Through the Crabacombs

20th: Through the Crabacombs Make a Good 48 Hour Mega Man Level

Being trapped in a bubble would make anyone crabby.

Overview Creator(s): NARFNra Composer(s): NARFNra Statistics Scores: 78 60 83 56 Total: 69.25 / 100 Rank: 20th Elements: 1 Box Items: Cyorown Feeber M-445 Bubble Platform Falling Platform (MM5) Enemies: Crabbot Croaker Cyorown Feeber Haiker N M-445 Gimmicks: Bubble Platform Falling Platform (MM5) Bosses: Grey Devil Other Information: Skippable

Theme Music No End in Sight Stage Order Location: Tier 9 Previous: Cornerstone to Dominate Next: Spicy Banana Bread Storehouse

Through the Crabacombs is the 20th place entry in Make a Good 48 Hour Mega Man Level. It consists of an underground collection of flooded tunnels using Pump Man's tileset, wherein the player is forced to deal with Feebers and infinitely spawning M-445s while maneuvering around large numbers of spikes. It also features several long vertical rooms where the player must ascend on Bubble Platforms and Falling Platforms while being attacked by Cyorowns. The long vertical Bubble Platform rooms in this stage occasionally suffer from object-spawning issues due to how the Bubble Platforms work in scrolling areas, which can sometimes make it appear to be impossible to complete buster-only. In general, repeatedly jumping while ascending long vertical rooms on Bubble Platforms can prevent this issue.

Strategy

It should be noted that the Flame Mixer is an extremely strong weapon in this level - no enemies in the stage are shielded, and many rely on projectiles or odd angles to attack Mega Man, meaning that the weapon makes handling most areas in the stage quite a bit easier. In addition, weapons like the Homing Sniper, Beat, and the Rain Flush are highly effective at handling relatively fragile enemies in awkward positions on screen, especially with the help of the W-Tank found at the beginning of the level. When equipped with a weapon, it can be useful to know that the player can escape Feeber bubbles by pressing A instead of wasting ammo by shooting.

At the beginning of the stage is a series of relatively simple vertical rooms introducing Feebers, Cyorowns, and Falling Platforms. If the player completes a small platforming challenge early on, or happens to have bought the Beat Fetch and Fortified Talons upgrades, they can easily obtain a W-Tank.

The first truly difficult segment begins when the player first heads to the right, entering an underwater hallway filled with Feebers, M-445s, Crabbots, and spikes. In this segment, it is extremely important to be cautious regarding the giant hitboxes of Feeber bubbles, as it is easy to fall into a pit. M-445s are easy to destroy, but come down in vertical spaces wherein hitting them can be difficult. However, because they start moving in a sine wave motion if the player happens to be to the side of them, they're not very hard to get out of the way with patience.

The next room immediately starts with an ambush by a Croaker - walking forwards to the edge of the platform allows you to dodge its attack and attack the Croaker, but watch out for its Mini Kerogs. Beware - while waiting for the Bubble Platform to spawn, if you get onto the generator and then drop back off of it, the Croaker can respawn and start launch its Mini Kerogs directly into you on this platform, possibly knocking you into the pit. In the next segment, be ready for attacks from Cyorowns - they will be spawning at the top of the screen and firing at diagonal angles, which can usually be avoided through jumping. The end of this room can be relatively troublesome - due to the nature of how Bubble Platforms scroll, a set of Falling Platforms necessary to get into the next room may not spawn, forcing the player to either use Rush or to fall back down and respawn a Bubble. For some reason, if the player jumps continuously while rising on the Bubble, the platforms are more likely to spawn and remain there.

The next room contains the checkpoint, and after a short period, shifts to another horizontal underwater segment featuring Haiker Ns. When dealing with the appearance of two of them in a room with a prowling Crabbot, it's best to immediately try to destroy one or both before the finish implanting into the pipes, or dealing with their projectiles can be troublesome. Because the room is free-scrolling, however, it's easy to retreat and respawn them to try as many times as the player needs. It's worth noting that this room also has no collision protection on the top of the screen, meaning that in several cases the player can easily jump off the top and bypass segments of the level.

After a Cyorown ambush hallway and a small elevator, there is a small segment wherein the player must choose the right blocks to fall down while avoiding attacks from enemies in other enclosures - beware, there is no escape from these enclosures without weapon use, so if the player has somehow exhausted all of their weapon energy for Rush Jet, Rush Coil, and Concrete Shot, they may be forced to reset. A Croaker that appears in this room also fires Kerogs startlingly fast onto the platform after the first drop, so the safest way to deal with that is to jump and land slightly away from the edge of the platform.

The final room is a Bubble Platform where the bubbles slowly pop. This room isn't too difficult so long as you are careful - Feebers will attempt to trap you in bubbles that push you into spikes or off the platform in this room, but there's only two of them and escaping from the bubbles is exactly as simple as it always has been. Because you're underwater you can skip a large distance to jump up to the boss door quickly, but be careful not to jump too high too early, because doing so will scroll the platform off-screen and force you to restart from the bottom once more.

