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Starting an LP on this soon. Surprisingly, a screenshot and text based one, not a video LP. Let's see how it works out. I don't think this game or its immense stock of glitches have been given enough attention.
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Jan 31, 2024 03:51
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 19:22 |
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Welcome aboard the SS Kamari, who is a complete noob at this site and these forums, but am definitely doing my best. I've browsed some LPs here by now, to learn myself how to do the thing, but this is my first ever LP on SomethingAwful. Heck, it's really my first LP of anything. I've done small videos before detailing things I've done in the past, like a dialogue script hack of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past that I never did get around to patching into an IPS, but amidst my horrid failures to keep up with the world of gaming lies the pain-alleviating truth that this, a glitch LP of Mega Man II for the Game Boy, shall be my official entry into the zone. I bet everyone's excited. I know I am; after all, Mega Man II was the most revered of all the Game Boy Mega Mans; heck, it was a best seller, easily outstripping all the other competition of 1991. Metroid II, the Return of Samus? This game made her power beam look like a pea shooter, and Final Fantasy Adventure could keep its sickles and swords and whatnot, because the Mega Buster was the real shining example of---- Nintendo Life: "A-hem" Three out of ten?!?!?!?!!! Whattaya mean this thing was hated by Mega Man fans?! Well, let's not get too hasty. To be clear, this game was NOT that badly appraised. Plenty of people thought it was a nice difference from the rest of the series (me included), and it got some pretty good reception from some of the gaming community at the time. Though I'm sure most Mega Manners wanted to stick to pow-pow-powing the bots on the big colorful screen, not the tiny beeping gray rectangle that was available in those days. Mega Man II had a shrieky soundtrack, stiff movement, low dynamicity in its finer detail, and was drastically easier compared to the pre existing entries in the series. However, the soundtrack's melodies were on point, the stiff movement makes it easier to control and navigate in my opinion, it also has plenty of really good detail in some spots, and as it's easier than the other games, it's the only one I don't get whooped in (well, I hardly have played any others besides Mega Man X, so maybe that point doesn't count). I definitely can see the weaknesses in this game, but also the strengths. Some people simply laugh nowadays to think it ever held a position of power as the second of the top ten Game Boy games of 1992 according to Nintendo Power (all these stats are coming from the Mega Man II Wikipedia page, so do with that what you will, although there are sources present). But it's not really any one source's opinion that counts most, no matter how powerful it is, whether it has the word Nintendo in it, or how many elementary school kids at the time insisted their dads worked for the magazine since nobody would believe their claim about the game company itself. Whose opinion counts?! The freakin' gamers!!! I grew up with Mega Man II. For many years, it was my only knowledge of the Mega Man series AT ALL. I had a Game Boy that I'd gotten from my grandparents' house, a copy of Mr. Do they'd had lying around, and it wasn't until my big brother gave me his old copy of Mega Man II that I got a taste of the Mega Buster. Suddenly, my world changed. No longer was I a clown wearing a very uncomfortable suit bouncing a beach ball around a terrifying land filled with monsters, sentient letters and delicious desserts. Now, I was a freaky space man looking dude wearing a very uncomfortable suit firing a lemon shooter around a terrifying land filled with killer robots, sentient iron gears, and the closest thing to a dessert would probably be me getting my arse handed to me about forty thousand times on a silver platter in the first four stages. I can't remember if it took me months or even a year or more, but I absolutely BOMBED that game so hard that I began to think maybe the levels were intentionally designed to be unbeatable. I seriously had this idea that they were meant to be unwinnable just to show a player what an "impossible" game looked like, and no matter how far you get, they get more and more difficult until you inevitably die no matter what. But no, that wasn't the issue. The real problem lay within. I, Kamari, sucked at video games. I've gotten better at them since my childhood, and nowadays I'm capable of wrecking Mega Man II seven days of the week (in more ways than one, as this LP will demonstrate in its shaky but somewhat orderly fashion), but I've never really been more than a casual gamer. I'm into some games, like the Armored Core series, and am pretty good at a few of them. I enjoyed a lot of classic SNES titles like Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Donkey Kong Country 2 (again, thanks to my wonderful grandparents and their game carts with their dying internal batteries making me restart countless times). Chrono Trigger has certainly had an impact on me, and Quovak and Leavemywife both did really uplifting and hilarious playthroughs of that game here (if the LPs are no longer on this site, you can find them with no trouble at the LPArchive). https://lparchive.org/Chrono-Trigger/ https://lparchive.org/Chrono-Trigger-%28by-Leavemywife%29/ But despite many times searching, I simply haven't found much interest in Mega Man II at all, and its glitches, even less so. I uploaded a video to YouTube as a young teen showing me on my old Game Boy Advance SP doing some of my favorite stuff, and someone else used my technique to aid in a TAS, referencing me and even teaching me a little bit more about the glitches, and that's all the activity I've seen for Mega Man II. On the official David Wonn site for glitches, I found that someone talked about how a cloud might disappear in Air Man's stage when you die. Uh. Arright. The epitome of Mega Man glitches, for sure. But really, it's totally corrupting the world and melting and garbling things up that makes this game interesting for me nowadays. There's minor, there's major, there's glitches because it's a primitive Game Boy game, and I'm here to show you all just what this old gray rectangular piece of poo poo is capable of. (Is...is he talking about the Game Boy or the game?) Yes've. (I follow my own rules, dammit.) Let's be honest from the get go. This is a game meant to be finished quickly. It isn't meant for any real in depth discussion or deep thinking, and is best experienced as a single throwaway title between multiple better games, just to take a momentary breather. So what am I gonna do with it? I'm nose-diving rear end deep into this big boy and discussing each and every thing that pops into my head This will be a screenshots and text based LP, although in a place or two, if I find it necessary, I'll link a YouTube video instead (but first I gotta upload that video). Hear me out: I understand Mega Man II isn't the kind of game you'd expect to see a screenshot based LP for, because it's an actiony platformer where: 1. You jump and shoot 2. You jump a lot 3. You shoot stuff 4. Occasionally you elevate your character using the primary interaction button whilst unleashing a form of energy from your projectile weapon intending for it to make physical contact with a mobile target Honestly, screenshots are just my favorite way to do this kind of game. Despite the above, it's rather short, simple, and I have enough screenshots to show off at least 90% of the terrain and a LOT of text explaining what I'm doing and what's going on. Since this is likely not the expected way to do such an LP, I want you guys to give me feedback on that, if you will, and tell me how this type of LP is working out for you. I'm beginning by uploading just the intro here, as well as the Clash Man stage. You're the customers and this is the product, so your feedback counts to me just like the gamers reviewed Mega Man II. Tell me your opinions: does the screenshot and text thing work? Am I trying too hard with the humor? Should I tone down vulgarity, repetition, etc? Do I talk too much? (yes and unfortunately that's the one thing I'll never be able to change, but in this type of LP words are needed, so I can sort of convince myself it's all right for that reason) I've had a nice chat about this with SimplySimon, who I want to call out a thanks to for his advice and reassurance. He's also done a playthrough of Mega Man II before, which can be found on YouTube through the LPArchive. I've also changed my dialect a smidge due to his advice about what the people here find desirable, a favor I'm sure will come in handy for me countless times that I otherwise would have gone overboard. https://lparchive.org/Mega-Man-II/ It was he who suggested I try a video instead, and I'll take that as an alternate idea if this format doesn't work out (though I won't be able to do voice commentary so I'll have to stick with captions). I sure do hope I can make this original version work, as this is my favorite way to do it, and changing that would ruin all the fun for me. But if the unorthodox and possibly senseless format isn't giving you guys any fun either, what would be the point, right? So tell me if you want to see more of it the way it's presented here (if the answer is no, be nice about it). I'll be going through the whole game, all ten stages, and whenever the opportunity for a glitch comes about, I'm tackling it to the ground and then a bit more. Seriously, I'm a talker whose primary language is Tangent. I'll try to stay on topic as much as possible, of course, and everything I say will be about Mega Man II, as this is an LP of the game. It's just, the LP is also going to include me doing crazy things that (no bragging intended) I might actually have been the first to discover (yeah right...really, I think I'm just maybe the first person to talk so much about them and publicize them on a well-known forum). The first four levels will be played normally, as I have no glitches to show off there. The next four will be where that commodity takes off. I'll focus more on the glitches then, but still show the stages being completed, for LP's sake. You can disregard most of the text and stick to the screenshots if you want. But then of course, you'll miss out on me reminding you about fourteen times that while I'm not a programmer, I'd like to talk a bit about how I THINK this particular glitch might work or how MAYBE it's doing this to the system memory and haha funny you can damage Quint by shooting above his head before he even gets on Sonicjack the Hedgehammer. Strap in if you're a person who enjoys jumping from point A to point >, because my sanity is goose and my ultra gamer instincts are set to polar bear. Let's go beat up some goddamn robots and break a world in half. Kamari fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Feb 1, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 03:57
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As a brief foreword, we'll be doing this all in order, despite the freedom of choosing any of four stages at any given time. The first world will go Clash Man, Metal Man, Wood Man and Air Man. Clash Man is coming soon, just as soon as I can actually get the screenshots to upload the right way (I'm on time constraints right now and haven't managed to get the screenshots working the way they're supposed to here; as a newbie here, I have to spend more time figuring out how to place a whole bunch of them all over the post between my text, instead of just one at the very bottom). I take time to catch on, but my enthusiasm is akin to a leopard scenting an antelope covered in barbecue sauce, so don't worry. Kamari fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Feb 1, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 04:16
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Two days from joining to janky game LP? Fantastic, sincerely love to see it. I'll click on all the music links, because these games still have cool music! (...Mostly.)
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Jan 31, 2024 07:42
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Jo. Please stop finding new ways to write "stupid newbie", it's beyond cringe as the kids call it. It's too bad you missed posting in the Sandcastle, could have given you some tech advice there - I guess I can do it here. First of all, resize your screenshots, they're tiny. I know that's the original resolution, but they're probably too small even for a phone screen. As the Mega Mans are pixel-based games, you can upscale them 2x or even 4x without any loss in quality (make sure that whatever you use to resize doesn't use any filters). Or, even better, just take them at a higher resolution. Though if I understood you correctly, you already took them? Then use irfanview to bulk upscale them. I strongly recommend using lpix.org for screenshot LPs. With an account here, you will get one there. Get an auto-uploader and it'll be much, much easier to do your thing.
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Jan 31, 2024 10:11
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Reading the homeric epic that is the OP I felt like there would eventually be a part where I get to a recipe for someone's homemade beef burgundy. Friendly advice: show, don't tell 
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Jan 31, 2024 10:39
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I don't know what's happening, but I love every word of it.
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Jan 31, 2024 13:06
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THE BAR posted:I don't know what's happening, but I love every word of it. Strap in, we're witnessing  modern LPing.
