Integrity

i kneel to you. my crown is yours, for now.

i go all over the place. up through fates i'll flip between numbers, an acronym, and a one-word title (e.g. "genealogy", "radiance") with the proportions dependent on the game. post-fates, i don't think i've ever called the games anything except "heroes", "echoes", "feth", and "engage".

to the future reader of sf.net: don't post like this, it is bad e: kid got himself banned so i'm just going to ice the post. it added nothing.

STARSHIP TROOPERS: TERRAN COMMAND (THE ARISTOCRATS, 2022) Finished: 16/7/24. Playtime: 35.3 hours. Slitherine are a funky publishing house, and one that's near to my heart for no real concrete reason. Founded in 2000, they've maneuvered into the popcorn wargaming space pretty solidly by this point; games that have a bit more rigor to them than your Advance Wars and your Fire Emblems, but aren't quite to the level of depth of a Gary Grigsby's game. They also have computerized versions of the Gary Grigsby's games, though, if you want something with more heft to it than even I can stomach. Notably, if you've seen some of the kinda comical Real Battle Simulators from the 2000s History Channel or from Deadliest Warrior, there's a good chance (a guarantee in the latter case) that it was Slitherine's work. They have a peculiar flavor of eurojank to their general outings, despite being English themselves, due to doing a lot of publishing for various continental studios, including today's specimen, Belgium-based The Aristocrats. I wrote pretty lovingly about Infested Planet a few years ago as a non-micro-intensive nice introductory kind of RTS compared to something like Starcraft or another of the more traditional RTSes. Terran Command is the next step along the ladder from Infested Planet to Starcraft, and it even shares quite a few fundamental gameplay similarities to Infested Planet, such as your positioning and force composition being far more important than any in-fight micro and a focus on gradual tightening of the noose around enemies rather than aggression being overly rewarded. If you picked up that one and vibed with it at all, I absolutely recommend this one as well. Terran Command is a campaign-only game, essentially. There are user-created scenarios if you want, but there's no co-op, no competitive multiplayer, nothing of the sort. Fortunately, the campaign is quite good for what it is, even if it has a bit of a slow ramp-up. Unit matchups and counters are carefully considered enough that none of the roster ever really gets obsoleted, and the missions give you diverse enough setups and objectives to let the whole (hefty) roster variously shine. It stands fairly uniquely among RTSkind in that my default "I have the space for one more unit but no real needs" pick was generally the Tier 1 Generalist rifle squad rather than anything fancy, because they actually do a reliable job at many different tasks. I'm a big fan of that kind of fundamentally sound design. Out of the whole campaign, I'd say only one mission was a proper ballbuster (a late defensive mission) and, while there were certainly a good few forgettable filler maps, most made a pretty good case for being included in the campaign. Then there's two DLCs. These two DLC campaigns are butt ass hard. Each includes about half the maps of the main campaign and a handful of new player and bug units, and both pick right up around the difficulty the main campaign left off on. I think I liked the first one, the mercenary campaign, generally more than the second, the cop campaign. Both have kinda-silly unit balance issues (the Shredder Merc and the Riot Shield Squad respectively) but both are reasonably designed around the stronger units without getting ridiculous about it, with the exception of the mercenary campaign's Immolator bug. Fuck that dude. I'd absolutely recommend buying Terran Command and playing it and then considering picking up the DLCs if you're hungry for more. They add nothing to the base campaign. The achievements here are pretty straightforward, charmingly. Every mission (18 base, 7 mercenary, 9 cop) has two associated achievements for doing secondary objectives or some other specific thing. The quality of these are a bit all over the place, unfortunately. Early on, they're almost all really good, being things like shooting a bunch of the ranged bugs with snipers, stretching to clear a whole map that you don't have to, or spending half of a 10-minute multi-tier defense mission at the first line that's intended to collapse. By the time you make it to the DLC campaigns, there's far more cases of having you use a very specific unit at maximum veterancy to do a specific thing, which generally leads to finding a nice spot to sit down and farm unit experience. The worst cases of these are late in the main campaign and late in the cop campaign, both cases asking you to have three simultaneous copies of a specific max veterancy unit that you're going to have to go deeply out of your way to farm up. Pretty much all of the DLC missions have at least one "use this specific max veterancy ability on this specific unit" achievement, unfortunately. It does taint the batch. Two of the achievements, outside of those, stand out as being particularly poorly thought out. The first, Self-Preservation, comes from the midgame of the cop campaign. The mission it's attached to gives you a small squad (a rifle squad, a cop squad, and an officer) and is split into discrete segments as you clear a huge building. The second of these segments is the storage room, and Self-Preservation tasks you with getting through the storage room without taking any casualties. Enemy resistance isn't terribly strong, but the problem with this requires that I explain the cop squad to you. The cop squad, being good fascist state cops, have submachine guns and "detainment drones" which shock enemies to slow them down. The detainment drones are automatically sent out, die pretty easily, and are automatically rebuilt by the squad for free, letting them function as a very effective ablative shield for your army. Their veteran abilities allow them to summon one of two kinds of drone that are various ways to deliver explosions to the bugs. If any of the ability drones explode, that's a casualty; if any of the detainment drones, which are designed to die, die, that's a casualty. Even with those constraints, the achievement isn't too hard to do - I did it four times in less than an hour trying to figure out why it wasn't unlocking - but the real vs. perceived criteria makes it way more frustrating than it needed to be. The last, and far simpler, is Anti-Tanker III. It asks you to kill 200 Tanker bugs. At the end of all three campaigns, I had killed 119. This one was easy to finish up by making a quicksave right before a Tanker died, quickloading after it died for +1 kill, and repeating for about 15 minutes while watching a video. Scaling's off, but not the worst. All that said, if you go into this without going for achievements at all, there's only two or three questionable missions (one per campaign, weirdly) out of the entire bunch. Terran Command is a fantastic second RTS for someone to try getting into, particularly at the typical Steam sale price of ~$15. Interestingly, The Aristocrats' other work for Slitherine was already in the works before I even picked this one up, so look forward to them coming back with an actual popcorn wargame after I introduced and then didn't talk about Slitherine's popcorn wargame library for a whole post.