The boss, the Grey Devil, is rather easy. However, the room's low ceiling and flooded nature means the trajectories of its projectiles will be altered slightly from those players familiar with the Megamix Engine's version of the boss may remember - the simplest way to avoid its attacks is to stand next to it after learning the timing for when it moves across the room.

Skip Status

This level was deemed skippable on M-Jacq's suggestion, due to the difficulty of some segments (especially given the low number of checkpoints and heavy use of instant-death traps like pits and spikes).

Judge Comments

Judge Comments
ParmaJon  : 78 / 100
Design Creativity Function Fun Aesthetic 30 / 35 09 / 15 10 / 10 17 / 25 12 / 15 CRABACOMBS, I LOVE IT. What I don't love is the checkpoint placement. Like legit, if you fixed that you'd solve most of my problems with this stage. Your gimmicks and the bubble crabs are fairly conducive to using spikes and pits as obstacles, and the challenges you made (especially with the 3 Gyro Man platforms on top of each other covering a hole, or the long vertical sections with the bubbles) are great uses of the gimmicks. Really good job. The issue is that since so much of the level is based on instant death, you need more checkpoints to make the level better. Going through the same sections multiple times is boring since this is not a fast-paced level. Splitting this level into 3 or 4 sections instead of 2 would go a long way in making it better. Despite that, the level feels, sounds, and looks grate (get it?) with the sewer theme. Has that nice dismal sewer feel. Overall, good experience.
PKWeegee  : 60 / 100
Design Creativity Function Fun Aesthetic 18 / 35 09 / 15 10 / 10 13 / 25 10 / 15 Dang, those crabs were a pain at times. Well, this stage was pretty fun at times, and at others, it felt kinda...blah. If that makes sense. Clearly, there were clever ideas behind these challenges, but some of them just didn't click right with me. The last bubble elevator, for example. The crabs kind of screwed me over more times that I'd have liked. Overall, though, it was decently fun.
M-Jacq  : 83 / 100
Design Creativity Function Fun Aesthetic 33 / 35 13 / 15 08 / 10 17 / 25 12 / 15 Difficult sections in the Mega Man games - and most video games, really - comes in two varieties. You've got tricky sections, which are difficult because executing the correct maneuvers to get through them requires skill on the player's part. You've then got "gotcha" sections, which are difficult because they require you to act and respond extremely quickly. (So, single-screen Yoku Block puzzles are "tricky," Quick Lasers and spike drops are "gotcha"...-y.) Both can work in a level, but you get significantly more leeway on tricky sections than you do on gotcha sections when it comes to how punishing a level is. Players get less angry when the mistakes they make are due to something they could have foreseen. This is a long prelude to say that while this level is very, very hard at points, and it's light on checkpoints as well, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The sections done over pits have very generously-timed and obvious cycles; I never thought that my failure on these sections was due to anything other than human error. Meanwhile, while there were a couple "gotcha" enemies - the Cyorowns in particular - they never showed up over spikes or pits. It's not ideal that the difficulty curve was close to backwards, and that the earliest part of the level was harder than what came afterwards (especially when you had to hop between ledges placed directly above one another), but I can forgive that. This level is really, really well-made from a technical standpoint, if you ask me - clean level architecture, interesting setups, that sort of thing. That final segment in particular is ace - the bubble "elevator" turning into a more standard Wave bubble puzzle as you dodge spikes and M-445s was really cool, and a nice showy capper to the level. Grey Devil was pretty cool as well. I suspect I'm in the minority on this one, but I really liked this level in spite of how tough it is in spots (to the point where I think it warrants a Skip Teleporter - not for me, mind you, for other people). Just a really solid platforming experience.
Freems  : 56 / 100
Design Creativity Function Fun Aesthetic 19 / 35 08 / 15 09 / 10 13 / 25 07 / 15 Well, we got ourselves a perfectly fine level, so let's get talkin'. A few placements of the crows didn't feel well thought out given how they act almost instantly upon spawning on screen (which is more annoying when the screen just keeps going up vertically), there were probably a few more spikes than really needed, and a few jumps just felt more janky than they really needed to be. Now you certainly did have unique ideas for these gimmicks. Using the Gyro blocks in a way that there's multiple ways to go down and you have to determine the correct one while dodging enemy fire and the bridge of Wave Bubbles at the end that slowly gets smaller as some of them hit spikes. These are neat ideas in theory, but I don't think the level takes full advantage of them. The Gyro situation can be handled very quickly and the enemies prove a little threat and while the Wave Bubble section at the end is cool in theory it really ended before it began. And given the fact that it was underwater, it was very easy to just skip the whole last part of it entirely and jump up to the boss door. They're kinda saved for special moments when I almost wish more of the level was dedicated to these cooler sections. More of that would have been great.

Trivia

• This stage is the highest-ranked level in MaG48HMML to feature a Skip Teleporter, the next-highest being Cosmological Factory in Tier 4.