The Joys of Speedrunning

I've always found myself a bit fascinated by the concept of speedrunning video games. Like many people, I watched that Mario 3 speedrun about 10 years ago when it came out. You know, the one where the guy bounces on every bad guy for the autoscrolling levels so that he finishes with 99 lives. I later found out that this was tool assisted, which means that the inputs were programmed into an emulator, accounting for its pure perfection. But the concept has always been interesting, particularly in games where the difference between a tool assisted speedrun and manually inputted speedrun are very close. Super Mario Bros., for example, is very close to "optimized" for human play, as the record for a tool assisted run (2:54 and milliseconds) is only a few seconds off the unassisted run (2:56 and milliseconds).

I used to speedrun extremely casually, if only against myself. On my train rides into D.C. for work a few years ago, I used to beat Pokemon Emerald over, and over, and over again, trying to beat the elite 4 as quickly as possible. I had my time under 10 hours, which I thought was pretty good (and is still better than anyone else I've ever met), but the world record time, without using any glitches, is 2:33. Oh boy. Keep in mind that this is not even a competitively run game in the speedrunning community, and the wide range of outcomes in the records, spanning nearly half and hour from the 1st place finish to the 10th, shows the variability and lack of consensus on the "best path" to complete the game. In Super Mario Bros., the "best path" is absolutely known, although they may make a gamebreaking discovery of a new glitch or trick at some point, so the spread is about a second between first place and tenth.

So I casually have tried out speedrunning against myself in the path, and have enjoyed it. But the most serious recent attempt at speedrunning I've had is in the Mega Man Legacy Collection for PS4. I've been beating all of the Mega Man games on it, and enjoyed them so very much that I decided to give the challenge mode a shot. In this mode, you undertake various challenges, trying to complete them as quickly as possible. These can include things like "beat Dr. Wily from Mega Man" as quickly as possible. When you complete it, you are rewarded with either a Bronze, Silver, or Gold Mega Man head. You can also have your time posted on the leaderboards, which anyone can watch to see the tricks you used to finish the challenge quickly. I have found that repeating these challenges over and over and shaving seconds at a time off my best time has been oddly therapeutic and immensely enjoyable. I set a personal challenge to get gold on all of them, and thus 100% my first set of achievements on PS4 or PS3, which will be fun to show off. But it's very invigorating to set a new PR, and even more so to reach the pinnacle of human perfection and get a Gold. I've finished over 20 of the 50+ challenges with a Gold, and am committed to finishing all of them, which is definitely setting back progress on Mega Man 10 and my other games in the backlog. But I'm really having fun, and think that for a certain subset of the gaming population, this would be a really fun opportunity to greatly improve at a game. I now know that I could probably clear Mega Man 2 without continuing after practicing all of the bosses over and over, and working the most challenging parts a ton. And each of the games from Mega Man to Mega Man 3 would all flow much easier for me due to my repetitions in those games in the challenges. I'm working through the Mega Man 4 challenges now, which means to me that I'm approaching the 50% mark, which is great. I'll be very excited to see that 100% in my profile for the game.

To be clear, I'm not a great speedrunner. Most of my times, even the gold ones, are a solid 30% slower than the top of the leaderboard. But I'm improving, challenging myself, and enjoying the fruits of my labor. That's enough for me.

-TRO

Song of the Day (Volume 20): Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine

It's gotten a little too brutal on this blog as of late, so Get Up! Can I take it to the bridge?

-TRO

Battle of the Breakdowns

There was once a time that I sat down and attempted to figure out which breakdown is better, that in Lamb of God's 11th Hour and Ruin. I think I had almost settled on 11th Hour, but then realized, why bother? Both are pretty much the pinnacle of one of the greatest bands in modern metal, and deserve to be enjoyed on their own. And you should enjoy them as well!

-TRO

Song of the Day (Volume 19): Bleed

Of my last 13 posts, I've had one extremely long reTROview reTROspective, 11 What I'm Playing full reviews, and one song of the day, so I think I've earned a few days of Song of the Day.

BLEED. Please note that this video is pretty unsettling, so feel free to just listen if you'd like!

