Paul Kuliniewicz

Mega Man 9 was a great game. It took everything that made the early NES Mega Man games terrific and built on them, and avoided the traps that made the latter games me-too rehashes of the same basic gameplay. It played off of the player’s expectations of how a Mega Man game plays out, slipping in traps to trick and surprise anyone who grew up playing the original games. (And its increased difficulty modes in turn played off the player’s expectations from having played the game in normal mode, instead of just making enemies harder to destroy.) The weapons are nicely varied and often have dual uses, such as Tornado Blow hurting all enemies on the screen and boosting your jumps a bit thanks to the updraft. Mega Man 9 easily ranks in the same tier as Mega Man 2, one of the greatest games of all time, period.

Mega Man 10, on the other hand, is a good game. Not great, but good. It’s a pretty solid game, but definitely not as innovative as its predecessor.

The weapons are somewhat harder to use effectively. Several of them have a two-stage attack, and only the second stage deals significant damage. For example, the Commando Bomb’s blast waves are more effective than hitting something with the bomb itself, and the Thunder Wool’s lightning bolt is much stronger than the cloud that rises up from Mega Man’s arm cannon to fire it. It’s good to not have each weapon just be a differently-shaped projectile, but it can be tricky to aim for something near your target.

(Speaking of Sheep Man, I get the distinct impression from playing the game that he was originally supposed to be something like Thunder Man. They tried to make him look like a robotic cloud, but it wound up looking more like a robot sheep, so they ran with it. It would certainly explain why Sheep Man’s stage is electricity-centric rather than pastoral.)

The individual stages aren’t bad, though the gimmicks in them aren’t quite as fun to play through as they were in Mega Man 9. The disappearing blocks (heh heh) in Sheep Man’s stage are neat, but the see-saw thing in Blade Man’s stage is more tedious than anything. Some stages have branching paths, which is then taken to a bit of an extreme in Wily Castle 1, where the branches themselves have branching paths.

I don’t think pointing out that Dr. Wily turns out to be the villain warrants a spoiler warning.

Wily Castle is the high point in the game. The bosses in particular are pretty great, riffing on past games and, in one case, a minor Internet meme? I really like the music for the Wily Castle bosses, and I think it goes particularly well with the first one. I also suspect that anyone familiar with Mega Man 2 will do the exact wrong thing out of instinct when they first encounter Wily Castle 3’s boss, like I did. That’s the subverting-player-expectations thing that Mega Man 9 did so well. And the final battle has a decent variant of the requisite fight against Wily Capsule.

By the way, Dr. Wily has tried to take over the world nine, or maybe ten, times already. Who keeps issuing him building permits for new Wily Castles? It’s not like he could build his latest Wily Castle in secret.

Why do I say nine or ten? Mega Man & Bass is a classic-series but unnumbered Mega Man game, so technically Mega Man 9 is the tenth in the series, and Mega Man 10 is the eleventh. Mega Man 9 supports this by referencing each of its nine predecessors in its ending. However, Mega Man 10 only calls out to the nine numbered classic-series games before it, completely ignoring Mega Man & Bass. And it’s not as though Inti Creates isn’t aware of Mega Man & Bass, since they developed both Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10. It’s odd.

The plot makes no sense, even by the low standards of Mega Man games. Ostensibly, Dr. Wily needs Mega Man and Proto Man’s help to recover the components of the Roboenza cure machine from the infected robot masters who stole it from his lab. And it is reasonable to think a mad scientist who spends all his time making killer robots would be interested in not having them infected by a virus. But it turns out that Dr. Wily was behind Roboenza all along! So… why wouldn’t he already have the cure stockpiled somewhere, or design Roboenza so infected robots didn’t steal his stuff? They were his robots, too, since they have DWN-series numbers. Any why would he give Roll a functioning cure capsule, if he wants to trade the cure for robots’ loyalty? Or why not just use his close access to Mega Man and Proto Man to infect them directly? Was Dr. Wily just hoping that Mega Man and Proto Man coming into close contact with the infected robot masters would cause them to catch Roboenza? It seems needlessly indirect, especially when he’s right there in Dr. Light’s lab working on the cure machine.

Dr. Wily’s plan here makes the whole Mr. X thing in Mega Man 6 look downright genius by comparison.

Mega Man 10 does have an easy mode, which apparently has some people up in arms. Normally I’d say “if you don’t like it, don’t play it”, but you do need to play through it to unlock some of the challenges, without which you can’t get 100% completion on those. Easy mode also counts for the in-game challenges, which I’m not entirely sure I like. My second play-through was on easy mode to unlock some of the challenge stages, and without trying too hard I passed the challenges for beating the game under an hour, beating the game without dying, and beating the game without using any E-, W-, or M-tanks. (Granted, though, I did go through a few Shock Guards — even easy mode can surprise you with spike traps.) I’d like it better if the in-game challenges distinguished which difficulty level you beat them at, just like how some of the challenge stages distinguish between getting through the stage and getting through without taking damage. But beating the game without taking damage would be difficult even on easy mode. Doing it on hard mode… wow.

The challenge stages are a good way to practice fighting the game’s bosses without playing through the appropriate stage first, and they also give you a chance to practice with each special weapon and explore the full extent of its capabilities. I wasn’t aware, for instance, you could use the Wheel Cutter to climb walls, until I went through the challenge stage where it was needed.

If Mega Man 9 is on the same tier as Mega Man 2, I’d say Mega Man 10 is somewhere between the original Mega Man and Mega Man 4: still good, but a bit disappointing, especially when compared to its predecessor. I’d be apprehensive about the prospect of a Mega Man 11, since it doesn’t look like they’re going to top Mega Man 9 anytime soon.

Given that one of the core mechanics of the Mega Man series is the rock-paper-scissors style system of how each robot master is vulnerable to another robot master’s weapon, and given that the original game had robot masters that attacked by throwing rocks (Guts Man) and scissors (Cut Man) (and yes, rock beats scissors), it’s surprising that there still has never been a paper-themed robot master.

I just learned what will be bumping River City Ransom off the first page of my Wii’s menu: Mega Man 10.

I recently purchased and played through Zoda’s Revenge, the sequel to StarTropics, on Virtual Console. Having played the game before back in the day, I knew I was in for a control scheme with weird jumping mechanics (but not nearly as weird as those of its predecessor, of course). However, I had forgotten just how awful the game’s storyline is. None of it makes any sense if you make the mistake of stopping to think about it.

