Weak franchises

I was thinking that the movie franchise equivalent to Mega Man vs. Mega Man X (in terms of quality, disregarding that the two series are related) is probably Friday the 13th vs. Hellraiser. With Friday the 13th, you know exactly what you're going to get - it's never going to be particularly great or special, but it's never going to go off the rails either (except the one time it did, catastrophically, with Mega Man 8 GOES TO HELL). Hellraiser starts off genuinely great and hits one solid riff on that, takes a wrong turn but is still kind of tolerable for a few more entries*, completely jumps off a direct-to-video cliff by the fifth, and hangs around for four more things and a reboot that no one was asking for.

*I hated HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE ("in space") until I saw its pathetic shadow EVENT HORIZON.

What I'm Playing, May '14

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

More catch-up on unfinished posts. Again, the ones with long summaries I actually wrote back in May and the others will just get a sentence. Never gonna get these done if I keep giving every game a huge essay. Next up is the summer list. 

Games Finished (that never had a Started entry):

Mega Man V (Game Boy / 3DS VC)

Really like the execution of level themes in this game and its downplaying of gimmicks in favor of small unique moments.

Mega Man Xtreme (Game Boy Color / 3DS VC)

The Game Boy Megas Man were really all over the place. Dr. Wily's Revenge is a semi-port of Mega Man that retools the level design, Mega Man V is 100% original, and now there's Mega Man Xtreme, a mixed port of X and X2. Four stages are drawn from each game and strictly recreated here, so while the level design remains brilliant because the first two X games are, there's also no need to play this game if you have access to the SNES titles (which, if you own a SNES, PS2, Gamecube, Wii, or Wii U, you do). There are a few things that set Xtreme apart as distinctly worse: 1.) Select is the dash button, which is really pretty awful on a 3DS, 2.) the gameplay is a little crunched down to fit the smaller screen (enemies missing here and there), 3.) the level selection doesn't cohere since it was taken from two different games, 4.) most of the collectibles are gone and 5.) when you charge your gun (aka all the time) the lead guitar track cuts out of the music, making this the rhythm-only version of the X/X2 soundtrack.

Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360)

Spec Ops: The Pretty Good Story about PTSD That Wasn't as Much an Adaptation of Heart of Darkness as People / The Game Itself Said It Was. And would have been more effective with less shooting, to be completely honest. If it's supposed to be mind-numbing and emotionally dulling, mission accomplished, but we were there by the halfway point.

Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires (Xbox 360)

The Dynasty Warriors: Empires games are a sub-series all their own, having run for five or six games now (they started at 3). They use the same engine as their main series counterparts but instead of focusing on character variety and bosses, they shift the focus to tactics. It seems a little silly that at this point "Empires" isn't just a mode in the main games, since I can't imagine them having separate audiences. Just a cheap move by Koei to inflate sales from their die-hard fans.

Anyway, worth an extra purchase or not, DW6: Empires is a solid game. Like in DWG3, the player is still conquering territories by grinding through troops at enemy bases, but enemy commanders don't play as big a role in the action, functioning as HP sinks more than bosses. The movesets are extremely basic, allowing room for tactics to take over as the key gameplay element. Each map is wide open and contains almost a dozen bases and enemy armies, meaning there are far more critical points to the battle. Because the enemies are so plentiful and widespread, the player needs to take advantage of their ability to pause the game and issue attack and defense orders to allies. The game feels more along the lines of Battalion Wars or Battlestations than pure action, as winning requires the full utilization of the player force.

The strategic over-map (familiar to anyone who's romanced the three kingdoms) is more a stage select than anything, offering far too few options to make for real macro-strategy. Still, Empires seems to provide a nice middle ground between the tough arena fighting of the main series and pure turn-based tactics.

Games Started:

Tomb Raider (Xbox 360)

Basically the same gameplay style as Resident Evil 5, this shines when it breaks into exploration of broad climbforming hubs, but does so too infrequently and bores with it's scripted mini-game segments.

