torsdag 25 juli 2013

Up and coming games

Here are the main upcoming games I'm looking forward to and intend to purchase once they are out:

Grand Theft Auto V - X-Box 360 - September 17
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze - Wii U - November 11
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - 3DS - November 11
Super Mario 3D World - Wii U - December 12

So yeah, a lot of Nintendo games and well-known franchises. There just aren't that many other interesting games coming out I think unless you are into mobas, Minecraft, rougelikes or whatever other hellish incarnations they pass off as video games these days. I'd like to play the new game by the studio that made Muramasa or Last of Us for that matter, but Sony are evil and I wont buy a PS3 for just one or a couple of games. GTA V is going to be sweet, GTA IV was awesome even though it gets a lot of hate from the die-hard GTA fans.

DKCR was perhaps not perfect (damn you forced waggle controls!), but it was a very good game in its own right. The next game in the series can only be better since there are no waggle controls this time around. While ALttP is not my favorite Zelda, actually far from it, another top-down Zelda game you simply can't miss and this one looks really cool from the videos they have released. Super Mario is always Super Mario and platformers is my favorite genre besides real FPS games (not pseudo-game interactive movies like the CoD-games).

onsdag 24 juli 2013

Features in Megaman games

A slightly different blog post this time around since I wanted to talk about features in Megaman games, and what I like and dislike about them.

The slide - This is a very good idea on paper since it seems to add a strategic element to the game. That is, you need to time your slides in order to avoid enemy attacks. However, since the Megaman game in question that has the feature needs to be designed around it, it renders it quite pointless. Because pressing the button combination to slide at the right moment isn't exactly 'hard'. If you design the game so that Megaman can walk to avoid the enemies instead of sliding it's basicly the same game except you have not added a feature that there is no need for. A better solution to lower the hitbox would probably be to enable Megaman to duck. But we all know Megaman can't duck, right?

The charge-up buster - A common complaint I've read about the buster is that it made the robot master weapons pointless in Megaman 4 since a charged-up shot was more powerful than any other weapon. While that could be true I think there are other aspects of the feature that are more important when determining whether it's good or bad (said reason is merely a balance issue I think since apparently this was not a problem in MM5 or 6). Basicly charging the buster is always the right idea, meaning you always hear that sound throughout the game which is less than ideal. Also it takes mashing the button to shoot lemons pointless which I think is a skill that should be promoted. Thirdly missing a charge shot is often really bad for you which means you have to shoot them really precisely, as opposed to missing with a lemon which is no big deal. Which changes the dynamic of the combat for the worse.

E-tanks - As a kid I loved the E-tanks because they meant I could farm them like crazy on Gemini Man's stage and finally complete a Megaman game! A few years later I realize how they break the game in half since you do not have to care about the RM weaknesses which is integral to the gameplay in the games. It also creates a vicious circle where the RM's need to be made harder in order to still be challenging even when taking E-tanks into account, which in turn makes them too hard to complete without using E-tanks.

Rush - I'm not against Rush per-se, but I'm not a fan of the way he has been used in the games. The Rush Coil makes you able to reach higher places, but since you have it from the beginning and have almost infinite energy, placing stuff higher up becomes kinda a moot point. Rush Jet was overpowered in MM3, but in the other games I think it was underpowered in that you move up and down too slowly and can easily run into stuff. Rush Marine obviously was extremely limited in when you could use it.

Items in MM2 - These I like. Turn Item 1 and 3 into one item like in Rosenkreuzstilette and I think it's the best solution. Not too broken and still useful.

Magnet Beam - I like the Magnet Beam, but the problem is you can skip entire areas by just using the beam, making it a bit too good. Perhaps limit it's energy more or design the levels to limit it's usefulness that way.

The Shop - Ewwww. Nope, Megaman is not an RPG or Action-Adventure game. I felt MM9 was balanced after people using the shop items, making going through the game without them a pain.

torsdag 18 juli 2013

Megaman Unlimited Frustration

Yo!

It's been a long while since I posted an entry here but now it's time again. I've played and completed the recently released fan game Megaman Unlimited and I feel like venting some of my thoughts.