not to poo-poo your thread but those are pretty much all just jrpg tropes, not at all specific to srpgs

yeah the achievements were genuinely smooth as anything. a small handful caused any trouble at all, off the top of my head the only notable one being seeing leviathan's EX skill in z1 which requires you to have a high rank. on the other hand, you can face her as the ...third or fourth? mission of the game, so it's not like it's particularly hard to keep your rank up that long on casual mode. getting all Item B chips in zx was a little obtuse but not missable, you can just swing through a list of poorly-documented sidequests at the end of the game. most of the games i ended up getting 3 or 4 of the 5 achievements before even beating the game and just had to reload a late save / start a new run to get a single quick one. zx advent had the "worst" set but i'm honestly not sure if they were the worst because they were difficult or because i hated zx advent, and even they took me like an hour and a half to clean up all of. e: to the rest of your stuff - i honestly can't argue with any of that lmao. zero was absolutely an insane game made by assholes (as a smart guy once said) and i can see it putting someone off very quickly and never encouraging them to come back. it worked for me, though

lmao

MEGA MAN ZERO/ZX LEGACY COLLECTION (CAPCOM, VARIOUS) Finished: 12/7/24. Playtime: 42.6 hours. Here's a weird one. I had no concept of these games before buying them, but I'm going into them with high hopes on account of how much I generally liked playing as Zero in the X games, even the bad ones, except X6. Literally all I know as of this writing is that I'm pretty sure these games were originally for the Game Boy Advance, and I know you go to cyberspace at some point. Let's get cooking, fellas. MEGA MAN ZERO (CAPCOM, 2002) Something happened in the jump to the GBA, and I can't really put my finger on it. Even when the X games were good, there was always a certain retro cruft to how your guy controlled, a little bit of delayed input here and there or poorly laid out (or missing) control options, shit like that. Zero is the first time that I felt like the franchise was shedding all of that and letting the beauty that would become Mega Man 11 shine through. For a handheld title, Zero controls like an absolute dream here, and I want to stress as I transition to a new paragraph that I genuinely had fun with almost all of my time in this game. I put that up front because Zero is an insane game created by assholes. You create hard saves at your hub, and any time you run out of lives (which are not common) it's back to the load screen. If you, like me, put yourself into a position where you spend your starting two lives early, you're then boned into a situation where whatever stage you pick, you have to do it flawlessly in a single go. Checkpoints are incredibly sparse, possibly only at bosses, and each retry chip is a weighted decision as to whether or not you want to submit to doing the entire stage again. This comes to a head against the final boss, where running out of lives against him means you have to go through the entire boss rush and a short level besides, again with however many lives you had when you made the save, to go for any more attempts. It's shockingly bad, and testament to the game that I powered through it anyway. It's worth noting that the collection includes an optional Checkpoints Mode that you can toggle on from the wrapper menu, but man I ain't used any assistance since the classic games. My toxic pride is in full swing. Adding extra zest to the asshole flavor is the Cyber-Elves. You get these little beauties from fixed chests in stages as well as pseudo-random drops from enemies, and they are consumable to provide some effect like healing you, stunning enemies, saving you from a single pit, etc. There's two kickers here: first, that by "consumable" I mean when you consume them they're gone permanently from a unique and non-renewable list, and second, that the notably good ones require elf food that drops from enemies like any good shop currency. The good ones turn into shit like your subtanks and life upgrades, making them the only ones that give a permanent effect rather than a quick buff before they face oblivion. The bad news there is the amount of elf food they require. In the run up to the final boss, literally the final stage, I crested 1,000 elf food for the first time. Each of your two subtanks requires 1,200 elf food to activate. Each of your two small life upgrades is 750, and the large one requires in the ballpark of 2,000. You will not be interacting with this system at all unless you purposely sit down and grind it out, which you were pretty clearly meant to do because your basic combos and charge attacks are locked behind weapon proficiency, which only goes up on an individual-weapon basis by doing more successful attacks with that weapon. I think most of the grinding in the X series was due to mismanagement and poor numerical balance; Zero fundamentally asks you to grind to power up. I refused. Now, then, here's the fucked up thing: despite that, I still think Zero was a really good game. They've made incisive cuts to the fundamental design of the franchise now that the game can focus entirely on Zero's playstyle and doesn't have to account for X. You bring two weapons, each with its own button to attack with, from a pool of four that you can hotswap anytime in stages: sword, spear, shield, and gun. I ran chiefly with the spear and gun and swapped to sword and spear for bosses. Boss weaknesses, when they have one, have been simplified to an elemental rock-paper-scissors, and Zero interacts with this by putting a fire, ice, or thunder chip into his third equipment slot, which will infuse the charged attacks of whatever weapons he has equipped. It works a lot better than the guess-and-check lottery of Mega Man and X for me, since paying attention