Killer Bullet was so similar to Bullet Bill that Nintendo asked Capcom to remove them and prevent brand confusion. So Capcom only uses that enemy design in remakes and ports of the first game, not in sequels. In Japan, Bullet Bill's name is simply Killer. Of course, the design of drawing a smiling shark mouth and angry eyes on missiles and airplanes was done at least as far back as World War 2.
That would only be cool if they didn’t have the gravity acceleration bug in which standing in “not solid” ground does not refer your vertical fall acceleration. That’s a big reason why the Foot Holders and getting hit off magnet beam also are very jank in this game
In defense of gutsman's stage and backwards difficulty curves I'd much rather lose my lives early on when a game over is no different than a lost live(sometimes even better because you gain your lives back) than at the end when a game over is a lot larger of an issue(can't really defend the blind fall but if I remember correctly you can grab the bonuses sometimes by hugging the wall so I usually got the one-up on my second time through) also now that I think about it that opening challenge can sort of work the same way that open-world games or metriodvanias place an overly difficult challenge at the start of an area to say your not good enough yet come back later but once you do come back and clear it you feel invincible because your making so much progress without too much difficulty until the end when they bring back the challenge (albeit artificially) with the blind jumps and big eye
@@toekneemart5597 That is a perfectly fair take! Possibly one of the redeeming qualities of the stage. I still stand by that the level isn't fundamentally well thought out, but I can find that defense to be reasonable. On the blind falls, even when hugging the wall I would sometimes not able to reach the bonuses, maybe I'm just not doing them properly or it's just inconsistent idk lol. As for your metroidvania comment, I never thought of it like that before 😲. But I think a better example of a difficult challenge at the start would be the big eye you see in wily's castle 1.
Yeah, reminds me of design frame talked about cuphead bosses becoming more simple the further you get in them. Though I do want to note they did become harder as they went on though unlike guts man, they just made the challenge a lot less complex as to not pressure the player too much far in the stage which is similar to what's happening here
Yeah, reminds me of design frame talked about cuphead bosses becoming more simple the further you get in them. Though I do want to note they did become harder as they went on though unlike guts man, they just made the challenge a lot less complex as to not pressure the player too much far in the stage which is similar to what's happening here
This was my thought as well (at least the first part). Imagine how much more infamous this part would be if it was at the end of the level instead of the beginning (and then you get greeted by a Big Eye right away).
My suspicion on Guts Man's stage is the moving platforms weren't actually supposed to be very hard, but limited testing meant the full scope of the monster they'd created wasn't known until it hit retail. I'd actually wager the development team also did most of the testing. To the team, the platform behavior is reasonable, and after jurt a little bit of practice navigating the segment becomes trivial. To anyone outside the team, the platform behavior is extremely counter-intuitive and the timing is excessively tight.
Ignoring everything else, the first moving platform should already be onscreen before you reach the edge, instead of only appearing after you've waited. That was pure zero skill "die to learn" design; you die the first time and then it is never again even a risk. (Which is why it likely never came up with testers that already knew to wait.) While it doesn't follow a standard difficulty curve, putting the precision platforming challenge at the start of the stage does at the least reduce the cost of practicing the timing, as you aren't losing any real progress. It doesn't make it good design, but it would have been a much more painful experience if this section occurred near the end of the stage.
11:30 "land safely" followed by a very obvious cut XD Guts Man's level makes sense in a way. Put the hard part right at the beginning so if the player does game over or have trouble, they don't have to play through the whole level again to practice the hard part.
"Punishing players for trying to learn the basics of the level" actually feels like typical NES game design for me. Trial and error and all that. Preferably there would be lower stakes to trying to figure things out and there'd be a more natural progression and increase in difficulty, but not always.
Gutsman level design is kinda brilliant. When you have to wait before the platform, that's the development team telling you to be patient. Of course, I never was. I'm glad I got to see this. I liked & subbed. Keep it up. Love the content.
it is funny that i had the same impression about that level , and that occurred to me about last week despite i've been playing it for at least 30 years now we go from 0 to 100, then 30?