Lone Survivor (PC / Steam)

If you've ever said to yourself, "what would happen if I made Resident Evil into a sidescrolling pixelated thing and gave the player character the ravenous hunger of Ultima VII's Avatar", then you've played, sealed, and delivered Lone Survivor. See you're in this post-apocalyptic world and there are zombies and you can only shoot in three directions so to get headshots you gotta get real close but worse than ammo scarcity is food scarcity and also your little dude is going insane (maybe? or is the world going insane?!) so you're forced to trek out into the wilderness and keep moving to keep fed. So maybe it's like Don't Starve meets Eternal Darkness. There's some neat mystery going on (that of course as all insanity-based games threatens to get overindulgent) and a bit of old-timey adventuring of the go-find-the-scissors-to-cut-through-the-skin-wall variety. It's definitely thrilling to duck through a dark passage and have no clue where in time or space it may lead. I generally like the tiny graphics, as it reminds me that part of the horror of older games was the power of imagination. The old rule is that what you don't see is scariest, but I'd say that what you can only kinda-sorta half make out is even scarier. Trying to figure out what the fuck I'm even looking at can get some twisted possibilities running through my head and be even stranger than the often bland cut-and-dry 3D of modern horror.

The low-res art looks great on the environments but a lot of the monsters come out looking more silly than scary

Moon Chronicles: Episode 1 or whatever (Nintendo DS / 3DS eShop)

This was a shockingly boring game that wasn't survival horror at all, more like a spaced out visual novel whose remaining episodes I certainly will not be playing. Also, how many Alien references do you need in one game?

Andrew's 2013 GOTY People's Choice Awards Hosted By Woody Allen and His Cat

What a year. Some of us started our careers, others traveled to distant lands to seek their fortune, and still others found talent and promise where it was least expected. The start of a new year is a time to reflect on the big and small: how much weight did I gain from Christmas/New Year's Eve/general eating habits? What am I doing with my life? How can I prioritize my video game/reading/netflix habits to optimize my entertainment utility?

I don't subscribe to New Year's resolutions, because they've never been effective for me. As someone who spends regular hours in the gym, I'm familiar enough with the new-year-rush, just as I'm familiar with the new-years-scoffing-at-the-new-years-rush. The folks doing the scoffing are *hopefully* people, like me, who at some point made going to the gym a full-fledged habit in their lives, and not just assholes who role in once a month. I go to the gym because it's something that I do. I used to avoid it, then later, looked forward to it. Now it really is just one of the few ways I spend my time; I get a very subdued satisfaction from it. Not a "wooo im being healthy and shit" feel-good moment, but a simpler and less pretentious high. All this to say that I believe there are absolutely positive changes folks can make in the new year, going to the gym more often being a classic example with which I am familiar. But I didn't start going to the gym because it was new year, I started because I didn't like how I looked and didn't like how many other people were stronger than me.

Working out, particularly weight-lifting, has taught me that we really can change things about ourselves given the right circumstances and sheer will power. Maybe not the core things, like being a generally shitty person or a kleptomaniac or something like that, but we can play around the edges. Sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, we can change our habits simply by making the decision to.

But christ is it hard. And that's why I at least can't make fun of the guy in the gym whose visits' periodicity decreases from 2 January onward. You might as well try, because even though chances are slim that whatever habit you're trying to form will stick, there's still a chance, and you're certainly not losing anything by spending a couple hours on the treadmill giving it a shot, wheezing, and looking like hell. If the start of a new calendar year gives you an excuse to role the dice on quitting smoking, or posting more on the blog, then it's as good a reason as any.

Wait what games did I like this year? Greg L. had one game, I have a few quick hits for you:

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

Not done this one yet, but it really is the most polished game I've played in quite sometime. Much of the game play is straight out of the original, but the environment is neat and pretty, the mechanics tidy, and the puzzles fall right in that sweet spot (maybe just my sweet spot) of being easy enough not to slow me down but difficult enough that you get that single second of satisfaction from figuring out how to light the cob-webs on fire, or get the crystal out of the frozen refrigerator. LM: DM really demonstrates that yes, Nintendo first party games really are all we can expect me to play on my 3DS.

