The reason you don't get energy refill at Wily stages is because you're going back-to-back on the stages. the first set of stages, the idea is you head back to doctor light's lab and therefore recover.
I get what you're saying but if you're entering a new stage, it makes more sense to me to have weapons refilled. Energy is, so why not weapons as well? I believe they changed this with the Gameboy games.
@@GoodVibeCollecting I feel like it's all just part of making the game harder. Forcing you to be more careful about your resources, and perhaps rely on weapons you otherwise wouldn't due to your favorite weapons running low on energy. I always liked it because of that extra thought it adds to resource management. Of course, that all becomes kind of moot when it's typically so easy to just get yourself a game over to refill your weapons if you need to, anyway.
@@gurvmlk Either way, it was a different approach than most NES games at the time. Unfortunately in this case, it makes it all that much easier to softlock the game.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Although it does accentuate one of the good things about video game time limits. They give you an out if you wind up stuck someplace, because you can get yourself killed by waiting out the clock.
@@gurvmlk So I guess in a way, timers were a good thing and a bad thing. Bad because console games didn't really need them like arcade games did. Good, because as you mentioned, they can get you out of a jam.
Lol what? You would have to be absolute moron to fall victim to this lol. Who uses coil that damn much anyways? You would have to be really bad at the game
Mega Man 3 was the first Mega Man that I played. I rented it back in the day. Loved it so much that I ended up buying and / or getting gifted 1 - 4 on NES befoe upgrading to SNES and getting X 1-3. 3 was my favorite, with 4 being a close 2nd. The music still pops in my head from time to time. I never realized that you could get soft locked in these games. I believe the reason that you don't get automatic weapon, etc energy refills in the Wiley stages is to add some challenge. There was also a 2nd controller code that would pause enemies. Mega Man 4 has a glitch where you can toad / rain flush Wiley, after defeating him, but before he flies away that soft locks the game.
It may have been the first I played as well. Been so long that I don't remember. Mega Man 2 was the first one I remember seeing. Clearly remember my friend's friend getting it for his birthday, ripping open the box, and throwing it in the trash. I consider 4 to be one of the weaker NES Mega Man games but I also know people love it as well. Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, every Mega Man game reills your life/energy after each stage but for some reason this game doesn't. It's possible it was intentional but I'm guessing it wasn't. Yup, there are several tricks you can do with the 2nd controller. Probably weren't meant to be left in though. I'm curious what other Mega Man games have softlocks.
It was my first and my favourite too. When I was a young kid, my brother's friend lent it to us, along with a sheet of wrapping paper that had a few passwords on it ... by the time we returned it, we had completely filled up that sheet. Good memories.
@@HelpTheWretched I wonder how many people still write down passwords. I think most people just take a picture of it with their phones now. Thankfully the passwords are pretty short and simple in this game.
wasting Rush like that, Rush is a good pal and doesn't deserve to ever be over exerted like that. One also makes sure to get him refilled as soon as possible.
As kids, me and my buddy abused the crap out of the player 2 jump trick, so we never experienced getting softlocked. Great idea showing all of the places this could happen.
Thanks, it's something I've been thinking about doing for quite some time now but figured it wouldn't really fit in with my usual unboxing videos. It seems people enjoy it so who knows, maybe I'll do more in the future.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Post a video showing all the second player controller combinations for MM3 ... There are tons. Like holding up, right, A + B and other combinations that stop the music, make you invincible, make it so that pits no longer kill you ETC
I would have lived to experience this as a kid 😂 great memories I think. I used Game Genie back then to do triple shots, moonwalks (megaman walked backwards... quite a challenge when you still have to kill enemies in front of you!) and the almighty megajump 🤣
3:30 it makes perfect sense, after the robot master stages you check back to base and recharge. Dr. Wiley castles are a marathon from start to finish. That's bad design tho.
I would guess the developers didn't expect anyone to use Rush Coil to zero energy in those situations since most players aren't going to use Rush Coil except when required or to get bonus items, and because of the game being shorted on development time it wasn't caught during testing as a possibility either. I'm not sure there's really an easy solution to them either, outside of just not requiring Rush at all. Even putting energy there, the player could just pick up the energy for another weapon instead. I guess you could throw a random spike pit or a respawning enemy there. Personally, the fact that the game requires Rush at points is something I actually quite like about MM3, so I wouldn't really have wanted them to just not use Rush.
For sure, Rush was a new addition and they wanted to player to use him. It's unfortunate that they overlooked the possibility of softlocks though. I wish someone would make a hack of this game that prevents this from happening.
I have worked QA on some video games in the past and the correct term for this is progression break where a design choice (or script break) potentially keeps you from advancing. Soft lock is something else where the game itself glitches and puts you in an unrecoverable state and you can't really do anything but the game hasn't actually crashed or froze completely.
Good to know, but I think the majority of people are more familiar with the term softlock. Even if progression break is the correct term. It's like how non linear games are often called Metroidvania's even though they have nothing to do with Castlevania or Metroid.
It's funny how the artwork had to be westernised back then. Companies were anti japanese artwork for some reason. I'm guessing they were afraid of it looking to childish. Some of it was weird, some of it was very off brand, but it is from a different era that alot of wish we could go back to.
Although I love the anime style we’ve settled on today. I still think MM2 is the coolest looking one!! It’s like something out of Flash Gordon or something with some grit. The western art seems to get a lot of shade these days. I don’t get it.
@@RamManNo1 For sure, I always thought the MM2 cover was cool in like a comic book kind of way. It's way better than the MM1 cover, yet people still hate it because he has a gun. The cover was created by Marc Ericksen. I recommend checking out his other work. He did a bunch of box art for video games. He even re-did the MM2 cover for Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2018.
I found the p2 jump trick while playing with my brother. One of us would play the game, the other would pretend to. Found out that we could survive falling in gaps that way too. And i found out that you could zero out the energy by by letting go of the button to hear the death music while my brother was trusting me to hold it as he walked through the big hole Gemini man's stage.
Because the game is unfinished and was hastily brought to market. Had they gotten the extra 3 months they wanted to properly finish it these flaws and others would have been solved. but capcom wanted to move onto other projects and this was to be the final megaman game so they just wanted the cash grab.Its also why Megaman 4 is such a good game, because capcom saw what poor planning results in. They got ALOT of hate mail over these flaws in MM3 so they let inufane have the proper time to work on MM4 and it shows.
For sure, if they had more time, even just a few more weeks, they could have fixed alot of the bugs in the game. I don't know if 3 was supposed to be the final Mega Man game. Maybe on NES but it was a big seller for them so I'm sure a SNES version of 4 was considered at one point before shifting focus to Mega Man X.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Yes 3 was planned as the end of the saga, and frankly it took Inufane begging capcom to be allowed to make it, there's an interview he did for one of the magazines explaining this, I think for the mm8 anniversary release, they gave him a tiny budget and limited time for them to even agree to what we got. 3 sold very well. But at that time in 1990 with the release of 3, there were no plans at all for bringing megaman to the soon to be released SNES. Hell they didn't even plan on making the ones for gameboy. Only after they made bank on 3 both from in home sales and the arcade machines which were a very successful port, did they start licensing out the rights and producing more games. And it was after 4s huge success on NES and the success of mm1 on GB that the X series was officially put on the drawing board in 1991. By the production of MM6, X and 7 were to be the future of megaman on the SNES, which is also why 6 was released in haste unfinished.
@@GoodVibeCollecting The biggest thing left out of 6 was that protoman was supposed to have a story arc, a sort of redemption after MM5, where he would be investigating who Mr.X really was and giving Megaman helpful tips throughout the stages, also the battle with Mr.X ball chain machine was supposed to go differently with Mr.X giving a speech about his new world order and protoman helping megman in the battle. The difficulty of the game was also supposed to be much harder, but all of that was cut, toned down, which resulted in weapons like beat being nerfed, cause otherwise mm6 would have been way too easy.
I grew up having Mega Man 3 as my introduction to the series and I still love revisiting it from time to time. In spite of its flaws it definitely is my favorite one. I did find myself at points where I ran out of RC but I always knew about the high jump trick so I never got stuck with that. It was the parts in Shadow Man's and Gemini Man's stages where I needed rush jet and rush marine that I'd get stuck. Honestly, I don't remember where I learned the high jump trick from. I think it was some kind of guide book or something. I also learned you could hold up on the 2P controller to slow down the framerate, however it also slowed Mega Man down so it was kind of useless aside from slowing down jump timing or slowing down to more easily avoid enemies. One thing I did figure out on my own however with the high jump exploit is that you can hold right on the 2P controller while you're in pits too, and it prevents you from dying in the pits so long as you keep it held, and if you let go and go back to holding it on the right frames when enemies are nearby, the game gets really confused and will at some point play the death noise, stop all music, and drop Mega Man's health to 0 but keep you alive, so you now have infinite life and only pits and one hit KO things can kill you. However the mega buster no longer worked and you had to primarily use Rush to shoot which was the downside, but I used that exploit quite a bit as a kid to beat the game lol. Later on I ended up beating it legitimately when I was older, but it was still really cool getting to beat it as a kid thanks to figuring out that exploit lol.
