When I was about 9 or 10, I fell in love with SMB through the Mario Deluxe GBC cart. Once I discovered one of the more obvious infinite life glitches, I–for some reason–sat around on a Saturday morning, watching cartoons and repeating this infinite life generation loop, just to see my score counter go up.
To my surprise, when I got bored of this, I realized that I had unlocked an entirely new game.
It was Deluxe’s version of the SMB2J, which I had never heard of. They were called the Luigi Levels in this version. They were a bit more fair, because they didn’t have the random gusts of wind, and Deluxe overall allowed saving between levels, so you didn’t have to play the whole thing in one sitting.
The way that the Luigi Levels punished knowledge of the rules and rhythms of SMB completely blew my mind and changed the way I viewed video games. I had no idea that these levels existed elsewhere, so as far as I knew this was something special that likely very few other people knew about.
Megaman
I played through Megaman 2 for the first time in preparation for Megaman 9. I had never gotten into the MM games, but I wanted to have some relationship with them, in the hopes of enjoying 9. For some reason, I decided that I should play through it using only the peashooter. Part of it was that I didn’t want to bother sussing out the level order, but I also like a stiff challenge.
It was actually really, really fun playing the game this way. It forces you to really learn the robot master patterns. I had such a fun time playing that way that I beat 9 and 10 the same way, and that’s just how I play MM games now.
Ohh, yeah, once I stayed at my friend’s place in California for a week, and two of those days he needed to go to work, leaving me with like half a day to kill by myself. I borrowed his PSP and his copy of Mega Man: Powered Up (which I’d never played before) and proceeded to beat the game using Roll and a big limp fish.
megaman 2 is one of the best games to start that habit with, actually. one of the ways the sequels became more monotonous, i think, was how aggressively weapon weaknesses were pushed on players. the buster does progressively less damage to bosses in each of the first four games, and the idea of some bosses having weapons they were “partially” weak to is thrown out after 2, if i remember correctly. making the metagame of weapon-weaknesses almost mandatory for a normal playthrough ultimately made these games less interesting or supportive of multiple playstyles.
also i think mm2 is the only game where a boss (metal man) is instantly killed by its own weapon. i wish the later games had done more with this joke
Yeah, I totally “got” the MM series with MM2 and then loved MM9. MM1 didn’t work as a cartridge or on my PSP emulator, so I never got around to it. But man, did MM3 not gel with me. Just felt wrong. I was weirdly bad at it, and had no interest in learning how to be better. MM4 and 6 felt better to me, but I also just wasn’t interested enough in them to learn the levels.
I’m one of those guys who thinks that the slide and charging were missteps. It doesn’t bother me too much, but it just seems to add unnecessary elements, and I don’t like the hoarding mentality that charging encourages.
dr wily’s revenge is cool, too, particularly if you consider it as something that was lead by a particularly competent mm1/mm2 fan. do people ever talk about that game? I don’t know
charging would have been so easy to fix–just up the charge shot’s damage slightly, and make the buster automatically fire at full charge; or, even better, have the “full charge” only active for a limited frame window (complete with a satisfying sound/visual cue) before going back to a partially charged shot. both of these would have been way more interesting than what they actually went with.
sliding was a dumb but at least not especially harmful gimmick. it definitely was not as bad as having to interrupt the flow of a level to go into a menu and pull out the mandatory Rush Spring
Back when Shenmue was new, there were online rankings of various things, including the sprite scaler arcade games. The rankings were sorted by various factors, including region.
At the time, I was the #1 Shenmue Space Harrier player in Maine.
I maintained that rank for a few months, until I stopped paying attention.
How many other players were there in Maine? Er. Not sure. More than 1, anyway!
Yeah if I was smart I would have realized this. The worst part is that blue shells will hit you if you’re in 6th as long as everyone in front of you has finished the race, so you’re never truly safe. Double Dash and Wii were absolutely the worst for this- they’ve toned blue shells down a lot in 7 and 8
People do sit in lower places in Mario Kart 7 and 8, especially the first lap. It’s worth it to get a really good item sometimes. The problem with sitting in second is that you typically have limited options for passing first except for “going really fast.” You end up relying on blue shells to put you in first, but those explode anyway so you can get caught in the blast. The best bet is to just get as far ahead as possible and minimize the damage of a blue shell by being in the center of the road. If you’re really good, you’ll actually maintain a very slim lead, then slow down as soon as you know a blue shell is coming. It’s risky though, because it locks on earlier than it might seem, so you can still get hit even if you’ve been in second place for a second or two.
7 and 8 aren’t nearly as random as their predecessors, although you can always end up going from first to third with bad luck. The online rating system gives you positive points for anything above 5th so it feels less punishing to be in first the whole race and get creamed right at the end. Plus the races are short- always another shot at first right around the corner, unlike a 40 minute Mario Party slog.
yessss I reblog the yugiuno comic all the time on tumblr, it’s so great
that said, I don’t have a lot of exposure to the genre since not a lot gets translated!
most of what I know of is what I learned from GCCX famicom manga cafe segments.
Famicom Wolf, which had a protagonist raised by wolves, and called upon wolf powers to play games
Famicom Soldier of Fortune was about a boy with programmer dreams
Famicom Cap, Cyberbrain Boy, and Famicom Rocky were some other series
there was also This Is Family Computer! but that was an educational comic about the famicom with a goku-like mascot (who I used as my tumblr avatar for a while)
I hadn’t heard of Fighting Gamers, but I’m gonna give that a look for myself!
Oh! There’s also the fight against one of the D’Arby siblings in part 3 of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. That’s literally one of my favorite parts, and involves a bootleg F-Zero with a controller similar to that boomerang ps3 prototype design.
the real question is why Blizzard never made a licensed manhwa about becoming the best starcraft player in the universe, modeled on hikaru no go and other semi jokey sports manga about unusual subjects.
I’ve got a volume of Umehara FIGHTING GAMERS! and it’s actually pretty entertaining. Daigo Umehara appears as this completely silent, unstoppable force, as less-famous Great Player Nuki tries to learn the Vampire Savior metagame well enough to challenge him.
There’s a great moment when Street Fighter Zero (Alpha) 3 comes out, and Nuki’s trying to talk his friends into pooling their money to buy the arcade board so they can practice at his house. “C’mon, guys! It’s only a few hundred bucks each if we all throw in! Don’t you guys want to beat Umehara?” Then he looks down to the “camera,” face smirking in shadow, and thinks “Not like any of you stand a chance.”
When I was a kid I could finish a complete race in Mute City I on the SNES F-Zero… with the television turned off. Like as soon as the race started I would have someone turn off the TV and off I’d go with my eyes closed, counting the time between turns.
I have played Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup online from 0.3.4 version to 0.19. I have wins on all but three versions. I’m not the oldest person to play however; actually apol started a year earlier than myself and is still active, among others! I once held the speed record for 15 runes but that was years ago, off the now obsolete Mountain Dwarf Paladin.
I used to trade first place on the dailys for Flamebreak before it got too samey for my tastes.
