Startropics 1 - Chapter 7 Dungeon 1 No Damage Run
0Yep. I'm just not going to do any more Perfect Runs for Startropics 1. Chapters 7 and 8 are simply too much for that idea.
Chapter 7's first dungeon is just *HORRIBLE* even for a simple No Damage Run. The only enemies that aren't Demonic Spiders are the Pod Shooters, and even then that's purely because they're too predictable to be a threat unless you try to rush through them. Everything else pulls some form of RNG for aggravation. The yellow Space Troopers are fought in claustrophobic locations where it would be a nightmare to slip by, which is where I'm abandoning the Limited Kills condition, especially when this run lost only 30 points on unnecessary enemy kills anyway. You do fight some Space Troopers in an open location, but they're green, so they're more durable, AND they fire further. Oh, and would you look at that, they knock off 2 1/2 Hearts PER HIT.
Similar over-the-top punishment is dealt by the Space Bikers, who have their own RNG spawning locations. Sometimes, they can catch you unavoidably and when that happens, kiss A FULL THREE HEARTS goodbye, and also enjoy the stun period where all you have is your still bad mobility, while your attack is locked out until a significant amount of time after your Mercy Invincibility has worn off, which can lead to taking further hits. I'm left wondering why fighting games in general make this worse, because this whole section would have its cheap design show up in a REGULAR run. Not helping is that sometimes, the Space Riders can spawn completely off-screen and catch you that way, which is why I was firing back at given points, just to counterambush any that spawned from behind. Oh, and this is just fighting back and killing them before they can catch me, never mind just evading all of them with the platforms I'm stuck dealing with.
And wouldn't you know it, the Silver Jet Pack Jumper duo add even more headaches to this RNG fest. These pests can easily riddle the room with dakka, some of which is fired conveniently where you're expected to jump, which can lead to you being trapped. It's a blatantly unfair situation: all Mike has is straight fire, that doesn't even reach all the way across the room, and his mobility is limited to having to jump across a few platforms, but the SJPJs can fly wherever they want, fire in whichever direction they want, and have no rhyme or reason to how many volleys of bullets they can fire in succession, making their rest periods hard to capitalize upon. The ONLY mercy about their offense is that their bullets each deal only 1 Heart worth of damage, but that means NOTHING to a No Damage Run.
With these 2 each having 24 HPs, this gets so annoying that I end cheating by using RAM Search/Watch (a feature on FCEUX) to put their Current HP values on watch. (The RAM addresses are 0331 and 0333 if you're wondering.) Even with this, I end up only getting off on the SJPJs having wide hurtboxes on the horizontal, allowing for Ray Gun cheesing. And you know, that's another thing: the Difficulty Spike in general. Look, I get it, we're fighting aliens. But the Ray Gun works off of cooldown, the ONLY reason moments like the Space Rider section are halfway playable and the Space Rider section is still cheap even then. It's just....NEXT LEVEL. AT least then I can fume about this mess then.
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