matter of attacking with Meteor after dodging Griffon’s lighting attacks.  This is a pretty easy fight in the grand scheme of Dante Must Die, but a legit fight against him would be much much harder.

Next is Nelo Angelo 2, which was another fight that just stopped me dead.  He’s really not even that hard to dodge, but he has a ton of health and he deals a ton of damage very quickly.  I’m also a very impatient type and I keep trying to go for my own damage when I should be jumping out of the way of his sword swings.  This fight of Nelo Angelo is susceptible to the time stop ability of the Bangle of Time, so eventually I give in and start using it to get huge chunks of damage on him.  Even with the Bangle of Time it still took a few tries, but it made the fight much easier.

Next came Griffon 3, and this was surprisingly one of the funnest fights in the game.  The key here is that you have to clip Griffon’s wings as quickly as possible, or you’ll be a sitting duck.   You can start the fight right off the bat with two charged meteors in Devil Trigger, and then hit Griffon with a couple of DT grenades.  This will bring him down fast.

From this point, you really just want to pelt Griffon from a distance with your grenades, and get your shots in with Ifrit when Griffon charges you.  I found dodging Griffon’s lightning pretty fun here, and he was by far the most enjoyable fight, even if it lasts a tad too long.

Next came Nightmare 1.  Nightmare is the type of boss that feels impossible the first time you face him, and suddenly becomes really easy once you know how to deal with him.  Nightmare uses a rotation of attacks that doesn’t change and makes him very predictable.  He’ll first attack with a laser from his front, then send out a spike to jab you with, and then go back to the laser.  Later incarnations of NIghtmare will mix up a flying twisting spike as an alternative to the head laser, and if you’re not close enough to his head he’ll shoot homing missiles instead of the head laser, but otherwise this is the dead locked pattern.

From here, you just need to get used to where you want to stand and how you want Nightmare to rotate with you.  If you equip Ifrit and have Rolling Blaze, you can counter Nightmare’s spike attacks and stun him, which is the biggest way to rack up damage against him.

Nightmare will also attempt to swallow you up if you don’t have his light sources activated, and this teleports you to a room with a previously fought boss.  The first Nightmare fight puts you against Phantom, the second Griffon, and the third Nelo Angelo.  The good news is that if you defeat the boss here, Nightmare takes a sizable chunk of damage, so you can even work into your strategy when you’d like to have him swallow you up if you’re comfortable with fighting any of those bosses since they are significantly weaker here.

Nightmare 1 isn’t that bad, but his second and third forms have other problems will cover in a minute.  Next up instead is Nelo Angelo 3, who is by far the toughest fight I’ve had to deal with in the entire series at the time of this writing.  Nelo Angelo 3 is a monster and I died to him over 120 times.  I fought him all freaking day long.  You can’t cheese Nelo Angelo with Bangle of Time this fight, and now he throws swords at you just to make the fight even more of a pain.  On a whim after my 120th death, I wanted to see if Holy Waters worked on the guy, and to my shock they worked incredibly well!  I had about 8 by the time I completed all my previous playthroughs and reached this guy, and that was enough to do him in.  I may try to fight Nelo Angelo completely legit one day in the future, but for now I was just happy to be done with him.

Next up is Nightmare 2 who isn’t any harder than his previous incarnation, but this time the freaking camera is right in the worst possible position, and it changes angles on you at the worst possible moments.  The camera did far more damage to me than Nightmare ever did.

Nightmare 3 at least doesn’t have this issue with the camera, but he does have way more health than the previous fights.  I struggled with this until I started using charged Ifrit attacks to damage him, and that made all the difference.  I got nervous while he was in his final phase shooting lasers everywhere though, so I used an untouchable and used Vortex to finish him off.

Finally there was Mundus, and he wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.  His first form is a rail shooter section in outer-space, and the only real trick to this one is to hit Devil Trigger at just the right moment and use Vortex on Mundus when he’s passing through you.  This is the best way to score up damage on him.

On the other hand if you’re impatient and have a ton of Devil Stars you don’t need for the rest of the game, here’s the best place to burn them as you continuously ram Devil Triggered dragons up his butt.  That brings us to Mundus 2.

There’s two strategies here - you can jump in close to Mundus on the floating platforms and Melee him with Sparda, or you can hang back and pelt him with ranged attacks.  On DMD difficult, meleeing him is really risky, but if you have untouchable stars left, they’ll just go to waste past this fight, so they make a great way to burn him down quickly.

However, fighting Mundus from Ranged isn’t all that bad.  You can keep an eye on the battleground fairly easily, get free recharges of life and devil trigger from enemies and those floating rocks he sends at you, and your ranged attack while Devil Triggered does a decent amount of damage.  I think I could have beaten Mundus without using any items had I decided not to burn the rest of my Untouchables to get the last half of Mundus’s health in Melee, had I fought the entire fight ranged.