to a boss's elemental attacks can cue you onto their weaknesses without looking anything up online. It's a far more elegant system, and only one of the bosses across the entire game is really a proper asshole fight (uncoincidentally, one without a weakness whatsoever). Combat's fast, brutal, and flashy - Zero dies in only 5-6 enemy attacks but health drops are plentiful, trash enemies tend to die in 1-3 attacks, and even the chunkiest bosses fall to ten or twelve charged sword slashes. The game's brutal, and occasionally unfair, but it's generally quick to get back up and going once you're attuned to how the game wants you to play. I had a fantastic time overall, and I'm told Zero is the nadir of this pack. MEGA MAN ZERO 2 (CAPCOM, 2003) Nearly everything gets improved from Zero to Zero 2. Now that the old days are properly gone, Zero 2 is free to go back to the well of classic Mega Man and extract things that worked. Subtanks as loot, in addition to elves, are back, and the game goes back to take the more traditional intro -> choice of 4 bosses -> intermission stage -> choice of 4 bosses -> endgame progression of days gone by, but still using the elemental weapon triangle of Zero rather than explicit boss weapons. Speaking of, explicit boss weapons are back as well, but in a weird way. We'll get to that in a moment. The improvements from Zero are almost comical overcorrections: weapons level up fast as hell, elves require way less food and you get way more elf food and, on top of that, regular old continues are back which retain the elf food you got before gaming over, all of which combines to completely obliterate the grinding Zero required of you. It's a very welcome change. Besides that, the core of Zero's gameplay loop is all there and slightly refined, touched up in little places here and there. The mixed bag is the new stuff, and I think I fall on the side of appreciating the idea moreso than the execution. You have two methods of progression that are fresh to Zero 2: boss techniques and forms. Boss techniques sort-of ape the techniques that Zero got from boss kills in the X series, but with a caveat: you only get the boss's technique if your rank is sufficiently high when you kill the boss. Your rank is global and difficult as hell to keep high, and once it's in the pits the way to get it back up involves clearing stages that you're necessarily not getting boss techniques from, because it's low. I never got close to the rank necessary to get any techniques, but there are three consumable fairies (that you have to find) that will overwrite your rank for the stage you're on with an A-rank, giving you the boss technique on completion even if you suck it up. It's not a bad idea, but it needs a lot of tuning that it really didn't get, especially since you have to preload the fairy into your deck before starting the stage and using any fairy, including the permanent upgrades and the rank-up fairies, loses rank points. Strange system. Forms are possibly even stranger. Zero can gain a number of forms that give him a new paintjob and fundamentally alter his abilities and can be hotswapped anytime the game is paused. Conceptually, I like this one a lot - but it's also got a caveat in how they're earned. Each form has a specific condition, ranging from reasonable ones like "kill 10 enemies with aerial Z-slashes" and "pick up 25 life capsules" to ridiculous ones like "kill 50 enemies with the buster" and "hit 30 enemies with reflected projectiles", each of which must be accomplished within a single stage. Where this begins to fall apart is that these conditions aren't hinted at in-game, and only one form's requirements can be fulfilled per-stage. Got your 50 pistol kills, but also did the pretty easy 25 life capsules? Sorry, bud. What's good about them, though, is that they're both strong and thematic to their unlock condition. The life capsule one (Energy Form) makes you significantly weaker, but doubles enemy drop rates to let you fill up your subtanks faster. The buster one (X Form) makes you into essentially X6 X, with a powerful gun and a backup sword. The one I ran for most of the game, the aerial Z-slashes one, gives you a slightly altered combo with much more vertical reach and speeds Zero up significantly. With just some gentle tweaks, such as allowing multiple forms to be unlocked in a single run and hinting in-game at the requirements, I think this could be a genuinely incredible system. Now for the bad. Zero 2 commits two fauxs pas, and unfortunately they're both things that target my sensibilities directly. The first is more nebulous: the game's just kind of douchier than Zero. It's all the small things, like enemies placed where you'll fall on them blind, or boss arenas that happily let the boss attack you from offscreen, or jumps that are just a little bit too tight to be polite. It's never enough to directly take the experience down, like in X8, but it hangs over the game like a gentle pall. Zero had the excuse of being raw in many ways; the genuine refinement of Zero 2 makes stuff like this stick out all the worse. The second, and worse, sin is that your kit has been changed. The sword, gun, and shield from Zero all return completely intact. The astute reader may note that my main weapon in Zero was the spear, and that the spear is not in that list. The spear has been replaced by the Chain Rod, and the Chain Rod absolutely fucking sucks and, worse, is intended as a grappling hook mobility tool - a purpose for which it's also terribly designed. They stripped out my favorite weapon, put in some complete trash to replace it, and then created enemies and levels where you're strongly encouraged or required to use it. For this, and little more, it became a discussion with myself as to whether Zero 2 was better overall than its predecessor or not. I came down on the side of yes, but the conversation was there to be had. Onwards! MEGA MAN ZERO 3 (CAPCOM, 