Mega Man 2

I was telling Yourself I should get some badge for beating this game for the first time, welcoming me into the Classic Gamers Club for the Insecure and the Neck-bearded. Tons of fun, and really distilled for me (see LM:DM above) why a little dollop of difficulty can in fact sometimes make a game better, despite my inclinations. Plus, man is the music good. You really don't hear catchy melodies like some of the best in MM2 in games anymore; we've moved towards music that emphasizes the atmospherics of the game more than shooting for good music in and of itself. And I'm not even a particularly big fan of chip-tunes.

Mighty Switch Force



I really didn't know what to expect from this game going in, but I was pleasantly surprised. Like MM2, it's challenging without being infuriating, taking a simple mechanic to its absolute gameplay limits. With a button press you make blocks around the stage become insubstantial while instantaneously other nega-blocks (get the reference??) become safe for landing. You play a curvacious-toon she-cop hunting curvacious-toon, scantly-clad she-lawbreakers, maneuvering around the stage with timed jumps combined with timed block switches. The game does a good job of making the puzzles a good mix of thinking and....well doing, as often to successfully navigate the player must plan well in advance but also be react quickly to an unaccounted for twist. This game is cheap and absolutely worth the money. Starting the second shortly.
 
Dishonored



Yourself did a very good (he pays me to compliment him on the blog) write-up of this one closer to its release, but I'm not one to play a game near its release and I am one to write about games that have been much-discussed. I didn't get the whole point Yourself was trying to make about killing, in the game, being super-meaningful or whatever hippy bullshit he was trying to pull. What I can say is that it was a super-well done stealth game in an interesting if not cohesive (wait whats the deal with the cult and the powers and how's it tie in with every other damn thing?) world. Most of the missions, which take place episodically, were unique jaunts, and the paths to murder varied. I might actually play this one again, which I think speaks to how successfully they pull off the role playing aspects...I went all stealth the first time, I wouldn't mind experimenting more with the weapons in game.

Final Fantasy VII



Yep this is on this list. I've played a lot of JRPGs in my day, but somehow managed to avoid one of the "greats" for this long. I honestly think if I had played it at age 13, it would no question be my favorite game of all time, despite my desire to disassociate myself with anything as wildly popular as FF7. There's so much to love here and no one needs me to go through it, especially no one reading this blog. But 16 years post-release there was enough about the controls, finding my way through prerendered mazes, and back-tracking to keep it from being one of the most epic and fulfilling gaming experiences of my life. I guess it's no surprise looking at the list above, but it had been a while since FF7 since I finished a game and truly missed it with all said and done. Still though, I'm not spending hours breeding chocobos. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Who sucks more? Mega Man 7

A long time ago I had an interesting idea that Greg and I would present cases for which game was worse, Mega Man 7 or Mega Man 8. After replaying (about half of) and collecting notes on Mega Man 7, it was hard to maintain enthusiasm to carry on with the endeavor, as I wasn't sure I was willing to waste more of my life playing two games I completely hate in the most uneducational way possible. They're just so boringly bad in that all of their failures are the collected failures of all of the previous Mega Men without any mitigating strengths. Mega Man 7 at the very least is the poster child for a game that fails at the conceptual level and is in no regard worth playing by anyone. It is a void of any idea ever. But that's enough sunshines and sunbows - I now present to you my original, real-time notes on Mega Man 7 (with some slight comparisons to 8). I was just going through old documents and noticed these and actually found them kinda funny, so enjoy. If you've played MM7, you'll know what I'm talkin' 'bout. If you haven't, sit back and enjoy the entire experience of the game condensed into about a hundred words. 

a funnyman's game (mettaur joke)

sprites so big it's painful (one enemy on screen at a time)

gimmicks are old as hell (air man, ice man)

lots of colorful characters (bass, auto, etc)

the shop which is the stupidest thing ever

really fucking dumb bosses (cloud man, junk man (dust man ripofff), an ice guy, burt's man, fucking racecar man, slash beast?)

