Oh cool, I didn’t get kicked for inactivity yet. Let’s see if I can keep it that way.

Roguelite. Left/right move, A double-jumps, X attacks, Y uses your equipped magic attack, B dashes, R interacts (when applicable), and L uses a healing potion. This takes the Rogue Legacy approach of haivng pre-designed rooms chosen at random instead of true procedural generation, but keep in mind the game is still very linear: levels are never much bigger than 5x5 rooms, and you’re always looking for the specific door-room that leads to the next level. You can buy permanent upgrades and rescue prisoners who will offer free equipment for the start of all your future runs, but besides that, this is one of those “back to the beginning” roguelites where you have to replay every level and boss to get back to where you were, and if you’ve never liked that, this game won’t change your mind. Technically, the game does have checkpoints, but you don’t get one until after beating the third boss…and it only lets you start future runs right after the first boss (same for beating the 4th to get a checkpoint right after the 2nd), so you still have to play 60% of the game in a row at minimum to beat the game.

However, while I really wasn’t a fan of the game’s checkpoint system, I should give it praise for getting almost everything else right, including stuff I haven’t seen another game get right in a long time. Controls are solid (there’s a bit of momentum when you stop, but the platforming challenges never get precise enough for it to be an issue), healing potions work instantly without interrupting you (no forced delay/movement-hinderances like Dark Souls, etc. have), and enemies/bosses are rather fairly designed so no matter how the RNG plays out with your equipment, you can always reliably take them down. I even beat the final boss the first time I made it there. Also, when you hit-stun an enemy, they actually stay hit-stunned as long as you keep up the pressure; no abrupt breaking out of it like I’ve seen other games do. But the part I really want to praise: you can walk forward while attacking! I can’t remember the last game of this ilk that actually lets you do this. In other words, if a hit-stunned enemy is about to be pushed out of your attack range before dying, you can just…move forward…without stopping your attacks. It’s beautiful. Sadly, you can’t dash out of your attack animations, but I guess nothing’s perfect.

Unfortunately, the game does have some of what would otherwise have been minor issues that–when combined with the checkpoint system–are gonna make you wanna prioritize health and defense upgrades before any others, assuming you don’t just give up outright. Hurtboxes for certain attacks can hang around just a bit longer than it looks like they should; some attacks (flying enemies preparing projectiles) have foreshadow animations that are so long, they loop back around to not having any; a few foreshadow animations can be ambiguous as to how the attack will play out, meaning you can’t really react to them on your first encounter; dark rooms make it harder to see certain projectiles or red light on the ground that indicates an attack coming from the floor; and of course, there’s my old pet peeve of level design needing to flatten itself out to accommodate the more hack-‘n’-slash-y enemies who aren’t really designed around you being able to take on more than one or two at a time, but the game still occasionally spawns incompatible ones in the same spot. Magic could help due to its range, but once your magic meter is empty, that’s it unless you stumble across low-spawn-rate magic potions or a magic-recharge station. On top of this, when you kill an enemy, you actually do have an extra delay added to that specific attack, which–depending on your equipment–absolutely means the difference between keeping the other nearby enemy hit-stunned or said enemy getting a hit off on you. The worst is when you finally make it to the fifth zone and encounter red-light areas that slow your movement. They’re not like water–you can still only double jump–but both horizontal and vertical movement is slowed greatly, making it (next to) impossible to avoid certain enemy attacks (particularly the ones that just summon hazards near you, regardless of your or their positions). Honestly, this issue by itself made me second-guess my recommendation.

Still, the game is pretty good overall if you don’t mind the game’s checkpoint system. If you like these types of roguelites, you’ll probably enjoy this game, too.

I looked through a bunch of the recent Next Fest demos, and here are the ones I found worth checking out:

Platformers:

Physics are kinda wonky sometimes (even getting me killed once), but the game shows promise.

Solid platformer. Doesn’t do much unique, but does it well. Almost flawless.

Killing enemies to charge the higher-jump is odd, but the teleport-gun has solid implementation.

Another quality title with a well-implemented gimmick. The escape level gets close to being too long without a checkpoint, though.

The wing-boost (midair-jump) takes some getting-used-to, but the demo only has four short levels, so you won’t. Still okay, though.

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SHMUPs:

Decent bullet hell, though the demo’s last boss started to breach unfair territory.

Bullet hell, but almost nothing is unfair (at least on Normal mode), and the demo has 13 two-phase bosses!

Promises different paths for each character, but the demo only has one level (the same for each one). It’s an okay level, though.

I decided to see what new prologues were out on Steam since last I checked, and I found a couple that were pretty fun:

• Dark Gravity: Prologue
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

• BioGun: Clinical Trial
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

Dark Gravity Prologue: SHMUP. Standard movement, RT shoots, RB toggles auto-fire, LT shoots your secondary weapon (has ammo but slowly refills when not in use), and the A button dodges. Most shot patterns can be avoided just fine with basic movement (at least on Normal mode), but there are still a few where you need to use the dodge button. Also, even after going through the tutorials, it’s easy to forget about your secondary weapon.