2004) I've been fairly high on the previous two games, but with some modest caveats to both. Zero 3, finally, irons it all out. I still miss my spear, and my spear is absolutely not back, but Zero 3 feels like it's broken fully out of the specter of classic Mega Man without the roadbumps along the way of its predecessors. Everything has finally come together into a grand package, and genuinely the only negative things I can say about it are that the word parts go on a little too long sometimes, and if you fully engage with the new elf system then you'll steamroll really hard by the end. That's hardly a negative, though. The Chain Rod is gone, praise the Lord, and it's replaced by the Recoil Rod, basically just a tonfa that can be aimed like the previous Rods and which you have to use for mobility periodically. It's not the spear, but I like it a hell of a lot more than the Chain Rod. Zero 3's primary contribution to the series lies in how you customize Zero himself, taking the form of chips and elves. Chips are straightforward as they come: through fixed stage loot and boss kills, you can variously acquire head, body, and foot chips. One can be equipped in each slot at any time, and they give boosts such as autocharge on your weapons or the ability to doublejump, in addition to the elemental effects from prior games. This fairly well replicates most of the functionality of the Form system from Zero 2, but in a more sensible and accessible way. I still think they should have given that another go, but this is good enough. Elves are changed from Zero 2 in two ways: first that they're cheaper to get up and running, and second that some elves are Satellite Elves which can be equipped to provide a persistent effect (such as dropping health capsules or shooting at enemies like Gradius options) at all times. Where this gets interesting is Zero 3's approach to difficulty and ranking. Many elves can be switched from consumable to satellite or vice versa, feeding into the ranking system in that your satellites don't penalize your mission score, unlike consumed elves. If you want to romp through the game and just eat every elf you come across, you're welcome to do so, and the resultant Zero becomes absolutely titanic by the end stages. If you want to see those EX Skills and play a higher ranked game, you're not locked entirely out of the elf system like in past games, you just have to engage with it more tactically. I think it's a fantastic balance to strike and does a much better job to encourage thinking about strategy and replaying the game than the previous two games did. Speaking of the endgame stages, Zero 3 also features a completely unique mission spread in the Mega Man franchise. As opposed to the standard eight bosses, either all together or in two banks of four, Zero 3 has you face four bosses (from which you get your elemental chips), then after an intermission stage has you face three in any order, go through a second intermission stage, and then face four more in any order before going to the endgame stages. It creates an interestingly balanced game, where many other Mega Men were overwhelmingly defined by their robosses or by the endgame stages. I liked the flow a lot, and they do play a bit with some of the extra stages, such as one where you have to raid a library for data and take notes on what you're looking for. It was all just enough to engage the brain without ever being enough to become tedious or take me out of the game. It was just fantastic, end to end, right up to the credits. I can see why this one's held up as the best of the Zero games, and I absolutely don't disagree with that assessment. MEGA MAN ZERO 4 (CAPCOM, 2005) I don't know if Mega Man Zero 4 is the best Mega Man there's ever been, but by God, it's my favorite. Everything negative I have to say about this game is picking at nits. I had comprehensive fun through the whole game. I might, in the grand scheme of Mega Men, even put this little plucky handheld title above 11. Holy moly. I guess I do disagree with that prior assessment after all. To start out, your weapon loadout has shuffled again, and for the first time I'm not mad about losing the spear. The shield and any sort of mobility stick are both gone, replaced by the Zero Knuckle. The Zero Knuckle is fucking fantastic. Its attack is a no-combo short-range punch which you can charge up to increase from "modest" to "pretty good" damage. Punching various stage things, such as switches, causes Zero to interact with them in some way, making it your interaction tool like the tonfa was in Zero 3. Getting the killing blow on a trash enemy with it causes Zero to rip whatever weapon they've got off them, and now instead of punching you get to use that weapon contingent on durability restrictions on some of them. This genuinely never gets old, and even though some of the weapons are total flops, I still found myself constantly ripping guns off of guys and using them instead of my actual blaster, pulling Old Reliable back out for mostly boss fights. For the first time in Mega Man history, it injects a thrill at seeing enemies pop up - perhaps a new one, what can be ripped off of him? Perhaps a reliable foe, like the Wolverine-like claw robot, which I know gives me a hefty damage and range claw stab that I can use almost as a second saber? Even bad weapons and spent guns, or anything you grab, can be thrown with a dedicated Toss button for some pretty good damage in a small explosion. This never gets obsoleted, either; the first phase of the final boss has an attack to drop big knives all over the ground and, you guessed it, punching one will pick up a 1 durability big knife that does a shitload of damage to the boss or clears other knives off the field. I can't stress how much God damn fun the Zero Knuckle was to use. Moving on, they finally nailed progression down. Techniques are back in their X4 form, being your primary form of delivering damage