First I want to start out by saying that being a maker of a Megaman fan game myself I have a lot of respect for the people who did this game. I know all too well how much of your time and effort goes into doing something like this. It feels like I'm kind of in a unique position having this point of view and being able to see clearly what kind of design choices has gone into the game and how they affect the end result.

When you first start out playing MMU it strikes you what an extremely difficult game it is. Unfortunately the difficulty in the game is of a kind that lately has been commonly reffered to as "artificial difficulty". This means in almost every screen of the game you have to memorize exactly what to do and tip-toe through the stage in order to not die. Before you have the strategies for the stage down, they seem incredibly hard, once you know them they aren't a big deal except for their LENGTH. A better approach would be to have the player being able to intuitively combat what comes up on the screen instead of all this trial-and-error. The worst offender being Rainbow Man stage, hello Quick Man lasers! One of the worst Megaman gimmicks makes an unwelcome return and is now more irritating than ever.

Another thing that becomes apparent quite quickly is that the stages are way too long. Commercial Megaman games are known for having short stages, and in my opinion it fits the games perfectly. Rom hacks are known to have really long stages and all it does is show how it doesn't suit this kind of game. There is nothing more frustrating than playing for what feels like 15 minutes and die right before the checkpoint and having to do it all over again. Personally I would like the stages to be 50% shorter, but objectively they still need to be slightly shorter maybe by 25%.

The length of stages ties into the third major problem with the game. The enemies do WAY too much damage to Megaman. Once in my playthrough I played Tank Man's stage and was at 50% life by the third screen! It doesn't help that the enemies and their bullets are very hard to dodge before you have played enough to learn their patterns, and that the item drops are very infrequent.

Since the stages are so long, you *really* want to finish the robot master once you get to him or her, and as usual E-tank abuse works like a charm when fighting the RM's at the end otheir respective stages. Making it uneccessary to care about the weakness order until the refights. The robot master designs are imo a bit strange, they look more like something out of an X series game. Their patterns are very predictable and need more randomness introduced. Also for some reason you take a million damage when Megaman touches them making the E-tank timing hard sometimes. Regarding the NES-limitations I know the developers didn't make the game with them in mind, but some things are just so blatantly non-NES it looks kinda stupid. Yo-Yo Man's string is one of those things (the leprechaun enemy's coins in Rainbow Man stage is another, the NES would never be able to handle that many sprites). I mean even hell has different temperatures.

There are a number of somewhat obvious bugs that haven't been sorted out despite the game being in development for five years. Sometimes when you fall diagonally down right at the edge of a platform Megaman will bounce up about a pixel, play the landing sound and then fall down instead of landing on the platform. This is a well-known problem when designing a platform game, how to make the hit detection of the player object decide whether it has landed on top of the platform or its side, when hitting the very tip of the edge at a 45 degree angle. BUT it's kinda easy to workaround, I for one did it in my game in GameMaker so a game developed in C++ should be able to solve it fine.

Other minor things is that the slide sometimes fails, even when using the dedicated slide button I think, but I can't confirm this. Sometimes when jumping right at the edge of a platform you will just fall down instead of jumping and the spike hitboxes are f-ed up when using Rush Jet near them.

A lot of complaints from me but like I said I have a ton of respect for the developers of this game and their effort. At the same time I can't honestly say I enjoyed the game or even had fun when playing it, I just played to beat it while trying desperately to control my frustration and not rage-quit. Making a very hard game is something anyone can do, the difficult part is to make a balanced game that feels fair without being too easy. This is why I can't stand Megaman rom hacks. This game should've been tested by beta testers outside of the development team so that they could have access to said testers' valuable input regarding the difficulty. I know myself that when you develop a game like this and play through the stages over and over again, your view of its difficulty will be very subjective and it's easy to start raising it just because you worry it might be too easy. What do I know, maybe they want I Wanna Be the Megaman, but I'm willing to bet that was not the case.

I don't know when I will make another blog post but hopefully a bit more frequent. See you!