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Jan 31, 2024 16:50
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Disregard this reply's original text; thank you Simon, I figured it out after all. Can't give you enough kudos. Thanks to your advice, the LP is ready to take off right now. Clash Man is done, and I'm going to upload the first chapter right in the very next reply. It should be there in less than an hour; get ready everyone, I'm about to finally "just post" (jeez thank God! I feel you people, the impatience was with me too.) Kamari fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Feb 1, 2024 |
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Feb 1, 2024 04:12
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Episode 1: To Clash or To Crash? That is the Translation... It's good to get back to the basics. As much as I'd love to be playing this on one of my many Game Boy systems I've collected over the years in a desperate attempt at chasing clout in the retro gaming community, I'm forced to take the easy route and use an emulator to capture video, which will be turned into screenshots. My computer, unfortunately, ran this game so incredibly fast that I had to switch the rendering method to something more complex and then throw a filter in there to try to make it look somewhat like the original pixelated appearance of the Game Boy, and not an oil pastel painting unintentionally depicting Mega Man's struggles in a dystopian future filled with melting clocks and psychotic murderbots. Forgive me, but these are not the best quality. I did the best I could with the wonky equipment that I had. Hopefully they're enough to pass the test.  I can't tell you how much grief these four assholes gave single-digit-age me. They flipped me the bird so many times, I was forced to paint myself green and oink. My attention to detail was set to trees are like sharks mode, so the first guy looked like a monkey in a space suit, the second guy looked like the metal blade was squashing his head and his eyeball was popping out of his skull, the third guy looked like he was wearing a halloween costume, and the fourth guy looked like a sumo wrestler with his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth. These details did not help my concentration any.  *Mocking chimpanzee noises*  This stage definitely clashed with me, I'll tell you that much. And a billion things more, if I have my way around here.  Well, this level totally doesn't look like a fever dream version of Toy Kingdom made out of snapped wires and misshapen boulders. We drop in, ready for some action...and our very first threat emerges.  *GASP* Oh no, it couldn't be! Not the floating stringless yo-yo's with the googly eyes!!! Wait, what? I guess a Game Boy definitely isn't much for pixel-perfect detail all the time.  This thing doesn't remotely resemble a telly, and you're not getting any decent reception if you do manage to jam an antenna into its head. I don't think it even knows why it's here. It travels at the speed of a snail pulling a cinder block the size of an apartment building, and as a kid one of my favorite pastimes (other than dying forty-three or seven hundred times depending on the day of the week) was running counterclockwise around this screen avoiding this guy and his twin brothers while they tried in vain to capture me.  Oh well, no time for that now, we're outta here.  Oh good lord no, not two of them!  Luckily, my cobweb-filled brain ground out an ingenius plan: run.  Leading me to this area, where we run into our first halfway decent enem...Mega Man, what the hell is up with your running sprite half the time? Is it just me, or has one-third of your body disappeared? And if you aren't pulling a Houdini, you're ice skating. Oh well, they can't say Mega Man doesn't have style.  Anyways. Meet the Blocky (Japanese: Burokki), who has a neat gimmick.  When you shoot him in the face...  bonk  Uhh...wait, lemme try again.  doink  Third lemon's the citrus, dammit!!!  *POP* there we go! His barrels fly off, and they zoom across the screen toward you. No matter how far away you are, you're definitely within range of getting the teeth knocked out of your mouth, so standing about a Game Boy screen inch away from him helps you stick between the two barrels that seek to end your Mega life (by damaging you two points).  *BONK* Of course, if like me you aren't actually using a Game Boy here, the measurements will be thrown out of proportion, so then you'd best reach into the hat and hope you pull out a rabbit and not a sentient bloodthirsty chainsaw. I wasn't so lucky.   But no matter what, shoot him the second time and he's down, and now we can progress.  You Tin Can Stan shuffling mother fucker. That's right, if you get pushed too far back, then once you defeat him and return to the point where he was, another one will be waiting for you.  Pay no attention to my slightly depleted health bar and let's continue forward. Climbing this ladder...  ...brings us up here, where Tellys can now spawn from nothing, because why not. I'm sure they also put equal effort into becoming Netflix capable.   Oh, so that pipe was somehow extending into the lower screen. Based on how screens work in this game (an explanation I'll beat to death much later when we're actually using glitches, because I don't know of a way to do any of that in the first world), this doesn't make much sense to me, but if I haven't mentioned it yet, I'm not exactly a game programmer by any means.  Shoot the first one and jump on the platform. This makes so much sense to me and is so easy nowadays, yet this is the first area I got roadblocked at countless times as a kid.    Oh dear lord no, they're pulling out the big guns on me now.  Oh, and more Tellys will come zooming on in. I hear these ones are on sale.  Shooting this guy isn't enough. The platform takes so long to reach you that by the time it's there,  a SECOND Telly has appeared and you have to shoot again right before jumping. Really, I can't think why this is the challenge here. I sure wasn't singing the same tune as a kid, though, so maybe that was why. You only shoot one more on the journey up, and then you can jump to the ladder.    Now here's an interesting oddity. See this ladder here? This long pipe we're standing on? This wide-open, empty space devoid of life?  Run to the right...  Then come back for absolutely no discernible reason, and Tellys will start spawning out of the wall. You can clearly see that Mega Man, only ten minutes into his adventure, has already mentally checked out.  He proceeds to murder another Blocky's face off.  Somehow this time he fired like Clint Eastwood and took Blocky out right away. And no damage!  Probably coulda grabbed that big HP orb, but I was moving too fast here to think clearly.  We can't get that E-tank, as we have no adapters to reach those heights. Rush is so adorable when he's doing non-dog related  Falling to the right here is a shortcut that lets us skip the first instance of an annoying enemy, the Shotman. He fires six times to the far left, then six times at a high trajectory left. Not too dangerous, as he only does one damage per shot and is placed to be a nuisance, not a threat.  The REAL danger here comes if you aren't paying attention to where you're falling, and this here is a neat trick, in my opinion, that keeps you on your toes. The spikes down there will live up to their previous misdeeds and kill Mega Man to death, although I'm not sure why these ones look so odd. I think it's a triangle of miniature spikes and the darker one is in the back, but they look like toy spikes made of plastic for some reason. Being a monochrome Game Boy object, I have no idea why I'm picking up that detail from this thing.  The Shotman is unfortunately not named the Turnman, or he could turn around when he feels me shooting him from behind.   Now for our first truly challenging screen (even now, still, I occasionally have trouble with this one).  This is the widest you see death pits get in the game. That's what these are: any bottom floor area with black pixels all over them. You have to jump from the very edge to make it, and while that's easy to master...  When Tellys are flying at you from above, it's not the cakeiest walk out there anymore.  Time your shots right to get rid of them so you can jump across and not get knocked into a pit mid-jump.  Oh for the love of Christ.  *BANG* I couldn't find the advantage fast enough, so I barreled right into one of them and used the momentary invincibility to jump across.   The very definition of temptation in a Mega Man game, ain't it? But stick around on this screen too long and you're for the birds, if you know what I mean.   Between those two screenshots I tried to get the orb you see there, but I fell down and had to hastily grab the one on the lower screen instead. I climbed back up the ladder of platforming shame and exited this screen just in time to see another new enemy pop out. This is the Pipi, although as a kid I always mispronounced it "pippy" and now that's stuck with me. Calling them "Pippy birds" sounds so much cuter than pipis, which sounds like I'm talking about Pokémon, not Mega Man. Besides, a couple of the enemies I don't remember or know names for, so I'm forced to make up cute, funny, or pop culturally significant names on the spot (hint: I'm not well versed in pop culture). Pippy birds drop eggs which break open to reveal Peep-peeps, tiny chicks that will zoom toward Mega Man to deal one damage. They can be easily killed in one hit, but as a flock, a couple will still be around to get him most of the time. Still, not bad for harvesting items, especially with a better weapon.  Climb up to this screen next, and Pippy birds betide any who dare to stop for a snack here.  Or here.   Just gonna grab this E-tank  And scoot   Climbing back down and going up the left ladder, there's a peculiar enemy I want to show here.  Any second now. Come on, dammit.  THERE they are, the Fly Boys.  For some reason they take three and a half seconds to show up, by which time you've given the screen a cursory glance around, lamented Clash Man's decor and inefficient electrical wiring system, and climbed out of here. They're a carryover from Mega Man 2 for the NES, and serve absolutely no role in this game other than to show up and be all HEY LOOK WE KIND OF EXIST  Even when they do appear, it takes them another four whole seconds to actually jump to the left and try to get at you. And if you're still on the ladder, while they will get super close to the edge of the platform, they'll never quite fall off, so you're in no danger. Just climb back down and then up again to make them go away, then go up the next ladder whilst shaking your head and wondering why Capcom didn't bother just giving them the shaft entirely.    Wait, where were they coming from in the first place?!  Oh well, there's other issues to worry about. This Shotman is almost guaranteed to get every new player. Even holding up constantly, you're just a couple pixels from getting hit as you climb up and avoid the gunfire.  Wait here till he starts shooting upward...   Then get back on the ladder and wreck his day.  I'LL SHOW YOU WHO THE REAL SHOTMAN IS MOTHERFUCKER  Now we're feeling apprehensive, aren't we?  Who knows what horrors await us beyond the door.  No turning back now.   Aaaaand...it's Sonic the Hedgeface wearing a space suit and sporting rockets for arms.  This makes him marginally more impressive.  As soon as poo poo goes down, he's instantly gunning for your rear end right from the get go. Gotta hand it to him, he ain't called Clash Man for nothing. But the fight, once the pattern is caught, becomes super easy. I'll break it down.  Jump so you're slightly above him,  fire a bullet, which causes him to jump automatically. If you're in the right spot just above his height, he jumps right into the shot.    He jumps higher than Mega Man, and stays in the air longer, so you fall first. Slide-dash below him to the right before he lands (I know it's not called slide-dash, but I use that move as a dash to this day, so I've always called it that).  He'll fart out a bomb at you. This is meant to make it seem like he's punishing you for firing at him and he's dictating the pace of the battle on his own terms, but what he's really done is shown you that the control over the timing of this fight is all yours. He's a slave to your pattern, because every time you fire, he will jump, allowing you to carry these moves out. Sliding will easily help you dodge the bombs, just avoid them for a second till they've exploded.   He'll turn around and come at you from the other side. Do the same stuff. Rinse and repeat, left to right.    And before you know it, Clash Man explodes into friendliness pellets and is gone for the forseeable future.  I AM THE EATER OF CORPSES  Being an energy sucking mega-vacuum nets Mega Man the Clash Bomb and Rush Coil. Let's discuss these for a minute. The Clash Bomb...I've seen it on the NES version, as the Crash Bomb. It's one badass weapon. It clings to walls as it ticks down, then explodes with a loud sound effect, and can break open some extra paths. It does NONE of that here. It's not utilized at all for any secret paths in the game, has no exploding sound effect (despite having one in the battle), and it can only be used four times. This would be more acceptable if it could break open walls or locked doors and thus served as a key of sorts as well, but we don't get any of that satisfaction. Rush, as a Super Mario spring, is infinitely more useful. He has six uses, and can get you to higher places where large HP orbs, power crystals, and extra lives are waiting. Not that with enough skill you'll need any of that, but it's nice to see our good boi get some actual use out of his adaptations. And that clashes and burns the stage for this update. Come back next time, and witness such spectacles as invincible hard hats, murderous juggling clownbots, and a boss who is probably the easiest in the game due to his insistence on never throwing the first punch. Provided, of course, that I continue with this format. So, any of you who have opinions to share...let them out. I can't promise I'll simply go with everything I'm suggested, but it won't hurt for me to take into consideration your viewpoints, and determine whether or not I proceed with it this way. For now, it's time for me to Mega Bust out my Super Game Boy and play some Mega Man on the CRT. Man, I'm such a sentimental slob.
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Feb 1, 2024 05:08
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Your images look great and it's easy to follow your path through the level. Commentary's a bit uh overdone maybe but you warned us about that. imo it's fine, keep going!
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Feb 1, 2024 11:10
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Yeah, this is cosy cool, despite me having no experience with these games.
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Feb 1, 2024 15:24
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This looks fun. Keep doing your stuff, OP.
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Feb 1, 2024 22:10
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Episode 2: Oh, you're inevitable? Well I am Metal Man, motherfucker. Welcome back to the ---- thunder crashes what does "intro" mean?!??!?!!! It's the one who's the complete opposite of Clash Man. In every way, shape, and/or form (but mostly and). I'll explain as we go along. Now that I've found faster, more efficient ways to get my work done (1% figuring out techniques I didn't know I could utilize before, 99% 5 Hour Energy), I'm even more eager to continue, now that I've got a bit of time on my hands. Right now you guys are thinking "thank God we don't have another super long beginning to sit through." And you're right!  One square flew the coop, let's visit the most crunchy stage there is in this entire game.  "Ey yo Mega Man"  "I'm finna metallically  kick  yo rear end" Holy poo poo, he's got dance moves. Mega Man, I think we've met our match, no?  I wasn't joking when I said it's one hundred percent the opposite. First exhibit: all the colors are pitch black. We're no longer inside a brightly lit utopia for floating yo-yo's and shuffling Jenga barrel stacks, we're in a dark nightmare filled with metal booby traps, spiky things, and literal circus acts.  Our first enemy, the Springer, is a HUGE step up from what we've seen previously. He's designed to catch you off your guard. He moves slowly back and forth, but as soon as you land on the same plane he's located, he moves eight times faster. If he catches you, his face pops off and waves back and forth on a spring while you run and scream, and I'm over here wondering why the hell this thing wasn't mass produced as a Halloween decoration. Probably the possibility of injury lawsuits. He's taken down by a Clash Bomb, if you feel so inclined (this first one isn't worth it though, you'd best save that limited weapon).  Down here, we have spikes that were placed in a dick move kind of spot, but it's one of those test of reflexes things. I could say it's bad design, but if you lose a life and really feel sore about it, you could Game Over yourself right here and still reset the stage only six seconds away from this thing, so there's not much room for complaints here.  More room to fall here, so these are slightly less offensive to my great ancestors.   And here's the circus act. The Pierobot. A clown juggling. How does this relate to metal besides him being a robot? He's riding a giant sentient iron gear. That's right, even if you kill Clowny McBossDamagePants (do NOT run underneath the gear right after destroying it unless you killed him too), the gear will still drop to the ground after a moment and target you. It does half the damage as the Pierobot, which makes me super glad that guy didn't resort to throwing pies in our face, as they most certainly would have been made of metal and smashed Mega Man's teeth out the back of his skull.  Now here's where it gets really challenging. The moving floors don't push too fast, but they will definitely throw you off balance.    This is rather easy to avoid now, as it's only being introduced here, but the Chain Crusher deals four damage----again, as I've called it, boss damage. It activates when you get near it, so just wait a second till it's slowly rising again, and then once it's almost back at the top, run past it. There's enough of a delay before it comes back down that you won't struggle too hard here.    These are the Moles, sentient drills that move slowly and deal two damage. Luckily, this spot is one of those "kill everything in sight to refill your health" areas, and you'll need it for what's coming up.  This. The classic combo trap. Both enemies introduced separately and almost harmlessly, now working in tandem with a moving floor and ready to wreck your Mega day.   This is the closest thing to a death pit we've seen in this stage. Believe me, the level doesn't need them; it's dangerous enough on its own, in my opinion. Clash Man's stage is super easy once you develop a marginal level of skill, but Metal Man's stage will bash you left and right all fourteen days of the week.   There's actually a mini gauntlet of these, I just skipped the middle area in the screenshots. You can hang around and shoot at them if you want, but you have to be quick and precise or they'll overwhelm you. Otherwise, gun for it by slide-dashing or doing mini jumps as you run. And hope this one up at the end doesn't end up the bottom slice of bread on a hero sandwich made out of Mega Man's robo-intestines and internal bionic organs.   The Metall is an easy but annoying enemy. They deal two contact damage, or just one from their triple spread bullets, which are almost always in an inconvenient position to likely hit Mega Man. They die in one hit, so as they peek out of their invulnerable hats, you have just an instant to shoot before they do.     Ah, what a conundrum. What ever shall we do.  I have some pretty good ideas.  Firing a bullet with a Rush adapter selected summons him.  He looks so happy to be of assistance. :3  Dammit, game, where's my cute little boing sound?! Gimme a boing sound!!!   Oh for pete's sake. NO, Metal Man, I'm not joining your titanium circus.   This uphill progression makes defeating them quickly a bit more difficult for the slower paced players. It's possible to get trapped between two here, and have to make a perfect jump over a gap with an iron gear rolling back and forth so as not to get hit.  This is a HUGE waste of iron gears. Can you IMAGINE the money Metal Assface could make if he actually sold these things to a market somewhere instead of designing robo-clowns to ride around on them?  We're done already, but no seriously, this stage is a BIG leap up from Clash Man. You have to be ready for everything that's coming at you left and right here. Besides, we've still got the Man himself to deal with.  I'm kinda shaking in my boots a bit, to be honest. After what we've just been through, what's the boss like?!  "Ey yo Mega Man" (Mega Man is tired of repetition, I'm assuming)  "I'm finna metallically  kick  yo rear end" Well, I've learned a lot about consistency today.  : What do you think? Huh? Sorry, I wasn't really paying attention. Dammit!!! I spent all day perfecting my moves just for this moment! : ... And then  Metal Man  proceeds to do nothing at all. This is the most boring, disappointing fight in the entire game. As long as you stand here, Metal Man does fuckin' NOTHING. And when you do finally get his heavy iron rear end to drag itself somewhere, it's so easy to avoid damage that I feel as though he should have been one of the enemies earlier in the stage. Hell, a booby trapped room filled with Springers and Chain Crushers would have been a bigger challenge. Don't get too close to him, or he'll leap to the left side of the screen (likely smacking into you in the process) and that's the most damage he'll be able to deal in a single hit. So just don't get too close. It's pretty easy not to, honestly. "I'm gonna run in place so mad"  Get to the middle of the screen, and pull off the same trick you used on Clash Man. Jump slightly above Metal Man and fire, and he'll jump into the shot. Firing is the only way to make him launch his attack at you.  He jumps high in the air, releasing a metal blade at you (the one on the left here) and then a second one as he lands (the one on the right). They're pretty easy to jump over, as they come at you super fast and thus aren't much of a timing challenge. Just jump in the middle and shoot, dash left to get ready for your defensive jump, pull that off, run back to the middle. Ugh. Metal Man, I'm pretty sure your NES counterpart knew what it was doing. Maybe he's just super tired from running in place all the time to stay on the right side of the room, because the moving ground NEVER stops going left. Is there a hack of this game that makes Metal Man a more challenging boss?!  I AM THE EATER OF METALS *promptly vomits up metal fragments and blood*  But the rewards are SUPER satisfying. Let's talk about them for a minute. The Metal Blade is another polar opposite of Clash Man. Instead of a difficult boss that nets you a nearly useless weapon, we have an easy boss that gives you a super badass weapon. The Metal Blade can be used 76 times before it runs out of ammo, making it one of the two highest-ammo weapons in the whole game. It can basically be your Buster for a whole stage without much effort needed to refill. It's like a double powered Mega Buster with four times the hitbox, and it goes through multiple one-shot enemies, which will make certain areas a BREEZE. The Clash Bomb may defeat Springers, but there weren't enough of those guys to really pack much of a punch, which is why they didn't show up in the later areas of this level. The Metal Blade, on the other hand, was the thing that gave kid me the excitement to press on to more stages. The Rush Marine confused me a lot when I first got it. If you fire it, it's just a thing that gets summoned and then instantly zips away like Spider-Man stealing my pizza box. I had no idea what that quickly flashing ghostly looking thing was that appears for one frame (on a Game Boy screen it's super hard to see), but I wound up thinking it was some kind of familiar that squashed enemies in front of you. You can jump into it for a single frame and hear Mega Man land on it, but it obviously won't function. Trying to use its air-intended counterpart in the water was what taught me the lesson. Rush Marine is the longest lasting Rush upgrade, with nearly 50 seconds of continuous use before it turns off. It moves fast through the water, lets you skip underneath certain enemy gauntlet areas, you can still shoot enemies and avoid them more easily than before, and if they hit and damage you, it doesn't push you around any. Mega Man doesn't even look like he cares when it happens. I wish this thing was utilized more often. If screens could scroll vertically within a single area, there could have been levels with HUGE water based screens and hidden areas and items. Man, there needs to be a complete overhaul of this game using the same engine and levels and items and all, just make the levels bigger and more complex! Rush demands more appreciation, dammit!!! Well, this stage was metal as hell, but the boss felt a little rusty, so my impression is a mixed bag. To combat it, I shall now go onto YouTube and watch LP's of Undertale. Hopefully this will help me get over my disappointment at Metal Man as a final boss. But at least he was easy enough for me to be my first victory as a child, and for that, the inevitable ...Seriously, he's weighing my heart down. He's made of metal and he's constantly running in place. There are about twelve different toxic metals floating around in my bloodstream and I think I'm having a heart attack right this very second DEAR GOD SOMEONE GET HELP METAL MAN STOP loving SHOOTING BLADES THROUGH MY VENTRICLES YOU TRIANGLE HEADED PIECE OF SH Kamari fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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Feb 4, 2024 00:29
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Kamari posted:Whose opinion counts?! The freakin' gamers!!! 
