As promised, a video example of the principle I was discussing last time out. To review, the concept was that Spider-Man 2 is inherently a twitchy, spastic game and chaining multiple high-speed actions tends to see compounding chaos and failure.  Accordingly, skillful play is mostly about taking advantage of the portions you can control well to simplify the approach to the parts you can’t.

Before we finish this series, maybe I’ll come up with a pithy term for that concept.

I usually avoid embeds, but I think that’s probably appropriate for a post like this:

Approaching checkpoint #2: 0:16 – 0:25 – That initial plunge down to street level is lovely, isn’t it?  But we care about what comes after.  If you’ve played Spider-Man 2 at all, you know that you move fastest when swinging.  If you have a long distance to cover, aspire to ABS: always be swinging.

But I approach checkpoint 2 with just two swings, including big, lazy arcs after releasing.  If you look at 0:23 in the video, you can see why.  I want to hit that building at exactly the same altitude as the wallsprint checkpoint.  It’s a short bit of wallsprinting and a very quick release after the checkpoint.  There’s no time to adjust once I’m on the wall, so I make sure my entry trajectory is just right.

Approaching checkpoint #3: 0:24 – 0:31 – Next up is an orbit around a roof antenna.  (I guess they’re antennas?  Random girders sticking straight up from the tops of buildings.)  Just one swing on the approach, fairly straightforward.  Again I manage altitude so that I’m just about level with the checkpoint when I web.  The two things to consider with orbits are the radius of the circle and the entry point.

Why?  Because Spidey is fucking fast.  What you really care about is where you fly off when you release the orbit.  In some games, you could probably accomplish the exit you wanted no matter how you entered.  But here you can’t, at least not consistently.  If you tried to just eye up the right release timing, you’d often fly off in terrible directions.  Instead, I’m going to release the orbit as soon as I hear the sound indicating that it’s complete: after exactly one full spin.  That’s predictable and repeatable.  So my entry point will define my exit.

So how does that apply here?  As I approach the antenna, my eyes are on the next large skyscraper further down the street.  It’s the building I’ll be swinging past at 0:34.  I wrap around the right side of the checkpoint, line up with that building then fire my web just as I’m square with it.  My release actually fires me about 45 degrees off to the left of where I want to go, which is about the norm.

Approaching checkpoint #4: 0:30 – 040 – Well, this is a combination of the elements from the last two approaches.  Two more long, lazy swings.  Rapid swings with minimal airtime between are fast, but they don’t allow adjustment time to line up approaches.  The hit on the swings is worthwhile to create a repeatable experience on the skill elements.

Yes, I just made up the term “skill elements” to cover orbits, loops, walljumps, wallsprints and poleswings.

Entry point for the orbit?  My target for the next checkpoint is that building just to the right with the red sign around the top.  You’ll see that I line myself up with it before I web, and come out of the orbit heading right towards it.  I time this release better than the previous one, and my incoming and outgoing trajectories are almost identical.

You can enjoy the sex appeal of the rest of the challenge without further commentary.

I’m still lacking a clever name for the principle, but I think the lesson comes across.  When you have some space between elements, use it to create a repeatable approach to the tricky bit so you don’t have to make micro adjustments while the control is at its twitchiest.

Ice Man challenges cleared. The only enemy is Ice 10 is the bullet, mario style slow-moving jammies. Gotta cross all sorts of bottomless pits by freezing bullets and jumping off them. Climax comes when a full screen stack of them come at you, and you have to freeze the bottom two to slip through. It’s all tasty, but nothing superb.

No progress yet on Cut 9.

In news both grander yet somehow even less interesting, I resurrected The Great Project: recording Mega time clears of every challenge in Spider-Man 2 for the Xbox. I’d like to hope that my tone already made it clear, but the term “The Great Project” is entirely ironic. The considerably more sincere “I Lack Discipline and Therefore Interminable Project” polled poorly.

The atrophy of my skill was horrifying. I foolishly jumped right in to an Insane challenge. #102, I think. Starts from a second floor balcony on the west side of Central Park. Results were dreadful.

After a dose of futility, I wandered around the north end of the island and cleared a bunch of the Mediums and Hards laying around. That went well, and I was able to upload a pile of new Mega clears to youtube. Buoyed with unwarranted confidence, I tried another Insane. #119, a wallsprint sequence around the elevated track. That went even worse. Apparently my wallsprinting has suffered especially from the passage of time.

Spider-Man 2 at is chaos at speed. What makes the game so great is precisely that you can move far faster than the game can handle. When you’re tackling an Insane challenge, you leave behind the smooth curves and long arcs of your early swinging experiences. It’s all wild angles, sudden turns and spastic stops.

Wallsprints are maybe the worst of it. When you first learn to wallsprint, it’s straightforward. You’re just running on a wall. At normal run speeds, you have the same control you would on foot. But in challenges, you hit the wall at peak swing speed. There’s essentially no steering over short distances. You zip around in nearly random directions if you aren’t careful about your entry angle.

Thus the skill required is managing that chaos. I think the bulk of it is controlling input, eliminating variables. Use swing time to smooth everything out and try to have a nice clean entry angle to the next move. God, that sounds fluffy and meaningless.

Tell you what. I’ll go through my Insane videos and generate a walkthrough for one to demonstrate what I mean. I’ll try and illustrate how success boils down to managing the entry to moves rather than making adjustments during the moves themselves. Look for that in a future post.

Passed Cut Man #7, cue the chorus of angels. Frankly, there was little sense of climax. I made a small adjustment to my pattern and cleared it immediately. The innovation was to take advantage of the screen scrolling and the effect it has on spawns. We’ll apply a bit of newspaper style here and postpone the details so we can get the juicy stuff up top.

