Gaming Update: May 6th, 2013 Edition

I haven't been playing extensively as I would like and I think it's because I'm an adult living in an adult world. Spending hours playing multiple video games doesn't translate very well.  That being said, since the beginning of the year, I've invested roughly 28 hours playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, 14 hours on Mariokart 7, a couple of hours for Papers Please and 3 hours on Mega Man; not including some amount of time spent on Tetris and countless demos from Nintendo's eShop.  I guess I have been playing a bit.

But in the last week, I've been playing a lot of Mega Man on my 3DS.  It's not that I've been playing Mega Man extensively, just the first area of Dr. Wily's compound.  Now, I'm not sure how long I've been at this one particular stage, but I would guess it would have to be at least an hour.  There are currently two things holding me up with the first of x number of stages in Dr. Wily's compound.  First thing though, the first stage is pretty short, which makes having to go through it multiple times trying to beat it that much more bearable when I die, which happens frequently.

The first area that gives me trouble is this:

What makes this area difficult (for me at least), is that the flying/shooting platforms cannot be killed and do not follow a set pattern.  From what I've been able to tell, the platforms base their flying on where you are at the height of your jump.  I think.  There have been times when I've dropped and the platforms are at the right height to where I have to jump to avoid being hit, then the platforms increase in altitude and are now out of reach and are practically bumping against those nasty ceiling spikes.  Now, I know I could just use the Magnet Beam (I'll get to this in a later post) and create platforms across this spike-filled-hell-pit and make it to the other side if I don't get shot off and die, thereby using up the needed energy for the following screen where would I absolutely need it.  

The following section of this stage that vexes me is the boss.  The Yellow Devil.

*SPOILER* Using the Thunder Beam is essential here as it shortens the pain.

That bastard.  Yellow Bastard?  Very close, but less rapey.  So there's that too.

A  couple of other things that I wanted to bring up are Friday's Penny-Arcade comic and posting.  I have that same feeling very frequently and not only with Steam games, but with everything that I have saved in my Amazon shopping cart.  $15 price drop bringing a normally $40 blu-ray down to only $25?  I may have to buy it now. . . after I check my financials.  Which is why I try my damnedest to not visit Amazon or Steam's Store front on a regular basis.

The second bit is from Kotaku, where columnist Chris Person breaks down a Katie Couric exposé about the harmful effects of video games.  I thought about writing my own thoughts about the media's reaction to video games that are violent and how Couric's episode of whatever show she's doing spins the tragic events that occurred by highlighting video games as the cause as opposed to one of many elements that lead up to the tragic events.  After reading the Kotaku article, I knew that Mr. Person was able to state what I would end up rehashing and full of a lot more biased emotion.

So this covers the tail end of last week and the start of this week.  I really need to get off my ass (which is hard when you need to play games in order to review them) and finish some of my half-started reviews that are starting to gather dust; which is funny because most of those games came out more than a decade ago, so the dust is quite thick in some areas.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Over the Fence

[Credit for the Mega Man screen grabs goes to wtcvidman and his walkthrough of Dr. Wily Stage 1.  Also, I've only used the video for screen grabs as opposed to it's purpose as a walkthough.  And super kudos to wtcvidman for not talking through the walkthrough, which I get irritated with when people talk over walkthroughs, but that's a personal issue.  I'll talk about that later.]