Well, prepare to join me in making that mistake. I’ve taken the liberty of stripping out all the entertaining parts of the game and distilling what’s left.

Chapter 1

Mike Jones’s uncle, Dr. Steve “Dr. J” Jones, is struggling to decipher something that he had presumably found in the wreckage of the Argonian escape pod in the previous game. Of course, in that game he had had no trouble translating the ship’s log he somehow extracted from the melted wreckage, so why this last code is giving him such a difficult time is a mystery, especially when we discover the secret behind it.

  

And as anyone who’s ever read something backwards knows, it automatically turns whatever book you happen to have lying around into a portal through time.

  

Chapter 2

Mike winds up in the stone age, where luckily for him, not only does everyone speak English, but they also happen to have a prophesy about him saving their children from a monster. The prophesy may or may not also be phrased in terms of baseball.

  

For all I know Mike is indeed a pitcher, which would explain why he throws every weapon he eventually acquires in the game. (Throwing axe! Throwing dagger! Throwing kitana?!) However, much like Inigo Montoya and the Man In Black, Mike is not left-handed!

  

Either stone age psychics are just as accurate as modern-day psychics, or the stone age villagers were really hoping for Link.

On the plus side, though, it turns out Argonian telepathic powers still work even if one of the parties involved is thousands of years in the past. Because if there’s one message that someone who suddenly appears in the stone age needs to hear, it’s that they traveled back in time.

  

Chapter 3

Mike time travels to Ancient Egypt, wherein he helps deliver a pizza to Cleopatra. I can only imagine the delay was because some fat plumber kept stomping the delivery turtle.

  

Mike then makes his way through a hedge maze to learn psychokinesis from a monkey.

  

Mike then explores the Great Pyramid, which for some reason has conveyor belts in it. I assume this is because the StarTropics universe takes place in the alternate timeline where Ra took the Stargate with him when he abandoned Earth, but forgot all about the conveyor belts in his landing pad.

Chapter 4

Mike next travels to nineteenth-century London, wherein he teams up with Sherlock Holmes to stop Zoda from stealing a particular artifact from a museum (which I can only assume, like all artifacts in British museums, was itself originally in Ancient Egypt).

  

Now, you might think that not even time travel can let you meet Sherlock Holmes, since he’s a fictional character and all. That just shows how little you know about time travel.

Also worth pointing out: yes, Mike is on a fetch quest for tetrads. Except in the Virtual Console version of the game, where Nintendo was apparently worried about trademark issues or something and replaced all instances of “tetrad” with “block”, even though the graphics didn’t change at all, and come on, everyone knows what those are.

Chapter 5

Mike’s next stop is the Gold Rush. Words cannot do justice to the one-two punch of blatant anachronism and painful attempt to be what-they-though-was-cool-in-the-90s: The Cactus Dance:

Mike then has the option of using explosives to mine for gold. And remember kids, if you ever find a chicken nugget buried in a mountain while mining for gold, just go ahead and eat it.

  

Then Mike gets new psychokinetic powers from a talking donkey. Or maybe they’re magic powers. Whatever. In a post-Cactus Dance world, does it really matter?

  

Chapter 6

Mike finds himself in Renaissance Italy. You can tell this because all the people on the streets of the village are such extreme ethnic stereotypes you might think you were playing Punch-Out!!.

  

Also, the pizza delivery guy from Chapter 3 recognizes you on the street. Why this makes sense: Mike is in Italy now, and the pizza was delivered from Italy. Why this makes no sense: Cleopatra lived in the first century BCE, whereas the Renaissance took place over a thousand years later. Mike can travel through time by shouting gibberish at a book. What’s the pizza guy’s excuse?

Anyway, Mike saves Leonardo da Vinci from Zoda-Y’s plaster-breath by fetching the hammer and chisel from his workshop’s basement. Why Leonardo has a dungeon full of deadly traps between the first floor and the basement is a mystery, as one might think an old man would have difficulty navigating the series of well-timed jumps needed to get through. Even more inexplicable is how the villagers are fully aware of his personal dungeon and don’t seem to find it odd.

  

Once Mike chisels Leonardo free, he then gives him some advice on a painting he’s working on, in another painful attempt by the game to seem 90s-cool at the cost of damaging the space-time continuum. Also of note: in Leonardo’s two-frame animation where he changes the painting, at no time does the brush actually touch anything but her face.

  

In return, Leonardo lends Mike his flying machine so he can reach an old castle with the next tetrad. En route, Mika telepathically warns Mike from the future about how the evil aliens are also traveling through time in search of the tetrads. This might’ve been useful information, had Mike not fought Zoda-X back in London nor already been aware Zoda-Y is in Italy.

  

In the old castle, Mike fights a bipedal triceratops who spits energy spheres, in case things hadn’t been anachronistic enough. Also, Zoda-Y ambushes him at the end, and refers to Zoda-X as his henchman. This is despite that fact that they’re both clones of the original Zoda (whom Mike killed at the end of StarTropics), and despite the fact that there’s also a Zoda-Z you fight at the end, so if any of the three clones would be the leader, Zoda-Z would be it, not Zoda-Y. No wonder the evil aliens are losing: they have no clear chain of command.

  

Chapter 7

There’s not much to say about this one, actually. Zoda-Y sends Mike to a Transylvanian castle where he fights a bunch of undead monsters and, ultimately, Zoda-Y as well, scoring yet another tetrad in the process. Maybe the creators of the game finally gave up on trying to put a plot on this game?

Chapter 8

Never mind. Mike arrives in Arthurian England for the last tetrad. Apparently everything the creators of this game know about England comes from fictional works. It doesn’t help that even the knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail look daring and heroic by comparison.

  

King Arthur seems OK with the whole thing and decides to knight Mike and order him to fight the obligatory dragon. Along the way, Mike encounters Merlin, who had been disguising himself as animals throughout history in order to give Mike psychic/magic/whatever abilities. Everyone needs a hobby, I guess.

  

Side note: it seems that the fact that Merlin has been helping Mike along his journey was supposed to be a sudden reveal in Chapter 8. Unfortunately, the Game Over screen has Merlin encouraging Mike to give it another try. Whoops.

