Re: SoR2access again, with recordings and other games
X-Men
Of the games I included in the first post, this is the least accessible, because it's definitely a platformer. But, between the vOICe and some trial and error, I've been able to make it through enough areas that I'm willing to give it a write-up.
First of all, the copy in the zip requires the European bios to load, but it will run slowly if you leave the country code set to Europe after it gets past the intro. Slow motion might be helpful in some cases, since it's hard to get good information out of the vOICe at more than 1Hz, but you can switch it to US or Japan after the intro if you want normal speed.
The logo should be followed by some music, which is the same music that will play in the menus/character select area.
Press start here, and you'll get the story, with its own menacing music (Magneto's doing something with a satellite, I dunno.).
When the title music cmes up again, you'll be on the difficulty menu. You start out on the "Hero" setting, which is basically "Normal". If you press up, you'll be on "amateur", and down will be "superhero". Amateur is the easiest, but you get an ominous ending halfway through in that mode, and don't get to play the last 3 levels. (If you can get the amateur ending while blind, though, you're clearly lord Awesome McGamemaster, and I want to hear about it!)
When you select your difficulty, you'll be at the character select. Now, the way this works is a little weird; basically, between the levels, you're in the Danger Room, where the X-Men do their training. The character select screen is actually on a series of monitors in the bottom-center of the room, and if you manage to hit one of those monitors when playing, you can go back to character select.
The character select does not loop, so you can go all the way to the left for Gam
bit, or to the right for Cyclops.
From left to right, it goes:
Gambit
Nightcrawler
Wolverine
Cyclops
If you press start on a character, it will bring up their profile and a photo, including their stats, abilities, and backstory. Unless you have an OCR program that can read these, you're better off looking up a walkthrough on Gamefaqs if you want to read them. They aren't that important, but they might be interesting.
Press start again, and your character will enter the Danger Room.
If the game recognizes a second player controller (which it probably will), the title music will continue playing, while player2 is given the chance to join. If you leave the area with these monitors, the Danger Room music and timer will start.
Controls:
A: Mutant power. You have a mutant power meter, and it can run out pretty quickly if you abuse it. It refills automatically, but very slowly--on the order of several minutes. There are items you
can find that restore mutant power, but they're small and you probably won't find them with the vOICe. Using these powers can get a little complicated.
B: basic attack. You can combine these with jumping or crouching as needed. Mst of them are punches, but Gambit gets to use a staff, which means he actually gets a combo where, if you press B twice quickly, he'll use the staff, then punch. THe staff also hits low as well as directly ahead, which is nice, since there are some things most characters need to crouch to hit.
C: Jump. Holding it can sometimes increase the maximum height.
C while jumping: Gambit and Cyclops can do a flip-thing this way, which may or may not get them to jump higher/give you a moment where your attacks can hit a wider area.
If you pause the game, all sprites (that's characters, enemies, and interactive objects) become invisible, but hte background stays on screen. At the top of the screen, the characters' icons a
ppear (in the same left-to-right order), but there's a bottom row as well, with more characters you can summon to help you.
This pause screen does not loop, but the sound of the cursor moving will still play when you're at the edges. It also has a few differences if you're playing with another player.
The bottom row, from left to right:
Rogue
Archangel
Iceman
Storm
You can only summon these once per level, unless you find their icons after using them. (The icons are pretty rare, and positioned inconveniently.).
To summon them, you need to select them from the pause screen, unpause, and press A.
Rogue will fly at a specific target and do the maximum damage a single hit can do, usually.
Archangel will fly across the screen 3 or 4 times, which usually kills everything that isn't a boss. If you time it right with bosses, he can get in several hits on them as well.
Storm hovers and causes, well, a storm, which can
sometimes hit bosses twice, but usually only hits once. It's also good for killing everything on screen.
Iceman will create an ice-bridge, starting from where you are when you summon him, and going to the left or right, depending on which way you're facing. The bridge will disappear after a few seconds. Most of the trickiest platform puzzles were designed in such a way that Iceman cannot get you all the way across, but he helps.
In two player, if you move all the way to the right (as player 1), or left (as player 2), in the pause menu, you'll wind up on Jean Gray. Normally, Jean saves you from falling in pits (which you will be doing a lot, since they're hard to avoid even visually), but in 2player, she'll move one player closer to the other. She does this automatically, to prevent someone from going off screen, but it can be used strategically, too.
About those pits.
Jean will carry you back up in a forcefield, either until you are abo
ve something you can stand on, or at the top of the level, whichever comes first. If you hold left or right while she's flying you, she'll move you in that direction.
But! You still take damage from falling into pits, so you want to avoid it as much as possible. That's one reason I'd suggest playing with the vOICe (the other being that you just plain can't find everything by guessing and memorizing, unless you're just really good at guessing and memorizing).