The prologue has four levels, but one of them is in a branching path, and the game won’t let you go back to the other level once you’ve made your choice; the only way to play the other one is if you start a new campaign and replay the first level again. You also get to see a preview of the main game’s campaign paths, which is how I know you have to play through half of the main game three times in order to unlock all the levels.

Once you do, though, you can play them in Single Mission mode in any order and on any difficulty, even if you only played the campaign on normal mode. That’s how I tried out hard mode: it has the same number of enemies in the same formations at the same locations, but they shoot more projectiles, requiring the dodge mechanic a lot more. Some levels also have an extra boss/phase at the end; level 1 and 2a were fine for the most part, but 2b’s additional boss had some cheap laser attacks, so I stopped playing when I lost there. Still, normal mode is worth playing through, so I can recommend it.

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BioGun Clinical Trial: Twin-stick Metroidvania. Left stick moves, right stick shoots, and LB jumps. As with any Metroidvania, you’ll get upgrades as you progress, such as dashing (RB), hovering (LT, but can be changed to the jump button in the options), and a stronger, longer-range gun that uses ammo (RT). The game has that “hold a button to heal after a delay” mechanic that I hate, and you can’t even move while healing unless you buy a specific upgrade and have it take up your lone upgrade slot (which can only be swapped out at save points). Once again, a game invents a problem and sells the solution instead of doing things right from the get-go. This type of stuff is why I’ll never understand the player-side popularity of RPG mechanics: pay-to-win was always its logical conclusion!

Level design is okay, though I could easily see the full version ending up as one of those games that doesn’t really have much of a difficulty curve. Enemies have fair attack patterns and no stage hazards will catch you off guard, but there weren’t many parts I had trouble with outside bosses, which can have some cheap hits (like the fish that’ll charge at you, even if you’re on the lower level where the ceiling is too low to jump over it). There’s even an optional boss placed before you get the long-range gun, and IIRC this part is right before a shaft that you can’t jump back up, so you can’t exactly go back for it afterward. Plus, the boss itself keeps spamming swarms of the bug enemies–too many to fight off and get many hits in before the next group spawn. Still, what’s here is fine for being free, so I think it’s worth checking out.

Just beat Ninja Senki (not DX, but the free original version), and it’s okay for a free platformer. Controls are fine and level design is decent for the most part, but the game can be pretty repetitive at times (literally using the exact same level chunk & enemy placement multiple times in a row), and level 8 has a bunch of cheap hits, partly because it introduces the three-bullet shooters (who are pretty much never used fairly) and partly because it’s the only one where getting hit by the boss is an instakill because you always get knocked into the pit. Honestly, although I haven’t played the DX version, it looks like it isn’t all that different from the free original, so I’d definitely recommend this one instead, which you can download here: https://ninja-senki.en.uptodown.com/windows/post-download/43818 Just know that it doesn’t save your progress, so you have to beat it in one sitting (it has infinite continues, though).

I also got this game as a gift a couple days ago:

• Mega Man 11
  

  5 hours playtime

  17 of 50 achievements

Besides typical Mega Man controls (jump, slide, charge shot), this platformer introduces the “gear system”: LB temporarily increases your attack power but using it too long weakens you and greatly lowers your fire-rate, and RB slows time down but also slows your own movement as well. As a result, it doesn’t really do anything to alleviate potential cheap hits because if you don’t have enough reaction time to hit the jump button or slide or whatever, you don’t have time to hit the time-slow button, either. Honestly, I forgot it was there most of the time, only remembering when I hit the wrong button while trying to switch weapons (mapped to LT and RT).

Level design is okay for the most part, but there were a few lapses in quality. One of the things Mega Man is known for is introducing new things safely, but Torch Man’s stage fails to do this twice. First of all, the teepees looks like background objects, so when you walk into the first one and take contact damage, you’ll shoot it down and see that no enemy comes out of it. A couple teepees later, you’ll jump up to a platform that’s only a few tiles wide and shoot the teepee down only for an enemy to spawn behind it and jump forward at you, hitting you again! At the very least, the first one should’ve had the enemy so the player knows to be on guard for the rest of them. In that same level are Mash Burners, which constantly shoot flames upward so you can’t get past them without killing them, which causes them to explode. That much is fine, but once again, shortly after they first show up, you’re placed on a small platform with one in front of you (after a drop so you can’t jump back), but the platform isn’t large enough to avoid getting hit by the enemy’s death explosion. It isn’t until several rooms later–past the halfway point–where the game has them walk into a pit and you realize shooting them just once turns their flames off without killing them (they die in only two shots). That would’ve been a good way to introduce them safely…if that had been how they were actually introduced!

Some of the bosses have issues as well. The first I noticed was the mini-boss in Block Man’s stage: it’s too long to jump over, so you have to find a safe zone, but the mini-boss’s four pieces fall in different, seemingly random positions on the screen each time. Even with the time slow power, I couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to avoid getting hit sometimes. The worst is probably Acid Man, though. See, all the Robot Masters get a pattern change when they get low on health, and what Acid Man does is: he dives under the arena where you can’t shoot him, sends a wave towards you that you need to jump over, then–as you’re jumping over the wave–he’ll jump out of the water and hover at the top of the screen (where your Mega Buster also can’t reach), then immediately shoot three shots at you in a row (which are super hard to dodge due to you being right next to the boss when it happens) before diving back under the arena (where–again–you can’t shoot him) and loop the pattern. The only reason I won is because I happened to have his weakness, which can hit him at the top of the screen; I’m pretty sure he’s actually impossible with just the Mega Buster alone.