For the first time ever in a Mega Man game, fight Snidely Whiplash!

weapon sequence isn't clear but that's nothing new

both games only do four bosses at a time

elevator sequence in junk man

intro and middle stages

environmental power puzzle - using electricity in junkman

junk man's stage didn't have much going on, no gimmick. it's junk

get stuck in the junk in the boss room

those invincible spinny back and forth enemies that are in every game come up too often

fucking polar bears

you have to find rush powers like in an X game

junk beats ice... of course!

very weak gimmicks, just kind of an amalgam of other similarly themed ones

Rush search is so dumb

the ice cracker fires ice bullets, right?

yes, and the bullets will split when they hit the ground.

bomb puzzles in burst man... again, after mm5 and 6. 8 has the bombs that walk around and those are neat

burst man chemistry - who would ever use beakers that big? someone with a shrink ray.

ground-sticking spinny things you stop by shooting are in every level so far (maybe) and seem to be invincible to most powers

when metools shoot, it makes the sound that wonderboy 3 makes when you swing your sword

got sent back to the beginning of burst man a lot

mega man is at the very top of the screen during the rising portion of burst man

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And right there after about five stages is I think where we stopped, or stopped taking notes. That game! I feel confident I won't return to this because I feel confident that there is very little chance I will play Mega Man 7 ever again. Got I hate that game.

What I'm Playing, Junely '13

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

It's pronounced "june-LYE". Because once again we're stuck between months, because I forgot when something ended and then a whole week passed and then it was like oh no my life is flashing before my eyes. It's summer, so new games aren't coming out, especially because a new console generation is on the horizon, but it's not like new games ever stopped me before.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (Game Boy / 3DS VC)

Despite Capcom having released up to as many as like I dunno I think six Mega Men on 3DS Virtual Console, only ONE of those is from the Game Boy Mega Man series (which itself contained five unique games). Because this is Capcom we're talking about, so they need to milk stuff they've already released - you know, those NES Mega Man games that were already re-released as a collection on GCN and PS2, then re-re-released on Wii Virtual Console? Where the hell are the fucking Game Boy Mega Mans?! Don't you worry, because I wrote on my Wily's Revenge post-play survey at Club Nintendo that if Nintendo doesn't get on Capcom to release these games, something bad is going to happen. Yes I fill out those surveys. You get 10 coins for it! That's like 1/10th of a free game!

Anyway. Wily's Revenge. Considering that the original NES series teetered on the brink of tolerability, often slipping into shit (MM1 and MM3 in particular), you'd worry that a Game Boy entry would certainly fall on the crap side. I know I did. Surprisingly, though it may be a bit tame, Wily's Revenge is awfully competent and occasionally even surpasses its console brothers with smart design twists. In particular it displays my favorite use of fuzzy blocks to date (to be elucidated in a later article) and one of the cooler boss weapons up to this point in the series, Enker's Reflecto-Shield. The game is short and the levels largely in the class of easy forgettability recognizable from MM1's Bomb and Cut Man stages, but it's a fun taste of Mega Man worthy of a look from fans.

Games Started:

Bad Bots (PC/Steam)

More like Bad Game! Eh, that was a cheap shot. Plus it's not a bad game. So double cheapshot. Basically I'm an asshole. Bad Bots was a relatively minor indie release on Steam that probably isn't benefiting from the hovering Metacritic average of fucking 40-something. It's not exactly innovative, but something this competently made by such a small (single-man) team at a low price-point hardly deserves that kind of derision. It's fun, it's unique to look at, it offers enough linear progression to distinguish itself from the litany of free Flash/mobile games out there, and it's fucking fun. Sorry if side-scrolling twin-stick shooters aren't en vogue anymore - anyone who likes them is sure to like Bad Bots. As is anyone who likes heavily saturated pulp-style scifi artwork. It's definitely not a must-buy, but the demo is worth a try, and if developers like Point 5 saw the same kind of cash flow as garbage-brains like Twisted Pixel and Team Meat, we'd have a much more colorful indie marketplace. Normally I'd complain that the writing is embarrassingly terrible, but it'd be kinda hard for the sole writer - who isn't a native English speaker - to be too embarrassed by his script.

Minecraft: Xbox Edition (what platform do you think?)