About the mutant powers:
Gambit throws exploding cards. If you hold A long enough before releasing, he'll throw more or something. They tend to flutter around him, which means they sometimes hit above and below as well. If you can't hit an enemy with his staff, a card will probably do it. His staff is pretty nice on its own, though.
Nightcrawler's teleportation is probably the most complicated. If you hold A, he'll basically enter BAMF mode, where he is
invulnerable, and any enemies that touch him take damage, excepting a few bosses. I think you don't lose much if any mutant power just by using it this way, even. You can teleport directionally, but whether you release the direction or the A button first matters. I forget how, specifically, but I think you need ot be tapping the direction when you press A. If you do it one way, he'll teleport a short distance in the specified direction. If you do it the other way, he'll actually teleport all over the place before returning to near his starting position, which is an ok attack, but a terrible teleport and a waste of mutant power. Yes, he can teleport through most walls, but emphasis on "most". He also has a dive-kick he does if you attack while he's in the air. It's nice, because he dives down and forward and hits whatever's in the way until he lands, but you can stop the dive by releasing B. It makes it easier to guarantee where you're go
ing to land, and is probably his best attack for hitting bosses.
Wolverine's claws can be extended or retracted with A. The sound for extending and retracting them is the same, but his strikes will sound metalized with the claws out. He loses power while the claws are out, and they retract automatically when he hits 0. When he has low mutant power, he will sometimes go into a berserker rage, in which he just runs around attacking at random. This can damage him (especially if he does it off a cliff), and doesn't do much to enemies, so you should try to keep it from happening. He has a lesser dive attack with the claws out, and he can double-jump with claws extended to do a spin attack. The spin attack costs a lot of mutant power, so use it sparingly. It's a pretty nice attack, though. Oh, and Wolverine can heal if you sit still with claws retracted, but it takes, like, 10 minutes.
Cyclops's optic blasts are frustrating, because they're very powerful
and efficient, but hard to aim for us. He can perform them while crouching and jumping, and if you hold A, you can aim them in any of the 8 directions, diagonals included. If you hold A long enough, he'll do a version of the blast that bounces off walls a few times. You can't hear it bounce, but this version does sound different when it fires. Or it's supposed to, anyway; some emulators screw with sound and the two optic blasts might get blurred if the settings are wrong. Cyclops is also pretty tall, so sometimes crouching attacks, be they punches or optic blasts, are the only way to go.
Also, you have a limited number of substitutions in each level, which let you switch characters. (These do not work in the Danger Room; you have to use the monitors there.). To switch, just pick the character from the pause screen, and when you unpause, press A. You can't do this very many times per level, though.
Back to the Danger Room.
This area is mostly pla
tforms and computers and things. Before some levels, there will be orbs flying around in different patterns, which restore some life/power if destroyed. The orbs make a pretty distinct sound, but I don't even know if the timing of the loop corresponds to their position in their flight pattern, and it's not in stereo, so... good luck finding those.
The Danger Room usually has a time limit; if time runs out, you enter the level anyway. There is an entrance to the levels, though, if you don't want to wait for time to run out. It's this big green thing floating off to the left of a certain platform, positioned like so:
to the left of the character select area, is a wall, short enough that you can jump atop it. Important note: when you're against a wall and facing it, pressing B has no effect (unless there's a switch there), so if you want to know if you've run into a wall, just press B.
There are three platforms, one atop the other, abov
e and to the left of this wall. THe portal to the levels is across a jump to the left of the top platform. Reaching it audibly is hard, but luckily unnecessary, unless you want to try the Gambit Glitch. The Gambit glitch is when you hold A while jumping through the portal, until the level starts. Sometimes, this lets you skip the level. Sometimes, it just freezes the game.
The first level includes these puzzles, basically from left to right:
-You start out in a mess of trees and cliffs, where it's harder to avoid falling in at least one pit than not.
- There's a cave, where there's a lever you need to hit to lower an impassable wall. I think Nightcrawler can teleport through the wall, but the lever is surprisingly easy to find. It's small and does not show up well on the vOICe, but the cave itself does, and an enemy will jump at you just a little to the left of the lever. So all you really need to do is avoid going on top of the cave (or dying of
pits and spears), and you should be able to find it. Some hit-every-step-or-so might be necessary. (Gambit can hit it with his staff; everyone else needs to do a crouching attack to hit it.). You'll here the lever click and some rumbling when you hit it. If you fall in a pit, you've passed it.
- Past the lever, there's an opening between the first cave and a second. It's hard to get out of the second cave when you can't see it, but if you focus on jumping up and slightly to the right until you run into more enemies, you should avoid it entirely. That second cave contains an Achangel icon, all the way in the back, but you shouldn't need it.
- The next area is supposed to have a puzzle where you kill the hornets by destroying their nest, but it's not worth it. If you manage to stay in the tree tops and actually do so, good for you. But this is one of the few places you can safely land on the ground for a while.
