I kind of hate the Palicoes in Monster Hunter. They don't just generally overdo the annoying noises and fucking terrible cat puns, but half the time they'll just piss about in a remote corner of the zone and keep it there. Which I guess would be a good thing if I was bowgun (of course they'd die instantly if I was), but as melee I kind of need to bait the target into certain places and you little shits are NOT HELPING
Almost all curses on every floor, which translates into not being able to see your map, items, and rooms switching up on you randomly as well as transporting you randomly. You also effectively have less floors to do the run, due to XL/combined floors. You can also, as a bonus, suffer from Curse of the Unknown (what is my health at???), and Curse of Darkness (ow my eyes and/or Where Are The Enemies??). They can't be erased via curse-removing items either, in any degree.
Every enemy with a Champion form - creep on the ground, more health, even more health, exploding, etc. - will have a Champion form to be fought, including bosses. Said Champion non-boss enemies usually drop items; now they don't.
Very very very few forms of health drop. Basically only exceedingly select items, like a rare-ish book/active item. They can be obtained in items like Super Bandage which give a heart container plus two spirit hearts, but not like Squeezy for example, which rules out many items.
You end up fighting the superboss in Mega Satan at the end of it.
And finally, when you complete the challenge it gives Samson Child's Heart, aka one of the single worst trinkets of all time ever since it was a thing.
A) Your only source of health regeneration is HP Up items, and a select few items that passively regenerate your health. This is A Problem in a game that (despite Ed and Tyrone's insistence to the contrary) has quite a few sources of unavoidable and near-unavoidable damage.
B) You are permanently under the effects of the following: Curse of the Blind, Curse of the Maze, Curse of the Lost, and Curse of the Labyrinth. What this means is that you can't see any of the items you're picking up (which can lead to picking up run ruining items such as Cursed Eye), the floors are double the size, you have no way of navigating the floors other than your memory (and a lot of rooms in the game look incredibly similar), and you are randomly teleported around the floor (which just makes you even more lost.) You can also be affected by Curse of the Unknown, which removes your health bar from the HUD (which isn't really a problem, honestly, since your health status is always "not enough of it".), and Curse of Darkness, which makes it really hard to see anything.
C) All applicable enemies spawn as their champion variants. This includes things like fast moving enemies that also pull you towards them, enemies that explode in your face, and double/triple/quadruple bosses.
D) You have to fight the third hardest boss in the game at the end of all this.
TL;DR You are in a constant state of dying and are also absurdly disoriented whilst being in the State of Dying.
My problems with AB revolved around the fact that they locked a signifcant portion of content behind a timegate just to spite dataminers, tried to pass it off as a "bug", and then locked part of that content behind an ARG only people in one city of America could do.
Like, I wouldn't have put so many hours into the game if I disliked it. But at the same time, I'm a game designer, and I'm not just about to ignore ridiculous design decisions like "teleport someone into a random room in a massive maze every few rooms, when you have no way of telling where you are in the first place."
So, I finally managed to get Mighty No 9 working. Not well, mind you; I'm already at the lowest possible graphics setting, and the game still runs like a ball of sludge.
To give the game a modicum of credit, there are some flashes of creativity in the design of some of the minions. There's this really interesting miniboss in the requisite ice level that's like Pong and it would be a fun boss in a better system. But for the most part, it's just...really awkward. The voice acting and characterization would be rejected from an 80s Saturday Morning Cartoon (and not from Transformers -- I mean the really hokey ones), and the game puts just enough focus on the characters that the poor writing wears on you.
And by god, this engine is...poorly optimized? I don't have the right vocabulary to describe it, but something definitely went foul in development. This laptop can run Arkham City and the Talos Principle with minimal trouble, and Deus Ex Revolution was only slight trouble. The only game I've ever found completely unplayable is Assassin's Creed 4, and Ubisoft is famous for making overbloated drivel that can kill a PC. I should not have to run a 2D game at the lowest setting to make it playable. And even then, it chugs and bugs out, and even when it works right, the design decisions are occasionally infuriating. That Pong boss from earlier, for example, would be fun if (1) the game didn't respond so slowly and (2) if there wasn't an ice floor that made the sort of twitch reflex jumping and dashing that the boss required really really difficult. 66% of the time, when I get hurt, I'm pretty sure it's because the game screwed up rather than me and that's absolutely frustrating to work through.
