Insane Difficulty: Well, as Promised... - Insane Difficulty

My god. I fucking died when you read the Sigma Stage dialogue. That was hilarious .

Yeah, as you suspected, you had a much forgiving time because of the obscene amount of upgrades one gets up to that point. Try doing that stage a bit earlier, and you'll have one heck of a tougher time.

I was right about to say that I'd suggest updating the version to the new one, but then I figured this was recorded pre-release, so yeah. Loved the vid. Can't wait to see the rest nao.

Hart-Hunt, on 30 April 2015 - 02:42 PM, said:

I was aiming for "90's cartoon character" on that one.

Hart-Hunt, on 30 April 2015 - 02:42 PM, said:

I think I recorded the last 5-7 episodes post-release, actually, but I don't like changing versions partway through a playthrough of anything. Hopefully I'll be able to keep a "one a week" release schedule. It's difficult to keep up with though, since the other two series that I'm doing take so long to record, and this one takes so long to edit! Glad to hear that you're excited.

Don't worry though, I'm planning on playing the newest release eventually.

Oh don't worry, the changes are mostly not worth the "update + rerecord". The only thing I'd suggest doing is replaying the new Spark Mandrill stage, which should be a lot cleaner now (boss is the same though).

Oh, I didn't mean that I'd re-LP it for the new release. I just figured that I'd end up playing the hack again for some reason or another in the future, and I'd use the newer version next time.

Death Count:

Intro Stage: 5
Chill Penguin: 68
Storm Eagle: 22
Sting Chameleon: 73
Armored Armadillo: 62
Spark Mandrill: 28
Flame Mammoth: 29
Launch Octopus: 48
Boomer Kuwanger: 14
Item Search: 27

Most of my deaths here were from the fact that I was focusing more on finding things than on not dying. The stages are all much easier at this point, and for the most part the regular enemies can't do any substantial damage to me anymore.

I find the majority of the items at this point. I do miss are the E. Tank in Spark Mandrill, as the menu screen shows a fourth E. Tank in it after I grab the third one (Note the difference between the opening sepia shot, the gratuitous slow-mo and the part where I exit from Flame Mammoth), and this confuses me a lot. I definitely don't actually have a fourth E. Tank though, as I find out later in Sigma 4. This also probably prevents me from getting the Hadouken (Seriously? I thought you guys were joking about it in chat earlier. If it's three shotting bosses, I'm assuming that you can't edit it or something?), if I'm correct that you need all items to unlock it, but it doesn't matter anyways as I never re-entered the area with the capsule when I returned to Armored Armadillo. Honestly, I think it was probably for the better either way.

I feel as if I was more in tune with Hart-Hunt's hiding places for these powerups than the vanilla designers. I certainly found more powerups, at any rate. Although both of those might simply mean that I looked harder here than in vanilla. I certainly needed them for the Sigma stages, after all. I am glad that this managed to fit in a standard half hour segment though, as opposed to being drawn out into two.

...

Did you seriously do 4 neon jumps in 6 attempts, without previous practice whatsoever? (Yeah, power of the 80's = neon jumps)

The buster upgrade is exactly like in vanilla. You get it in Flame Mammoth, or Zero gives it to the player if you don't have it. IF the latter happens, dialogue changes, and Zero kinda gives X a rant in Hard Type. <.<

...Lockirby confirmed godtier MMX speedrunner. Do you understand how hard that actually is?

...What in the hell happened in 28:50 O.o

Yeah, if you ever read the vanilla prerequisites for the final upgrade, you don't need any of the revisits in Hard Type. Just go with full upgrades, and full life.

Haha, I can only really do the neon jumps when I'm standing still though. Any attempt to do them while actually moving ended in pain, so I never actually get any mileage out of them .

Okay, so the buster was the same in vanilla. I wasn't sure because it could have gone either way from what I knew.

28:50 was just me showing off that that my inventory only shows two E. Tanks. I was going to edit a red circle into the video to emphasize that, but decided that editing the video was taking too long, so I scrapped that idea (but ended up leaving the weird slow-mo in there).

Death Count:

Intro Stage: 5
Chill Penguin: 68
Storm Eagle: 22
Sting Chameleon: 73
Armored Armadillo: 62
Spark Mandrill: 28
Flame Mammoth: 29
Launch Octopus: 48
Boomer Kuwanger: 14
Item Search: 27
Sigma 1: 26

Wow, only 26 deaths here? It felt like a lot more. This video ended up being a little longer than intended, and I really should have cut out more of the platform part at the beginning, as looking back I left in some "meh" parts. Still, with all that stuff related to Vile in the center, it's no wonder that it ended up being long.

