Mega Man I: Ice Man's Stage Breakdown

Introduction

   Yes, as you can see from the amount this image got shrunk to format it for this blog, this stage is pretty darn long. I think it's more than twice as long as Guts Man's Stage. It also has some of the most time-consuming areas in the game, with extremely difficult platforming in many areas - definitely a poor choice for first stage for a beginning player. Graphically it has as clear a logic of place as any stage in the game; it's pretty obviously meant to be some kind of arctic research station located on top of a frozen mountain or glacier of some kind. There's slippery ice, water (presumably salt, since it's not frozen), and the largest pit hazard section in the game right in the middle of everything. If it weren't for the Magnet Beam I'd place it as the worst stage in the game just for its sheer difficulty, but the ability to skip the more offensive platforming challenges allows even beginner players to get through so long as they come prepared.

Part 1: The Second-Longest Horizontal Stretch in the Game

Map

Description

    At least I think it is. I haven't actually counted screens, but a quick visual survey of every other stage in the game seems to confirm it. And due to the terrain, which though entirely linear and lacking any major obstacles still requires a fair amount of jumping and dodging, it actually takes longer to complete than the longest one (which we'll be seeing in Wily Stage 2). Let's take a look at some of the more salient features, shall we?

Breakdown

1. This flat starting area introduces this stage's (unique) special enemy: the Crazy Razy, which runs towards the player and fires single shots. If the player shoots its body three times, the head detaches and begins acting similarly to a Blader; if the player jumps slightly and hits the head first, the whole thing dies in one shot instead. It's the first example of an enemy with a sweet spot in the game (and, I think, the only normal enemy in this game that has one, unless you count the enemies with shields, and those focus more on timing than aiming). The design here is pretty good; the player sees the enemy first on flat terrain before encountering it in more difficult circumstances; of course, since this is the only place the player will ever see it, and it appears only a couple more times in Section 2, this is of limited interest. The Crazy Razy's running/flying speed and size make every appearance of one a Forced Encounter Challenge by default, since running past it is very risky.
2. The player encounters three more Crazy Razy enemies here, and then is done with them for the rest of the game. This section of the stage is fairly low-key and slow-paced, which might lull a player into a false sense of security - the exact opposite of the opening of Elec Man's stage. I'm honestly not sure if this is good or bad, nor could I venture to guess whether it was intentional or not on the developers' part.
3. This marks the first occurrence of water in the Mega Man series, and one of only two appearances in this game; and really, since the second (also in Wily Stage 2) features the NES series' only occurrence of moving water, it might as well be the only appearance. In this game, as opposed to every other game both in the original series and in every spin-off to date, water does not make Mega Man jump higher. It slows his movement ever so slightly - not really enough to affect gameplay significantly - and that's it. While running through this tidal pool-like area, the player must deal with Spines in the lower sections between the upraised pillars while Pengs fly constantly from the left. Pengs are essentially a less challenging version of Killer Bullets; they move in a slightly slower sine-wave pattern (I think), and they do not explode when shot. The closest thing to this section in any other stage is in Part 3 of Bomb Man's stage, where the player faces Beaks and Killer Bullets; but that section is more challenging due to the pit hazards and more difficult enemies. Still, it's the most challenging bit of this Section, and a beginner player is likely to take a hit or two, which is okay, because...
4. ...the developers placed a conciliatory Big Life Energy here. You know what, I think they were trying to lull the player into a false sense of security. A beginner player will likely appreciate this very easy Big Life Energy, guarded by a mere two Octopus Batteries (made only slightly more threatening by the slippery floor). If that was their plan, though, they revealed their hand pretty quickly, because the difficulty ramps up sharply after this screen, and doesn't drop again.

Part 2: Yoku Yoku Panic!

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Description

    This is the first time I have found a need to break my general rule of dividing sections by horizontal and vertical scrolling; the bottom screen here is the start of a horizontal area, but it so clearly belongs with the room above that I have separated it entirely from the rest of that area. This is the second and last appearance of Appearing Blocks (also called 'Yoku Blocks', hence the reference above) in Mega Man I; it's rather strange that the developers never tried to provide any further escalation on this interesting and innovative hazard, especially considering how frequently they used it in future games. Mind you, these are very tricky sections, but the only real hazard is a spine that patrols the water at the bottom of each section - high challenge, but low pressure. I'm not sure this is a bad thing, though; it certainly takes a while to get it right and even an expert player is likely to take a hit or two, since dodging Spines is damnably hard thanks to their variations in speed, and yet few players are likely to die here, at least very often. The respawn area is in the top room of this section, as well, so a player who does succumb won't have much to redo. Of course...since the next part is possibly the hardest section in the game (the ending boss-rush excepted), almost any player is likely to have to do this more than once in a run of this stage. So, it cuts both ways.

