Metroid Fusion

Yakuza is just, like, a perfect storm of things that make bosses suck. Hard-to-dodge attacks, attacks that deal massive amounts of damage, small vulnerability window, erratic movement pattern...

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

It just feels like you're shooting missile after missle into his mouth...and it doesn't do that much damage. The second form is especially annoying

I treat all living things equally. That is to say, I eat all living things

Is that the spider thing? I think that only annoyed me because the last save point was several rooms previous, and I tended to die a few times when I first fought him.

Now though, he's not so bad. You just need to have a good strategy.

I just got up to Yakuza and seriously, fuck that guy.

Step 1: Morph ball in the corner, he practically can't hit you in his first phase.
Step 2: no what are you doing out of the corner get back over there just stay there maybe he'll go away

In seriousness, it's been a while since I last played Fusion (having lost the cartridge and whatnot), but once you know what you're doing, Yakuza isn't that awful. Nightmare, on the other hand, can seriously mess you up if he gets the chance to pin you to the wall while making gravity all wonky.

Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark All the dinosaurs are running wild

Nightmare is random. Fortunately nightmare can also be a relatively short battle.

Apocalypse: Dirge Of Swans.

I found the Nightmare battle more fun than maddening. Perhaps I just liked its creepy melting face.

...

That face is a large part of his appeal to me. It's just so delightfully wrong.

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

Ridley-X... eh, fuck that screechy bastard and its cheap-ass attacks. Even Yakuza and the SA-X didn't give me as much trouble as that fucker.

Experience has taught me to investigate anything that glows.

Well if you use missiles, he's really hard. I don't think I could beat him using missiles(seems like the charged plasma beam is the "standard way").

I treat all living things equally. That is to say, I eat all living things

Yakuza is probably the boss that killed me the most, besides maybe the SA-X chases. Ridley and Nightmare were the hardest for me to get a pattern down on though. I ended up just shooting at them when I could and running away when I couldn't and it worked for the most part. Nightmare took longer.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

I like Fusion but it's not one of my favourites. It emphasises the story over the gameplay when Metroid has never been about the story, and feels too rigid and linear, forcing you down a specific path of progress and blocking off areas of the station you don't need to go to for your current objective, never giving you much of a chance to explore. Also, with Samus constantly in communication with Mission Control, the sense of isolation in the previous games is absent.

The SA-X is cool. It really feels like you're being stalked by an unstoppable Determinator.

I'm torn between liking Super and Fusion more. Super had better exploration and interesting sequence breaking, but Fusion's controls just felt so much smoother. In Super you got lost on a strange alien world, while in Fusion you had an objective you had to find on the BSL. They're slightly different, but both are great.

Your preferences are not everyone else's preferences.

Precisely! I personally don't try to think of a definitive Metroid style. Yeah, I agree that Super Metroid is a really awesome game, but Fusion was also really good IMO.

It is hilarious how easy it is to exploit SA-X's AI though. Kind of a nightmare retardant.

I treat all living things equally. That is to say, I eat all living things

If you have a choice, see if you can find the Japanese version of the game, since as with Prime, North America got the most rushed version of it, while the Japanese Fusion includes a few more features such as the difficulty selection later seen in all versions of Zero Mission.

And hey, I think the linear, modular style was a neat homage to Return of Samus; it just didn't work out as well as it should have. I think it's funnier, too, to try to explore the whole game the wrong way and discover just how many brick walls there are, than Zero Mission's condescending approach of making it look linear but then providing secret shortcuts that you'd only find early by firing missiles into odd corners of ceilings, which is a total reversal of what I felt worked about the NES game's design. What really brings Fusion down for me is the lack of a "skip whole conversations" button, for players who already know the whole story, since you can always go back and re-read your current mission anyway.

It is kind of annoying how even if you do pull off a trick to skip ahead in the sequence, it just glitches out the game story so that you can't proceed until you go back and do it correctly; Metroid of all games ought to be flexible enough to handle that sort of thing. The best is if you can do the "single wall jump extension" trick (may require emulator) in that big empty room of Sector 2 TOR, allowing you access to the whole upper-right section of the level much too early. There the game gets all sorts of confused, switching between vine-choked and vine-free depending on what rooms you last entered, and giving you both caterpillar rooms and wasp rooms. You could even beat a boss or two early, but I believe they don't give you new weapons then, and the only item of value may be an early energy tank.

Actually it does, if you watch all the demos after the title screen.

I really don't think you can complain about the game not being built to handle people breaking it by exploiting glitches that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

EDIT: Ignore me, I was being dumb.

edited 15th Jul '12 8:12:45 AM by unnoun

Yes you can. It could totally have been built to let you break the sequence, but they chose not to and made it needlessly inflexible instead.

If there is one thing Fusion needed, it was an option to skip, or at least speed up the dialogue portions. They're not too long, but long enough to get irritating on a speed-run.

Your preferences are not everyone else's preferences.