Maze of Significantly Less Death

49th: Maze of Significantly Less Death Make a Good Mega Man Level 2

At least we all escaped, right guys? ...guys?

Overview Creator(s): MiniMacro Composer(s): SoulEye Statistics Scores: 18 37 18 38 22 Total: 26.6 / 50 Rank: 49th Elements: 1 Enemies: Metall Neo Metall New Shield Attacker Returning Sniper Joe Screw Bomber Telly

Theme Music VVVVVV - Predestined Fate Stage Order Location: Tier 5 Previous: Holy Crap, Mega Man Can Airslide? Next: Volcanic Furnace

"Your teammates are trapped around this weird area after a plane crash. Go save them!!!"

―Info box, first room of the level

Overview

Maze of Significantly Less Death is the 49th place level in Make a Good Mega Man Level 2. As the name suggests, it's a large maze, filled with Gravity Flips, which Mega Man must traverse to rescue his teammates (with each one being a member of the MaGMML2 devteam represented by a sprite of Mega Man with different colors in place of the blue and cyan), who will each provide keys to unlock Key Barriers blocking the Energy Element.

Strategy

After dropping down two screens (minding the spikes on the edges of the second screen) and walking through a few screens with a mild amount of enemies, Mega Man must traverse two rooms consisting mainly of Gravity Flips and spikes, followed by an underwater Gravity Flip room. After this, dropping down and walking to the left leads to the center of the stage, and the room where Mega Man finds his teammate Renhoek (represented with a dark green and green color scheme). From here, Mega Man can take several routes.

By going back to the right of the center room and going up through the vertical tunnel of spikes, Mega Man finds his teammate Smedis2 (represented with a purple and red color scheme), a teleporter back to the center room, and a secret room below with Eddie, as well as the acronym "GG" written in tiles, and a pair of M-Tanks and E-Tanks used to spell out the word "MEME".

Going below the center room and then going left leads to three rooms, with the first two combining water with spikes and Mega Man 5 Falling Platforms, and the third combining those same falling platforms with Mega Man 2 Conveyors. At the end of the third room is Mega Man's teammate iYamWhatIYam (represented with Mega Man's default colors), and a teleporter back to the center room.

Going below the center room and then going right leads to two rooms, with the first combining Gravity Flips and Conveyors with precise spike placement, and the second being a series of jumps across Sparkman Platforms and Drop Platforms. At the end of the second room is Mega Man's teammate MrKyurem (represented with a dark red and white color scheme), and a teleporter back to the center room.

Going to the left of the center room leads to four rooms combining Gravity Flips with New Shield Attackers, Metalls, and water. At the end of the fourth room is Mega Man's teammate Garirry (represented with a black and purple color scheme). There is no teleporter here, so Mega Man must go back the way he came.

After rescuing all five teammates and finding all five keys, Mega Man can break all of the Key Barriers and obtain the Energy Element.