For sure, even though it's a buggy game, it's still great. Mega Man 3 just has this warm and cozy vibe to it that the other NES Mega Man games are missing. I think alot of that is from the soundtrack and which sits between 2 and 6 as the best Mega Man NES soundtracks IMO. The 2nd controller exploit was eventually mentioned in several gaming magazines at the time however most people didn't have subscriptions so I feel like the majority of people didn't know about this trick. It sure is fun to mess around with though. It's always neat when devs leave stuff like that in games.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Yeah I'm guessing they were like debug inputs or something. And yeah the music in MM3 is what's most memorable for me for sure. I've always said that music makes the game. A game can be crappy and have lots of flaws, but if the soundtrack is full of bangers people often will still remember it anyway. Cheetahmen/Action 52 is the greatest example of this.
@@RonTheTryhard Since the graphics were very limited, the music help set the tone and atmosphere of these old games. Plus 8-bit music can be very catchy as well. With modern games you don't need to rely on music as much which is unfortunate because every game sounds like a movie now and is forgettable the moment you turn off the system.
Just after the checkpoint on the Needle Man "Doc Robot" stage there is a huge pit you have to cross with Rush Jet. If you get past that part and die it sends you back and makes you redo that part. It's very easy to run out of the Rush Jet energy and have no way to get back across. Maybe it isn't 100% a "soft lock" because you can kill yourself and get a game over, but it essentially is a soft lock.
Right, that was just a design flaw. Since you can kill yourself, I don't consider it a softlock. This game has several stage design flaws like that. Maybe a topic for a future video? Hmmm ;)
Most likely but we'll never know unless we hear from them directly. Considering how secretive japanese developers like to be, that will probably never happen.
on the topic of mega man 3 being broken in unique ways, getting hit during top spin prevents all knockback and falling during the knockback animation. it's actually really good for the cloud portion of snake man's stage.
In the X series, X3 has a potential softlock that I've fallen victim to before. There are enemies that can prevent you from moving towards the end of Blizzard Buffaloe's stage, and if they freeze you in the wrong spot and you don't have a zero swap avaliable, you're done for.
Oh? I had X3 growing up and this is news to me. Although I think I know the spot you are talking about. Ironic how both Mega Man 3 and X3 have softlocks.
@@HylianWindRider Yup, the enemies that shoot ice at you. You don't have enough time to break free and keep getting re-frozen. Pretty sure X3 was developed by a different company so it's bound to have a few more bugs than normal. It happens. No one is perfect. I wonder if there are anymore?
Like many others out there who could be watching this video I'm a child of the 80's and had the privilege of growing up with a Nintendo system. Over the course of several years my videogame library expanded (I'd always ask the same thing every birthday and Christmas...more GAMES!), and eventually I owned the complete run (at the time) of MegaMan 1-4 which were my absolute favorite, even more than the super Mario titles. My child self could not choose just one as my ultimate favorite of the four, as each of them have their own distinct personalities and brought something slightly different to the table. For some reason whenever I hear music from any of these games it awakens a nostalgia trip where I'm sucked into a vortex taking me back through time once again to revisit those cherished childhood days. No responsibility, no stress of daily life weighing down on me every passing hour...just pure bliss. For some of us grown up kids living in the past it is the closest we'll ever get to finding happiness within, and I'll take whatever I can get. Even if it's just a 4 or 5 minute video of my old 8bit pal that I've grown to recognize and love so damn much. Thank you for the trip back through time.
100% can relate. Christmas and birthdays were the best time of year because that usually meant more games. I only had Mega Man 2 and 3 back then which were the most common ones to find. The rest I either borrowed from a friend or rented them. Back then you had to find used games at a mom & pop game store, a pawn shop, or a garage sales. Not like today where you can buy pretty much any game you want online. I'm guessing you didn't have Mega Man 5 and 6 because you upgraded to a newer system? Those were very late releases and most people had moved on to SNES and Genesis. Thank you for that childhood backstory and watching the video. It means alot. :)
It's not something I hear much people talk about so I decided to make a video about it. It just took me a few years to finally make it LOL. Thanks for the support as usual. Hope all is well with you.
I knew about the player 2 controller stuff, me and my older siblings had them figured out within a month of getting this game. I recall the manual hinting at the second player controller doing things and encouraging playing around with it.
Just always remember to prioritize Rush whenever you find weapon energy drops. Never let it drop to zero unless you absolutely have to, and always keep one on standby. Weapons have your main weapon as a backup, but Rush does not.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Much like when you get to Wily's castle in MegaMan 2, where you have to make sure to keep Item 1, 2, and 3 filled up. I can name several soft lock spots of the top of my head in Wily 1 alone.
@@k1productions87 I've beaten MM 2 more times than I can count and it's not sticking out to me if there is one. All of locations where it seems like you can get stuck either have respawning enemies or allow you to die.
Finding soft locks in games is always fun. One specific one that I discovered is in a game called Landstalker for the Sega Genesis. It's weird finding a flaw in an otherwise polished game. Fortunately there is a save feature in Landstalker, where in MM3 you'd have to reset your game entirely. Thank goodness for save states.
It happens. Programers are only human and are bound to make some mistakes no matter how many times they go over things. Especially when they are on a tight deadline. I'm not familiar with the Landstalker softlock. How does it happen?
Yeah, that one seems more likely to happen. Thanks for confirming it happened to you, even though it left you salty LOL. Thanks for the support as usual. Hope everything is well with you.
Some argue this is evidence that Rush Coil was once planned to have unlimited energy. I believe many ports of this game to later systems removed the debug codes, so perhaps you really could get stuck!
If you know the high jump trick by pressing the right on the 2nd controller, you can jump really high, Pressing Up on the second controller makes everything slow so it was an easy way to beat bosses. You you really can’t soft lock the game unless you didn’t have a second controller or a little brother to make him press the Dpad.
Yes, that's what I mean by the 2nd controller trick. That was never mentioned in the manual though and as I said, you had to learn that trick from someone else or have read it in a magazine. Not everyone had that privilege though so I'm sure several people got stuck in the game.
This was my first NES Megaman game. Never finished it on my original cart. I have gone back and finished it for sake of beating all orginal megaman games but dang I'm no good at these games. I must say that x1 and x2 are more my jam.
Cool video never thought about this. Mega man 3 is easily my favorite, its the one i played the most as a kid but they're all sooooo good. Thank god for rom hacks and fan games and indie studios for keeping this style alive!
I know we all sucked the first time we played a Mega Man game. None of us were pros our first time out. But even then, we didn't get soft locked like this. Mega Man 3 was the first one I played in the series, and I sucked so back I couldn't even reach the bosses, let alone beat them. However, even then getting soft-locked by accident never occurred to me, because you really do have to go out of your way to fall prey to this crap. Seriously, if you actually manage to get soft-locked by accident in any given Mega Man game, rather than on purpose in order to demonstrate that it's even possible, you suck so bad that you have no business playing a Mega Man game lol.
It happens more than you think. When you have millions of people playing the same game, with each person playing slightly different than someone else, it's just a matter of time before something like this happens. Your skill level has nothing to do with it. This shouldn't have been an issue in the first place though. I'm sure if the devs had more time, they would have discovered this and fixed it.
I'd always figured the debug codes were left active in Mega Man 3 by mistake. Now I've started to wonder if the devs realized at least some of these softlocks were present, and perhaps wondered what other issues might exist, and thus decided they needed to leave the debug codes available just to better ensure the game could be completed.
I think the reason your weapon energy doesn’t refill in the Wily stages is because it kind of goes with the story. Mega Man is going through Wily’s castle from beginning to end and not going home to refill between stages. This could also explain why when you pick the game up where you left off with the password system, you always have to start Wily’s castle from the beginning no matter how far you got. Of course that always sucked for Mega Man 8 being forced to get past that infamous first Wily stage every single time.
There is one solution to all of these issues: If you hold left on controller 2's D-pad, that will allow Mega Man to jump much higher. That can also be used to allow you to become mostly invincible on most stages. The stage must have a pit for your to fall in, jumping in & out of the pit will instantly drain your health. That will enable you to take hits from enemies without dying. However, you won't be immune to spikes. Those will still kill you. You also can't activate the invincibility glitch on Hard Man's stage, since there are no pits to fall in.
You can also get softlocked in Mega Man 2 at the very last fight against Alien Wily, if you have not replenished the bubble weapon inthe previous stage and you ran out during the fight, there is no way to defeat him as its the only weapon that does damage, so you'll have to restart the entire Wily Castle!
That's not really a softlock though since you can still die. More of an annoying design. A softlock is when you can't progress any further and have to reset the game.
@@GoodVibeCollecting if you die though, are there any ways to replenish Bubble Lead? I admit it’s been a while since I played but I don’t recall any enemies in the last stage, just the acid drops.
@@neochozo Nope, you just have to take the punishment from Wily until you get a game over. Which then refills your weapons. It's a very odd design choice. All enemies and bosses should be effected by the buster, even if it only takes 1 bar of health away. Don't force someone to use only one weapon.