Anyway, turns out Merlin is best friends with Hirocon, the ruler of the Argonians, notable for having had their butts kicked by Zoda in the previous game. Hirocon hid the tetrads across time and space for a hero to someday find them. Hirocon nailed the “across time” part, but one would think a spacefaring alien would consider “across space” to include “places other than Earth”. No wonder they got conquered by Zoda.

  

Merlin upgrades Mike’s psychic power enough that it’s finally actually useful to use as the main weapon. Mike presses on, slays the dragon, gets the final tetrad, and discovers via time-traveling alien telepathy that Zoda-Z is attacking C-Island in the present. Since Mike’s understanding of time travel comes from a totally excellent movie, he doesn’t quite get that “urgency” and “ability to travel through time at will” are mutually exclusive. So he turns to the last page of the book that for some reason lets him travel through time by shouting gibberish….

Chapter 9

Mike arrives at C-Island, just as he did in the first chapter of the original StarTropics. The island has received a graphical upgrade since then; I blame the seven Argonian children Mike saved from Zoda at the end of that game. Anyway, Mike walks to Coralcola and discovers that everyone’s contracted swine flu.

  

OK, it might’ve been Zoda-Z’s doing. Reabducting the Argonian children — the last survivors of their race — wasn’t enough of a dick move, so he also swinified a bunch of defenseless villagers. (In StarTropics, the chief game Mike the village’s only weapon: a yo-yo. And Mike never gave it back.) On the plus side, the final dungeon turns out to be the first dungeon of the original StarTropics, remixed a bit for the sequel’s control scheme.

  

Well, it’s not quite that easy, since after fighting the C-Serpent’s skeleton, Mike gets one last chance to stock up on potions before going through a boss rush culminating in the final showdown with Zoda-Z and his swinification gun. (Luckily, the effects on Mike are only temporary.)

  

Mike emerges victorious, rescues the Argonian children (for the second time), and the villagers have inexplicably reverted to their human form. As luck would have it, Chief Coralcola, despite living on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific, is a pro at Tetris, and can figure out how to reassemble the tetrads to form…

  

As shocking as this may be, I am not going to mock the fact that Argonians have seal-people-in-blocks technology, since StarTropics already established that. In the final two chapters of that game, Mike collects the three “magic cubes” from Zoda’s spaceship, and when they’re recombined, they turn into the seven Argonian children. What I am going to mock is how apparently seven children can be sealed in three cubes, but they used twenty-eight cubes (7 tetrads x 4 cubes/tetrad) to seal Hirocon by himself. It seems to me if the cube plan was your survival-of-the-species Plan B, you’d want to cram as many people as you can in there to maximize genetic diversity once you start rebuilding your population.

There’s also the little problem of how Hirocon hid the tetrads throughout Earth’s history before having himself sealed inside them.

  

It gets worse. Apparently their plan is now to go back to Argonia and rebuild their society. Never mind that Argonia is presumably crawling with Zoda’s yellow and green stormtroopers now, and probably being ruled by Zodas A through W with 23 iron fists. You know, the invasion force that destroyed their military and nearly exterminated their race. And then traveled all the way to Earth on two separate occasions just to wipe out the last few survivors. No, I’m sure going back with a total force of one man and seven children will be enough to liberate the planet.

Plus, there’s the whole issue of not having a spaceship. The Argonian escape pod melted into an unusable wreck in the Lost Ruins in the original game, and Mike blew up Zoda’s ship in orbit around Earth shortly thereafter. (Mike escaped in an, um, escape pod right before the big boom.) Earth doesn’t have ships capable of interstellar travel. Plus, they’re on a small island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, so even if Earth did have such vessels, they aren’t going to be anywhere readily accessible.

What’s that, you say? You can just turn yourselves into pure energy and fly back to Argonia like that?

  

WHAT?!?!?! If the Argonians have an innate ability teleport themselves across interstellar space, why didn’t they just do that in the first place? Why didn’t the entire population of Argonia just teleport themselves to some uninhabited planet when Zoda attacked? Sure it’d take a little advance planning, but so does scattering tetrads throughout Earth’s history so you can be resurrected should your planet be conquered. Actually, the latter would be harder, what with the time travel and everything. Plus, the Argonians would have had a casualty rate of zero instead of billions.

Boy, it’s sure a good thing Mike saved the leader who came up with that plan, so he can continue ruling over the tattered remnant of his civilization as they return to a planet no doubt occupied with the same invading force that nearly killed them once already. Had Mike not traveled through time collecting tetrads, the Argonian children would have lived long and happy lives in an island paradise. Sure, Zoda-Z would have come after them, but as long as Mike had saved the Super Nova weapon from the end of StarTropics, he wouldn’t have been any more difficult to defeat. (I assume the only reason Mike didn’t have it in this game was because he justifiably wasn’t expecting to have to fight aliens that day.)

Congratulations, Mike, you just doomed the Argonians.

Over the course of April 10 through 12, untold millions of people worldwide observed the resurrection of something that once had died but now is risen, in perpetual hope and expectation of its eventual return in glory.

I am talking, of course, about Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, a three-part miniseries that marked the first new Red Dwarf to be made since 1999.

I don’t need to tell you I’m a Red Dwarf fan — my three computers are named holly, kryten, and queeg, after all. I first discovered and fell in love with the series back in high school, when the local PBS station would air Red Dwarf, Red Green, and two episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in an epic two-hour block on Sunday nights. I believe they eventually stopped doing that because federal law prohibits PBS from airing anything that awesome.

Back in 1999, Red Dwarf season 8 ended (after Rimmer kicks Death in the groin and tells him that “only the good die young”) with the words “The End”, followed a few seconds later with “THE SMEG IT IS”. Alas, until this month it was the end. There was no season 9, and the movie never got made.

All hope for new Red Dwarf was lost, until I stumbled across by chance the Red Dwarf page on TV Tropes a couple days after Easter, and noticed the tiny little paragraph closing the write-up:

A three-part story Back To Earth was recently aired across the Easter Weekend of 2009 on digital channel Dave, putting an end to the complete lack of any new TV or book output since 1999.

The next step was obvious.