That said, this is the last tough fight in the game, and once you win this, you’re basically done.  There’s a very easy escape sequence, and the final fight with Mundus in the sewers just requires you to vortex him or slash him a few times and you’ve won the game.

Overall compared to DMC 3, DMC 1 just doesn’t give the normal enemies enough health to be really threatening once you know how to deal with them, and the bosses have far less health too.  That’s the main thing that makes this game so much easier in Dante Must Die by comparison.

That said, Nelo Angelo is easily 10 times harder than Vergil in Dante Must Die mode, and beat me whole handedly over and over.  It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve faced in the franchise so far, and had I not cheesed him with holy waters, I probably would have ended up restarting and farming more untouchables or vital stars.  

That said, DMC 1 was a whole lot of fun to break down into all the best ways to handle each enemy and boss, and was a great experience overall.  It’s too bad that the follow-up was awful.

[cycomatix]

Devil May Cry

Platform:  Playstation 2

Release Date:  August 23rd, 2001 Capcom

The original Devil May Cry is starting to show its wrinkles as we approach the game’s 14th anniversary.  By comparison to DMC 3 or 4, or even DmC, the original feels a bit slower, it has less accessibility, and the writing and voice acting are “Capcom-bad” writing and acting.  But even if the original Devil May Cry isn’t exactly aging like fine wine, the overall experience is still a very sweet one!

Devil May Cry revitalized the Beat ‘em Up genre, pitting our one tough hero Dante, against hordes of monsters and demons.  While these games typically like to have the player as the underdog in the fight, Dante is presented as at least on equal footing with monsters ten times his own size, and he doesn’t even blink when a giant lava spider-scorpion thing starts threatening him.  You have to love Dante’s cocky attitude in the face of what would otherwise be overwhelming odds to a normal character, and this is one of the defining and appealing traits of the character.

And in combat, you’ll be challenged to find something as fluid and rewarding as this series.  The enemies are vicious, and they only get worse as the difficulty rises, but all of them generally have some predictable patterns or weaknesses, and if the player experiments or researches their foes long enough, they’ll discover exactly what the best strategies are for taking them down.  The game gives players a lot of lee-way in how much skill the player needs to develop as well with cleverly hidden health pick ups and store bought devil trigger upgrades.  Using Devil Trigger itself is a great way for inexperienced players to mitigate some of the tougher challenges while giving veterans an extra boost while they work on perfecting their runs through each stage.

It’s surprising how daunting the Dante Must Die difficulty feels for new players compared to how relatively obtainable it feels after you actually start working for it.  The game makes sure to train you at each stage for each encounter ahead, and by the time you actually do make it to Dante Must Die, you’ll be ready for it.  The biggest obstacle to stopping yourself is only the trepidation of playing at such a high difficulty.  Well that and the freaking camera, but I’ll get more into that when I discuss the nitty-gritty details of my Dante Must Die playthrough.

[cycomatix]

Gaming with a Series 6 - Devil May Cry - Dante Must Die

Among my bad ideas, this one definitely ranks high.  I love this series, but I’ve always played it about as casually as I could, only leisurely strolling through the normal difficulty and stocking up on enough items so that I didn’t have to worry about the game’s brutal gameplay mangling me too harshly.  With the release of Devil May Cry 4:  Special Edition though, I’m on a bit of a kick, so I’ve decided to do something I thought I would never do, and attempt to complete each game on their hardest difficulty - Dante Must Die.

If you’re not familiar with the series, Devil May Cry was first developed as a Resident Evil sequel by Capcom, but soon the game’s director Hideki Kamiya strayed away from more traditional elements of the Resident Evil series and started building a world with a nearly invincible protagonist, a fluid combat system, and a death metal soundtrack.  This game wasn’t fitting with the Resident Evil brand, so it needed a new one - Devil May Cry.  The story was re-worked, and the horror elements were marginalized to a more action oriented focus and Dante was born!

Ask anyone who has played these games on the easier difficulties, they’ll tell you how ludicrous the idea of playing the game on Dante Must Die mode seems, but despite the brutality of this series, there’s a delicate and smooth progression to that difficulty, and to even unlock Dante Must Die mode, you need to complete the game first on Normal, then Hard, and then you can try Dante Must Die.  Later games in the series even put a step in between Hard and Dante Must Die (Very Hard) just to give the player that extra practice.

The game also allows the player to not start Dante Must Die mode from scratch and allows them to keep all their accumulated items and health upgrades from previous runs, meaning that if you don’t feel ready to crash into Dante Must Die mode, you can spend a playthrough or two stocking up on health restore items.

But the real question is, what does Dante Must Die mode add to the gameplay experience?  The answer to that question is that it forces your mastery of the game.  Once you understand the basics of the gameplay, you can play Normal pretty leisurely and not worry about learning enemies and bosses particular patterns, and you can get away with using some Vital Stars on the tougher enemies.

