Breath of Fire: A Cure for Zombies

 SO, jumping back in....we were left with a clan chief who wanted me to save his village so that an interracial couple could get married in the towns surrounding a dry river....

basically

The Chief said that Agua would have the key to unlocking the GIANT ASS ROBOT up in the north. Ok, lets do that.

I wandered a bit and found that zombie town again. I talked to the chief and he immediately told me what I wanted to know.

There we have it, Agua, a place I need to be to get to this robot business. But...rid the zombies?

They were still pretty hard up for a cure for these pretty harmless zombies. I mean...they weren't even attacking anyone.

Yeah, alright, lets put these monsters to rest

I'd like to take the time to introduce people to a minigame in RPGs known as Ask the NPCs. See, proper conveyance in a story-based game wasn't really a thing. You had to solve problems by asking around. Sometimes you ask the wrong people and there's consequences, but in this game, you're usually pretty safe to ask any ol' NPC nearest to you and you can figure out what to do next.

Clue 1: There's shit wrong with the soil

Clue 2: We can fix the shit with water

Clue 3: We can use a jar to hold water

People stopped giving me "useful" intel after that, and then I had an idea to wait til nightfall and check out the zombie situation again. Then I met a nice crazy zombie-loving lady who knew exactly what I needed.

Thankfully her zombie husband had some sense and opened a secret passage so I can take her jar and go get some clean water.

Putting Bo in the lead lets me skip through forests like its flat ground, so that led me to find...

A fancy cave! This is another dungeon with lots of stairs and badguys every three steps.

Dungeon Designer's Tip:

         In order to make small maps more challenging to the player, make sure that all items are in the centre of the map, but you have to go out of your way to get it. Also, in order to progress through the dungeon, make sure the player has to take the longest route fucking possible.

At least power leveling is easy in forever-dungeons

Eventually I made it to the bottom and found an underground lake of the very hard to find...water.

Thankfully a miracle of RPG's happens. A quick cutscene took me back to the village instantly 

*HALLELUJAH* and we dumped the water in the middle of town.

Went to the chief and he gave me lots of gold and items for my troubles as well as a magic Tablet.

 ooooOOOooooo shiny!


Keep on gaming, Gamers.

-ME0

Mega Man X: Holy Boss-Battles Batman!

So I demolished the rest of the old bosses in this one level, and fought a new robo-beast; which ended up having me face 6 boss fights in one level! SIX. I was running low on all counts of powers and energy tanks as the level progressed. It also felt like the bosses were a little more difficult than the first time I fought them... not that I DIED a whole lot. The fights just felt harder.

The first boss door (which again was pretty much as the start of the level) was the Armored Armadillo. I knew I had to electrocute him with my lightning shot to get rid of his armor, and then continuously do so until he died.

Don't worry, I'm not invisible, I just got hit by his forehead shot.

After defeating Armadillo, I made my way through some baddies and got myself to full health; just in time for the next boss door (which was pretty much a single hallway away.)

And within this doorway was that bastard who can actually turn invisible: Sting Chameleon. He was just as annoying as I recall, the first time we fought. Only THIS time, I found his weakness!

THE BOOM!... erang.

So I made my way out of his chamber, down a little drop where there was some health behind some pipes. I used the boomerang to snag them up (that thing is all kinds of handy, ain't it?)

Onto the next boss! Here I had to face off with Spark Mandrill! I already knew his weakness, so I could use my wonderful Ice Shot to freeze him whenever he was getting to close for comfort. I did not leave the battle unscathed however, as each one of his flying punches would knock me off the wall if I tried to avoid them that way.

You know what killed the dinosaurs? The ICE AGE!

So that was 3 bosses down, so I was imagining I would be facing a new boss right away, but I was wrong! I dove down into some water and instantly knew what was coming.

Hmm... I wonder who I'm fighting next?

Oooo... Surprise, surprise.

Octo-whatever his face is was a bastard. I very much did not enjoy fighting him. Mainly because I couldn't figure out his weakness, and also I couldn't remember how I beat him last time. So I switched rapidly through my powers and buster shots, trying to avoid his missiles and keep away from his whirlpool thang.

Then I killed him with his own powers; just for the hell of it.