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Feb 4, 2024 21:06
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Could you show each special weapon in action? And the dog upgrades too, of course.
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Feb 4, 2024 21:53
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quote:Man, there needs to be a complete overhaul of this game using the same engine and levels and items and all, just make the levels bigger and more complex! Strongly disagree, this game's engine is rear end. If you want a better Metal Man stage...play Mega Man 2 (NES)? If you want more complex underwater stuff, Mega Man 8 should have what you're craving. iirc - but I haven't played it - Wily Tower from the Genesis compilation/port should have some (optional) Rush Marine segments if you want the original flavor?
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Feb 4, 2024 23:14
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Episode 3: Isn't mass murdering forest critters FUN?! The SS Kamari is once again sailing the stormy seas as it's As a wise man once said, “there's no such thing as screwin' around when there's forest robots to fight!” Who? I dunno, probably somebody somewhere.  This is going to be an interesting new kind of setting, as I don't recall Mega Man being a wilderness type of guy. But now he's got to face down a boss who is definitely happy to see him unless that's just a costume he's wearing, and dear God, I don't have time to wait for the imps to stoke the level of fire I'm going to burn in for that. Hell can wait, as, considering your perspective on this game, we're probably already kinda there. But me? My enthusiasm, as usual, is that of a nine-tentacled octopus chasing a chocolate-covered astronaut through a junkyard.  As soon as we pop in, our first enemies are visible. No, they aren't bombs, but they do look like it when they're dormant, which makes them cute as a button in my opinon. These are the Battons, which are similar to Tellys and Goblins, in that they fly slowly toward the player and just sort of smack into you. Battons, however, are just kinda dicks, and they fly away to nest in a tree after every time they hit you; five seconds later they pop back out thinking “hmm, that was fun, time for round two.”  As robots with hundreds of years life span don't have time to wait around for that nonsense, Mega Man runs to the right and gets accosted by the Robbit. They deal three contact damage, and they also fire metal carrots at Mega Man.  That would be threatening if it weren't so adorable and only did one piece of damage. I can't help but point out that this screen was, as usual, a huge stopping point for kid me. I just couldn't survive the sheer numbers of tree bombs and Rambo bunnies.  There's something that, of course, will make all of this SUPER easy.  The Metal Blade. It has its place right here in Wood Man's stage, akin to chainsaws chopping easily through wood being the ideal theme as far as I can tell. According to Kanthulhu, I ought to show each weapon and dog upgrade, which I will definitely be doing when their time to shine comes up. Unfortunately, only in screenshot form for now; videos may likely come later when the glitches do. I'm still huffing and puffing with excitement for when that day comes.  While it takes six buster shots to kill a Robbit, three Metal Blades will do the trick, and the last one always fires through. This is the weapon I mentioned before that, when one-shotting enemies, will just fly through the screen eliminating them. Metal Blade is overkill for Wood Man's stage, and it's a grand time. I don't show it in action here, but the Metal Blade can fire in all directions. There are times this can come in handy, though it's not necessary often.  This Robbit can't be defeated easily with just the Buster. I take damage every time I try to jump over it. Luckily, the Metal Blade reaches it despite the poor guy being on a lower level.  Bunnakin may have the high ground, but Megobi-Man Keyourleaseonlifehasexpiredobi ain't interested in that poo poo.  Whew, that was a time killer.  Not much explanation for these, as Battons take about five seconds to activate, and it's super easy not to jump into them. Perhaps they're meant to be item generators though, because we've got our first miniboss coming up, or as I call them, boss enemies.  Hot dog, it's the Hot Dog. He's the first in-level boss enemy, and true to his name, fireballs up to twelve thousand robo-degrees Celsius are launching out of his gaping maw.  See what I'm talkin' about?!  Despite that ledge appearing to have some wiggle room, it's impossible to stand still even on the farthest edge and not take damage. Hot Dog, being a boss, gives full boss damage both by contact and by his fireballs, so running right through him isn't a great idea; you'll likely lose half your HP. Considering his boss room doesn't allow for a lot of maneuverability due to its uneven makeup, he doesn't leap around and attack. He simply stands there, barfing fire the whole time and generally being a total badass four times Rush's size. With carefully timed jumps and shoots, avoiding his fire while simultaneously laying into him is the way to go. Metal Blade isn't needed here, as it takes sixteen hits with or without the Blades to defeat Hot Dog. He, unlike the other enemies, isn't themed specifically to Wood Man's stage, so Metal Blade isn't “super effective” on this coal-coughin' canine.  That was one hell of a time, and it's not the last boss enemy we'll see in the game, either.  After surviving Hot Dog, getting hit by a metal carrot is just insulting. Robo-Rabbid doesn't know what's good for him, so I metallically give him the what for. If only I had some neat poses like Metal Man. That power crystal down there replenishes the Metal Blade quite nicely, as the large ones fill eight points on any weapon's bar, restoring half of its maximum power.  Another gauntlet screen! Oh noes! Mega Man is all tuckered out, what's he gonna do this time?! Well, Metal Man's biological treasure horde comes in handy once again.    Because Rush just turned into a fuckin' SUBMARINE. I mean, okay, that wasn't a surprise, considering the name wasn't trying to hide anything, but still! A SUBMARINE!!! The submarine lasts the longest of the three Rush upgrades, and Mega Man can still fire from it despite being enclosed in a glass dome. There's absolutely zero opposition down here, so he can just scoot on through. This stage BEGS you to have beaten Metal Man, I swear.  Above us are the Needle Press and the Cannon (Japanese: Houdai). Needle Presses are a weaker version of Chain Crushers, and they move up and down faster. They do less damage and aren't quite as dangerous, but can be a menace when grouped together, as there are plenty of them here. The Cannon unfortunately, despite translation, teaches us nothing about all-you-can-eat-and-drink culture, and everything about having cannonballs fly into our faces whilst every single weapon we launch at it bounces off in the shape of a big foam middle finger until its shell is open. But they only take three hits to go down when vulnerable, and they don't take long to get rid of.  Ain't got time for your poo poo Metty.    Dodging those cannonballs is super satisfying.   I lost a little HP because I unnecessarily went back and actually fought through the gauntlet in case I'd need any screenshots from there, but decided they wouldn't be necessary. I shall now climb the ladder of LP'ing shame.  You have to wait for the first  At least these aren't such a pain in the neck. And why are there TWO giant HP orbs? Because the next screen is completely nuts, that's why.   Wild turkeys are running full speed right at your ugly mug, that's what it's all about in Wood Man Town!!! Time to make like a tree and get outta heah.  gently caress this poo poo I'm out  Du na nun nun nun  gently caress this poo poo I'm out  Psyche, we're the hero dammit  And this is why the Metal Blade is a gift from the gods and nobody can convince me otherwise.  That's still the same Metal Blade. It takes six buster shots to kill the turkeys, or Cooks as they're called, but ONE Metal Blade will slice them wide open and gut them just in time for Thanksgiving. Thus Metal Blade can simply fly across the screen one shot at a time, killing two or three Cooks before you have to fire another.     Metal Blade, our lord and savior.  I was fawning so hard over the Metal Blade, I accidentally slid right through this rear end in a top hat. He did not like being ignored, and promptly shot my rear end with a carrot. He dropped a giant HP orb in return though, so it's all good.  I wonder what this boss is gonna be like? His stage was rad, but has the ease with which I murdered his associates made him mad?   Answer: yes  Wood Man, unlike Metal Man, has two opposing attributes: he begins throwing all he's got the moment the fight begins, and he matches the difficulty of the stage if you didn't get the Metal Blade first. He starts by firing a line of razor-sharp leaves into the air, which then gradually float down and must be avoided while returning fire. His shield of leaves is pretty effective too, stopping at least half of your gunfire most of the time.  After the leaves begin to fall from the ceiling, he just throws that poo poo right at your face and jumps closer. Wood Man ain't no coward.  Jumping over the shield isn't hard, but I still occasionally slip up at it. It's about the same difficulty as jumping across wide death pits, but as a moving assailant.  By the time the shield is gone, these are close enough to the ground to block some more of your weapon fire. Wood Man then begins regenerating the cycle. As he's standing and waiting, that's the time to unload your buster shots on him, but there's two catches. One, a single round of rapid firing isn't enough to defeat him even while just standing there and whaling on him. While he's throwing leaves around (a battle strategy mysteriously lacking in any wooden components), you're getting into a damage race with the guy and thinking you've got it easy. Suddenly, he's so close that he's jumping right on top of you, and in your hurry you realize he's in the middle of the screen, making it harder to keep your distance as you run through him to get to the other side, taking extra damage in the process, and suddenly making those one-point damaging leaves look like a lot less of a joke than you might have thought they were. Unless you can fire fast enough, this strategy might overtake you.  The second catch, unfortunately for Wood Man, is that we don't need no drat buster around these parts, because we've got friggin' METAL BLADES, SON!!! Metal Blade is even more difficult to fire through Wood Man's shield, but just wait for him to throw it off the first time, then unload with the Blades. He dies in four hits.  FOUR.  Look man, say what you will about this game, but there are times I just adore this poo poo.  I AM THE EATER OF W Let's not finish that sentence.  Chopping a robo-boss down like a tree grants us another gift from the holy gods type of weapon (although mysteriously lacking in any wooden components), the Leaf Shield. Let's have a moment of discussion. The Leaf Shield is a weapon I vaguely hinted at back in Episode 1, when I mentioned a weapon that is better than the buster for farming items out of multi-spawn enemies (specifically, the Pipis, who drop eggs full of Peep-Peeps). In every screen you encounter them, they spawn infinitely and drop a ton of eggs all over the place, so items will be blasting out everywhere. You can arm a Leaf Shield for free by pressing B to have the leaves surround you. You can just stand still while enemies like Peep-Peeps fly into you and die instantly, releasing items everywhere. That doesn't even use ammo. It only drains energy once you press up, down, left or right to throw the shield in that direction like a giant buster shot. Good news? It also crashes right through several enemies in some cases, like the Metal Blade. Bad news? The Leaf Shield makes a habit of bouncing off more enemies than some other weapons do, showing that the size of Wood Man's weapon apparently doesn't always matter (cough, cough) This weapon is the definition of item farming, so it makes sense that it came from a stage full of trees, I suppose. Because you know, trees are a type of plant. Plants, crops, farming. You know. Analogical humor. Uh. Anyways, next time we'll be witnessing spectacles such as a stage that's certainly got Can the next baddie bring us to our knees, or is he just puttin' on airs? Kamari fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Feb 11, 2024 |
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Feb 11, 2024 05:11
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Digging this thread a lot so far! A leisurely stroll through a less-than-great game with all our favourite robots! Such as this fucker we'll be seeing next time I think.
