Mega Man

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Thad
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Mega Man

Postby Thad » Thu Jun 12, 2014 7:59 pm

I got to thinking recently, in a comment on one of Parish's Anatomy of Games articles, about the flaws in the weapons in Mega Man 2 and how subsequent games tried to tweak them. MM2's got the best weapons and balance of the series but it's not perfect -- the Metal Blade is versatile enough to completely overshadow all the rest, the Time Stopper has extremely limited utility, and the fully-charged Atomic Fire is devastating but only gives you two shots, for example.

Has anybody tossed out a ROM hack that tweaks these balance issues by substituting some of the later iterations on the weapons (Shadow Blade for Metal Blade, Flash Stopper for Time Stopper, etc.)?

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zaratustra
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Re: Mega Man

Postby zaratustra » Fri Jun 13, 2014 9:01 am

Rockman No Constancy is the closest to this http://www.cutstuff.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=2981

My suggestion would be this:

Atomic Fire - OK
Leaf Shield - OK
Air Shooter - OK
Bubble Lead -> Search Snake
Metal Blade -> Shadow Blade
Time Stopper -> Flash Stopper
Quick Boomerang -> Needle Cannon
Crash Bomber -> Drill Bomb

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Thad
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Re: Mega Man

Postby Thad » Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:25 pm

I'd probably leave the Quick Boomerang as it is, decrease the energy consumption of the Crash Bomber but leave it the same otherwise, and decrease both the energy consumption and damage done by the Atomic Fire at its third level.

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Re: Mega Man

Postby Thad » Mon Jun 16, 2014 6:49 pm



Apparently I am late to the party on this, but somebody has adapted the Worlds of Power novelization of Mega Man 2.

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Re: Mega Man

Postby Thad » Mon Aug 10, 2015 1:49 pm

Ars digs Mighty No. 9.

It really looks a lot like Mega Man X's mechanics and level design with the original series' cuter aesthetics and sensibilities. Which I do not have a problem with.

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Re: Mega Man

Postby Thad » Sat Oct 10, 2015 11:56 pm

Welp, I just wrote a three-part series on ten-year-old remakes of even older video games.

What Mega Man Powered Up Does Right and Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X Does Wrong, Part 1: Aspect Ratio

Part 2: Verticality

Part 3: Rebalancing Act

Up next: a postmortem on why putting the whole thing together was a gigantic pain in the ass and you should not expect any more posts like this anytime soon.

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Friday
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Re: Mega Man

Postby Friday » Sun Oct 11, 2015 1:24 am

Up next: a postmortem on why putting the whole thing together was a gigantic pain in the bollocks and you should not expect any more posts like this anytime soon.


well I'm sorry to hear that. thanks for doing it, was a good read.

I don't automatically agree that enemies dealing more damage is always a lazy/cheap way to increase difficulty. It certainly is if it's the ONLY thing that changes, but used in concert with other things (like adding new attack patterns or speeding up the game) it can be an effective tool.

But then, you should probably ignore everything I have to say regarding video game difficulty, because I am a masocore fan.
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sei
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Re: Mega Man

Postby sei » Sun Oct 11, 2015 2:05 am

Friday wrote:But then, you should probably ignore everything I have to say regarding video game difficulty, because I am a masocore fan.


Don't worry, I'd still OHKO it.
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Re: Mega Man

Postby Sharkey » Sun Oct 11, 2015 8:41 pm

GG, Thad.

Actually, it kind of reminded me of yet another example of how not to deal with vertically constrained space in a port/remake, and in another Mega Man game, no less. I don't know if anyone ever got around to playing Megaman and Bass on GBA. I think I ended up doing a writeup or a preview or something for EGM. I dunno, it was back at the dawn of fucking time. Anyway, given that the GBA was essentially a tiny Super NES you'd think it'd be pretty straightforward, but those extra pixels shaved off the top and bottom made a world of difference. Rockman & Forte was a pretty fair-to-middling game to begin with, but it would have made a perfectly solid port if it weren't for that one thing that made it nearly unplayable in places. It managed to turn what felt like half the jumps in the game into blind leaps of faith. I remember arguing about it with someone who said they didn't have any problems with it. Probably Shane. And yeah, if you'd played the shit out of it on Super Famicom you probably wouldn't have much trouble, but without supernatural foreknowledge of the difference between spike pits and a hole you're supposed to jump down it was a clusterfuck.
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Thad
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Re: Mega Man

Postby Thad » Sun Oct 11, 2015 10:09 pm

Yeah, I think I mention it briefly in the piece, as the sort of lazy port that MHX should really not be comparable to.

It's not so bad if you play as Bass because he's got the double-jump, but it's pretty much murder if you play as Mega Man.

I should replay it anyway. I've always wanted to get a screencap of that profile of Dr. Light that describes him as "douchie".




(It seems like somebody should have capped that already. I'll go do a search.

...

...it is in my autocomplete. I have looked for this before.

...Okay, it's not a screenshot, but it's transcribed on Wikia.)

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Re: Mega Man

Postby Sharkey » Sun Oct 11, 2015 11:01 pm

Meanwhile, I had no idea that Dr. LWright looked like this:

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Captain N, of fucking course. I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall when they were deciding this stuff.

"Hey, is Dr. Wright a pointy-eared dwarf?"

"Yeah, pretty much. He wears a green smock. Because he's a doctor."

"And his hair..."

"Is a white mohawk. And also he's retarded."

"Is his beard also white?"

"He doesn't have a beard!"

"Oh, good. That'd mess up this scene where a beardless Dr. Wright gives a rimjob to a smiling albino tribble."

