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!