Breakdown

  
    The first of two screens features a simple series of seven Appearing Blocks. I mentioned in my Elec Man's stage breakdown that four was the typical number, and it is, but it's not universal. In any case, as with the Appearing Blocks in Elec Man's stage, here there are no groups of more than one block. Each block appears in order, with up to two on-screen at a time, and then the sequence repeats. What sets this apart from the set in Elec Man's stage is the relative difficulty of their placement. Notice how the 2-3 and the 4-5 transitions serve more as fake-outs than anything else; the jumps are possible (I did them in my footage), but they're quite tricky, and it's actually easier to simply skip from 1 to 3 and then either from 3 to 5 or from 4 to 6. The player is thus given a sort of Equivalent Path Choice, only played out in the sequence of Appearing Blocks instead of normal stage design. It's a remarkably clever use of what was already a fairly clever hazard, and one of the many signs that the team responsible for this game really cared about their work.

    Of course, the Spine patrolling the water at the bottom is also one of the many signs that the team responsible for this game really hated the player. Though in all fairness, any player not skilled enough to reach the top without taking significant damage shouldn't be playing this stage before beating Elec Man's anyway, so there's that.

    I complained earlier about the lack of escalation in the developers' use of the Appearing Blocks, but honestly, this is pretty escalated. Just look at it. Once more there are seven groups, but here the setup is more complicated by entire orders of magnitude. The first four form a more-or-less duplicated left-to-right sequence across, one on top of the other; the top set is unreachable from the bottom, however, and so what the player must do is start at the bottom set. He can, if he chooses, begin at the bottom 4, but that will place him in the path of the Spine in the water (of course, he can exploit the game's limitations to scroll the Spine out of existence too, as I do in my demo, but that's cheating and only a scoundrel would do so). Wherever he starts, after the bottom 4, he must then backtrack along 5, 6, and 7...but then comes the trickery. The top 1 is a dead-end, nothing but a fake-out. The jump from 1 to 2 is impossible across the top. Thus, the player is forced to do what before was optional, and jump just as 7 disappears onto the upper 2, and then immediately from there up to the top 3. From there it's just a simple jump across to the top 4 and onto the ledge. Quite a bit to manage for a new hazard, and most players take many, many tries to get it right.

    Unless, of course, they just use the Magnet Beam to skip the whole thing. Mega Man is usually pretty good about that sort of thing - it's one of the reasons the game has such broad appeal.

Part 3: And It All Comes Tumbling Down

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Description

   Here it is. This is why people hate this stage, and I can't really argue - it's a good reason to hate it. This is one of two areas in Mega Man I to feature the Foot Holder enemy, which is unique among Mega Man I enemies in providing a platform for Mega Man to stand on as it flies about, periodically shooting two shots directly to the left and right. The two massive pit hazards frame the action with a particularly merciless and sudden High Pressure Challenge, and the 1-Up at the end is nothing but a taunt - it is almost impossible to drop into the narrow passage where it rests.

Breakdown

    This section is hard. If the player approaches it without the Magnet Beam, it is arguably the hardest bit of platforming the game has to offer - maybe the hardest bit in the entire NES series. The only place that comes even close would be the rail-platform section in Wily Stage 4, and that's much shorter, and also more predictable.

    See, the thing is, Foot Holders move randomly. They fly horizontally and diagonally, changing their left-right movement at regular intervals but their horizontal movement unpredictably. Firing shots also seems to be random; or if it isn't, it's too dependent on circumstances to be predictable in practical terms. So jumping from one Foot Holder to the next becomes as much a matter of luck as of skill - will it choose to head up at the last moment, denying the player his landing, or will it suddenly fire, knocking him helplessly into the gaping pit below? Of course, sitting still and waiting for the perfect jump is equally risky, since a stray shot might come at any moment with precisely the same result. Not to mention that sitting still and waiting for the perfect jump could take literally any amount of time.

