Comments on: The Anatomy of Mega Man 2 – VI – The quick and the dead http://www.anatomyofgames.com/2014/06/18/the-anatomy-of-mega-man-2-vi-the-quick-and-the-dead/ Defunct, amateurish, game design analysis by Jeremy Parish Wed, 25 Nov 2015 23:31:21 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.7 By: J. Parish http://www.anatomyofgames.com/2014/06/18/the-anatomy-of-mega-man-2-vi-the-quick-and-the-dead/#comment-2699 Sat, 21 Jun 2014 12:37:48 +0000 http://www.anatomyofgames.com/?p=10798#comment-2699 But leaning on rote memorization and trial-and-error is a crappy game design philosophy. That’s the problem here; it betrays the organic feel of Mega Man’s design.

]]> By: Bobo Cujo http://www.anatomyofgames.com/2014/06/18/the-anatomy-of-mega-man-2-vi-the-quick-and-the-dead/#comment-2696 Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:06:44 +0000 http://www.anatomyofgames.com/?p=10798#comment-2696 The difficulty of the lasers is often overstated; they fire in the same pattern every time, which makes them a matter of memorization and developing a bit of muscle memory*. Once you know the pattern, it’s pretty much a cinch to get past them; I can breeze through this pretty much every time I go through this now.

The true value of the Time Stopper in this level is to prevent the whole laser sequence from being awful, strictly-trial-and-error level design. In this way, it gives you an alternate, earnable way of getting past this hazard (in much the same way that Item 2 lets you get around the Heat Man disappearing block chasm).

Also: Quick Man is weak to Crash Bombs, and unlike Time Stopper, you don’t have to switch to the Buster to finish him off. (It’s particularly useful if you fire it at a wall and let the explosions take off huge chunks of his health due to the minimal invincibility frames.) For me, though, the fact that you even have this choice does wonders for Mega Man 2’s replay value as it boosts the value of playing through different boss orders**.

* yes, this could arguably be said about Mega Man games in general, but much more so here…
** that said, my favorite order: Bubble -> Heat -> Wood -> Air -> Crash -> Quick -> Metal -> Flash. It’s the only order that guarantees that you have a proper weakness weapon for each subsequent boss without having to switch to the Buster, and minimizes Quick Boomerang/Metal Blade cheesing.

]]> By: Leliel http://www.anatomyofgames.com/2014/06/18/the-anatomy-of-mega-man-2-vi-the-quick-and-the-dead/#comment-2682 Thu, 19 Jun 2014 14:00:52 +0000 http://www.anatomyofgames.com/?p=10798#comment-2682 One of the signs of improvement in MM games is the gradual ability to start the game from different stages as I played them over and over and over. The Quick Beams were hard, but not overly hard — for me, by far the hardest MM2 level to learn to do first was Heat Man.

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