- When the pits reappear
, you should hear the waterfall. It's quiet for now, but it gets louder when you get closer. This part involves a lot of platform-hopping. The platforms are pretty wide, but you still need to find them somehow. There's a path behind the waterfall near the top of the level, with some life/power increases in there. If you can't find that path, Jean can get you across, so long as you have enough health left to survive. I would not recommend using Iceman here.
- There's a brief reprieve with some enemies with spears hiding in the foliage, before you come to an area with two well sculpted trees between two beds of deadly thorns. You're supposed to jump from tree to tree until you get to the top. If you can pull this off, you'll certainly take less damage crossing the next area, if only a little.
- The next area consists of a large field of thorny brush, a brief area of safe cliff (which has a pit in it, but it's easy to avoid), then a field of
spikes. You're supposed to jump onto a platform from the top of those previous trees, then hop across some baskets that rise and fall on pulleys. You can hear when the pulleys change direction, but the baskets are very thin and I'd be impressed if someone could get across this with only the vOICe. There's a stack of platforms to the right of the safe area, and above the spikes, which you can only reach via those baskets. The relevance of that area is that, on the top platform, there's a lever which lowers the spikes, so you can jump across each section safely. There's an enemy on one of those platforms, too, and there's one down on the safe cliff, which can... sorta help orient ou, I guess.
It's important to note that you don't actually make much sound when you get hurt by the thorns or the spikes, but the thorns do tend to cause your character to jump a little, so you might hear the landing sound come a bit unexpectedly often. This is t
he main reason I switch characters in this level, since it's very hard to make it across without taking loads of damage. Also, stay in the air, even if it's jumping, since that means less contact with the spikes.
- Not far past the spikes, you'll run into Juggernaught. He mostly just stomps across the screen, from left to right. You won't be able to leave his area until he is defeated. There are some platforms you can jump to while he's charging, but if he's not charging and you're up there, he'll jump and cause the ground to shake, and that's enough to knock you off the platforms. (There's a way to skip this fight using Iceman, but it's hard to get right and isn't really worth it). The only way to damage him is to hit him in the general helmet area. Nightcrawler is good at this if you have a good sense of where he and you are. If not, Rogue and Archangel can usually defeat him.
- The next area leads up to a river
(like the waterfall, it gets louder as you get closer.). You're meant to hop across on moving platforms that appear to rotate such that you fall off after a second or three. These are thin and partly obscured by the equipment they're attached to and it's almost impossible to make it across without falling (and Jean has a hard time landing you on one of them). I usually save Iceman for this (don't use him until you can hear the platforms moving; luckily, these do make sound.). Iceman's bridge doesn't cover the whole river, though, so unless you manage to jump pretty far, time the summon just right, and make an amazing leap over the remaining gap, you'll probably take some fall damage, here.
- When the river gets quieter, but does not go away, you're at the end of this area. There's a door ou need to break open, and I think you might even need to be jumping a little to hit it. Then jump through it (t the right, naturally), and you
9;ll go on to Zaledain's Temple.
Zaledain's temple has a pit of... nails? I'm not sure, but there are vanishing platforms you're supposed to use to get across, Mota-style. If you walk to the right and hear the landing sound, you've fallin in that pit, and need to jump back to the left to get out. An Iceman bridge can get you across this one, if you summon him while you're in the air. Just be sure you're facing right!
There's a slight doorway you need to jump through on the other side, then you're in the boss arena, where you have to fight Zaledain. She likes to sit in one place and throw blasts at you. She jumps to a different platofrm (or the ground) every time she's hit, making it hard (but not impossible) to get the maximum hits on her with Archangel and Storm. The room is full of platforms, but there is plenty of space between them, so if you need to find her to attack directly, you'll probably have some trouble.
(I like Nightcrawler for bossfights, just because of the divekick and ability to teleport past them, but whatever works...). If you want to use the vOICe, you might try the color filters here; the platforms are sort of a lumber-ish color, a light brown/yellow/gray, and Zaledain is glowing purple and red and maybe a little Orange. Her blasts are yellow-orange, and... just plain hard to dodge without knowing where they're coming from, but surprisingly weak.
The next level involves a lot of doors, keys, switches, and lifts. If you can make enough sense of the vOICe's feedback by this point, it's a good way to find things. The lifts are not likely to show up on the vOICe, but their general areas are; for example, one lift rises through the center of two long platforms that are pretty easy to hear.
Nightcrawler can skip a good chunk of the platforming parts of this stage, even; he can teleport through the first wall you run into.
There's a good deal of
color-coding in the enemies and different parts of this level, too, so you may eventually want to try it with color filters.
I'll save the attempted walkthrough of this one for when I know the way I've explained things so far has actually been helpful. It's kinda long.
URL: http://audiogamesforum.captivatingsound.com/viewtopic.php?pid=174853#p174853
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