Ah ha ha ha, and you thought I was kidding. No, seriously. I meant any amount

of time. It's absolutely ridiculous.

    To compound matters, the relative lack of background design makes it hard at times to gauge the absolute motion of each Foot Holder; if two are moving right at the same time, it is easy to mistake them for moving left at the same time, and the difference in jumping difficulty is very severe between the two, since their movement does not augment Mega Man's.

    Even with the Magnet Beam, there is a strong chance of dying here, if a shot should come at the wrong moment or the player hesitate just a quarter-second too long in lining up his next beam platform. It's much, much easier than going blind, yes, but still risky. Ice Man's stage is arguably the hardest in the game; Fire Man's probably comes close, but I would still argue that it is easier.

    Because their movement is random, there's no point in having diagrams; nothing remains consistent from one run-through to another, besides the high probability of death.

Part 4: A Quick Respite

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Description

    Hardly any is needed; this is pretty self-explanatory. If the player, upon dropping into this area, reacts quickly enough, he is able to collect some Small Weapon and Life Energy drops as an apology for the previous section. There are no hazards here; the stage is basically over.

Part 5: Another Big Eye

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Description

    Once more, none needed. This is another regulation Big Eye ending, the fourth of four. Thank goodness, Fire Man's stage is the other one without one.

    Next time, video footage and Ice Man's stage analysis! Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading, 

The Undesigner

Mega Man: Elec Man Stage Analysis AND Critique

Part 1: Analysis

Stage Divisions

They're oddly organized, yeah, but look how rectangular I managed to make it!

    Right off the bat, we can see there's a lot more variety here than in Cut Man's stage, both absolutely and screen-for-screen. Despite several of the stage's flaws (which I will outline here), this one fact goes a long way towards making it more entertaining than Cut Man's. In the post on Cut Man's stage, I said there were two stages worse than it, and this was one of them, but after having played and analyzed it further I may retract that. It has some notable flaws, but on the whole it's pretty strong, especially considering how many different ideas the developers were trying out here.

Difficulty Chart

    I had problems with this one. Elec Man's stage has relatively few individual points of high difficulty; the stage tends, from my observations of beginning players, to draw most of its challenge from a number of individually low-pressure challenges which, if not handled consistently, lead to death by a thousand cuts, especially considering the near-total lack of enemies that can be safely farmed for Life Energy drops (Watchers are dangerous, so farming them is risky, and Spines cannot be killed without a Special Weapon, the most practical of which is the Rolling Cutter, which the player will need to face Elec Man safely). The only high-pressure challenges in the stage are the two horizontal Sections, 5 and 9, and the total lack of any active threats renders them relatively tame despite the presence of an instant-death pit hazard. So I tried to reflect in this chart the areas where the player is most likely to take some damage, with the understanding that while each individual area is relatively easy taken in isolation, when taken as a series the player needs to pay some pretty serious attention in order to make it to the end.

    Honestly, it's not a bad idea; the designers used pacing and the game's mechanics with what may very well have been a careful selection of threats to create the sense of a marathon stage in a fairly small area. The player is forced to play the long game, as it were, exercising more caution than seems necessary because each little loss will add up without much chance for recovery. In that light even the rather frustrating Big Eye at the end makes a kind of sense from the standpoint of the slightly malicious design theory that prevailed in that time: it provides a surprise test to see if the player has been careful enough. "You must have this much health left to proceed." I don't think it worked quite right, but the idea is sound and the stage definitely had a lot of thought put into it - perhaps more than any other we've looked at so far. The basic problem with the stage is really just that in practice it ends up being frustrating, which I think is why players tend not to react terribly positively to the stage.

    Of course, there are some flaws in the execution, too. The Big Eye at the end is a piece of malicious design that would soon be eliminated from the series. The overall pacing is still a bit spotty, with a lull in challenge in the middle that breaks the sense of escalation. And the very first room is terribly designed; it's tricky even for an expert player and totally ruins the sense of flow and freedom from which the game's controls derive much of their pleasure right from the start. As a warning of what the stage is going to be, it does fine, but I have in mind one specific change that could have been made, within the limits of the stage's already-chosen mechanics, to make it better.