So, was Back to Earth worth a 10-year wait? Sort of. (minor spoilers ahead)

Part 1 starts off is textbook Red Dwarf, with things having reverted back to the premise of the pre-seasion 6 episodes (though taking place 9 years after season 8): just Lister, Rimmer (a hologram again), The Cat, and Kryten aboard the titular Red Dwarf (with Holly’s absence given a brief hand wave). Nothing great by any means, but not bad either.

The transition from the fight with the giant squid in the water tank to Katerina’s appearance is very clumsy, and though the abruptness of it can be explained in light of the reveal in Part 3, surely there could’ve been a cleaner transition between the two. Even ignoring the impossibility of the Red Dwarf supporting two holograms at one time (especially seeing how it happened in the last two episodes of season 1), the rest of Part 1 does little other than to set up the premise of Parts 2 and 3.

The storyline that fills most of Parts 2 and 3 is sort of weird. Remember that scene in Spaceballs where the bad guys watch a VHS copy of Spaceballs to figure out where the heroes are? It’s sort of like that, but stretched out over half an hour.

More specifically, the crew get sucked through a swirly thing into the “real world”, which is eagerly awaiting the premiere of Back to Earth. They find a promotional DVD case of the three-parter, and while there’s no actual disc inside, they learn from the back of the case that Back to Earth is the end of Red Dwarf. Since in the “real world” universe they’re just fictional characters, they’ll cease to exist once Red Dwarf has ended, and so they seek out their creator to plead for more life. Hilarity ensues.

This level of self-referentiality is tough to do well, especially as the backbone of the entire plot. While Back to Earth manages well enough, being set in the “real world” loses some of the feel of being Red Dwarf. Which isn’t to say there isn’t excellence to be found within; take, for example, this scene that mercilessly spoofs the magical image enhancement capabilities found in TV shows:

Also, you just know someone in Britain is making a real-life Carbug.

Oh, and lest you think my constant scare-quoting of the “real world” is some sort of spoiler, I’m doing it because of the one infuriating difference between the real real world and the “real world” as shown in Back to Earth: the “real world” apparently got ten seasons of Red Dwarf instead of eight. Lucky smeggers.

In any event, it’s obvious that just as Back to Earth is about the Red Dwarf crew asking the show’s creator to keep making episodes, Back to Earth has the ulterior purpose of testing the market for interest in, well, new Red Dwarf episodes, and not-so-subtly asking The Powers That BBC to fund it.

Maybe the whole “ten seasons” thing wasn’t an error but a promise — the half of Grant Naylor still working on Red Dwarf has apparently said he’s not interested in making season 9 but is interested in making season 10, whatever that might mean.

And we all saw how well season 8’s promise of more Red Dwarf turned out. But one can hope for new life, and isn’t that what the Easter season is all about?

Well, that and Peeps.

Seriously now, major Mother 3 spoilers ahead. I’m going to discuss major plot points in the game. I’m even putting everything behind a cut, to prevent you from reading anything accidentally. OK?

Read the rest of this entry »

Mother 3 is better than EarthBound (a.k.a. Mother 2).

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, Mother 3 is the game where Lucas and the New Pork City stage in Brawl come from. (Tip: if you want to avoid Mother 3 spoilers, don’t play Brawl.)

Mother 3 delivers the same style of humor as its predecessor, despite having a more serious, even depressing, storyline. And manages to pull it off, no less. To avoid spoilers, I’ll save further discussion and speculation on that for a separate post, but suffice it to say I’m still trying to figure out whether or not I liked the ending. (And EarthBound’s cast list at the end blows Mother 3’s out of the water, but never mind that.)

Graphically, it has the same cartoony 16-bit sprite style of EarthBound, but larger and with much more detail. Whereas EarthBound gave you a two-frame walk animation, Mother 3 has sprite animation like this:

The battle system is much the same as in EarthBound, including the rolling HP meter. Fighting in Mother 3 relies on more exploitation on that mechanic, however; there are plenty of enemies that do lots of damage, but beating them quickly lets you exit battle before most of the HP drop occurs. Likewise, which characters you rely on to heal makes a difference, since the longer you wait, the closer everyone else could come to death. There’s also a new combo mechanic, where tapping the button in time with the rhythm of the background music deals more damage. Together, they keep battles fast-paced, despite being rooted in an archaic choose-everyone’s-action-at-the-start-of-the-turn system.

Even better, the final battle doesn’t depend on spamming a command that is either only available in the final battle (Sing in the original Mother) or is largely useless until the final battle (Pray in EarthBound). Instead, the final battle in Mother 3 is… something else entirely. But enough about that, without getting into spoilers.

Like EarthBound, the enemies you fight skew strongly towards the goofy. In particular, the villains in Mother 3 spend a lot of time making chimeras, so when you aren’t fighting the Pigmask army you’ll be facing off against kangasharks (kangaroo + shark, complete with a joey + shark in its pouch), cattlesnakes (not a cat + rattlesnake, but cattle + snake), and hippo launchers (which do not launch hippos, but rather are a hippopotamus + rocket launcher, and are just as dangerous as you’d expect).

I’d say that the Pigmask army’s geneticists have too much free time, but their orders come from the top. Normal animals are boring, after all.

The music in Mother 3 is very good, and there’s plenty of it. The sound player accessible from the title screen has no fewer than 250 songs in it. In particular, there’s a lot of variety in the music that plays during battle, which prevents the tap-in-time-to-the-rhythm mechanic from being too easy, especially since some songs don’t have a steady beat to them. My only complaint musically is that the villain’s leitmotif is very heavily represented throughout the soundtrack, so if you don’t like it, that’s going to pose a bit of a problem.

While the “dungeon”-type areas you fight through are generally good, a few in particular stand out. Tanetane Island is wonderfully creepy and disturbing, and the boss at the end was indeed magnificent. The tower in Chapter 8, whose name I won’t mention due to it being a spoiler, is quite possibly the greatest final dungeon I have ever seen in an RPG. At the very least, it has the best use of toilets in a video game, period.

Although having experienced EarthBound isn’t strictly necessary to understand Mother 3, I’d recommend it. Not just because I’d recommend playing EarthBound in general, mind you, even though I would. There are connections to be found between the two games, which I’ll probably ramble on about at great length in the spoilery companion to this post. Maybe someday EarthBound will finally be released on Virtual Console.