Dante Must Die mode on the other hand puts you in a spot where those items are helpful, but you can’t rely on them because of how much damage your enemies output.  You need to know what attacks and strategies to use against the monsters, and which weapons work best.  The monster encounters are mixed up differently, and you’ll fight against harder enemies earlier on and against different combinations of them.  Furthermore, Dante Must Die mode adds one more trick up its sleeve and give enemies access to the same trick the player gets to access their Demon form - called Devil Trigger.

The enemies on Dante Must Die are already hard, but once Devil Triggered they’re even more vicious!  The game at this point suddenly makes small rooms that used to be a walk in the park some of the most dangerous parts of the game, and this is to say nothing of some of the bosses which are merciless.

But despite all of this, if you take the plunge into Hard Mode, and then finally reach Dante Must Die, it never feels unobtainable.  It never feels like something you watch some crazy Japanese player complete with years of mastery.  It feels like something you could do, if you just made a few less mistakes and if you just learned a few more moves.  Its a hard series, but that difficulty is fair, not insurmountable, and I’m taking the plunge to defeat it once and for all!

That said, I’m not going for all S-Ranks, and I’m not limiting my item usage.  These are things I think I could do with enough practice, but this is something I’d like to spend my summer on, not my entire year.

In addition to this, I’m making an effort to play through each game with at least every additional character once through at least normal.  I’m making no promises to do Dante Must Die with Virgil, or Lucia, or Lady and Trish, though I will be making a playthrough with them, and at least once with some of Dante’s more interesting costumes.  I’ll also be going through each Bloody Palace as well, and clearing additional modes like Heaven or Hell and Hell and Hell.

[cycomatix]

Rockman Battle & Fighters [Neo Geo Pocket Color]

Platform:  Neo Geo Pocket Color

Release Date:  July 2000 Capcom

The Neo Geo is probably only known in the states for Metal Slug and a good chunk of arcade fighters, and the hand-held version is even more obscure.  The more obscure a game is from a major series, the more worrisome it is to play it because you never know if you’re getting a gem like The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, or a turd like Mega Man for the Game Gear, and seeing as this is a down-scaled port of the two arcade fighting games to a hand-held, expectations couldn’t be lower.  But it may surprise you to know, that this version of the Arcade games captures the gameplay so well that it might even be a contender for the better version.

Graphically Battle & Fighters isn’t a lot to look at, but there’s a good deal of sprite work done here to mimic the actual animation frames from the arcade as close as possible.  The detail is minor, but the characters move and attack just like the arcade, and the gameplay is all the better for it.  You would expect this game to be inferior based on technology limitations alone, and while it certainly doesn’t look as good as those arcade games, it plays completely the same.

As stated, this port contains both the original Power Battle and the Power Fighters.  It also has a database that you can fill with the Robot Master’s profiles, which gives the games a little bit more replay value.  This version of the game is arguably the best one to play because of little features like that.

As impressive as it is that the Neo Geo Pocket emulates the arcade versions so well, it still is fundamentally just those games - which as I said in my reviews are pretty mediocre games overall.  This is definitely not a game worth hunting down to play, but if the novelty of it makes it something you’d like to see, try giving it a shot!

[cycomatix]

The Misadventures of Tron Bonne

Platform:  Playstation

Release Date:  July 22nd, 1992 Capcom

If you’ve played and enjoyed Mega Man Legends, there’s a good chance a lot of the enjoyment you got out of it was watching the characters - primarily the Bonne family.  If you want to see more of them, then you should definitely check out this prequel that went overlooked by many fans for years.  It lacks the scope of the other two legends games, and it corners cut in production to save on development costs but Tron and her servbots are just about the most charming of game characters ever!

Tron is on a mission to save her kidnapped brothers by paying off their enormous debt.  To do this, you’ll have to complete three very distinctive mini-games and manage your 40 servbots to help Tron out.  There’s an action minigame where you rob banks and steel farm animals that plays similar to the original Mega Man Legends, there’s a puzzle game that involves stealing shipping containers off a dock, and a heavily story based exploration minigame where you’ll primarily direct servbots where to go.  The puzzle game is fantastic, but the other two games don’t play as well, and can get tedious and boring at parts.

Where the game doesn’t excel in stellar gameplay though, it excels in charm with the characters and story.  Tron and her servbots are definitely the most endearing of video game villains, and it’s fun to see Tron thwart the police and other diggers during the course of the game and the interactions between her and her dimwitted servbots will carry most players through the entire game.

But this is a game that loses a lot on a second or third playthrough.  There just isn’t a lot of fun things to do in this game once you’ve seen the story, and the actual actions you need to take to progress through it can feel dull when you know what is coming ahead.  What I’m saying here is that the game has a lot of style, but very little substance, but it’s worth that one playthrough if you’ve enjoyed the previous Legends games.  This gem used to be a tough find online and in stores (a prices usually ranging from $100-$250), and on emulators it has had a lot of glitches.  Now that it’s on PSN though, fans that haven’t tried it should give it a shot.