Hazard Population

    And the stage manages to do all of the above with no more hazard types than the brief Guts Man's stage! This diagram shows the integration the developers achieved with Elec Man's stage; almost every hazard is encountered more than once. However, it's important to note that some of this integration is also illusory - for example, in Section 6, the Spines and Electric Arcs are not both going to be encountered in any one playthrough because of the divided nature of the stage. Still, it's a nice change from the two stages we looked at earlier - the stage presents a more or less clear logic of progression and switches things up often enough to stay interesting; no obstacle overstays its welcome, as we saw in Cut Man's stage.

Part II: Suggestions for Improvement

    This section is experimental. I doubt I'll be doing it for every stage, and probably not even for many, but I was too strongly tempted by the strong ideas swimming under the surface of Elec Man's stage. These are obviously only 'suggestions' in the most distant sense of the term; the game is more than 25 years old now and I have no plans on making a ROM hack of it, or ever playing one. All I'm doing is seeing if the concept that I have teased out of the stage design through my analysis can be strengthened by a few minor changes. Not a full re-design (way too much effort for no real reward), just some minor changes. Call it a 'dry test' of my methodology, to see if I can get practical results out of this project. And, of course, none of these suggestions are intended as personal criticisms of the team that made the game. Hindsight simplifies everything, especially over 25 years of distance, and I'm an idle philosopher considering the matter in the abstract at my leisure, while the developers were technicians in a fast-paced, for-profit industry working with new, difficult hardware on a strict deadline.

    Anyway, here goes:

Suggestion 1: Provide an alternate route on the first screen.

    This seems so obvious now; and, to their credit, the developers used techniques similar to this in later games, especially after Utility Items became more varied and central to the gameplay. Here, all I have done is shift the area of play left a bit to eliminate some wasted space and place a ladder on the right side of the screen, blocked by a Super Arm Block. This setup preserves the developers' intention (as speculated by me) to give beginning players a warning that this is not the best stage to do first, but it also does two other things as well.

    First, it provides players who are approaching the stage later in the game with a superior way to eliminate the annoyance of dealing with the Spines (especially since the only practical Special Weapon to use on them is the Rolling Cutter, which is essential for defeating the boss), and in doing so preserves for them the sense of flow that is so essential for maintaining the player's enjoyment of the game's mechanics.

    Second, if the player is trying this stage before beating Guts Man, it sends a clear message right from the start that the Super Arm might be a good thing to have in this stage - even more clearly than the beginning of Cut Man's stage before; players who do not make it all the way to the Magnet Beam would thus have some nice conveyance to go beat Guts Man before coming back even if the haven't seen the Magnet Beam hiding behind all those blocks yet.

Suggestion 2: Build Up to the Big Eye at the End

    At first I thought I was going to suggest eliminating it entirely, and that would certainly be what a modern developer would do, since frustrating the player through malicious design tends to be frowned upon now. But I want the stage's basic concept to stay the same, and since the final test is important to that, I would keep the Big Eye. The real problem with it is that the player has no real warning of it, other than the fact that there has been a Big Eye in 3 out of 4 stages so far. So, instead of leaving Sections 5 and 9 totally blank, throw a Big Eye in each of them. The horizontal platforms at the start are more than long enough to allow a player sufficient time to kill them without a serious threat, and placing one at the open-air top of each enclosed vertical area would condition a player to expect one, making the escalation of having to face the last one in a much smaller area precisely that - an escalation, and not a nasty surprise.

Suggestion 3: Fix the Guts Block Dead-End

    Yeah, you knew this was coming. I would not eliminate the Guts Block dead-end entirely, though. It's got one good thing going for it - it gives the developers a chance to force the player to use his newly acquired Magnet Beam if he got it, while letting players coming to the stage without the Super Arm proceed normally. I would just place the Guts Block at the beginning of the dead-end instead of the end, and make sure at least one screen of the divided area had Watchers to provide the player with fodder for Weapon Energy drops. Then the Magnet Beam challenge could be free to take up a whole screen, and the player could be given an optional power-up, like a 1-Up, instead of a face full of Flea.

Conclusion

    Well, that wasn't so bad, was it? I am honestly a bit surprised. I remembered disliking Elec Man's stage intensely, and I still can't exactly say it's my favorite, but it seems that Elec Man's stage is really a very strong design idea marred by two or three poor design choices, which in hindsight might easily have been fixed, and were generally avoided in later games. I look forward to comparing it with the very similar Crash Man's stage later, especially since it includes a very similar split-stage design near the end.

