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Nothing elates the crowd like a matter of fact rundown.  Prepare for scintillation as I list.

Here’s the reality of Mega Man Powered Up: not every character has moves as cool as Cut Man’s walljump.  Or more accurately, none do.  Fire Man’s gimmick is pretty limited, but they get a few cool challenges out of it.  When his headfire is doused by water, his only attack is a small fire aura.  So to hit anything, he has to jump right up against it.  Less of the platforming, more of the killing dudes.  Ok, I think I mentioned this was pretty limited.  Up to Fire 9 now.

I did peak ahead and take a look at the final set of 10 challenges.  Those are the Wily challenges – various boss mixes which can be played with any character.  This culminates in having to beat all bosses consecutively on Hard, which is a fairly horrifying prospect.

We’ve established a running theme that 1CCs mean nothing in a vacuum.  Our next entry in the series is Deathsmiles, which I cleared within my first five plays.  Scoreplay, however.  I’m up to 60M now, which means that I’m not really getting any decent activations other than the one on C-2.  I suck at recharging after an activation, I can’t play the Gorge and oh yeah, I still die to Jitterbug sometimes.

Last time out, I was concerned that some radical route changes were going to be necessary in order to clear the Mega time for challenge #102.  It seems I overstated.  I got it just a few days later.  I made a few minor adjustments which don’t warrant typing a description, plus I changed when I was kicking in the spider sense.  Diggy-do, another insane mega in the bag.

This is the first new Insane video I’ve managed to upload in 9 months.  That’s idle time not futility — a distinction I don’t find terribly comforting.  The world will not end in fire or ice; it will end in dust.  To validate my prophecy, my capture setup died shortly thereafter.  The project is back on hold and the dust accumulates.

Guts 10.  The Guts challenges have gone fairly smoothly to this point.  9 was a little puzzley, but not to the point of inducing bile like Bomb Man’s.

I’ve cleared all 10 challenges for Mega Man, Cut Man and Ice Man. Cut 10 was a bit of an anti-climax after 8 and 9, but that set of 10 was ace. Working now on Guts and Bomb.

Bomb Man’s challenges are less action and more puzzle. Sort of a Mario vs Donkey Kong feel. Which is to say, they suck. There’s some jump timing, but it’s all slow and tedious. Here’s a rule to live by: if it’s not fun, don’t do it. Don’t slog through it just because some jackass stuck it on a checklist and you have an obsessive need to check all the boxes. That’s just OCD fucking with ya. Fuck OCD. OCD only hurts, it never helps.

Story in short, I’m done with Bomb Man’s challenges.

The other thread I’ve got going is the Spider-Man 2 challenge mega times. I’m working actively on two Insanes, on both of which I’ve passed the normal time. I’ve actually got #102 dialed in fairly close: target time is 26 seconds, I’m at 28.2. Some of that is execution; I could definitely tighten up the opening bit where I’m hopping between the awnings. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s 2+ seconds of savings there. Which means I’ve got to improve my route somehow.

If your sphincter is clenching with terror at the prospect of me laying out the entirety of the challenge in excruciating detail, you may relax for now. That post is imminent, but not today.

As promised, a video example of the principle I was discussing last time out. To review, the concept was that Spider-Man 2 is inherently a twitchy, spastic game and chaining multiple high-speed actions tends to see compounding chaos and failure.  Accordingly, skillful play is mostly about taking advantage of the portions you can control well to simplify the approach to the parts you can’t.

Before we finish this series, maybe I’ll come up with a pithy term for that concept.

I usually avoid embeds, but I think that’s probably appropriate for a post like this:

Approaching checkpoint #2: 0:16 – 0:25 – That initial plunge down to street level is lovely, isn’t it?  But we care about what comes after.  If you’ve played Spider-Man 2 at all, you know that you move fastest when swinging.  If you have a long distance to cover, aspire to ABS: always be swinging.

But I approach checkpoint 2 with just two swings, including big, lazy arcs after releasing.  If you look at 0:23 in the video, you can see why.  I want to hit that building at exactly the same altitude as the wallsprint checkpoint.  It’s a short bit of wallsprinting and a very quick release after the checkpoint.  There’s no time to adjust once I’m on the wall, so I make sure my entry trajectory is just right.

Approaching checkpoint #3: 0:24 – 0:31 – Next up is an orbit around a roof antenna.  (I guess they’re antennas?  Random girders sticking straight up from the tops of buildings.)  Just one swing on the approach, fairly straightforward.  Again I manage altitude so that I’m just about level with the checkpoint when I web.  The two things to consider with orbits are the radius of the circle and the entry point.

Why?  Because Spidey is fucking fast.  What you really care about is where you fly off when you release the orbit.  In some games, you could probably accomplish the exit you wanted no matter how you entered.  But here you can’t, at least not consistently.  If you tried to just eye up the right release timing, you’d often fly off in terrible directions.  Instead, I’m going to release the orbit as soon as I hear the sound indicating that it’s complete: after exactly one full spin.  That’s predictable and repeatable.  So my entry point will define my exit.