[cycomatix]

Mega Man and Bass on the Wonderswan!

[cycomatix]

Mega Man and Bass:  Challenger from the Future

Platform:  Wonderswan

Release Date:  August 5th, 1999 Bandai

And continuing with the obscure Mega Man titles comes  Rockman & Forte: Mirai kara no Chōsensha, which roughly translates into the title above.  The last time I reported on the Wonderswan was about a little over a year ago during the Final Fantasy run  but this time it’s a game I can actually play.  The Wonderswan is a rare hand-held system in North America, and this game in particular is about as rare itself, ranging from $140-$300.  But for the true collector, is the game worth the asking price?

Well the answer to that question is not really if you plan to actually play the game.  Challenger from the Future gets a lot of things wrong about the Mega Man series and makes some strange decisions in its design and story.  First, this game is a sequel to Mega Man II on the game boy - that’s right, the bad one!  It follows up on Quint, talks about the distant future of Mega Man, and kinda goes all over the place.  I don’t really speak Japanese so I’m going to have to take the words of the fan-translators on this one, but it’s definitely a tonally weird choice for the series, especially since the game ends with the antagonist’s actual and bloody death.

When it comes to the gameplay though, this is a game that falls into the debatable range of quality.  It’s no where near as bad as something like Mega Man PC, or even something official like the disaster we’ll be covering in the future, Mega Man X7, but the game has a lot of nagging problems that make it underwhelming.  For instance, all the bosses have really strict and basic attack patterns, but they are also weak to just about all your weapons.  The weapons themselves are either useless or completely over powering.  Seriously, there’s a weapon in this game that makes you invulnerable while using it and it just completely drains all of the bosses life!  Just look at the picture below against the final boss!

The size of the sprites also make awkward hit boxes, and the game likes to put spikes in places that are annoying to deal with.  The game also has a level that takes advantage of the Wonderswan’s screen rotation gimmick, but it doesn’t really add anything substantial to the game besides annoying players emulating it.  On the whole Challenger from the Future isn’t as bad as you might expect it to be, but the quality is still far from the par of the series.  I’d only recommend trying this if you’re a die-hard fan.

[cycomatix]

Love it when I find a Mega Man song I'm not familiar with that is great!

This is Ice Brain from the remastered Mega Man Zero 2 tracks!

[cycomatix]

Super Adventure Rockman

Platform:  Playstation, Sega Saturn

Release Date:  June 25th, 1998 Capcom

So this is an obscure one only released in Japan, and one of the only FMV style games in the Mega Man franchise.  While there is some novelty in seeing a Mega Man game delivered in this format, and it is fun to see a full cartoon movie’s worth of animation, SAR fails to deliver with its very limited gameplay and tedious load times.  The story of this game was recently adapted for the North American Mega Man Comics by Archie Comics.

As with most FMV games, the video is shrunk to the center of the screen behind a UI panel, and at points during the game the player is given a decision to choose a path they’d like to go down.  There’s some variance here and multiple paths to choose from, but a few can literally lead to dead ends where you’re just forced to watch a cutscene of Mega Man dying before being taken back to the screen to load your game.

While the bulk of the game is focused on watching these animations, the actual gameplay segments feature you at a first person perspective of Mega Man where you aim a cursor around and fire at enemies.  You can switch weapons gained from Robot Masters to do a tiny bit of extra damage in the weakness chain, The cursor moves extremely slow while your enemies move pretty fast, and that makes these segments frustrating and tedious.

If you’re a big Mega Man fan, this game is worth playing through at least once for the novelty, but if you’re just looking for a fun game to play it really isn’t worth the trouble.  I personally own a physical copy of this game complete with case and instruction manual, but I own it because it’s a semi-rare game of my favorite series.  If you really want to experience this game, I’d recommend just watching a playthrough on youtube unless you speak Japanese.

[cycomatix]

Mega Man & Bass [Bass Playthrough]

When I play this game, I typically choose Mega Man; I’m just the type of guy who likes playing the game with its primary protagonist I guess.  Mega Man I find is easier to play with in this game as well, because he shoots through walls, slides, and has a charged buster attack.  Bass by comparison feels more like a Hard Mode to me, because while he can double jump and rapid fire, his shots are incredibly weak and require an upgrade to go through walls.  There are definitely some segments of the stages that are easier with Bass than Mega Man, but as a whole I find dealing with Bass’s weaknesses more difficult than Mega Man’s.  For this playthrough, which is otherwise a vanilla playthrough, I’m going out of my comfort zone a bit and playing as Bass.