Thanks for reading,

The Undesigner

Elec Man's Stage...In Motion

Well, after much research, I've got this thing embedded finally, it seems. Man, that was a lot of trouble.

Next time, something a little different - I'll still past my usual analytical charts, but I'm also going to do a special 'Fixing Elec Man's Stage' section! Stay tuned!

Quick Apology

Hi, readers (all three of you)! I'm sorry my update schedule got spotty; I've started my self-directed Java lessons in earnest again, and it's been tricky figuring out how to divide my time between that and this. With the impending shipment of my OUYA, I want to be at least conversant enough in Android development to toy around with things, so I'm rushing a little bit. I'll have the Elec Man videos done soon, and will try to post the analysis within a week. It's my birthday this weekend, though, so I doubt I'll be doing much of either for two days.

Thanks for your patience!

The Undesigner

Mega Man I: Elec Man's Stage Breakdown

Intro: A Not-Quite-Horrible Mistake


    Notice something different about Elec Man's stage? If not, please stop holding your laptop or tablet sideways and place it in the upright position again.

    So, yes. The very first Mega Man game featured an entirely vertical stage. Actually, the second one did, too, and the comparison and contrast between the two will, eventually, provide us with some interesting looks at how the developers learned from game to game. The format was largely dropped in later games, though, and most of the reasons for that will become quite clear as we look at this one.

    Before I start with any criticisms, though, I'd like to point out some rather good points about the stage that become apparent pretty immediately:

• The music is quite good; it's arguably the best theme in the first game, and certainly one of the more frequently remastered and remixed.
• Graphically, this stage is one of the more elaborate in the game, and while logic of place isn't the strongest, it gives a great sense of atmosphere. The navy blue sky and orange...whatever it is (tower walls? machinery?) contrast well and there is some variety in the tiles used throughout.
• The hazard selection in this stage is, for the most part, consistent and rational, and shows thought on the designers' part in considering the kind of challenges that would work in a stage configured like this.

    Unfortunately, the end results still weren't quite right. Let's take a look at some of its issues in depth:






Part 1: A Very Mixed Bag

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Description

    That first room. Oh God, that first room. There isn't a single person who has played this game who does not hate that room with a burning passion. Otherwise, to be fair, the area is not that bad; as we'll see, the developers made some good use of their design 'theme' for the stage and included some smart tutorial elements to boot.

Breakdown

1. I am going to be as understanding of this room as I can; as I stated before, the purpose of this endeavor is not to rate things on a good/bad scale, but to understand as thoroughly as possible the actual effects of design choices, and to some extent what intentions likely were behind them. That being said, it's no bloody joke; this screen is annoying. The three Spines occupying the platforms here will almost certainly hit any player who is approaching these jumps without a weapon that can destroy them (the Rolling Cutter, Hyper Bomb, or Fire Storm, really, since the Elec Beam is acquired here and there are no blocks to throw with the Super Arm); this makes the three jumps, already requiring a lot of precision, intensely aggravating. Only the lack of severe consequences for failing (a mere 3 points of damage from contacting a Spine) keep it from being a game-breaker.
   
   Now, I think I can see why the developers might have placed this challenge at the very start of the stage. It isn't a tutorial element, really; it's too challenging. What it is is a 'gate'. Gates are a design element that don't really feature heavily in the Mega Man games, for the most part, but they're pretty simple in practice: they are intended to keep a player from going somewhere or doing something until a certain condition has been reached. I'll deal with them much more thoroughly once I start deconstructing the Metroidvania genre, which relies heavily on this device to manage player conveyance. For now, though, I believe this was placed here as a mild form of gating, to discourage first-time players from attempting this stage first. Why? Well, that will become apparent a bit later on.
   
   Meanwhile, though, the end result is still intensely frustrating, and I think it was ill-advised. There had to be a better way of signalling to the player not to come here first.
2. The meat of the stage begins here, unfortunately with more of the same. The bottom of these two copy-pasted screens contains two more Spines on the two platforms the player must navigate to reach the ladder up, and since they are only two tiles wide each, it is virtually impossible to avoid damage without a weapon to kill them. The next screen, however, is a fairly well-done tutorial element to introduce the player to the Electric Arc hazard he will be dealing with later in the stage. During the run-up from the ladder, there is plenty of time for him to observe the arcs firing, and the loud buzzing noise signals 'threat' pretty clearly. He must cross the arcs here to proceed, but the timing is forgiving and the platforming is easy, so even a novice should quickly become confident, which is important because this threat will be used a great deal in this stage.
   
