Mastery #16: Pac-Man (Atari 2600)

 

        

        I don't have that much to really say about this game. Many people know just how terrible of a port this game is compared to it's arcade counter-part. One of the most difficult parts about playing this game is that the ghost flicker on screen so much sometimes you can't really tell if they are blinking to where you can eat them or if they are just flickering normally. The arcade game made it very clear when a ghost was eatable, even had a sound effect to tell you when they were edible. But the Atari 2600 version nah, it does play a sound effect but even when the sound ends you still have maybe like 2-3 seconds still you can eat the ghost. I died so many times because of this. 

https://retroachievements.org/game/13094

    Most of the achievements to this set was fairly simple with the exception of 2 that caused me a lot of problems. Some of the cheevos were slightly difficult like the getting 5 lives total, or the reaching 5k score. Normally it doesn't look that bad and truth be told it wasn't really now looking back on it. But what really caused me the most trouble was the 10k points & the 9 lives. And those only proved difficult because of one reason. It was because what level I was on playing the game on. 

    

    For anyone that didn't know the Atari 2600 had a switch on the console that controlled different difficulty levels for games. Most of the time it would just change the speed of the game or just throw more enemies your way, but in the specific case to Pac-Man it would just speed up Pac-Man. Which in hindsight now is an ABSOLUTE MUST to earn the two cheevos that caused me the most problems. As you progress in this game the ghosts move faster but Pac-Man remains the same speed the entire time so when you get to the later levels the ghost move faster. So in mode 1 or I guess on difficulty 1 Pac-Man moves rather slow. So getting through the first 3 levels is fine but once you start getting to level 5 it become just way too difficult.

        

    

    So after I moved up the difficulty of the game the last two cheevos became much easier cause Pac-Man could actually keep distance from the ghosts. The other huge factor I used to master this was the "CC Pattern". This is a pattern in the map that you can move to avoid the ghosts almost every time. This pattern was created by Casey Coenen and can be found on the gamefaq page for Pac-Man. This pattern only applies to the Atari 2600 version too apparently. But it frustrates me that it says if you stick to this pattern you can go on forever, that's not true. Not true at all. I am sure they didn't actually mean it that it can work forever but still I didn't think there were going to be so many hiccups with it still. I died a handful of times, most of the time I had to go off the normal path just to avoid death. But I must say once I got the hang of it & understood what the path was doing it's not that difficult adjust. 

    

   

    Overall the achievement set was good set & the game was well not the greatest but if you turn off the piercing sound it makes & pop on a 80's arcade remix it's not nearly as bad. 

Mastery #15: Mega Man Soccer (SNES)

 

    Mastery #15 what a great game to make my 15th mastery. This game was another little gem from my childhood. At the time when I bought this game my two favorite sports was hockey & soccer. And one of my favorite video game franchises/heroes was in fact Mega Man, so this game to me was peanut butter & jelly. This game overall was a pretty standard soccer game, select your roster, formation, pass. kick, slide tackle. Except it had one other feature which was super shots. Super shots were like if Mega Man were to put his powers into the shot. So like when Ice Man shoots the ball, it will turn into ice and as soon as it hits it's target it freezes them. With skill this could be the goalie you're shooting at and if so the ball will drop & roll behind them resulting it into a goal. When I was younger seeing the computer team do it to me was beyond frustrating since I didn't know how to return it back to the computer. This was the times before the internet so it wasn't like I had any easy way to figure out the button combination to do the super shot. (It's holding down R + Shoot button).

    Looking back on it now & playing it again to earn the achievements I've really come to realize just how great of a gem this game really is. It's no Mario Strikers Charged but it definitely paved the way to that point. Even many sports anime use this super shot adaptation in there show (Prince of Tennis & Eyeshield 21 & Inazuma Eleven). Even movies used a similar adaptation in Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer where someone could perform a super shot of some kind. Now I'm not saying all of these examples took what Mega Man Soccer did, because although I didn't perform any proper research but I am sure this "Super ability shot in a sport" doesn't all just come from this game. But to look back on it now it does seem like a relatively great idea for a Soccer video game. 

    This may be unpopular opinion but despite James Rolfe's comedic take on Mega Man Soccer (AVGN Episode 139) I think this a great game. Now I wouldn't necessarily put it on my top 10 or anything but I would love to see this game get a rerelease or a new updated version for the Switch or PC. Basically doing their own take of Mario Strikers Charged but just with Mega Man characters. The controls are good, the game has a decent good pace, it's not over challenging in any way, and it has some great SNES music to it. Like Dr. Wily's field theme just sounds so cool.

    Now let me glance over some of the frustrating flaws to this game. The two major frustrations that come to mind is the slide tackle/jump button & the control of shooting. Both make sense to me on a technical level, as in the same button functions slide tackle & a jump block or header. But when you press it if the opposing player has position of the ball your character will perform a slide tackle but if the opponent chooses to pass or shoot, your character will perform instead a jump block or header. This becomes frustrating because you will behind your opponent just about to catch up to them to perform a slide tackle but instead just jump up into the air looking like a fool. 

 

    The achievements to this game were all pretty simple and straight forward. https://retroachievements.org/game/1021 Score a goal with each character's super shot, win in the League, win the Capcom Championship & Win the tournament. There was one cheevo that I was surprised was not in the list though, which was winning in a shoot-out, my whole time while earning all the cheevos for this game not once did I enter in the shoot out screen:

    Now it's possible that was a cheevo before and it's since edited to be removed for whatever reason. Just like how by the time anyone who would be reading this, somebody may have added this cheevo in. Other than that this was a great game to master, it can be a bit time consuming and repetitive but not something too difficult where it would take up a lot of your time.

While finishing up this blog post I did come across some information that I was completely unaware of. This game released in the United States was not a fully finished game. It was missing the entire ending sequence & the ability to play as Dr. Wily. Since than someone has come along and fixed this issue (https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4215/) but it just begs the request even more, RERELEASE MEGA MAN SOCCER!