Cut 8 was a cruise. A little cooldown as a reward for passing 7. I actually failed to make the critical jump in 8 repeatedly, but failure was non-fatal so I could just keep hammering at it. Accordingly, passed on what was technically my first try.

I’m working on Cut 9 now and it is delicious. Mega Man Powered Up is not designed as a throwback to the series in general; it is specifically an homage to Mega Man 1. The enemy types are all from 1, the stages are designed to be remixes of 1′s. One of the few design elements that’s completely new are container spawns. Little devices in the ceiling that repeatedly drop giant crates. Cut Man’s 9th challenge is the pinnacle of crate-spawning design.

You use Cut Man’s walljump to cross giant chasms by pinballing off of falling crates. I think the beauty of that may have been lost in the prose, so I will emphasize. You walljump off moving surfaces over bottomless pits. Games were made for this.

Ok, it falls a bit short of being the unparalleled joy it ought to be. The walljump is not quite as nimble as you’d really like. MMPU is really vertically constrained, so you’re never more than two jumps or so from the top of the screen. But this is the good stuff.

Back to how I passed Cut 7. Tedium follows, gird yourself.

To review, you’re on a narrow, icy platform. 8 enemies spawn in a semi-circle around and above you. They’re the infinitely respawning enemies that pour out of pipes in Mega Man 2. You used the Jewel Shield in 9 to scum them for health and weapon power drops. Slow-moving cylinders with eyes. You’ve got to survive for one minute.

The innovation I finally happened on was using the scroll of the screen to limit spawns. Picture the 8 enemies in three groups. 3 on the right, 2 on the left and 3 above. I was killing the right-hand group then moving right, into the space I just freed up, to kill the remaining five. Then move back left and repeat.

What I noticed was that I was almost always dying to the left-hand group of 2. The top 3 were more or less irrelevant. Furthermore, the platform was just wide enough that if I moved to the far right, the spawn spot of the leftmost 2 would be off the screen. And because it’s a MM game, that means those 2 would not spawn. This was no more than a short delay, of course. I had to move back left and they’d spawn then. But since those 2 were the big problems, cutting back on their spawns made things much more manageable.

I’d like to begin by saying that I will not be discussing combos much in the near future as the detail has become excruciating. No, this has nothing to do with Dan’s comment, I was thinking the exact same thing right after my last post. For now on I will forgo the minutiae and only bring up the subject when there is something substantial to talk about.

To talk about combos on a higher level for a second, I don’t particularly enjoy learning them. In fact, I kind of view combos as the bullshit you must wade through in order to enjoy the more meaningful parts of the game. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is some enjoyment in pulling out a combo in a match. It’s like an extremely small minigame in which your movements and timing dictate your success. I know that there are people who LOVE these microchallenges and thoroughly enjoy practicing the secret handshakes you must do with the controller to pull off some impressive moves. But I don’t much. I mostly view it as something that, somewhat artificially, makes one player a lot better than another based not on reactions or strategy, but skills that are less interesting to me. But the good news is that they are not strictly necessary at intermediate levels of play and they are something that can be slowly worked into your game plan as you progress.

Since my last post, I’ve played quite a bit of Fei Long. And I’m just about ready to stop doing that. As much as I like him as a character (which is to say, I like Bruce Lee) and his flame kick just looks so damn awesome, he really sucks badly. It’s like Capcom went out of their way to make him as awkward and difficult as possible. As I mentioned earlier, one of his basic specials is 3 consecutive QC’s. Why 3? It’s not like it’s such a great move when correctly inputted, why make it so difficult to pull of his plain special moves? Then there’s the chicken wing. You do a half circle forward. Plus up-forward. As far as I know, there’s not another character in the history of video games that has the same input for a special move. Again, it just makes it more difficult to pull off basic specials. Charge characters usually receive benefits for their complexity. For instance, it’s easier to pull off a hadoken than a sonic boom, but SB’s have godlike recovery times in exchange. Fei Long has difficult moves with no apparent benefits. Even if I did put in tons of practice with him and got him to be a really good Fei Long, he’s still low tier and would lose out to decent players playing decent characters. So, it’s reached a point where I have to ask myself, what’s the point? It’s much more enjoyable to use a character that’s responsive to your controls and usually does what you want him to do.

Since this has turned out to be a pretty whiny post, I’ll add one more thing: I still don’t like ultras. It’s not enough that they take 1/3 of your life bar away, they also usually have invincibility on startup or other such special properties. Supers are much more reasonable I find. They take a while to build up, they come at the expense of EX moves and they’re only super, not ultra. I’d say I eat wakeup ultras about once per round. No doubt I have to get used to watching my opponents’ meters and expecting those wakeups whenever the meter exists.

Cut Man’s 7th challenge is unyielding. I’d love to bore the 2 people who accidentally read my posts while checking the site to see if there are new BlooCloud posts to spam with the details, but there’s little to say. It’s a fight on a tiny little platform against 8 respawning dudes. I’ve found a pattern that lets me keep the bastards in check indefinitely, but at some point in the course of a minute I inevitably fuck it up.

It’s a little demonstration of chaos theory. I let some tiny variation creep into my rhythm, completely survivable on its own. But then each time through the loop things spin further and further off the axis. Frantic death.

Moved on to the Ice Man challenges, currently on the last. They’re all built around freezing guys in flight and using them as platforms to cross big chasms. Freezing dudes then jumping on them is a fun enough mechanic to make people think the Metroid games don’t suck, so it’s wildly compelling here.

Best of the bunch was probably the 8th. Gotta freeze fleas in mid-jump. Fleas are the little buggers who jump towards/over you in big arcs and take just a single buster shot to kill. Meaning all the freezes are one-shot affairs. You don’t get a second chance to time it right like you do against the octopus batteries.