So how does that apply here?  As I approach the antenna, my eyes are on the next large skyscraper further down the street.  It’s the building I’ll be swinging past at 0:34.  I wrap around the right side of the checkpoint, line up with that building then fire my web just as I’m square with it.  My release actually fires me about 45 degrees off to the left of where I want to go, which is about the norm.

Approaching checkpoint #4: 0:30 – 040 – Well, this is a combination of the elements from the last two approaches.  Two more long, lazy swings.  Rapid swings with minimal airtime between are fast, but they don’t allow adjustment time to line up approaches.  The hit on the swings is worthwhile to create a repeatable experience on the skill elements.

Yes, I just made up the term “skill elements” to cover orbits, loops, walljumps, wallsprints and poleswings.

Entry point for the orbit?  My target for the next checkpoint is that building just to the right with the red sign around the top.  You’ll see that I line myself up with it before I web, and come out of the orbit heading right towards it.  I time this release better than the previous one, and my incoming and outgoing trajectories are almost identical.

You can enjoy the sex appeal of the rest of the challenge without further commentary.

I’m still lacking a clever name for the principle, but I think the lesson comes across.  When you have some space between elements, use it to create a repeatable approach to the tricky bit so you don’t have to make micro adjustments while the control is at its twitchiest.

Ice Man challenges cleared. The only enemy is Ice 10 is the bullet, mario style slow-moving jammies. Gotta cross all sorts of bottomless pits by freezing bullets and jumping off them. Climax comes when a full screen stack of them come at you, and you have to freeze the bottom two to slip through. It’s all tasty, but nothing superb.

No progress yet on Cut 9.

In news both grander yet somehow even less interesting, I resurrected The Great Project: recording Mega time clears of every challenge in Spider-Man 2 for the Xbox. I’d like to hope that my tone already made it clear, but the term “The Great Project” is entirely ironic. The considerably more sincere “I Lack Discipline and Therefore Interminable Project” polled poorly.

The atrophy of my skill was horrifying. I foolishly jumped right in to an Insane challenge. #102, I think. Starts from a second floor balcony on the west side of Central Park. Results were dreadful.

After a dose of futility, I wandered around the north end of the island and cleared a bunch of the Mediums and Hards laying around. That went well, and I was able to upload a pile of new Mega clears to youtube. Buoyed with unwarranted confidence, I tried another Insane. #119, a wallsprint sequence around the elevated track. That went even worse. Apparently my wallsprinting has suffered especially from the passage of time.

Spider-Man 2 at is chaos at speed. What makes the game so great is precisely that you can move far faster than the game can handle. When you’re tackling an Insane challenge, you leave behind the smooth curves and long arcs of your early swinging experiences. It’s all wild angles, sudden turns and spastic stops.

Wallsprints are maybe the worst of it. When you first learn to wallsprint, it’s straightforward. You’re just running on a wall. At normal run speeds, you have the same control you would on foot. But in challenges, you hit the wall at peak swing speed. There’s essentially no steering over short distances. You zip around in nearly random directions if you aren’t careful about your entry angle.

Thus the skill required is managing that chaos. I think the bulk of it is controlling input, eliminating variables. Use swing time to smooth everything out and try to have a nice clean entry angle to the next move. God, that sounds fluffy and meaningless.

Tell you what. I’ll go through my Insane videos and generate a walkthrough for one to demonstrate what I mean. I’ll try and illustrate how success boils down to managing the entry to moves rather than making adjustments during the moves themselves. Look for that in a future post.

Passed Cut Man #7, cue the chorus of angels. Frankly, there was little sense of climax. I made a small adjustment to my pattern and cleared it immediately. The innovation was to take advantage of the screen scrolling and the effect it has on spawns. We’ll apply a bit of newspaper style here and postpone the details so we can get the juicy stuff up top.

Cut 8 was a cruise. A little cooldown as a reward for passing 7. I actually failed to make the critical jump in 8 repeatedly, but failure was non-fatal so I could just keep hammering at it. Accordingly, passed on what was technically my first try.

I’m working on Cut 9 now and it is delicious. Mega Man Powered Up is not designed as a throwback to the series in general; it is specifically an homage to Mega Man 1. The enemy types are all from 1, the stages are designed to be remixes of 1′s. One of the few design elements that’s completely new are container spawns. Little devices in the ceiling that repeatedly drop giant crates. Cut Man’s 9th challenge is the pinnacle of crate-spawning design.

You use Cut Man’s walljump to cross giant chasms by pinballing off of falling crates. I think the beauty of that may have been lost in the prose, so I will emphasize. You walljump off moving surfaces over bottomless pits. Games were made for this.

Ok, it falls a bit short of being the unparalleled joy it ought to be. The walljump is not quite as nimble as you’d really like. MMPU is really vertically constrained, so you’re never more than two jumps or so from the top of the screen. But this is the good stuff.

Back to how I passed Cut 7. Tedium follows, gird yourself.