The main problem with Bass is that he usually can’t kill most of the smaller enemies with one charged shot, or the bigger enemies with several shots.  This becomes a problem in stages like Tengu Man’s level, where the enemies known as the Mokumokumos will quickly latch on to you and drag you into a pit.  I had a lot of trouble with the intro to this stage because of this problem, though Tengu Man himself posed little threat.

Burner Man’s stage also gave me issues with trying to aim at enemies positioned around walls or at strange angles.  This stage is probably the one that gives me the most trouble in this game outside of King Stage 2.

If there’s one nice thing about playing as Bass though, it’s that you can skip large chunks of the level with Bass’s double jump.  Many of the platforming sections that would be tricky with Mega Man are a joke with Bass.  You can even unlock the ability for Bass to fly temporarily with Treble if you have enough bolts, but I prefer to save my money for the other upgrades.

While many sections and bosses were challenging, nothing compares to the brutality of King Stage 2.  While the bulk of the level isn’t challenging itself, the boss gauntlet it has can be overwhelming because the bosses you fight are cheap and irritating.

The first boss is The King Tank, which requires you to destroy all of its weaponry to advance.  This fight is made much easier with the upgrade that allows you to shoot through walls, and the upgrade that saves you weapon energy.  This way, you can spam Lightning Bolt to hit the top of the head, and use your buster on part of the tank that spawns enemies - all from the safety of the crawlspace under the tank.  The forward gun is a bit trickier, but you can blow it up with the remote mines by popping up and down the nearby ladder.  It’s a bit of a tricky fight that you’re actually safe from 90% of the time, and plays out more like a puzzle than a traditional boss fight, but this fight isn’t the big problem.

After you beat this thing you start the second leg of the level, and thankfully there is a 1up that always spawns at the start of this section - you’ll be needing it.  The fight against the next boss, the King Plane, could be one of the cheapest and most difficult fights of the series.  This thing is a pain in the butt, and you have to combat it by jumping across floating platforms.  As if this wasn’t bad enough, the Plane constantly breaks the platforms and launches out flashbangs that keep you from seeing where you are.  While I do have the option to use Treble to fly in this section, I won’t have enough weapon energy to use him the whole flight.  Bass’s double jump certainly helps in this section versus Mega Man’s single jump, but it isn’t a fun fight either way, and the number of times I fell into a pit made an aggravating night.

The best strategy against this guy is to just stay on top of his attacks.  The Plane only has one move that directly attacks you in a significant way, and you can counter that by blowing up his laser when it starts charging up.  For dealing with when the boss breaks the platforms, you’ll want to quickly jump to your Lightning Bolt weapon and use that to gain some extra hang time while you pray a platform gets under your feet.  I really hate this boss, but he’d be tolerable if this stage were just him and the tank, but we’re only half way done with the bosses.

Beating this boss takes you to the third leg of the stage, and now you won’t have a re-spawning supply of 1ups to finish out the level.  While this small section isn’t difficult, if you lose to the first King fight, you have to play through it again, and that means it’s hard to get to King with full health.  Remember, you can’t recover health in this game aside from the Party Ball upgrade which only shows up in specific parts of the level.

And the first part of the King fight is a trick any way.  If you fire at King you’re just wasting your time and getting hurt when King fires a laser back at you.  You have to wait until Proto Man shows up and gets destroyed again before you can actually attack King.  It takes a while to even figure out what the game is doing here, so you can expect a cheap death or two while you’re learning the boss.  When you actually fight King, he’s not terribly difficult, but chances are you won’t have the health to beat him unless you’ve wised up to the first part of the encounter.

Finally you reach a checkpoint and King combines his plane and tank into one giant machine to fight.  You have to hit this thing in the head which requires some finicky positioning with Bass.  Of King’s attack’s in this fight, only one is really dangerous.  King sends a homing shot that chases you and that you have to destroy before it hits you.  Lightning Bolt works great for this, but since that’s King’s weakness in the previous fight, you might have to rely on Wave Burner instead.  If you run out of lives at any point during this stage, you have to start the entire thing over, including the tank and plane fights!

This is the stage that takes all the fun out of the game.  If this whole thing were two stages, it wouldn’t be so bad, but this gauntlet is just so frustrating.  Cheap deaths, cheap tricks, and awkward fights make a Mega Man game where you can’t heal yourself infuriating to deal with.  Your best bet for this stage is to stock up on bolts and buy a bunch of extra lives before tackling it.  You might want to save your game with these lives too, so you can reload if you run out.

Wily’s stage is a boss gauntlet as well, where you do the Robot Master refights, but now you fight them as part of the overall stage like in Mega Man X.  You should be used to the bosses by this point to know how to take them down, and each segment in between gives you opportunity to heal and restock your weapons, but you’re likely to lose a couple of lives in the process.

