Lordy lordy what an ill-advised feature. Whose stupid idea was this? The worst part is that it was the original idea for the ENTIRE BLOG. And you think you have it bad now.
I have no idea how to choose games to Back in the CCCR. Any suggestions? That's half the reason I put it off all the time; the other half is that I can't write it when I'm anywhere but home, because I have to play the game to review its menus. It's not like I store them in my head. Hm, maybe I ought to take an hour or two one day at home, go through a dozen or two games taking notes, and write the reviews later based on the notes. That would actually be a... good idea.
How was that little vacation through my thought process? Pretty interesting stuff, right? That's what I call river-of-consciousness writing, and I've already copyrighted, patented, and litigated that word, so don't even try. Jimmy Joyce'd be proud. That sellout bastard. So uh, until I do the thing I just said I was gonna do, allow me to write one of the few Back in the CCCR's I can do from memory: Mega Man X.
Hey, that old boy just made an appearance in the last post! What is this, some kind of corporate Capcom shill blog? Next you're gonna want me to go buy a Pepsi.
Yes, I would like you to buy a Pepsi. All I wanted was a Pepsi. Just one Pepsi. And she wouldn't give it to me! So go buy a 2-liter today at your local Giant grocery store! At the low low price of $0.99! Pepsi has never tasted this good, and this cheap!
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| The original Pepsi marketing department |
Wonder if I can get sued for that. For prices this low I mean. So low they can't be legal! Luckily the odds of a live person finding this blog are about the same as the Angels winning the pennant. Then we can be a family again! It never occurred to me at age 7 just how ridiculous is the concept of that movie. I guess that's the idea; kids don't understand sarcasm. That's why it was the greatest film ever made! (Ebert preferred Little Big League, but what does he know). Was the lesson in the end that his family actually did get back together because he believed, or that you shouldn't use figurative language around kids unless you want them to be really disappointed? I'm not reading the wikipedia, you do it.
I've played Mega Man X about a thousand times and each and every last time I have to take a detour into the options screen to set my controls. That's right, MMX let's you reassign all of your face and shoulder buttons freely. Spectators have asked me "how do you wall-jump/dash/charge so fluidly?" The answer, of course, is that the default controls are kinda stupid, because they make this nigh-impossible. Y for shoot, A for dash, and B for jump. The obvious evolution you can see this makes on classic Mega Man is that dash function, and the key to effective play of X is combining this speed with precision wall-jumping. How the fuck are you supposed to combine that with charging a shot when it requires three face buttons? The answer is simple: re-assign dash to one of the shoulders. High-level play is outright impossible without doing so. Of course, later Mega Man series (Zero, ZX) wised up and put it there by default.
The Verdict? Mega Man X gets a: Control customization saved this game from ruination out of 10
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| If some genius at Capcom was able to figure out in 1993 that giving the player full control customization can allow playability beyond what the developers had envisioned, why nearly 20 years later do I still need to be writing this feature? |
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