The Wily fortress was pretty disappointing. Only four levels, and two of them barely have any level to go with their bosses. In fact, the boss-refight stage doesn’t have an exclusive boss (it just ends once the duplicate Robot Masters are defeated), and the first level just reuses the Yellow Devil again (who has no weakness in this game; the wiki says its weakness is the bomb weapon, but I used that against the boss and it only dealt one point of damage!). The first Wily stage also has a lot more background details, making the transparent 8-way-shooting enemies very difficult to notice before they pop out and attack, knocking you into a pit.

However, the most disappointing part of the game are the challenges. All of them (except four) either recycle the main game’s levels with next to no changes, or they recycle the main game’s bosses in some form of boss rush. Worse, 3/4 of the non-recycled challenges are just high-score minigames (one of which is unintuitive because how are you supposed to figure out what the normal enemies’ weaknesses are besides trial and error?), and the final one–the only one that’s worth playing due to being an actual new level–is way too long considering it has no checkpoints (and on top of that, it also ends up recycling the main game’s bosses with no changes!). It’s been a while since I played Mega Man 10, but I distinctly remember that game’s challenges were unique levels. Heck, even Mega Man: Powered Up, for all its flaws, at least had the decency to make most of its challenges original levels, even if a lot of them also have the same checkpoint issue as this game’s lone extra level.

Overall, this one’s hard to recommend. There’s a lot of good things here, but it also has a bunch of problems–some of which run counter to what Mega Man is known for. It especially doesn’t help the game’s case when there are so many free games doing the same thing better (like the Mega Man DOS Remake). The lowest it’s gone for is $10, which is still a bit of a stretch IMO considering the challenges are less than an afterthought (and apparently, hard mode barely changes the level design, unlike Mega Man 10! That was something I liked about that game, and they did away with it here!).

Hydorah was really close to being a high-quality SHMUP (and a free one at that!), but it has one major deal-breaker: you can only save five times per playthrough, even though there are 11+ levels. Individually, the levels are rather well made, challenging, and fun, but as soon as I tried to ration my saves, the game would become an exercise in tedium as I’d end up having to replay levels I’d already beaten just because I got game over on the following stage. I finally called it quits around the halfway mark at the WARCORE, an extra-long boss at the end of an already-longer-than-average level (featuring two mini-bosses, one of which you can only barely kill in time since the auto-scroll keeps pushing you to the wall). I’m pretty sure I reached the boss’s final phase, but a single mistake means you have to redo the whole boss fight with a weaker and weaker gun until all your lives are gone (and this game’s bosses take way too long to kill unless your gun is fully powered up). Still, I might’ve been able to forgive that and keep trying if it weren’t for the saving issue.

I did finally beat another good game, though:

This is the Mega Man DOS Remake, and it has the same controls you’d expect from a Mega Man fangame besides buster-charging: left/right move, A jumps, X shoots, and down+jump slides. Physics are also accurate to the main games, except underwater jumping isn’t slowed down. I’m slightly disappointed that it reuses official Mega Man tracks instead of using Kackebango’s original Mega Man DOS soundtrack, but oh well.

Level design is pretty good. The only time I was blindsided by a new enemy was in the lower-left stage, where the dev decided a downward, vertical segment was a good place to introduce the Hard-Man-style bear traps. Besides that, the game is pretty good at introducing new things safely. There were a couple areas that combined two different timing hazards that didn’t seem synced properly, but the rest of the levels do a decent job at making sure everything can be avoided and dealt with using just the Mega Buster, and any damage/death is your own fault (except one part in the fourth castle stage where a sawblade-thrower was completely covered by foreground objects). There are even some improvements over the official games, like knockback being almost completely gone and there being background tiles that indicate where exactly the disappearing blocks will spawn. EDIT: The game even goes out of its way to make sure you can shoot the MM2 small frogs when they’re on the same platform as you, which you couldn’t do in MM2 (your shots would just go over them).

The only part I didn’t like on a conceptual level was the top-left stage’s gimmick: it starts off fine by having fixed locations where your jump height is reduced or increased, but after the halfway point, it has drones speed across the top/bottom of the screen, carrying these zones with them. This means you’ll inevitably come across a wall too high to jump over, and you’ll just have to sit there and wait for the right drone to come along. Plus, you have a very small window to make your jump; mistime it, and it’ll be a normal jump, which is extra bad during segments where you have to jump from a switch bomb and can’t wait for the next drone before it explodes and you fall into the pit.

