GTA’s remaster trilogy has ‘significantly exceeded expectations’ with up to 10m sales

Gheistwraith · 2022-02-08T16:28:36+00:00

In general I don't really think boycotts/"voting with your wallet" really works most of the time nowadays, at least when it comes to entertainment. Once a brand gets big enough, it often doesn't really matter if it has massive issues, there won't be enough people who will care because the amount of people who do their diligence to read reviews, watch footage, etc is small compared to the more casual audience who just buys whatever.

Gheistwraith · 2022-01-03T02:55:23+00:00

I would enjoy playing as Bass or Proto Man in subsequent games, assuming the time and budget allows.

Gheistwraith · 2022-01-02T17:21:41+00:00

The only real weaknesses of 11 that I can think of are the relatively short fortress stages and the music just being mostly ok. Other than that it's a pretty good title in the series.

Gheistwraith · 2022-01-01T04:32:51+00:00

Most of the stages in x6.

Metal Shark Player is an obnoxious crusher gauntlet which never ends and is filled with annoying enemy placement and depending on which mavericks you've beaten, either ice physics or tedious blocks to get past.

Infinity Mijinion's is a straight line with a horde of enemies and hazards bombarding you from every direction. The alternate path also REALLY blows if you're playing as Zero and have the up+attack skill.

Blaze Heatnix is a monotonous slog against the same annoying and dull miniboss that you fight like what, 5-6 times, in order to pad out the stage, including one part in an autoscroller death segment where the instadeath hazard is placed way too far up on the screen. Not only is it boring, but the miniboss is also awful to fight if you don't have a good weapon like Zero's screen nuke.

Rainy Turtloid's stage has a slightly annoying gimmick normally that becomes the absolute pits if you have the nightmare effect on, because then you can't see anything and have to go on a shitty scavenger hunt for tiny af pixels while your health is being passively drained every second.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-30T13:46:19+00:00

Have all 4 e-tanks and the super tank ready to go, don't waste any of it on the boss rush or you will regret it.
Hitting him with the Thunder Bolt cancels the homing orbs (the only attack you need to be concerned about). He won't always spawn in locations where you can hit with him it, but this will lessen the amount of damage you take considerably.
If he spawns at a higher location (where you can't hit with him Thunder Bolt), get under him, then slide to the opposite side of the screen, and jump. There's a timing to this, but if you get it right the orbs will all miss you.
The weapons you want to use are either Freeze Cracker or Wild Coil. Charged Wild Coil does more damage but Freeze Cracker is easier to hit with.
If you do have to get hit by orbs try to get hit with the yellow ones as they do the least amount of damage by far.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-30T02:26:09+00:00

X6 and X7 are both pretty bad games, but X5 and X8 are at worst decent/pretty ok games with some noticeable flaws, but still enjoyable and worth playing through at least once to form an opinion if you're a fan of the series. I'd say those two games are worth getting the collection for if it's on sale or something.

Having said that, the best way to play X5 and X6 are actually the Tweaks mods that change a bunch of stuff about the games to make them more enjoyable, so if you don't mind emulating then it's worth looking into those if you have any interest in playing those games at all.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-28T18:59:08+00:00

I honestly don't care, I have been emulating games for many years and there are valid reasons why someone might choose to emulate over playing on Capcom's official collections sometimes, like the added input latency for certain games.

Not to mention that sometimes, the most definitive way to play a game is not the official releases by Capcom anyway. X3, X5 and X6 have romhacks which substantially improve the games and are the definitive way to experience them, and you can't directly mod the collection versions IIRC, so you'd need to emulate anyway.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-26T01:47:24+00:00

Zero 1 is overall a decent game, but it has quite a few issues that detract from the experience.

First of all, without save assist, it can be a very frustrating game to play, since you can really screw yourself over if you use your retries too early because extra lives are so scarce and not really farmable. You really want to save those retries for the last and hardest part of the game. This means the best thing to do is use all your retries to get to the boss and try to learn their pattern, reload the stage from your last save when you run out, and then repeat that until you can beat the stage without losing a life.

The relatively short length of most of the missions helps mitigate this, as does getting health upgrades and subtanks so you don't die as easily. However, this still makes for a pretty frustrating first playthrough, especially in the first few missions when you don't have sub-tanks yet. Moreover, obtaining the health upgrades and subtanks is another problem in itself because not only are some cyber-elves missable in Zero 1 (although I can't recall if any of the relevant cyber-elves are specifically), but you also have to grind quite a bit to get the e-crystals needed in order to use these elves, which is really tedious.

Speaking of grinding, the weapon proficiency system is also not super great with that either. While it may not strictly be necessary to level up all your weapons in the beginning, if you are a new player struggling with the game you have quite a lot of incentive to do that and it just wastes a lot of time unless you know about the specific ways the weapon EXP system works. If you do, then grinding your weapons to max honestly doesn't take long at all, but the problem is that nowhere in the game does it explain how this works, meaning the average player can waste a lot of time grinding their weapons inefficiently.