The good news is that Wily in this game is relatively easy since he takes a fair bit of damage from his weaknesses.  If you run out of Remote Mines and Magic Cards though, you might be out of luck, so be sure to keep these items topped off and to use the Energy Saver whenever you need to use a weapon.

Mega Man and Bass is a good game, but I don’t understand why the developers suddenly started getting weird about E-tanks after Mega Man 8.  Just a few of them really would reduce some of the stress of this game and make it a bit more palatable to your average player.  This is a game for those who want their challenges to be merciless, and don’t enjoy a game unless they have several dozen deaths along the way.  For a series that’s considered by many to already be pretty hard, Mega Man and Bass is up among the top challenges.

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Mega Man and Bass Gifs

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Mega Man and Bass

Platform:  Super Famicom, GBA

Release Date:  April 24th, 1998 Capcom

Mega Man and Bass was literally one of the last games made for the SNES counterpart, the Super Famicom in Japan.  It came out nearly a year after Mega Man Legends, and it reuses a lot of assets from Mega Man 8 - so that should give you a clue of where we are in history here.  While this game returns to its roots in a big way after Legends, it is one of the most frustrating and challenging entries in the entire franchise.  Some of the levels in this game are so difficult they really over shadow the quality in this title.

This is the first game in the series where players can control Bass, who differs from Mega Man by not being able to naturally shoot through walls or charge his buster - but he can double jump and fire in all directions.  While these two abilities get you around with Bass in most platforming situations, the boss fights are not balanced very well against him - and everything takes so much longer to kill with him.  Mega Man by comparison offers a much easier game overall, though the game still is by no means a walk in the park.

One of the worst stages of this game is the penultimate level.  In it, you have to fight four bosses in a row, three of which have a whole stage to get through between them, and one of which can instantly kill you.  The stupid flying tank fight is so frustrating it’ll make you want to snap your controller in half as you get nudged off the floating platform to your death for the tenth time in a row - and after you beat him you’ve still got the tougher bosses left in the stage!  It’s completely relentless, and there are no E-tanks in this game either - no viable methods to refill your health.  You get one health bar to take on these bosses and if you game over, it’s back at the beginning of the stage for you!

And if you have the lower quality Game Boy Advance port of this game, now you’ve got to deal with the same camera issues as the Game Gear Mega Man!  It’s such an oversight this game doesn’t at least have some E-Tanks in it, because honestly there’s so much to like about this game aside from just how brutal it is.    I’m no slouch to difficulty, I beat Castlevania III just last year, but Mega Man and Bass is just a game that doesn’t play very fair.  I’d still recommend giving this game a shot, but for my own entertainment I think I’d rather play something that wasn’t designed to irritate me.

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Mega Man Legends [Hard Mode]

Typically when a game unlocks a harder difficulty after you finish the first playthrough, I generally don’t bother with it.  There’s a lot of games out there I just don’t feel like putting  a second playthrough on right away, and Mega Man Legends for a long time has been one of those games.  After all, this game is more about the exploration and characters than challenge itself, but, since I’m putting myself up to challenges for this series, I decided now would be a good time to explore this game in a way I never have and fire up hard mode.

It’s been a while since I’ve played Legends, so I had to grab my original Playstation disk, throw it in my PS3 and play through this game twice.  First to unlock hard mode, and then again to finish hard mode.  My first playthrough was fairly casual about the game though, as I decided not to bother with any extra exploration or side quests since I was only trying to get the next difficulty unlocked.

You don’t really need a lot to beat the game either, especially on the normal difficulty.  Most enemies will get chewed up pretty efficiently from your normal buster, and aside from the Shining Laser, the side quest rewards aren’t as good as the things found in the main ruins.  The primary benefit of the normal playthrough was that it prepared for me for the hard mode playthrough.

In terms of differences, the only real change is that the enemies have more health and deal more damage.  For the most part though the general level of difficulty at this stage is a bit more palatable for me.  Smaller enemies are more dangerous and require you to be more careful around them, which gives the ruins a bigger edge than before since now things can go quickly out of hand and the tension is raised.

The bosses too for the most part feel a bit more interesting to fight because that extra level of health means you can’t just damage race them or cheese them with certain weapon powerups.  That said, towards the end of the game, things get a bit ridiculous.

My first roadblock came from the Lake Jyun encounter.  The whole game previous to this point was still relatively easy if I played a bit more careful, but this encounter stopped the playthrough dead in it’s tracks for few hours.  While I can dodge and defend myself fine, in this encounter you’re guarding a ship Roll is driving, and if it takes too much damage you’re done.  On normal, this encounter isn’t a big deal, but on hard it’s difficult to rack up enough damage to destroy most of the ships and it only takes a few shots to hit your boat to sink it.  You also don’t have a lot of options as this point for special weapons, so at this point in the game you have to either just beat it, or give up - there’s no easy outs this time.

