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101/128

Latest addition was the exit from F27 to F36.  That’s what, 18 new ticks in the last 2 months, 6 in the last month?  Zipping right along.

Progress will only slow further, as the feats remaining are yet more daunting.  The third exit of F27, for instance:

Umihara Kawase presents merciless skill checks.  “To reach this door, you’re going to have to master long toss swings*.  You’ve used long tosses a bunch, and you were able to muddle through on stages where you could retry repeatedly on failure, or take 20 swings back and forth to build up momentum.  But now you’re going to do it right, on the first try.  Master the skill or die.”

This is something that goes on in most any deep action game, but I feel like it’s more discrete in Umihara.  THIS is the spot where you need to learn the basics of boost jumps, and THAT is the spot where you need to master them.

* Don’t try to find a definition for “long toss swing.”  If there’s a lexicon for UKS, I’ve never seen it.  I make up all the names I use for techniques.  If this were something anyone actually discussed, we could hammer out common definitions.

Umihara Kawase Kanzenban: 95/128

I note that I last posted at 83/128 and was about to start tickling away at F45.  I suppose I went back and unlocked some alternate paths after that, because my counter was sitting at 87 for a spell.  Had a burst today and cleared F45 then 46, 53 and 54 in the same game.  Worked out the trick to F55 in practice mode, so I’ll be able to pass that in my next full play too.

Progress updates are a pretty tedious way to read about a game.  A bit of trivia about the way exits and clears work does not rise much above that level.  It’s kind of a crime to have written more than a paragraph about Umihara without reference to bounce.

The big factor that separates Umihara from your other various ninja-rope action games is that Umihara’s fishing line is elastic.  That’s completely confounding at first, since your initial ineptitude gives the impression that the swing system is weak.  Experience overcomes, fortunately.

With a little practice, the bouncy rope means new tricks are possible, unseen in other wire-action games.  I mentioned that I had to dust off my boost jumping for F45.  The stage starts with a pit filled with glass shards that is wider than you can leap.  There are no ledges above you to anchor to, so swings are impossible.

The trick is to anchor your hook on the ground, then walk away from the pit, stretching your fishing line.  Use that spring to speed up your jump, almost doubling your distance and clearing the pit.  It’s actually pretty easy to time, and once you’ve got it down, you can work boost jumps into other stages where it’s not actually required.  Just fun.

Combining a stretched line and the momentum gained from reeling in creates a lot of speed, allowing for all sorts of slingshot moves.  Only once you have those under your belt will some of the alternate exits begin to seem possible.

And that paragraph is the kind of condescending pablum that means I need to stop writing for today.

Mild progress in Umihara Kawase DS, Shun SE mode.  83/128 on the counter now, and a new clear acquired via F43.  One of the consequences of the near-arbitrary routes through the game is that there are multiple exits that result in a win.  Oddly, the high score screen does not differentiate between the various clears, so a quick clear via the easiest route will always rank above far harder accomplishments.  The rewards of achievement in this game are personal.

My map screen as it stands now:

Not the easiest of reads.  It’s not obvious, for instance, that the quick route to the F30 clear goes 02 -> 05 -> 25.  Still, a far piece better than the Playstation map.

That dead-end on F45 looms large.  That’s up next.  I used a handful of boost jumps in the F43 clear, so I think I’m ready for the 45 route again.

Doing that thing with Umihara Kawase DS (Jun SE Kanzenban or some such jibber-jabber).  I’m a fiend for wire action games, and the PSX Umihara is probably the best of them.  The straightforward take on that is the mode I’m playing on the DS port, which also has the SNES original and a remix mode of Shun.

It is not trivial to describe progress in the game, if you haven’t played before.  Winning the game is nothing worth mentioning.  You’ll probably do it within your first hour of play, and you’ll only see a few fields in the process.  Less than 10 of them, out of the almost 50 in the game.

