Рет қаралды 3,001
Please see segment/video 1 (Burst Man)'s description for an explanation of what this challenge is about, and what the rules/restrictions are.
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What better way to top off an obnoxious stage than with one that's twice as difficult? This is mitigated only slightly by way of being allowed to bring the most versatile weapon in the game to face the horror with me. Wily 3 feels more at home with Castle stages of old than the other two, in that enemies are placed in cumbersome, you-are-not-meant-to-avoid-this places. All of them. The coolest part of all this is it gives me ample opportunity to bring the slide jump out to play. Oh, did I say opportunity? I meant downright demand.
Right off the bat we're facing an extended climb with one of the game's more threatening enemies to avoid hits from. Especially when you're dangling uselessly between their volleys while they chuckle merrily out of reach; or whatever it is faceless purple cannons do to express mockery. The expertly-crafted bullshit of their configurations is dealt with here by, what the fuck else, screen scrolling. If the player can't physically 'see' the projectiles being fired, they won't actually fall to you, but the cannons have still technically fired them, and so still enter the usual downtime between volleys. This in conjunction with the beautiful Noise Crush see me safely through to something far worse.
Something else this series is no stranger to are complete asshole Mets in Wily stages, and 7 is no exception. The final two Metall FXs (Wily, you need to come up with a better naming convention than serial codes) are placed just right to beat you to the punch on firing. Being that they are in cahoots with those large spike-filled gaps, this is not pretty. Noise Crush comes to the rescue again, and the method of how looks awesome as a bonus. Letting a rebounded Noise Crush lead the screen ahead of Mega Man, provided you employ some tight timing, will plant it into each Metall well before they fire their bullets, but not before they emerge to glance at you in boredom. It's pretty terrific.
A second, less painful climb leads to a third gauntlet which proves the staff responsible for this stage placed a bet to see how far each could one-up the other's dickery. The jumps in this stretch are maddeningly specific when you can't cheese them with item-use (remember that Rush can only be used for collection and when a necessity). One in particular is already pixel-perfect on its own, but the fact that it leads into a horrible clusterfuck of flamboyant propulsion and bouncy springs really compounds to give you the full experience. And that was a bizarrely erotic sentence.
Once that parade concludes itself, the hardest part has passed. Those platforms straight out of Super Mario World fall into the same category every stage obstacle does, which is that they've got nothing new to add to a restriction-specific run. Ditto the disappearing blocks, whose most noteworthy accomplishment is the amazement they inspire in me that Capcom hasn't learned no one fucking likes that shit by now. Concerning the split path at the end of this section, I need to elaborate that as awesome as the Noise Crush is, it's not awesome enough to kill Kanigance in less than 16 charged hits. Now, maybe we differ on assessing this stage, but I didn't see much in the way of spare ammo that could be saved for the guy, so it's off to kill the stegosaurus instead.
By this point you're probably wondering where in the fuck I'm going to pull 7 more shots of Noise Crush out of my ass, and the answer is that I'm quite literally going to pull them out of my ass. Or rather, Mega Man's. There is a difficult trick that conspires to make Noise Crush even cooler than it already is, which is the ability to charge a shot without needing to rebound it. If you slide essentially the moment you let a shot fire, Mega Man's momentum will overcome the bullet's, and you'll pick up the charge. That allows just enough to kill this oversized demon mask and look a damn fine sight in doing so, too.
What you didn't see in this exceptionally smooth stage were the dozens upon dozens of id-shattering fuck ups that came of getting it all to go properly. This racked up more failures than any other segment, although the previous one tried pretty damn hard.