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Jan 15th, 2007 at 09:13:04 - Megaman 2 (NES) |
In light of what I just said...I have to add that the second time you fight Metal Man, in Wily's little transport room. And you just 1-hit KO the bitch with his own blade. That's...that's choice. That's personal. That is the straight up bitch-slap you've been waiting for after all those tedious Wily stages. The final boss? eh... No, the satisfaction comes from the Metal-man moment.
Hehe, and I'm sure I'm not the only person ever to figure this out, but the final level with the lame red drops falling from the cieling. Just hold the right button and ignore everything. You get through just fine as long as you don't stop. Only then do you have to start paying attention to the timing.
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Jan 15th, 2007 at 09:09:03 - Megaman 2 (NES) |
You know, some of these bosses are just a little...lame.
I mean, I consider myself depressingly good at this game, and for about half the bosses my strategy generally involves mash the jump and shoot buttons, or hit him up close with the weapon he's weak to.
I guess thats good and fun...but I don't really feel like I'm fighting with them. They are just more part of the background. Fighting someone is supposed to be a very personal thing. You know that old phrase...you never know a person until you fight them? To be honest in real life it's often a little left field but in video game design I think there really is a lesson to be learned there.
The whole point of a boss is that it's supposed to be the living manifestation of the level you are playing through, right? I mean the word "Boss" sort of implies ownership rather than physical embodiment, but they aren't supposed to be land owners. I mean, do you get to the end of a complex platform game and find a guy behind a desk with a briefcase that goes:
"Oh...Mario...hey...Uh...fancy meeting you here...yeah, about that princess business..."
No. nonononono, you get a big beefy green killer dinosaur breathing fire halfway across his lair dancing across a bridge over a pit of firey lava. See my point?
Now, I think it's important though. I always go on about this whole "crescendo effect" which I should at some point learn to spell right. It's a basic idea that as you go through a level or game, the environment gradually gets more and more intense (hopefully at a rate which mirrors the player's skill or interest) and then it all culminates at a climax where you fight the anthropomorphizes representation of the proximal world in the form of a fire breathing dinosaur or pig snouted desert lord or evil grand vizer or something.
I think it's important to make that climax personal. Strong example: the robotnic bosses in Sonic The Hedgehog 1, 2 and 3. Each boss is somehow unique, and there is a pattern or strategy or something. You get to it and you feel, "oh yeah, this guy" or "aaaalmost out of this freaking casino bizniss."
With Megaman 2, the bosses seemed too forced. It was just an excuse to memorize an order to beat the levels. If nothing else they died to fast, and their attacks were a little too hard to avoid. Never gave you a chance to really play with them, dance with them. And thats why I like action games. I like dancing with devils.
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Jan 15th, 2007 at 08:57:30 - 5th Blue Conquest (PC) |
I've always had a bit of a hard time taking this map too seriously in terms of really being a game. A lot of the problem is the whole effect of an RPG made in a strategy engine is just a bit off.
The biggest thing is the effect it has on the game's pacing...or lack there of.
5th Blue Conquest never created any of the feeling of emmersion I wanted, and I think of it as a sort of plot/world outline for when I finally get off my ass and make a decent strategy game engine. It all just moves so slow. You click, order the one unit you have to go somewhere...it makes you feel like you are large-scale micromanaging one guy who really doesn't feel all that much like "you."
It bugs me. I need a strategy engine. Then I can make the game for real and get rich and take over the world and make monday's illegal.
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Jan 11th, 2007 at 23:39:04 - 5th Blue Conquest (PC) |
Ok, I've got to throw this in here because its another one of my stress games and I just played it because low and behold I still have a lot of 110a homework. Translation: PROCRASTINATION GO!
5th Blue Conquest is the name of a Warcraft 3 custom scenario I first made back in ... 2002? And I've been poking and tweaking at it ever since. My friends and I have started to refer to it as its own game as it has pretty much nothing to do with the actual warcraft 3 game, and since I've been working on it for just under a quarter of my natural life, I've had a lot of time to work on it and develope and such.
There are 20 playable characters, plus about 9 hidden, a bunch of easter eggs, etc. The average game takes somewhere between 5 to 9 hours depending on how completist you're being about things.
...ok, hold on...everthing is about to respawn.
You know, these cutscenes just reek of "I made this in 11'th grade". I.e. they suck. But I could never change them...it would just detract so much from the game...I mean, some of my friends know this map inside and out an they always giggle at the little bit with the skeleton henchmen.
Man, I really need to get off my ass and make my own engine for this game. Frozen throne just isn't cutting it anymore.
Actually, one of these days I should actually play frozen throne. Honestly, I got Warcraft III pretty much exclusively for its map editor. I was expecting it to be like the starcraft editor but better and I was right. It's sort of like GameMaker for strategy games. The scripting borders on programming language at times, especially with the way I deal with variables and function calls.
I tried importing mp3's into it at one point, and learned that maps larger than 4 megs cant be shared across a network. I also learned that Mussorsky's Night On Bald Mountain is one of the best songs to hack shit up to, ever. No arguments.
What was that? What'chu say?
No. You're wrong.
Night on Bald Mountain is better.
No
You fail. At life.
Aaaand just hacked the goblin shredder. This character would be so nasty in PvP, but no one ever wants to play PvP.
You know, in general, people tend not to like PvP as much as Coop given the choice. Sort of an interesting counterpoint to the common "Conservative Mothers Against Anything Fun" attitude that video games are spawning grounds for antisocial and violent behaviour. Course, my mom spends a bunch of her time playing Diablo II, so maybe I'm not one to talk.
hmm. One of the biggest problems with this map, and sort of an issue I have generally with making RPG's in the WC3 engine, is that there really is no middle ground between magic vulnerability an magic immunity.
Sooner or later and RPG is going to throw an item with Magic Immunity at the player. In this RPG there is the complete mages set, and the Layer Armor. Both of which are a royal pain in the Nanto to get, but whenever people play the game (people who know it anyway), their primary mission objective is: "Get the layer armor".
Its like, even though its a hard thing to aquire, the level of protection it offers almost makes it a prerequisite for doing much of anything else. So you learn how to get it and it's not really all that hard after all. If you're quick you can be the first to rush the angel palace, but mostly you hope you can get lucky warren hunting in that little lake in the Jp colony or the trees behind the cursed mountains or if you're really brave, you go for the Kailu straights or something to get that Warren heart for the Layer Armor recipe.
But the point is, once you get the layer armor, you can only get hurt by physical damage, so in the later game, the only way to make an enemy harder is to up the attack and defense, which doesn't really add challenge, it just changes the degree to which you have to power level before you can take on certain things. It's tedious and I want a way around it. Hence the desire for my own engine to make the map in. Who knows, maybe Alessa will pull it off.
Thats enough of this for now, I should do something productive and stop procrastinating
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Jade has been with GameLog for 17 years, 10 months, and 13 days |
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