That was the first level I tried since I always start at the top-left, but when I got game over there, I decided to play the others and save it for last. However, when I replayed it after beating the other Robot Masters, I noticed something odd: the sky was evening instead of day, and when I reached the halfway point, I was sent down into a completely different level chunk than the one mentioned in the previous paragraph! Yeah, turns out the levels are different depending on what order you tackle them in, and this particular one ended up being easier than the early-game segment since you don’t have to worry about waiting on the drones (this one has the up/down ceiling crusher instead).

Also, as you beat the levels, four of them will get Doc Robot icons on them. There are two main differences between these Doc Robots and the ones from Mega Man III, both of which are improvements: 1) they aren’t a carbon-copy of another Robot Master’s pattern (some of them even have TWO bosses’ weapons), and 2) they’re completely optional; beating them just gives you bonus passive upgrades (like extra special-weapon ammo, more recharge from weapon energy items, auto weapon-energy distribution, and a bullet-split for the Mega Buster). The only downside is, unlike Mega Man III remixing the levels for the Doc Robots, these levels are exactly the same as before; you just have to figure out that the red barricades–which look no different than the last time you played through the stage–now suddenly open to a new part of the level when you touch them, and it’s in these segments where you’ll find the Doc Robots.

The other four Robot Master stages have collectible letters. Get them all, and you’ll unlock the ninth Robot Master stage (overwriting the top-right stage on the stage select). The level itself is a bit bland in parts, but the boss makes up for it by tossing a bunch of projectiles around that are hard to react to on your first go. The power you get isn’t all that special in and of itself, but it’s the weakness for a few of the bosses (particularly in the castle stages).

Speaking of bosses, they’re generally okay, but there are a couple that go way too far. The boss on the bottom-left has a double health bar and three distinct phases on top of some pretty cheap attacks, making it by far the hardest Robot Master in the game. I only used two E-tanks in my playthrough, and one of them was against that boss. The other one was against the boss of the fourth castle stage: it starts off promising with the wall tiles turning into orbs and just staying there, making you think you have time to react to them, but then they’ll suddenly bolt to another location without even showing you a preview of the path they’ll take. Plus, its second form shoots a three-way projectile with a different trajectory for each shot each time, making it super difficult to react or avoid them. Then, it has a third phase where it’ll move faster and faster around the arena, once again not showing you what path it’ll take, meaning you can’t react to it. This isn’t the final boss, but it’s the hardest, cheapest one.

Overall, the game is pretty good, and it’s an example of why I’m still a Mega Man fan. I recommend it, even if you’re someone who has never played a Mega Man game before or you’ve heard some negative things about the franchise. It may not be the best Mega Man game, but it’s free and it shows off a lot of the franchise’s good qualities. You can download it here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=618780083 (scroll down until you see “Windows standard: DOWNLOAD[packedrat.net]” and “Windows zipped: DOWNLOAD[packedrat.net]”). Small disclaimer: I played v2.13, not the latest build. Hopefully, some of the issues I encountered have been fixed.

EDIT: Another disappointment is that you have to beat all the castle stages in one run, but the high quality means that isn’t too big an issue.

I haven’t played the NES Flintstones games, but this one seems more about referencing bootlegs in general, so I doubt I’m missing much on that front.

Platformer, no controller support. Left/right move, up grabs certain objects like vines, etc., Z jumps, X attacks, up+attack uses your sub-weapon, and Shift swaps between your two sub-weapons. Controls are fine; there are only minor issues that don’t affect gameplay too much, such as movement having a bit of momentum and attacking having a split-second delay.

First, I should point out that the game doesn’t work properly on high-refresh-rate monitors. It starts off seemingly fine, but you’ll notice enemy projectiles and moving platforms are too quick for you to beat the first level (and the game only saves between levels).

Oh, and the game has a lives system for some reason. You can change it to infinite lives in the options, but it doesn’t save your options settings, so you have to go back and change it each time you close/reopen the game.

Get past all that, though, and the level design is pretty good. It’s a good balance of challenging without going beyond the limitations of the controls. Yup, it’s actually designed around your short-range attack preventing movement for a moment! The only issues I really had were 1) the train (5th EDIT: miscounted, it’s the 6th) level’s gaps in the ceiling (where rocks fall) is small and easily overlooked, and the white bar you can grab on with the up key doesn’t really look like something you can grab; and 2) one chasing-spikes segment in the 7th level starts as a horizontal segment, but the gap in the wall doesn’t lead to the next area so you realize you have to keep going up. Plus, there’s also a lot of up-and-back-down segments that make the timing a lot tighter than it seems at first (especially since there are flashes that cause the spikes chasing you to jump ahead quite a bit).

Although the levels are mostly good, the third level decided to have visual interference, like a blackout segment and an upside-down segment, which is more annoying than challenging.

Bosses are a mixed bag, though. Your attack range is short enough that you have to be quite close to deal damage (unless you have sub-weapon energy, which there is admittedly a lot of), and although your attack animation isn’t that long, you still can’t move during it. Despite this, many boss patterns have abrupt movement changes that–due to the aforementioned control quirks–you can only really avoid if you know they’re coming (and even then, it can still be a toss-up for a few of them). The worst example is the semi-final boss: one of its moves just pushes you back against the wall, but this doesn’t sync up with its other attacks (which are chosen in a random order), so it’s common to find yourself trapped helpless against the wall while a laser falls on you, dealing unavoidable damage. Closest I got to avoiding it is figuring out that your attack’s horizontal-movement-prevention will also work against the wind, but this still isn’t a sure-fire way to avoid getting hit since attacks can happen at almost any point. Definitely don’t turn on one-hit KOs; you’ll need that health bar.