@@GoodVibeCollecting never forgiving them for the boobeam trap, where there's not enough crash bomb to kill all of the enemies AND destroy most of the walls. While it's possible to navigate carefully and destroy the enemies with 1 crash bomb left, the fact that you're forced to do this is annoying as hell and just not fun design
@@alecrutz956Yup there is a specific way it must be defeated. Before I knew how, it would always take me two attempts. Running out of energy, dying, farming for me energy, and then finally beating it.
I forget if it was this game or another Mega Man game, but there's a spot where there's a 1-Up high above the player, and the only way to reach it is to use Rush Jet. However, if you use Rush Jet to get it there, you don't have enough Rush Jet energy for later on in the level when it's required to proceed. Arin ranted about that in an episode of Game Grumps.
It's this game. Needle Man Doc Robot stage. You still have plenty of Rush Jet though so not sure what Arin is complaining about. Just Game Grumps being game grumps I guess. :P
I'm like 95% sure that's why the high-jump feature was added, to get around the fact that you could soft-lock yourself. These flaws were probably discovered too late to redesign the levels, so the jump was added so that Nintendo Game Counselors could offer that advice over the 900 number.
These kinds of obstacles should always have respawning enemies somewhere, and preferably also a pit, so that the player can die on purpose if everything else fails.
Dr. Light: "Mega Man, are you all right? You've been on Gemini Man's planet for 3 weeks!" Mega Man: "Dr. Light, Rush is out of energy and I have no other way to get over this wall!" Dr. Light: "Okay then, Mega Man, just teleport back to Earth and we'll get you and Rush refilled at the lab!" Mega Man: "..." Dr. Light: "Then, uh, refill with some energy capsules from nearby enemies!" Mega Man: "Sorry Doc, but I already destroyed all of the enemy robots." Dr. Light: "Are you sure? These readings say that there are some enemy robots located in the egg capsules above your head. Go back to the ladder and look up!" Mega Man: "I see them! But.... I can't shoot upwards." Dr. Light: "..." Dr. Light: "Mega Man, just climb. Over. The wall." By inventing AI, Doctor Light gave himself a one-way ticket to being the most disappointed person in history.
On the Wiley stages I always farm for weapon energy whenever anything gets half depleted. It takes a little while, but there are plenty of good places to farm.
If you do the jump cheat, you can also jump in and out of pits. If you die in the pit and jump out, you have invincibility but can't shoot the normal weapon.
MM3 was the only one that I owned in the 90s. I knew the trick and I kept the P2 controller jammed into a dresser drawer, holding down, quite often lol
Well, that's one way to do it. Most people just use a rubber band or use their feet. I'm curious to know how you found out about the trick? From a friend? Magazine?
Mega man 3 seemed to really add depth to the overall story of the game's universe. i think that's why so many people love it more. My only gripe is i feel that its the hardest game in the original series
One time when I was playing, I ran into a far more annoying softlock scenario, this time in the form of a glitch. I was at the robot master rematches, I defeated one half of Gemini Man, but then the other half just disappeared, didn't get beaten, and never came back. The teleporter didn't even work, and there were no stage hazards I could kill myself with. Literal limbo, and after all that hard work.
It's not something that can easily happen. You have to purposely be messing around to do so. The fact that it CAN happen though is kind of an issue and I know it's happened to others.
I doubt it. I bet it was just left in the game because the devs didn't have enough time to remove it. If it was intentionally left in, they would of hinted at it in the instruction manual.
You would have to be the most inept person on earth to actually get softlocked by the Spark Man Doc Robot Stage or Wily Stage 1 because of the fact that they are right at the beginning of the stage and you will have full energy when you start. Now if you somehow died in the Spark Man Stage before beating Air Man and unexpectedly used all of your RC and RJ, then you may have a problem.
It's unfortunate though because having full weapon energy or having a weapon capsule at the beginning of the stage would have lessened the chances of a softlock happening in Wily 3.
While the concept might have been intentional, the results were not. Mega Man 2 also had spots that punished "mismanaging" energy usage, but you could always run out your lives and continue. If you get caught in one of these situations in Mega Man 3, the only solution is to either reset the NES or use the unlisted debug commands. These areas really do lend to the idea that the game was being designed with infinite Rush Coil energy in mind.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Yes, the other places are designed to let you farm energy capsules. Even the start of Wily 1 has infinitely spawning birds in case you somehow manage to waste all your Item energy before you get past the first wall.
Stuff like that you have to question whether it's a softlock or a glitch. If it's something odd like that, that the player has no control of, I'd say it's a glitch.
There’s one where if you die on one of the Wiley bosses (I think it’s stage 1 or 3 whichever one has the crane thing) when you spawn from the mid point your teleported animation gets stuck and your soft locked. Happened to me a couple weeks ago.
This is why fans shouldn't dunk on Jet Mega Man from MM6. You can say MM2 and 3 are "the greatest games" in the Classic series, but don't ignore when later games make an actual improvement.
Jet Mega Man is awesome but sadly got nerfed in MM7. MM6 is good but you can tell that game was also rushed. Another commenter pointed out that there was a lot cut from it. Including more interactions with Protoman during levels and a story arc.
Honestly, I’ve played the heck out of this game since it was released. It’s my favorite game of all time. I’ve never EVER had any of this happen to me. 🤷🏻♂️
Neither do most people who play this game. It's not something that immediately stands out as a possibility. I had it happen to me before when I was younger and I've always been curious if there were anymore spots in the game that softlock you. Sure enough, there are.
You know, this really shows how the game was rushed because they weren't really testing the game on a full playthrough very often. Pretty sure they would do the high jump trick and say "yup, this should be working just as normal if a player were to use Rush Coil instead" BTW what is going on with these 60s style mugshots? Dr. Wily is pure nightmare fuel here 💀
They are from the Mega Man 3 Nintendo Power poster. It was very common for artwork to be westernized back then. Alot of it was very off-brand looking. Some was interesting, some was weird.
I bet this is why that high jump using the 2P controller trick got leaked in none other than Nintendo Power. I personally want to think it was designed on purpose to troll the players, as you said, but maybe the Capcom programmers had troll's remorse at the last second and put the high jump trick in, then leaked the trick to NP so kids wouldn't get too pissed. That's my headcanon now.
@@GoodVibeCollecting And the controller trick is a debugging feature for the developers that was simply not removed due to the game being rushed to shelves. I mean it's cool but I seriously doubt it was left in intentionally.
Could it be that the high jump trick was put into the game as a fix for the level design issues that resulted in the soft lock? It seems like this fix would have been easier to put in place for a rushed game than to redesign the levels. The trick doesn't exist for any other Megaman game (as far as I know).
That would make sense except it's not mentioned anywhere in the game or instruction manual. Plus it feels more like a debug mode since you can do other things with it as well.
Man I've been playing this game for almost 35 and never encountered any of these softlocks not once. They are really good catches but man, you got to really be going off the beaten path and messing around to find it lol. 😃
For sure, but it has accidently happened to other people. It's something that's starring you in the face the whole time but you never thought about it.
That's more of a glitch, but yes. That and the Hardman glitch could be considered softlocks. I was showing how softlocks could happen from the level design.
so loved this game back in the day, never could get past the doc robot stages when i was young, found the fun glitch? of just using the blue dots in the password screen to skip some of the stages since the blue dot would be basically 2 red dots in the password... gave up cause i couldnt get past the long pit in needle man stage, sadly when i got older and the internet started being a thing i found out all the left in debug mode info and better yet all the beta issues left in game as to this day i strongly believe that 3 was released in beta mode not finished at all... altho some other capcom games back then had the same debug mode by using controller 2 (Ducktales)
That's one good thing about the passwords in this game, they are very short and simple. I don't think the game is a beta. Yes, it's missing some stuff like different backgrounds and is buggy but for the most part the game is in a finished state. If they had a few more extra weeks, I think most of flaws would have been fixed.
You're a Mega Man fan? I would have never guessed LOL. Honestly, I think this might be mine as well. 2 is great and is the one everyone loves but there is just something about 3's vibe.
@@kraken5003 So MM 9 and MM 10 are actually lower on my list. It was nice to finally play a new Mega Man game after 12 years but I don't hold them in the same regard as the NES games. Even though they are 8-bit. The fact they went back to 8-bit also seemed odd to me. I really wish they would have called MM 9 something else. Like, Neo Mega Man or something. Similar to what Nintendo did with the New Super Mario Bros. games. MM 10 felt like it was quickly made to cash in on the success of MM 9 and didn't really offer anything new. MM 11 is the true MM 9 IMO. Yes, I'm weird like that.
I seriously wonder how close the gap is between 2 and 3 as being someone's favorite. The gaming community makes it sound like 2 is the favorite by a landslide but I bet 3 is very close to it.
Sometimes they had to leave debug tools/codes in game because removing them would crash the game, meaning they would have to reprogram it all over again.