Bloody hell, Shovel Knight has the same aims of bringing the NES era into modern game design, and it beats this game out of the water. Let me say that again: Mighty No. 9 was btfo by a game made by a lesser known studio with no big names attached to it, that had about 9% of the funds that MN9 had, and took a third of the development time.
I've turned the graphics settings down to lowest, and reworked some of the controls to my liking, and the game finally plays smoothly. I have a laptop with a fourth-generation i5 processor with Intel Integrated 4400 graphics, and 8 GB of RAM.
MN9 seems to be rather poorly optimized, but the gameplay seems decent so far -- about on par with a classic Mega Man game, which is rather clearly what it's trying to take after. I'm about halfway done with the game, for what it's worth.
If the game lags for you, though, then yeah, the gameplay definitely sucks.
(Also, slight correction, it's 2.5D, not strictly 2D.)
I have seen 2.5D games with lots of 3D effects sometimes become heavy processor loads -- see Never Alone for example. (Which is a good game for other reasons.)
I don't know why you'd play MN9 though when Shovel Knight exists, is really good, and has one free (and very large) expansion out and another free (and very large) expansion on the way.
I don't know why you'd play MN9 though when Shovel Knight exists, is really good, and has one free (and very large) expansion out and another free (and very large) expansion on the way.
shrug
2013!Yarrun kickstarted the game, and now that current-gen Yarrun is stuck with it, he's going to play it so he can properly criticize it because I'm not wasting $20 dollars if I can help it
And I assure you, I'll switch back over to Shovel Knight as soon as the next expansion comes out. Did you see that frigging trailer? It's like Ninja Gaiden up in there.
I'm definitely going to try to get Shovel Knight before they do the split thing they're gonna be doing when it drops on the Switch. It seems like the kind of thing I'd probably enjoy.
I've turned the graphics settings down to lowest, and reworked some of the controls to my liking, and the game finally plays smoothly. I have a laptop with a fourth-generation i5 processor with Intel Integrated 4400 graphics, and 8 GB of RAM.
MN9 seems to be rather poorly optimized, but the gameplay seems decent so far -- about on par with a classic Mega Man game, which is rather clearly what it's trying to take after. I'm about halfway done with the game, for what it's worth.
If the game lags for you, though, then yeah, the gameplay definitely sucks.
(Also, slight correction, it's 2.5D, not strictly 2D.)
I have seen 2.5D games with lots of 3D effects sometimes become heavy processor loads -- see Never Alone for example. (Which is a good game for other reasons.)
I do feel like there's a tangible chasm between the Mega Man games and MN9
I have some experience with the series. Mega Man 2. Mega Man X. The Day in the Limelight series. That one Street Fighter/Mega Man crossover. I liked them. I felt comfortable with them. And it wasn't because they weren't a pain to play -- lord knows I never beat M. Bison in that last game.
Imo, the underlying conceit behind Mega Man gameplay (and, well, a lot of NES/SNES era gameplay) is that gameplay is punishing but logical. Your controls work as so. Each enemy works like so. The level design is as so. You can more or less ferret out the basics in the first 15 minutes of gameplay, and each level takes maybe another 15-30 minutes.
With MN9, there's no sense of patterns. The usual signifiers of bottomless pits will linger just slightly below the bottom of the screen. Enemies will end up having abilities you didn't expect (like being able to survive oil fires). I'm never confident about what platforms Beck can grab onto or not. And strictly speaking, the game doesn't feel confident in its own design. See the way the game spits out random power-ups whenever you die, as if saying that they know the level design is bs and they're hoping that whatever Patch gives you will be enough to get you to keep playing.