I should also note that a couple bosses/minibosses will seem unavoidable until you realize they break tradition with the rest by having no contact damage (at least for part of their sprite)! Since the sprites are ripped directly from other sources, the game has to rely on presentation alone to convey this, which sometimes works but not always.

Overall, despite the flaws, this game is pretty good, especially for a free game. I recommend it. You can download it here: https://gamejolt.com/games/grand-dad/162835

Finally, another good game! Let’s see if I can stick to posts about good games without being kicked for inactivity.

Grid-based Puzzle. The D-pad moves your selected snakebird one unit forward, and L/R swap control between the different snakebirds in the level. The goal is to open the portal by eating all the fruit by moving headfirst into them, which increases the snakebird’s length by one tile, then leading all the snakebirds into the portal.

The game is very well-designed and intuitive. Levels will actually make you encounter certain less-than-intuitive mechanics multiple times so you’ll never forget about them when they’re required for a more-tricky level, such as the fact that you can stand on uneaten fruit. If anything, the game might be too easy for too long, but it does have plenty of genuinely challenging puzzles, too, especially once you beat the Primer island and reach the main island. Better yet, it accomplishes this without constantly introducing new stuff! The only part that’s kinda underutilized are the portals that send you from one to the other (as long as you position yourself to fit around the exit), but they still get a fair bit of use throughout the game.

The only real issue it has is that not all levels tutorialize certain interactions well, even though figuring out said interaction is the entire puzzle. For example, one level just needs you to know that moving two snakebirds into each other will straighten them out without pushing them off a small ledge, while another one requires you to know that you can push blocks that you’re also technically on top of, letting both your snakebird and your block move across a spike pit. The worst one was one of the portal levels that seems tricky until you stumble across the fact that if there’s a portal one-unit above you, you can still push up to “jump” into it or push objects through (and this particular interaction is only required for, like, two levels). Still, although these moments were annoying, the really difficult puzzles only require knowledge that has already been conveyed to you in previous levels, and I was able to beat the entire game without having to look up a walkthrough despite the difficulty.

Highly recommended.

…and here’s the other reason I chose to play Yo Noid:

3D parkour-style platformer. Left stick moves, A jumps, and X grapples onto a nearby grapple point (if you’re not close enough, pushing it does nothing). You can also wall-jump, as well as wall-run.

You don’t need to know anything about the first game to enjoy this unofficial sequel. In fact, I even doubt the dev(s) know that much about the first game because only its plot and first level are referenced, and only for this game’s first level! Everything afterward has nothing to do with it, making it clear the only reason it was chosen was to reference the Noid’s status as a (former) pizza mascot. Heck, even the genre is different, being a 3D parkour-platformer with no enemies instead of a 2D action-platformer with no switch-hunts. The same way the original Yo Noid was a reskin of another game, this game could have also been reskinned into something else and nobody would ever make the connection.

The parkour mechanics aren’t even well-made. You can’t jump from a grapple-swing, nor can you use the momentum to carry yourself upward after letting go, so the only way to make certain jumps is to drop down a bit and re-grapple so that your connection is longer and you can swing further…and sometimes you have to do this while the game automatically tries to reset your grapple length back to a predetermined length! Wall-runs are also finnicky as you can do basically the same thing only to have your descent happen earlier and you not make the jump. It’s not too huge an issue for the first level and 2/3 of the levels in the hub, but for that one remaining hub level, the difficulty spikes and the problems become undeniable. You’re told at the start that the level will be a challenge, but you’re not told it’ll be because of the controls. The dev must also know that the game mechanics don’t quite work like they should because every time you fall into the void (the only way you can die), you respawn on the last platform you jumped from, even keeping any collectibles you got between the platform and the pit.

The final level is arguably easier, but it’s also very dark, obscuring where you have to go. It also has a boss fight, but of course, it’s nothing like the bosses in its namesake. The ground lights up with red/pink tiles before switching to blue ones that electrocute you, and you have to avoid being electrocuted for long enough that dice fall down. Then, you grapple a dice, spin yourself around, and toss it in the general direction of the boss; rinse and repeat enough and you win. Oh, and the game ends on a cliffhanger that will probably never be resolved given how long ago the last update was. Then again, maybe the cliffhanger was just meant to be another joke.

One more thing: the three hub levels have little pizzas scattered around like coins, and if you collect all the pizzas in a level, a chime will sound and the level’s hub box turns gold. However, if you beat a level WITHOUT getting them all, they don’t stay gotten, which is extra frustrating given how finnicky it is to get certain ones in the difficulty-spike level.