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Feb 11, 2024 07:45
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Metal blade beats wooden robots, of course. This game is very logical. What did your dog get?
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Feb 11, 2024 10:56
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The metal chickens are actually immune to the Metal Blade in big console Mega Man 2, making that screen MUCH harder. Unless you know the trick, which is standing still and letting them jump over you.
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Feb 11, 2024 12:57
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Episode 4: IIIII JUST WANNA FLY (but not this high please help dear God how did we get up here) Welcome back to  And this is why.  Air Man always looked like he was holding a cup of something in his right hand, no? This stage takes place in an even weirder location than Wood Man's: up in the drat clouds! I have to say, I wonder how Dr. Wily's doing keeping track of all these robot masters so far apart from each other. Clash Man and Metal Man could easily just have their own factory stages right next door to each other for all I know, but Wood Man's out in the freakin' boonies and Air Man's up in the stratospheric wilderness, where I'm super glad Mega Man is and I only exist vicariously through his spirit, Mega Buster, and similar desire to absorb the souls of my enem COUGH SNORT I mean, rid the world of evil.  The acrophobia's kicking in already, dammit. Mega Man drops in to begin on top of these floating glass platforms with grumpy faces sculpted onto them, and I have to admit, I'm a bit mystified by the presence of these things all over the stage. Not only are they on the ground everywhere, but also a part of these gigantic spawning attack platforms we'll be seeing soon. Is it sculptures of Air Man's face? Someone else? Well, it's nice to know Mega Man doesn't give a drat.  As there are other things to worry about. We've seen Pipis (or as I call them in my cutesy way, Pippy Birds) who drop eggs full of Peep Peeps (tiny birds that are great for farming items from because Mega Man has no problems murdering newborn wildlife that didn't ask to be a part of this poo poo in the first place). Let that sink in, Environmental Destruction Man.  Mega Man, in all the glory and style of purely ignoring all moral lessons relative to the situation at hand, simply skids under the Pipi whilst presumably flipping it the bird (or flipping it the Pipi. I swear, that needs to become a thing right now. Only we Mega Man fans will get it.)  What's this? An empty gap?! You don't wanna go and jump a gap like that!!!  Oh nvm  These platforms aren't enemies, so I don't think there's a name for them (but I could be wrong). In lieu of certainty on their nomenclature, I henceforth christen them Levitating Mega rear end in a top hat Oshitarethosescrewscomingoutofthesidesoftheseplatformses, or for short, LMAOs. Never mind, I looked them up. They're called Air Tikkis. … I'm sticking with Levitating Mega rear end in a top hat Oshitpleasedon'tmakemetypeallthatagainses.  Periodically, these terrifying nightmare rocket fuel platforms will shift screws on the sides up and down, and it's something you'll usually just choose to take damage from for the purposes of speeding things up around here. Lingering too long on a platform will cause these little guys to pop out from the sides. These are the Goblins I mentioned a long time ago in passing; they're actually mini versions of the LMAOs, something I didn't even realize until now. Look at them closely; see the resemblance? They even do only one damage point, just like the screws on the sides of the giant ones! How adorable, until they knock you out of the sky and send you right down to the only believable death pit in the entire game: falling right out of the sky, heh heh!!! Falling RIGHT OUT OF THE SKY!!!!!!!!!  The death pit also ends very abruptly, as for some reason, dropping down a little to the right is non-fatal. Level design. For anyone curious, yes, if I were to actually hack and remove the glass platform here and have Mega Man fall, he seriously WOULD die if he were even right at the end of the black dotted line indicating the death pit, but he would survive if he were just barely to the right of that line. This is a result of experimenting a lot with a program called Erosion, which is similar to Vinesauce in that it corrupts game ROMs while keeping them readable; I've had a LOT of fun doing that to this game over the years. Had some pretty interesting results; I probably won't be including any of that in my playthrough of this game (they would require sections of their own, probably) but I'll mention parts of them if something that reminds me of them comes up. Meanwhile, if you have a Mega Man II ROM, I encourage you to give it a go yourself.  But not right now, though; we've a terrifying sky stage to beat.  Another roadblock for me as a kid. These rude-rear end clouds block everything around them from sight, and as a youngster I originally didn't know Mega Man could slide, which is the only way to progress here. I can't tell you how long I got stuck here before I finally figured it out.   Ah, the Scworm. I would've spelled it Sqworm, but that's just preference talking. Anyways, remember how I said those clouds are bastards? There was a big HP orb hiding behind that one. Weirdly, if you die to the Scworms on this screen, everything hidden by clouds is momentarily revealed, including sprites of items like that. Scworms are a great enemy for farming free items, and you don't even need something like the Leaf Shield. Use your regular buster shot; they will shoot the Scworms without harming the generator as it's too low, so they spawn infinitely, and by masochistically running into the generator every time something interesting pops out and hoping you don't accidentally kill yourself by these fuckin' Scworminators, you can max out all your items, your HP and your lives in no time. In fact, when lives start appearing, they start spamming half the time for some reason. I dunno why; in case I haven't pointed it out yet, I'm no game programmer. I probably haven't been clear on that.  Here's our next screen. Since the first screen of the level was super dee duper fun, let's have ANOTHER death pit gauntlet!  Heh heh, saw this one coming and fired early. I'm so a-smart.  But if you're running at normal speed and not dashing, it's likely one of them will surprise you by popping out from behind this oddly shaped inkblot cloud. I'm TELLIN' you, man; those guys are just here to be dicks.  You'll start being blown backwards here, because we have a weaker imitation of the final boss coming up, who tries to push you off the platform with a super powerful fan that I definitely wish I had one of for those hot summer days. This enemy is called the Fan Fiend (Japanese: Matasaburo). The Fan Fiends aren't very common; in fact, there's only two of them in the whole game, both right here. They kind of just stand there, waving their arms up and down in a taunting manner “nyah nyah, gonna whoosh you to death” and taking Mega Man's gunfire like they can't even feel it.  Here's the second one; the areas look identical, LMAOs and all.  And right after the second one comes this guy, and a challenging area that I do have some amount of respect for, as it was SERIOUSLY hard for munchkin sized me back in the day. This enemy is called the Lightening Lord (Japanese: Kaminari Goro), and nope, they're not here to Lighten up your day with their hilarious misspellings, they're here to light your rear end up with literal bolts of lightning they throw at Mega Man from their bare hands and thou shalt bow down to we air gods of electrical destruction you lemon shooting piece of sh  Pay no attention to the bloodstains on this flying platform, or Mega Man's sketchy platforming physics, and let's move on to...  Uhh...another Lightening Lord. And another. And another. Now, here's the beauty of this situation, and by beauty I mean hair ripping frustration for the uninitiated: there's six of these guys in a row, and you defeat them by jumping up a little to shoot them before they're aligned with Mega Man (they come down towards him as his current platform is rising up, making them pass each other vertically). If Mega Man simply stands and waits to be level with the next Lightening Lord, then shoots as soon as the guy's in range, he won't be defeated; you'll always be about one shot from killing him, so if you just wait for Mega Man's platform to go counterclockwise up and left, back down, then return to the same spot as ol' Lordy is coming down again, they will both have momentarily gotten so far away from each other that the Lightening Lord's sprite will have disappeared and regenerated without you realizing it, and be back at full health and I SPENT SO MANY PLAYTHROUGHS OF THIS STAGE SHOOTING HIM INFINITE TIMES AND DYING TO HIS LIGHTNING BLASTS BEFORE I FIGURED IT OUT DAMMIT Ahh, nostalgia. Isn't it fun to remember how pitifully we all got our asses kicked back in the wonderful childhood days of gaming? Sobbing uncontrollably  At the end of that maddening trip we drop down here,  and ah, yes, can't get enough of these guys. But this is just to refill your health if the Lightening Lords took too much of it flinging electrical bolts of punishment and pain at your mega cranium. Just be careful with the platform positioning here; since Mega Man is on a lower level than these ones, he has to jump up a little to shoot them (unless he waits for them to spawn and jump down, but that takes longer), and he could accidentally destroy the generator. Despite appearances, you drop down and left here, so if you got through the Lightening Lord challenge (that sounds pretty badass, not gonna lie) without a scratch, this screen's just a quick drop.  To this platform, where this asscloud is hiding a hole in the platform causing you to fall right on top of the Scworming Scworms that are about to spawn below. Dammit Air Man, couldn't you just have done this at an airport or something? I hate you and your fan wielding carcass so much right now.  Luckily I, Kamari the Master Platformer, am an expert at jumping over invisible holes. The Scworms live to Scworm another day, as I need no sacrifices from them right now. Demonic laughter  Uh, hi? Not sure what this weirdo's doing up here. Wonder if he overslept and didn't make it to work on time today. “Heh, hey Jeffrey. Barry never came in today.” “Ehh, I bet that bastard stayed up all night watching The Walking Dead again.” Mega Man: TF did these fuckin things just talk  Anyways... (Suddenly ominous lack of clouds is, suddenly, ominous)  Gonna be honest here, whoever designed this guy knew how to make a boss look terrifying. If I woke up in the middle of the night and this thing was standing next to my bed, I'd poo poo myself.  Oh well, we know what to do. BOMBS AWAY!!!  Bo...bombs away? (Glances nervously at Air Man's unchanging health bar)  Wait, that can't be right...  AHA!!! His true weakness! I fling the proper weapon at him  Just in time for the leaves to all bounce off the tornadoes he fires and have them smack into me at the same time while Air Man pulls off a quick dab just to say “fuk u lol” with style. So, Air Man is a pretty decently damaging boss, and it's hard to dodge every single thing he shoots at me, but those tornadoes don't stop me from unleashing even regular buster shot hell upon his hide. The battle begins with him blowing Mega Man backwards with an even stronger fan than the Fan Fiends have (you can just barely snail towards Air Man). Then he fires three different sets of tornadoes, one right after the other. There are three variants; the one that hit Mega Man right here is my most hated of them all, as there's two tornadoes right above and below the same spot; it's impossible for me to jump through those two. I've probably only done it once in my whole life. You can shoot Air Man liberally while he's firing tornadoes, and as he does it rather slowly, he usually only manages to finish off the first three, jump-skip-hop to the left side of the screen (run under him while he's performing the second, higher leap) and begin the second set before he explodes. And this is with REGULAR shots. But Leaf Shields?  Let's find out.  WHO'S LAUGHIN' NOW, AIR MANIAC, HUH??!?!??!?!!!  He throws out a different variant out of desperation. This one is much easier to deal with; just stay below the tornado cluster above until it passes, then jump over the last one. They all remain in identical formation as they zip toward you, so there's no randomization to throw you off. The third variant has two tornadoes right next to each other in front, which Mega Man can shoot Air Man through without having to tap-jump up and down, and a cluster above and to the right of them. When they come zooming forward, a well-timed slide to the right (or left if everything's facing the opposite way, which kinda screws me up sometimes if we're being honest here) will keep Mega Man out of harm's way.  Nothing's keeping this motherfucker out of harm's way, though. For it's time to MAKE LIKE A TREE  AND LEAVE There we go, that's the correct expression. Thanks, future evil old Biff. Don't you just LOVE serving up some deep dish punishment pizza?!  I AM THE EATER OF COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF NATURAL GASES---- explodes  Fortunately, Mega Man is not only resistant to over-consumption of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, nearly 2% water vapor, and 0.2% argon, carbon and a bazillion other things, but he's also got another upgrade for Rush, in addition to claiming the discount knockoff version of the Tornado Blast. Oh, Air Man, even in death you do laugh while you're burning in hell. Let's jaw about these upgrades for a moment. The Air Shooter, honestly, seems kind of gimmicky and useless, but it does have its moments. Unlike Air Man's total control over the element of air, Mega Man just fires three tornadoes diagonally up in the direction he's facing----to the left, middle and right. They spread out as they rise, so there's room to hit a number of enemies above, but this is never really utilized to great effect anywhere. It also has nine uses total, meaning it's definitely not something you'll be clearing stages with. But it does have its convenient moments that would otherwise be an eye rolling challenge of pure frustration and death pit fueled fury, so I'll give them a C+. Rush gets one of his best, and his most easily exploitable upgrade, in the entire game. The Jet is just a platform similar to the Item-1 from the NES version of Mega Man 2, but this time it's Rush, and like a good boi, he'll go in any drat direction you please whilst wearing a big triumphant doggy smile over his mastery of the air. His usage ticks down one point per second, so you naturally would have sixteen seconds to use him, which is more than enough for any screen in this game. But there's an odd catch that I feel was not intentional. Mega Man has the ability to “catch” Rush's Jet form without actually mounting it. That is, since you can fire Rush and have Rush deploy relative to Mega Man's horizontal position, you can jump into the air while summoning him and have him deploy above Mega Man's head if you please, following him vertically as he runs left and right, and as long as your jump (and therefore Rush) was low enough, he can do a little jump to mount Rush any time. In this “caught” state, Rush will not vanish the way he does if he's summoned and left alone for three seconds. This is an identical state to jumping up off of Rush while already riding his Jet form around, and because of this, the Jet will stay right below you (provided it doesn't hit a platform or wall in the process and become misaligned with Mega Man), making it perfectly safe to jump all around, as you will never fall away from Rush. And, while Rush isn't mounted (while Mega Man is jumping), HIS TIMER FREEZES. If Mega Man deploys and mounts Rush on one side of a wide gap screen, and rides him to the far side, he can continuously jump up and down on top of Rush in order to barely use up any of Rush's power at all the whole time. With well timed jumps, it's possible to use less than ONE POINT OF POWER crossing the absolute longest screen in the entire game. So I guess Rush's exhaustion really just comes from carting Mega Man's fat hiney all over the place. Mega Man's doing himself a favor with all those goddamn calisthenics. So, for next time. I've talked about the glitches, and soon they will arrive. I don't want anyone to be too overexcited just yet, though----the next episode, we'll begin to tackle them, but just barely. The first one that's worth mentioning at all will be covered, but it's only just so. Luckily, I can do them in relatively similar order of intensity and shock value as the stages progress, so we won't have to throw things too out of whack at any point. The first glitch will be something I show off inside of the next stage I feature, and it'll just be a quick thing, right before I press on and show the rest of the stage in the same normal way I've been doing so far. Don't worry; the glitches won't stop me from showing how things are done normally (to some extent anyways lol), as this is an LP after all. It's just, that glitch isn't really anything big to crow about, even though it's kind of entertaining. The next episode, and every one after, will still be in screenshot form----but this is where the videos may begin popping up, as well. I'm not POSITIVE if I'll be doing a video for the next episode...honestly, the glitch is easy enough to show off without the use of a video, screenshots and descriptions could do it. But then, it won't look nearly as cool. I'm debating whether it's worth a video or not, and right now my mind is set on yes. I probably will do a YouTube recording and feature it. Just rest assured, whether I change my mind about that later or not, I most definitely will be doing videos for the rest of the game's glitches, especially the craziest glitch of them all that comes much later, because that one almost entirely cannot be appreciated without a video at all. It'll still have screenshots, as I'll be completing entire stages WHILE IN THE SEVERELY GLITCHED STATE...as there will be certain, uh, “elements” of the stages that you'll be wanting to hear, so to speak. As well as mocking dead ends that most certainly are akin to literal hell for our Mega pal over here. Everyone knows how high pitched and shrieky this game's music is already. It can actually get better if you perform certain glitches well enough; yes, certain odd things you do while in a [certain kind] of glitched state can surprisingly reprogram the instruments and make them sound lower and more rough-edged and badass. And it can also get worse. MUCH, MUCH WORSE. You readers ain't seen nothing yet. Have a good week, everybody. I'll be over here, jealously eyeing the fans department at my local electronics store and muttering to myself about the falling quality of necessary household appliances these days. Hell, put Dr. Wily on the job; if there's anything this guy knows how to do right, it's make a decent fan. Rest in peace, Air Man, may you eternally have Leaf Shields thrown at you from every angle, you ornery bastard. Kamari fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Feb 23, 2024 |