Perhaps these soft-locks would have been fixed with additional play testing. Admittedly Mega Man 3 is a solid game in spite of being called an unfinished beta.
sooooo megaman 3 has an interesting bug/mechanic, that will keep you from softlocking in this game. hold right on the D-pad Controller two and you will do a super jump glitch. this jump is so strong you can actually jump OUT of bottomless pits.... Yes, it's considered cheating and you shouldn't rely on it to get through the game, but in the event of a softlock circumstance, I'd think it a better solution than having to restart the entire game cause you had to reset. and lose a good chunk of progress. hope y'all find this helpful.
Right, that's what I mean by the 2nd controller trick. But let's be honest, how many people know about it back then? I didn't and I was a hardcore Mega Man fan. I do wonder if it was purposely left in the game though to get past softlocking. Obviously it was put in for debugging but was never removed. Who knows.
They had to put a limit on the amount of uses, otherwise you could just abuse it. Especially Rush Jet which breaks the game...to an already broken game.
The worst mistake in the MegaMan games is that certain powers have limited use, or that they do not recharge in some emergency way. or that they require you to have an alternative power up that you did not get 😓🤞
Sure 1 and 2 have some flaws but nothing game breaking like this. Flaws aren't always a bad thing either. It gives games some personality. Something modern games are lacking.
It looks like they fixed the one in Spark Man in Wily Wars for the Genesis but not so much the others. I'm not too familiar with the Wily Wars so I could be mistaken. Edit: I was looking at the original Spark Man and not the Doc Robot stage. Oops. No softlock fixes.
@GoodVibeCollecting I was looking at the Spark Man stage and not the Doc Robot revisit. Again, never really played Wily Wars but seems like a somewhat lazy port now.
I think MM2 is much more guilty than 3 in this respect, given how many bosses in Wily's fortress can only be killed with a specific weapon, and if the bar for that weapon is empty, too bad for you
Yes, and I hate when bosses can only be defeated with one weapon. However, I wouldn't consider that a softlock because you can still die and try again.
I thought this video was going to be interesting should have said rush softlocks. Also mega man 3 was an unfinished game so thats why everything was overlooked
@@GoodVibeCollecting technicall yes. If you get all the energy capsules like a doofus. I mean you can grind until you get enough energy to use it but either way you won't have enough to cross the gap
while most of these situation were artificially produced (spark man stage v.2, wily 1 - you always start with full weapon power) it's totally baffling how these stage designs stayed. I never got into these situations as a kid but I think it happened to some players. Though with the controller 2 trick you could get out of these caught-up-in-eternity-situations 😂
It has happened to other commenters. These were most likely overlooked because they ran short on time. I found these pretty easily so surely they would have to.
@@GoodVibeCollecting The "Mega Man 3 Revamped" hack solves all of these softlock issues, and it also makes Rush Jet more balanced by making it unusable under water; it has even put back the glowing Saturn-like planet that is supposed to be in the sky at the beginning of Gemini Man's stage.
@@Peter_1986 I consider that to be more of a hack though. It's not the same game. I wish someone would leave the game as is and only fix the softlocks and graphical glitches. Call it Mega Man 3.1 or something like that.
Yeah, basically if any fundamental basic function in a video game is tedious to do, and it doesn't require any actual skill, then there should be a quick way to get it done.
so thats why the controller 2 comands are for... one for Megaman 4, if you use Rain flush after defeating wily before final, he dies, and the game gets stuck.
Lol another reason people didn't like doc robots let alone bigger to make jumping a pain. I liked it. Guess it rushed to softlock 😂 but I never had that experience. Glad wily wars let ya rewind on switch online and added wily towers.
I actually like the Doc Robot stages. It's neat how you have to revisit the stages but they are destroyed and redesigned. Revisiting stages and refighting bosses was definitely a Capcom trope.
Thanks for confirming that. The Spark Man stage is near impossible to happen but it can. Gemini Man stage happened to me at least once as well so don't feel bad.
The reason you don't get energy refill at Wily stages is because you're going back-to-back on the stages. the first set of stages, the idea is you head back to doctor light's lab and therefore recover.
I get what you're saying but if you're entering a new stage, it makes more sense to me to have weapons refilled. Energy is, so why not weapons as well? I believe they changed this with the Gameboy games.
@@GoodVibeCollecting I feel like it's all just part of making the game harder. Forcing you to be more careful about your resources, and perhaps rely on weapons you otherwise wouldn't due to your favorite weapons running low on energy. I always liked it because of that extra thought it adds to resource management.
Of course, that all becomes kind of moot when it's typically so easy to just get yourself a game over to refill your weapons if you need to, anyway.
@@gurvmlk Either way, it was a different approach than most NES games at the time. Unfortunately in this case, it makes it all that much easier to softlock the game.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Although it does accentuate one of the good things about video game time limits. They give you an out if you wind up stuck someplace, because you can get yourself killed by waiting out the clock.
@@gurvmlk So I guess in a way, timers were a good thing and a bad thing. Bad because console games didn't really need them like arcade games did. Good, because as you mentioned, they can get you out of a jam.
Some of these were easier to fall victim to than I imagined
It happened to me so yeah, I'm sure it's happened to others as well.
Lol what? You would have to be absolute moron to fall victim to this lol. Who uses coil that damn much anyways? You would have to be really bad at the game
This Just confirms again that Rush is *"Everything"* in MM3..
Damn such a Flawed Masterpiece!
It really is.
Mega Man 3 was the first Mega Man that I played. I rented it back in the day. Loved it so much that I ended up buying and / or getting gifted 1 - 4 on NES befoe upgrading to SNES and getting X 1-3.
3 was my favorite, with 4 being a close 2nd. The music still pops in my head from time to time. I never realized that you could get soft locked in these games. I believe the reason that you don't get automatic weapon, etc energy refills in the Wiley stages is to add some challenge.
There was also a 2nd controller code that would pause enemies.
Mega Man 4 has a glitch where you can toad / rain flush Wiley, after defeating him, but before he flies away that soft locks the game.
It may have been the first I played as well. Been so long that I don't remember. Mega Man 2 was the first one I remember seeing. Clearly remember my friend's friend getting it for his birthday, ripping open the box, and throwing it in the trash. I consider 4 to be one of the weaker NES Mega Man games but I also know people love it as well.
Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, every Mega Man game reills your life/energy after each stage but for some reason this game doesn't. It's possible it was intentional but I'm guessing it wasn't.
Yup, there are several tricks you can do with the 2nd controller. Probably weren't meant to be left in though.
I'm curious what other Mega Man games have softlocks.
It was my first and my favourite too. When I was a young kid, my brother's friend lent it to us, along with a sheet of wrapping paper that had a few passwords on it ... by the time we returned it, we had completely filled up that sheet. Good memories.
@@HelpTheWretched I wonder how many people still write down passwords. I think most people just take a picture of it with their phones now. Thankfully the passwords are pretty short and simple in this game.
wasting Rush like that, Rush is a good pal and doesn't deserve to ever be over exerted like that. One also makes sure to get him refilled as soon as possible.
Rush is a good boy. Most people wouldn't run into this issue but the fact that it can happen, and get your perma stuck in the game is an issue.
As kids, me and my buddy abused the crap out of the player 2 jump trick, so we never experienced getting softlocked. Great idea showing all of the places this could happen.
Thanks, it's something I've been thinking about doing for quite some time now but figured it wouldn't really fit in with my usual unboxing videos. It seems people enjoy it so who knows, maybe I'll do more in the future.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Post a video showing all the second player controller combinations for MM3 ... There are tons. Like holding up, right, A + B and other combinations that stop the music, make you invincible, make it so that pits no longer kill you ETC
@@Haywood-Jablomie People have already made videos about it. I would of mentioned it but I wanted to keep the video short and to the point.
I would have lived to experience this as a kid 😂 great memories I think.
I used Game Genie back then to do triple shots, moonwalks (megaman walked backwards... quite a challenge when you still have to kill enemies in front of you!) and the almighty megajump 🤣
@@FromGototheGo Game Genie is how some people were able to beat NES games. You can do some neat things with it in this game.
3:30 it makes perfect sense, after the robot master stages you check back to base and recharge. Dr. Wiley castles are a marathon from start to finish. That's bad design tho.
Funny how they changed this with the Rockman World games though. Then again, I don't think those are considered canon.
Rockman 3 is soft broken. Rush’ed job?
Broken is reply. Channel rushed?
Dude GREAT job on this video. I really enjoyed it
Thank you for the support as always Tyler. I figured you would like it since you are also a Mega Man fan.
I would guess the developers didn't expect anyone to use Rush Coil to zero energy in those situations since most players aren't going to use Rush Coil except when required or to get bonus items, and because of the game being shorted on development time it wasn't caught during testing as a possibility either.
I'm not sure there's really an easy solution to them either, outside of just not requiring Rush at all. Even putting energy there, the player could just pick up the energy for another weapon instead. I guess you could throw a random spike pit or a respawning enemy there.
Personally, the fact that the game requires Rush at points is something I actually quite like about MM3, so I wouldn't really have wanted them to just not use Rush.
For sure, Rush was a new addition and they wanted to player to use him. It's unfortunate that they overlooked the possibility of softlocks though. I wish someone would make a hack of this game that prevents this from happening.