Then I leapt out of the water and found another boss door. When I entered I saw the conveyor belt and knew right away I was to be facing Flame Mammoth. Last time I didn't have his weakness, and I knew I did this time. As far as I could tell, it seemed the tornado power did more damage to him. I jumped away from his fireballs, and soot shot, and blasted him down as much as I could.

I finished him off at the same time as getting knocked into the air by his fat-ass weight coming down.

So I had finished them all off. All them old guys. And the level wasn't over? Who was I supposed to fight next?... Some rather large robot, T-Rex head thing? This guy was annoying as hell. He killed me a fair amount of times, to be honest. He only had two attacks really. His upper half and lower half would split and move seperately attempting to hit me. The other is if both halves come together and shoot a large electric orb out at you. I had to dash under that one. You can't hang up on the wall to avoid it... It will launch at you.

Also, in trying to jump through the gap of top and bottom, the top would often be too fast and crush down on me, causing a fair amount of pain. How I ended up winning was getting into a rhythm of his movements and blasts; I scrolled through my powers, charging fully as well as I could to do the most damage possible. And in the end, it was still a damn close call.

HUZZAH! I won! Whew... That was DAMN stressful.

But I finished him off, that I did. And was then sent to the boss screen again. This HAS to be the final boss now; Sigma. I'm also curious as to whether I'll get some answers of some plot? Maybe?... Maybe I'm hoping too much. I guess we'll see.

Catch ya later gamers.

Super Metroid: The Gravity of the Situation

Hey Gamers, been a little while, hey? I just recently got back from a tour of a puppet show that I'm in the middle of, and up until now haven't had a lot of game time. Buuuttt, that's not my excuse, seeing as whenever I WAS available, I was gaming like a mad man. However, my actual reason for not posting in a while is because I finally figured out how to get unstuck in the abandoned Space Pirate ship thingy. Because I now had the grapple beam, I went back into Brinstar and found that I had skipped a spot that was grapple beam friendly. I grappled my way across this large gap with glowy little bug things getting in my way and then I found something. I nearly pooped my pants and totally forgot to make a screenshot while I was at it, but the item I found was called the X Ray scope. So you know that problem I had since I started playing this game, where I'd get stuck for hours and have to shoot walls and bomb floors until finally I found the one passage what would allow me to progress through the game? Well, let's just say the X Ray Scope would have come in handy a LOOOONNNNGGGG time ago. However, I've now made good use of it and discovered many secret stashes of missiles and tank upgrades and whatnot. So THEN I went back to the abandoned ship from the end of my last post and found a passage at the bottom of the ship with my new X Ray Scope. 

All of the above took me a few hours of game-play...but the one, true, SOLE reason that I have not been updating in a while is because many many many more hours were spent in frustration trying to kill this guy.

 A website told me his name is Phantoom, or something like that. In any case, if you're panicky and trigger happy during boss fights like I get from time to time, this fight was hard. It wasn't until hour...oh I dunno...13? That I finally smartened up and stopped using super missiles and power bombs on him, because little did I realize that the super move he kept using on me was only because he was angry at MY super moves. So then I gave my head a shameful shake and used strictly regular missiles and charge shots. The fight was ten minutes that time.

So after killing Phantoom, the lights and power came on again in the ship and the save point (which woulda been really handy pre-boss-fight for dummies like me) was now accessible. I was then able to explore more of the ship and soon discovered another awesome upgrade, this time to my armor.

As you can see, it's purple. Which already makes it cooler, seeing as the last one wasn't much of a color upgrade. Now this here is called the Gravity Suit. Sounds cool, yeah? Well, it is. Under water is no longer a slow, arduous process, as the suit treats undersea travel as if in open air. Also, it has a super jump ability that you can use by entering super speed, pressing down (which holds the charge) and then pressing jump when you're ready. It's a bit hard to use, but worth it for those hard to reach places. So then I found a reserve tank for my energy and proceeded into a new world, which was short lived for some reason and brought me back to Brinstar. I'll be playing more soon and will let you know if I figured out why it brought me down here.

Later Gamers.

Mega Man X: Underwater Battle!