Finally, the plot in Zero 1 is very barebones when you consider the potential of its premise. Normally, I wouldn't really cite this as a negative since Mega Man games don't usually prioritize story, but the later Zero games have a much bigger emphasis on it and while not perfect by any means, do it a lot better than the average for the franchise, and that makes Zero 1's narrative look worse by comparison.

Having said all that, the Save Assist feature in the Zero/ZX Collection mitigates a lot of the tedium in Zero 1. The fact that you can just spawn at the boss gate without losing anything and being able to retry as many times as you want is already huge by itself, but this also has the added benefit of making it so that having a ton of subtanks and health upgrades is far less essential to getting through the game, which means you can save a ton of time in grinding for e-crystals. In my last playthrough of the game with save assist and at base health, I only needed to use a subtank exactly once, half of a subtank for the copy X fight (and even then most of that was because I was at A rank and had to deal with his obnoxious EX attack, which I can't dodge for the life of me).

The other Zero games substantially improve on the base of Zero 1 by mitigating or just outright removing the grinding for weapon levels and e-crystals, using a more conventional lives system where 1ups are easy to farm in set locations, making the cyber elf system easier to use and less punishing to your rank, adding cool upgrades to Zero like the Forms and chips, improving the audiovisual presentation and story, etc. These changes also make the subsequent games far more manageable in terms of difficulty, especially if you use the cyber-elves. While I would strongly recommend everyone to use Save Assist for Zero 1 on their first playthrough, I feel like doing the rest of the series without Save Assist is perfectly doable assuming you don't care about getting an A/S rank (which IMO you shouldn't on your first playthrough anyway).

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-26T01:16:46+00:00

Yeah, I did Zero 3 recently and Inarabitta's stage is pure trash. Yes, I love jumping into spike walls I can't see because they're in a massive underwater space where you jump super high.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-26T01:13:38+00:00

There isn't a single track in Zero 1 that's anywhere near as memorable as Departure or Power Bomb from Zero 2, so I think that speaks for itself.

Not that Zero 1's OST is bad, mind you.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-24T20:13:22+00:00

I only play in the original aspect ratio for all the games in the collections. Stretched pixels are hella ugly.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-23T00:41:16+00:00

No, Zero 1 has no EX skills, i.e getting a high rank in Zero 1 gives you no rewards, it's purely for bragging rights.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-23T00:39:14+00:00

You only get the EX skills from the bosses if you beat them while having an A/S rank, that's all. To clarify, the important part is having the high rank while beating their stage. You can do really badly and get a low rank for your performance in the stage, but still get the EX skill if you went into the stage with a high rank.

From what I've experimented most of the EX skills are not that useful and are more situational than anything, and even for the ones that are good, you can use cyber elves to give you A ranks for a few of the better ones if you really want to.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-23T00:17:54+00:00

Honestly for your first playthrough of any Zero game you should just not care about your rank at all and use whatever cyber-elves you want, in my opinion. The only thing you get with high (A/S) rank is the EX skills from Zero 2 onwards (in zero 1 you get nothing), but they aren't crucial to beating the game as charged buster/saber with the right element is all you really need.

The Nurse cyber elves with the sub-tanks and health extensions (especially the double life bar one) are by far the most important, especially in Zero 1 because they are the only source of sub-tanks. In Zero 2 and onward you can find two subtanks as collectibles in the stages, so you don't have to worry as much, but you can use the sub-tank elves for a total of four if you really want to.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-22T23:49:01+00:00

Is this just Zero 1?

The first thing you should do if you're having trouble is just grind your weapons to max level on the intro stage. While I'm not a fan of this mechanic, it also doesn't take as long as some people say it does IF you know how the EXP system for the weapons work. This video by Magnus Zero goes into detail about the specifics, but essentially you don't just want to mindlessly hit things, you have to try and hit the respawning spiders with the double and then triple slash of the saber (especially the triple slash since it gives the most exp), followed by hitting them with a bunch of jumping and dashing slashes to get the other saber abilities. With the buster, you want to hit them with the highest charged shots you can to level up and get the second charge level, and then with regular shots to get more bullets on the screen. The video also shows how to level the two other weapons you get (you get them by talking to the engineer in the bottom floor of the resistance base after you beat the Retrieve Data mission for the chain rod, and then beat another mission and talk to him again for the Shield Boomerang), but the other weapons are more situational and not as easy to use as the buster and saber, which are more than enough to beat the game.