I have worked QA on some video games in the past and the correct term for this is progression break where a design choice (or script break) potentially keeps you from advancing. Soft lock is something else where the game itself glitches and puts you in an unrecoverable state and you can't really do anything but the game hasn't actually crashed or froze completely.
Good to know, but I think the majority of people are more familiar with the term softlock. Even if progression break is the correct term. It's like how non linear games are often called Metroidvania's even though they have nothing to do with Castlevania or Metroid.
I loved Nintendo Power's Megaman 3 art; it was like some kind of uncanny valley between the Japanese character art and western art.
It's funny how the artwork had to be westernised back then. Companies were anti japanese artwork for some reason. I'm guessing they were afraid of it looking to childish. Some of it was weird, some of it was very off brand, but it is from a different era that alot of wish we could go back to.
Although I love the anime style we’ve settled on today. I still think MM2 is the coolest looking one!! It’s like something out of Flash Gordon or something with some grit. The western art seems to get a lot of shade these days. I don’t get it.
@@RamManNo1 For sure, I always thought the MM2 cover was cool in like a comic book kind of way. It's way better than the MM1 cover, yet people still hate it because he has a gun. The cover was created by Marc Ericksen. I recommend checking out his other work. He did a bunch of box art for video games. He even re-did the MM2 cover for Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2018.
I found the p2 jump trick while playing with my brother. One of us would play the game, the other would pretend to. Found out that we could survive falling in gaps that way too. And i found out that you could zero out the energy by by letting go of the button to hear the death music while my brother was trusting me to hold it as he walked through the big hole Gemini man's stage.
Discovering secrets like that was so much fun. Especially with other family members/friends.
You don't need a brother when you have a brick lol
@@Prodmullefc I'm surprised how many different things people used to hold down the 2nd controller.
Because the game is unfinished and was hastily brought to market. Had they gotten the extra 3 months they wanted to properly finish it these flaws and others would have been solved. but capcom wanted to move onto other projects and this was to be the final megaman game so they just wanted the cash grab.Its also why Megaman 4 is such a good game, because capcom saw what poor planning results in. They got ALOT of hate mail over these flaws in MM3 so they let inufane have the proper time to work on MM4 and it shows.
For sure, if they had more time, even just a few more weeks, they could have fixed alot of the bugs in the game. I don't know if 3 was supposed to be the final Mega Man game. Maybe on NES but it was a big seller for them so I'm sure a SNES version of 4 was considered at one point before shifting focus to Mega Man X.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Yes 3 was planned as the end of the saga, and frankly it took Inufane begging capcom to be allowed to make it, there's an interview he did for one of the magazines explaining this, I think for the mm8 anniversary release, they gave him a tiny budget and limited time for them to even agree to what we got. 3 sold very well. But at that time in 1990 with the release of 3, there were no plans at all for bringing megaman to the soon to be released SNES. Hell they didn't even plan on making the ones for gameboy. Only after they made bank on 3 both from in home sales and the arcade machines which were a very successful port, did they start licensing out the rights and producing more games. And it was after 4s huge success on NES and the success of mm1 on GB that the X series was officially put on the drawing board in 1991. By the production of MM6, X and 7 were to be the future of megaman on the SNES, which is also why 6 was released in haste unfinished.
@@Phoenixesper1 And it shows with 6. All of the weapons make the same sound as the buster and for some reason the controls feel a little off.
@@GoodVibeCollecting The biggest thing left out of 6 was that protoman was supposed to have a story arc, a sort of redemption after MM5, where he would be investigating who Mr.X really was and giving Megaman helpful tips throughout the stages, also the battle with Mr.X ball chain machine was supposed to go differently with Mr.X giving a speech about his new world order and protoman helping megman in the battle. The difficulty of the game was also supposed to be much harder, but all of that was cut, toned down, which resulted in weapons like beat being nerfed, cause otherwise mm6 would have been way too easy.
@@Phoenixesper1 Sounds like they had big plans for 6 but couldn't implement them in time. It still is a good game though.
I grew up having Mega Man 3 as my introduction to the series and I still love revisiting it from time to time. In spite of its flaws it definitely is my favorite one. I did find myself at points where I ran out of RC but I always knew about the high jump trick so I never got stuck with that. It was the parts in Shadow Man's and Gemini Man's stages where I needed rush jet and rush marine that I'd get stuck. Honestly, I don't remember where I learned the high jump trick from. I think it was some kind of guide book or something. I also learned you could hold up on the 2P controller to slow down the framerate, however it also slowed Mega Man down so it was kind of useless aside from slowing down jump timing or slowing down to more easily avoid enemies.
One thing I did figure out on my own however with the high jump exploit is that you can hold right on the 2P controller while you're in pits too, and it prevents you from dying in the pits so long as you keep it held, and if you let go and go back to holding it on the right frames when enemies are nearby, the game gets really confused and will at some point play the death noise, stop all music, and drop Mega Man's health to 0 but keep you alive, so you now have infinite life and only pits and one hit KO things can kill you. However the mega buster no longer worked and you had to primarily use Rush to shoot which was the downside, but I used that exploit quite a bit as a kid to beat the game lol. Later on I ended up beating it legitimately when I was older, but it was still really cool getting to beat it as a kid thanks to figuring out that exploit lol.
For sure, even though it's a buggy game, it's still great. Mega Man 3 just has this warm and cozy vibe to it that the other NES Mega Man games are missing. I think alot of that is from the soundtrack and which sits between 2 and 6 as the best Mega Man NES soundtracks IMO.
The 2nd controller exploit was eventually mentioned in several gaming magazines at the time however most people didn't have subscriptions so I feel like the majority of people didn't know about this trick. It sure is fun to mess around with though. It's always neat when devs leave stuff like that in games.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Yeah I'm guessing they were like debug inputs or something. And yeah the music in MM3 is what's most memorable for me for sure. I've always said that music makes the game. A game can be crappy and have lots of flaws, but if the soundtrack is full of bangers people often will still remember it anyway. Cheetahmen/Action 52 is the greatest example of this.
@@RonTheTryhard Since the graphics were very limited, the music help set the tone and atmosphere of these old games. Plus 8-bit music can be very catchy as well. With modern games you don't need to rely on music as much which is unfortunate because every game sounds like a movie now and is forgettable the moment you turn off the system.
Just after the checkpoint on the Needle Man "Doc Robot" stage there is a huge pit you have to cross with Rush Jet. If you get past that part and die it sends you back and makes you redo that part. It's very easy to run out of the Rush Jet energy and have no way to get back across. Maybe it isn't 100% a "soft lock" because you can kill yourself and get a game over, but it essentially is a soft lock.
Right, that was just a design flaw. Since you can kill yourself, I don't consider it a softlock. This game has several stage design flaws like that. Maybe a topic for a future video? Hmmm ;)
I think you can still cheese it with constant jumping, since Rush only drains energy when you're actually standing on him.
@@BagOfMagicFood That to, but not everyone knows that trick.
Great idea for a video. Yeah, I'll bet the developers just overlooked those.
Most likely but we'll never know unless we hear from them directly. Considering how secretive japanese developers like to be, that will probably never happen.
on the topic of mega man 3 being broken in unique ways, getting hit during top spin prevents all knockback and falling during the knockback animation. it's actually really good for the cloud portion of snake man's stage.
One of many amusing glitches in this game.
In the X series, X3 has a potential softlock that I've fallen victim to before. There are enemies that can prevent you from moving towards the end of Blizzard Buffaloe's stage, and if they freeze you in the wrong spot and you don't have a zero swap avaliable, you're done for.
Oh? I had X3 growing up and this is news to me. Although I think I know the spot you are talking about. Ironic how both Mega Man 3 and X3 have softlocks.
@@GoodVibeCollecting It's near the boss fight gate if that's what you are thinking.
@@HylianWindRider Yup, the enemies that shoot ice at you. You don't have enough time to break free and keep getting re-frozen. Pretty sure X3 was developed by a different company so it's bound to have a few more bugs than normal. It happens. No one is perfect. I wonder if there are anymore?
@@GoodVibeCollecting I am finding specific ones like this mega man 4 one:ua-cam.com/video/oQs3J_mI2Pg/v-deo.htmlsi=tGgbfF4kEnw7TDSX
@@GoodVibeCollecting Search up "Mega Man X softlock" and you'll find specific ones as you scroll down.
Like many others out there who could be watching this video I'm a child of the 80's and had the privilege of growing up with a Nintendo system. Over the course of several years my videogame library expanded (I'd always ask the same thing every birthday and Christmas...more GAMES!), and eventually I owned the complete run (at the time) of MegaMan 1-4 which were my absolute favorite, even more than the super Mario titles. My child self could not choose just one as my ultimate favorite of the four, as each of them have their own distinct personalities and brought something slightly different to the table. For some reason whenever I hear music from any of these games it awakens a nostalgia trip where I'm sucked into a vortex taking me back through time once again to revisit those cherished childhood days. No responsibility, no stress of daily life weighing down on me every passing hour...just pure bliss.