   One more thing to note about these two screens. Take a look at the closeup to the right. Do you see how the designers used the copy-pasting to create an optional, one-way double-back path with a Big Life Energy as an Optional Path Incentive? Clearly this was a peace offering to make up for the difficulty of the first screen, and perhaps to help a first-time player if he missed the timing of the Electric Arcs just before. A clever use of what would otherwise have been an unfortunate side-effect of stage compression techniques (all too common in early NES platformers) to ease difficulty and player frustration. I'm impressed. Of course, it does mean taking damage from the Spines again, but that amounts to less than what the Big Life Energy heals.
3. This two-screen section introduces a new enemy type, the strange-looking Watcher, which appear about five seconds after the screen loads in groups of three from the top and bottom. When they reach horizontal alignment with the player, their eyes protrude and fire twin lightning bolts at the player. This is considerably more advanced enemy behavior than most mooks we've seen so far; only the Sniper Joes have been more sophisticated. And they were created for this specific situation, it's pretty clear. The layout of these two screens is a rare instance of vertical movement that isn't really a proper OROC; the player need merely stay on the ladder, and indeed can't really do anything else. The ladder thus effectively restricts the player's movement, creating an instance of a Restriction Challenge, in which the difficulty arises from circumstances preventing the player from using his normal capabilities - in this case the ladder limiting him to slow, mono-directional movement. An interesting idea, and relatively successful; once the player understands that the lightning bolts cannot simply be dodged (the Watchers coming up from the bottom make simply dropping from the ladder and re-grabbing it a poor option), he will fairly quickly arrive at the solution of pausing and methodically eliminating each Watcher as it reaches his altitude - something like a Threat Management Challenge, only less chaotic.
4. This area features the use of Appearing Blocks, which we are encountering for the first time in this series. They will be a staple hazard in the series from now on, appearing in every single game we'll be dissecting, and it's worth a look at some of the techniques the designers used here, though they're quite basic. We'll see more complex examples later on in Ice Man's stage, which features the hazard more prominently.
   
   
   
   
   Yoku Blocks are generally timed so that two are on-screen at any moment. Usually there are four blocks or groups of blocks that appear, creating a 'cycle' of four phases in which two groups are present on-screen, allowing the player to make jumps. It is possible to 'skip' a phase by timing one's jump just as the current block disappears, but this requires solid timing and foreknowledge of where the next block will appear - something the developers expect the player to be able to do virtually everywhere these blocks are used, including here. The creation of two distinct 'paths' here is also going to be a common theme; later configurations, even in the first game, will make smart use of this principle to create longer single paths while conserving 'cycles'. The initial jump straight up is the hardest one here due to the necessary timing, but it is a low-pressure challenge and so does not grate overmuch. Oh, and it's a Blind Path Choice, too, since the next screen up can't be seen from here and has power-ups as a reward for taking the left path. It's difficult to get back to the main path from there, but possible, and the power-ups are minor (just three Small Weapon Energy), so it's fairly benign.
   
   One more thing: notice how the sprite for the Yoku Blocks here match up with the background? It's a nice touch of logical design, indicating perhaps that the blocks are coming out from the wall.

Part 2: Approaching the Next Tower

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Description

    This area serves as a sort of palate-cleanser after the long vertical area preceding it. Vertical movement in Mega Man games tends to feel limiting due to the lack of smooth scrolling, and the monotone orange of the first Section gets oppressive after a while. The background here is navy-blue sky (1), and a fairly simple but somewhat challenging platforming challenge leads directly to a ladder that takes the player to the next tower. The Big Life Energy at (2) is basically a death-trap; the developers intended to lure novices here with the promise of more health in order to teach them not to be stupid. Since it's in the player's choice whether to try it or not, it's a fairly benign example of malicious design, used to teach the player caution and discretion.

Part 3: A Choice of Ways

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Description

    You recall the very minor Path Choice from before? Well, that was just a preview. Here we find the single most significant Path Choices in the entire game, making up almost half of one of the longer levels between the two: an extended Equivalent Path Choice followed by a Blind Path Choice gated at the end by an obstacle requiring a weapon the player may very well not have (though there are hints along the way), and riddled with traps and annoying enemy encounters no matter which choice the player makes. If people do not remember this stage kindly, this section is why. Let's take a more in-depth look.