Most fields have multiple exits.  And roughly speaking, the harder the exit is to reach, the harder the stage it takes you to.  The numbering of the fields is a poor indicator of difficulty, and the various paths to clear the game don’t follow anything like a sane order. This map should give some sense.

What all of this means is that you decide how hard you want the game to be.  The easiest clear takes just a few minutes and you’ll never break a sweat.  Clearing via F55?  Beyond mortal ken.

It also means that you have to be fairly familiar with the game to interpret any accomplishment.  To know, for example, that reaching F42 is quite a feat.  I haven’t, by the way.

If you duck into practice mode from the DS menu, it shows all the stages you’ve reached so far, and the paths linking those stages.  There’s also a counter, XX/128 in the Shun SE mode, which I’m guessing is the number of different paths you can unlock.  It’s not the number of fields, because there are only 50-ish of those.  (EDIT: It’s not counting paths either.  See first comment.)

Once you’ve got some mojo working, reaching the deeper stages becomes the real goal, so raising that counter in the Practice menu is probably as good an indicator of progress as any, even if it’s nothing like linear.    And assuming I’m understanding it correctly.  In any case, I’m at 64/128 right now.  I’ve forged a fair bit further on the PSX disc, so I’m still in the scraping off rust phase.

I game-overed on F36, so that’s probably what I’ll work on next.  You can reach it via the alternate exit on either F0 or F7, and then the second exit on F35.  7->14->15 is easier than 0->11->23->14->15, if you’re looking to try it.

After a hiatus of entirelytoolong, I have returned to the Great Cause: recording successful mega-time runs of all 150 challenges in Spider-Man 2.  This is not an effort that should have required years, so we can file this as evidence against my productivity and dedication.  With my capture rig alive once again, perhaps we may summit before another year passes.

Had I wanted to organize the challenges by difficulty, I could have passed all the Easy, Medium and Hard within a night or two.  The Insanes are all.  As it is, I’ve tackled them geographically.  The tokens that activate each time trial challenge are spread throughout the city, and I’ve worked from south to north.  This gives me a varied diet as I progress instead of gnawing only on the very hardest.  I’ve cleared two new Insanes in my latest surge.

Challenge 80 was the more interesting of those.  Two rough sections made this … rough.  The first was the jump off the gargoyle at around 0:42.  Doesn’t look like much in the video, on account of I made the jump.  What would be clear if you were among the victims suffering through my streamed attempts was that Spidey2’s clipping is a little shaky.  Lining up my sprint to hit that goal marker and also get the full-power dive towards the next marker without triggering a weird hover and blowing 5-10 seconds was a more precise operation than you’d guess.

The second crotchkick was the climb up the Empire State Building, starting about 1:10 in the video.  The quickest way to scale skyscrapers in Spidey2 is to sprinkle charged jumps into your wallrun as dashes.   This is what I’m doing at the start of the video with those half-charges on the jump meter.  But the ESB is tiered.  The top of each tier interrupts my wallrun.  The slow, useless float after each can really kill my time.  My success in the recorded run is middling. I had some time to spare as I reached the building and didn’t blow it too badly.

Finally the obligatory evangelism.  Spider-Man 2 contains the best game ever made.  150 time-trial challenges, the Mary Jane missions, the pizza delivery missions and the Daily Bugle missions.  In a sinister turn, this content is hidden behind a mediocre beat-em-up, so well disguised with a facade of dopey combat unlocks and shitty voice acting that few have discovered the precious treasure.  Mercifully, the game offers a code to skip all that nonsense that reviewers think is the game.  This is not a cheat code.  It is a machete to hack through the jungle of mediocrity and reach the Lost City of Gold.

I was briefly adrift in Mega Man 9.  I completed my immediate goals, which were a legit no-continues clear of the main game and an any-means-necessary clear of Hero.  After that: a little bit of Superhero, some baselines in Time Attack, some Endless….