For some of us grown up kids living in the past it is the closest we'll ever get to finding happiness within, and I'll take whatever I can get. Even if it's just a 4 or 5 minute video of my old 8bit pal that I've grown to recognize and love so damn much.
Thank you for the trip back through time.
100% can relate. Christmas and birthdays were the best time of year because that usually meant more games. I only had Mega Man 2 and 3 back then which were the most common ones to find. The rest I either borrowed from a friend or rented them. Back then you had to find used games at a mom & pop game store, a pawn shop, or a garage sales. Not like today where you can buy pretty much any game you want online.
I'm guessing you didn't have Mega Man 5 and 6 because you upgraded to a newer system? Those were very late releases and most people had moved on to SNES and Genesis.
Thank you for that childhood backstory and watching the video. It means alot. :)
Wow! I honestly wasn't aware of these soft breaks in this game! Definitely an interesting topic for a video!
It's not something I hear much people talk about so I decided to make a video about it. It just took me a few years to finally make it LOL. Thanks for the support as usual. Hope all is well with you.
I knew about the player 2 controller stuff, me and my older siblings had them figured out within a month of getting this game. I recall the manual hinting at the second player controller doing things and encouraging playing around with it.
Unless there was a revised version of the manual, I don't recall it being hinted at. I know plenty of gaming magazines mentioned it though.
Just always remember to prioritize Rush whenever you find weapon energy drops. Never let it drop to zero unless you absolutely have to, and always keep one on standby. Weapons have your main weapon as a backup, but Rush does not.
For sure, and throughout most of the game, if Rush should drop to 0 it's not a big deal. However with these locations it is.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Much like when you get to Wily's castle in MegaMan 2, where you have to make sure to keep Item 1, 2, and 3 filled up. I can name several soft lock spots of the top of my head in Wily 1 alone.
@@k1productions87 You can still die though so I don't consider it a true softlock. It's either a design flaw or was purposely designed that way.
@@GoodVibeCollecting I correct myself on one of the ones I had considered a soft lock, but there is still at least one I can recall
@@k1productions87 I've beaten MM 2 more times than I can count and it's not sticking out to me if there is one. All of locations where it seems like you can get stuck either have respawning enemies or allow you to die.
I never had that problem, i always had rush coil/jet health.
Most people never had this issue happen to them.
Finding soft locks in games is always fun. One specific one that I discovered is in a game called Landstalker for the Sega Genesis. It's weird finding a flaw in an otherwise polished game. Fortunately there is a save feature in Landstalker, where in MM3 you'd have to reset your game entirely. Thank goodness for save states.
did you forget about passwords?
It happens. Programers are only human and are bound to make some mistakes no matter how many times they go over things. Especially when they are on a tight deadline.
I'm not familiar with the Landstalker softlock. How does it happen?
@@Erlisch1337
No, but its sort of a null point when most of these softlocks are in the end-game levels.
The Dr. Wiley stage 1 happened to me before back when I rented the game. Boy was I salty 😠 great video topic my friend
Yeah, that one seems more likely to happen. Thanks for confirming it happened to you, even though it left you salty LOL. Thanks for the support as usual. Hope everything is well with you.
Some argue this is evidence that Rush Coil was once planned to have unlimited energy.
I believe many ports of this game to later systems removed the debug codes, so perhaps you really could get stuck!
That makes alot of sense. I can see why they limited the amount of use though.
If you know the high jump trick by pressing the right on the 2nd controller, you can jump really high, Pressing Up on the second controller makes everything slow so it was an easy way to beat bosses. You you really can’t soft lock the game unless you didn’t have a second controller or a little brother to make him press the Dpad.
Yes, that's what I mean by the 2nd controller trick. That was never mentioned in the manual though and as I said, you had to learn that trick from someone else or have read it in a magazine. Not everyone had that privilege though so I'm sure several people got stuck in the game.
This was my first NES Megaman game. Never finished it on my original cart. I have gone back and finished it for sake of beating all orginal megaman games but dang I'm no good at these games. I must say that x1 and x2 are more my jam.
It's a long game and is not the easiest in the series. X1 and X2 are definitely more beginner friendly.
Cool video never thought about this. Mega man 3 is easily my favorite, its the one i played the most as a kid but they're all sooooo good. Thank god for rom hacks and fan games and indie studios for keeping this style alive!
They are all special in their own way. 3 was the first one that I owned. Got it from a Blockbuster that was going out of bussiness.
I know we all sucked the first time we played a Mega Man game. None of us were pros our first time out. But even then, we didn't get soft locked like this. Mega Man 3 was the first one I played in the series, and I sucked so back I couldn't even reach the bosses, let alone beat them. However, even then getting soft-locked by accident never occurred to me, because you really do have to go out of your way to fall prey to this crap. Seriously, if you actually manage to get soft-locked by accident in any given Mega Man game, rather than on purpose in order to demonstrate that it's even possible, you suck so bad that you have no business playing a Mega Man game lol.
It happens more than you think. When you have millions of people playing the same game, with each person playing slightly different than someone else, it's just a matter of time before something like this happens. Your skill level has nothing to do with it. This shouldn't have been an issue in the first place though. I'm sure if the devs had more time, they would have discovered this and fixed it.
@@GoodVibeCollecting True.
I'd always figured the debug codes were left active in Mega Man 3 by mistake. Now I've started to wonder if the devs realized at least some of these softlocks were present, and perhaps wondered what other issues might exist, and thus decided they needed to leave the debug codes available just to better ensure the game could be completed.
I am curious if they are mentioned in Rockman 3's manual. If so then yeah, they were left in on purpose.
I think the reason your weapon energy doesn’t refill in the Wily stages is because it kind of goes with the story. Mega Man is going through Wily’s castle from beginning to end and not going home to refill between stages. This could also explain why when you pick the game up where you left off with the password system, you always have to start Wily’s castle from the beginning no matter how far you got. Of course that always sucked for Mega Man 8 being forced to get past that infamous first Wily stage every single time.
Jump! Jump! Slide! Slide!
I love that you included a quick shot of the ad scene in comic books! 😍👌🏻
It's a great ad and really stands out.
There is one solution to all of these issues: If you hold left on controller 2's D-pad, that will allow Mega Man to jump much higher. That can also be used to allow you to become mostly invincible on most stages. The stage must have a pit for your to fall in, jumping in & out of the pit will instantly drain your health. That will enable you to take hits from enemies without dying. However, you won't be immune to spikes. Those will still kill you. You also can't activate the invincibility glitch on Hard Man's stage, since there are no pits to fall in.
Yeah, many others have said the same thing. That's what I mean by 2nd controller trick.
I hate that MM3 was so rushed. I always wonder how much better the second half could have been
If it wasn't so rushed, I think it could have been seen as the fan favorite.
You can also get softlocked in Mega Man 2 at the very last fight against Alien Wily, if you have not replenished the bubble weapon inthe previous stage and you ran out during the fight, there is no way to defeat him as its the only weapon that does damage, so you'll have to restart the entire Wily Castle!
That's not really a softlock though since you can still die. More of an annoying design. A softlock is when you can't progress any further and have to reset the game.
@@GoodVibeCollecting if you die though, are there any ways to replenish Bubble Lead? I admit it’s been a while since I played but I don’t recall any enemies in the last stage, just the acid drops.
@@neochozo Nope, you just have to take the punishment from Wily until you get a game over. Which then refills your weapons. It's a very odd design choice. All enemies and bosses should be effected by the buster, even if it only takes 1 bar of health away. Don't force someone to use only one weapon.
@@GoodVibeCollecting never forgiving them for the boobeam trap, where there's not enough crash bomb to kill all of the enemies AND destroy most of the walls. While it's possible to navigate carefully and destroy the enemies with 1 crash bomb left, the fact that you're forced to do this is annoying as hell and just not fun design
@@alecrutz956Yup there is a specific way it must be defeated. Before I knew how, it would always take me two attempts. Running out of energy, dying, farming for me energy, and then finally beating it.
I forget if it was this game or another Mega Man game, but there's a spot where there's a 1-Up high above the player, and the only way to reach it is to use Rush Jet. However, if you use Rush Jet to get it there, you don't have enough Rush Jet energy for later on in the level when it's required to proceed.
Arin ranted about that in an episode of Game Grumps.
It's this game. Needle Man Doc Robot stage. You still have plenty of Rush Jet though so not sure what Arin is complaining about. Just Game Grumps being game grumps I guess. :P
I'm like 95% sure that's why the high-jump feature was added, to get around the fact that you could soft-lock yourself. These flaws were probably discovered too late to redesign the levels, so the jump was added so that Nintendo Game Counselors could offer that advice over the 900 number.
it was a debug feature they forgot to remove
If it was, Capcom USA didn't know about it.
@@omegarugal9283 Or didn't have enough time to remove.
These kinds of obstacles should always have respawning enemies somewhere, and preferably also a pit, so that the player can die on purpose if everything else fails.
Exactly.
I found out the high jump thing by accident. If you get the shadow weapon before you get rush jet, just go to the shadow weapon and push right.