2:30 ish - something else, the forced scrolling of the position of the ladders means the top-center screwy will always respawn - hinting at respawn mechanics
I'd much prefer such a punishing difficult section to be at the beginning of the level. After getting a game over, you feel the tension before even going back into the stage, but don't have to spend time getting back to the section to practice it.
@@jonathanvaux2715 Yeah I get that. I just think they could've found a way to ease the player into that section. They could still introduce it earlier in the level, but at least give us a less taxing portion to familiarize ourselves with the platforms movement and then go to the big challenge. All it would've taken is one extra section to an already short level.
I would not be surprised if this section originally was later in the level, and got moved upfront because it was very challenging, especially because of Megaman's fall physics which make the section more challenging than they might be in a Mario game. The fall speed ramps up very quickly, comparatively! I think it's actually a very good call moving it upfront, the only thing it really needed was a short section where the mechanic appeared before (like a single ladder section with a floor you needed to use the mechanic to cross.
Agreed. I just finished a replay of Mega Man 9 and boy does it love putting really hard parts halfway through the Wily Castle stages. So frustrating to have to replay all the easy bits in front after a game over. Put the hard bit at the start please!
@@fy8798Honestly, I think the Guts Man platforms are a result of limited play testing. They weren't hard for the development team, and it wasn't apparent until after the game hit retail that the timing on them is very precise and also very unintuitive.
@@CptJistuce Given how other assets get reused MUCH more often, I honestly doubt that. I think they very much were tested and considered slightly wonky, they just didn't have the time to tweak them and so put them into more limited spots that didn't cause .
OK, so here's a question. In which order were the levels made, and, do the follow the boss weakness order? Then compare that to the later games and you'll probably see another angle of game development where you can see how they progressed in level design with each new game they made in the series. You may even notice some regressions between later games too indicating how development teams changed or just that they were trying new things and mistakes were made as they went through the series. Something like that could be an interesting video series given how in-depth you went on just these two stages.
Not really sure. I tried to look up and do more research on the game's development to see if I could find the order the levels developed, but couldn't find anything regarding that. Your idea is not bad 👀I might give it some consideration, I was already planning on playing through the entirety of the classic games, so it's something I'll keep in mind.
I know the stages for Mega Man 2 were deliberately designed to give clues towards the boss weakness. Some are obvious, such as circumventing Quick Man's lasers with Time Stopper. Some are more thematic; the vertical nature of Crash Man's stage along with having to constantly deal with enemies that are above you was meant to clue you in to use the vertical firing Air Shooter against the high jumping boss. Some were likely emphasized through planned ideas that never actually made it into the final game, such as the idea that using Atomic Fire in the forests of Wood Man's stage would set them on fire and cause the bat enemies to leave (Atomic Fire being the intended weakness of Wood Man, despite the balance-breaking nature of Metal Blade.)
Larkman Tuah! Dive Bomb on that thang. What could have been remedied in the conveyor belt section in Gutsman's stage is that instead of a bottomless pit, there's a safety net that will catch you should you miss the jump and a ladder to get back up and try again with only ONE conveyor belt to teach the players on how to be patient and have the entire stage built around those conveyor belts, rather than have them be a one-and-done mechanic almost as if it's a construction site, you going higher and higher until you square off against Gutsman at the top floor. Kind of taking all the best parts of Fireman's waste disposal stage and applying it to Gutsman's stage.
Gabyoall has always been the name for the spinning enemies in Megaman 1 There are also Big Eye like enemies(Big enemies that jump, do a lot of contact damage and have a lot of HP) but aside from the ones in 2 are much more balanced and less random than Big Eyes themselves
I was a young kid when this game came out. Saw it in some multi-story mall in Minneapolis. Eventually got it and played it. A lot. Less than 2 though lol.
