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Posted: 08/12/22, 18:06:10 |
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Posted: 08/12/22, 21:14:35 |
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Posted: 08/13/22, 08:37:54 |
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Posted: 08/13/22, 09:24:23 |
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Posted: 08/13/22, 18:44:43 |
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Posted: 08/13/22, 18:45:56 |
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Posted: 08/13/22, 20:11:43 |
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Mega Man X5I've always heard the series took a sharp drop downhill after X4, but I could never be sure if it were really true or not. So I've gotta say... ...Yup it's true, X5 is terrible. Stage design isn't just poor, a lot of it borrows ideas from past games in worse ways, particularly the final stages, and there's less variety. I guess they became creatively bankrupt after 4. This isn't the end of it though. The game is also timed in a way that decreases each time a stage is played, whether completed or not. This serves to discourage the usual exploration until all eight regular levels are finished. What's more, the lower this counter gets, the "higher level" the bosses become, gaining more health the longer it takes to beat stages. On top of all this, they learned nothing from complaints about Nintendo and added an annoying helper character who stops the action to point out mostly obvious stuff every couple of screens. Seriously, one of the help messages is literally "You should proceed by stepping on the platforms." To say one positive thing, the idea of scaling bosses based on the player's completion kinda makes some sense for these games and the way upgrades and weaknesses work, which can make it easier to start things out before all that stuff is obtained and help prevent becoming too powerful. But X5 poorly implements it. @Zero Looking at it another way, any game you don't complete would become part of your backlog, so this is like backlog prevention! |
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Posted: 08/13/22, 21:31:15 |
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Posted: 08/13/22, 22:30:28 |
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I'm a little over halfway through Banjo-Tooie and like the first one, I'm really into it at this point. Initially I wasn't so sure, the game got off to a pretty slow start and I wasn't sure if I was going to like some of the changes. There's a lot more variety, but some of it (like the FPS segments) isn't great and at times I wondered if they were getting too far away from what these games are good at. It's quite a bit different of a game. I wonder if Rare was sick of hearing "oh they just made a re-skinned Mario 64" (which I think is a super reductive and inaccurate take on B-K, but it's a sentiment I've seen over the years) and decided to focus more on the adventuring side of things in B-T than the platforming and collecting. In any case, I appreciate that they didn't just make the same thing all over again.
The bigger, more complex levels were a bit daunting at first. Some of the level design has been confusing as a result, especially in worlds like Glitter Gulch Mine and Jolly Roger's Lagoon (where I got lost a few times). Not necessarily saying that's a fault of the game, but it's definitely more complicated than the first game. That said, I've loved all of the different ways that the various worlds connect to one another. In the first game, there were only a few occasions I can recall where I had to return to an earlier world with new knowledge/abilities in order to get a jiggie/etc. that I had missed. But that's happening all the time in this one, going back to earlier worlds and opening up new paths between some of them. In the first game most of this between-worlds backtracking for secrets happened in the Grunty's Lair hub, and in Tooie there's a lot of it throughout. And it's something I've really enjoyed doing after completing each new world and before moving onto the next one.
It's too early to say if I like Tooie more or less than Kazooie, but I am liking it a lot and am just as hooked as I was with the first game.
Also, I'm a couple hours into Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. It seems to be a more obvious follow-up to SotN than CotM was, and so far I think I like it more than CotM for that very reason. |
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Posted: 08/15/22, 19:00:23 |
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Posted: 08/15/22, 23:10:51 |
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Posted: 08/15/22, 23:23:00 |
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Posted: 08/16/22, 16:34:52 |
- Edited by |
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on: 08/16/22, 16:43:10 |
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Posted: 08/16/22, 18:49:41 |
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Posted: 08/17/22, 06:55:38 |
- Edited by |
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on: 08/17/22, 06:56:15 |
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Mega Man X6
I was a little nervous moving on because if I recall correctly, the games only kept getting worse. And I've gotta say...
...Ow, it's painful! This game is so much worse than X5 it almost feels intentional. The level design isn't just bad, it's also really slow due to elements that slow down the player, such as slow auto-scroll; moving pieces of the stage; a repeating spongy miniboss; etc. Another issue with this is that messing up means a slow slog to get back to that point. Many upgrades are tied to rescuing Reploids, who can now be killed by enemies, some of which are set up for this to happen really quickly basically requiring memorizing the game, meaning that some upgrades are permanently missable without restarting the whole game.
Fortunately most of the bosses are pretty simple and easy by comparison, with the exception of Infinity Mijinion which is one of the worst bosses ever created in any game ever. The final stages are a hodgepodge of bad ideas including requiring certain upgrades to complete. One more thing that makes matters worse is how X can no longer fire through walls or platforms; this was also present in X5 (and maybe even X4, I can't recall), but it's a much more noticeable annoyance here with the way levels are set up and having to keep enemies away from the rescues.
I'm tempted to call this one of the worst games I've ever played, it was just a miserable experience. But I know that next in line is X7 which seems pretty infamous, so perhaps I should hold off for now on that designation. I shudder to think... |
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Posted: 08/17/22, 22:33:23 |
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Posted: 08/17/22, 23:46:37 |
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Posted: 08/18/22, 03:53:17 |
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Posted: 08/18/22, 03:53:56 |
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Posted: 08/18/22, 04:01:31 |
- Edited by |
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on: 08/18/22, 04:02:29 |
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