Yup, that is another well known glitch in the game.
Dr. Light: "Mega Man, are you all right? You've been on Gemini Man's planet for 3 weeks!"
Mega Man: "Dr. Light, Rush is out of energy and I have no other way to get over this wall!"
Dr. Light: "Okay then, Mega Man, just teleport back to Earth and we'll get you and Rush refilled at the lab!"
Mega Man: "..."
Dr. Light: "Then, uh, refill with some energy capsules from nearby enemies!"
Mega Man: "Sorry Doc, but I already destroyed all of the enemy robots."
Dr. Light: "Are you sure? These readings say that there are some enemy robots located in the egg capsules above your head. Go back to the ladder and look up!"
Mega Man: "I see them! But.... I can't shoot upwards."
Dr. Light: "..."
Dr. Light: "Mega Man, just climb. Over. The wall."
By inventing AI, Doctor Light gave himself a one-way ticket to being the most disappointed person in history.
😄
On the Wiley stages I always farm for weapon energy whenever anything gets half depleted. It takes a little while, but there are plenty of good places to farm.
Rush Coil/Jet is about the only thing you need. You can beat the levels without any weapons but they help.
If you do the jump cheat, you can also jump in and out of pits. If you die in the pit and jump out, you have invincibility but can't shoot the normal weapon.
You know a game was rushed when the cheats themselves are buggy.
MM3 was the only one that I owned in the 90s. I knew the trick and I kept the P2 controller jammed into a dresser drawer, holding down, quite often lol
Well, that's one way to do it. Most people just use a rubber band or use their feet. I'm curious to know how you found out about the trick? From a friend? Magazine?
The Wily Stages is definitely made by purpose because Wily Stages are always a gauntlet and has always been. You need to be careful about your ammo
More importantly, your Rush energy.
Mega man 3 seemed to really add depth to the overall story of the game's universe. i think that's why so many people love it more. My only gripe is i feel that its the hardest game in the original series
Alot of people do. Part of that is because it probably wasn't play tested enough.
One time when I was playing, I ran into a far more annoying softlock scenario, this time in the form of a glitch. I was at the robot master rematches, I defeated one half of Gemini Man, but then the other half just disappeared, didn't get beaten, and never came back. The teleporter didn't even work, and there were no stage hazards I could kill myself with. Literal limbo, and after all that hard work.
Yup, that is a known glitch to happen. There is also one where if you beat Hard Man as he's smashed into the ground, Mega Man stays frozen in air.
Pretty cool. I wouldn’t mind more videos like this.
Thank you. I wanted to try something different and I'm glad people seem to like it :) I have another Mega Man 3 idea in mind that I might consider.
I had the game back in the day and the second controller trick is mentioned in the instruction manual.
Haha, nice try. It should have been though.
I can beat MM3 in under an hour and despite the many, many times I've played it I have somehow never softlocked myself.
It's not something that can easily happen. You have to purposely be messing around to do so. The fact that it CAN happen though is kind of an issue and I know it's happened to others.
@@GoodVibeCollecting for sure! cool video!
@@misterknite Thank you. Glad you liked it. I've been sitting on this video idea for like 5 years LOL.
These softlocks makes me wonder whether the high jump was added as secret workaround.
I doubt it. I bet it was just left in the game because the devs didn't have enough time to remove it. If it was intentionally left in, they would of hinted at it in the instruction manual.
You would have to be the most inept person on earth to actually get softlocked by the Spark Man Doc Robot Stage or Wily Stage 1 because of the fact that they are right at the beginning of the stage and you will have full energy when you start.
Now if you somehow died in the Spark Man Stage before beating Air Man and unexpectedly used all of your RC and RJ, then you may have a problem.
Which very well can happen. Same with Wily 1. The odds are extremely unlikely but this shouldn't have been an issue in the first place.
These weren't accidents. The wily stage ones are on purpose . The reason is you're supposed to manage you energy usage
It's unfortunate though because having full weapon energy or having a weapon capsule at the beginning of the stage would have lessened the chances of a softlock happening in Wily 3.
While the concept might have been intentional, the results were not. Mega Man 2 also had spots that punished "mismanaging" energy usage, but you could always run out your lives and continue. If you get caught in one of these situations in Mega Man 3, the only solution is to either reset the NES or use the unlisted debug commands. These areas really do lend to the idea that the game was being designed with infinite Rush Coil energy in mind.
@@BainesMkII Even then, just about everything can be killed with the buster in Mega Man 2. The exception being the Wily 4 boss and final boss.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Yes, the other places are designed to let you farm energy capsules. Even the start of Wily 1 has infinitely spawning birds in case you somehow manage to waste all your Item energy before you get past the first wall.
@@BainesMkII As well as Scworms that respawn once they go off screen.
Sometimes you could get a random softlock if a Boss defeats you. Megaman would get stuck on the ceiling of the room before the Boss.
Stuff like that you have to question whether it's a softlock or a glitch. If it's something odd like that, that the player has no control of, I'd say it's a glitch.
@@GoodVibeCollecting sorry, I'm not used to the vocabulary. :) but I get the point
@@MismiMan Yeah, it doesn't really matter what you call it. I still call it getting stuck LOL.
There’s one where if you die on one of the Wiley bosses (I think it’s stage 1 or 3 whichever one has the crane thing) when you spawn from the mid point your teleported animation gets stuck and your soft locked. Happened to me a couple weeks ago.
That's only in the JP version. They removed that section in the NA and EU versions.
Played this alot back in the days, and able to finish it without loosing any life. This things never happen.
They do happen to people, just not very often.
This is why fans shouldn't dunk on Jet Mega Man from MM6. You can say MM2 and 3 are "the greatest games" in the Classic series, but don't ignore when later games make an actual improvement.
Jet Mega Man is awesome but sadly got nerfed in MM7. MM6 is good but you can tell that game was also rushed. Another commenter pointed out that there was a lot cut from it. Including more interactions with Protoman during levels and a story arc.
@@GoodVibeCollecting Each of these games was rushed out
Meanwhile true fans know that mm2 sucks
@@panthekirb7561 If they were, some are less obvious.
@@panthekirb7561 C'mon now, it doesn't suck. I do think it's overrated though and wish the other games would get more love.
i wonder if the glitched rush jet (accessing it through shadow blade or something before you actually get rush jet) consumes energy...
IIRC it does.
I laughed too hard when the cloud shoved you off.
I think I've died more in mm3 than every other game ever combined.
I knew about that glitch from personal experience LOL.
These are all cool but...how are you jumping so close to the ground like that?! Amazing!
Clearly Mega Man is pissed off about being softlocked and now has to start over.
Thanks for the continued support. :)
I was not a fan of Megan until I played part 3. Its the game that got me into the franchise.
2 and 3 were the first Mega Man games for alot of people. Probably because they are the most common.
I fell to at least one of these, probably one of the Gemini examples you had mentioned. I still love this game though.
Thanks for confirming that, proving it does happen.
Honestly, I’ve played the heck out of this game since it was released. It’s my favorite game of all time. I’ve never EVER had any of this happen to me. 🤷🏻♂️
Neither do most people who play this game. It's not something that immediately stands out as a possibility. I had it happen to me before when I was younger and I've always been curious if there were anymore spots in the game that softlock you. Sure enough, there are.
You know, this really shows how the game was rushed because they weren't really testing the game on a full playthrough very often. Pretty sure they would do the high jump trick and say "yup, this should be working just as normal if a player were to use Rush Coil instead"
BTW what is going on with these 60s style mugshots? Dr. Wily is pure nightmare fuel here 💀
They are from the Mega Man 3 Nintendo Power poster. It was very common for artwork to be westernized back then. Alot of it was very off-brand looking. Some was interesting, some was weird.
I bet this is why that high jump using the 2P controller trick got leaked in none other than Nintendo Power. I personally want to think it was designed on purpose to troll the players, as you said, but maybe the Capcom programmers had troll's remorse at the last second and put the high jump trick in, then leaked the trick to NP so kids wouldn't get too pissed.
That's my headcanon now.
It's a possibility but I still say it's from them running out of time.
@@GoodVibeCollecting And the controller trick is a debugging feature for the developers that was simply not removed due to the game being rushed to shelves. I mean it's cool but I seriously doubt it was left in intentionally.
@@philiplonidier Exactly.
The FACTS & TRUTH no one wants to see nor admit to, in the end. BASED.
Thanks for watching.
Could it be that the high jump trick was put into the game as a fix for the level design issues that resulted in the soft lock? It seems like this fix would have been easier to put in place for a rushed game than to redesign the levels. The trick doesn't exist for any other Megaman game (as far as I know).
That would make sense except it's not mentioned anywhere in the game or instruction manual. Plus it feels more like a debug mode since you can do other things with it as well.
This happened because the game was rushed out too soon. Lots of content was cut. Think of the simple title screen that had the long musical opener.
People have mad hacks that restore the cut content but as far as I know, no one had made a hack that just fixes the softlocking issue.