7 is objectively trash. At least on the NES, they had an excuse to not give him a neck. And what's with the leaned forward stance? Like he sits on a chair all day and his back has just formed into a 40 year old desk jockey's back. That sound font, too. Jeesus, yank my eardrums out with a stick. The only cool part was the throwback to Ghosts and Goblins in Shade Man's music. Rockman and Forte wipes the floor with 7. What is that refight room? You get to pick from two at a time, then move on to the next two? Get out of here. I refuse to play that game on principle alone, homie. It's garbage and it will always be garbage. Especially when you realize it was released two years after Megaman x and 3 months after X2.
You have exactly 123 subscribers right now. Would I really want to ruin such a beautiful number when I can just hope the RUclips algorithm tosses more videos of yours in my recommendation feed later?
The rails in guts man man are even worse than you mention. I remember when I first played the game I had so much trouble because the platform's sprite didn't actually make sense - the platform is "raised" when the green ball is on the solid part of the rail whereas it is instinctual to assume that the platform is "raised" when the sprite shows the platform as raised. I rented this game several times and played this stage thinking the game was bugged because the platforms wouldn't work reliably and I kept falling through seemingly solid sprites so I eventually made sure to enter the stage with the Magnet Beam.... ...and then I discovered the screen wrap death glitch, which is stupidly easy to pull off in the Guts Man rail section it took me a while to figure out what was happening. Using Magnet Beam to go too high above the top of the screen causes the game to register Mega Man to have wrapped to the bottom of the screen and hit the death plane
It'd be great to see you try and give a fix to the level design. I think that in the guts man stage, itd be good to put a screen where the player has the option to test the rail mechanic safely, like above some ground and put a prize (not something game breaking, maybe a 1up) on the top to make them want to climb and see the mechanic by themselves. That would make them want to test and experience the mechanic and get used to it safely and receive something in return for understanding it well
I think after seeing the overview of Gutsman, the intention is to test your reaction speed and quick-thinking. Mastering the moving platforms and the blind falls teach you that the boss is going to be something that requires split-second decision making and precise jump timing. Gutsman requires you time your jumps to not get stunned, and quick speed to avoid his cluster rock attack. I say its good level design. What does Fireman's stage teach you about his attack pattern?
While I agree it's silly to introduce them so early into the level the Gutsman platforms are way too exacerbated to me. They're very consistent, they're clearly telegraphed, and le falling glitch is nothing more than a visual wtf than a bullshit hurdle because if you fall you fall, you're not gonna steer your way to safety regardless of velocity. The FOOTHOLDERS however are terrible. Purely random and literally don't fucking work 50% of the time. If you wanna talk about bugs ruining a mechanic that should be your Great Filter, makes buster runs way more of a bitch than any boss could dream of. And while I'm here dropping hot takes I also think the disappearing blocks in Ice Man's stage are the most forgiving in the entire franchise so idk why people always bring those up as the number one example on why the mechanic sucks. Not one block leads you to a pit, just a minor annoyance and maybe a tussle with a Roomba if you don't have any weapons
The ironic thing is that this game's clunky gameplay is a direct result of being made by a Roboticist... I'm not kidding, It sounds Ironic that a game about scientists making robots was programmed by a Robot maker, but it's actually true. The main programmer of the game wasn't very experienced with making games, previously he worked with, well... Robots. Factory machines to be specific, he was writing code for assembly line software and similar simple automatons. And those aren't supposed to act at a razor's edge because any mistake or miscalculation can cost someone an arm or their life. To add to that, factory robots are supposed to do simple things, they don't need fancy behavior. So he coded Mega Man with as much caution as he had with factory machines... with a lot of safety checks and careful exact coding that often makes the game visibly slow down when something more complex is happening.
One factor of game design in these early era games was the transition from arcade machine to home console, and the changes in design philosophy that come with that not being established yet. When you design a game that's meant to provide entertainment while also eating a steady diet of 100 yen coins, quarters, etc., having these "cheap shot" designs like unexpected spikes or nigh-unavoidable environmental hazards are a "tax" to ensure that players are having moments of failure that require another coin. Home console games don't need those moments, but they were just part of normal game design that everyone was used to.
