Archive for March, 2009

Finally got the tenth torn letter! Took me a couple of hours, but the second half of the path up to it was far easier than the first, so once I got half-way I got the letter easily. Now I’ve got to decide whether to try the final boss or run away and start over to get the two letters I’m still missing. Decisions, decisions.

Fighting the upgraded versions of the annoying twins Kim and Chi over the last few days, I found myself experiencing the gaming equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. It’s a rock hard fight, I was dying dozens of times, over and over again… and yet I started to feel like the game was doing everything it could to help me out, as if it was my ally in the fight against the twins. The twins’ recovery times after attacks started to seem absurdly long, the warm up times equally so. The collision detection seemed to be skewed heavily in my favour. Every failure felt like my fault – and there were far more failures based on bad split-second decision making than based on mucking up the controls. Sometimes I didn’t press the buttons correctly, but mostly I was dying because I was just deciding to do to the wrong thing. It felt like the game was giving me all this help, yet I was letting the side down. Maybe we should call it Prinny Syndrome, when a game seems to be trying to help you out even though it’s killing you over and over again.

Anyway, I killed Kim and Chi this lunch time, finally, and then went through the rest of the bosses in the boss rush without any real problems. Basil and Chervil are another two-character boss, but much, much easier than Kim and Chi. Slower, easier to predict, no real trouble. Next was Cyberclops 2.0, who was as insanely easy as the first version. Get in the right spot and you can kill him without being in any danger of being hit. Then on to a fight with Hoshikage, who took ages to work out when I first faced her, but who I only lost one life to today. And, finally, Moab, who should have been the easiest of the lot, but who somehow held me up for quite a while, taking about ten or fifteen lives off me before I got him. (That mainly was down to impatience to finish the rush, I think. Once I forced myself to calm down and take it slow I beat him easily.)

So now it’s on to the final boss again. I’ve got 677 lives in stock. Will it be enough?

Kim and Chi are too hard. They’re annoying in their normal end-of-stage form, but the upgraded boss rush versions are horrific. I’ve got about eight hundred lives at the moment, but I may decide to run away and go for another play through where they don’t appear. It’s not that they break the game, because they don’t, it’s just that they’re a bit too hard for me.