Man I've been playing this game for almost 35 and never encountered any of these softlocks not once. They are really good catches but man, you got to really be going off the beaten path and messing around to find it lol. 😃
For sure, but it has accidently happened to other people. It's something that's starring you in the face the whole time but you never thought about it.
I expected you to mention that you can kill Gemini Man (both of them) before their energy runs out - happened to me once :)
That's more of a glitch, but yes. That and the Hardman glitch could be considered softlocks. I was showing how softlocks could happen from the level design.
so loved this game back in the day, never could get past the doc robot stages when i was young, found the fun glitch? of just using the blue dots in the password screen to skip some of the stages since the blue dot would be basically 2 red dots in the password... gave up cause i couldnt get past the long pit in needle man stage, sadly when i got older and the internet started being a thing i found out all the left in debug mode info and better yet all the beta issues left in game as to this day i strongly believe that 3 was released in beta mode not finished at all... altho some other capcom games back then had the same debug mode by using controller 2 (Ducktales)
That's one good thing about the passwords in this game, they are very short and simple. I don't think the game is a beta. Yes, it's missing some stuff like different backgrounds and is buggy but for the most part the game is in a finished state. If they had a few more extra weeks, I think most of flaws would have been fixed.
my fav Megaman game off all time
You're a Mega Man fan? I would have never guessed LOL. Honestly, I think this might be mine as well. 2 is great and is the one everyone loves but there is just something about 3's vibe.
MM9 is the best MM
@@kraken5003 So MM 9 and MM 10 are actually lower on my list. It was nice to finally play a new Mega Man game after 12 years but I don't hold them in the same regard as the NES games. Even though they are 8-bit. The fact they went back to 8-bit also seemed odd to me. I really wish they would have called MM 9 something else. Like, Neo Mega Man or something. Similar to what Nintendo did with the New Super Mario Bros. games. MM 10 felt like it was quickly made to cash in on the success of MM 9 and didn't really offer anything new. MM 11 is the true MM 9 IMO. Yes, I'm weird like that.
Wall of spikes is another q
Wall of spikes?
Still my absolute favorite Mega Man game.
I seriously wonder how close the gap is between 2 and 3 as being someone's favorite. The gaming community makes it sound like 2 is the favorite by a landslide but I bet 3 is very close to it.
You know a game was rushed out the door when they didn't even bother to remove testing/debugging tools.
Sometimes they had to leave debug tools/codes in game because removing them would crash the game, meaning they would have to reprogram it all over again.
Perhaps these soft-locks would have been fixed with additional play testing. Admittedly Mega Man 3 is a solid game in spite of being called an unfinished beta.
For sure. Capcom was a quality company and something this probably wouldn't have gotten past them if they had more time.
sooooo megaman 3 has an interesting bug/mechanic, that will keep you from softlocking in this game. hold right on the D-pad Controller two and you will do a super jump glitch. this jump is so strong you can actually jump OUT of bottomless pits.... Yes, it's considered cheating and you shouldn't rely on it to get through the game, but in the event of a softlock circumstance, I'd think it a better solution than having to restart the entire game cause you had to reset. and lose a good chunk of progress. hope y'all find this helpful.
Right, that's what I mean by the 2nd controller trick. But let's be honest, how many people know about it back then? I didn't and I was a hardcore Mega Man fan.
I do wonder if it was purposely left in the game though to get past softlocking. Obviously it was put in for debugging but was never removed. Who knows.
I've been playing this game for around 30 years and I've never used all of any of the rush powers.
Most people don't but just like winning the lottery, it eventually happens to somebody.
it never made sense to me that rush coil would consume weapon energy.
They had to put a limit on the amount of uses, otherwise you could just abuse it. Especially Rush Jet which breaks the game...to an already broken game.
Weird that these haven't happened to me, I played it all the time when I was a kid and some of them seems really likely to happen from time to time.
It something that rarely happens to people but it could happen. It happened to me :P
The worst mistake in the MegaMan games is that certain powers have limited use, or that they do not recharge in some emergency way. or that they require you to have an alternative power up that you did not get 😓🤞
Every Mega Man game has that one weapon that overpowers the others. Which pretty much makes them useless.
I loved playing the first three games so much back then that I forgot how flawed those classics were.
Sure 1 and 2 have some flaws but nothing game breaking like this. Flaws aren't always a bad thing either. It gives games some personality. Something modern games are lacking.
If anyone noticed they were probably like oh well you have passwords.
That's also a possibility.
It looks like they fixed the one in Spark Man in Wily Wars for the Genesis but not so much the others. I'm not too familiar with the Wily Wars so I could be mistaken.
Edit: I was looking at the original Spark Man and not the Doc Robot stage. Oops. No softlock fixes.
I may make a follow up video about that in the future but as far as I can tell, they are still there.
@GoodVibeCollecting I was looking at the Spark Man stage and not the Doc Robot revisit. Again, never really played Wily Wars but seems like a somewhat lazy port now.
@@jamessnedeker4799 Yeah, the softlock is still there. It should have been fixed but I guess they wanted to keep the game faithful to the NES version.
I think MM2 is much more guilty than 3 in this respect, given how many bosses in Wily's fortress can only be killed with a specific weapon, and if the bar for that weapon is empty, too bad for you
Yes, and I hate when bosses can only be defeated with one weapon. However, I wouldn't consider that a softlock because you can still die and try again.
@@GoodVibeCollectingbut weapon energy doesn't refill on death
@@bestaround3323 It does with a game over though.
I thought this video was going to be interesting should have said rush softlocks.
Also mega man 3 was an unfinished game so thats why everything was overlooked
Can't give away all the details haha. Yeah, I think anyone who plays this game can tell it's unfinished.
Honestly needle man 2nd part of doc robot stage. If you get all the energy while using rush jet and die at any point.
You aren't softlocked there as you can still die. It was more of a bad design.
@@GoodVibeCollecting technicall yes. If you get all the energy capsules like a doofus. I mean you can grind until you get enough energy to use it but either way you won't have enough to cross the gap
@@GoodVibeCollecting on a side note I liked this video!
@@ccouthen_gaming You can exploit Rush Jet if you keep jumping while riding across. You will lose none to very little energy that way.
@@ccouthen_gaming I greatly appreciate it.
Gotta save up those energy tanks.
This was before the introduction of weapon energy tanks.
God forbid Rush ever be required for anything.
Having Rush be required can make things more interesting but not when it can potentially soft lock the game.
@@GoodVibeCollecting
How about turning rush into a suicide weapon when you're out of ammo?
That would prevent the soft lock and be hilarious.
@@kekeke8988 Haha, yeah that would be funny to see.
So basically all of these issues would have been solved if they hadn't made Rush mandatory for single player platforming
Yup. I can see why they wanted you to use him though. Still, this is something that should have been tested more thoroughly.
while most of these situation were artificially produced (spark man stage v.2, wily 1 - you always start with full weapon power) it's totally baffling how these stage designs stayed. I never got into these situations as a kid but I think it happened to some players.
Though with the controller 2 trick you could get out of these caught-up-in-eternity-situations 😂
It has happened to other commenters. These were most likely overlooked because they ran short on time. I found these pretty easily so surely they would have to.
@@GoodVibeCollecting The "Mega Man 3 Revamped" hack solves all of these softlock issues, and it also makes Rush Jet more balanced by making it unusable under water;
it has even put back the glowing Saturn-like planet that is supposed to be in the sky at the beginning of Gemini Man's stage.
@@Peter_1986 I consider that to be more of a hack though. It's not the same game. I wish someone would leave the game as is and only fix the softlocks and graphical glitches. Call it Mega Man 3.1 or something like that.
I'd always have the NES Advantage plugged in port 2 to activate the cheats with my feet.
Yes, I would wash them first.
That's an easier way to do that for sure.
Holding left on controller 2 allows Mega Man to jump over that.
Yes, that's what I mean by 2nd controller trick.
A simple "reset stage" option could have prevented so many of these 😂
Or as others have mentioned, some kind of time limit.
Yeah, basically if any fundamental basic function in a video game is tedious to do, and it doesn't require any actual skill, then there should be a quick way to get it done.
so thats why the controller 2 comands are for... one for Megaman 4, if you use Rain flush after defeating wily before final, he dies, and the game gets stuck.
Yup, although I'd consider that to be a softlock from a glitch.
Lol, I think I fell into all of these as a kid.
Wow, that's actually impressive.
I used to sit the leg of a kitchen chair on the second controller to get the cheats working.
We used what we could back then. The easiest way would be to use a rubber rand.
Lol another reason people didn't like doc robots let alone bigger to make jumping a pain. I liked it. Guess it rushed to softlock 😂 but I never had that experience. Glad wily wars let ya rewind on switch online and added wily towers.
I actually like the Doc Robot stages. It's neat how you have to revisit the stages but they are destroyed and redesigned. Revisiting stages and refighting bosses was definitely a Capcom trope.
Whats sad is, i fell for the third one once, and 4 and 5 twice each🙄 at least 1-2 never got me, lol
Thanks for confirming that. The Spark Man stage is near impossible to happen but it can. Gemini Man stage happened to me at least once as well so don't feel bad.