All of the issues in the second level highlighted here are why I never got into the MegaMan series. The stages are just unforgiving, and have entirely too much "randomness" involved. (The vertical section where you have to guess, or know, where to go.) This is just straight up bad game design, and MegaMan as a franchise does this kind of thing constantly.
I don't like the vertical drops for their "die to learn" nature, but you can often mitigate the risk by hugging a side as you fall. The way the game briefly pauses to render the next screen can potentially give the player enough time to decide whether to stay in their lane or try to shift to an adjacent column. Though over-eager spike hitboxes can make that harder than was likely intended.
Killer Bullet was so similar to Bullet Bill that Nintendo asked Capcom to remove them and prevent brand confusion. So Capcom only uses that enemy design in remakes and ports of the first game, not in sequels. In Japan, Bullet Bill's name is simply Killer.
Of course, the design of drawing a smiling shark mouth and angry eyes on missiles and airplanes was done at least as far back as World War 2.
There are killers in Mega Man 3.
@@mohdadeeb1829 There are enemies that behave similarly, but Killer Bullets are not actually present in Mega Man 3.
Gutsman stage negative emotional aura
The rail platforms in Gutsman's stage are so under-utilized! It would be cool if the entire level were built around them.
NOOOOOOOO! GOD! NO GOD PLEASE NO! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
That would only be cool if they didn’t have the gravity acceleration bug in which standing in “not solid” ground does not refer your vertical fall acceleration. That’s a big reason why the Foot Holders and getting hit off magnet beam also are very jank in this game
Only if it had a gravity gimmick that makes the jumps more lenient.
In defense of gutsman's stage and backwards difficulty curves I'd much rather lose my lives early on when a game over is no different than a lost live(sometimes even better because you gain your lives back) than at the end when a game over is a lot larger of an issue(can't really defend the blind fall but if I remember correctly you can grab the bonuses sometimes by hugging the wall so I usually got the one-up on my second time through)
also now that I think about it that opening challenge can sort of work the same way that open-world games or metriodvanias place an overly difficult challenge at the start of an area to say your not good enough yet come back later but once you do come back and clear it you feel invincible because your making so much progress without too much difficulty until the end when they bring back the challenge (albeit artificially) with the blind jumps and big eye
@@toekneemart5597 That is a perfectly fair take! Possibly one of the redeeming qualities of the stage. I still stand by that the level isn't fundamentally well thought out, but I can find that defense to be reasonable. On the blind falls, even when hugging the wall I would sometimes not able to reach the bonuses, maybe I'm just not doing them properly or it's just inconsistent idk lol.
As for your metroidvania comment, I never thought of it like that before 😲. But I think a better example of a difficult challenge at the start would be the big eye you see in wily's castle 1.
Yeah, reminds me of design frame talked about cuphead bosses becoming more simple the further you get in them. Though I do want to note they did become harder as they went on though unlike guts man, they just made the challenge a lot less complex as to not pressure the player too much far in the stage which is similar to what's happening here
Yeah, reminds me of design frame talked about cuphead bosses becoming more simple the further you get in them. Though I do want to note they did become harder as they went on though unlike guts man, they just made the challenge a lot less complex as to not pressure the player too much far in the stage which is similar to what's happening here
This was my thought as well (at least the first part). Imagine how much more infamous this part would be if it was at the end of the level instead of the beginning (and then you get greeted by a Big Eye right away).
Gutsman also has the shortest robot master stage in the entire series including the gameboy games
Megaman 1 and 2 were my favorite in the whole series.
This video was pretty entertaining. I kinda want to see you do the rest of the levels in mm1
I hate to be ''one of those'' guys but, I completely cheesed the GutsMan platforms when I was 7 years old. Never understood people's issues with them.
I knew there would be one of those guys in the comments.
Growing up I was told that Mets were called Hard Hat Hooligan, which I totally prefer to Met
My suspicion on Guts Man's stage is the moving platforms weren't actually supposed to be very hard, but limited testing meant the full scope of the monster they'd created wasn't known until it hit retail. I'd actually wager the development team also did most of the testing.