Overall, this one’s hard to recommend. I’m already not a fan of parkour-platformers, but this one’s mechanics are a bit finnicky as well. That said, the game is free and very forgiving about deaths, so over half of the levels end up being kinda okay (though the ones that aren’t okay are really not okay). You can get the game from here: https://dustinbragg.itch.io/yo-noid-was-ahead-of-its-time

After making my post about Mega Man Perfect Harmony I tried once again to find a backup of its Steam successor for download. While I was unsuccessful, I did stumble across a stream of it, where I discovered the real reason it was taken down: the original fangame’s levels had been thrown out in favor of straight-up copying levels from the first Mega Man game! Needless to say, I was very disappointed, but I noticed another detail: the stage select had 8 bosses, while the first Mega Man only had six Robot Masters. Wasn’t there another game that also borrowed heavily from Mega Man 1 while having 8 bosses? A game that I never had the opportunity to play back when it was new?

Platformer. Left/right move, X jumps, ☐ shoots, and L/R cycle between your unlocked weapons.

Those of you who’ve played the original Mega Man may remember that if you let go of forward while walking, you’ll slip forward a bit (even on regular ground), something that was rightfully removed in Mega Man III onward to make the controls more responsive. The slip is even absent from Mega Man: The Wily Wars (the Mega Drive port of the first three games + exclusive postgame levels). This game…brings that slip back. Worse, there’s now a very noticeable 0.2 second delay between when you push forward and when you actually begin walking forward–a flaw the original game DOESN’T HAVE! If you want to move forward instantly, you have to do a little short hop, but that obviously means you can’t jump again until you land, once again hamstringing the responsiveness of the controls. I thought this game was supposed to fix the original’s flaws, not add to them!

In fairness, there are some improvements compared to the original. Wily stage 1 is no longer impossible if you miss the Magnet Beam…because the Magnet Beam was removed entirely (at least in the New Style stages). Certain enemy patterns have been simplified to make them less cheap and unpredictable while still being recognizable. The Hyper Bomb (Bomb Man’s weapon) now explodes immediately upon collision with an enemy, making that power somewhat less clunky and useless than before. Fire Man’s attack was slowed down so it can actually be dodged now. Ice Man can now keep running all the way to the other side of the arena, so you can’t just stand in place and keep shooting him like before. Boss corridors don’t have enemies anymore (though that’s something I feel still could’ve worked). Plus, every single stage was redesigned, so there’s reason to play this game even if you already beat the original. Most bosses were also given an extra attack as well.

Unfortunately, not every addition was for the better. Oil Man’s stage introduces oil-covered tiles, and trying to walk on them causes you to trip and not move at all for a second. This means not only that you need to keep jumping, but that you consciously need to stop moving when you’re about to land to avoid tripping again (and if you’ve played a Mega Man game before, you’ll know there are times where you need to keep moving, making this stop-and-start requirement counterintuitive). Mega Man 6 did oil puddles better since, in that game, all that happened was you walked slower and jumped lower until you got out. Also, when the oil in Mega Man 6 catches fire, it burns forever; in this game, it just seems like it burns forever, but there are parts where you have to wait for it to burn out since the tripping mechanic and surrounding level design means you can’t kill the fire enemy in time.

However, what caught me off guard the most is that almost every Wily stage boss was made more difficult! The Yellow Devil now summons a hazard vortex as soon as a single orb is on that side of the screen, giving you even less room to react to them than before. The game tries to make things easier by having the shot pattern happen slightly above you before the fight starts, but it’s done with the Old Style pattern, meaning you still have to memorize the New Style pattern mid-fight to dodge it. CWU-01P has it even worse because its bubble shield is too large to jump over unless you quickly hit it with its weakness: the Super Arm, aka the one where you need to have a pre-existing block available to use it, even if you have plenty of weapon energy! Plus, this isn’t just a one-time occurrence; each pattern-cycle has it go above the screen and restore its bubble, and it doesn’t drop another Super Arm block until after it sweeps across the floor, so you gotta play damn-near perfectly. Now, if you look up a video of this boss, you’ll see a small gap below it when it crosses the floor, implying you’re supposed to slide under it like Mega Man III…except this game won’t let you slide until AFTER BEATING THE GAME, meaning you have to beat this boss without it! The final boss’s second phase has a similar move, where it quickly charges from one side of the screen to the other, once again having that small gap below that you can’t get under without the slide maneuver that you don’t have yet. I was only able to beat the game because, on my last life, the boss just never did that attack.

Side note: if you beat a Robot Master only using the Mega Buster, you unlock that boss as a playable character as well as the character’s respective Challenge missions (giving a reason for bosses to respawn when replaying beaten levels, a reason the original game didn’t have). Neat in theory, but it does make the optional collectibles unintuitive. For example, some levels have clock blocks, so you’ll think “oh, I can use Time Man’s ability as Mega Man to get past them”…except Time Man’s power merely slows down time, which neither gets rid of the blocks nor lets you get through before they spawn; you can’t even attack without swapping weapons again. Instead, you have to play as Time Man directly, and then you can destroy those blocks by shooting them.