Tomas Haake is a top 5 metal drummer, and probably top 3, and this technical monstrosity demonstrates that pretty nicely. Can you imagine the shin splints from all those double bass triplets? And the time it took to get all of those varied timings on the riff hits down? Incredible. I'm still in awe that they played this live when I saw them this summer.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 25): Mortal Kombat XL

MORTAL KOMBAT!!!! You know you just said that in the voice. Anyway, I've always been a Street Fighter guy. Mortal Kombat was cool for some initial shock value, but the gameplay of Street Fighter II was simply light years ahead of Mortal Kombat, and as they were generally in the arcades around the same time, I usually pumped my tokens into SF II. But I did always think that Mortal Kombat had a great look, and a great concept, and that if they simply cleaned up the enemy AI a bit, and advanced in their fighting mechanics at least to the level of SF II, they'd have themselves a good original game. Mortal Kombat II was MUCH better than the first game, but then Mortal Kombat 3 was dreadful, and I never really went back to the series.

But my friends had gotten Mortal Kombat X for Xbox One, and told me how great it was, so I picked it up. It was cheap, I'd heard good things from other sources, and they wanted to play online, so I went for it. So how is it?

It's no Street Fighter V. Which in itself is no Street Fighter III. But it's a solid, enjoyable fighter that doesn't take itself too seriously.

The basic mechanics of Mortal Kombat are all here. including a few newer system innovations from other fighters that help to pick up the otherwise boring playstyle a bit. Again, this is my first MK game I've played seriously at all since 3, so these innovations might have been picked up in some previous iterations of MK, all I know is that this is the first that I've seen them, so I'm treating them as new.

The fighters now include a now standard power meter that builds up by taking attacks and delivering them. You can use this meter to perform powered up versions of special attacks, or save it for the end to deliver an "x-ray" attack, which is basically a fatality in the middle of the match that usually deals about 33% of the enemy's life bar. Meter bonuses, as is typical in the genre, are given for certain things include counter attacks and first hit bonuses. While I found the powered up specials fairly underwhelming, particularly compared to their counterparts in SF III, IV, and V, it was a nice change that added flexibility to the characters, and the x-ray attacks are a nice touch of the brutal nature of MK added in as gameplay, rather than a post-match sign of disrespect.

You can also dash forward and backward now, a nice change that increases the mobility of your characters.

There is an excellent story mode that really puts Street Fighter V's dull one to shame. And it's WAY better than Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator's abomination of a story mode that basically has you watch an hour and a half long anime movie. Ugh. Seriously, there's not a single fight in the story mode. The mode is fully animated, features pretty good voice acting, and nicely walks the line that Mortal Kombat usually does by not taking itself too seriously. There are plenty of cheesy moments in it, but they're never really played up as serious ones, which is nice. What's better is that the story mode puts you in the role of a wide variety of fighters, and has you fight around 4 matches with each, while you're introduced to the story and the Mortal Kombat universe. This is an excellent opportunity to try out some of the new characters, as well as experience the new spins they have put on old characters.

One method in which they change up the old characters is by giving each character three basic loadouts (can't remember exactly what they're called at the moment) that change different elements of the character. So Liu Kang can go full offensive and use a loadout that lets him add fire to his punches, or he can use another loadout to gain the opportunity to heal himself by switching stances. This allows you to pick not only your character you want, but also nudge them more towards your preferred playstyle.

The game controls fairly nicely, although it sometimes is too forgiving on inputs, defaulting towards performing a special move too easily. For example, while crouching and trying for an uppercut, you can accidentally perform a down+left+y button press that will result in a special move, when that wasn't your intent. While Street Fighter V went a good deal towards improving the noob friendly nature of the inputs and combo system, this takes it to an absurd end.

It also feels like the competitive balance between characters is not great. There is a clear upper tier of characters, and a clear lower tier, and it feels like a huge gap between. This gap is far more than other competitive fighters, and results in frustrating experiences if you happen to like weaker characters, and a resulting lack of diversity in selected characters. To qualify this, I'll say that I know very little about competitive Mortal Kombat, so this is just based on my seat of the pants sense following a few weeks of play, rather than my more robust understanding of competitive Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, or Super Smash Bros.