To review, you’re on a narrow, icy platform. 8 enemies spawn in a semi-circle around and above you. They’re the infinitely respawning enemies that pour out of pipes in Mega Man 2. You used the Jewel Shield in 9 to scum them for health and weapon power drops. Slow-moving cylinders with eyes. You’ve got to survive for one minute.

The innovation I finally happened on was using the scroll of the screen to limit spawns. Picture the 8 enemies in three groups. 3 on the right, 2 on the left and 3 above. I was killing the right-hand group then moving right, into the space I just freed up, to kill the remaining five. Then move back left and repeat.

What I noticed was that I was almost always dying to the left-hand group of 2. The top 3 were more or less irrelevant. Furthermore, the platform was just wide enough that if I moved to the far right, the spawn spot of the leftmost 2 would be off the screen. And because it’s a MM game, that means those 2 would not spawn. This was no more than a short delay, of course. I had to move back left and they’d spawn then. But since those 2 were the big problems, cutting back on their spawns made things much more manageable.

Cut Man’s 7th challenge is unyielding. I’d love to bore the 2 people who accidentally read my posts while checking the site to see if there are new BlooCloud posts to spam with the details, but there’s little to say. It’s a fight on a tiny little platform against 8 respawning dudes. I’ve found a pattern that lets me keep the bastards in check indefinitely, but at some point in the course of a minute I inevitably fuck it up.

It’s a little demonstration of chaos theory. I let some tiny variation creep into my rhythm, completely survivable on its own. But then each time through the loop things spin further and further off the axis. Frantic death.

Moved on to the Ice Man challenges, currently on the last. They’re all built around freezing guys in flight and using them as platforms to cross big chasms. Freezing dudes then jumping on them is a fun enough mechanic to make people think the Metroid games don’t suck, so it’s wildly compelling here.

Best of the bunch was probably the 8th. Gotta freeze fleas in mid-jump. Fleas are the little buggers who jump towards/over you in big arcs and take just a single buster shot to kill. Meaning all the freezes are one-shot affairs. You don’t get a second chance to time it right like you do against the octopus batteries.

Progress in MMPU. I cleared all 10 of Mega Man’s challenges. They weren’t bad at all, with the exception of ‘Octo Battery Assault’. That’s a long series of jumping puzzles with various patterns of octopus batteries flying at you. They’re the stoplight-looking jobbies that open up their one eye and fly along the X or Y axis.

I got through 2 more of Cut Man’s challenges, which brought me to the one I was stuck on way back in the day: “Survive Rare Enemy”. You’re stuck on a narrow icy platform, waves of enemies spawn and you have to survive without getting hit for 1 minute. I lasted 10-15 seconds on a few quick tries.

This probably wouldn’t be bad as Mega Man, since you can spam buster shots. But you can only fire two cutters at a time. (I’ll leave it to the MM dorks to fill in the actual weapon name. I know them all by the bosses. You kill Elec Man, you get “Elec Man’s shit.” I don’t know if it’s supposed to be the Wave Jiggler or something.) So I’m hosed if I let one go too early, or too low/high on a jump.

This is going to be another Mega Man post. Which makes me get that queasy feeling of needing to justify myself. Like when someone walks in on you pantsless.

I don’t really consider myself a Mega Man guy. That is probably disingenuous given that I’m playing two MM games right now and a third was my favorite game last year. The only game of the lot that I think is really exceptional is MM9. That includes the X series, which is mostly forgettable. But being recent 2d shooty/jumpy games with tight controls puts them in an uncrowded category.

Perhaps it helps my case that I’m abandoning MM10. In our last episode, I had died on Chill Man. Cleared him, cleared Nitro after an easy and mostly uninteresting stage, then tried Commando. That stage punched home the lesson that was more subtly taught in the prior stages: this game is deliberately unfun. Commando Man’s stage has a periodic dust storm effect that could only have been intended to make sure that we are not enjoying ourselves. Wind effects are a staple of the series, but this is a combination wind effect and whiteout. You can’t see the platforms while it’s blowing. Which might be kind of cool for the speedrunner, who will need to progress blind. But the safe tactic is obviously just to stop. To sum up: multiple times throughout the stage, you’re encouraged to stand still and do nothing for while.

The theme from my last post was basically that I wanted better weapons so I could cruise through Chill Man’s stage faster. Going smoothly and quickly through hard stages is what makes MM fun. That’s what each stage should aspire to. MM10 is instead full of stuff to sabotage that. It’s choppy and it drags. Screw it. I’d rather go back and play more of MM9.

I also dusted off Mega Man Powered Up recently. I lost my save at some point, so I’m doing all that jazz: unlocking each dude and playing through all the challenges. The core New Style game is middling. The challenges are the real meat here. There are 10 per character, 100 in total (Mega + 8 Robot Masters + a boss survival set). They’re Break-the-Targets-ish mini stages which are built around the special abilities of each character. They ramp up quickly to being all kinds of hard. Dozens and dozens of restarts hard. Hard enough that the lack of an instant restart annoys after a while. I’ve learned to hate the little intro animation you have to do on every single restart.

Little progress to report. Got through six or seven of Mega Man’s challenges and five of Cut Man’s.