Judge Comments

Judge Comments
snoruntpyro  : 18 / 50
Design Fun Creativity Aesthetics Functionality Skip Teleporter? 3 / 15 3 / 10 3 / 15 4 / 5 5 / 5 No Lots of shield enemies. A loooooot of shield enemies. It drags down the gameplay by like, a lot. A whole lot. The enemies used here are just extremely basic Mets, Sniper Joes, etc and it makes the whole level feel boring, dull, and uninspired. I do like the use of the reverse gravity, though, and the behavior with reverse grav + underwater seerrioously weirded me out. And the teammate dialogue was cute, too. But they're not like, a huge part of the gameplay, really? I liked most of the rooms that DID use the reverse grav but they were few in number. Most of the rest of the level just felt bland and uninspired. And Sniper Joes. Lots of Sniper Joes.
JupiHornet  : 37 / 50
Design Fun Creativity Aesthetics Functionality 10 / 15 8 / 10 15 / 15 1 / 5 3 / 5 Hey Flashman. Nice level ya got there! Looks like you learned from your mistakes last time :P All jokes aside, the whole level was very well thought-out and it was clear where you had to go to find the keys. I also enjoyed the humorous things everyone in the "crew" said. My only issue is that some of the gravity "puzzles" were a bit strange and the aesthetics were kind of a mess...also, you can actually get some of the items while teleporting to main room if you spawn there after you die. The worst part of it was the...questionable enemy placements. The part with the 4th key (IYamWhatIYam) was probably the worst in terms of this.
Enjl  : 18 / 50
Design Fun Creativity Aesthetics Functionality Skip Teleporter? 3 / 15 2 / 10 5 / 15 3 / 5 5 / 5 No As a VVVVVV nerd I am slightly saddened by this level. There's sooo much more it could've done with the VVVVVV theme. The challenges presented are all pretty basic and random and it all feels somewhat disconnected, held together by the VVVVVV plot and music. As it stands it's somewhat of a mess of ideas which one may enjoy on first playthrough but is not worth revisiting due to its lack of meaningful content.
Garirry  : 38 / 50
Design Fun Creativity Aesthetics Functionality 10 / 15 8 / 10 12 / 15 5 / 5 3 / 5 Generally I feel like some parts of this level were kinda unfair, such as spike drops, or some weird enemy and obstacle placement, but overall it was pretty solid. It was really fun. I feel like the unfair deaths and glitches kinda ruined some parts of it, but ultimately it was really interesting. Well this level is pretty much based on VVVVVV but having to rescue team members in a Mega Man game is not something new, I really appreciate the concept, as well as the creativity of the level in general. Fabulous! It looks absolutely fantastic. Music choice is great too. This level is actually kinda buggy. It's easy to get slammed inside a wall due to bad transitions. Otherwise it's still playable. Generally, it's a level with mostly solid level design aside from a few sections, but for me, the biggest problem is the amount of bugs this stage has, such as having a broken camera or being able to be slammed into a wall because of buggy screen transitions. Nevertheless, the graphics are excellent, and this is definitely a stage I enjoyed.
ACESpark  : 22 / 50
Design Fun Creativity Aesthetics Functionality Skip Teleporter? 6 / 15 5 / 10 9 / 15 2 / 5 0 / 5 No I'm not Mega Man, I'm my original fan character, Blega Man! Neat idea, don't get me wrong, and your initial set up had me excited for something that never came. Therein lies the issue - this stage appears to be all idea and no substance. Nothing much happened? There were some good gimmick introductions, but never did I see any pay off. It is also frankly, one of the easiest Mega Man stages I have ever encountered, I get the feeling so much effort was put into making the stage not frustrating that you probably went too far. The fact there are SOOO many collectables with nothing to actually hurt you renders this a complete cakewalk. The tileset is.. also kind of ugly? It is interesting to look at, and a decent idea for a level theme, but far too many segments just seem to be missing the requires tiles, or are weirdly placed. It is also hard to tell what is and isn't foreground at times. I also encountered a crap ton of level design bugs and blunders... which made it not only hard to backtrack, but also got me killed several times as I was shunted into walls as I moved from area to area. The Red area was the BIGGEST offender here, and is so easy to stumble upon, I do wonder if this was playtested very much. [SOME OF THIS HAS BEEN FIXED POST JUDGING, BUT NOT ALL] I was just sort of bored towards the end. It's inoffensive, but I doubt people are going to remember this very much. Good idea, bad execution.

Trivia

• The premise of the level is a reference to the video game VVVVVV. In that game, the player character must use gravity-flipping abilities to traverse a series of mazes to rescue their teammates, who are represented by differently-colored sprites of the player character. Similarly, this level requires traversing through a maze with several Gravity Flip switches to rescue the player character's teammates, who are represented by differently-colored sprites of Mega Man.
• The level's name is a reference to the MaGMML1 level Maze of Death.