"He has to do that for the whole cartoon, though."

"So he's rimming the tribble all the time? What about all his lines..."

"The tribble speaks them. It's his translator. Dr. Wright has a particular kind of brain damage that limits him to communicating exclusively through analingus."

"Oh yeah. I remember that from the game."
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zaratustra
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Re: Mega Man

Postby zaratustra » Mon Oct 12, 2015 4:24 am

Well it IS faithful to the in-game sprites

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Re: Mega Man

Postby Thad » Mon Oct 12, 2015 1:07 pm

All that and it's STILL better than the Ruby-Spears cartoon.

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Re: Mega Man

Postby Thad » Mon Oct 12, 2015 4:16 pm


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Sharkey
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Re: Mega Man

Postby Sharkey » Mon Oct 12, 2015 4:42 pm

Oh, man. Welcome to screenshot country. Even though I haven't written much about games in like, a year, I'm still in the habit of snapping screens every minute or two or whenever something just looks interesting or odd. And then I don't do shit with it all until it's finally piled up so high I have a hard drive packed with tiny jpgs and have to clean it out. Also, thanks for reposting that Skyway Square gif. The one thing I was really sad about losing when my hard drive burned out, other than the mostly finished 101 free games article I was working on, was several years worth of unsorted City of Heroes screenshots. God fucking dammit, I can't believe someone hasn't leaked the server code for that fucking thing by now.

Oh, and on the topic of the liberal interpretation of kinda-vague NES sprites, this is still my favorite Ridley:

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From the NES instruction manual, even. So yeah, nobody in the US had a fuckin clue, and it's not like you could just google that shit.
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Re: Mega Man

Postby François » Mon Oct 12, 2015 5:15 pm

I may have taken over 2000 screenshots for my LPs, but I'm sad to say I don't really have a non-pain-in-the-ass way to do things. I set up my emulator to display exactly the quality and dimensions I wanted to have in the screenshots, set up Greenshot to capture a specific area of the screen, and put together a simple autohotkey script to hit the area screenshot key when I pressed one of my otherwise-unused controller buttons. I could probably have done the same to switch between full screen and windowed at the touch of a button as well, if I cared about playing in full screen. (I didn't because I was also switching back and forth between the game and notepad so I could write as I played, so I had to be at the keyboard anyway.)

I'm certainly going to spend brainpower on at least an attempt at streamlining the process before too long though. For, uh, reasons.

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Re: Mega Man

Postby Thad » Mon Oct 12, 2015 6:05 pm

Yeah, I was mostly doing it out in the living room (though the SNES and NES screenshots were mostly in my office). Not ideal notepad territory. Could have dragged my laptop out there but then I'd have been juggling three input devices.

Also, before I do any more fucking around with my DualShock 4 in my office, I'm going to need to figure out why it keeps dropping out under Linux; that was a whole separate hassle that I didn't mention in the article because it wasn't really pertinent.

(Office computer's mostly for games that I play with keyboard/mouse anyway.)

As I mentioned elsewhere, I briefly considered doing a screenshot LP at one point but realized how it would really not be fun at all and that's why I never did it. Obviously some people have more patience for that kind of thing than I do.

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Re: Mega Man

Postby Blossom » Mon Oct 12, 2015 10:13 pm

François wrote:I may have taken over 2000 screenshots for my LPs, but I'm sad to say I don't really have a non-pain-in-the-ass way to do things. I set up my emulator to display exactly the quality and dimensions I wanted to have in the screenshots, set up Greenshot to capture a specific area of the screen, and put together a simple autohotkey script to hit the area screenshot key when I pressed one of my otherwise-unused controller buttons. I could probably have done the same to switch between full screen and windowed at the touch of a button as well, if I cared about playing in full screen. (I didn't because I was also switching back and forth between the game and notepad so I could write as I played, so I had to be at the keyboard anyway.)

I'm certainly going to spend brainpower on at least an attempt at streamlining the process before too long though. For, uh, reasons.


My thought would be to take joy2key or something and rig your controller so an unused button sends, like, f11 or something. then bind that as a screenshot key in fraps or steam or whatever.
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Re: Mega Man

Postby Thad » Tue Oct 13, 2015 1:44 am

Maybe, though I'd have to remember to toggle it off and on depending on when I was using it.

Another issue I forgot to mention: if you do two RetroArch grabs right in a row, the second one will also cap the message telling you that you just did a screengrab. I don't know if there's a way to turn it off; screenshots seem to be totally fucking undocumented; it took a lot of searching to work out that it took the F12 key to take a screenshot, and switching between JPEG and PNG output requires manually editing a config file.

Also: If I'd realized Mega Man Xtreme 2 used Launch Octopus and Flame Mammoth's stages, I'd have probably had a few more screenshots in the thing, but it probably wouldn't add much. It gets around the underwater issue by not having your jump go any higher underwater than in a regular stage; this mostly works but since I'm used to the higher jump I died a couple times trying to make jumps that I couldn't. And while you can't see as many of them, it's got the same breakable blocks on Flame Mammoth's stage as an indication that there's something up there.

And while it's got its flaws (a lot of slowdown and blinking sprites, and some dodgy collision detection in places) it's actually a decent example of what I'm talking about: it's more like Powered Up than Maverick Hunter X (or the first Xtreme) in that it reuses good big chunks of levels from earlier games, but it remixes them in sensible ways that better fit the hardware it's running on.

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zaratustra
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Re: Mega Man

Postby zaratustra » Tue Oct 13, 2015 5:52 am

what do I do with this, people

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