Speaking of the Challenge missions, they’re in sets of 10; one set for Mega Man, 80 for the 8 Robot Masters, and ten more that are just different boss gauntlets (so I didn’t play them). The first few of each set are generally pretty easy, as they try to get you used to each character’s different abilities. The hard ones, however, are a coin toss between decent challenge and tedious frustration. Multiple levels are built around hammer pendulums, which are extremely finnicky to the point where you can land on one, go through your entire landing animation while still being on it and moving with it, then abruptly clip off the platform and fall to your death, all without pushing a button or having anything nearby to interfere with you. Other challenges make you go through a solid 2-3 minutes of tight jumps where a single mistake means death–all without a single checkpoint despite the unforgiving level design–and still have cheap moments where you’d have to do something ahead of time that you wouldn’t be able to know until after it’s too late. I lost count of how many of these require save-states to be made somewhat reasonable. The most telling Challenge is the Time Man one with a 6 second time limit: you have to charge your gun so that it slows down time instead of shoots, then you have to shoot the exploding missiles so you can get through to the exit while avoiding their harmful explosions. Seems simple enough, but no matter what, I’d always end up about one second too short and lose. This is the only Challenge level I had to look up a video to see what I had to do, and it turns out that when you shoot the missiles, they lose collision for the brief moment between being hit and exploding, and you have to abuse that to run through them to reach the goal in time! One of the things Mega Man is known for is introducing new mechanics safely and intuitively, but how was I supposed to figure this out? And sure, plenty of other Challenge levels in this game do a bad job of introducing stuff, but this is esoteric kaizo-hack nonsense! What the actual hell is it doing in an official Mega Man game??

The game also has a level editor, and the optional collectibles in the main game unlock different options here. Although you’re allowed to pick which Robot Master the player has to fight at the end of your level, you’re not allowed to make changes to the arena itself, or even pick which difficulty the boss will be (it’s always New Style Normal difficulty). I also thought you had to end levels with a boss at first because I never unlocked the Party Ball option, and I didn’t know that was an option until I played the DLC levels. Despite having the option not to be repetitive, some of them still end with the same bosses you’ve already beaten, with the only thing preventing them from becoming completely redundant is that they often don’t have a checkpoint by the boss door, so you have to go through a bunch more obstacles each time to reach them.

As for the DLC levels themselves, it’s more of the same coin toss that the Challenge missions had, but now with an added dose of repetitive level design–particularly in the “ultimate” levels. The description for Ultimate Oil Man says to practice on Hard mode if you’re having trouble, but from what I played, Hard mode doesn’t change the game’s levels; it only changes enemy AI, which wouldn’t help when all DLC levels are stuck with Normal mode AI and only differentiate themselves via level design. Plus, Ultimate Oil Man is one of the easy, repetitive ones, making the description even more ironic; the only issue is that it uses dark background objects that make it hard to notice the oil tiles in the final hallway. The GameSpy level is almost fine, but there’s one part where you have to make a tight jump from the edge of a fast conveyor belt, which is way too narrow a window to time it reliably. A few other levels I played have similar fast-conveyor-belt-jumps, and I never got used to it. Ultimate Cut Man is mostly reasonable except one part where you have to jump from a fast conveyor belt moving in the opposite direction you need to jump to, so the only way to reach the ledge is to use Oil Slide: shoot from one edge so the bubble lands on the other edge, then jump forward so you aren’t pushed off but not too high so you don’t jump over your oil, and do it all while being shot at by the constantly-spawning, 8-way-shooting Flying Shell enemies. Oil Mania finally tells you how to exit oil slide in a way that doesn’t involve running into a wall: hold up and push jump…while you’re already in midair, so after already jumping. The level itself already suffers due to being built around this finnicky mechanic, but it gets even worse by having yet another newly-introduced mechanic that I had to look up a lets-play to figure out: Oil-Sliding through downward-shooting water lets you jump again while you’re in the stream.

I’m probably not going to play many of the user-created levels since there’s over 80,000 of them and, as mentioned previously, many of them almost certainly reuse the same 8 bosses from the main game.

Overall, this one’s hard to recommend. It does make some welcome improvements, but it also keeps flaws that should’ve been fixed a long time ago, and then it has the temerity to introduce a slew of brand new problems! If you can’t get it for cheap, just stick with Legacy Collection.

I know this is a reskin of another game, but I actually tried playing a fan-translated version of Wagyan Land years ago, before I knew of Steamgifts–let alone BLAEO. I’d made it to the first boss, where you’re supposed to pick an image whose word starts with the same letter that your opponent’s word ended with, and since that letter was S, I chose the tile with a sock on it since I didn’t see anything that began with a K…except the word ended up being “socks,” which let the boss choose the sun card. I didn’t lose outright, but I didn’t see anything that began with an N, either (bear in mind around half the cards were gone at this point), so I just stopped playing and never got around to giving it another chance. Honestly, part of the reason I decided to play this game is because I remembered seeing a couple YouTube videos on it, so I knew that its tile-selection minigame was different.

Platformer. Left/right move, A jumps, and B attacks (but since your weapon is a yo-yo, you have to wait for it to come back before you can attack again, which is annoying when enemies take multiple hits to kill). You can also spend MP to use special abilities you can find in the levels, but to do that, you have to push down and B simultaneously. I had to look up the manual to learn that, and even when you know what to do, it can take a bit to get the timing right. Also, both the potion and the 8-way arrows both do a screen-clearing attack; it’s just that the potion costs less MP.