Never before has a game pioneered so quickly going from so addictively fun to so forgettably boring. Come on spell-check, your suggested corrections for "forgettably" are "forgettable" and "unforgettably"? How can those both be in the dictionary but "forgettably" isn't? What a mad, mad world we live in. This is like the time I killed that kid.

I'm exaggerating of course. He survived with fourth degree burns covering most of his body. But Minecraft certainly has the fun dynamic of like... those Flash games I played in the student center to kill free periods in high school. Kinda tedious at first, then it gets exciting, then it's just plain awesome, then around the three hour mark it's completely peaked and I move on. What was that one? Defend Your Castle or something? Minecarp is Defend Your Castle for a new generation. A generation where that is by far the most profitable business model in gaming. Could it at least have fucking quests or something? Why not just play with Legos?

See, I'm like a steelworker: I kill what I eat. See, I'm like a hunter gatherer: I kill what I eat. See, I'm like a bricklayer: I kill what I eat. See, see, I'm like a murderer: I kill what I eat. That's my description of Minecraft, and/or the lyrics to "Steelworker". Your call.

Mysterious Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer (SNES)

Broooooooooooooo! Or is he???

If there's one thing I sometimes do, it's follow through on my promises here on this blog. So I played a bit'o roguelike in Chunsoft's original Shiren the Wanderer. Surprisingly, the game is damn fun - there's a gratifying responsiveness to the turn-based real-time action, the randomized floors are just the right size to feel unique but not labyrinthine, and the action comes fast and furious. Tying it all together of course is that one-death-ends-it-all tension that makes every rare reward feel even rarer. Unfortunately, I've now died so many times that I have a hard time reveling in any particular treasure, knowing that just around the corner some random-ass trap is probably gonna take it away from me.

Gradius II: Gofer's Ambition (Turbo-Grafx 16)

Konami riffing on Alien? I refuse to believe it!

The history of Gradius II is a bit odd - I'd actually like to do a feature comparing the NES and Arcade iterations of the game, as they're so completely different that they're essentially different games. What Japan got on the Turbo-Grafx (the US didn't get the game at all) is supposedly a pretty direct arcade port, one that will feel suspiciously familiar to any veteran of Gradius III. While II may lack III's coolest upgrade over the original (and the rest of the series), the customizable weapon sets, it otherwise parallels its graphics, music, and gameplay mechanics. Where the two differ is that Gradius II is really fucking hard. Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but after a few weeks with the game and dozens of runs, I can barely get through level 3. By comparison, I could beat the first five stages of Gradius III basically just by looking at them. II is almost like the Lost Levels of this series. 

Games Finished:

Saints Row The Third (Xbox 360)

Play through all two alternate endings! Experience morality choices like you could never dreamed was true! Man the ending of this game was dumb as hell. I was just excited that they finally gave me the chance to let a member of my "crew" die. Of course the game tried to make that feel super morally ambiguous or something and was all like "AH HOPE IT WAS WERT IT, DAWG", and I was like, hell yeah it was. That bitch was a stupid bitch. She did nothing but bitch and moan the entire game. She extremely deserved to die.

The climactic battle against the main villain is immensely unfun and ill-conceived. See, he's a luchadore, so the only way to defeat him is quick-time events. That's what I said. It's not like it was hard, but I was pretty pissed when the game glitched out and left me wandering around the ring for ten minutes mashing the attack button and thinking I was making progress, only to learn (after giving up and going online) that a QTE had failed to trigger and I had to reload my last save file. Weirdly (or thankfully), this battle isn't the end of the game, being followed by two 'cooldown' missions determined by the aforementioned moral choice. The better of the two sees the player take to Mars for one final confrontation with the villain (hmm... wonder if Volition reused their Mars assets from the Red Faction series...).

My final takeaway from this game: about halfway through, there was a zombie mission, and I thought to myself: for all the mayhem this game touts, how come there's no chainsaw melee weapon? Then at the end of the game, you do get a chainsaw. So good on 'em for including the chainsaw, but a little too late, no?