The first part was definitely the hardest part for me. I didn't know about the dropped dash inputs on those platforms at the time, so I felt that it was my own mistake when I wasn't dashing. Even when I wasn't directly killed by dropped dash inputs, I was paying a lot of attention to dashing properly, which kept causing me to slip [up] on other things. I'd estimate that half of my deaths in this level were due to this. The rest of the first area was easy; the enemies here are cannon fodder for my arsenal of weapons at this point. Once I started getting through the moving platforms, the rest of the first part was okay. The platforming segment was definitely made easier by the presence of R. Shield, which this area is practically tailored to. Not having to dodge any of the enemies is a huge thing off my mind.

I also check out the weapons in this segment. I still don't like the Flamethrower that much, but I can see how it's a lot more useful just to throw out in short bursts, considering its high damage output. I'd consider it useful in some boss fights at least, depending on what other options I have.

Next part of this is the Vile fight. It's a fast paced battle, but I do a lot of damage to him, so it's short. This fight really didn't take me very long. My HP/Armor powerups continue being worthless here, as I only take one hit on the run where I beat him.

But boy am I glad that I had the HP for the next part. The vertically oriented shaft here was probably the most difficult part of vanilla for me, although in Hard Type it's pretty much in line with the rest of the game. I can't use C-Sting in this part because it's just so useful in that mess that comes beforehand, meaning that I can't just dash through here while invincible like my tactic was for vanilla. So I do the logical thing and make use of the charge attack with Storm Tornado... actually wait, for some reason I dismiss Storm Tornado as being useless in vertical areas and use... E. Spark? I guess I didn't think too hard about that one, but to be honest it works perfectly fine. The downside is that E. Spark would have been more handy against Boomer Kuwanger at the top. Boomer Kuwanger is a tough cookie now, as his boss area probably received the largest upgrade from before. Now the hole in the centre is easier to fall into, the safety platform is gone, and the walls are cramped. With my new upgrades though, he still goes down once for every two or three losses. Homing Torpedoes still wreck him pretty badly. However, I decide to catch the Idiot Ball before the jump to the next segment, causing me to lose a couple perfectly good runs here.

I'm not sure where the last checkpoint is, so I'll just break it up here. The last portion is really easy. There's a bunch of enemies, but they really only serve to give me free stuff before the boss fight. Bospider is, IMO, by far the easiest boss in this hack, going down in one attempt and only taking down half of my life bar.

Death Count:

Intro Stage: 5
Chill Penguin: 68
Storm Eagle: 22
Sting Chameleon: 73
Armored Armadillo: 62
Spark Mandrill: 28
Flame Mammoth: 29
Launch Octopus: 48
Boomer Kuwanger: 14
Item Search: 27
Sigma 1: 26
That stupid jump at the start of Sigma 2: 22
The rest of Sigma 2: 25

Well, almost at the end now. These stages are broken up into more chunks than the average level, so this is going to come in pieces.

Part one contains a platforming segment that's really a bit of a puzzle. I can try a Neon Jump to get through here, but that's tricky because I hadn't yet figured out how to do Neon Jumps while moving (for that matter, I hadn't even figured out that they were called Neon Jumps yet). So with that off the table, it took me a while to determine that I had to hang off the right side of the platform, jump to the side of the other platform, dash wall jump off and then get the fooge out of there. This has to be done fairly quickly, so it definitely needed some working out. Once I got it once my consistency shot up dramatically, but I still had failures. The part between there and Chill Penguin isn't too bad at this point. Just get through it and to the boss. I end up having a death that you were hoping for a while ago, which is ironic because I knew it would happen this time and I just wasn't paying attention. Chill Penguin isn't too bad now, since I have his weakness and I can tank a lot of hits at this point, so I have an enormous margin of error compared to the first run. The slightly smaller stage isn't a huge deal, but he can jump into me a little bit more easily on the wall now.

Part two resembles part one a little. A tricky jump at the beginning that I have trouble working out (though a little easier), a relatively easy follow up (though a little harder, especially since I am trying to conserve C. Sting ammo initially because I don't realize that there will be another checkpoint after Storm Eagle), and then a boss that wouldn't be super difficult if it weren't for the fact that I had to go all this way to get to him. Ironically, although I didn't realize that C. Sting was the Eagle's weakness, it ended up being the weapon that allowed me to bring about his downfall. Although let's be honest; it's not much of a weakness when E. Spark and probably Fire W. both deal two damage to him anyways.

