raocow's talkhaus

I don't remember if official games did this at all, but Megaman Unlimited, instead of doing thematic weaknesses, just made a robot master's weakness something that more or less countered their attack pattern. And that's a neat way of doing it, but it's hard to intuit what would work against a given boss, and even then you can't possibly know what one's weak to until you fight it.

I don't see why the boss weaknesses have to make sense, you're supposed to experiment and see what sticks. That said I don't care for this game having two weakness chains. That just feels unnecessary.

Ashan wrote: ↑5 years ago @Blue
I mean, MM1 did the rock-paper-scissors thing, and MM2 did the logical elemental weaknesses. From there I can't think of much more for "logical" boss weaknesses. A lot of subsequent games have some sort of fire and ice/water boss where one is weak to the other. If you want weaknesses to make sense you'd probably have to start with the boss weapon and work a robot master around that. Hard Man's got a fist punch weapon - what's weak to being punched? Punching Bag Man?
That's not to say I'm first to defend 3. As previously mentioned, I think it's the jankiest in the series. I think the simple act of trimming the doc robots would have gone a long way. Every time I think of this game I just start imagining like... The top spin, and not only its uselessness in dealing damage, but also it's random weapon consumption. And the fact that it's the final boss weakness and can either take 20 hits or 1 hit. I would have liked if they put the time spent on the doc robot stages into polishing the other content.

Top Spin is my favourite weapon in all of Mega Man, but you really have to know how it works and why it "randomly" consumes so much energy. The trick is to never press the button for too long when hitting something that isn't killed in one hit. Because due to a bug, if you hold down the button while you're "in" an enemy that isn't killed instantly, the weapon's energy continues to drain. So if you're just toying around trying to see what it works against, just push it once at the beginning of your jump.
This sounds like a serious drawback, but it's actually only against one enemy: Shadow Man himself (and the Doc Robot that's weak to it I guess, but eeeeh). Everything else either dies in one hit, or is immune to Top Spin, so you can learn not to use it against them.

What I'm saying is this: if you know which enemies are weak to it and in which stages they appear, you can dance through entire levels just one-shotting everything in your path with a twirl and a flourish and it's glorious. Really annoying enemies like the hopping dudes in Shadow Man, the parachuters in the same, the pole vault guys, they're all felled in an instant and you're completely immune to them while you're spinning, as contact kills them, not you. But if you're just playing around to see if this weapon might work against...oh no, it doesn't and now the energy is gone...then you will hate it, yeah.

Same is true for Charge Kick, by the way :D. I just love melee weapons for some reason!

Megaman 3 is def the best of the first three games imo, the level design is solid throughout and there's no instances of completely bullshit spikes in difficulty like the first two games had. I'm not familiar enough with the other games to make the call that it's the "best" (ive only played 4-7 once each a long time ago and havent played 8-10) but it's the one I remember both having the most fun with and being the most fair in its difficulty

Re: boss weaknesses making less sense: I think that's kinda inevitable the more esoteric and less "it's an element" themed the robot masters get. There's only so many variations on "fire robot" "water robot" "grass robot" "electric robot" you can have w/o getting repetitive

Sorry about that late title change. My body needed that rest, yo. Mega Man 3's got some issues of its own just like the other two, but I think it plays better in motion. I also believe that this is where the series starts getting really neat with the mini-bosses and regular foes. We're starting to see a lot more movement or life in foes like that giant springy thing.

Still can't believe this is the one that gave Capcom so much trouble during its development. It doesn't always look like it when you're playing it, but sure enough, it was a struggle getting this one out the door.

While we're at the start and I think noone else (unless it was on YT) has mentioned it, I'd like to remind raocow of the one thing that always annoys me in MM3: turning around is kinda borked. I don't know the exact causes, maybe it's a delay during the shooting animation, but occasionally, Mega will just not turn the other way even if you hit the button. This can be your death in stressful boss fights when he's just standing there dumbly firing away from the enemy. You kinda need to force it and I hope this reminder helps alleviate some frustrating "buttons didn't button" moments - I don't have a good fix for the issue, but I believe knowing about it helps.