Something you’ll notice early on is that, although stages aren’t too long (only a minute or two), they don’t have checkpoints and you die in one hit. Why does the game have lives, then, you may ask? Because you only have 3 continues, after which you have to start the whole game over from the beginning (you can earn more continues, but to get enough points for that, you have to beat, like, three levels in a row without getting game over). I know it was a trend for games back then to do this (as well as certain modern hack “retro inspired” games), but there’s plenty of evidence to show that–even back then–devs knew this wasn’t good game design. There’s a cheat code in the NES Super Mario Bros that lets you continue from the world you got game over on (like how the All-Stars version works normally), and even Capcom themselves made a game three years before this game that has infinite continues by default, and yet it was fairly well-received and financially successful. You might’ve even heard of it: it’s called Mega Man! That said, if Wikipedia is to be believed, this game was merely published by Capcom and developed by another company that didn’t get credited in-game.

Suffice to say, I used savestates to beat the game.

If I had to guess why they chose to limit continues despite infinite-continue games having been tried-and-true by this point in time, I’d say it’s because the level design is simple. It’s not bland–I’ve played enough bad games to know what true blandness is–but it definitely pales in comparison to its contemporaries (like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mega Man 2). The difficulty curve also isn’t consistent; I found level 12 (the one with the conveyor belts) to be one of the easiest ones despite it being just a couple levels before the end. Can’t have customers beating the game in a single rental period, can we?

Also, somewhat unexpected for a NES game (at least from my perspective) is that there are gimmicks that only get used once or twice in the whole game. The first level has every platform going up and down, so you have to be careful not to be on one that’s about to sink into the death water…but that’s the only level where this happens. The second level is the only one with ice physics and the only one with platforms that break if you stand on them too long. Level 3 is the only one where you’re on a skateboard and you kill enemies by jumping on them since your default yo-yo attack is disabled here (in every other level, jumping on enemies gets you killed). There’s a whole TWO levels where you’re flying in midair and have to tap jump to stay airborne as you progress. There are even multiple different enemy types that only show up in a single level. I would’ve assumed that NES devs would have been more conscientious about using up storage space, but then again, they managed to get 14 levels out of it, even if they did end up being rather simple levels.

Despite the simplicity of the level design, some cheap hits are snuck in there as well. In the first level, there’s a fish enemy that’ll jump up from below the screen, not going too high the first time–but the second time, it jumps higher, faster, and a few units to the left of where it first jumped–which often ends up being right where you’re standing, waiting for the next platform to come up out of the death water. Level 7 (the circus) has what looks and acts like the level’s previously-introduced up/down-moving platforms, except when you get within a unit or two of it, there’s a split-second smoke-puff animation before it turns into a horizontally-moving enemy, moving towards you. The worst is in level 10, where it looks like you can run under the bricks an enemy throws, except…

Honestly, this one’s crazy enough that it might be my emulator at fault, but personally, I’d find it even more wild that NES emulation still has problems after all this time.

Then there are the bosses, which–as alluded to previously–eschew the platformer mechanics in favor of a tile-selection minigame. The computer randomly picks a tile on its side, and then you have to pick a tile on your side with a larger number–if you have one. The difference between the numbers determines how many points you or the enemy gets, with you needing to get a set number of points to win. Thing is, you have more than just basic number tiles: there are tiles with roman numerals on them, and tiles with pictures on them. What do they do? Well, the game doesn’t make it clear, so I checked the manual, and…it doesn’t say. For crying out loud, the whole point of manuals is to explain stuff like this! Instead, the manual describes the game like they’re still trying to sell it to you, and the boss fights barely get a sentence alluding to their existence. So yeah, I had to do trial and error to figure out that the symbol tiles force the boss to discard its selected tile and the roman numeral cards double or triple the number on whichever card you pick next. Also, each round has its own time limit, so you only have a few seconds to choose one of the roman numeral cards to figure out what it does, then realize it doesn’t do anything by itself and that you have to pick another card, because if you run out of time, you don’t just lose the round–you lose the whole battle and a life and have to play the level again.

Still, these minigames have potential, but what holds them back is that they aren’t separated enough from the rest of the game. See, those roman numeral cards and symbol cards? You find those within the platformer levels, and sometimes the only way to reveal them is to attack a seemingly-random, innocuous spot in the level to reveal them (you eventually learn to just toss your yo-yo constantly in hopes of finding them by accident). I’m also pretty sure that if you don’t find (enough of) them, the boss battles become impossible to win no matter what your strategy is, but thankfully, I never ended up in that situation (all the bosses after the first one ended up being really easy). Oh jeez, is that the real reason the game doesn’t have infinite continues? Because you can screw yourself over by losing all your lives too close to a boss? Too cruel.

Overall, I could’ve forgiven the simple level design and even a few of the cheap hits, but having limited continues–whatever the reason may be–is what puts this into not-recommended territory for me.