And yes, I am going to complain about the 2.5D. Considering that every retro game that's succeeded in the last few years has either been pixel art (Shovel Knight) or cel-shaded (Shantae, Mighty Switch Force, a hell of a lot of others), 2.5D was a very deliberate choice that should have been backed up by either visionary visual design or interesting game elements. So far they've used the extra pseudo-dimension in one way that couldn't have been done in 2D, and 2.5D has clearly cost them in the visuals department.
And yes, I am going to compare it to Shovel Knight, and Shantae and the rest of the modern retro indie crowd, because the success and critical acclaim of those games is what I have to compare MN9 to. Revisionist takes on old games have been done before and done a lot better. Hell, Mega Man 9 did MN9 better than MN9 did. So there's no excuse for this to be this crappy besides horrendous mismanagement.
I know that there were some people who complained about how the game ended up looking different from early concept pictures. I have no special attachment to them, but it did seem that those early concept pictures were more cartoony.
I'm actually not a big fan of 2.5D either, more specifically, polygon-based 2D platforming -- I prefer spritework because it just feels more able to be precise about hitboxes.
I'm also not a huge fan of the older Mega Man games, which this seems to intentionally hark back to. I don't know why people like Mega Man 2 so much, specifically, because I didn't. I think Mega Man 3 is better than it, and I like 4 through 6 more than 3. Given Beck's abilities I find this game roughly similar to Mega Man 3, which is sorta middle-of-the-pack for me.
For what it's worth: * I've played Day in the Limelight which I thought was interesting though not something I'd copy/homage. * I've played Street Fighter x Mega Man which I thought was pretty well done except too much on the less-than-reasonably difficult side with things like losing your charge when getting hit and some enemies taking far more regular buster shots than charged shots for no real reason. * I've played Rokko-chan which I enjoyed. * I've played Mega Man Unlimited, which I really enjoyed. Somewhat on the difficult side, too, but much more reasonable in its difficulty, and much more rewarding as well. And it actually -- an exceptional feature in a Mega Man game -- had a convincing story. (Not to mention the bonus level...which is an excellent example of difficult and fittingly awesome.)
Let's talk about the Patch support system, actually.
For those of you who were wise enough to not back MN9, the main campaign has a support system for players who die a lot, sort of like how the 2D Wii/Wii U platformers had the Super Guide. Unlike the Super Guide, Might No. 9's support system is kind of...silly, honestly.
Basically, there's this robot called Patch who will show up after you die or before bosses and minibosses and (if you've had to restart the level more than twice) at the beginning of the game. Patch will give you up to three random power-ups. The problem is that Patch is either completely useless or completely broken. On the useless side of the spectrum, the majority of really crappy deaths that you'll fall into again and again and again are bottomless pits or some other form of super-lethal environmental hazard, and there's no power-up for that. On the broken side, Patch generally gives either health pick-ups or super-buffs that increase Beck's defense, attack power and/or speed. And those can single-handedly get you through a tough mini-boss. That, and Patch will occasionally just give you extra lives (!), which is just...horrible, honestly.
I'm not saying I want Patch gone; I honestly wouldn't have gotten this far in the game without it. It's just that he feels emblematic of the overall sloppy design. Patch is their version of the ingenious Dark Souls-derived loot loss system from Shovel Knight. And while Shovel Knight reinforced its validity by confidently stating 'if you're good enough at this game, then that mistake won't matter and you'll be able to continue the level unabated', Mighty No. 9 goes 'Okay, we know this level is bullshit, so we're going to throw power-ups at your face and hope that you're satisfied enough with them to keep playing'
This discussion has been making me want to play Shovel Knight even more than I already did, honestly. But I've got a lot of games to catch up on or finish. >_>;
Let's talk about the Patch support system, actually.
For those of you who were wise enough to not back MN9, the main campaign has a support system for players who die a lot, sort of like how the 2D Wii/Wii U platformers had the Super Guide. Unlike the Super Guide, Might No. 9's support system is kind of...silly, honestly.