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Feb 20, 2024 03:04
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Ahoy, for it is Sunnight, and what better time (other than maybe Frievening when it probably is more fun for everyone) to upload the next episode of an LP, especially one that features actual video footage? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoJcQYkH7YM This links to a clip showing the Hard Man stage's famous (well, not really) glitch in action. It doesn't show the full stage being completed; that's done here. It's the “infinite HP glitch” for lack of a better term, but THIS term is sure misleading, and you'll find out why. Insert the devilish laughing soundtrack of your choice here. (Saying this reminds me I haven't put up any Tindeck links for this LP. To be fair, I ought to at least link to a few YouTube videos showing the soundtracks, as well as improved, remixed versions some true musical artists have thrown out there.) But to summarize the infinite HP glitch before we begin (as luckily, the glitch is performed right at the beginning of Hard Man's stage...), and if you want to skip to the LP part of this episode, just scroll down till you reach the next update right below this one (this is just a short one to explain the glitch). Simply enter the Hard Man stage and keep going right, until you encounter an area with an energy tank, and Have “Su” Bees are flying back and forth, dropping Chibee hives everywhere. Get rid of the energy tank by collecting it (it's necessary to remove all interfering sprites from this screen). On the bottom of the screen, slide back and forth quickly and try to keep hitting the trigger points that spawn more enemies onscreen, so they keep adding more Chibees. Eventually, there will be so many Chibees that the game will be overloaded on sprites. There won't be much slowdown or anything (pretty resilient game up to this point, not gonna lie), but Mega Man's HP shouldn't be updating as readily as usual. Once you're certain the Have “Su” Bees are not going to be able to get any more Chibees to spawn (and likely you've used the energy tank by now to prevent Mega Man from dying), go back out to the right side of the level and summon Rush Jet. Make sure Mega Man jumps up into him in order to “catch” him and prevent him from disengaging, but don't actually mount him. If you do, use the ledge on top of the screen to get Mega Man off; Rush will stay high up onscreen after this, but he won't disappear. (If Rush won't actually show up when you try to summon him, you're fine; he's only needed in order to be an extra sprite in case you don't have enough onscreen yet, so if he isn't appearing, it's because you already have enough anyway.) Make SURE there are no frozen Have “Su” Bees around this area. Occasionally, the glitch can cause one of them to get jammed while they're trying to escape after dropping a hive. It's important that none remain. Now, proceed onward. You have to move slowly because you need to let the Chibees keep up with Mega Man. If any of them get offscreen and their sprites vanish, he will die instantly. Same thing if Rush disappears for any reason at all (which is why, in the video, I kind of scramble to keep him around near the end where he almost gets left behind because of the outer wall). So, why is the term “infinite HP” misleading? Because it's only the sprite lag preventing Mega Man from dying. Somehow (I'm not sure how, as I'm not really a programmer by any means----I'm sorry for not having ever really made that clear, to be honest), sprite lag in this game stops certain onscreen values from updating properly, including weapon power and Mega Man's HP. Weapons / Rush adapters will stop working when they run out, even if their bars still show a usable amount of power due to not updating; pausing and unpausing will force them to update, anyway. Mega Man, on the other hand, will not cooperate. If his HP bar shows even ONE slot on it, he stays alive. Pausing and unpausing doesn't update this (unless there aren't enough sprites onscreen to keep him alive by lag). He can last the entire length of the screen, before attempting to climb up to the next on the ladder... ...and die instantly because all of the Chibees disappear. That's as far as he can get. On a side note, some other odd, unexplainable thing I found is this: if you arm a Leaf Shield on Mega Man when the Chibees are surrounding him, it'll instantly kill most of them, and make him die too. The leaves will continue to spin around, which is kind of hilarious, but when Mega Man restarts the level and starts running to the right, a “phantom” power bar will appear on the left, without a label, and I believe it's the Leaf Shield bar...maybe. I'm not sure why it's still there. Nothing weird happens if you beat the level with that bar showing; pausing and unpausing, even if you don't select anything, will make the bar disappear. That's really all there is to this one. Like I said, only just kind of worth showing off. The first real deal glitch, and it's a single screen weird thing that doesn't really impact much of the game. It's kind of a foreshadowing of a much more major glitch coming up later, though. The future glitches will be usable in MANY locations, and have much more oomph to them. I'll try to get out timely videos for each one, at the same time I add the episodes for their stages here. Things will get a bit disjointed in the future, but I'll try to keep it as straight as I can.
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Feb 26, 2024 04:56
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 Mega Man looks super apprehensive here, and I have to say, I don't blame the guy. Isn't that one badass skull in the entryway to this castle? At least, I think it's the entryway. Come to think of it, I can't see a door anywhere. If Dr. Wily just kept the castle locked up completely, Mega Man couldn't get to him.  But Dr. Wily doesn't think that far ahead, as Mega Man flies his Rush Bomber right through the ceiling and crashes to the ground. As you can see, Dr. Wily has considerately painted his initials around the castle, in case you forgot the name of the guy whose abode you've infiltrated.   Look who wasn't expecting a surprise visitor today!  Dr. Wily backs up slowly as Mega Man approaches. Suddenly, Mega Man just straight up guns for it, and Dr. Wily's expression can very well be interpreted as a smirk,  because Mega Man fell for his trap.   And dropped into the area where we select the NEXT four stages in the game! This psyched me out as a kid. What's that?! Four MORE layers of fun to this ice cream sundae?! And we can select them ACTIVELY instead of being limited to a cursor on a screen?! Technology, my son!!!  We'll do these in the same order as everything else above. It conveniently works out.  I only just noticed the four lives Mega Man has down there. Too bad that's about to be history.  Why, you ask?  Let's find out.  Because of this guy and his tiny metallic bee-rethren. The big guy above is called the Have “Su” Bee, which unfortunately means the thing he's carrying around is gonna give us a real bad time. The hive these enemies carry, when dropped, will spawn five Chibees, miniature robot bees that enjoy metallically stinging Mega Man to death, although they move super slowly compared to their big bee-rothers (okay, I'll stop).  See how I suddenly have one life? In the video I recorded for these screenshots, I attempted the infinite HP glitch from the YouTube video I linked above. I died three times in those attempts. It's that difficult sometimes. It also depends on what emulator you're using; some of them make it a bit easier.  WITNESS THE BIRTH OF CH See, being robotic means they get to skip the whole larva and pupa stages. Sonic the Hedgehog, in all his robot-destroying glory, really is an rear end in a top hat. All those poor forest critters he's depriving of their cool robot suits.  But these Chibees ain't havin' none of that poo poo.  Mega Man manages to grab what bits of health he can shoot out of them, and run off. As he runs along these platforms, we see the next new enemy jumping out of those holes, the Wanaan (incorrectly spelled Wanaaan at the end of the game, if I remember correctly). They simply spring out and attempt to snap Mega Man's legs off of his body, like a sentient bear trap.  And more angry bees swarm in, but are quickly left behind. The key to avoiding the hives is to wait for the Have “Su” Bee to reach the side of the screen, then turn and run the opposite way as they're dropping the hive. Or, in an enclosed space like this, keep going the same direction, as the bees will be out quickly, but cannot reach you as easily.  As evidenced by leaving them in the Mega dust here.  BWOOP MEGA MAN, MEGA MAN!!! THOSE ARE CALLED “HAMMER JOES”! THEY'LL SWING THEIR MIGHTY HAMMER AROUND AND THEN THROW IT.  SO YOU'D BETTER WATCH YOUR----  BONK UGGHHH!!! Of course getting hit by one of the hammers is all part of my master plan. Trust me, I'm an expert LP'er.  Anyways, climb up here and shoot at the Hammer Joe from below on the ladder, and time your shots so that they get him when his eye is open (turns black) or he's throwing the hammer. When the visor is closed, shots bounce off of him.  Also, make sure like a freaking shtoink-a-doink, you get your Mega rear end knocked off the ladder twice in a row. That's how it's done in Hard Man Town, you feel me?!   Oh boy, an extra life! That sure would make up for the beating I just took.  If only there wasn't a catch to doing this.  Yep. Dick move, game. It's possible to prevent this if you only just barely touch the edge of the extra life, then turn back without sliding any further to the left. It isn't difficult to do; you've got a little room for error with it. The Hammer Joe only respawns if Mega Man goes too far left.   Behold, the enemy known as the Returning Monking (Japanese: Kaettekita Monkingu). It's an upgrade of the series' earlier Monking enemy, lighter and faster than it used to be.  And a whole lot stupider, according to this game's design. If you get too close, the Monking will jump to the ceiling and hang there, waiting for Mega Thiscan'tbeatrapatall to walk right under him, then drop down and start leaping and bouncing all over the place and smacking into Mega Man. Not a bad enemy overall, when you don't have the extra distance for easy Kaetteoshita Monxtermination, but very static sprites. It looks like it's standing all the time, except for when it hangs from the ceiling. Have a look.    Not the sharpest carpenter's nail in the construction zone, as we Mega Manners say.  … (panting and sweating) Is it worth it???  Answer: nope.  Okay, now here's room for the Monking to get nasty.  Walk under him so he drops down, go back to the right and make him bounce right to follow Mega Man, then slide-dash left and jump up onto the ladder just before he returns to thrash our pal. Not today, King Kong.  Meet the upgraded form of the Metall, the Metall K1000. These drive miniature tanks, and unlike in some of the other games Mega Man encounters them in, he can shoot them anytime here without them having any sort of “invulnerable” period. He has to fire the lemons right into those gaping tea saucer eyes, however. But they don't move very fast, so they aren't much of a threat, despite doing a respectable amount of damage (three points).   It's easy to nope right past these guys at normal speed. Not a threatening enemy by any means, unless Mega Man stops to tie his shoes. That damned right lace keeps coming undone, the left one is fine but the right, THREE TIMES A DAY, mother f...  This is the best place to encounter a Have “Su” Bee, because as soon as Mega Man touches that door,  he says bye-bye to Beelicia and is ready for the big bad whatever-the-hell-is-on-the-other-side-of-this-tunnel.   … … … Well count me confused, because I have NO IDEA what the hell this guy's supposed to be. Keep in mind, when entering these stages, we aren't told the boss's names anymore. The castle bosses are a complete mystery to the uninitiated like me, who hadn't the faintest clue what to call this guy. I mean, his suit looks metallic, I guess, but we already freakin' did Metal Man.  The best way to respond to this confusion is by blowing him the gently caress up.  Which does only one point of damage. And now, as we can all plainly see, Noname Man is pissed.  He retaliates by firing his robo-fists at us, which target Mega Man directly and even bounce off the walls to get him a second time in case he jumped out of the way.  Clash Bomb has no effect on them, and Punch Man leaps high into the air as Mega Man runs around wondering what the hell to do next.   Okay, THAT is one badass attack, not gonna lie. It shakes the whole screen and also freezes Mega Man in place, sometimes causing him to take EIGHT DAMAGE instead of four.   Earthquake Man gets back up and glares at us again just in time to get Air Shot in the face. Wellp, sorta. Doink  All right, then, time to make like a tr... ...nope.  But I DO have the best weapon of all, the inevitable Met... ...one point damaging blade.  It turns out, I don't actually have Nope Man's weakness weapon yet. He's one of those who requires that I do NOT play the game in the proper order, but luckily...  ...due to his attack pattern, damage racing him with the regular buster isn't a bad strategy. The flying fists only do one point of damage, so despite being difficult to avoid, they're not much of a threat. Just don't get under Sumo Man when he tries to mash you into a Mega Pancake.  And that sums up this fight pretty nicely. Not a bad one, but turns out to be not that big a deal once you realize just dodging his body slam and shooting is an easily working strategy to execute.  Turning Knuckle Man into Ghost Man and Kirbying his discarded remains into our gaping maw reveals that inside of Santa's sack is the Hard Knuckle. He's called Hard Man, and this is why, yes, I decided to retire a certain running joke, as I'm not getting anywhere NEAR that can of Scworms. Let's check out this weapon. The Hard Knuckle isn't anything overly special, as it fires out a giant metal boxing glove, but it's cool as hell. It's even bigger than Hard Man's own fists. It has one slight effect the other weapons don't: it freezes Mega Man in place momentarily when fired, possibly a testament to its extreme power. Unfortunately, it only has nine uses total, like the Air Shooter, so it's not really necessary to utilize much, other than on the boss later that can't take being Knuckled. But to anyone who knows the true secret of the Hard Knuckle... ...you already know what's up. You already know why we didn't have any serious glitches to show off just yet. We just acquired the most dangerous piece of equipment in the entire game. Things are about to get real. Next episode (which hopefully I'll be getting out sometime next weekend like usual, as work sometimes nets me an odd weekend schedule and I can't be sure whether I'll get to things as quickly as I want) is when we start to see the real shenanigans. Next week, a video is definitely in order. It'll probably be short like this one was, but it'll get the point across. Also, the glitch post will be AFTER the level post, because the glitch post itself will contain a LOT of talking about the glitches at hand, along with plenty of WTF screenshots that'll leave you scratching your head. I'll try to get the points across as if there was not a video, basically; in fact, there will be some details I mention in the text post that the video won't show, as the video really is more like a “preview” of the glitch. I'll try to cover anything it doesn't reveal in what I type that update. If you guys think I'm excited now, just wait. My enthusiasm has graduated to the level of a giant mutated radioactive porcupine stomping a barbed wire fence into the ground. Oh, and he ate both the octopus AND the chocolate covered astronaut. Bet you forgot about those guys, didn't ya? But next week, hopefully I'll be leaving you with something you'll NEVER forget! (For another four days or so until you remember you have to pay the rent or something and Mega Man slips your mind.) Have a good week everyone, work hard, and remember to avoid any bees you come across. Because you never know, man. Those motherfuckers could seriously all be robots. Kamari fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Feb 26, 2024 |
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Feb 26, 2024 04:56
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Loving this LP. Is hard man “difficult man” or “solid man” in Japanese?