Part three is a joke.

Then we've got the titular face guy. His eyes aren't dangerous, really, as their attacks are too slow to be threatening. Truly, the nose isn't too hard to avoid, but I don't really figure it out during the run. I mean, sure, I end up doing it correctly in the final run, but I hadn't really worked it out. If I had been on the other side of the stage when the walls closed for the last time, I would have been wrecked completely instead of scraping through.

Death Count:

Intro Stage: 5
Chill Penguin: 68
Storm Eagle: 22
Sting Chameleon: 73
Armored Armadillo: 62
Spark Mandrill: 28
Flame Mammoth: 29
Launch Octopus: 48
Boomer Kuwanger: 14
Item Search: 27
Sigma 1: 26
Sigma 2: 47
Sigma 3: 56

I really should have taken a break after Sigma 2. I had been playing too long at this point, and I start to be very sloppy, especially after Launch Octopus.

This is less a stage in the vein of the last two, and more just falls into the pattern of "short mini-level then a boss". None of these level portions are particularly difficult or time consuming in their own right, so it really just comes down to fighting the bosses again.

Armored Armadillo is in a stage where he is more difficult to predict, and the spikes on the ceiling ruin my turtling strat from before. However, I have a lot of weapons that can pierce his armor now, so he's not that hard to fight. I may not have used E. Spark in a way that would knock his armor off, or Fire Wave in a way that would allow me to destroy him, but it was honestly not so difficult to fight him like this either. Shotgun Ice plus E. Spark plus Fire Wave is enough to take down his entire health bar without putting myself at undue risk, so that's all I need.

Sting Chameleon is ridiculously easy this time around. The thing is, dodging his spike move is borderline random as far as I am able to play it. When I can only take four hits, and I have to deplete his entire health bar, it requires me to not make any mistakes and still get pretty lucky. The amount of hits that I'd take from the spikes from average luck was enough to kill me handily in the first fight, but that's not even close to true here, so the spikes are only a minor concern, and the rest of the moves are fairly easy to dodge. When I can take a ton of hits from the spikes and have a bunch of free easy hits with the Metal Blades, it's not hard at all to kill this guy. Maybe it's just me, but the stage seems a lot less dangerous as well, since the uneven floor isn't nearly as distracting as the mud and the walls don't hurt me now. I actually comment in the video (as I did in Boomer Kuwanger's stage) that the boss room seems like a mistake somehow.

Launch Octopus is a boss whose attacks are fairly weak but hard to dodge. This puts more emphasis behind powerups in this fight, and since I have a lot more HP, armor, etc. this fight gave me a lot less trouble than before. The stage redesign changes this fight probably the most radically out of all of them, but only seems slightly less forgiving. IMO comparing the stage to the first time it's not so much harder as just different, except maybe for the spikes on the ceiling. Still as fun as ever!

Flame Mammoth is where I start playing really poorly. I should have gotten this a lot more quickly, but every time I was close to victory (on two of my earlier attempts he had one HP left) I just started getting careless. This fight really shouldn't have been so hard as far as I can tell. I also completely fail to make use of Storm Tornado once again. The fight was fun, but I cut essentially everything out here because I wasn't really learning anything or showing anything new here, just playing badly. I did leave in a couple funny things though.

D-Rex is a very challenging boss, and I'm still not really sure how to dodge his thunder balls (especially the last one he fires in any given set) reliably. I guess I could guess when he is about to use it and use C-Sting, as two charges of C-Sting would probably get me through the entire battle. I never try to make use of C-Sting here though. I end up doing something that I totally called earlier in the one full attempt that I show in the middle of the failures here. He's not hard to damage, but he's also hard to survive, making this battle fun and fast-paced, although your victory possibly depends more on what D-Rex happens to do than what you do (I'm not really sure to what extent my failures were my fault here; it's hard to tell).

We've almost reached the end of this series! The next episode is the last in this LP.