Alright. So, underwater levels never really were 'my thing' in most games. They make your character sluggish, unresponsive, and in general more difficult to avoid attacks. Happily it appears that SNES games (or just Mega Man X here) that they don't change all that much, except that cause your jumping to be slightly slower, but it actually enhancing my ability to choose where I fall when I leap. This level ended up being fairly lengthy, though might've just felt that way.

It started with shallow water which had robot water-bugs. They died with some buster shots. It got deeper fairly quickly and the first deep dive ran me face-to-face with some robot sea-horses who popped out of the ground and hurled themselves at me. They were rather annoying to be honest. I killed a bunch, and tried to keep moving, but they kept launching up from the ground! couldn't escape them. I kept blowing them up again and again, until I finally got out of their 'territory' and ran into these robot piranha things.

If you're wondering where I am in this picture; I'm inside the fish. It ATE me. It sucks in water and pulls you into it's belly. Luckily this doesn't do any damage and I can just shoot my way out, it's just an inconvenience. Next big thing was this guy:

There seems to be a trend of forced movement in this level, which I suppose makes sense, considering that it's underwater. Anyway, this guy didn't really have anything too special, he just sucked and blew, attempting to get me to fall into the pit of spikes. He also launched out these... robot snake-things which homed at me. I was hit by them a few times, but after continuously blasting him with my buster, and a couple other powers, he ended up dying. So I continued on my way, and these bombs started raining down from the surface. They weren't homing, but they were annoying. I moved as fast as I could through that area, and avoided the spikes... Then I heard some rumbling;

And thus, giant-snake-mini-boss thing popped up. It moved slow enough, and didn't shoot anything, so as long as I just kept myself away from where it's head was, I was alright. The only parts of the body I could hit were the head and the end of the tail. The body bounced my shots away. It took a bit to kill, because it would sometimes go back into the dirt, but it was just delaying the inevitable. It died, and dropped me some health and some energy for my ammo for my super powers, and the boss door was there shortly after. However, I didn't find a single power-up in the level so I did some back-tracking and found a rather large gap. I jumped over it before cuz I thought I'd die; but the camera moved down with me, so I decided to see how far down it would go.

I entered a cavern of some sort, and there was another giant-sea-snake-mini-boss thing. So I killed him, and then there was a health increase! I was so happy, and then promptly fell into a spike pit. so I fought my way back through the giant-sea-snake-mini-boss thing and went to slay the boss.

So this punk pointed and me, and said I was going down. So I was like 'Oh, you are SO going down.' This Octo-punk shot missiles. MISSILES! Luckily a charged shot usually destroyed the ones that would hit me, and then hit him, so I could plug away at his health that way. Again, I didn't have the power which was his weakness though, so I had to plug away his health normally. The regular buster/charge-shot combo seemed to be the most effective. So I killed him good.

So there are 3 bosses left, and the last 2 bosses I fought I didn't have their weaknesses... So, I hope I have the chameleon's weakness, because I think I'm gonna take him on next. Catch ya late gamers.

Super Metroid: high jump boots...now what?

So I've been at this for a couple hours today and I think I'm stuck. 

My first moment of joy came when I realized that old memories of a charge-up shot were not invented by my imagination. So, now I'm equipped with an extra-damage-giving arm cannon. Which is awesome cuz I keep wasting missiles on ceiling jumpers.

So then I moved on to find these little jerks.

If I could improve one thing about this game it would be to make it easier to get the hell out of spikey water. I had so many deaths because of that that I was ready to eat my controller. However, with a little patience I got through it and found out that my super missiles blow these guys up in a hurry. It wasn't long before I finally found these suckas:

 Which made life a little easier, but then I realized that a quite a few rooms back and on a whole different level I had left areas what were too high to reach. However, I can't go back there because I've closed myself off. So then I found the next save point, here....

And was doubly miffed to find that I had nowhere else to go. To the right of this save point was a dead end that I couldn't blast through, and all the rooms I could access were either too hot for my armor(or something...) or the door wouldn't open with any of my weapons. I feel like I missed something and its frustrating. There's also a room with Indiana Jones style closing doorways that I have to run through, but the second one still closes too fast. Being too frustrated to continue I have called it quits for the day and will try again tomorrow...or later tonight.