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Feb 26, 2024 19:27
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Domus posted:Loving this LP. Is hard man “difficult man” or “solid man” in Japanese? Neither. Boss names are in katakana ("this word is foreign") rather than kanji ("this word has hidden meanings"). Mega Man Knowledge Base wiki posted:Hard Man (ハードマン Hādoman)
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Feb 27, 2024 14:33
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Glitch time, looking forward to it.
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Feb 28, 2024 16:43
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Episode 6a: You may be the Top Man, but I'mma break your stage in half. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB1NVtjJzqk Note that you can do these glitches in any level at all, anywhere you want, as long as you have the Hard Knuckle. Get ready for hours of crazy time if you do. So first, some screenshots just to show what the heck is going on. If you didn't watch the video, I'll try to highlight everything here, but I'll be using timestamps from the video, so it helps if you check it out anyway. The text below the screenshots right here will also go in the video description on YouTube. (Psyche never mind no it won't, it looks like it goes far beyond YouTube's allowable limit. You SomethingAwful folks are seeing exclusive text here. Maybe I'll put it in the comments on the video.) Sorry if things here are a bit out of whack; I tried to keep it orderly as best I could, but this episode took me a few hours longer than usual to put together, and some details may be all over the place. I hope the screenshots help. Also, I'm sorry, I just now realized that the video and audio of the uploads fall out of sync over time. I'll try to remedy that next time; thankfully it doesn't really ruin the overall thing I'm trying to do, showing off the glitches. But next time I upload a video, I do need to slightly change the speed of the audio; audio in my next big glitch will be super important, even timing, to a degree. Now, let's have a look at those screenshots. To skip to the level LP part of this episode, scroll down to the very next update below this one.  Right after using the Hard Knuckle and generating a 1/3 glitched scroll. (You could call it a “one-third scroll,” I dunno.)  Going down!!!  I regret everything  Dear God send help (this is if you do it twice in a row, scrolling down two screens both with the Hard Knuckle)  And then going back up to the Metall K1000 screen after performing two glitched scrolls back to back.  BWOOPMEGA MAN MEGA MAN THOSE ARE...UHH NEVER MIND I'VE GOT TO GO  ¼ of the bottom of the screen corrupted, which can cause crashes in many instances.  Including right here, if I had gone ONE MORE PIXEL to the right. The glitchy “wall” on the left side is a guide for this particular area: if you scroll past the last line of visible pixels (see how it's almost out of view?), then the game freezes instantly. But it would also have frozen if I turned around and tried to go back. So I had no choice but to commit droppuku right here, and reset the stage that way, to avoid that otherwise inevitable crash. This video is not a full comprehensive showdown of the glitches, simply because they can both be performed in countless locations through the game. The video just shows an introduction to both of them, and also a bit of messing around with both of them. In the comments, you can see the link to my LP on the SomethingAwful forums again, where full details about the glitches (and of course, the actual LP that goes with them) are located. For a 1. 0:19 wtf just happened? If you pause the game, and then use the Start button to unpause and immediately hold A and B together as the menu scrolls back down, and keep holding those buttons, Mega Man will both fire his weapon AND drop off the ladder at once. So he fired the Hard Knuckle at the same time he began the screen transition, which is the entire base of and key action that performs the Hard Knuckle glitch. 2. Why he runs in place after each 1/3 scroll? When you use the glitch and are in a messed up screen, Mega Man is usually stuck a few pixels down in the floor. Running in place is just to show this, and then he jumps out to free himself. Beware of locations where something will be right above his head and prevent him from jumping; in these cases, he'll get stuck. 3. 0:35 What's wrong with THIS screen?! The glitch simply carries over, that's all. After glitching your way into one screen, the next screen you go to (without using the glitch a second time) will still be a little messy, but completely safe, and it will fix itself if you can scroll away from the damaged areas and come back. 4. 1:10 okay, so why are we surfing back and forth aimlessly here? Just showing how the glitched floor extends across the entire screen. The main bulk of the screen will fix itself if you can scroll away from the area you entered in (ie, if it isn't just a single square screen), but the bottom will never fix itself, and vertical pixels will always be a bit misaligned with sprites. This screen will also ALWAYS cause the next one you enter to be a little glitched still, even if you did scroll around and attempt to fix things on the first screen. 5. 2:10 The screen is WAY more messed up now, as the damage covers 1/4 of the whole screen from the bottom up, in these cases, going too far can crash the game. That doesn't happen if the screen only has a small glitched line across the bottom; but a huge ¼ glitched section is too much for it to handle in many cases. If the whole screen flickers as you scroll left and right, you're in danger of crashing. However, as I continue to go back and forth here (and also after dying, I went right back here and continued these shenanigans), you can hear how the music changes. The notes become deeper and more robust. Yes, the 1/4 damaged screen is super deadly, but it can also have some neat side effects. It's difficult to hear without headphones or good speakers (listening on a phone probably won't let you hear it) because the bass of the lower notes goes up. 6. Also, know that if you die in a stage and then continue using the glitch from the checkpoint (I can't remember if this happens if you restart from the beginning of the stage), then certain screens will glitch up differently than they did otherwise; somehow, dying previously in a "checkpoint section" of screens (the area between your current checkpoint and the next) alters how the glitch affects the screens. THIS LEADS TO THE CRAZY GLITCH I WILL BE SHOWING NEXT WEEK. Prepare for the game to have a complete meltdown when we showcase next week's gigantic glitch. 7. 3:56 The sprites of some enemies will, for a moment, resemble different enemies / sprites occasionally when performing the glitch. I'm not sure why certain sprites are chosen; sometimes it makes sense, but not always, like here. There are no Hammer Joes in this stage at all, so why they show up as corrupted sprites here is a complete mystery to me. 8. 4:08 Whoa, what?! When I paused and unpaused several times, what I was specifically trying to do was have Mega Man jump for just one frame. Pressing the A button and then IMMEDIATELY pressing Start right after as you hold A, done right, will make him do a quick 1-frame "hop" after unpausing (let go of A before you unpause). This causes him to drop down inside those few pixels he's stuck in, and go through the floor into the screen below...and, as seen here, sometimes from the wrong position. He isn't supposed to be able to go to the lower screen from the right side of the above one, and this messes up his central location on the long scrolling water screen, putting everything HUGELY out of alignment. Which leads to point number 9... 9. 4:10 WTF?! Why do we see half of a different screen here?! This is something I said before I would basically beat to death explaining when the time came, the way that screens in this game works, but to be honest, it doesn't really take THAT much explaining. Despite me not being a game programmer by any means (I probably haven't been clear on that), I figured out through both this glitch AND by using Erosion, that all of the screens in each level are not above and below each other----they're actually right next to each other. So the screen we're seeing poking in from the left here, is actually the screen that you should see ABOVE Mega Man, if he were to climb back up that ladder up there. This means, every time Mega Man shifts screens up and down, he's actually teleporting from the side of one screen to the side of another screen, every time. It's pretty weird. I'm sure you can infer on your own what all this means if you check out a few screen transitions yourself, both glitched and normal. Whether going up or down, if Mega Man progresses forward, further into the stage, with a screen transition, then he's teleporting right. And if he goes back to a previous screen, whether scrolling up or down to accomplish this, he's teleporting left. See, this entire game is really a left to right platformer in disguise. 10. 4:40 Because of everything being off-center, most locations you do this “drop below the floor” thing in will cause Mega Man to be unable to proceed fully to the right because the screen won't scroll far enough. Usually just exiting to the left side is fine, and will fix things; I can't remember any locations where I became legitimately stuck because of this. 11. 4:59 Why did we skip over the Metall K1000's screen when going up the ladder? Well, it's more about how the game handles screen transitions, and kind of building from point 9 above. Once we went far enough to the left, since the Metall K1000 screen was already partially showing, the game now assumed we were ON that screen, rather than the one Mega Man was currently running around on. Whatever screen shows up on the farthest left point of wherever he currently is, the game treats any screen transition as though Mega Man were there, rather than whatever area you see him on to the right side. Even if the left side of the screen moves ONLY ONE PIXEL into the previous area, the game instantly assumes, screen transition wise, that he's on that previous screen, and appears to make him skip over it when he changes screens going up or down.* (This will be touched on and continued more farther below.) So the game thought he went up from the Metall K1000 screen, rather than from the water screen, and accordingly took him to the beginning screen. 12. 5:12 Again WTF, so this is a result of what Mega Man did earlier, off-centering himself on the water screen by dropping through the floor of the right side of the Metall K1000 screen. When you fix everything with a couple screen transitions, one lingering side effect (only stops if you beat the stage or lose a life) is that every screen will be shifted slightly over to the left. Sprites are actually in their correct locations; it's the screens themselves that are wrong. You can see this by looking at the far left and far right sides (or on single square screens, you'll instantly see how the left wall is too narrow and the right wall is too thick). This affects sprites, since they don't change their positions; even enemies will be standing in the wrong places. But the biggest woohoo of this whole “shifty” thing is that Mega Man's interactions with ladders will change too. Whenever he grabs onto a ladder, there are set points on the screen he is supposed to become attached to vertically when he changes into his “climbing” state. These pixel points, like sprites, do NOT change along with the shifted screens, so while Mega Man is technically climbing in the right horizontal area, the ladder will be too far to the left, causing him to hang off the right side and clip into a wall. He can also hang off the left side too; it depends which side he was on when he latched onto it. On the left, that doesn't do much; but the right? He can continue climbing up walls even after the ladder ends, since he's sticking far enough into them that they're considered “extensions” of the ladder he was already on. In fact, the moment he gets on the ladder from the right side, he's already climbing the wall, not the ladder. He can't climb a ladder bare on the right side without a wall; if he tries, he just flickers and falls right off, forcing him to grab on from the left. 13. 5:45 DEAR JESUS GOD THIS IS TOO MUCH TO PROCESS Okay, let me try and break this down a bit. Here's where my explanation may be a little shoddy, as I'm not experienced with the in depth technical aspects of this game, I just know what I see and have studied from the surface a billion times doing this. Anyone who sees something I say and thinks “no no, you're not saying this right” feel free to correct me. I'm just speaking in layman's terms what I've figured out for myself doing this; I might not explain every little bit properly. Mega Man climbed up into a completely empty screen. Why? What's going on here?! The reason why, is because... * of this. Since he was on the very first screen in the level, and we now know that all screens are considered to be next to each other, the screen he climbed up into was actually the empty space to the LEFT of the beginning screen. Every level has an empty white space to the left of its first screen, and it helps immensely in these situations to avoid crashing and getting stuck anywhere; it's basically the programming's “cop-out” screen when things go wrong. In fact, you can access this screen from ANYWHERE in the stage if you climb up to the ceiling and scroll up where you aren't supposed to be able to go. If you trigger a vertical screen scroll from a location that isn't supposed to be possible, especially the far right side of a long horizontal scrolling screen where the transition (entrance and/or exit) is only supposed to be possible on the left, you'll enter an area that doesn't exist, and instantly be warped to this “safe” screen. Mega Man will then fall from this screen and be back on the first screen in the level, essentially resetting the whole stage. Be warned----whenever he enters this blank safe screen, it also resets his “Spider-Man” climbing ability, as dropping back into the first screen of a level on the right side will shift everything again. Sprites and ladder climbing may still appear off-center, but he most likely won't be able to climb up walls anymore; it all depends on if he hit the bottom of the safe screen at just the right spot or not as he fell back to the beginning screen. If, on this screen, there is a platform on the right that Mega Man can climb onto, then he can jump off to the left and, depending on exactly where he hits the bottom of the screen (and whether he's on the left or right side), affect how the next part goes. It's possible to manipulate this to make the beginning screen of any stage loop over and over. 14. 6:00 Here's that empty white space. It's a part of the safe screen sticking into the current screen, just like back in point 9. This is the only instance of Mega Man being able to actually access the piece of screen sticking in from the left, as there's no wall here blocking him. So, since that safe screen is on the left side, the game naturally assumes Mega Man is on that screen rather than the beginning screen, so it drops him...right back into the beginning screen AGAIN. Even though he was literally just there. Again, only instance of ever seeing that, will be with the starting screen of any level; all other screens you might be able to see this happen in, there's a wall preventing Mega Man from getting to the left area. Dropping into the white gap and restarting the beginning screen will allow him to progress, as the centering is now fixed (since he dropped down into the screen on the left side, rather than incorrectly from the right). 15. 6:25 This is what I call a “Hard Knuckle Glide.” Since the Hard Knuckle stops Mega Man in his tracks, it also resets his falling velocity. If used enough times in succession while falling, you can make him fall slowly enough that he kind of “glides” across the screen. I did this here in order to make him fall through the right side of the blank safe screen, instead of the left side. 16. 7:04 Mega Man did not get to the Metall K1000 screen, but warped instead into the safe screen. This happens because, since everything is shifted slightly to the right, that means the previous screen in this area (which is the blank white screen to the left of the beginning) is considered the screen Mega Man is currently on, even though it isn't showing right now because he's on the far right side of a long horizontal screen. This resets everything again, and is also why, when he goes back up the invisible ladder you see him clinging to, he re-enters the beginning screen from the far left side rather than the right. At this point, you'd think when Mega Man went down that ladder on the right, he would have re-entered the beginning screen again, but he didn't because he was too far away from the area where the blank screen was sticking in. This part does confuse me a little bit as well; it obviously isn't possible to do this on single square screens, but on long scrolling screens, I'm thinking his horizontal position must have a severe effect on it as well. My brain hurts, and the way I talk, yours probably does too by now. 17: 7:29 THANK GOD IT'S FINALLY OVER WELLP IMMA DO SPIN Kamari fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Mar 3, 2024 |