Breakdown

1. The path begins here with a fairly clear choice: left ladder or right ladder. The dividing wall between them and the difference in background serve to graphically highlight the significance of the choice; without them the player might assume the ladders arrive at more or less the same place, as they did before. Watchers reappear here as well, and render the leftward ladder more dangerous until the player has dealt with them.
   
   The next screen up, the player sees the first fruits of his choice: either a gauntlet of Electric Arcs or another set of Spines situated on more narrow platforms. For a player without a weapon that kills Spines, this makes the right path...the right path.
   
   The next screen trades the twin hazards for another set of Watchers. One rather nice side-effect of the screen-by-screen movement is the variety of hazards the stage offers; though we've only seen a relative few sorts, they've been so well distributed and paced that the stage feels quite well-populated, something that has hindered some of the horizontal stages we've looked at. Of course, the fact that almost all of the enemies are fairly annoying (Electric Arcs that do little more than punish impatience, Spines that can't be killed by normal means, Watchers that are just plain bastards) cuts into this somewhat, but even so, at least the player isn't likely to be bored in this stage. If only Cut Man's stage had taken that cue...
2. And here a player attempting this stage without the Super Arm gets his first hint of danger. The object here is unique in the game and when collected permanently adds the Magnet Beam to the player's arsenal. The Magnet Beam is the first in what will become a long tradition of utility weapons that serve little or no offensive purpose but increase the player's platforming options; this one is essential to completing the game, which is a shame because collecting it is optional, and even impossible without either having the Super Arm here or completing the stage twice (since the Elec Beam also breaks these blocks; it also kills everything, makes the best Reuben you've ever had, and totally had its way with your mother last night).
3. The first screen in the following Path Choice echoes the previous; once more Spines patrol the platforms to the left while Electric Arcs jump the gap on the right. But past that, things get rather different. The next screen has Electric Arcs, while the third has the same on the left, and on the right just a couple of Fleas.
   
   Oh, and one more of those blocks, placed directly in the player's path and completely blocking any player without the Super Arm who chooses this path.
   
   There's not much to say beyond pointing out that this is a terrible design choice. I can't imagine why the developers did this. Perhaps in a future post I'll run through some possibilities for what they might have done instead, but for now we'll move on. Other reviewers have no doubt spoken of this misstep plenty already.

Analysis

    This section was a bold move on the developers' part, but they lacked the experience to make the most of it. It was an interesting idea that fell flat in execution, I think because they tried to do too much; not only did they try the radical idea of splitting an entire half of a stage into alternate paths, but they also threw a game-critical power-up into the mix, behind a gate, and then give the player a chance to try it out at the end (since you can't jump up to the platform at the end of the second right branch once you destroy the block, you have to use the Magnet Beam; of course, if you *can* destroy the block, it's a cinch that you already got it, so there's that). It's an ambitious bit of game design for the time, and I think it overreached just a bit. After some thought, I think I am going to do a post going over some possible changes (all within the rough limitations of the system present in the game) to make this section work better. But it must wait until my breakdown and analysis are complete.

Part 4 and 5: The Quick End

Map(s!)

Description

    The stage closes with two more low-key sections, neither strictly worth a breakdown. First, a copy-pasted Section 2, followed by two last screens, the first containing two last Electric Arcs (not counting the six in the run-up to Elec Man) arranged similarly to the first two (1), and the second containing the obligatory Big Eye (2), this time contained in a small enough area to pose a significant threat to a player who approaches without enough life to take a hit. It is not safe to stay on the ladder, since the Big Eye's arc will most likely cover it, and there is not enough room on the platform to reliably kill it with the Mega Buster before it reaches the player. Running under it is a viable option...if the player is lucky enough for it to do a higher hop and quick enough to react to it; but there is no really safe way to deal with this encounter without a weapon capable of killing it quickly.

Oh No, Why No Videos?

    Okay, long story short: I haven't been able to get footage of Elec Man's stage besides my own yet, and this post has already been delayed enough at this point. I will go back and add video breakdowns as I get them completed, but I've been a bit busy the past few days and I wanted to keep the content flowing on this blog. Thanks for your patience, and don't worry, I intend to keep the feature.

Thanks for reading,

The Undesigner