Basically, there's this robot called Patch who will show up after you die or before bosses and minibosses and (if you've had to restart the level more than twice) at the beginning of the game. Patch will give you up to three random power-ups. The problem is that Patch is either completely useless or completely broken. On the useless side of the spectrum, the majority of really crappy deaths that you'll fall into again and again and again are bottomless pits or some other form of super-lethal environmental hazard, and there's no power-up for that. On the broken side, Patch generally gives either health pick-ups or super-buffs that increase Beck's defense, attack power and/or speed. And those can single-handedly get you through a tough mini-boss. That, and Patch will occasionally just give you extra lives (!), which is just...horrible, honestly.
I'm not saying I want Patch gone; I honestly wouldn't have gotten this far in the game without it. It's just that he feels emblematic of the overall sloppy design. Patch is their version of the ingenious Dark Souls-derived loot loss system from Shovel Knight. And while Shovel Knight reinforced its validity by confidently stating 'if you're good enough at this game, then that mistake won't matter and you'll be able to continue the level unabated', Mighty No. 9 goes 'Okay, we know this level is bullshit, so we're going to throw power-ups at your face and hope that you're satisfied enough with them to keep playing'
Honestly, aside from Patch, I don't think that early Mega Man games as well as some of the harder fangames like SFxMM are much different from this. The levels are about learning their quirks and somewhat unforgiving about this, and then after you bang your head against them enough times you know them well enough to be able to get through them with relatively little difficulty. Usually.
There are somewhat obnoxious amounts of instant death traps in some places in MN9, such as early in the mine level. Maybe that's the problem -- the game doesn't feel like it gives a sense of difficulty progression, within each level. Obviously, you can't do this between levels because you're allowed to pick from any of 8 levels to start with, but within any one level, you sorta have to know Mega Man conventions to make sense of the gameplay.
And come to think of it, I feel this same way about SFxMM's design too. I've always felt that it wasn't really all that much fun to play, and thanks to your help in inspiring the above commentary, I know what to point the blame to.
I mean it's kind of a staple of the entire series. I can't be the only one who's actually played the NES ones recently because there was some grade-A horseshit in those games.
Granted it was bad design back then too and we should really know better now, and I can't comment much on MN9 other than saying it looked mediocre, but it just seems really silly when people say that the new games suck because of bullshit levels but then turn around and say MM2 was the best. Like, do you even remember Crash Man or Quick Man's stages? Heat Man's glitchy desyncing disappearing blocks? Instant death collision when a dragon spawns underneath you? How about those false floors over spikes? Maybe how half the bosses have borderline undodgeable patterns?
I mean we love them in part because there was nothing else, but in part because we took the time to memorize everything. I'm pretty sure, like, MM6 was the only one that wasn't guilty of extreme bullshit even compared to the modern games, but it's never the one people say they liked best.
Anyway the reason I came to this thread tonight was because I was watching a stream of Pokemon Alpha Sapphire, and someone in the chat made a very good observation:
"Aqua's plan is the dumbest by far. Kyogre causes it to rain, which would pull water from the ocean, into the sky, making it rain the ocean's water back into the ocean. How is that supposed to cover the land?"
Even if you say it's supposed to rain on the mainland, that would be taking a significant amount of water from the ocean and deposit it onto the mainland, thus lowering the sea level. And Magma's plan would melt the ice caps and raise it. Both teams are accomplishing the exact opposite of what they set out to do.
I mean we love them in part because there was nothing else, but in part because we took the time to memorize everything. I'm pretty sure, like, MM6 was the only one that wasn't guilty of extreme bullshit even compared to the modern games, but it's never the one people say they liked best.
Anyway the reason I came to this thread tonight was because I was watching a stream of Pokemon Alpha Sapphire, and someone in the chat made a very good observation:
"Aqua's plan is the dumbest by far. Kyogre causes it to rain, which would pull water from the ocean, into the sky, making it rain the ocean's water back into the ocean. How is that supposed to cover the land?"