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Mar 3, 2024 00:11
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Episode 6b: Is he the Top Man or the Underdog? Let's find out. Mega Man drops into a stage where...wait what? WHAT is that in the backgr...never mind. Mega Man, stay focused, my dude.  Instantly we encounter a brand new enemy. These little hippity hoppers are called the Mecha Kero (Kero is a Japanese variant of “frog,” I think). They do minor damage varying between one and two points, but are frustrating to hit sometimes unless you catch them mid-jump. For years I thought they were rabbits, not frogs. Don't judge me.   Wassup, K1000, your metal rear end is grass.  I couldn't resist a little tomfoolery here. I went back to the first screen and Hard Knuckle'd my way down two screens just to screw around with the stage a bit.    As you can see, it's perfectly safe here, due to the glitched line at the bottom being very low height. If it's up to ¼ of the screen, THEN you're in trouble.   Ah, this guy! I should have caught a better screenshot of the New Shotman here, as he fires three bullets to the left and right simultaneously on a timed pattern. He also bursts a couple rounds just to the left and right, which hit the ground and explode, if you're standing close enough to him. But his bullets only do one point of damage, and he only does two.  I showed THAT motherfucker who the real Shotman was, too.  Oh dear God I repent for all my sins This is a glitched side effect from the way I entered the previous screen. Despite not using the Hard Knuckle here, the screen only scrolled down halfway. I'm not going to keep doing this too often, though; it's an LP, and I do want to show off the stage properly, at least for the most part. After this, everything returns to normal.  Our new world boss enemy!  This guy is called the Tama Tank, but I personally think he's a step down from the Hot Dog. Tama, just like Doggo, will not move around, as his screen doesn't allow for a lot of maneuverability. But he has two weapons, not just one. First, what you see here. A mechanical furball that will bounce all over the place and deal two damage if it hits you. I'd recommend not shooting it, as defeating the furball will cause Tama to release three robo-fleas that will hop all over the place. They only deal one point of damage, but are an even bigger pain to shoot down. And if you do, Tama just freakin' fires another furball at you. It's best to just let the first one bounce around and shoot Tama to death.  Anyone else think that guy looks like Garfield? I think he looks like Garfield.   I shan't be pushed into the pit of despair by this steely locomotive, no sir.   Yeah, I skipped both the HP and the extra life. Whattaya gonna do about it?!?!?!?!?!!!  This enemy isn't as much of a threat as I'm sure he wants to be. He's called the Top Fiend (Japanese: Komasaburo), but while that's an even more badass name than Top Man (and would have made for a great alternate title), his fiendish capabilities are a bit lacking. Just like the Fan Fiend being a weaker version of Air Man, the Top Fiends are a weaker version of Top Man. Every second or so, they will fire a spinning top that moves quickly along the ground. You can destroy those in just one hit, and their damage isn't anything to worry about, either. Only three can be present at once; they start to disappear after that. This particular one, as you can see, can be easily defeated by climbing to the lower portion of the ladder and shot from far away. Then, just wait for the tops to vanish from the pit below.  Oh no!!! Not another  *Pfft*  Nyeh heh heh, I'll show you who the REAL Top Fien----  BLURGH  One energy tank and one humility lesson later...  I have to admit, these guys ARE adequately placed. This one is best defeated by standing on the bottommost step and just jumping and shooting, making sure to get the tops before they reach you, and letting just your stray bullets hit Fiendy over there. He doesn't take many hits to go down.   To avoid getting hit by the tops, pressing B and then almost immediately sliding is key. If only tops dealt more damage, I might feel a bit more threatened.  Jeez, that's some serious air time there, Mega Man.  This method of platform traversal is rather interesting. It's a shame it's only used once here, and for such a short stretch.  Just these three, and that's all. The first and third ones go up, while the second one goes down, and they slowly spin the whole time. When landing on them, Mega Man spins around in a circle too (well, according to his sprite, he's kinda just shifting left and right...lemme tell ya, the spritework in this drat game is freakin' impeccable, man). The shifting is enough to throw you a bit off balance and make it, not quite difficult, but at least a bit more tedious to traverse these top platforms. It would have been better to have this area stretch on a bit longer, maybe using five or six of the tops, and perhaps have it pop up twice in the stage, not just once. Although, if Mega Man jumps on one of the rising tops just as it is barely appearing from the bottom of the screen, the game counts him dead instantly and he explodes. A tiny little glitch worth noting, I suppose.  These guys look terrifying when inverted. I'm pretty sure they could have palette swapped some enemies to look like their “getting shot” negatives, and had them be upgraded dark forms. I'd call this one “Sleep Paralysis Fiend” or something along those lines. He seems to fit the bill.  Okay, this stage wasn't too big a deal. I give it a B so far.  Is Top Man really the top man?  I'm not sure just by looking. If he wasn't wearing that top-shaped helmet, I'd be just as confused by his appearance as I was with Hard Man's.  Top Man starts by shooting out three tops diagonally up and in front of him. They freeze in place momentarily, then all fly at Mega Man at the same time.  So like a pro who can do it all, I quickly arm my Air Shooter and have Mega Man slide underneath the tops,  an instant before they actually targeted me, causing them all to smash into me at the same time right after I dealt one point of damage with a weapon which turned out not to be Top Man's weakness. Only thing I'm sure of so far is that I, definitely, am not the top man right now.  BOOM----nah.  Hard Knuckle is the weapon that'll do it (and by “it” I mean four points of damage to Top Man), but unfortunately, while he's spinning around, he becomes immune to all weapons. In this ballet training phase, he shoots over to the other side of the screen at the speed of light. Look, he may be a ridiculous boss to fight, but this guy's gonna win first prize at the talent competition, just you bitches wait and see.  He actually looks kinda cool when he's a negative.  I wonder if he still dances just as well when he's a corpse. Probably not. Bummer.  Stealing Top Man's title and reverting his position to Bottom of Grave grants us the ultimate of spoils: Mega Man is now a top-notch dancer. You know, rather than being able to fire spinning tops like homing torpedoes, which would have been infinitely more badass. To use the Top Spin, jump into the air and press B at any time. Mega Man will start spinning around (there's even swirly marks around him, which Top Man didn't get), and when he lands on an enemy in this state, he crushes them like Super Mario. Unfortunately, not all enemies can be defeated with the Whoo Wahoo Yipee spin jump, and if that's the case, Mega Man himself will take damage instead. Personally, I hate this weapon. I never find any use for it, and the times I do, it's way more cumbersome and risky than just firing some kind of shot from a safer distance. It even makes the same “poink” sound all the buster weapons make, which is kind of ridiculous. I could poke fun at this game for not giving every weapon a unique sound effect like the NES version of this game did, but I remained silent about THAT, didn't I?! C'mon, Capcom, gimme something to work with here!!! Well, okay, next week they definitely will, and I'm not talking about the weapon. I'm talking about the glitch I'll be showing off. I showed two here (mainly, the Hard Knuckle glitch, and then the so-called “Spider-Man” glitch that it lets us perform). But next week's episode is the one where I said the game would have a meltdown. Not the visuals, no...the screens and enemies won't become any more messed up than they did today. But the motions and the audio...ugh. Dear God. It's gonna be a nightmare. It'll absolutely require sound, and I have to give all headphone users a HUGE FREAKIN' WARNING THAT THE SOUNDS YOU'LL BE HEARING FROM THIS GLITCH ARE NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART (or the faint of eardrums). You'll also see a return of what happened in the Hard Man stage glitch-wise, where things start to lag and stop values from updating. And I mean LLLL AAA A AA A A A G . I sure can't wait. Stay tuned, everybody...as much as I hate it, I have to go train for the ballet now. Might as well make this Top Spinning thing not be a TOTAL waste of time. Top Man, I hate you so much. I give your dancing a perfect 10, but I hope you're burning in hell.
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Mar 3, 2024 00:11
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Heh, the screen warp glitch reminds me of the one in Link's Awakening, including the enemies loading sprites from different enemies. That one gave you so much replay value with the possibility of sequence breaking, this one... not so much. Good job with this, had no idea this game had so many easily exploitable bugs.
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Mar 3, 2024 21:45
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Episode 7a: As if Magnet Man doesn't already hate me enough. As it's such a beautiful day outside, I decided the best way to enjoy it was to pull the curtains shut, turn on my laptop, and get this next episode of Mega Man II's LP uploaded! The work schedule was a bit extensive last weekend, so sorry for the delay everyone. But rest assured, Kamari does not promise crazy fun times to be had and then renege on it! He's just late sometimes. Super reliable fellow, ain't I?! First off, TWO video links for everyone. You get a video link, YOU get a video link, YOU GET A VIDEO LINK!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJoILcOxixU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Shiw_lMIBQ Here we are. I did try to fix the audio speed this time around, but unfortunately that only made it WORSE somehow (should have been an easy fix but everything got messed up instead of better), and I decided I didn't want to spend an hour trying to make that work after all the other stuff I'd already done, and still had yet to do, with this update. This one isn't that big or anything, but it took a long time for me to get from start to finish. I split the different work between a couple days, and it took me multiple tries to record proper footage of both videos. But hey. I did it for y'all. The audio problems shouldn't be too bad; the audio sounds like it should, it just lags behind the video a bit as time goes on. But it shouldn't ruin the experience overall. The first video is me demonstrating the big glitch I'm showcasing today, and what is likely the most horrendous way to completely screw up this game. Not visually, I already cleared that up before, but AUDITORIALLY. Auditorially. Is that a word? I'm seeing a red squiggly line under that. Oh well, if English was my first language, I'd probably feel a bit more ashamed, but hey wait a second it IS my first language, and what was I doing here again? The second video is me playing through Magnet Man's stage entirely, but the only reason I even HAVE a video of that to show you guys (and it's the video where this week's screenshots come from) is because I beat the level WHILE USING THAT GLITCH. It's the Slow-Motion glitch, because I'm so good at naming things. I don't even know if I'm the first person to discover this; I mean, this game wasn't THAT unpopular, there's definitely others out there who have tinkered around with it. Just, headphone users...beware. The audio in the videos is already high-pitched and shrieky enough. As I said once before, long, long ago... IT. GETS. WORSE. Beware, if you choose to watch these videos. They're not for the faint of eardums. Now, before we get into the main brunt of beating Magnet Man's stage, allow me to flip him the magnetic bird by spoiling half the stage first without yet having any intent to beat it. He's probably thinking I stuck around the plants in Top Man's stage for too long, the way things are going here today. I'll show a few screenshots from the main glitch video first, and give some explanation as to what's going on (the same thing I did last time, so buckle up kuz the seat belt beepy thing is driving me nuts) (Seriously kids I swear I will turn this thing around) There won't be quite as much crazy text here as there was when I explained the Spider-Man glitch, but if anyone's confused and has questions, I will update this particular episode to answer those questions. Unless you'd rather I make a separate reply answering those. I don't like making replies without any actual game content being in there, personally, as it's misleading (puts me back out in front without me giving anything to the viewers) but I'll let you guys make that call, since you ARE the viewers. As before, this'll be split into two sections. If you wanna skip all the glitch nonsense only to get caught up in even more while I play through the Magnet Man stage part of the LP, skip the rest of this section and scroll down to the next one.  Begin by using this password for maximum effect with the glitch. This particular code places Mega Man after just having beaten Hard Man's stage, and with four energy tanks. About the best you can do for that part of the game, and he has three levels to mess around with. But only three. You'll see why later. MUCH later. And we're all gonna regret it, trust me.  So, to keep things at a fast pace for now, simply enter Magnet Man's stage, and get past the first two screens. This is the third screen, and the first “checkpoint” screen of the level (man, we got there fast, didn't we).  Use the Giant Springers to get Mega Man killed. Yeah. That's actually necessary. For no discernible reason at all, to make the glitch work correctly, Mega Man has to first just randomly die once at the first checkpoint of this level.  Now, with his life counter slightly smaller (I never noticed how much a 1 looks like a middle finger until now), get through that screen normally...  Fight through this next one...  Then at the bottom, hop on the ladder and Hard Knuckle scroll south. Remember, equip Hard Knuckle and press A and B at the same time on the ladder to do it properly.  Jump out of the floor, be careful of the death pit right here because it still exists, even though the enemy sprites didn't load in...death pits aren't sprites, so they're always functional, even at the worst of the Hard Knuckle glitch)...  Jump over the invisible gap, shouldn't be too hard, and then run forward till you get right here, and the screen is just beginning to fix itself back up a little.  