Category: First Impressions

And I’ve been making this nasty habit of playing through the levels without making much use of the new Double Gear system that’s supposed to help out. Turns out that the levels are entirely playable without ever having to rely on the Double Gear system to help in a crutch. Note that entirely playable doesn’t necessarily mean easy peasy; some split-second timing and memorization of certain patterns, such as the laser traps of Fuse Man’s stage, are essential to conquering these challenges barebones.

About the only real use I’ve found for Double Gear is in offensive capabilities, as the gear can power up your master weapons much like Mega Man X’s arm upgrades… and speaking of which, a Gear-Powered Charge Shot lets you shoot two in a row much like in X2. There’s actually a few neat little touches here and there that are somewhat subtle callbacks to past Mega titles and those in the know will get a little more out of it, I think.

As I’m playing this newest Mega Man game in the wee hours of the night, learning and relearning some of the bits and bobs that makes this newest game tick, a sudden realization dawned on me… I’m eventually going to have to play that other game… you know, the “better than nothing” game.

Welp.

In a follow-up to a previous post, I eventually downloaded and installed the recently released Mega Man X Legacy Collection compilations from Steam and gave them what can be described as a rather quick playthrough each of the games. And while I’m sure everyone’s experience is going to be different based on their set-ups, I found the collections to work just fine. Performance-wise, I didn’t seem to encounter any of the problems that others have come across.

Mind you, I’ve been playing it on the default screen settings in windowed mode and chances are these issues may pop up on higher resolutions, but since the chances of me playing fullscreen are slim to none since I use windowed views to capture footage, this hasn’t proven to be a massive issue… yet.

In any event, the collections work fine. There are quibbles to be had as far as the package is concerned, but in terms of performance, I’ve yet to encounter any major issues. Now whether this merits a video or not is an entirely different story, but… let’s not cross that road just yet.

Might as well get it out of the way… yes, I have played it. I’ve sampled what little I could and I wouldn’t mind making THAT into a House Show thing in lieu of the Mega Maker stuff. Hell, give me a couple more months and I might have enough material for a review thing to fill a day in October… more on that (much) later, I suppose.

However, we’ll see if any of that comes to fruition. By this time, as this post is getting “published” or whatever, the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection will be unlocked and chances are I’ll be spending quite a bit of time on that one unless the game hits me with SecuRom or whatever bullshit DRM that comes packaged with it. Shit DRM is the main reason why my play time with Sonic Mania (an excellent game, by the way) has been very limited.

On the bright side, we got the spring cleaning shit on Steam out of the way, so that’s something.

Anyway, gotta run.

Later.

So I downloaded Mega Man 10 for WiiWare and beat the whole thing… in Normal Mode. My performance is also crap, but I’ve got enough footage to put together a montage of gameplay clips (That clip’s available on my YouTube channel – hard to miss). Nothing spoiler warning. All in all, this is a smooth follow-up to Mega Man 9 with some rather interesting level design. A fun, well-designed game, although there isn’t really much new. If you want my full thoughts, just click the break. I warn you; there are spoilers.

Continue reading “First Night Impressions – Mega Man 10”

Just before the New Year, Castlevania The Adventure ReBirth was released and I coughed up the thousand Wii Points to buy it. Somehow, I managed to reach the fifth stage on my first game on Normal difficulty… seems rather off. Don’t know if I’m that good or if the game’s that easy… most likely the latter. Even so, it’s still no walk in the park, it’s classic Castlevania, and I wouldn’t have it any other way… unless they made it more like Super Castlevania IV… but oh well.

Bought the version of Tetris that was released last week as a downloadable PSP mini game and have had a week to play it. I’ll probably be posting a full review on GameFAQs or something, but basically this is your usual offering of Tetris. It has a nice, clean presentation, the gameplay is familiar to those who have played the game before (although the controls are somewhat slippery and sensitive), and there are a nice variety of game modes (that you must unlock first) to try out. The game also comes with built-in acheivements or “feats” as they call it.

All in all, it’s a fairly decent Tetris, although at ten bucks, it seem a little steep. If you really enjoy Tetris, this is a nice one to add to your collection, but if you’re perfectly happy with the Game Boy version, this isn’t going to offer you anything new.