The best strategy here is to mostly ignore the missiles shot at you and focus on the torpedoes from the purple ships.  Despite what the game would have you believe, you don’t actually have to kill all that many ships so much as you just have to survive on a timer.  When the airships show up and start strafing you, you have to focus on them or they’ll chip away your boat’s health to nothing in a hurry.

Once they’re dealt with, the Bonne’s show up in their new boss fight with the  Balkon Gerät, and you’ve got to blow up missiles for just a tiny bit longer until Roll gives you the option to retreat.  While speed-runners might try to fight the Bonnes right then and there, the safe option is to head back to port, save your game, and come back right at them with full health.  Once I reached this checkpoint, the game was smooth sailing again.

The next bump in difficult was Bruno, another one of the Bonne’s boss robots.  This is about where the game started getting a little tedious because Bruno just has a ton of health here.  My strategy against him didn’t change at all, but the fight took so much longer because Bruno’s health takes up most of the screen.  It’s a long fight, but easy enough that I didn’t die to it.

With the Bonnes taken care of, all that was left was Mega Man Juno.  At this point, my buster is as good as it’s going to get - but I wasn’t carrying the Shinning Laser.  During my hard playthrough I was taking more care to pick up some of the items in the dungeons just so I’d be able to get this weapon if I really needed it, but it turns out Juno really wasn’t all that tough.

Both forms of Juno have a ton of health, but his attack pattern is pretty rigid and very easily predictable.  The problem is that the endurance of the fight means that eventually you’ll make a mistake or two over what is about a 10 minute combat sequence.  Juno’s first form has a laser attack where he spins in a circle that can throw you off and caused most of the damage I took on that fight, but his second fight saves the nastiest attack for the end.

During Juno’s second form, he’ll cause two shockwaves across the ground and then hurl tons of lasers to your position.  You have just enough time to run out of the way, and if you get hit by one of these things you’re taking a huge amount of damage.  While you can get a lot of shots off on Juno by just circle strafing him during most of his attacks, this particular attack you should only focus on getting away from it.  He fires it a lot during the last half of his health, so it really makes the fight go on even longer.

It took three tries though, so it wasn’t really even in the same leagues with some of the troubles I’ve had with Dr. Wily or Sigma.  If worse came to worse also, I could have just opted to go get the shinning laser and wreck him with it.  Legends was an interesting experience in hard mode, and truth be told I think some of the difficult things about it should have just be merged into the normal difficulty with regards to the general game.  The last few bosses of the game on the other hand are just too tedious on this mode, so I personally doubt I’ll ever go back to this mode.

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We robbin banks again!

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Mega Man Legends

Platforms:  Playstation, N64

Release Date:  December 18th, 1997 Capcom

If you’re late to the Mega Man party but still managed to get interested in this franchise, you’ve probably heard of Mega Man Legends, one of the most beloved games of the series.  And it has every right to be as it’s one of the most charming and visually interesting games of that era.  That said, nostalgia can be a pretty deceptive barometer for quality, so if you come in to this game now, keep in mind many individuals have some pretty rose-tinted glasses when it comes to critically analyzing this game.

That isn’t to say Mega Man Legends is bad at all, though it is as severely dated as any early 3D game is from this era.  For what it’s worth, Legends fared far better in 3D than Castlevania did by a country mile, but the controls in this game feel pretty terrible - especially on the Playstation controller.  This game was before analog support, and the Playstation D-Pad is stiff and uncomfortable in comparison.  Mega Man has tank controls too, so combat can get rough as you’re trying to wrestle the controls while enemies shooting projectiles or charging at you.  

Beyond that, Capcom’s production quality on this game, while significantly improved from Mega Man 8 and X4, still has terrible problems with audio levels and uneven voice acting.  Many scenes characters are inaudible during the music or vice versa.  Even the best song in the game can barely be heard in the scene where it plays!  With the voice acting, while the Bonne Pirates are fantastic, playing up their parts as extra hammy as the script is written, Mega Man and Roll both need some work - especially Roll who delivers the majority of spoken dialog in this game and has some of the worst lines and most uninteresting character development to boot.  I take more issue with the directing and some of the dialog than with the voice actors themselves, and I feel like a lot of the problems arise from Capcom’s unique directing style at the time.  

That said, where Legends does shine, it shines really well.  There are few games with as much charm and personality as this title.  There’s kind of a weird tone to the whole thing that feels like Flash Gordon invaded Leave it to Beaver since you’re running around a pretty small mild-mannered town with laser cannons and flying pirate ships.  The ruins exploration also gives the game some elements of a Tomb Raider type game as well, though significantly lighter in scope than that game.  If you can get used to the dated controls, and can tolerate some of the scenes which are so far some subtle they’re silly, then I think Legends will have a lot to offer you.  Just go in with some measured expectations.  And play the Playstation version - the N64 version has weaker audio do to the restrictions of the cart vs CD.