Finally, I must say that the Mother 3 translation is very well done. The project’s blog goes into great detail about all the challenges involved in making it, and the end result shows a lot of polish and attention to detail. It wasn’t just a matter of replacing Japanese text with English text; there were lots of technical problems that had to be hacked through along the way, all without anything to go off of except the binary code of the game.

So stop reading this and go play Mother 3.

[Image credit: starmen.net]

Everyone in the galaxy is an idiot. At least, that’s what I learned from playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

Let’s say you’re the Galactic Federation. You hire a handful of bounty hunters to hand-deliver an antivirus to your computer systems after the Space Pirates have (choose one: compromised, owned, 0wn3d, pwn3d) your networks. Suddenly, said Space Pirates launch a surprise attack, and while aforementioned bounty hunters try to stop a very unpleasant-looking glowing space rock from smashing into your military base, they get blasted by the nigh-unkillable antagonist from the previous game with something that makes their bodies start producing phazon.

Phazon, by the way, is basically concentrated evil in mineral form. It’s extremely toxic and mutagenic, with the tendency to mutate anything or anyone who comes into contact with it into something very deadly and something eager to be deadly. Naturally, the Space Pirates love using the stuff in their genetic experiments.

In other words, suppose someone shot you in the face, and suddenly you started pooping weapons-grade uranium. Now suppose that weapons-grade uranium is also sentient. Well, being the GF, you’re now stuck with four bounty hunters with this condition. What do you do?

Naturally, instead of trying to cure them, you figure out a way to weaponize this internal phazon production in three of the bounty hunters and send them out to fight the Space Pirates. And when you mysteriously lose contact with them after a couple weeks, instead of suspecting that the evil sentient self-regenerating substance has done something, you know, bad to them, you go ahead and make the same “upgrade” to your last bounty hunter, and send her out to find out what happened. And kill Space Pirates.

For whatever reason, Samus apparently sees nothing wrong with any of this. If it were me, I’d be a little upset about them making changes to my armor while I was busy being unconscious with a life-threatening medical condition. Especially when it turns out that the fail-safes in the upgrade to prevent runaway phazon production, um, don’t exactly “work”.

In the GF’s defense, they do apologize when they find out what they did.

That’s the premise to Corruption in a nutshell. The same sort of 3D Metroid action you’d expect from the rest of the sub-series ensues as you travel between planets collecting power-ups and upgrades hidden in implausible areas in (mostly) abandoned environs in between shooting Space Pirates and the eponymous metroids. In that respect, it does things a bit better than its predecessors, in that the plot coupons needed to access the final area of the game are less blatantly arbitrary. In Corruption, they’re energy cells needed to systematically power sections of what’s left of the GFS Valhalla as you explore it, whereas in the previous two games they were “artifacts” or “keys” needed to pass an arbitrary barrier leading to the final boss. (Echoes was particularly bad in this respect, requiring a series of keys to be collected to reach every major boss.)

The Wiimote+Nunchuk control scheme works pretty well, with the decoupling of movement and aiming eliminating much of the need to lock on to enemies in order to hit anything. There’s a lot of waving the Wiimote around to activate knobs and levers and such to activate them, but by matching the motions Samus makes in-game, it avoids feeling like the “arbitrary waggle” controls that apparently plague many Wii games. Plus, swinging the Nunchuk back and forth to use the Grapple Beam works well, especially when using it to rip apart annoying flying enemies.

One problem with the controls, albeit a minor one, is that although all the dials-and-levers type stuff is done with the Wiimote in your right hand, Samus does the motions with her left hand, which breaks the verisimilitude a bit. Of course, her right hand is sort of occupied operating her arm cannon.

I’m less forgiving, however, of the attempt to force more traditional FPS elements into the game play. It comes up a bit in the Spire Pod sequence in SkyTown where you fight hordes of Space Pirates, but it becomes much more blatant in the last areas of the Pirate Homeworld. The combination of the X-Ray Visor and the Nova Beam acts like a sniper rifle, letting you headshot Space Pirates for one-hit kills. Soon after that’s introduced, you’re stuck with the task of escorting a squad of GF tactical demolitionists who have a surprising lack of combat ability. None of this feels very Metroidy, and it weakens the final areas of the game.

Speaking of which, I didn’t much care for how the entire way your health meter works is changed in the final area, especially not the ham-handed way it’s explained to you via a series of four or five dialog popups. I suppose it would’ve been worse if the permanent-hypermode you’re stuck with on Phaaze worked the same way hypermode does in the rest of the game, where letting the phazon meter fill up results in game over, but still, I can’t approve of changing such a core game play mechanic like that, especially once that guts even the limited options for weapons selection you had up until then.

And weapons selection is almost as limited as in the original NES version of Metroid: the new types of beams and missiles replace, rather than complement, the old ones. Worse, missiles as a whole aren’t all that useful once you have enough energy tanks in reserve to abuse hypermode, which is effective against pretty much everything you fight. I don’t think I ever ran close to running out of missiles even before my stockpile hit triple digits.

However, I must give credit for how the game has you deal with the shield protecting the Leviathan Seed on Elysia. On Bryyo, getting past it involved fighting your way to a pair of shield generators and calling in airstrikes from your spaceship. It initially seems like the same will happen on Elysia, until the Aurora unit in SkyTown suggests you just drop a giant bomb on the shield and blow it up. Of course, you then have to run around SkyTown assembling said giant bomb, but still.

Also appreciated is the ability to have all the locations of hidden items marked on your map near the end of the game, if you figure out how to do that. It beats traversing the game world again looking for those last couple items if you’re going for 100% completion. Though to my credit, I did manage to get 98% of them through careful observation and obsessive note-taking, using the endgame map only to find the last two missile expansions.

In practice, however, that’s really only for bragging rights (and unlocking slightly longer endings), since as I mentioned earlier, there’s little reason to use missiles except to get past certain obstacles. Ship missile expansions are even more useless, since aside from getting past a couple obstacles on Bryyo you never need to call in bombing runs again. Actually, it turns out that all the different buttons in the spaceship are just for decoration except for the one that lets you fly from one point to another. Not that I was looking for a dogfight sequence in a Metroid game, though, but if the ship only serves as transportation and a mobile save point, why bother with a cockpit screen at all?