in different directions rather than one-stop boss killers, and you no longer have to maintain a high rank to use them. Instead, every stage has two Weathers that can be active when you select them. These weathers are, essentially, a Normal/Hard mode toggle for each stage, and taking the harder weather makes the stage more difficult in some way and lets the boss use their EX Skill, but if you beat the stage under the harder weather you get that boss's EX Skill for yourself. The Artificial Sun stage, for instance, can be entered under Clouds or Sunshine; entering under Sunshine makes the tremendous heat when you're out of the shade damage you faster and gives the boss a larger explosive attack to launch at you. It's a far better way to encourage a "harder" playthrough that gives you more options to use in battle without the insanity of the ranking systems of the previous three games. I liked it a lot. Your cyber-elves have received a huge overhaul as well, condensing into one elf. You still feed her food to level her up (from 1 to 7), and each level increases the abilities she can equip, one track for each color of elf from the previous games to always give you a red, a blue, and a green ability active. This also functions as a soft difficulty selector; you can overcharge her to get better abilities from multiple tracks, but at the cost of your rank. On top of that, there's a big jump in cost upgrading her from level 4 to level 5 that you're going to have to grind for if you want it, but the abilities she starts getting from level 5 and on are completely bonkers. In essence, Zero 4 lets you decide to go grind the elf up if the game gets too hard, without ever making it necessary to be able to play with the game's systems. It's a great compromise. The one mixed bag is the crafting system. You have a set of three body parts - head, chest, foot - that you can equip chips into, just like in Zero 3. This gets shaken up in Zero 4 in that you don't get given any chips at all for free from bosses or stages, you have to make them all from parts that drop from enemies. Each enemy drops themselves as a unique part, and you learn recipes through interacting with the humans in the refugee camp, which might cause you to want to go back to a previous stage to go get some robot parts to make something or another. That said, you don't need a recipe - if you know how to make what you want from a previous run of the game, go ahead and slap the parts into the crafting window and press the button to craft Something Unknown and you'll get your subtank or part you wanted guaranteed. I think this is a fantastic system, with the big caveat (and it's a big one) being that the game doesn't do shit to explain it. It's a great system to know how to utilize, and it benefits a lot from having a shopping list or a guide up, but going into the game without any external resources would end up just making it a huge pain in the ass, and it's too central to the game to be that way. Unfortunate to fumble at the end like this, but it's still not that big a deal in the scheme of things. Besides all those, the gameplay is Zero 3's. There's no real extra polish on it, and there didn't really need to be. Some of the bosses are asshats, some always are. The stages are generally memorable and largely fun to go through, with the game returning to the intro, your choice of eight robot masters, an intermission stage after you do any four, and endgame stages after you do all eight. There's just not much more to say. Zero 4 was fantastic, and I strongly suspect it's going to end this journey solidly on top of all the Mega Men I'll have gone through. Absolutely fucking wild for a game on the late-stage Game Boy Advance. MEGA MAN ZX (CAPCOM, 2006) The wheels came off. I've never liked Metroidvanias very much, personally. It's probably my most cancelable gaming opinion overall. I've finished only two Metroids and zero Castlesvania, and I've variously bounced off of many of the greats of the genre. Got sick of Cave Story less than two hours in. Stopped playing Hollow Knight before the first real boss. I don't know why they flop and Souls games don't except for some nebulous thing about movement tech being unlocked by completion, and yet I like Kingdom Hearts, for instance. It's very irregular, and I recognize it as a me problem, but here I am. Mega Man ZX incorporates a world map, movement tech, and backtracking into the Mega Man formula. It flops. The weird thing is that is doesn't at all flop because of the Metroidvania elements. The map for ZX isn't particularly onerous, even though back- and fore-tracking through the city gets tiring. The movement tech essentially boils down to doing the missions for Model Hx and Model Lx to get airdashes and swimming. The backtracking mostly is just looking at the map and figuring out that area H-1 probably comes off of area A-3 from context clues and the layout of the overall map. It's not great, don't get me wrong, but it isn't the issue with the game. Mega Man ZX takes the Zero formula and expands it. Instead of one Mega Man, you play as an amalgam of five Mega Men and can swap between them at-will. Each has a gimmick - being Zero, having an air dash, having a shitty programmable blaster, swimming, and whatever the hell Px does. The problem is obvious: none of them are as impactful as, say, being Zero. Splitting your kit among forms doesn't accomplish what it did in the Zero games, adding things onto a base kit. It splits fundamental things into other forms, so you never quite feel like you have the full force of your own will at your hands. On top of that, some of them are so niche that it's just binary: are you underwater? Ought to be Lx. Are you not? Eat shit for being Lx. It's a poor system that could have been better turned to making a single, comprehensive kit, like Zero 4 did. The problem then comes up in the entire rest of the game. The bosses are keyed to be beaten by