To the team, the platform behavior is reasonable, and after jurt a little bit of practice navigating the segment becomes trivial.
To anyone outside the team, the platform behavior is extremely counter-intuitive and the timing is excessively tight.
Ignoring everything else, the first moving platform should already be onscreen before you reach the edge, instead of only appearing after you've waited. That was pure zero skill "die to learn" design; you die the first time and then it is never again even a risk. (Which is why it likely never came up with testers that already knew to wait.)
While it doesn't follow a standard difficulty curve, putting the precision platforming challenge at the start of the stage does at the least reduce the cost of practicing the timing, as you aren't losing any real progress. It doesn't make it good design, but it would have been a much more painful experience if this section occurred near the end of the stage.
@BainesMkII Oh yeah. If this had been the final segment of Guts Man's stage... the stage would have a worse reputation than it already does.
The MM1 itself is ok for a NES game.
It's rough & very unbalanced.
Not that every sequel after MM1 is perfect but they refined the MM formula.
Honestly these are great analyses. I’d love to see you go through the entire series, as well as your thoughts on Battle Network/Starforce.
11:30 "land safely" followed by a very obvious cut XD
Guts Man's level makes sense in a way. Put the hard part right at the beginning so if the player does game over or have trouble, they don't have to play through the whole level again to practice the hard part.
Really good analysis!
Thank you!
"Punishing players for trying to learn the basics of the level" actually feels like typical NES game design for me. Trial and error and all that. Preferably there would be lower stakes to trying to figure things out and there'd be a more natural progression and increase in difficulty, but not always.
Gutsman level design is kinda brilliant. When you have to wait before the platform, that's the development team telling you to be patient. Of course, I never was. I'm glad I got to see this. I liked & subbed. Keep it up. Love the content.
it is funny that i had the same impression about that level , and that occurred to me about last week despite i've been playing it for at least 30 years now
we go from 0 to 100, then 30?
2:30 ish - something else, the forced scrolling of the position of the ladders means the top-center screwy will always respawn - hinting at respawn mechanics
I'd much prefer such a punishing difficult section to be at the beginning of the level. After getting a game over, you feel the tension before even going back into the stage, but don't have to spend time getting back to the section to practice it.
@@jonathanvaux2715 Yeah I get that. I just think they could've found a way to ease the player into that section. They could still introduce it earlier in the level, but at least give us a less taxing portion to familiarize ourselves with the platforms movement and then go to the big challenge. All it would've taken is one extra section to an already short level.
@DeltaLev4 like starting with an easy moving platform section, some light combat, then the challenging platforms
I always used to start with Gutsman. Once that one's behind me, there's less pressure.
Putting the most challenging sections at the beginning of the level isn't a bad idea, imo.
I would not be surprised if this section originally was later in the level, and got moved upfront because it was very challenging, especially because of Megaman's fall physics which make the section more challenging than they might be in a Mario game. The fall speed ramps up very quickly, comparatively!
I think it's actually a very good call moving it upfront, the only thing it really needed was a short section where the mechanic appeared before (like a single ladder section with a floor you needed to use the mechanic to cross.
Agreed. I just finished a replay of Mega Man 9 and boy does it love putting really hard parts halfway through the Wily Castle stages. So frustrating to have to replay all the easy bits in front after a game over. Put the hard bit at the start please!
@@fy8798Honestly, I think the Guts Man platforms are a result of limited play testing.
They weren't hard for the development team, and it wasn't apparent until after the game hit retail that the timing on them is very precise and also very unintuitive.
@@CptJistuce Given how other assets get reused MUCH more often, I honestly doubt that. I think they very much were tested and considered slightly wonky, they just didn't have the time to tweak them and so put them into more limited spots that didn't cause .
OK, so here's a question. In which order were the levels made, and, do the follow the boss weakness order? Then compare that to the later games and you'll probably see another angle of game development where you can see how they progressed in level design with each new game they made in the series. You may even notice some regressions between later games too indicating how development teams changed or just that they were trying new things and mistakes were made as they went through the series.
