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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.

Bah to Simulation 30.  Can’t see a goddamn thing.  Bullets are invisible against the ground below, and when I’m focusing intently on the space right in front of my Fairy to avoid stray aimed shots, the enemy planes blur into the background planes. It’s a short stage with no tricky bits when rank is as low as mine, so it should be a cruise.  Blindness precludes cruising.

My current plan actually involves suiciding on sim30, but that’s been unnecessary so far.  I’m dying regardless, generally repeatedly.  The suicide is to force sim40 as the next stage, and then sim50 as the final.  If you no-miss through 30, you go to 45 instead, a certified crotch-kicker.  As ever, all glory to ycw.

My new hobby: abusing systems for comically easy 1-credit-clears.  Not “easy” games, rather, games that offer plenty of challenge when played respectably but allow some leeway for craven strategy.  The newest entry: Raiden Fighters Jet.  ALL1 clear with a miniscule score of 13M.  Thanks go mostly to Twiddle and ycw for details on managing the stage selection.

The salient bits: suicide against the sim15 boss to force sim20, then avoided medals in sim20.  I also let various tanks leave the screen unharmed in 20, but I think the medal dodging would have been sufficient.  That gave me sim35 as a final stage with one life and a respectable bomb stock, without having faced anything like a challenge.  I had never learned sim35 at all, so I still managed to die, then reached the boss with 6 or 7 bombs, subsequently spammed.

If anyone ever tries to suggest that there’s some inherent merit in 1CCs, pee on their shoes.  Anyone could do this.

Jet actually has a few awesome stages, so I’ll aim for a manlier route. Tolerance is waning for the whole hidden bonus system, so I don’t know that I’ll actually try scoring well.

Time to put RF2 on the shelf.  I got the top score on the US Live leaderboards for Arcade difficulty.  It has a bit of a feeling of being the only guy at the track, but it comes at the right time.  My love was waning fast.  The game really has long stretches of not much going on, even into stage 6 and 7. I never quite crossed into the zone where playing felt like work, but I could see the signs at the border off in the distance.

It’s an improvement of over 5 million from my previous best.  The gain came from an unexpected quarter.  I’d been hammering away at stage 3, thinking a few of those flatbed tank miclus would be the key to a big jump in my score.  There are four or five of those, each worth a million points and I’ve been within 3 million of the top score for weeks.  Harder than I thought; I never did get them all in a run.

The actual breakthrough was avoiding my common chain breaks at the end of st3 and throughout st4.  I bombfested through 4 to keep my medal chain intact.  I did accidentally discover a miclus on stage 5 that I was completely unaware of for a little gravy.

Jet is next, I think.  I need to learn stage selection conditions, but I imagine a no-score clear should be just this side of trivial.

All my RF2 problems are on stage 3 right now.  Oh, and 6 sometimes.  And then occasionally 7 when I pass 6.

——

Last stage of Nikujin before the final boss fight. I never would have cleared it as designed. For some short definition of never. The whole stage hinges on impale-jumps.  When you jump on an unalerted enemy ninja and press down, you impale him with your sword, for an instant kill.  If you immediately jump, you get extra height. Reading over that description, I find it fails to convey the giddy joy of the act.  Try it, see if I lie.

There’s a section of the stage where you’re expected to drop into a room, do an impale-jump to hit a switch, then a second to leave the room. The tricky bit about it is not alerting the second guy.  Once alerted, the jump is sabotaged and you have to retry the stage.  Or at least I assume that’s how it was designed.  As it is, I found that you can both trigger the switch and escape the room using wall-bounce jumps instead.  So I just kill the dudes, sparing countless retries.

On clear, the game scores you on the time to clear each stage.  There will be no further discussion of the matter.  I imagine most readers passed over the phrase “countless retries” earlier quite casually.  If you have not played Nikujin, or similarly designed infinite-lives games, you may lack a frame of reference for recurrent doom.

For those who do pursue the game beyond the clear, there are a number of speedrun videos out there, including one faster than this that played like hell for me.

Apparently a week or so is enough time to forget RF2 stage 7.  Died horribly.

I also took a few seconds to learn the scoring secrets on stage 3.  So far, my “scoring” runs have just been based on the secrets in stage 1, plus the first miclus in 2.  My ambition is paltry.

The bulk of the secrets in stage 3 are miclus triggered by flying over the tanks that appear on the flatbed cars of the train.  Seemed simple, but I blew it every time by killing at least one of the tanks before I noticed they were on-screen.  Guess I’d have to learn the cues that they’re coming up and guard my fire in advance.  Or you know, just not get those bonuses.  Which seems more likely.

The easiest way to clear Raiden Fighters 2, given my prior run which ended on the way to the TrueBoss, was to fail to earn the TrueBoss, thereby winning without actually accomplishing anything new.  This could also be described as the coward way or perhaps the pussy way.  Naturally, that’s what I did.  You need 100% destruction on each of the stage 3, 6 and 7 bosses to earn the TLB.  Easily avoided.  RF2 1CC’d, with a score of 13M and change, and no TLB.  The least possible 1CC.

I’ve already spoiled the sight of the ALL on the Xbox Live arcade leaderboard.   I was curious to give scoring a spin, and quickly racked up 31M.  The game is marginally harder with the rank increase that comes from scoring well, but the difference isn’t dramatic.  Perhaps “scoring well” oversells what I’m doing.  Better than 13M, anyway.  It’s still straightforward to bomb every potentially hard bit.  Stuff just fires from the very edge of the screen more often, which aborted my best scoring run on st6.

It might be worth trying for a clear with a 30M+ score, so I’ll toy with that for a bit. I’ll abandon the cause easily enough, though.  Hopefully it comes quickly.  Not yet sure which I’ll migrate to: Jet or 1.

I am not proud.  Scoring systems are important because they’re what keeps you entertained on stage 1 when you’re really working on beating stage 7.  My immediate goal was just to clear any of the Raiden Fighters games on Aces (arcade difficulty).  Through some combination of deception and misperception, I thought 1 was the place to start.  Naturally, this was entirely wrong.

Raiden Fighters is the hardest of the three for a no-scoring clear.  By a huge margin, if we allow for a Sim 35 clear of RFJ.  In keeping with the aforementioned lack of pride, I am abandoning it entirely.  So now 2.  Jet might be easier if I were prepared to deliberately earn Sim 35, but that seems annoying.  2 has really passive enemies, weak bosses and the ludicrously powerful Fairy.

Two serious plays later and I’m on the final stage.  Passivity is out the door once the ground enemies show up in 7, so I die rapidly.  I took a few passes at Training and learned enough to no-miss the stage reliably, including a single bomb at the boss.

Back to the real game, I reach stage 7 with my last life and a single bomb: exactly what I need to clear it.  All nerves, but I pull it out, bombing all the boss’ spam for the clear.  Well, no.  Seems I had failed to notice that just beyond the “Stage 7″ selection in Training mode is “Stage 7 + TrueBoss”.  I thought the game was over, because this is where all my training runs ended.  Instead, there’s a pair of turrets, a few drones and then a much tougher boss.  All of which was moot, since I died to the very first attack from those turrets.  Expertly done.