forms, which combine the Zero and classic forms of the game by having you swap entire movesets to deliver elemental weaknesses. It mixes the worst of the X games into the Zero format for absolutely no gain whatsoever. The bosses themselves are no champs, either, including nothing-ass attacks alongside zero-frame dashes and homing attacks that require consecutive quick hops to avoid. They're messes. The gameplay is sped up, which would ordinarily be a blessing, but ends up being exactly proportional to the screen expansion, meaning ZX has the exact same screen crunch issues that the Zero series had. The deepest problem comes from the simple format of the game: all levels have to be designed to be gone back and forth through up until the final bits. There's none of the innovation or leaps of faith of the Zero games, no interest at all. You always have to be able to backtrack. Save points are sparse, after all, and only half of them are actual warp bonfires, more akin to Dark Souls than its successors. On top of that, because there are bonfires, ZX can't really have checkpoints. If you wipe out on a mission and get a Game Over, you go back to the last bonfire at best, which can be many screens ago depending on the layout. This comes to a head in the endgame, where you have only your lives and subtanks to get through the obligatory boss rush and final boss all in a group. It's awful. It's frustrating, because ZX really does have good fundamentals. The basic combat, the running and jumping and slaying of enemies, is as solid as it was in the Zero games, adjusting for the forms. Bosses have a bad tendency to have terrible movesets and also to fold to their elemental weaknesses, and applying those elemental weaknesses occasionally feels like shit, but none of the bosses are anywhere near the worst of the franchise if you attack them at neutral. It's just a sad series of own goals, committed without real reason, many of them because of the format shift to the DS. Sad to see. MEGA MAN ZX ADVENT (CAPCOM, 2007) Holy smokes. The wheels may have come off for ZX, but the entire fucking bus fell apart for ZX Advent. I had some grudging praise for ZX and even some things that I didn't love but felt were only gently fumbled rather than being really trashy. ZX Advent is a genuinely shit game. We've successfully plummeted from the best Mega Man has been for me to the worst in only two games. It's honestly shocking just how terrible a game Advent is, and I'm going to try to explain why that is. The first thing, and biggest shame, is as regrettable as it gets: the fundamentals suck. ZX had the protagonist's kit diluted just a little too much across six forms; Advent gives you a grand total of fourteen, and the dilution is even worse than in its predecessor. Your forms take two, uh, forms: the Mega Men from ZX, and the bosses from Advent. The Mega Men from ZX are as the tin says, but stripped gently down. Overdrive is gone, and kit tweaks have been made, such as nerfing Model Px for some reason even though he was by a distance the worst form in ZX to begin with. Advent with just Model A and the ZX forms is a shallower game than ZX was. The eight boss forms comprise the rest of the roster, and these guys are as one-note as they come. The boss forms exist only to solve a certain environmental puzzle each - Buckfire jumps high, Rospark grabs vines, Bifrost breaks blocks, etc. - and have between little and literally zero combat utility. A special shout goes to Chronoforce, who is given to you as your underwater swimming form and then you proceed through precisely one underwater section at all until you fight Model Lx, the swimming form from the previous game. Model Lx is immune to ice damage. Chronoforce can only do ice damage. Fuck you for thinking to use the swimming form in the underwater boss fight, idiot. Immediately thereafter you're given a corridor of spikes to swim through that Chronoforce is too big to fit through. Beyond that, the game's just poorly laid-out. I said that the Metroidvania elements of ZX weren't to blame for its lackluster performance, but they're front-and-center of why Advent sucked. The stages that the game is organized into, equivalent to the sectors of ZX, are poorly connected and, bluntly, just bad. It's the worst of all worlds, a disconnected set of traditional Mega Man stages that pretend to be part of an interconnected world that you occasionally have to return to and scout out (read: Google) where the next objective is going to be. The stages themselves are designed to be gone back and forth through, like ZX, but are now chock full of bullshit platforming, douchey enemy placement, and a half-dozen different single sprites that you have to remember that Rospark or Vulturon is the right guy to solve that because you never bring them out unless you're solving that one sprite. The game also inherits ZX's poor checkpointing. Take your three lives and go forth; a Game Over returns you not to the last interim warp stone that you activated, but rather to the last bonfire you rested at. Bonfires are only at the end of sectors and in the hub, losing the save-only bonfires of ZX, so it's entirely possible that a certain boss or a certain level can take you back a half-hour of progess or more. Nothing's stopping you from farming more lives, though, so it's just a tax on not wanting to waste time to ensure that time isn't wasted later. It's a deeply terrible system strapped onto a deeply terrible game. This comes to a head in the endgame. ZX required you to go through the entire eight-robot-master boss rush and the final boss in a single set of lives. Advent requires this too, but it throws the single most punishing instant-death platforming stage in between the two. My first time through, I went into the boss rush with five banked lives, left the eight fights with three left, and didn't even make it to the multi-phase final boss. The checkpoint is before the cutscenes