Something like that could be an interesting video series given how in-depth you went on just these two stages.
Not really sure. I tried to look up and do more research on the game's development to see if I could find the order the levels developed, but couldn't find anything regarding that.
Your idea is not bad 👀I might give it some consideration, I was already planning on playing through the entirety of the classic games, so it's something I'll keep in mind.
I know the stages for Mega Man 2 were deliberately designed to give clues towards the boss weakness. Some are obvious, such as circumventing Quick Man's lasers with Time Stopper. Some are more thematic; the vertical nature of Crash Man's stage along with having to constantly deal with enemies that are above you was meant to clue you in to use the vertical firing Air Shooter against the high jumping boss. Some were likely emphasized through planned ideas that never actually made it into the final game, such as the idea that using Atomic Fire in the forests of Wood Man's stage would set them on fire and cause the bat enemies to leave (Atomic Fire being the intended weakness of Wood Man, despite the balance-breaking nature of Metal Blade.)
Larkman Tuah! Dive Bomb on that thang. What could have been remedied in the conveyor belt section in Gutsman's stage is that instead of a bottomless pit, there's a safety net that will catch you should you miss the jump and a ladder to get back up and try again with only ONE conveyor belt to teach the players on how to be patient and have the entire stage built around those conveyor belts, rather than have them be a one-and-done mechanic almost as if it's a construction site, you going higher and higher until you square off against Gutsman at the top floor. Kind of taking all the best parts of Fireman's waste disposal stage and applying it to Gutsman's stage.
Gabyoall has always been the name for the spinning enemies in Megaman 1
There are also Big Eye like enemies(Big enemies that jump, do a lot of contact damage and have a lot of HP) but aside from the ones in 2 are much more balanced and less random than Big Eyes themselves
I was a young kid when this game came out. Saw it in some multi-story mall in Minneapolis. Eventually got it and played it. A lot. Less than 2 though lol.
The big eye was fine in cut man’s stage because if you get bad RNG before you kill it you can just go back up the ladder and reset
After all these areas I NEVER knew you could freeze the fire towers!! Thank you for enlightening even a veteran player!
For the "bad area" of Fireman Stage, i feel like its a foreshadow of Fireman attack!
I've been replaying the games lately, it's funny, I prefer the stage design of 1 over mega man 9 for example. Overall my favorite is 7 though.
7 is objectively trash. At least on the NES, they had an excuse to not give him a neck. And what's with the leaned forward stance? Like he sits on a chair all day and his back has just formed into a 40 year old desk jockey's back. That sound font, too. Jeesus, yank my eardrums out with a stick. The only cool part was the throwback to Ghosts and Goblins in Shade Man's music. Rockman and Forte wipes the floor with 7. What is that refight room? You get to pick from two at a time, then move on to the next two? Get out of here. I refuse to play that game on principle alone, homie. It's garbage and it will always be garbage. Especially when you realize it was released two years after Megaman x and 3 months after X2.
You have exactly 123 subscribers right now. Would I really want to ruin such a beautiful number when I can just hope the RUclips algorithm tosses more videos of yours in my recommendation feed later?
Well... I no longer have 123 subscribers. But maybe one day we'll get 1234 subs 😂👀
The rails in guts man man are even worse than you mention. I remember when I first played the game I had so much trouble because the platform's sprite didn't actually make sense - the platform is "raised" when the green ball is on the solid part of the rail whereas it is instinctual to assume that the platform is "raised" when the sprite shows the platform as raised. I rented this game several times and played this stage thinking the game was bugged because the platforms wouldn't work reliably and I kept falling through seemingly solid sprites so I eventually made sure to enter the stage with the Magnet Beam....
