Game:

Mega Man (1987)

Duration: 10:08

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1

Looking back on this... I have no idea why I keep scrolling right to get to new Robot Masters, when obviously it'll be shorter if I go left first... old habits die hard, move right to advance and all that! (Clearly!)

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Fire Man Stage

The nice thing about Mega Man games is that the stage design is so robust that it's simple enough to understand at a glance but also complex enough that it can't simply be taken for granted. The problem here is that it creates a distinct shortage of things to actually talk about... I'll have to let my own natural longwindedness on incidental topics pick up the slack!

For starters, I didn't pick up on this at all until after the fact, but the reason why those flame jets from the floors register hits from weapons in spite of being unable to be destroyed is because they can actually be frozen with the Ice Slasher. Not that I would, as per the stipulations of the playthrough up to this point, BUT it does hopefully give you some interesting ideas as to how the stage can alternately be navigated with such a tool at your disposal.

I'm pretty sure the regular waves of heat passing through the piping at the beginning of the latter half of the stage CAN be avoided with good timing... but it totally eludes me as a result of my getting completely hypnotized by it the more I try to read it for an opening. Fortunately, just taking two hits on the way through isn't that bad... although it does bring up a major problem with the stage... or rather my traversal of it.

There's a LOT of damage to be taken here and not a lot of reliable places to catch your breath and pick up some replacement energy pellets. As such, you can probably have a pretty clear picture of the result when I scampered into the boss doors just glad to have gotten out of the heat. Well, hot off the frying pan and into the fire would not merely be a cheesy invocation of an old saying. I mean, it's still cheesy, but... aw, heck, let's just move on.

Fire Man is... well, he's probably the closest thing I have to a nemesis in this game, because I simply can NOT read his pattern... I thought maybe it was regular... maybe it was tied to my shots... well, I just don't know. Sometimes he shoots one wave, sometimes multiple ones overlapping... a lot of the time enough consecutively that it's beyond me how you can dodge them all. And, in case the screen isn't overly full of objects whizzing and flashing about (which really takes a hit when recorded and then again when uploaded to YouTube), every shot is also accompanied by spontaneous combustion directly at Mega Man's feet... so you've got to keep moving to avoid being burnt to a crisp.

I probably could've spared everyone watching a lot of wasted time by skipping the three minutes between about 5:30 and 8:30 and doing a similar speedup as seen in Guts Man's stage, but for some reason it didn't even occur to me... hypnotized perhaps by the concept of farming energy pellets in a fashion I hadn't even thought of my first time through. Perhaps this was born of sheer desperation, knowing that there's no way I'm going to be able to do anything between the boss doors. Who knows?!

Anyway, my previous battle with Fire Man revealed to me the precious detail that he actually loses his life fast enough while having a much shorter mercy invincibility period than Mega Man does... so this creates the interesting situation that you CAN just beat him by sheer attrition and defeat him faster than he can defeat you by sheer offense. It's not pretty, but it's more than doable.

Now, I HAVE done my homework on the subject and have seen that apparently you can somehow trick him into an exploitative action loop wherein you'll be able to jump and shot regularly without ever getting hit. Also, to my surprise, apparently the flames at Mega Man's feet are perfectly dodgeable just by jumping up and coming back down, but that'd require more precise timing than I'm willing to put forth as the "solution"... and compound this with the fact that it also seems from my searching that it's hard enough to get him into this cycle to begin with so... no... that's not how I was going to win against him, and what we have here is perfectly fine with me...

Oh well, as long as there IS a solution, regardless of how quick and dirty it really is, I'm still satisfied. Really NOT looking forward to rematching with Fire Man later, but we'll deal with that when we get to it.

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