Well, enough time of permanent rain would eventually just erode the continents away.
a pokémon game, except it takes place in geologic time so by the time you return to pallet town to give Oak his parcel, there's now a river blocking your path
A friend actually complained to me today that Mega Man 3's Hard Man was...well, hard. (As in difficult, but yes, pun acknowledged.)
Now I thought back to the experience I had when I played Mega Man 3. I remembered that Hard Man was one of the easier bosses.
So I booted up MM3 again and went up against Hard Man. Well, he was indeed hard. I was kinda surprised. My dodging was somewhat rusty (causing me to jump by accident sometimes), but that wasn't the main reason.
Turns out there is an entirely predictable pattern to his attacks. Each fist flies behind you and then re-homes on you. Then he jumps and tries to crush you. Rinse and repeat.
Furthermore, I rediscovered a totally cheese strat wherein I ignored his fists and just moved away from his ground-crashing and otherwise attemped to shoot as quickly as possible.
Thing is, these wouldn't likely have happened as quickly as they did had I not had a savestate for boss practicing. That would force me to replay the stage or farm for 1-ups just to keep practicing dueling the boss.
The level design was mostly fine, they just put a lot of extremely cheap bullshit in it. My point wasn't that I didn't enjoy those games (I still do), it was the myopic way people criticize newer games in the MM style for cheap bullshit without realizing how much of a staple it's always been.
And yes, I know a no-hit run of MM2 is possible. It just involves glitching Quick Man's AI with alternating weapons, going through half the game backwards (including the glitched-out disappearing block hell without the jet) just so you can use Item 1 against Air Man, doing the beam trap in a very specific and probably unintended way to hoard one extra shot so you can oneshot Wily 2 with a weapon that's supposed to be empty before he throws stuff you can't dodge, and at least two places I can think of that basically necessitate pause-teleport abuse. I knew about a third of these things when I was little, but it doesn't really change the fact that they're very clever solutions to very cheap bullshit.
That's not even getting into stuff like blind jumps down spike pits, half the Quick Man laser screens being impossible if you don't come into them already smashed up against the correct wall, the dragon and his massive rectangular insta-kill hitbox spawning 2/3 of the way across the screen with no warning, etc. Prophetic bullshit is still bullshit, even if we were persistent enough to memorize it at the time (and apparently aren't now).
Just beat 50 CENT: BLOOD ON THE SAND with a friend, been slowly chipping away a it every time they're over.
The last few levels of that game are un-be-fucking-lievable.
Alternate ending: As they drive away, in a quiet moment, Fiddy puts his face close to the skull and whispers "Finally got your remains back, Great-Grandad, rest in peace." and gives a little smile
Comments
I didn't know that.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
The Ultra Hard challenge in TBoI: AB+ is godawful, and basically the full "How Not To Design A Game" playbook all at once.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
A) Your only source of health regeneration is HP Up items, and a select few items that passively regenerate your health. This is A Problem in a game that (despite Ed and Tyrone's insistence to the contrary) has quite a few sources of unavoidable and near-unavoidable damage.
B) You are permanently under the effects of the following: Curse of the Blind, Curse of the Maze, Curse of the Lost, and Curse of the Labyrinth. What this means is that you can't see any of the items you're picking up (which can lead to picking up run ruining items such as Cursed Eye), the floors are double the size, you have no way of navigating the floors other than your memory (and a lot of rooms in the game look incredibly similar), and you are randomly teleported around the floor (which just makes you even more lost.) You can also be affected by Curse of the Unknown, which removes your health bar from the HUD (which isn't really a problem, honestly, since your health status is always "not enough of it".), and Curse of Darkness, which makes it really hard to see anything.
C) All applicable enemies spawn as their champion variants. This includes things like fast moving enemies that also pull you towards them, enemies that explode in your face, and double/triple/quadruple bosses.
