AM2R 1.5.4 Release Run

As my shoulder has, in fact, not healed fast enough for me to get the next XCOM 2 post finished, have a completely different post I finished a while back and then waffled on whether to post: another AM2R run.

I did the recording in the first place because stuff people were saying made it sound like it was a more substantial release, when it was actually a bugfix release, which realizing this lack of new content lead to the waffling. I ended up showing off enough interesting stuff I wasn't willing to just delete the recordings and all, though, so here we are.

In the first video, I discover that the suction units can actually be Bombed -they suck Bombs to them- which is way more convenient than using Missiles and I wish I'd discovered that much sooner.

I also show off that you can skip a specific boss fight you might not think can be skipped... and starting from the second video, largely show off how you can thus get through the entire game without Space Jump. A portion of this is clearly intentional, though I suspect you're meant to have to get the Space Jump before you can fully clear the Tower. It's possible I'm missing some trick for getting through that one pre-Zeta damage corridor without taking damage, though; I'm not a real AM2R expert, for all that I keep doing videos of random runs and all.

The third video involves a fair amount of dying. I'm fairly surprised I beat the Tester in one try with no Space Jump; the deaths are all to the one zeta Metroid I suspect is supposed to require Space Jump. Or more accurately are to the spikes in its route, rather than it, itself killing me.

The fourth video is straightforward enough, and the fifth and sixth videos are largely not anything new.

I do ultimately go back and grab the Space Jump, as Omegas are pretty unpleasant to fight without it. I'd actually always intended to go back for Space Jump simply because the Metroid Queen's final stage would be so miserable without it, but I'd not realized how important Space Jump is to fighting Omega Metroids efficiently. In particular, I hadn't realized their flame attack is basically an express counter to trying to use Spider Ball to keep out of their reach and dodge attacks and all. Still, I'm sure someone has cleared or will clear the game without Space Jump; it should totally be possible, and it's actually largely not that big an issue to be without it. Several fights -like the Tester- that I'd taken as designed around the Space Jump are actually perfectly doable, if a little harder, without Space Jump. It's only the Torizo fight -the one triggered by getting Space Jump- that actually is designed very specifically in the expectation you have Space Jump.

So that was cool to see in action in a regular run, rather than a randomized run.

There's a lot of sloppiness and screw-ups in these videos. Some of those are caused by using a keyboard instead of a controller -I literally can't do certain maneuvers because the keyboard can't accept that many inputs- while others are just me being rusty from having not touched the game at all in months, but there's also a certain amount of 'wow how did that happen' I can't explain... like in the first video, where I unlock access to an Energy Tank and then go right on past it, instead of immediately grabbing it.