that begin the endgame, let alone the stage leading up to the boss rush, let alone the boss rush. This would be bafflingly poor design in the mid-90s. It's 2007. Bioshock is out. If the intent is that the player should show mastery by beating all eight robot masters and a hellish stage and the final boss after all that: why? What was the intent here? I think it's nothing more or less than a lack of foresight and imagined systems not being planned out with any sort of rigor. I'm also going to be petty and attack something I haven't done since 8: Advent is cringe. The X and Zero games (including ZX) have been on an increasing trend of more story, more cutscenes, more plot overall, and it's been largely for the worse. Advent goes whole hog into that and, worst of all, forces you to always be in Model A for the cutscenes. Not only are you subjected to juvenile writing and (occasionally party-bad) voice acting, but every single thing you interact with restores you to Model A, and sometimes things that you don't interact with do as well. Cross a threshold and there's some plot to be had? You're put back into Model A and you go through the dialogue. Go into a boss room? Chances are pretty good you'll be turned into Model A for the conversation. Want to activate a warp zone? Weirdly, this turns you back into Model A. It's so much stupid wasted time transforming on top of the actual plot, which is so much nothing. It's only an annoyance, but it's an annoyance on top of a terrible game, which makes it all the more notable. All this combines to make a game that's just never any fun. It's a grueling exercise in getting better at the game to make progress, possibly constantly being thrown back depending on your skill, and having a kit that never seems to have quite the right answers to the enemies being thrown at you unless you happen into the right one (of fourteen). It is, in all honesty, a bad game. I am more than sorry that I played it at all. I will never play it again. God willing, I will never think about it again. Z-CHASER This is the Challenge Mode for this pack. Z-Chaser essentially gives you a "normal" and a "hard" stage for each of the six games in the pack and asks you to time attack through each, with the goal being an S-rank time (peculiarly, the middle medal out of five) in every one. The normal stage is taken from the first half and the hard stage from the back half of each game, sometimes even just being the intro and endgame stages themselves. The standard of play demanded isn't terribly exacting, more like the original Legacy Collection sandwiched between the brainlessness of the X Challenge and the brutal rigor of 11's Dr. Light's Trial. One cool thing, at least, is that you can choose to watch the run that each medal's time is based on, so if you want the pro strats to conquer S-rank you can go watch the insane ZZ-rank ghost's run and then try to emulate it. There isn't much to say about these that wouldn't be reflected by or just pulled directly from the respective game's post, so what I will talk about instead is the wrapper that the challenges are baked into. In a set of astonishingly unnecessary menu nesting, you're given your choice of the three modes (solo, multiplayer, and "leaderboard"), and then given your choice of the six games, and then given your choice of the two difficulties, and then given your choice of the five difficulties of race ghost, and then you get put into a prep screen where you can sort out your equipment and to choose if you want to watch the ghost (and play in a really tiny window) or not. Z-Chaser itself doesn't have an options menu; the options are here separately for each difficulty. That means that, for instance, if you rebind the Zero buttons to map to what you've been using in Mega Man all along, square to shoot and X to jump, you have to rebind them individually for every single one of the twelve stages. It's not a dealbreaker, it's just baffling, especially when the games share the same basic control scheme throughout and even then only add buttons, never taking any away. This system only works for someone who has the very specific muscle memory to want their subweapon on a different button in Zero vs. ZX, and you can't tell me that's a significant subset of people. In a specific hatecrime targeted against only me, the Zero 4 stages are both really short and easy, and the ZX Advent stages are both really long. WRAP-UP As with the previous collections, there's an achievement for looking at concept art and an achievement for listening to music. The concept art one is a little misleading - it says to look at 30 cards "across all six titles" when it really means look at 30 cards for each game, totaling 180. The music one doesn't put a secret track into the music player, but rather bizarrely asks you to listen to three songs per game in the music player and then beat a game and watch its credits through. Strange as hell to do, but I had a backup save I made right before the final boss of Zero 2 for some reason so I just reran that to wrap everything up. On the plus side, that means my last scrap of gameplay was good instead of ZX Advent! With that, I've now beaten twenty-five Mega Men for achievements and an extra one for some reason. Am I a Mega Fan? Not especially, there's a whole lot of chaff in the franchise, but the quality of the games generally went up with time, even though it was always a bit all over the place. When Mega Man 12 inevitably happens I'll definitely give it a try, why not. I'm finally out of Mega Men. I've got no plans to play Battle Network, and there's no way I'm going to play the gacha, so there's quite literally nothing left for me on Steam. Sayonara, Mega Man. Hell, if I'm being honest: sayonara, Zero. You gave me some great goddamn times. Here's the final ranking: Z4 > 11 > Z3 > Z2 > X4-0 > Z > 4 > X2 > X1 > 9 > X5 > 7 > ZX > 6 > 2 > 10 > X4-X > X7 > X8 > 5 > X3 > 8 > 1 > & Bass > 3 > X6 > Advent

