Famidaily - Episode 0412 - Totsuzen! Macho Man/Amagon (突然!マッチョマン)
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 30 окт 2024
- There's not like the extreme frustration of a game whose every design decision is made to hurt you.
Famidaily is my attempt to catalog all of the commercially released Famicom games.
I think a lot of folks in the US have a weirdly misplaced nostalgia for the game because it was one of those games everybody had, sitting next to their well-loved copy of Double Dribble and/or Tecmo Bowl. It was also always on the shelf of even the sketchiest light-pickens rental stores. Which is weird because it doesn't seem to have made a dent in any of the lists of the higher-selling games, but I swear it was everywhere.
I think it's a good game. I particularly like the resource management in regard to points. It makes points more than just score and adds an engaging strategic element lacking in some other similar titles. You do have to worry about bullets too but I rarely felt worried about ammo. Honestly your footage was the first time I've even seen your character ammoless needing to swing his rifle! That said, it is a frustrating, beat your head repeatedly against the wall kind of game, and I understand why people dislike it.
I can't exactly bring myself to go to bat for Amagon, but I did manage to beat it once. I just dug up a draft of a review blog post for the game from years ago that I never posted, but apparently this is what my past self suggests:
"My recommendation is to stock up on points as much as you can in the first level. During a given chunk of a level, you can only pick up so many items from enemies before they stop dropping them; I think the limit is nine, but the mechanics behind this are kind of opaque. In any case, there's a section towards the end of the level with swooping birds coming from the right and snakes coming from the left; this is the best place to get points early on, and by raking in enough point icons you can easily clear 100,000 points in a short period of time. If you conserve health carefully throughout the rest of the game and keep a steady stream of points coming in, you should be able to bring in Megagon at full health throughout most of the rest of the game."
Still, I feel like the transformation mechanic is flawed. You're just too weak as Amagon and too strong as Megagon, so the game is either too hard or too easy. It could've been worse, though, I suppose.
The whole issue with the limited bullets becomes (slightly) less of an issue if you can use Megagon to punch through a level once you run out of bullets, and hopefully pick up enough to get you through the next level while only losing a few bars of power. Maybe that's what the designers intended? In concept it could work well enough.
Also the boss of 1-2 literally takes 100 bullets. The US manual lists how many bullets each enemy in the game takes, while noting that Megagon's punches do as much damage as 8 bullets and the crescent waves do as much as 16 bullets. That first real boss is brutal though, just because it has the second highest HP in the game, only slightly below the final boss.
I remember renting this one, and did like the concept of switching between the gun and the machoman ability. but I'm sure playing it now those flaws would be even more glaring.
I'm just puzzled that that lion head boss seems to move by snapping from background tile to background tile rather than having a split scrolling layer, yet they didn't bother to place any background art around it either.
this game really needed unlimited continues
This is a stupid game. I love it, even though it's not very fun. For me, it's all about the bosses. I have only beaten this by cheating, but even when cheating it was frustrating.
I’ve been recommended this game a couple times, and I have never understood why, it’s interesting and kinda charming for sure but wow it is hard and not in a fun way, more like an arbitrary one
I feel like this game has a good skeleton, but bad level design. Had they upped the point pay out per enemy, not spammed you with 10 fast moving enemies per screen, and maybe gave amagons rifle more range, it wou have been more playable.