The biggest downside of MK XL is the online experience, which has been pretty awful. This may be an Xbox Live thing, or a MK XL thing, but regardless, my experience was very negative. The matchmaking was extremely bad. I came into playing online following completing the tutorial and story mode, and without playing a Mortal Kombat game in years, and completely dominated. I understand that there's a beginning period in which you're getting matched, but it should have ramped up much quicker. I won my first ten matches in a row without losing a single round. I faced people that clearly knew 0 about fighting games, leaping into crouching uppercuts over and over, unleashing moves that left them highly vulnerable, not blocking, etc. It's fine that there exist people like this online, but after 5 matches, you would have thought they would have bumped me up a tier. I'm sure that given enough time, this problem would work itself out, but playing online quickly became stale without serious competition.

The worst part of the MK XL experience was, however, the actual online game experience, which is fraught with lag in just about every match I played. We aren't talking about split seconds of lag, however. We're talking about full seconds in which everything on screen would completely stop. It was the worst competitive fighting game experience online I've ever had. Even the experience of playing Street Fighter x Tekken and Ultra Street Fighter IV online on my PS3 was far superior to this. And the experience of SF V and Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator absolutely leave my experience with MK XL in the dust.

So I'd say that MK XL lays the ground work for a seriously enjoyable MK experience next go around. I think the controls need a bit of rework, and the online experience needs a complete overhaul. But it's a great improvement in gameplay for a franchise that has long thrived on style over substance, and doesn't do anything to change it's delightfully gory signature look and feel.

I'll give it a kool 7.5/10.

And that's it! I'm finally done with my gaming backlog! Hopefully I'll beat Mega Man 10 tonight or later this week, bringing the classic Mega Man chapter of this year to a close. The next game I'll play after Mega Man 10 is teased in the image below...

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 24): Mega Man 6

The American art here is finally close to decent...but the Japanese is still way better.

Mega Man 6...the last in a noble line of NES Mega Man titles, and honestly not a bad one. Again, it follows the formula fairly closely, but like its two predecessors, the sixth game attempts to make some minor alterations to the formula, and mostly fails to improve.

The biggest changes here are the structure of the levels, and the two new powerups to Mega Man, which replace Rush. These powerups involve you merging with Rush to take one of two separate new forms, Jet Mega Man and Power Mega Man. Jet Mega Man can fly for a limited distance by holding the jump button, and Power Mega Man can charge up his attacks to blast through blocks to reveal secret locations. These secret locations play a large role in the other big change, the layout of the levels. These changes make for good fun, but mess up the balance of the game a bit. Unlike past uses of Rush to navigate around difficult locations, the Jet powerup doesn't have a finite supply of energy, in that it will automatically recharge once you hit the ground. This makes it so that the Jet powerup can be used over and over again to dodge difficult areas, with little to no downside, other than that Mega Man can't fight as well in the Jet suit. One major irritation of the powerups is that each time you use one, it shows a cut scene of Rush merging with Mega Man. While this was cool once, it would have been nice for it to be turned off for future transformations, or to be skippable earlier. As it stands, you'll need to wait a few seconds to skip it, which is annoying when you're transforming 5 times per level.

In several of the levels, branching paths can be found, usually using the Power or Jet powerups. Following these secret paths leads you on an easier path to the boss, and rewards you with a letter B, E, A, or T. Finding all of these letters unlocks Beat, your old friend from Mega Man 5, who can help you on your journey. This was a great idea, but is pretty poorly executed. For one thing, the "secret" paths are not difficult to find, nor are they difficult to get to. This makes each path kind of cheap, rather than the reward you might expect for finding secrets, like you'd find in a Mega Man 7 or Mega Man X. But it was a good idea at least, and laid the foundation for later releases.

The general strengths of the series remain strong. The soundtrack is again excellent, the controls are perfect, the visuals are the best ever on the NES (for any game), and the slowdown is really cut down here. The levels are fun and varied, and live up to the Mega Man reputation.