Endless Mode in particular fails to delight.  It’s a series of segments, each 5-10 screens big, thrown at you in random order, with bosses at certain milestones.  You’re scored based on how far you survive, in number of screens.  Brilliance is scattered throughout the segments, remixes of the best sequences over the life of the Mega Man series.  But there is no sense of ramping up as I progress in the mode; it doesn’t get any harder.

I’ve found the wind and set a course again: all-buster boss clear.  That is, I’ll use specials to pass stages, but I’ll fight each of the Robot Masters with the peashooter alone.  That seems a bit arbitrary, written out, but it made sense at the outset.  I’m not going to use e-tanks or the 1/2 damage jobby to pass any of them, which would make it fairly trivial.  Well, ok, maybe against Plug Man.  Because fuck Plug Man, that’s why.

Progress so far: 5 stages clear.  Magma, Plug and Tornado remain.  Hornet Man was the roughest so far.  Had to practice a spell to work out a viable strategy for him, which I guess I’ll bury beneath the fold.  You have only yourself to blame for the tedium of reading it.

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I’m finally starting to feel like I’ve got a handle on the secrets in sim5.  My approach to learning Raiden Fighters Jet has been a gradual one.  I ran through most of the stages first with no effort to score at all; I just focused on survival.  Then proper scoring technique in sim1, while just playing the rest of the game for survival.  That went smoothly enough, and yielded scores just shy of 40M for a full run.

Learning sim5 has not gone smoothly.  Hovering over the big turrets to reveal the 3 micluses in the early going is the hardest shit in the entire goddamn RF series.  I learned the TLB in RF2 more quickly.  Twiddle goes on about kamikaze planes trying to collide, but mostly I’ve had trouble with turret fire at short range while I try to sidle into position.  Maybe I’ve got a mental block about dodging sideways incoming fire. I come in sideways because I’ve got to shoot the stuff just upscreen from the big’un so that it can’t point-blank me while I’m hovering.

That’s falling into place now.  The micluses, anyway.  The DX bonuses on the trains are still elusive.  And I’m not maximizing at-a-time bonuses or all that jazz.

I was trying to summarize my approach to learning the game.  Once I have things a bit tighter on 5, I’ll start learning the secrets in 15.  And onwards, focusing on just a level at a time until success is assured.  I bring it up in part because the STGT folks are playing Jet this week.  What I’ve been doing is no kinda way to one-week a game.  My total time in is 13 hours, according to Aces, with a top score of 48M.  That’s not a great return on investment if you’re against a deadline.  And my scoring density sucks, since I play everything after 15 for survival.  I’ve reached Real Battle Phase 2, and plenty of folks score 60M+ without hitting Phase 1.

I find it suits, though.  At least for now.

Gallimaufry.

Purged the lingering embarassment of having not completed Mega Man 9.  I passed the “no continues” challenge, but that was a terrible lie since it was done through save abuse.  A legit 1CC still looms.  And Time Attack.  And Hero Mode.

I had a strange reluctance to mention MM9 because I assumed it was already in everyone’s pocket, but a glance around the friends’ leaderboards says otherwise.  Of course, now there’s a new shame.  The only times I do see are top-ten entries, thanks to Tiki.  When most of the discussion of the game is among people who are glitch-zipping through levels to put up 1′15″ times, there’s something anticlimactic to “oh hey, I only died once to the danger room in Jewel Man’s stage this time.”

Frankly, not only can I still die to the Jewel Man spike room, I also sometimes hose a few of the easier spike jumps on that level.  And there’s a good half-dozen places I can die on Tornado Man’s stage.

—-

Unlocked Vidmaster Challenge: Annual in Halo 3.  There are a set of seven challenges spread across Halo 3 and ODST which apparently unlock a special suit of armor.  Not my thing, but this one required 4-player co-op and I’ll help a dude out.

Specifically, we had to clear the last level in 3 (helpfully named “Halo”) with 4 players, on Legendary, with all of us riding Ghosts and the Iron skull turned on.  That last clause is the highway to the danger zone.  With Iron on, if one player dies, the whole group is reset to the last checkpoint.   The way Legendary co-op worked in Halo 2.

