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I’m not playing anything seriously. I played some Mega Man 10 yesterday but it was the barest sort of dabbling, which does not leave me with much to say about it. Well, there’s one thing I can say.

All my weapons blow.

I failed to clear Chill Man’s stage, wiping out with two deaths on the boss. It’s a stage with multiple sections that are tedious with the mega-buster. I’ve cleared Sheep, Pump and Solar at this point in my save, so that’s my arsenal.

Consider taking out an Octopus Battery that’s one block above the ground. Easy enough, but jumpy and slow with just the buster. The sort of thing I’d gladly blow weapon energy on to speed it up. None of those weapons are at all useful. I guess Solar Man’s jobby might save 1 jump, but it’s also slower firing, so that’s probably a wash.

At the same point in Mega Man 9, I’d be sporting the Splash, Gravity and Concrete weapons. All clearly better than the crap I’ve got, and two of which would speed up the Battery scenario.

I have been lollygagging.

My posting pace has faded to essentially zero. I have a fair excuse for this, with the birth of my daughter heralding in a total cessation of all gaming for quite a spell. But I’ve always shaken an indignant fist at posts by others which try to plead life-event excuses, so I expect no sympathy.

Further, my post history makes it pretty obvious that I was slacking even before I stopped altogether. Switching games after a single post, never finishing a thread. Today: reparations! Let’s recap the projects of the past and update progress. Or report abortion.

Raiden Fighters Jet.  Aborted.  I can barely remember it, in fact.  I stopped playing even before the folks in last year’s STGT started.

Mega Man 9.  I got the buster-only boss clear.  Then by the end, I was kind of irritated by how goofy my criteria for that were, so I got a legit buster-only clear.  1CC, no special weapons.  Tiny exception on the specials rule for a section in Wily 2(?) where you need to laser trident some blocks.  I know of no other way past there.  I also used some items against Plug Man, because fuck Plug Man, that’s why.  Either an E capsule or a 1/2 damage jobby.  Cleared Superhero mode, which rocks the body that rocks the party.  Never 1cc’d, though.  I’ll have to come back to it at some point.

Spider-Man 2.  I only spent maybe two weeks on the Great Project this time around.  My shame is vast.  No aborted effort looms larger.

Umihara Kawase Kanzenban.  No new progress since 101.  I will claim this is still an open effort nonetheless, because I have played recently.

Bionic Commando (GameBoy).  Aborted.  In a good way.  The back end of the game was pretty weak, with little in the way of cool swinging.  And then I credit-fed a bit and realized there’s a whole battleship level after you finish all the map stages.  And then I gleefully quit.

I think that sweeps the desk clear so I can start piling up brand new half-assery.

What I said was “I’m not going to just do a post to declare what I’m playing now.  I’ll wait until I have something interesting to say about it.”  Well, I’m about to stop playing it, and I don’t think I’ve generated anything interesting yet, so nevermind. I’ve gone far too long without a post (blame childbirth), so interesting be damned: I’m playing the Game Boy version of Bionic Commando.

Playing through the first few stages, you could get the impression that it’s a straightforward port of the NES game.  Starting around stage 6, however, the cruddy NES level design mostly disappears and the stages get vastly more challenging than anything seen there.

Even more improved than the stage design is the responsiveness of the controls.  The capabilities of the wire are basically unchanged, but it’s about twice as fast, without the big delays between actions.

This gives you two main techniques to work with when swinging.  The holdover from the NES is the forward swing.  Release at the far end of a swing, fly to the right, fire the wire at 45 degrees for another swing.

The new technique is the drop swing.  Reel in the wire so you’re just hanging right below the ceiling, hit down to drop, then fire a 45 degree wire to start a swing.  This technique never worked on the NES because Rad wasn’t agile enough for it.  What it opens up is the ability to reach successively higher tiered ceilings, plus changing your range for nearby grapple points.

Traversing stages requires mixing the two techniques.  The main source of difficulty is that you often have only one shot at getting it right.  If you reel in for a drop swing when another forward swing was called for, you might be hosed.  That’s fairly simple, but there’s a decent amount of fun to wring out of that one dynamic, and the stages  exploit it well.

The newfound agility opens up a few minor techniques.  Nothing that’s really demanded to pass stages, but stuff you can do to move faster.  You can drop out of swings early to get short bursts of speed in places where there’s no room for a full swing.  And you can slingshot: start reeling in the wire, then immediately release laterally.  Never required, but often fun.

Thanks are due to Ghegs for recommending it.  The obvious disclaimer is that Umihara Kawase Kanzenban is the much better game, and now that I’m starting to emerge from the newborn haze, it’s time I returned to that.

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.