skill issue, but regrettably i can't define why lies of piss clicked for me even more than fromsoft's own output. "sekiro with tighter deflect timings" scans to my own experience, but i found p's deflect timing more intuitive than sekiro's even was. it's a game that demands you play it very differently from the soulses and isn't very compromising if you don't figure it out. the best i can offer is to fuck around with the weapon-building system, particularly with the crushing-type ones (the shock and police batons were early favorites) and play more aggressively and less parry than you might think you should a problematic fave, to be sure e: i'll say this much: p didn't really click until like the halfway point, and even then two of the bosses around that point are complete indefensible horseshit

genuine lol

CATS HIDDEN AROUND THE WORLD (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2024) Finished: 7/7/24. Playtime: 2.9 hours. Travellin Cats goes for quantity over quality. Fourteen proper levels, a 'final' level in Antarctica, and then five bonus levels that were prototypes that turned out too easy so the guys tossed them in anyway. A hundred cats each, for a total of two thousand. It turns out about how you'd expect from the description. Each level has less care put into it than the dollar standalones, with only a single non-cat thing each to click to make a small noise (the best being in New York City, a hot dog stand you can click to make the New Yorkest guy yell HOT DOGS!!!!). The cats cleave a little too closely to the lazier "how can I get a cat to fit into this geometry" rather than the generally more organic laydowns of the standalones, but I think it's more a consequence of going for this size of game rather than any indictment of the developer. It's still a good time, and the Antarctica level in particular is a whole banger. Two Cats in a row because I'm in a peculiar rut of two games (Boltgun and Powerwash Simulator) both releasing DLCs within like a week of each other, a fresh Final Fantasy XIV expansion to run through, and no fewer than four simultaneous games that are big enough to get pre-written posts in Notepad++ as I chug through. Yes, one is a Mega Man.

similar to games you've played: warhammer 40,000 boltgun doubt

haha this one broke a four-way tie, my franchise tallies on steam on this roster are now cleanly Like A Dragon in first with ten, Final Fantasy with nine, and then Travellin Cats with six awesome the other three franchises that were tied up with five each were call of duty, dark souls, and sonic, for the curious

CATS HIDDEN IN CHINA (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2024) Finished: 26/4/24. Playtime: 24 minutes. The cats - and please bear with me here - are in China. This one just got its profile features unlocked after hitting the mystical Steam threshold for "legitimacy", so into the thread it goes. Travellin Cats Guy continues to hone his craft. Everything's just a little shinier: nifty art, little interactions to click on, slightly better performance and improvements to the hint system, so on. China in particular is one of the better ones done so far, with only a few brutal cats in the obligatory hundred that got got me to use the hints. I had fun. I like clickin' this guy's cats. A cool thing they've started doing is offering the gameworld art as a high-resolution PDF for an extra less-than-a-dollar, either for export to a digital art program or printing to make a coloring book. I think that's cute.

lol go for it hoss no problems here