MoneyMan wrote: ↑5 years ago Megaman 3 is def the best of the first three games imo, the level design is solid throughout and there's no instances of completely bullshit spikes in difficulty like the first two games had.

Does this include the Doc Bot stages?

Paragraph wrote: ↑5 years ago While we're at the start and I think noone else (unless it was on YT) has mentioned it, I'd like to remind raocow of the one thing that always annoys me in MM3: turning around is kinda borked. I don't know the exact causes, maybe it's a delay during the shooting animation, but occasionally, Mega will just not turn the other way even if you hit the button. This can be your death in stressful boss fights when he's just standing there dumbly firing away from the enemy. You kinda need to force it and I hope this reminder helps alleviate some frustrating "buttons didn't button" moments - I don't have a good fix for the issue, but I believe knowing about it helps.

Yeah, I brought that one up in my page one description of the game. It's definitely a thing! I usually notice it most when fighting midbosses where slowdown is more prevalent.

raekuul wrote: ↑5 years ago

MoneyMan wrote: ↑5 years ago Megaman 3 is def the best of the first three games imo, the level design is solid throughout and there's no instances of completely bullshit spikes in difficulty like the first two games had.

Does this include the Doc Bot stages?

I never found them too bad? Like yeah theyre harder than the rest of the game but on the whole they feel like natural evolutions of the ideas brought forth in the original levels, and on the whole they have p good design unless im forgetting something drastic.

MoneyMan wrote: ↑5 years ago

raekuul wrote: ↑5 years ago

MoneyMan wrote: ↑5 years ago Megaman 3 is def the best of the first three games imo, the level design is solid throughout and there's no instances of completely bullshit spikes in difficulty like the first two games had.

Does this include the Doc Bot stages?

I never found them too bad? Like yeah theyre harder than the rest of the game but on the whole they feel like natural evolutions of the ideas brought forth in the original levels, and on the whole they have p good design unless im forgetting something drastic.

Doc Needle, mandatory Rush Jet with a weapon energy pickup that doesn't respawn.

Bean wrote: ↑5 years ago

Paragraph wrote: ↑5 years ago While we're at the start and I think noone else (unless it was on YT) has mentioned it, I'd like to remind raocow of the one thing that always annoys me in MM3: turning around is kinda borked. I don't know the exact causes, maybe it's a delay during the shooting animation, but occasionally, Mega will just not turn the other way even if you hit the button. This can be your death in stressful boss fights when he's just standing there dumbly firing away from the enemy. You kinda need to force it and I hope this reminder helps alleviate some frustrating "buttons didn't button" moments - I don't have a good fix for the issue, but I believe knowing about it helps.

Yeah, I brought that one up in my page one description of the game. It's definitely a thing! I usually notice it most when fighting midbosses where slowdown is more prevalent.

Ah, I didn't check the OP, sorry! Also was not aware that it only is a problem when turning right, but come to think of it all my "fond" memories of the glitch were from trying to shoot an enemy to the right of me and failing...

Zinfandel wrote: ↑5 years ago

Doc Needle, mandatory Rush Jet with a weapon energy pickup that doesn't respawn.

That's literally the only part i can give you, and if the energy respawned it would be a perfectly reasonable segment. It's nowhere near close the levels of bullshit the Yellow Devil or Bue Beam Trap (among others) are

I'm with raocow in the "MM3 definitely isn't the best Mega Man but is definitely my favorite and one of my favorite platformers ever" category.