The Robot Masters are fairly boring here. Almost all of the bosses are extremely easy, and have very few variations in their patters, making beating them a breeze. Their designs are also somewhat lacking, requiring a fresh approach as shown in Mega Man X.

The plot is so tiresome that it's embarrassing. Using the same plot twist three games in a row...weak. And this one is the most thinly guised one of the lot, which makes it even more abysmal. Bad on you, Capcom.

So Mega Man 6 is another Mega Man game. It often gets criticized for not standing out from the crowd, and that's true. But it tries, and has some good ideas that it plays poorly. And the formula it's built on is enough to carry it to "good status". I'll give it an 8.2/10.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 23): Mega Man 5

Getting closer, America

Mega Man 5 is the least innovative of the classic Mega Man series, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad (just a bit lazy). It leans again on the Mega Man formula of platforming 'n stealing boss weapons, but feels a bit more fun than Mega Man 4.

Mega Man 5 takes the approach that the Mega Man franchise has an established, working, enjoyable formula, and it plays within it to great effect. There are few alterations to the game's formula, some mostly good, and one quite bad, but these are small and don't affect the game's quality much.

For example, Capcom executes a great idea to have Mega Man collect the letters 

M-E-G-A-M-A-N-V 

hidden throughout the levels. Finding all 8 will enable you to unlock Beat, a new robot bird friend, who can be summoned to attack your enemies. While collecting these letters was fun, they actually weren't, in the vast majority of cases, hidden that well. All but one was in plain sight, and only two or three were at all difficult to get. If these secrets hidden in a more challenging manner, like in Mega Man X, this would have been better, yet you have to give credit to the fifth game in the series for trying something new, if small, to alter the formula a bit.

A few levels feature some unique and new playstyles, most of which work to good effect. The Star Man level is in low gravity, which would be cool if it wasn't basically like being underwater, something that had been done since Mega Man (I'm pretty sure). More impressive, however, are the switching gravity sections in Gravity Man's level, which enable Mega Man to walk on the ceiling at times, and the boss fight features rapidly switching gravity, in which you'll fly from floor to ceiling and back, trying to shoot Gravity Man as he passes in the opposite direction. The level and robot master fight are among my favorites in Mega Man history, and represent a nice little tweak to the formula. Wave Man's stage also features a fun section in which you ride on a jet ski which automatically travels right. You can control the jet ski to shoot your enemies, as well as jumping over them as they come from both the left and right sides of the screen. I feel like they could have done more with this idea, and later did in Mega Man 8 with the snowboard and Mega Man X with the powersuits, but the attempt was welcome, and it was a fun diversion.

The graphics are again superb, with the best presentation to date. The sprites are excellent, and slowdown is at an all time low, showing Capcom's increasing ability to program beautiful and complex visuals while staying within the limits of the NES' power, similar to other late NES titles like Little Samson and Mega Man 6. The levels are the most detailed yet, and are really wonderful to look at.

The music is better than in Mega Man 4, and has several memorable tunes. The sound effects are again excellent.

The robot masters are much better than the boring ones in Mega Man 4, although not quite up to the par set by 1, 2, and 3. But Star Man, Gravity Man, and Stone Man are also excellent designs, and fun and unique battles.

The difficulty is similar to that in the fourth game, representing a happy medium between so easy that it becomes boring, and so challenging that it is unfun. The challenge feels rewarding here, although I enjoy more difficult games, generally. The penultimate castle in the game is very challenging, and is one of my favorite castles in Mega Man games.

Despite being a generally good game, Mega Man 5, has its weaknesses. It probably adheres a bit too closely to the formula, although it does try to differentiate itself in small ways. The new Rush Coil is positively dreadful, lacking the fun interaction present in Mega Man 3 and Mega Man 4. It's plot is even more tired and hackneyed than Mega Man 4, which is a remarkable achievement in and of itself. If you can't see the plot twist coming, you're not too bright. It again begs the question as to why it wasn't on the SNES, although it looks and plays perfectly fine, and does forge new ground on the NES, so it can be forgiven this.

An unremarkable late NES game that is nevertheless fun and does its best, I'll give Mega Man 5 a 8.4/10.

-TRO