Difference between revisions of "Holy Crap, Mega Man Can Airslide?"

Way to spoil the gimmick in the title woooow!! This level is pretty neat! It's cool to see that someone brought air sliding into this game and there's some pretty great setups made with it. The 'air jump slide' is pretty neat and adds a new twist to the air slide gimmick, and some of the acrobatics involved in the level are super fun to pull off. I really like the rooms with the fire waves, they'e super tricky but fun to work around. The Noble Nickel rooms are pretty great too, though I kinda struggled with the first one ;p. I really liked the block train segment, it reminds me of a few levels in SMW romhacks (I'll be specific and say IMPETUOUS ATHLETIC and no one will know what that means :V). The boss fight is neat, too, it reminds me of something you would legit see in a romhack. I think it actually IS in a romhack, I just forget which. Two issues, tho, one, that quick time event room after the midpoint is dumb, and two, sometimes my jump just doesn't register while air sliding? Idk. But overall it's a super nice level! Tho I think the solid blue background could have at least been black because it kiinda looks ugly rn :p

Look. There are levels that have a lot of potential, but fail when it comes to execution. Then there are other levels that are just...bad. Then there are levels like this, which do both. This was BY FAR the most disappointing level in the contest for me, and for that reason it's my least favorite...seriously, you can do so many things with an air sliding gimmick! Rockman 5 Air Sliding and Rockman 4 Burst Chaser X Air Sliding are both amazing romhacks that utilize the gimmick very well. This level, on the other hand, doesn't use the gimmick very creatively at all. All you really did with it was have the player use it hit switches and jump on Plant Man platforms. Slide over to the switch, a platform appears under you. Shoot the Plant Man platform, slide over to it. It's just not fun, especially with enemies everywhere. There was a room where the player died if they didn't know to slide to the right when falling. The 'jump after an air slide' function was sometimes unresponsive, leading to a LOT of deaths, and it was even worse when you required the player to use it with fireballs everywhere. The aesthetics were very minimal, with nothing more than a blue background and some blocks, and the junk guys and springs appeared to be standing on nothing, which is just lazy. The only thing I can really say I liked about this level was the boss, which was like a spruced up Top Man. Overall, though, I was extremely disappointed in this level. It really did drop the ball. You can do so much better than this!

Heh, interesting idea. I really like the platforming possibilities that this mechanic introduces. The pure platforming segments scattered mostly throughout the first half of the level are fun and tense, though I think they could do with less enemies, as they're sometimes placed in a way where they're ripping the player out of the flow of the level. I didn't enjoy the direction the level took with its fire and block snake sections. The fire sections felt like a ton of cheap hits and I fell into the pit in the 2nd nickel section far too many times. The block snake section replaces all the tense action of the level with slowly waiting for the snake to advance so the player can get to the boss. The boss itself was a really fun fight. I like how his attacks line up to allow for an easy dodging pattern that still made me feel like I was skillfully dodging a tough opponent (roleplaying woo!!!!). If this level toyed around more with its platforming segments, perhaps by introducing other types of platforms or having a section where, for instance guts lifts move in parallel and the player has to jump between them to avoid obstacles, I would have enjoyed this level a lot more. As it stands, though, neat concept.

Really awesome concept, but it just wasn't executed well enough. The level design is primitive as it is filled with plenty of extremely cheap spots, and the main gimmick isn't used as well as it should have been. Naturally, this means the level gets frustrating or boring fast. Another problem is that the main mechanic just doesn't work that well, for example, if you jump after sliding, you can't dash mid-air again, and you can't double jump if you don't dash mid-air beforehand. Other than that, the boss is kinda generic and the graphics are boring, but that's about it.

This stage has a seriously cool concept and primary gimmick, and is in fact, really well designed. The challenges are interesting and unique, and we even defy dev-kit only expectations by having a boss at the end. A modified dev-kit boss, but still a new boss.

So what went wrong? Well, this stage simply isn't very fun. This partially comes down to the presentation. It's hard to have fun in a space with zero context. There doesn't appear to be any progress being made, the player just gets a dull blue background. The player is visually bored to tears only 30 seconds into the stage, and somehow the graphics get worse as the stage goes on. The lack of graphics also hurts the gimmick setups - there are many situations where a tiled background could've been used to give indicators as to where something is going to travel, to draw the player's eye to what they should be looking at, and overall just have the level plain make sense.

One of the other issues comes down to sheer frustration. This is mostly focused at the Nickel, The second one. This might just be one of the worst Nickel placements in the game. Bare in mind, your earlier screen with the Fire Waves on is already rather obnoxious, not helped by the fact that visually they are rather hard to track where they are supposed to travel.Yes, there are some arrows, but in a do or die situation, these arrows simply aren't enough.

But the second Nickel - oh man. These screens are so finicky, require such precise timing, that it quickly becomes an chore, then a slog, and then you want to throw your controller/laptop/pc out the window as you are knocked into the pit for the 100th time. The real thing that kills these screens, is the fact the fireballs curl back on themselves. One would've been bad enough, both fireballs curving back? There was no reason for this, this renders the challenge into something that is too exact, mostly because the player themselves also has to curve backwards to land back onto safety. This is beyond frustrating. But the thing that absolutely murders this section and kills the fun factor dead - is that you have a second screen of this. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaa....

Alright, so the Nickels are optional, sure, but they should never cross the line into absurdity, not like this. It just kills the goodwill of any player who is attempting to get these things is going to have.

We are finally left with your boss fight. Hello, modified dev-kit boss! I'm not really sure what the point to this guy is, mostly because there is no need to actually use the air slide feature in the fight. Sure it makes it slightly easier, but its not required, and the boss rather feels like filler. Clever stage, that is just too clever by half to be all that enjoyable. Really, really wish some effort had been expended into the tileset, as my memories of the level are awash with the colour blue, and only blue.