Finally, getting back to my opening rant: the only reason Samus and the GF emerge victorious at the end of the game is that the Space Pirates are even dumber than the GF seems to be. The Space Pirates have hand scanners to activate their equipment. Space Pirate hands don’t look even remotely human, what with the three pointy fingers and all. So why do they have no problem accepting Samus’s hand, given that she is (a) human and (b) walking Space Pirate death. Samus is the last person Space Pirates would want using their stuff. It’s like if TSA made you use a hand scanner before boarding the plane, but the scanner was perfectly OK with bin Laden’s hand on it. Or a kitten.

And how exactly do hand scanners work when someone is wearing full body armor, anyway?

NaNoWriMo is all about writing a 50,000-word novel, or at least a (very) rough draft of one, entirely in the month of November. Assuming that workload is spread evenly across all 30 days, that works out to be 1,666 and 2/3 words per day, every day. Call it 1,667 words, unless you’re planning on having a character die at the end of each day’s allotment, each time with his last word being cut off 2/3 of the way through.

OK, there might be some humor value in doing that, but I’m guessing it would wear a little thin by Week 2, to say nothing of having to teach your word count tool of choice how to interpret fractional words.

Last time I did NaNoWriMo, way back in 2002, I was just making things up as I went along, with little thought to how each day’s work would fit in with the overall structure of the story. As a result, I’d throw in chapter breaks wherever the plot seemed to call for them, and besides that just wrote in 1,667 word chunks. (In practice, more like 2,000 to 2,200, since I had to make up the day lost trying to come up with a story, and after that I didn’t want to ease up on myself until the blasted thing was finished.)

This time around, I’m going to take the approach that most others seem to take, and have each day’s writing be a chapter unto itself, with the goal being 30 chapters that total 50,000 words. This will undoubtedly work better for me this time around, since I do have a general idea of the storyline already figured out more or less, modulo an inconsistency here or deus ex machina there, but I’ve still got about 10 days to work those things out. I can go ahead and outline what basic events happen in each chapter, helping to keep things more or less on track, and avoiding the possibility of having the big epic showdown happen on Day 15.

Unless I wanted to come up with a sequel real quick, of course.

So now, during the planning stages, the trick is to get an idea of how much story can be reasonably fit into each chapter, again to keep things balanced and flowing smoothly. It’s hard to visualize how much text there is in 1,667 words, thanks to the human brain’s inability to have a good intuition of numbers larger than you can count on your hands.

Thus, this post is intended to serve as a calibration device. This post shall be precisely 1,667 words long, according to the word count that WordPress periodically displays off to the side while I type this. When all is said and done, I’ll at least have a visual reference for how much writing I’m getting myself into each day next month.

Of course, if I wanted to be really ambitious, I ought to leave open the possibility of writing more than one chapter per day, queuing up the extras so that you the reader still get them in daily installments. This isn’t entirely unreasonable, especially since November 1 is a Saturday, which in principle leaves more time available for typing furiously than does your average day.

Discipline is the key to winning NaNoWriMo. Blind stubbornness and a willingness to follow through with something that no longer seems like such a good idea also help, but mostly it’s discipline. To enforce that discipline upon myself to ensure that I don’t fall behind the minimum 1,667 words per day goal, I shall hereby set upon myself this constraint:

No web surfing until the day’s writing has been achieved.

No checking the online copy of the newspaper. (And seriously, does Firefox’s spell checker recognize neither “online” nor “Firefox” as properly spelled words?) No reading any of the blogs getting pulled into my RSS feed reader. (“Blog” isn’t in there either?) No following webcomics. And absolutely no, under any conditions, visiting TV Tropes. That server runs entirely on wasted time.

Distractions are the enemy. All distractions must be eliminated to assure that this year’s NaNoWriMo effort is a success. Or at least, not a failure. Victory is decided by the word count, but true success is in the eyes of the reader.

In other words, in case this wasn’t clear already, each chapter is going to be posted here, one per day, all throughout November.

But to really kill off any possible distractions, I ought to also forbid any video games until the day’s writing is in the can. That one could be rough, though. I’m almost through Super Paper Mario, and I’m pretty sure I can finish it before the end of the month, but NaNoWriMo’s going to be taking away time that could’ve been spent playing Mother 3. It’s going to be sitting there, the sequel to one of my favorite video games, taunting me while I type and/or bang my head against the keyboard repeatedly. And from what I’ve heard about the game so far, it’s right about up there with EarthBound.

And how the heck am I still nowhere close to 1,667 words on this post? I’m still mired in the triple digits. The high triple digits, to be sure, but triple digits nonetheless. This is taking longer than I thought, and I’m doing little more than spewing stream of consciousness at this point.

This could be a bad sign for the story. I really don’t want to wind up with a bunch of 900-word chapters padded out to nearly twice that just to hit my daily quota. I guess I won’t know for sure until I actually draw up an outline of the story and see what will be happening in each chapter, but I’m starting to wonder whether I truly have 50,000 words worth of material right now.

And just think, in the original concept of the story, the finale was going to be what I’m guessing will take place somewhere between chapters 10 and 15. A lot more stuff has accreted onto the core story since then, and much for the better, but I would’ve been doomed had I been going with the original concept. Well, I guess I would’ve had to start making up the better/extended version as I went along, without the benefit of having been able to set some things up before the big reveal that would’ve been at the climax.

It’s kind of annoying talking about the story in vague generalities like this, but there’s not really any getting around it without dropping spoilers about key plot points, or committing myself to things that may well change over the course of the coming month. Given that most of the changes I’ve thrown in to the mix so far have improved things overall, I don’t want to cut that off just yet.

Which leaves me wondering just how exactly I’m going to squeeze another 500 words or so out of this post. And here just four paragraphs prior I was complaining about how low the word count was. I’m clearly running out of ideas, so I think I’m going to resort to a complete change of topic to pad things out some more.

In fact, since I mentioned Mother 3 up there not too long ago, I’m going to ramble on about EarthBound until I can finally kill this experiment and weep at how much work this sort of thing is going to be come November.

EarthBound is, at some level, a deconstruction of the Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) genre. A lot of the humor in it is playing the standard tropes to the point of absurdity.

