raocow's talkhaus

raocow, a couple of years ago, someone made a patch for SMA4 with all of the e-reader levels already in it. No extra hoops to jump through or anything, and no save files where progress has already been made by someone else. You might want to use this patch instead of whatever whoever gave you: http:...

I'm enjoying this LP so far. I played Super Mario Land 2 in my childhood but never owned it, so I borrowed it from a friend, beat it once, then never really made an earnest effort to play it again, so this "forced" trip down memory lane sure is pleasant. Speaking of the early '90s, though,...

The metool babies always get me there, too. The sheer repetition with all the snorkeling metools in the underwater portion create the perfect storm to forget that the normal metools in MM5 are one of the only variants in the entire series that aren't permanently dealt with after a single shot. Also,...

What I wound up doing on Richter was swatting the goomba through the wall with my cape. I was kind of surprised that it worked. I did this, too. I felt kind of foolish not realizing why the level is called Richter until raocow started trying to earthquake the goomba into the question block. :lol:

So, something to keep in mind when dealing with Rip Van Fish that you need to wake up for various reasons: a programming quirk causes them to wake if you're far enough away from them vertically. The RVF in Hydrologic can consistently be woken if you swim to the top of the screen when it's near the b...

Oh man, I've been away from SMWC for too long. I completely missed this release. Keytastrophe was one of the first hacks I played way back in the day, and I always appreciated the concept of the GB Donkey Kong approach to its early game puzzles. I'm gonna' have to go download this and play ahead of ...

Now we're talking. Megaman 5 was my favorite game in the series in my youth before developing a more nuanced opinion. Don't get me wrong; I still like it, and it's the most polished of the first six in the game feel department (MM4 and MM6 both have some flaws like slow screen transitions, MM4's slo...

Is it just me, or are the passwords getting larger with every defeated boss? I'm not 100% sure how it works or anything, but tinkering around with a password generator for the game, it seems that there's a base password with dots that get added/deleted or shifted around for every boss or two that i...

Rejoice, raocow, for this is the last Game Boy title where you have to blind-pick from a bunch of indistinguishable teleporters for the second set of bosses. :) Also, I want to echo others in saying that the music in this game, bad instrumentation aside, is mostly quite good. It's just a shame that ...

Ah, Megaman 4. This is my favorite of the NES six. It had steep competition with Megaman 3 in my youth, but MM4 eventually edged it out with its more consistent difficulty and having one of Megaman's best sets of weapons. People might like to start with Toadman, but I prefer to beeline for Pharoahma...

Considering raocow's apparently never played the GB Megaman titles before, I think he's doing pretty well. Younger me was so insistent on these games being so based on the NES source material that I never once considered that Elecman or Iceman could actually be a much easier starting point than Cutm...

It's a shame, too, because Wily Wars looks and (most of the time) sounds incredibly sexy.

If raocow's going to use MMLC2 for the later games, I hope the weird palette errors in MM7 and 8 get patched out by then. They don't hamper gameplay, but they sure are ugly.

Aww man, the hack was actually starting to pick up a bit there. Hopefully the author can take what was learned from this experience and apply it to a more complete future endeavor.

In spite of the hack's flaws, I'm really digging the palettes.

Gotta' say, SMBX always rubbed me the wrong way as a Mario enthusiast, but the underlying improvements made to the engine since raocow first started LPing SMBX episodes coupled with the sheer creativity of some of the people in the Mario community has really propelled its standing with me and made w...

I mean, you do have a point, though. I think you've convinced me to boot up X4 and see if Zero is as tedious as I remember. It's been a good long while since I played, and raocow has proven many times that he's a veritable bucket of surprises when I'm going off of experiences from years ago.

buddy, this is why dashing & dash-jumping exist! zero isn't an up-close fighter, he's a hit-and-run fighter and boss fights with him are more engaging and REALLY exhilarating in my opinion also, i hope you realize your error in suggesting raocow doesn't do something because it's harder than the...

I never really understood why X3 (and to a lesser extent, X2) had such repetitive boss themes when the original MMX's is actually a pretty darn lengthy melody with multiple phrases that might be TOO long considering the sheer abruptness of some of the fights. Lack of budget? Luckily, X3 is the low p...

Man, I really don't get the massive amounts of X5 hatred in this thread. I actually had more fun with X5 than X4. :( It's been a long time since I've played it, but as I recall, it's just too different in all the bad ways at once in a franchise that almost seems to take great pride in stagnant cons...

Even after all these years, raocow proves to still be the best beta tester of others' creations.

Of the lot, Tactics, 5, and 12 have always been my favorites, and Final Fantasy Tactics is still my most favorite game of all time. Tactics for dat story and gameplay coupled with one of the best iterations of the job system in the entire FF franchise, Final Fantasy 5 for dat gameplay and yet anothe...

I like how both the overused boss theme and the replacement boss theme are from the same game. ;)

Anyway, if this level didn't have instant respawns raocow would have spent just over 3 hours watching Mario's death animation over the course of this level. I'm just going to immortalize this quote right here. This is truly something every game designer should think about, and indeed, I am very hap...

Suddenly, the music for Chasm of Scales from VLDC8 in the second half of Serious Tank! Oh man!

These days, if I were going to hide something important (read: not anything like a 1-up, 3-up moon, or coins) in a random pit like that, there'd be an indicator. It may be a subtle indicator, but testing the player's observation skills is much more conducive to good level design than testing sheer p...