Death Count:

Intro Stage: 5
Chill Penguin: 68
Storm Eagle: 22
Sting Chameleon: 73
Armored Armadillo: 62
Spark Mandrill: 28
Flame Mammoth: 29
Launch Octopus: 48
Boomer Kuwanger: 14
Item Search: 27
Sigma 1: 26
Sigma 2: 47
Sigma 3: 56
Final Boss: 8
Total: 515

Wait, another upload already? But shouldn't it have taken another week or two? Well, I've been fiddling with a lot of things related to making videos, particularly getting Windows Movie Maker (the old version that didn't suck) to work on my computer so that I don't have to deal with my old, slow, crashy editor anymore. I wanted to edit a video to actually try out everything that I'm messing with, and the blindfolded runs are light on editing. Lucky thing I still had one of these left!

The final boss, (thankfully) was edited with a light hand for sure. Which is exactly what I was hoping for honestly. First of all, because I have to go through three bosses, attempts at this guy take quite a while. Every attempt takes about seven minutes, so despite the low death count I was recording for the length of time here as when I went through Armored Armadillo's stage. If the final boss's difficulty had been ramped into oblivion this would have gotten old fast. Recognizing that this boss didn't need to be edited to fit into the hack well was a fairly smooth move on Hart-Hunt's part. This ended up taking me less effort overall than vanilla actually, but I suspect that isn't the norm for most people (which is important because it is a Hard Type after all). Veterans would have to deal with the fact that R. Shield runs out of ammo before you win the fight, which I didn't have to worry about because I didn't know it was effective in the first place. Those who have never played before wouldn't have practiced the boss before, meaning that I had a leg up here; if I had done the games in reverse I would have probably found this more difficult than my vanilla experience. And the boosted damage of the boss was offset blow for blow by the larger amount of HP boosts and E. Tanks that I collected.

The first boss is Velguarder. He's pretty much just a warm-up boss. What do you do to escape a dog? Climb up something of course, and that's exactly what I do here. From there, all I need to do is identify the parts of his pattern where it is safe to attack (or when I have to move to avoid his fire) and then take those opportunities. Now that I know how to dash-wall-jump, avoiding his attacks is a lot more reasonable and doesn't really require luck. The dash-wall-jump fits naturally into my strats here, as even when I didn't know it existed I still felt as though I was expected to cross the screen somehow. This guy almost always did some appreciable damage to me in vanilla, but now that I know how to deal with him he isn't too threatening on his own.

Next is Jedi Sigma. My strat from vanilla almost literally just carries right over to Hard Type. The main difference is that now I need to use E. Spark and the Metal Blades for the majority of my damage, as my standard bullets do no damage and my pink shot makes me hover for an instant. It doesn't make much of a difference, but it's still enough to get me hit often. I don't need either of those things for the next fight anyways though. Now that I am doing two damage to him with E. Spark for most of his health bar, it's faster than in vanilla, which is pretty nice. It's too bad that I never experimented with Fire. W, as I thought it wouldn't have the range that I needed.

And now for the main dish. Unfortunately, I somehow remembered less about this guy from my vanilla run than the other two bosses earlier, and end up starting out trying my original lousy strat for this fight thinking it was the correct one. Thankfully, I snap out of that after a couple runs. I want to stand in the very center of the stage when he's in a neutral position. If I'm a little bit off center, the fire can hit me without warning. If I'm a little further over, the hand on my side of the field can hit me with little warning. And if I'm at the edge, both the hand and his lightning balls can hit me. So I want to stay in the center to have the optimal amount of time to react to whatever he does. If the hands shoot lightning when I'm there, it has no effect. If they move towards me, I have an opportunity to attack. But I still have to react fast, because it's hard to tell the difference between when a hand wants to ram me and when it wants to shoot lightning. I don't find this super easy, and I get hit or lose my attack option sometimes. He can also shoot fire, which is rarely a big deal, but it forces me into a position where I can get hit by the hands' lightning more easily. Finally, he can shoot lightning balls, which come very quickly and I never figure out how to reliably dodge. Fortunately, on the final run I just get extremely lucky and he almost never uses it.

As for offense, I could use R. Shield, but I didn't know about that. I also never worked out how to stand on his hands at the top of the field, so there was no possibility to get multiple hits in from that position. So essentially it came down to me getting one pink blast every time that the hands moved to ram me. Simple enough, but it's fairly slow. Thank goodness I didn't mess up with my E. Tanks this time!

And that's the end! I hope that you enjoyed the LP, particularly if your screen name happens to be Hart-Hunt. I ramble about the hack at the end of the video, and it was (surprisingly) articulated well enough that I won't add anything here. This is my first LP (that doesn't suck) of a game (that doesn't suck), so feel free to throw in some feedback.