For example, in JRPGs the silent main character’s only “dialog”, per se, is answering a “yes or no” prompt, and usually re-answering it until you answer the correct way. EarthBound also has you answer yes or no to questions like “Pop quiz: a Beatles song, ___terday”. Another area has an NPC rattle off pages and pages of types of nuts, asking “Which one do you like?”, with a yes/no prompt for your answer.

EarthBound also likes to make the reasons you can’t go to the next area until doing something else as absurd as possible. For example, the Onett police close roads whenever anything happens. Later, an inexplicable statue of a pencil blocks your path, requiring you to fund the development of the Pencil Eraser. Much later still, an inexplicable statue of an eraser blocks your path, requiring the development of, yes, the Eraser Eraser.

Then, of course, there is Dungeon Man, the ultimate fusion of man and dungeon. Besides doubling as both dungeon and NPC party member, he is full of signs pointing out the standard tropes in JRPG dungeon design, noting how monsters inevitably move in once you build a dungeon, and how he forgot to put a treasure at the end of a particularly long dead end path.

Speaking of treasure, most “treasures” aren’t found in standard treasure chests. Gift boxes are commonly found lying around dungeons, and let’s face it, those are just as explicable as treasure chests would be. But you can also find items in trash cans, such as finding a hamburger in the trash can outside the Onett fast food place. (Yum!) And when you first get control of Jeff, you have the option of loading your inventory up with cookies, if you don’t mind unwrapping all the presents Jeff’s friend stayed up all night wrapping for a birthday party. (And yes, the friend gets upset if you take any.)

Other things you’ll find in EarthBound: A cave full of five giant moles who each boast that they are the third strongest. A monkey that comes free with a pack of bubble gum. Beating up New Age Retro Hippies. Fighting the kid who lives next door as the part of the final boss.

Bonus tip before I hit 1,667: you can damage Giygas’s first form by Brainshocking him, which oddly doesn’t get reflected back at you like everything else does. If he attacks himself, his attack will bounce off him and hit… him.

And that’s 1,667.

For all you Brawl players out there wondering where Lucas came from, you may be interested to know that the unofficial English translation of Mother 3 (i.e., the GBA sequel to EarthBound) is now out.

I’d be playing it right now, but I’m currently working through Super Paper Mario, and I don’t like playing more than one game at once. (Though I am willing to make an exception if the game is sufficiently awesome.)

This has been a public service announcement.

Even “better” than the Mega Man box art: here he has an arm cannon and a gun!

Having now completed a play-through of Mega Man 9, I can safely say that it ranks right up there with Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3.

The level design in the Dr. Wily stages is very impressive, balancing the fine line between challenging and unfair. You’ll die plenty of times — I certainly did — but each time you’ll know it’s because you screwed up, not because something came out of left field and killed you. There’s plenty of ways to meet a quick death, but never without first giving you a chance to figure out a new type of obstacle in a relatively benign environment. The level design loves to play with your expectations, with lots of twists on mechanics you’ve seen (or think you’ve seen) before. By the time you reach the screen deep in Wily Stage 3 with three 1-ups in it, you’ll know to be on your guard, even if you don’t yet know why.

A fantastic instance of challenging the player’s expectations comes in one of the screens in Wily Stage 1. I won’t spoil it for you, but if you’ve played the game, you know exactly the one I’m talking about. It took me a long time to figure out the trick needed to avoid certain death, and it’s sure to fool Mega Man veterans — heck, especially Mega Man veterans — the first time they encounter it. Whoever at Inti Creates who came up with it is a diabolical genius.

Plus, in retrospect, it’s amazing it’s taken this long for Mega Man to enter a boss’s chamber from the right side of the screen instead of the left.

The bosses in the Wily Stages are also excellent. They nicely avoid the cliche that Mega Man 4 and later fell into of a series of well-drawn but unremarkable screen-sized bosses with a single weak point. Each one here is unique, ranging from a sort of reverse tug-of-war using giant spiked balls, to a multi-screen behemoth, to a twist on a classic Mega Man boss that requires pattern memorization and/or getting into the zone to beat.

Also, Dr. Wily finally realized how effective the mandatory skull-themed robot he pilots during the final battle could be if he made the whole thing out of whatever alloy it is that deflects all of Mega Man’s weapons. And not to spoil the ending, but he even seems to have anticipated his inevitable defeat, beyond just having an escape plan.

Alas, though, the game isn’t perfect. Dr. Wily’s final form sadly follows the stale “disappearing and reappearing saucer” thing that started in Mega Man 4. I never cared much for that type of final battle, though at least the weapons available this time give you a few options for hitting the saucer when it’s well outside of jumping range. Also, even though Rush Jet works just fine underwater, I would’ve kind of liked to see the return of Rush Marine for that purpose, just because.

If I may boast for a second, I managed to get about 25% of the challenges completed on this first play-through quite by accident, including half the beat-a-robot-master-under-10-seconds ones and the one that involves never stopping in one stage (Galaxy Man’s stage for me, if you’re wondering). (I’ve also managed to beat Dr. Wily’s first two forms without taking damage, but there’s no prize for that.) I don’t know if I’ll ever pull off the harder ones like the never-miss-a-shot or never-take-damage ones, or even the tedious ones like beat-the-game-five-times-in-a-day, but I’ll definitely be playing through the game many more times.

Peeking at the downloadable content coming next month, there’ll be options for increasing the difficulty even more, and adding an option to play as Proto Man. Arguably these could’ve easily been part of the main game, but given that I would’ve gladly paid $20 for Mega Man 9 as-is instead of $10, I really can’t complain about shelling out another $8 for all the extras.

Inti Creates could’ve easily relied on exploiting old-school Mega Man nostalgia and produced a lump of 8-bit shovelware, but they took the effort to recreate the quality of those games, not just their appearance. If there is a Mega Man 10 in the offing, let’s hope they don’t start slacking off.

Mega Man 9 is shaping up to be precisely as awesome as I had hoped. If you wish to remain unspoiled in regards to this awesomeness, you best stop reading right now.

First off, they’ve nailed the old-school Mega Man look and feel and sound. One could imagine an alternate universe where this game came out after Mega Man 2. Except for being able to save your game instead of scribbling down grid passwords. And the challenges ranging from easy (kill a robot master using only the Mega Buster… yeah, that’s how you have to kill the first one) to nigh-impossible (beat the game without taking damage!). And the online leaderboard for speed-running the game. And the hooks for downloadable content. But hey, the menus for all those things are downright 8-bit.

