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indigozealHeads up: My car's rear struts blew, my tax bill was considerably higher than expected, my dog's had vet problems, and my laptop is threatening to off itself. The various problems are getting sorted, but posting might be sporadic for a bit as I deal with the fallout.
In happier news: I finally beat Mega Man 2 tonight. I never owned the NES cartridge, but I rented it a few times shortly after it came out. Even playing on the U.S. cart's slackened difficulty, though, I never beat the thing; I always got stuck at (of course) the Wily stages. Prior to this last run on the Gamecube Mega Man Anniversary Collection, I don't think I'd ever gotten past the boss of the second stage, the living room; I know I never saw the Boobeam Trap.
I'd always thought of 2 as the quintessential Mega Man game in the 2 vs. 3 debate: it has the best music, the best Robot Masters, the best arsenal, and the best variety of stages, and it's the best incarnation of the classic Mega Man aesthetic (and, man, isn't it great how these games still look and sound terrific today?). After playing both 2 and 3 to completion, I still have to come down on the side of 2, but I can see the case for 3 for the first time. 3 is kind of a jumble with its weapons & Robot Masters, but 2 has a couple really frustrating design decisions near the end, where the game demands absolute perfection, or your entire game is shot. The first is the Boobeam Trap. This page in the middle gives a good rundown of the problems, but in (not so) brief: it's a boss that's vulnerable to only one weapon; you cannot waste any shots; and in order to negotiate the room and get yourself in the proper firing positions, you have to use your items with pretty perfect timing. In particular, getting up to the first target requires pixel-perfect deployment of the Item 1 rising platform; if you position it incorrectly horizontally, it'll disappear before you get to where you need to go, and if you don't time your leaps correctly, the platform'll either take off without you or vanish beneath your feet. Furthermore, if you don't deploy the platform correctly immediately upon entering the room, the timing of the boss's homing lasers will knock you off the platform before you get to your destination. You can recover from this, but chances are you'll eat a few hits along the way. Oh, and everything's flickering due to the amount of stuff on screen, so it's difficult to tell what's going on.
In any case: if you mess up too many times with the platforms or just once with firing your weapon, you won't have enough weapon/item energy to complete the fight; you have no choice but to die. Even if you regenerate, however, there's no real way in the level to regenerate your lost weapon/item energy - so, effectively, if you fail in this fight once, your entire game is ruined. (What you're supposed to do, I think, is save the two weapon energy refills you can find at the very beginning of the level for just in case you do fail at your first attempt at the boss - but getting your second chance means that you have to backtrack all the way to the beginning of the level.)
The second big problem is the very last fight, against Wily's alien hologram. It's vulnerable only to Bubble Lead (so that's another weapon you've got to make sure is at near-full at the game's very end) - but the big problem is that it drains 2/3 of your health if it touches you. It's also firing shots at you as it darts around the room, so if you've taken a few hits, one touch is an effective instakill. Now, it's not that difficult to avoid touching the hologram in the fight, or to avoid too many hits from the shots...but it's a debacle when you first encounter the fight, which comes after an 8-boss rush, two final bosses, and a corridor with exceptionally damaging acid traps. It's too much, and it's a big letdown to make it all through that only to lose to an afterthought. (I note that 3 does this "anticlimactic gimmick end boss" thing, too, with its Gamma fight that's vulnerable primarily to Top Spin.)
It's interesting how the Wily stages in 2 basically form one big puzzle, where you have to know not only what weapons & items to use when but what weapons & items to refill when. You want to get past obstacles in fairly good shape (health being a pretty scarce resource itself), but using the easiest option can sometimes land you in trouble later. It's not a matter of brute forcing the levels the first time; it's a matter of becoming intimately familiar with them and figuring out how to ration your resources at every step of the game. You really have to use all of the tools you've accumulated to survive. I respect that - and I would've really liked it, had it not been for the punishing difficulty of the above two fights, particularly Boobeam. ("The haunting threat of Boobeam" would've been a better title for this post.)
