Mega Man X3

I haven’t been doing a lot of gaming lately. For the most part I’d say that a lot of games these days aren’t really tickling my pickle in the right way anymore. I could blame it on the changing gaming industry, and write off nearly all new games as being utter crap, but instead I’ll openly admit that I don’t give games much of a chance. This is a sure sign that I’m getting old and stuck in my ways. So to celebrate, I decided to play through and write a post about one of my favorite games of all time: Mega Man X3.

So what actually possessed me to play it again? Egoraptor. Go watch his awesome videos. He recently made a hilariously amazing video on Mega Man X. Now the first of the X series was fantastic, but X3 happens to be my absolute favorite, mainly because you get to play as Zero and also (if you know all the secrets) you can get X to become insanely powerful – probably more unfairly powerful than any other Mega Man game in existence. No joke.

If you compare what X can do in X3 versus the previous two games, it’s pretty nuts. Sure, you can acquire the Hadoken that one-shots dudes in the face, but you have to be on the ground and have full life to use it! In X3 you start off able to dash, and can get 8 armor upgrades after that. You can double dash in the air, get this amazing red bubble shield that pretty much makes it so you can’t take more than one point of damage when hit, and if you’re running low on life you can just stand still to regenerate. And it fills up your E Tanks.

To top it all off, you can acquire Zero’s Z-Saber, which you can use at any time just by charging your buster, and it’s guaranteed to do 50%-75% percent damage to any boss. So yeah… you can kill Sigma in 2 hits. You’re kinda overpowered. It’s somewhat anticlimactic, but still quite neato.

How do you acquire the Z-Saber? I’m glad you asked, because I’ve often wondered myself, and almost all of the walkthroughs on GameFAQs don’t tell you! A couple of them tell you the WRONG information! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played through the game trying to get it, and screwed up due to misleading info. I’m going to tell it to you straight.

After defeating 2 bosses, you’re presented with opportunities to fight Bit, Byte, and Vile as mid-bosses. When you encounter them, you can either just win the fight or you can destroy them completely. To completely destroy them, you have to last-hit them with specific weapons. You can a-splode Bit using Frost Shield, annihilate Byte with Tornado Fang, and blow Vile to bits with Spinning Blade. To get the Z-Saber, the only requirement is that you kill Vile with Spinning Blade, the weapon you get from Crush Crawfish. You do not have to have certain items, and you can die as many times as you like. It doesn’t matter. Just kill Vile with Spinning Blade. That’s it. Oh yeah, and make sure Zero isn’t dead.

Once done, you’ll notice that the second Doppler stage is different! It’s not blown to bits like it normally is! Well, that means you’ve done everything correctly, and when you get to the mid-boss gate, switch to Zero and fight. The boss will crash into Zero, damaging him. Zero will leave you with his sword, and you’ll proceed to kill everyone in the face. Enjoy.

Ok, that’s it. Go play old video games now. Embrace your childhood.

I see you like to play Transylvania…

A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with my dad, and for some reason we got to talking about old text-based adventure games we  used to play on an ancient Apple II computer. Now, I’m not really sure what inspired me to do this, but nostalgia is a powerful thing, so recently I decided to search all over the internet for old computer games to see if I could figure out the titles to all the games we used to play.

It was a difficult task. After all, the internet barely existed way back then. Armed with only my faint memories from when I was a youngling (and a little luck), I was able to rediscover this aggravating and frighting game, Transylvania. Even more fun was discovering how to actually play old DOS games on an up-to-date Windows machine.

You need these things:

1. DOSBox
2. DOSShell
3. Some place to download old DOS games

I’ll let you figure out how to piece them together.

The best part about the whole experience was slowly remembering things as I played through the game, though occasionally my memories conflicted with what I was seeing in Transylvania. For example, I distinctly remember picking up a cross on top of the grave… and then you used the cross to kill the vampire in his castle… and then you could go to the basement of the castle to pick up this sweet item… but it wasn’t there! WHY!?

It turns out they made several versions of Transylvania, and the DOS version I found wasn’t the same as the old Apple II game I used to play. It was actually a lot harder, but still quite fun. I totally stayed up until 2:30am and beat the game. On a weeknight. I strongly recommend taking the time jump back into your childhood and finding some of these gems. If anyone can find Grandma’s House, let me know.