I always found it odd, too, that this game has no opening cutscene, especially considering it has a fair bit more story than the previous game (which did have an intro cutscene), with Dr. Wily apparently reforming and working with Dr. Light to build Gamma, Robot Masters mysteriously going berserk, etc. And also because it does have a late-game cutscene referencing exactly this. My guess is it probably was intended to have a title intro, but this fell victim to rushing and production problems, like many things in the game. While I do enjoy this installment, I guess that's one aspect that always felt a touch disappointing to me--this game clearly has ambitions of being the most epic Mega Man of them all, but because of the aforementioned production issues, things don't quite come together as smoothly as they should, and you can't help but be left with the feeling of what could have been. It's still a quality game despite this, though.

strongbadman wrote: ↑5 years ago I don't remember if official games did this at all, but Megaman Unlimited, instead of doing thematic weaknesses, just made a robot master's weakness something that more or less countered their attack pattern. And that's a neat way of doing it, but it's hard to intuit what would work against a given boss, and even then you can't possibly know what one's weak to until you fight it.

Rockman and Forte did this. You use the pusher weapon to knock a boss into his own arena's spikes, as an example. And I was okay with that. You couldn't tell what the correct order to do things in was until you got to the bossfight, but once you were there, it wasn't hard to figure out what needed doing. Combined with limited robot master selection, it worked okay.

I don't see why the boss weaknesses have to make sense, you're supposed to experiment and see what sticks.

trial and error is shit design

Blue wrote: ↑5 years ago

strongbadman wrote: ↑5 years ago I don't remember if official games did this at all, but Megaman Unlimited, instead of doing thematic weaknesses, just made a robot master's weakness something that more or less countered their attack pattern. And that's a neat way of doing it, but it's hard to intuit what would work against a given boss, and even then you can't possibly know what one's weak to until you fight it.

Rockman and Forte did this. You use the pusher weapon to knock a boss into his own arena's spikes, as an example. And I was okay with that. You couldn't tell what the correct order to do things in was until you got to the bossfight, but once you were there, it wasn't hard to figure out what needed doing. Combined with limited robot master selection, it worked okay.

Except it's another instance of the ice weapon being the weakness of the fire boss which is back-asswards.
But the way the boss select works kinda sends you in the right direction cause you can't fight Burner Man until after you killed Cold Man anyway, if I recall.

I hope raocow saves Shadow Man for after he has at least one E-tank. That fight may be one of the hardest buster deals in the classic series.

Ashan wrote: ↑5 years ago Except it's another instance of the ice weapon being the weakness of the fire boss which is back-asswards.
But the way the boss select works kinda sends you in the right direction cause you can't fight Burner Man until after you killed Cold Man anyway, if I recall.

Ice weapon defeated fire boss, fire weapon (which doesn't deal damage underwater) defeated water boss, etc. Elementally, it made no sense, but it followed a different thread of logic. The ice weapon did very little damage to the fire boss if you just hit him with it, and he could melt it with his attacks, but you could use it to push him into spikes for massive damage. The fire weapon's water pressure could pop the water boss's bubble barrier, the copy weapon confused another boss's homing attacks, etc.

It worked mostly opposite to conventional weakness logic but even that's a twisted logic of its own, and yeah, the limited boss selection always tried to guide you towards a correct choice.

Blue wrote: ↑5 years ago trial and error is shit design

It's not that the bosses are impossible to buster duel, it's just harder. Granted, this format would be improved if bosses in general had a couple not quite weaknesses that did slightly more damage than the buster

Mega Man 3, like Mega Man 2, is a game that I don't really enjoy as much as other people seem to. For the most part it's good, or at the very least decent, but there's one part of the game that keeps me from wanting to come back and replay it; I'll talk about that when the time comes. Also, I once mentioned that I like to use some of the lesser used weapons in the series; this game has the one weapon that's so useless even I won't use it (and I'm not talking about top spin).

While I'm here I guess I might as well say something about Magnet Man's stage. I find it interesting that the two sets of yoku blocks that are over pits are really easy compared to the ones that have no danger involved at all.

You didn't show off the magnet power!