Man, that was more words than I expected to expend on that topic. Anyhow, Mega Man 2: classic game, glad it's finally under my belt after over 25 years.
.
In happier news: I finally beat Mega Man 2 tonight. I never owned the NES cartridge, but I rented it a few times shortly after it came out. Even playing on the U.S. cart's slackened difficulty, though, I never beat the thing; I always got stuck at (of course) the Wily stages. Prior to this last run on the Gamecube Mega Man Anniversary Collection, I don't think I'd ever gotten past the boss of the second stage, the living room; I know I never saw the Boobeam Trap.
I'd always thought of 2 as the quintessential Mega Man game in the 2 vs. 3 debate: it has the best music, the best Robot Masters, the best arsenal, and the best variety of stages, and it's the best incarnation of the classic Mega Man aesthetic (and, man, isn't it great how these games still look and sound terrific today?). After playing both 2 and 3 to completion, I still have to come down on the side of 2, but I can see the case for 3 for the first time. 3 is kind of a jumble with its weapons & Robot Masters, but 2 has a couple really frustrating design decisions near the end, where the game demands absolute perfection, or your entire game is shot. The first is the Boobeam Trap. This page in the middle gives a good rundown of the problems, but in (not so) brief: it's a boss that's vulnerable to only one weapon; you cannot waste any shots; and in order to negotiate the room and get yourself in the proper firing positions, you have to use your items with pretty perfect timing. In particular, getting up to the first target requires pixel-perfect deployment of the Item 1 rising platform; if you position it incorrectly horizontally, it'll disappear before you get to where you need to go, and if you don't time your leaps correctly, the platform'll either take off without you or vanish beneath your feet. Furthermore, if you don't deploy the platform correctly immediately upon entering the room, the timing of the boss's homing lasers will knock you off the platform before you get to your destination. You can recover from this, but chances are you'll eat a few hits along the way. Oh, and everything's flickering due to the amount of stuff on screen, so it's difficult to tell what's going on.
In any case: if you mess up too many times with the platforms or just once with firing your weapon, you won't have enough weapon/item energy to complete the fight; you have no choice but to die. Even if you regenerate, however, there's no real way in the level to regenerate your lost weapon/item energy - so, effectively, if you fail in this fight once, your entire game is ruined. (What you're supposed to do, I think, is save the two weapon energy refills you can find at the very beginning of the level for just in case you do fail at your first attempt at the boss - but getting your second chance means that you have to backtrack all the way to the beginning of the level.)
The second big problem is the very last fight, against Wily's alien hologram. It's vulnerable only to Bubble Lead (so that's another weapon you've got to make sure is at near-full at the game's very end) - but the big problem is that it drains 2/3 of your health if it touches you. It's also firing shots at you as it darts around the room, so if you've taken a few hits, one touch is an effective instakill. Now, it's not that difficult to avoid touching the hologram in the fight, or to avoid too many hits from the shots...but it's a debacle when you first encounter the fight, which comes after an 8-boss rush, two final bosses, and a corridor with exceptionally damaging acid traps. It's too much, and it's a big letdown to make it all through that only to lose to an afterthought. (I note that 3 does this "anticlimactic gimmick end boss" thing, too, with its Gamma fight that's vulnerable primarily to Top Spin.)
It's interesting how the Wily stages in 2 basically form one big puzzle, where you have to know not only what weapons & items to use when but what weapons & items to refill when. You want to get past obstacles in fairly good shape (health being a pretty scarce resource itself), but using the easiest option can sometimes land you in trouble later. It's not a matter of brute forcing the levels the first time; it's a matter of becoming intimately familiar with them and figuring out how to ration your resources at every step of the game. You really have to use all of the tools you've accumulated to survive. I respect that - and I would've really liked it, had it not been for the punishing difficulty of the above two fights, particularly Boobeam. ("The haunting threat of Boobeam" would've been a better title for this post.)
Man, that was more words than I expected to expend on that topic. Anyhow, Mega Man 2: classic game, glad it's finally under my belt after over 25 years.
.