D) You have to fight the third hardest boss in the game at the end of all this.
TL;DR You are in a constant state of dying and are also absurdly disoriented whilst being in the State of Dying.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I've turned the graphics settings down to lowest, and reworked some of the controls to my liking, and the game finally plays smoothly. I have a laptop with a fourth-generation i5 processor with Intel Integrated 4400 graphics, and 8 GB of RAM.
MN9 seems to be rather poorly optimized, but the gameplay seems decent so far -- about on par with a classic Mega Man game, which is rather clearly what it's trying to take after. I'm about halfway done with the game, for what it's worth.
If the game lags for you, though, then yeah, the gameplay definitely sucks.
(Also, slight correction, it's 2.5D, not strictly 2D.)
I have seen 2.5D games with lots of 3D effects sometimes become heavy processor loads -- see Never Alone for example. (Which is a good game for other reasons.)
Besides, they're not near-identical experiences so they're not quite interchangeable like that, at least for me.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Also MN9 has pretty good music.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I know that there were some people who complained about how the game ended up looking different from early concept pictures. I have no special attachment to them, but it did seem that those early concept pictures were more cartoony.
I'm actually not a big fan of 2.5D either, more specifically, polygon-based 2D platforming -- I prefer spritework because it just feels more able to be precise about hitboxes.
I'm also not a huge fan of the older Mega Man games, which this seems to intentionally hark back to. I don't know why people like Mega Man 2 so much, specifically, because I didn't. I think Mega Man 3 is better than it, and I like 4 through 6 more than 3. Given Beck's abilities I find this game roughly similar to Mega Man 3, which is sorta middle-of-the-pack for me.
For what it's worth:
* I've played Day in the Limelight which I thought was interesting though not something I'd copy/homage.
* I've played Street Fighter x Mega Man which I thought was pretty well done except too much on the less-than-reasonably difficult side with things like losing your charge when getting hit and some enemies taking far more regular buster shots than charged shots for no real reason.
* I've played Rokko-chan which I enjoyed.
* I've played Mega Man Unlimited, which I really enjoyed. Somewhat on the difficult side, too, but much more reasonable in its difficulty, and much more rewarding as well. And it actually -- an exceptional feature in a Mega Man game -- had a convincing story. (Not to mention the bonus level...which is an excellent example of difficult and fittingly awesome.)
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
There are somewhat obnoxious amounts of instant death traps in some places in MN9, such as early in the mine level. Maybe that's the problem -- the game doesn't feel like it gives a sense of difficulty progression, within each level. Obviously, you can't do this between levels because you're allowed to pick from any of 8 levels to start with, but within any one level, you sorta have to know Mega Man conventions to make sense of the gameplay.
And come to think of it, I feel this same way about SFxMM's design too. I've always felt that it wasn't really all that much fun to play, and thanks to your help in inspiring the above commentary, I know what to point the blame to.
Even back then, I feel like it was the idea of the games that intrigued us, not the actual gameplay
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I am not part of his 'we' group.
Now I thought back to the experience I had when I played Mega Man 3. I remembered that Hard Man was one of the easier bosses.
So I booted up MM3 again and went up against Hard Man. Well, he was indeed hard. I was kinda surprised. My dodging was somewhat rusty (causing me to jump by accident sometimes), but that wasn't the main reason.
Turns out there is an entirely predictable pattern to his attacks. Each fist flies behind you and then re-homes on you. Then he jumps and tries to crush you. Rinse and repeat.
Furthermore, I rediscovered a totally cheese strat wherein I ignored his fists and just moved away from his ground-crashing and otherwise attemped to shoot as quickly as possible.
Thing is, these wouldn't likely have happened as quickly as they did had I not had a savestate for boss practicing. That would force me to replay the stage or farm for 1-ups just to keep practicing dueling the boss.
Just beat 50 CENT: BLOOD ON THE SAND with a friend, been slowly chipping away a it every time they're over.
The last few levels of that game are un-be-fucking-lievable.