The lag in this game is really unbearable, both when playing the game and when watching it being played. I booted it up an hour or 2 ago with the intention of doing a run through and got to the doc robots before deciding I didn't really want to go on. It's not even a somewhat consistent slowdown, it's just kinda random and then if you ever get into the groove of playing in slow motion it'll zip back to full speed and ruin whatever you were planning on doing. Also had multiple inputs eaten because of the slowdown. Bleh.

spark shock as a weapon honestly baffles me to this day. outside of boss weaknesses it is essentially useless as all it does it make an enemy stand in place while you do nothing to it or anyone else. it's just a worse ice slasher in every way

i like spark man though, even if his stage was the bane of my existence as a kid

I just noticed the boss healthbars are a uniform color.

That's REALLY FREAKING WEIRD! In 1 & 2, they changed with the boss's palette. They don't in 3. There's only four sets of three colors you can use simultaneously for NES sprites. In megaman, the first set of three is light blue/dark blue/black used for megaman, e-tanks, and weapon energy that changes based on equipped weapon, the second is flesh tone/white/black used for his face/buster shots/health pickups/other enemies/etc which is constant. In 1 & 2, the bosses often used two sets of colors. The yellow devil used red/white/black for his eye and healthbar and used orange/yellow/white for when he was transforming across the room. Gutsman used black/red/yellow for himself and then a bunch of yellows and oranges for the boulders he threw. Woodman used browns and black, then a set of colors with green for the leaves.

They can't DO that in 3 because they're using a full 25% of available sprite colors JUST on making sure the healthbars are a single color. magnetman and sparkman both threw projectiles that used their own palette. They also can't make bosses anywhere near as colorful because the only extra colors or highlights would have to be the same color as their healthbar.

Why the heck would they choose to do that? From a gameplay standpoint, it doesn't let them make boss projectiles stand out against the boss, and from a visuals standpoint, it makes the bosses less interesting. I can't think of a single benefit to doing it, so why the heck did they? Did consistently colored boss healthbars stick around after 3?

also having electricity defeat magnets is a bit like having ice defeat water; they're different forms of the same thing

So when I made my last post it didn't occur to me that raocow would be fighting Spark Man next; spark shock is what I consider to be the most useless weapon in the Mega Man series. Even with it's flaws, I can't believe that people say that top spin is the worst when spark shock exists in the very same game. Top spin may be unable to kill some enemies, but spark shock can't kill anything outside of bosses. Fortunately, shadow blade does just as much damage to Magnet Man as spark shock, so I can just pretend spark shock doesn't exist.

Not even I have any positive words about Spark Shock...though it IS rather good in MMIII for the Game Boy, and entirely redeemed in making Dust Man's godawful stage there a little bit more bearable!

raocow, I was too always baffled by the completely empty drop in Spark Man's stage, until I finally realized when doing the LP just how closely the Doc Robot stages mirrored their original.

Later, the shaft will be a spike drop!

strongbadman wrote: ↑5 years ago I don't remember if official games did this at all, but Megaman Unlimited, instead of doing thematic weaknesses, just made a robot master's weakness something that more or less countered their attack pattern. And that's a neat way of doing it, but it's hard to intuit what would work against a given boss, and even then you can't possibly know what one's weak to until you fight it.

Megaman 9 sorta did.

Black Hole Bomb eats Jewel man's shield, Hornet Chaser homes at Splash woman at the top of the screen, Laser Trident pierces through Concrete shots, Concrete Shot shuts Galaxy man's wormholes, Jewel Satellite blocks Plug Ball and Plug Ball travels to the ceiling where Tornado man is.

Blue wrote:They can't DO that in 3 because they're using a full 25% of available sprite colors JUST on making sure the healthbars are a single color. magnetman and sparkman both threw projectiles that used their own palette. They also can't make bosses anywhere near as colorful because the only extra colors or highlights would have to be the same color as their healthbar.

They could just have used the normal general palette (megaman's face, life, graphic effects bullets explosions etc) for the boss lifebars, though. It's more that they're just using the highlight palette, and for some reason used that only as a copy of the general palette...?