play bad game too much go mad

Since I've got nothing better to do at the moment (and recently rewatched [url=http://lparchive.org/Mega-Man-II/]Simon's LP[/url]) I've been tooling around in MMII, trying various things in Metal Man's stage. I've found out a few things, which may or may not be interesting.

Air Shooter doesn't work on much in this game, but it can kill the clowns on wheels! Shame that the wheels themselves are immune to it and the clowns take one shot from the buster anyway. You might think that you can kill the clowns before they land on the wheels, and you might think that you then wouldn't have to deal with them, but you'd be right and wrong. You can kill the clowns if you're fast, but the wheels dropping is independent of whether a clown actually landed on them. Even if you got them before they came on-screen.

Just as an aside, the wheels have [i]6 fucking health[/i], but it's more like 8 or 9 thanks to that [i]delightful[/i] glitch where firing too quickly makes buster shots go through enemies. A couple of times if you're using the buster, you're just praying to the glitch god that you can destroy the wheel before it hits you.

It also technically works on moles, but it does 1 damage and those fucks have 5 health and leave before you can kill them with it, so it might as well do nothing. Plus, if you're too close, the invincibility frames from one tornado will invalidate the other tornado, and I know that's not how it worked on the NES cause you can kill Crash Man in one shot with it on the NES.

If you want a genuinely useful use for it, you can kill the upper mets in the two random-ass met rooms halfway through the level. It doesn't work on the spring-head enemies, but you shouldn't be trying to use an upward-arcing weapon on floor crawlers.

Leaf Shield can kill the spring-heads, which is useful, needs two shots to take out the wheels if they're coming at you, which isn't [i]bad[/i], and one-shots moles, which is actually pretty useless. It flies off into the distance as soon as you move, and the path it cleared instantly refills. You could stand still and use it to farm health and weapon energy in the latter half of the mole corridor, once you've got out of the conveyors that always take you in the wrong direction, but it's painfully slow cause most of the time the dropped items end up in the floor or ceiling.

Checkpoint!
[spoiler][img]http://i.imgur.com/HPV1BtP.png[/img]
Ouch.[/spoiler]

Crash Bomb is your best friend in this stage. Kills the spring-heads, one-shots wheels, and there's a large refill after the checkpoint, perfectly timed for when you'd be running out. It's also Metal Man's weakness and he needs all four(!) shots to go down, so if you're having trouble with the stage [i]and[/i] the boss then fuck you I guess.

But you shouldn't be having trouble with Metal Man because his behaviour is entirely controlled by your actions, defaults to jogging on the spot and is limited to doing exactly two things:

1) If you shoot, he will jump. At the top of his jump he throws a blade at you, when he lands he throws one horizontally. Dodging this if you're all the way in the corner is impossible. As a nice touch, it's not just triggered by the B button like so many things in this series (tigers), he actually checks if there's weapons fire going on in the room! I found that out by missing with Crash Bomb, which made him go fucking berserk until the bomb blew up. Also he can't be hit by a Crash Bomb explosion on the wall, on either side of the room.

2) If you get really, really close, like one block away, he jumps to the other side of the room. The only way to dodge this is to go out of your way to trigger it by sliding at him, which isn't reliable at all. Once he's started jumping you can't run away and you can't slide away even if you're sliding with the direction of the conveyor. And the worst part is, his hitbox is so fucked and he's so twitchy about jumping that it will never, ever look like he actually made contact with you.

You might have noticed that neither of those things involve the conveyor changing direction. It doesn't.

The way to beat him is very simple: Run halfway into the room, jump, shoot, run all the way to the left, jump over the two blades back to the middle, shoot, repeat without any deviation until he goes down. Or just stand still and mash B every time he lands, that works too. It can feel like a pretty good fight if you don't exploit the AI and just jump and shoot on instinct, but sadly cheesing it seems like the only way to not eat a ton of damage.

So that's my big ol' effortpost about a shit gameboy game from 1992, hope you cared!