The plot is, well, nobody plays a Mega Man game for the plot, and Mega Man 9 delivers what you’d expect, with the right amount of ridiculousness in the no-seriously-Dr.-Wily-isn’t-the-villain-this-time-honest!-ness. Eight of Dr. Light’s robots are running amok, and Dr. Wily insists that he’s finally reformed right before Dr. Light turned evil (and if you donate money to Dr. Wily’s Swiss bank account, you can fund development of something to stop Dr. Light’s robots!). Apparently everyone swallows this, and it’s up to Mega Man to blast some sense into the robot masters after Dr. Light’s arrest. (Why the police apparently have no qualms about Mega Man, clearly Dr. Light’s deadliest creation ever given his undefeated record against dozens of Dr. Wily’s robots, running free while all this is going on, has not yet been addressed.)

The level design has been pretty good, putting new and interesting spins on the classic elements. Anyone who’s ever played a Mega Man game knows that eventually they’ll come across two things: disappearing blocks over spikes and/or pits, and multi-screen drops through spike-lined corridors. I’ve played two levels so far, each fairly arbitrarily chosen, and I’ve already seen both.

Plug Man’s stage has several disappearing block sections, and manages to find new tricks with them that previous games never tried. I wonder how many players will fall to their doom when a block suddenly appears in front of the platform they were trying to jump to. Nice. (In fairness, you could very much see that coming if you bothered to watch the pattern before you started jumping around.)

Splash Woman’s stage has the spike drops. Early on, you land on a platform in the middle of the screen. The left drop has no spikes, the right one does. You get to choose which one to jump down. Choose wisely, and you can get a 1-up. Later on, you have to go up a series of spike-lined rooms, relying on platforms that slide across the screen to reach the next ladder. In a way, it’s like a block puzzle mixed with a spike drop, in reverse. I haven’t gotten past the third screen without wimping out and using Rush Coil to avoid the pair of spikes deviously placed in the dead center of the room, but I’m sure it can be done.

So far, even when there’s clearly inspiration from a previous game, there’s something new in the implementation here that keeps it from being the series of retreads that Mega Man 7 wound up as. Again in Splash Woman’s stage, the part where you have to ride bubbles to the top of the screen is straight out of Wave Man’s stage in Mega Man 5, but this time (a) it’s underwater, so you can jump really well, and (b) enemies shoot out at you from the sides of the screen.

The attention to detail is pretty nifty, too. Get hit by an octopus’s ink blob in Splash Woman’s stage, and Mega Man stays covered in ink until you switch to a different weapon. You can also buy a “book of hairstyles” from the item shop on the stage select screen to take off your helmet… until you die. There’s also a “book of costumes”, which I haven’t tried yet, but from its icon I’m assuming it dresses Mega Man up as Roll. (For the record, there are also items available which are actually useful, if you’re in to that sort of thing.)

The robot masters themselves haven’t disappointed so far. Plug Man’s shots travel along the floor, up the wall behind you, onto the ceiling, and then drop down right above you head, so you have to keep your eye both on what Plug Man is doing and the shots you’ve already dodged once. Splash Woman swims to the top of the screen while fish move across the screen, and then she drops tridents on you. The Mega Buster is much more effective against hear than Plug Man’s weapon.

Another great nostalgic thing: Splash Woman and I managed to kill each other simultaneously, just like the first time I won-for-all-intents-and-purposes-even-though-the-game-didn’t-count-it against Cut Man way back in the original Mega Man. And just like then, Mega Man 9 counted it as a death rather than a victory. On my final life. Game over.

Count yourself sort-of-lucky, Splash Woman, for your days are numbered. Specifically, numbered 1, since tomorrow night it’s go time.

Damn you, Jamie, for planting the idea in my head. This is all your fault. The LHC won’t create a black whole and swallow the planet, but the following, a lyrical fanfic of an obscure parody song crossed with particle physics is so dorky it may collapse upon itself, forming a dork singularity from which nothing can escape.

I hope you’re pleased with yourself.

Well everyone hails
All their stories and tales
And Geneva now is a provider
Of stories that might
Tell of the epic fight
Of Mick Faldo and the large collider.

‘Twas a supercooled ring
Through which protons would zing
In hopes of maybe detecting Higgs bosons.
But a few people thought
It would turn all to naught
‘Cause they listened to credulous morons.

The scientists heard
Of these fears, quite absurd,
And explained that the worries were baseless.
But the fear-mongers told
About mini black holes
And reality-consuming strangelets.

Those fears and concerns
Failed to discourage CERN
And their plans to probe energies larger.
The opponents screamed “no!”
And they turned to the bow
Of Mick Faldo, the world-famous archer.

They asked, “If you have the time –
It won’t cost you a dime –
Could you stop it before things get much worse?
It packs far more power
Than a meteor shower
And it might destroy the whole universe!”

Mick Faldo replied,
“How would I get inside?
My success I could never guarantee.
And please done be miffed –
Though my arrows are swift,
They’re slower than .999c.”

But he tried nonetheless,
Aiming towards the ATLAS
And adjusting for underground weather.
But did his arrow trick work?
…
…
…
…
No, he felt like a jerk
When his shot pushed two hadrons together.

Still everyone hails
All their stories and tales
And Geneva is still a provider.
The story lacks harm
But it has a strange charm:
It’s Mick Faldo and the large collider.

Shockingly, I have broken with my usual practice of being as current with gaming hardware as Strong Bad is with computers. In my defense, however, much of its runtime will no doubt be put towards playing old games with the occasional playing of games that only look like they’re old.

I’ve been told that stuff and/or things will happen if I swap the following code with people who (a) don’t suck and (b) have the same hardware:

1685 2057 2828 8658

If I’ve got my end set up right, there could well be a Mii version of The Monarch in it for you. If that isn’t enough inducement for you, I don’t know what is.

Surely someone at some point has been inspired by watching The Prisoner and set up their own kosho ring. Preliminary searches on Google and YouTube only turn up things related to “real” kosho and not the product of Patrick McGoohan’s imagination.

Come on, in the post-Jackass era, can you seriously tell me no one has done this? And videotaped the results and posted them on the Internet?

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, watch this (from the episode It’s Your Funeral, if I’m not mistaken):