And then freakin' die again. You just have to use the second death pit on this screen, because it won't work with the first. No, Mega Man, you're not getting paid overtime for this. We can discuss terms later, boyo. You're stuck here for the duration, so smile, dammit. Things start getting weird just before Mega Man falls into the pit. The music gets quieter, then completely mutes itself (and if you're using some kinds of emulators, it might even start playing again super fast for a second, but the glitch will still work fine so no worries). Then when Mega Man dies, you don't hear the PEW PEW PEW sound. Instead, you just hear a quick, gritty “splat” kind of sound, everything slows down as if Mega Man just fired Samus's Space/Time Beam, and then the energy death spheres take fourteen billion years to fly across the screen. NOW it's taking off. This is where you'll probably want to turn the volume down. You do NOT want to hear what the stage music has turned into at full blast. Mega Man's slow death animation here is plenty of warning time for you to get ready, so don't redirect any shattered eardrum hospital bills my way, arrighty?! Arrighty. The music speeds up to MORE THAN FOUR THOUSAND PERCENT HIGHER. That's over forty times faster!!! Not getting it yet?! Okay, take the regular music. Double the speed. Now double that.. Arright, double it AGAIN. Double it a mother fuckin' fourth time. AND A FIFTH TIME!!! And then just a bit faster than that, and there you have it. Stage music now plays in a constant loop of one second, over and over and over again. That's how fast it is now. IT ONLY TAKES ONE SECOND TO LOOP. That's just demonic screaming, that's what that is.  Back on the checkpoint screen again, Mega Man now moves at about half his normal speed, as do the Giant Springers...and look! The HP delay glitch makes a glorious (heh, heh...) return! When he gets hit, nothing seems to happen. As long as there's at least one other sprite onscreen besides Mega Man, like an enemy attacking him, he can't die, because the main thing this glitch did was cause a HUGE amount of constant sprite lag. And it is NOT going away. He'll still die when he changes screens though, as screen transitions remove all other sprites, speeding the game up enough momentarily for the hooded figure's scythe to SHING his head off.  Until then, get used to a lot of this information not matching up.  Anyone else noticing by now that sound effects aren't playing? They are. They're just over forty times faster. 😈 Now we're in Top Man's stage again, and here I'm just going to demonstrate another oddity of the Slow-Motion glitch. That's why I came all the way over here. A lot of the time, when Mega Man falls into a death pit while the game's running in slow motion...  ...the pit will momentarily begin a screen transition FIRST. And then he'll die an instant later.  And whatever checkpoint he was at suddenly gets canceled. Here he is, back at the start of the stage again. WHAT?! Okay, bear with me here, I'm about to start the main Magnet Man part of the LP now, but first I'll explain what the hell just happened up there. When the game slows down so horrendously like this, despite screen transitions erasing all current sprites and speeding things up, it's still running just a BIT slow during transitions. Slow enough that it takes an extra moment to catch up and realize Mega Man's supposed to die because he fell in a death pit, and therefore, the true nature of death pits in this game is revealed. All death pits are actually just regular screen transitions, but they just have “kill Mega Man” coded into all the pixels in the pit about halfway down the drop. You can see this if you start to fall into a pit and then use a Hard Knuckle before Mega Man actually hits the bottom; he'll just die slightly above the pit without completely falling in. Similar thing if you ride Rush in his Jet form down into a pit; Mega Man dies instantly when he touches an area just above the pit, and Rush remains there (also, oddly, Rush's Jet energy keeps ticking down during the death animation, but those last few bits are put back into the energy bar after Mega Man respawns. Anyways, what does this mean? It means if you took all of the “die, Mega Man, loving die” codes OUT of the death pits, they would all just be screen scrolls going down. Down where? Down into nothing at all. Look at the photo again where the screen scrolled down slightly when he died in the pit. See how, in that bit of screen showing at the bottom, there's nothing there but white? Look familiar? Mega Man isn't supposed to scroll down when he hits a pit, he's supposed to die and then pay dearly for his sins. So there aren't any screens ever coded below death pits, even though they, by the fundamental nature of the game's code, are capable of scrolling, if the attribute that insta-kills Mega Man was just taken out of there. So he does the exact same thing he does when climbing up into a non-accessible screen with the Spider-Man glitch. He enters a completely blank screen. Remember how I wouldn't shut my mouth when I was talking about all that screen transition and blank stuff nonsense before? That blank screen is just to the left of the start of the stage. So when Mega Man started to enter it for just a moment before dying, as the game's slow motion caused it to take a second to catch up with his death, it now thinks he died right at the very start of the stage. So the checkpoint doesn't do anything at all. He restarts from the very beginning. You can always go back to earlier points in the stage by retreating from a checkpoint screen and dying on the previous one instead; the game doesn't “save” checkpoints after Mega Man passes those screens. It just looks back at wherever the closest checkpoint currently is the moment he dies. This used to psyche me out when I was a kid; I didn't know why it was happening. I thought just some weird thing about the slow motion glitch made checkpoints only work half the time, and not the other half. Kamari fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Mar 17, 2024 |
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Mar 17, 2024 01:36
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Episode 7b: Mag Okay, so now that we've royally pissed Magnet Man off and probably heavily reduced the stock value of his enterprise and real estate, we're going right back in to screw around with him some more. Said screwing around may or may not be the death of Magnet Man.  This new enemy comes gunning right out of the gate as soon as we start walking, and he's called the Mag Fly. They aren't dangerous, as they only do two points of damage. Mag Flies will simply pull Mega Man up into the air in an attempt to catch and damage him, but just keep holding right and he'll kinda just “hop” away from them.  Lol see ya later grumpy head  Right here, as you can see, that tiny bit of upward pull Mega Man gets from a Mag Fly while holding right can even make jumping over some pits slightly easier.  There's so many of those guys on this screen, I'm sure the game THINKS it made a dangerous scenario, but Mega Man is laughing his rear end off, I assure you all.  The New Shotman is excruciatingly furious that I skipped the unneeded energy tank instead of falling into his trap.   This new enemy is absolutely horrifying. This is the Giant Springer, a massive upgrade from the original Springer. They bounce their heads back and forth off their bodies if Mega Man gets too close, and when he's farther away, they fire missiles at him. In one of the ROM corruptions I did, certain sprite number limitations are removed, and Giant Springers fire FIFTEEN missiles at you instead of just one at a time. Dear God, these guys' power can run unchecked if you let it. Anyways, yup, I'm dying to G here so I can re-activate that glitch again. But no worries, I'll play through the rest of the stage still.  Skipping over all the methodology since I already described it up there, let's summarize it up with “bippity boppity booHOLY poo poo” And, to note, Giant Springers are weak to Clash Bombs, just like their Version 1.0 counterparts from Metal Man's stage. Oh, Dr. Wily. Don't you know how firmware upgrades work?    And Leaf Shield runs these guys outta town before they even have a second to be threatening. This is the Peterchy, and while the screenshots don't make it look that obvious in a still frame, they're basically two legs with clop-clop-clopping feet spinning over and over with a giant creepy eyeball in the center. I mean, hey, the scare factor probably helps with keeping intruders at bay. I'm not laughing. Are YOU laughing?! I'm not laughin'!!!    This was just where I did the glitch a minute ago. The life counter keeps flipping between 1 and 2 because I got the order of the screenshots a bit willy wonky, but don't worry, the stage is still being shown in the proper order.  Here's where I diddly dang died again  And then, as if that didn't even happen, here's Mega Man V E R Y S L O W L Y firing a Leaf Shield at more Peterchys. This screen here is the super corrupted one from the glitch above; there's the death pit that we couldn't see before, glad we can avoid its gaping maw whether it's showing up or not.  These magnetic beams slowly pull Mega Man toward the death pits, but they're easy not to get killed by.   Have I taught y'all Shotmen a freakin' lesson yet?!  As the game is severely glitched right now and sprite lag is so overloaded that if it were pineapple on my pizza there would be a country-wide bounty for my head, the disappearing platforms that let me climb up to the left side of the screen don't show up. This necessitates Rush helping Mega Man out of a LOT of otherwise sticky situations. Also, did you notice he looks even happier after Mega Man activates the spring :3  Now we've got us a huge problem. This screen is supposed to be FILLED with platforms. As it is, only one every ten feet or whatever the measurements in this universe are supposed to be will ever appear at one time, so it's not possible to proceed unless Rush is chock full of energy.  Mega Man, do you really insist on doing things the hard way?  “Up, up and AWAAAAA  hey wtf man that's not cool”  Not just a good boi. The best boi.   As they say, man's best friend, whether said man is Mega or not. AND women's best friend, too; hell, I'm not prejudiced, and Rush isn't either. There's no bias or judgement in that doggo's smiling heart.    “All right, we're almost at the end, what could go wrong” Mega Man, I SWEAR TO loving GOD.  Just a little glitch tidbit here, look at the bottom right. See that weird little background blip just below the ledge, where Mega Man can't access? Since the Hard Knuckle glitch causes him to sort of “teleport” down to the bottom of the next screen without actually falling all the way down, if he climbed up to the next screen and then did a glitched scroll down, he'd fall into that hidden away area. That leads to a blank white screen. The very first blank white screen I ever saw, and where I very first learned about the Spider-Man glitch.  Metall has pretty much given up, as he knows Mega Man shan't fall for his boohawk. Heh, they should've called those guys “Metal Shotman.”  But then this guy up here would probably file a lawsuit and demand their invincibility helmets.   Ah, there's that cute little missile I mentioned earlier. Yeah, they're tiny, but when there's FIFTEEN of those drat things flying around, I'm too busy pissing my pants to smile.  Well, Magnet Man, thanks to the power of canine friendship, your stage, despite being technically impossible to traverse in this state, was unfortunately only too traversable even in this state.  I wonder what he thinks of that?  “...Is...is it too late for us to be friends?”  Something's missing...isn't it?  Magnet Man's health bar. It never shows up. Loading it is blocked off by the sprite lag. But, oh no...that's not the worst of it. The game is now running at the SLOWEST SPEED YOU'LL EVER SEE IT RUN. It's going so slow, it actually keeps starting and stopping. All of this boss fight is happening at pause-unpause-pause-unpause speed, with all the grace of a snail who's smoked forty packs of cigarettes. Seriously, look at the freakin' video. And the demonic screeching music isn't helping.  But with Magnet Man's weakness being Metal Blade, at least that'll speed the fight up some. It only does two damage, but that's better than one.  With the speed being super incredibly slow, it's easy to time the shots just right to make sure none of these go through him. Which of course they do anyway, because I stink at timing even when the game is running at a quarter of its normal speed.  So Magnet Man will simply begin by hopping toward Mega Man with two big leaps, which is easy to avoid by just standing under the second jump. He'll then do one of two things on either side of the screen: he'll jump up high and fire three Magnet Missiles, which fly sideways and then down right above Mega Man to target him (that's kinda cool, not gonna lie, it's the only homing weapon in the entire game). The other possibility is that he'll generate a magnetic field that pulls Mega Man toward him to do contact damage, but it's not very strong. Just run in the opposite direction and wait for it to stop. Magnet Man is invincible while he's using this attack. He doesn't do this very often; in fact, he didn't do it a single time this whole boss fight. One small oddity is that, if Mega Man stands just under Magnet Man as you see here, but not too close to the wall that the Magster turns the other way and simply fires the magnets into the wall, then Magnet Man will be unable to track Mega Man's position, and will just fire the projectiles all the way across the room.  Maggy, I'm pretty sure you trained for this. You're not making a very good impression of Dr. Wily's programming skills.   Rinse and repeat. Just fire at every opportunity, and remember that the Metal Blade does in all directions, making this super easy. Maybe that's why they only do two damage; otherwise, it would be so easy that I'd take the dunce cap off of Metal Man and give it to Magnet Man.  And then finally! He's defea... … …  W...wait. Where's the energy spheres? Where's the attack absorbing cutscene??? Where's the DUN DA DUN DAN DUN DA DUN DAH DEEEEEEEEEE??!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!  Um  So uh  Sprite lag kinda stops all of that from happening too  Please open  Please God not like this  Rush!!! Please help me get outta here before I LOSE MY poo poo!!!  …  Fuk. ._. And that's the end. There's nothing left. Mega Man is completely stuck here forever. Even without Magnet Man's sprite, Mega Man is still moving at quicksand-up-to-the-neck speed, because there's something about this room that's just unleashing ALL the freaking fury of the gods down upon his hide. If you're using an emulator that makes the slow motion just a little less slow, then this doesn't actually happen. Mega Man WILL defeat Magnet Man like a normal enemy at first, but then once all the other sprites like Mega Man's' bullets and any stray enemy projectiles leave the screen, suddenly the cutscene will begin playing out of nowhere and Mega Man will be free. You can keep that from happening by shooting repeatedly, summoning Rush, doing anything to keep other sprites on the screen. But on most higher end emulators like VBA, or if you're playing on hardware (which actually makes the music sound WORSE because it doesn't just approximate the speed and tones the way a cheap emulator does), then he'll never get out. Never. ...So...let's just pretend we saw the screen that says “you got Magnet Missile.” Magnet Missile is a half decent weapon in my opinion, but only with nine uses. When Mega Man shoots it, it will turn and go up or down if it passes by an enemy above or below. It homes in perfectly, just like it did during the boss fight, and unlike Top Man, I'm giving Magnet Man points for proper advertising. I swear, I'm in the process of suing Top Man for not giving me the ability to fire tops out of my hand. Wouldn't that be awesome?!?!?!?!!! Magnet Missile's one really good use, other than just being a kind of gimmicky homing weapon, is being super strong against not just one of the Dr. Wily bosses, but two...and the second one is definitely not gonna be happy to see me take his rear end out that easily. Well. Whew. That's it. That's the glitches this game has to offer, at least, that I've found. I mean, I know I've overlooked explaining a couple weird things here and there, and in Needle Man's stage it's even possible to speed the music up slightly (but not THIS terrifying level of fast as seen here today), but I'll just make a little blurb about that when it does come up, not make a whole section about it. So, in the meantime, before I continue with the LP. Tell me what you guys think of this game NOW, eh? Seems like just a cheapo piece of plastic that probably should've given way to the other slightly better pieces of plastic back in the late 80's and early 90's, as a chunk of the gamers would probably agree with. But me? I see this thing exactly for what it is. It's a sleep paralysis demon. In Game Boy game form. I swear, if I ever see ANYTHING making the noises I've heard in today's episode, I'm gonna go check myself into a mental asylum. Kamari fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Mar 17, 2024 |
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Mar 17, 2024 01:36
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