MASTEROFMAYHEM'S PROFILE

author=CyberDagger
Pokémon Red and Blue. And this is coming from a hardcore Pokémon fan.

Sure, they started the series, and the newest games still use the same core mechanics. I am grateful for starting someone I love so much, of course.

But if anyone goes on harping about how they were the best in the series and the subsequent games are nothing compared to the originals, I will rightfully assume they are dressed in nothing but many layers of nostalgia goggles.

Truth is, Red and Blue are horribly broken games thet only miraculously manage to hold themselves together. Insane balance oversights (Though present day Game Freak is still guilty of this, though not as much. Stealth Rock anyone?) and ridiculous glitches make a game that was built with the multiplayer as one of its main components an imbalanced mess.

Some of the many glitches actually are bad enough to make the game fall apart, mostly because of crappy memory allocation practices that let wildly different types of data be saved in the same memory locations. The original Pokémon games are type error time bombs.

Now, I'm not saying the games are bad. They're not, and I can still enjoy them. But to say that they are the peak of the series is delusional. The Pokémon series only became something mechanically coherent with Gold and Silver.

Holy crap I think we actually agree on something.

Wait, is this finally finished?

A boogady boggady boo! Sorry, sorry I just couldn’t help myself.

Anyway he’s an Idea for a boss I just came up with, and that I intend for use in one of my projects.

Massive Driller
The boss possesses three attacks that it uses at random
- A powerful physical attack with its drill.
- A “Laser” attack that ignores defences, but is otherwise not as powerful as its physical attack.
- And a “shockwave” move that dose light damage to all characters and can cause them to fall over (preventing them from acting for a turn).
- Additionally it can cause a cave in/avalanche which dose massive earth damage to the party. Once it does this it can’t use it again until its next attack cycle.

After 3 or 4 turns the machine stats to overheat and it shuts down.
When this happens 2 mechanics/engineers appear.
- The mechanics will use a repair skill on the boss that will restore some of it HP
- Alternatively the mechanics an also attack by throwing a wrench at a party member. It dose light damage and has a chance of inflicting a “Dizzy” condition.

After 3 turns the machine reactivates. The mechanics leave (if there still alive) and the driller goes back to attacking the party (and it’s allowed to use its cave in attack again).

It’s defiantly a balancing act. You have to make sure the opponent dose enough damage that the battle doesn’t take forever, but also that the opponent doesn’t do so much you have to spend every turn healing/reviving which would also slow things down.

And when I said “exploitable weakness” I met one that turns a long fight into a short one. Of course you have to make sure that exploit is fairly obvious for the player to figure out other they will complain about it being a long annoying fight.

However I do believe that reducing healing would help make the game more difficult and/or fast-paced it that’s what you want to do. Just be prepared to have people complain about it.

Of course I just thinking out loud here at the moment.

I think we have, but it’s nice to see a list of stuff like this all in one place. Plus my subscription only kicks in once a month or so. I don’t know why.