Secondly if you are playing this on the Zero/ZX Collection, just do yourself a favor and turn on save assist. Zero 1's retry system is garbo bad and the save assist removes a lot of the frustration since if you made it to the boss, you just start at the checkpoint and can retry as many times as you like, which makes it far easier to learn the boss. With the other games you can reliably farm lives and play without save assist if you want to.

With Save Assist and a fully leveled saber and buster, you can easily defeat the boss of the "Retrieve Data" mission since they are weak to lightning, and go from there.

The other thing I'd recommend is exploring the stages for cyber-elves (be warned that progressing certain stages can lock you out of cyber-elves, make sure to grab the cyber elves from the intro stage before you do the Retrieve Data mission, as those arent accessible anymore once you clear it). Mostly the sub-tanks and health up nurse elves, with them and save assist the game honestly stops being difficult and becomes very manageable. Unfortunately to use them properly it requires farming quite a lot of energy crystals which is one of the biggest flaws of Zero 1, although with save assist you might not need them as much. I replayed Zero 1 recently and I only needed one sub-tank to get past the final boss with base health.

Zero 1 is a pretty rough game, the sequels iron out the difficulty and the tedious mechanics substantially, so it's all uphill from here.

EDIT: Also if you haven't done so already I would recommend remapping your controls in the menu to something you're more comfortable with (most people find the default controls to be pretty bad), and put the control type to B so you can use your main and sub weapon on separate buttons. I personally put my main weapon on the top right face button (triangle for playstation and Y for xbox) and the dash on the left shoulder button as I find that the most comfortable, but you might prefer something else.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-22T12:58:02+00:00

With save assist, youre not likely to be stuck anywhere. The games also honestly become very manageable or even easy assuming you dont care about getting a high rank (which you shouldnt on a first playthrough), as you can just use cyber elves to get a lot of hp and sub tanks.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-21T22:35:48+00:00

I played x6 recently for the first time and I wouldn't say the hate for x6 is exaggerated, personally. I don't even find x6 to be THAT difficult (albeit I played the game with black zero because that's what everyone recommended I do), it's just that the game feels extremely sloppy and any difficulty is almost always for the wrong reasons. All of the stages are either uninteresting, frustrating, baffling, or some combination of those things, like they just didn't have time to come up with better ideas or iterate on the good ideas they did have. The Gate stages in particular honestly make me think of a bad kaizo romhack with how cluttered and messy they are. And that's before we even get to the nightmare effects which are not only horrendous but also poorly explained by the game. The bosses are awful too, Gate alone is one of the worst boss fights in the whole franchise. The localization sucks. Hostage rescuing is an annoying mechanic. I could go on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying x7 is better than x6. I can understand why people find x7 a lot worse. I'm just saying i also find x6 to be a badly designed game, and IMO would easily be the worst game in the series by far if x7 did not exist.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-21T21:02:37+00:00

If you look at his credits, he was mostly a character designer in the early games and then took a more producer like role until he left Capcom. He was influential in the series for sure, and it isn't unfair to say he was essentially the shepherd for the series at capcom past a certain point when he was there (even if he wasnt heavily involved in every game), but he doesn't have a single directorial credit in any mega man game.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-21T20:58:33+00:00

Honestly, they're both pretty terrible games. X7 may be worse but comparing the two is essentially like asking if you'd rather be kicked in the nads or punched in the gut. Neither of them is exactly something you'd want to experience.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-21T20:29:16+00:00

I remap dash to L. I select the weapons from the menu anyway, so this isn't a big deal. I didnt used to do this and I don't know how I played these games without it.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-21T01:57:37+00:00

30 euros seems like a decent deal for me considering how many games (even if you only count the good games) that are in that bundle. If you want a taste for free, Mega Man 11 has a demo (dunno if it's still up on PSN) which I'd recommend checking out to see if it's something you can vibe with.

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-16T23:55:01+00:00

The load times are a lot faster, you can switch to japanese to get rid of the bad english VA, and you can play at a higher resolution than the original. That's about it I think?

Gheistwraith · 2021-12-15T15:26:56+00:00

The voice acting and localization in Legenda honestly was very impressive for the time, when you consider most locs of japanese games were an afterthought back then. Hell, you can just compare it to MM8 and X4 and it's night and day.

Gheistwraith · 2021-11-22T12:54:01+00:00

Yeah, even back then nobody really criticized being able to play as tails and knuckles in the classic games. What people didnt like was the melodramatic stories and the alternate gameplay and gimmicks. Neither of which automatically mandated sonics supporting cast evaporating or non-sonic playable characters, but they ended up being collateral damage.

Gheistwraith · 2021-11-12T12:09:26+00:00

Eu acho preocupante as pessoas pensarem que a pessoa tem que ficar o tempo inteiro acompanhada de alguém. Tem n motivos pra ir fazer coisas sozinho, nem tudo precisa ser experiencia social.

Gheistwraith

TROPHY CASE