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Mega Man X4 [Armorless Run]

X4 is a game that is surprisingly easy from repeat playthroughs.  It feels pretty rough as you’re learning it, but that’s the only tricky part.  X4 is less of a game that requires precise execution like many of the other games, and more about knowing how to dodge the attacks more than anything.  I was expecting more of a challenge from taking this game on without any armor, but after beating Sigma, I can honestly say that this is perhaps the one X game that armor is pretty superfluous.

Let’s break down the benefits of getting the armor, and I’ll explain why it isn’t necessary:

Helmet:  This reduces the energy consumption on the special weapons, allowing you to fire infinite shots of these weapons.  The thing is though most weapons give you plenty of shots and they all refill whenever you die or load in to the next part of the stage.  It’s a nice concept, but there’s not really any sections of the game where weapon energy is a problem.

Body Armor:  Gives you access to the Nova Strike, a powerful attack that sends X across the screen.  Damage X receives used to replenish the attack.   Nova Strike is nice when you’re using The Ultimate Armor, but pretty worthless as an attack when you have to charge it up so much.  Against bosses like Sigma, the attack generally just puts you in a bad position to dodge the next attack and isn’t worth the damage it does.

Leg Parts:  This allows you to hover in the air by tapping the jump button a second time.  This is honestly the most useful part as it allows you to recover when you misjudge a jump, and it works well against certain bosses, but in general the dash-jump covers more ground and is faster.  This part is nice to have but you can live without it.

Buster Upgrade:  You have the choice of either multiple charged shots, or one big powerful shot.  The upgraded shot is actually really good because it’s a very large projectile, and great for clearing stages in the game, but it honestly doesn’t make that much of a difference against bosses.  The utility of this part is off-set a little because this part is such a pain in the butt to get, and I honestly just saved a good chunk of time by skipping it altogether.

(Source)

So with all that in mind, this was mostly a vanilla run, with the only parts holding me up being the Colonel fight, and Sigma.  Colonel is tricky because he teleports right in front of you and attacks, and this is honestly the best fight to use the hover ability on the leg parts for so you don’t have to time when to jump over his slash.  Without the leg parts, I’m forced to find the right timing which is tricky, but doable.

Sigma himself on the other hand is just a matter of figuring out what to do.  The bulk of the Sigma fight is making sure to stand in a position that you can goad Sigma into using certain attacks.  Once you understand exactly how to fight Sigma, he’s probably the easiest final boss in this game of the entire series.

Form 1 is a cake walk.  X’s Rising Fire attack interrupts Sigma’s normal attack, so all you have to do is climb the left wall and jump over him every third attack Sigma makes (where he slashes at X with his scythe).

(Source)

Form 2 is trickier to figure out, but still pretty easy.  When Sigma jumps, you run under him to his opposite side and attack.  Cling to the wall to goad Sigma into throwing his hammer into it, which will cause Sigma to attack you with his laser eyes instead of his flying disks.  While he’s on the ground, use the Lightning Web to jump over him and cling to the opposite wall until his laser attack finishes.  Rinse and repeat.

Form 3 cycles between two forms of Sigma, and three different elemental attacks.  The Ice attack is simplest to dodge by simply clinging to the left wall.  The Fire attack is a bit tougher as you need to cling to the right wall and lead the fire up to the top of the screen, then fall back to the bottom to avoid damage.  The lightning attack is by far the toughest to dodge and the source of the most of my damage during this fight.  You need to stand in the right positions and lead the lightning slightly to the right and jump at the right moment to avoid it.  It’s fairly tricky to pull off and the hardest attack to avoid.

For the phases of form 3 you can attack, they always appear in alternating order, starting with Sigma’s massive head, and then with his laser gun.  When the head spawns in you want to stand about in the middle of the screen.  If you’re too close to Sigma, he’ll spawn in rocks that are very tough to dodge, but from the middle position he’ll attempt to blow you into spikes which is very easy to deal with.  For the head, use Ground Hunter.

For Sigma’s body and laser gun, the best advice here is to listen for when Sigma says something along the lines of “The End” which summons a wave of fire across the bottom of the screen.  During this attack, Sigma’s actual laser won’t damage you, so just move to the top of the screen on the elemental heads.  When Sigma goes to make his normal series of attacks, he moves pretty slow and telegraphs where he’s going to strike.  Just stay defensive and be some where he’s not aiming and take your shots when you’re in a safe position.  Sigma’s body is weak to Soul Body, but the range on it isn’t worth the effort to use it, so stick with charged shots.

This was the first Sigma fight I went through without any Subtanks, and without any armor upgrades no less.  Truth be told, using X without Armor is actually far easier than fighting this guy with a fully upgraded Zero, which I found surprising.  X4 was fun, but for now it’s time to move on to another series in the Mega Man franchise.

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How the world is, versus how game developers see it.