Normally, 4p co-op is a rompin’ stompin’, even on Legendary.  Halo 3’s stock Legendary isn’t that rough solo, and 4 is more or less an army.  Iron makes it a man’s game.  With a mixed skill group, Iron actually makes it a brutal slog.

We actually cruised up to Guilty Spark, despite my fears.  Grenade jumped to skip the tower climb, and waited for sentinels to mop up all the Flood.  Well, one of us did.  We were too incompetent to all make the pair of grenade jumps, so we just sent one guy to the top to trigger everything, while we hung out in the snow.

That only left the escape sequence on the Ghosts.  Easy enough on the Warthog, and Ghosts are even faster.  It’s the stock game-ending self-destruct escape bit, as we race along to reach the Forward Unto Dawn while the Halo collapses around us.  Oh god, the collapsing.  The horror.

The various dramatic destruction sequences are all triggered by your progress.  So it mostly falls behind you when you’re racing along with all the players in the same vehicle.  But with each of us driving our own Ghost, the player in front triggered everything.  So if I was far enough behind, the stage just fell out from beneath me.  Fiery plummeting.  And Iron’s on, so we all restart.  And repeat.

—-

Still jamming with Jet.  No progress, really.  I’m incompetent at the secrets in sim5.  Well, incompetent at surviving once they’re triggered, anyway.  That makes 3 triggered’s in one post, which is probably my queue to wrap this up.

I earned an ALL2 1-credit-clear on Raiden Fighters Jet to go with my previous and paltry ALL1.  Path was 1->5->15->20->40->50.  Score was 21M and change.  Yes, I know that’s bad.  That’s the idea.

My pattern for the weekend was to take a few swipes at the sim50 birdboss in training each day.  Before this run I added a practice session on the 20 and 50 bosses.  The former as a refresher, the latter because I knew I was just sloppily bombing and hoping.

The run itself doesn’t make much of a tale.  I had 1 life and like a dozen goddamn bombs in stock when I reached 50, so I played cautiously.  Adrenalin didn’t kick in until I reached the boss.  Bombfested and still managed to die once in his last phase of damage, during the recharge delay for the Fairy’s bomb.

Scoreplay is up next.  This effort leaves me at 6th, I think, on the Live scoreboard.  Which is deceptive, because the dropoff is so dramatic.  I have only 20% of Twiddle’s top entry.  So it’s really no score at all.

Score begets rank.  Rank begets speedy bullets.  May speedy bullets beget more fun.

On being presented with my Raiden Fighters Jet simulation 30 vision dilemma, the sage advisor suggested that I should perhaps not play that level at all.

There were two obvious options for a sim50 1CC.

a) 15 -> die on 30 -> fail the criteria on 40 -> 50

b) die on 15 -> 90% medal and 98% destruction on 20 -> fail criteria on 40 -> 50

My naive assumption was that one-missing 30 with no other goals was easier than playing 20 well.  Terribly mistaken.  20 is easy, even including the destruction rate and medal goals.  I thought I might perhaps suffer in rank in order to hit the 20 criteria, but that’s also not true.

So now I’m on to option B.  On sim40, you can pass to the real battle stages if you achieve all the criteria.  ycw states that one of those criteria is no-miss.  I assume that he means no-missing just that stage, since I don’t think you can reach sim40 without dying. The other two are activating special medal mode and not timing out any bosses.  I’ve never messed with boss timeouts; I just stay away from special medals.  This will of course all come tumbling down if I ever try to start playing like a man, but what are the odds?

I’ve only tried a few runs with the new route, and I reach the sim50 boss routinely.  I’ve even gotten him into his final phase of attacks.  And died with a bomb to spare.  Don’t ask me why, it’s just the nature of my groove.  So I’ll take a few jabs at the bossbird in Training and see if that does the trick.

And after the sim50 1CC, which is, after all, only barely more reputable than the trivial sim35 clear?  Tis a mystery.