Anarchy Reigns: To be damned by optimism

Before I get any further, let me clarify that I have NOT played Anarchy Reigns. It merely represents the latest in an unfortunate trend of games: those with good ideas reliant on community support.

Let me give you the ice cream on Anarchy Reigns, since no one has heard of it. You should have, since it's the pseudo-sequel to MadWorld, one of the best action games of this generation, and since that of course means it's developed by Platinum Games, developers responsible (sometimes by different names) for everything from Devil May Cry to Okami to Bayonetta. MadWorld was basically a modernized Streets of Rage - sizable open-ended stages without linear guidance were stocked with respawning goons, mid-bosses, death-traps, and mini-games. Anarchy Reigns expands this into a giant continuous open-world brawl. Since it's just a big city full of hostile brawlers, why not fill it with human combatants? Because, after all, the Internet is a place of magic and wonder.

This is a pretty good idea. It's less ambitious (i.e. more reasonable) in scope than an MMO, but still dense enough to offer a repeatably unique challenge. You just can't replicate human behavior and unpredictability, even with today's high-tech technological advances in technology. This comes with an inherent risk: every role needs an actor, and they need to be present at all times for the show to go on. Without players fully populating matches, all you're left with is an idea on a drawing board. A great idea, but gamers can't play an idea. Only ghosts can do that.

That's a risk that any multiplayer-centric game takes, but it's a much smaller barrier to overcome in, for instance, a 1v1 fighting game that only requires you to have one friend and allows you to sit in the same room and share a copy of the game. Tatsunoko vs. Capcom had no reason to be successful, but since I could always find at least one person online, or just get a friend to swing by, all was well. Hinging your entire concept on the notion that there will always be like hundreds of people playing requires A.) a giant budget and marketing campaign (Call of Duty, WoW) or B.) a heart full of hopes, dreams, butterflies, and optimism. Sometimes someone strikes gold. Other times it's Anarchy Reigns.

The thing that bugs me is that Sega, Platinum, and everyone involved had to know that the game wasn't going to be popular enough to sustain an online community. MadWorld sold like 35 copies. It's full of weird subject matter, super-mature content, poor graphics, and was launched at a terrible time for this type of title, against the likes of Capcom's gargantuan Devil may Cry and Platinum's own (for a different publisher of course) Metal Gear Rising: Revengreances. That's not a recipe for success. So is this a case where we can say the game is genuinely bad for hedging a bet that definitely wasn't going to pay off? Platinum knew there wasn't going to be community support, but they propped up the game with it anyway. Isn't that the same as developing an offline single-player platformer where there's a 95% chance the game will crash after stage 1? Even if stages 2 and on are the most brilliantly designed levels in history, it doesn't matter if you don't get to play them.

Americans completely eat up weird shit like this, right? Wait, I forgot my "not a completely moronic thing to say" hat this morning.

Yeah, Anarchy Reigns has the token single-player mode, and I guess that ought to be fun. It's almost enough to get me to buy the game, just because I can't get enough Platinum combat. But that's clearly a patch on the giant gaping damned-from-the-start black hole of the would-be multiplayer beat-'em-up. In the analogy above, the single-player is the equivalent of a stage 1.

Anarchy Reigns is far from the only offender. Look at Castlevania: Harmony of Despair or the thankfully canceled Mega Man Universe. It's good to experiment, but sticking a power-drill into your pupil isn't an experiment. As a gamer I just shake my head - this is Sega's mistake and their loss, not mine. As to an alternative solution, how we could make that great idea actually come to life... well that would take the genuine commitment of a company with a genuine budget. That discussion is the territory of marketing, not game design, and one that seems could use a heaping dose of common sense.

Back in the CCCR - I don't know, some game [looks like it ended up being Mega Man X]

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!

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

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?

Man Clash Man's level sucks anyway who cares

it's just another in the litany of gimmicks that makes Mega Man 2 one of the most painful of the series to play through

sure the stages are "unique" and "memorable", but that isn't exactly to its credit when what you remember about every last one is "okay I DON'T want to play that stage"

and jesus Ezio it's Mega Man not Megaman, this isn't Holy Factual Inaccuracy Batman (not Bat Man)