Let's Play MMX Hard Type - Part 5 - Whose Skull is Thickest?
Channel: Lockirby2
Date: 2015-02-27

Death Count:

Intro Stage: 5
Chill Penguin: 68
Storm Eagle: 22
Sting Chameleon: 73
Armored Armadillo: 62

Wait, wait, why am I doing Armored Armadillo next, when he's Hardcore ranking? Well, I totally forgot that Chill Penguin was Veteran, so I thought that my next challenge was a toss up between Armored Armadillo and Spark Mandrill. And based on my vanilla experience, I chose to go here first. Overall, it probably just made things easier for me. After all, I got an HP powerup here, and found nothing in Spark Mandrill's stage (spoiler?), so unless E. Spark would have suddenly been stupidly effective against Armored Armadillo, doing the stages this way around was only helping me out (I doubt that E. Spark would have been effective in the stage, for the same reasons that none of my other weapons were).

This stage is much heavier on the platforming than the others, and as far as the stage itself (i.e., ignoring the maverick), it was probably the second hardest after Flame Mammoth's. The first half had the speed segment escaping the (oh-so-cleverly named by myself) "Guy" about halfway through, so it was harder than the second half to get used to. When parts like this require a larger amount of reset time, it becomes easier to forget important things when the intensity starts back up again. But once I got through there just once, I was golden. After bypassing Guy the first time, deaths there on subsequent attempts were minimal in comparison. I thought this level had a pretty great learning curve, with just enough "learning by failing" to make you learn the level, but not enough to be annoying.

The second half was easier than the first (as per the usual, weirdly enough, in this hack). The speed segment was easier, thanks to the lack of bats, and right at the start. The HP powerup was easy to get provided I didn't take a hit anywhere beforehand (honestly, getting hit beforehand almost certainly meant death anyhow, so this wasn't a huge limiting factor). I'm going to have to search that last, fairly open-ended area again though. It's bothering me for some reason...

My fight against Armored Armadillo is what happens when one tries to bring their vanilla strats to a Hard Type mod. There's really not much else to say. When I spend a little longer than usual highlighting an attempt, I usually try to highlight what I've learned since the last attempt that I showed in detail. Here, however, it shows the lack of learning from my early attempts a lot better. Once I figured the battle out, he was dead as a doornail. I didn't even need an attempt or two at that point. In fact, I changed up my strat halfway through an attempt, and still destroyed him.

I've beaten all mavericks IRL, BTW. On to Sigma!