...and then I discovered the screen wrap death glitch, which is stupidly easy to pull off in the Guts Man rail section it took me a while to figure out what was happening. Using Magnet Beam to go too high above the top of the screen causes the game to register Mega Man to have wrapped to the bottom of the screen and hit the death plane
It'd be great to see you try and give a fix to the level design. I think that in the guts man stage, itd be good to put a screen where the player has the option to test the rail mechanic safely, like above some ground and put a prize (not something game breaking, maybe a 1up) on the top to make them want to climb and see the mechanic by themselves. That would make them want to test and experience the mechanic and get used to it safely and receive something in return for understanding it well
I think after seeing the overview of Gutsman, the intention is to test your reaction speed and quick-thinking.
Mastering the moving platforms and the blind falls teach you that the boss is going to be something that requires split-second decision making and precise jump timing.
Gutsman requires you time your jumps to not get stunned, and quick speed to avoid his cluster rock attack.
I say its good level design. What does Fireman's stage teach you about his attack pattern?
I'm impressed by your mental gymnastics there
@abc_4226 love to hear you explain why I'm wrong.
0:29 didn'tn't
How
Are you doing the rest of the levels in MM1?
Haven't fully decided yet. I'm currently planning on playing through the classic series and doing videos on them.
Out of all the stage designs in Megaman Elecman was my least favorite because your constantly ascending and it can get aggravating real quick.
While I agree it's silly to introduce them so early into the level the Gutsman platforms are way too exacerbated to me. They're very consistent, they're clearly telegraphed, and le falling glitch is nothing more than a visual wtf than a bullshit hurdle because if you fall you fall, you're not gonna steer your way to safety regardless of velocity. The FOOTHOLDERS however are terrible. Purely random and literally don't fucking work 50% of the time. If you wanna talk about bugs ruining a mechanic that should be your Great Filter, makes buster runs way more of a bitch than any boss could dream of.
And while I'm here dropping hot takes I also think the disappearing blocks in Ice Man's stage are the most forgiving in the entire franchise so idk why people always bring those up as the number one example on why the mechanic sucks. Not one block leads you to a pit, just a minor annoyance and maybe a tussle with a Roomba if you don't have any weapons
The ironic thing is that this game's clunky gameplay is a direct result of being made by a Roboticist... I'm not kidding, It sounds Ironic that a game about scientists making robots was programmed by a Robot maker, but it's actually true. The main programmer of the game wasn't very experienced with making games, previously he worked with, well... Robots. Factory machines to be specific, he was writing code for assembly line software and similar simple automatons. And those aren't supposed to act at a razor's edge because any mistake or miscalculation can cost someone an arm or their life. To add to that, factory robots are supposed to do simple things, they don't need fancy behavior.
So he coded Mega Man with as much caution as he had with factory machines... with a lot of safety checks and careful exact coding that often makes the game visibly slow down when something more complex is happening.
Mega Man's a "cult classic" now?
One factor of game design in these early era games was the transition from arcade machine to home console, and the changes in design philosophy that come with that not being established yet. When you design a game that's meant to provide entertainment while also eating a steady diet of 100 yen coins, quarters, etc., having these "cheap shot" designs like unexpected spikes or nigh-unavoidable environmental hazards are a "tax" to ensure that players are having moments of failure that require another coin. Home console games don't need those moments, but they were just part of normal game design that everyone was used to.
More pls
All of the issues in the second level highlighted here are why I never got into the MegaMan series. The stages are just unforgiving, and have entirely too much "randomness" involved. (The vertical section where you have to guess, or know, where to go.) This is just straight up bad game design, and MegaMan as a franchise does this kind of thing constantly.
I don't like the vertical drops for their "die to learn" nature, but you can often mitigate the risk by hugging a side as you fall. The way the game briefly pauses to render the next screen can potentially give the player enough time to decide whether to stay in their lane or try to shift to an adjacent column. Though over-eager spike hitboxes can make that harder than was likely intended.
I cant subscribe again man :/
That's why we got the burner accounts man lol
wait.. ddnt Mega Man came out first in DOS?
Pretty sure Mega Man first released on the NES. DOS version came after, I think it was in 1990
I totally disagree, gutsman stage is my favorite from megaman 1
Algorithm comment
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