Forum - View topic

This Week in Games - Arms

The thing is, MOST startups fail regardless of where they get their money from, whether it's crowdfunding, traditional investment, bank loans, or out of pocket. It's just now becoming a shock to crowdfunders who invest (and yes, I will use that word because this is essentially what crowdfunding is) because they don't realize just how low the success rate to unproven projects is in general, whereas professional investors and bankers know and are prepared to eat the losses if something they lend money to turns out to not be profitable.

I think both games use nostalgia as a springboard to create something different. Undertale, for instance, looks and feels like an old SNES RPG, but the Mercy mechanic, the ability to choose which major characters live and die, and the moral choices are all things no game of that era had. The game uses its look to give you certain expectations, then subverts them. Compare that to Yooka-Laylee, which promised nothing but the same gameplay as a 20 year old game, and delivered nothing more.

Ranked mode, which exclusively features those wonderful one-on-one fights, doesn't even unlock until you've completed the single-player Grand Prix on a pretty stringent difficulty level.

As for ARMS, after a good launch day run, I started sucking like a black hole at it. It used to be that I was doing well enough to keep getting health penalties in Party Mode, but by Sunday, half of my opponents had pulled off Perfects against me. I take it it's Grand Prix mode, but at the same time, there's something that just isn't clicking with me about it. Everyone can effortlessly dodge everything I do, and everyone else's punches always seem to hit even when I try to dodge. Blocking means they instantly throw a grab that I either don't have time to react to or I somehow miss.

Just some advice from my experience playing the game to anyone else having trouble, because I hit a similar wall the first few days of playing the game:

I think for me, the biggest revelation was that you don't necessarily have to jump/dodge to avoid an enemy's attack. Walking left and right, at a certain distance at least, is enough to avoid a lot of attacks. You just have to walk away from the side that the enemy punch is coming in from. So you always want to be moving.

You also have to jump and dash carefully, because when your jump hits the ground, or your dash finishes, you're more vulnerable. So what I've been doing is to mix up my jumps and dashes. Sometimes jump, and that's it. Or jump and dash. Or jump and dash in the opposite direction. Or just dash.

Single punches seem to be generally safer than throwing both at once, and have the benefit of still canceling enemy throws. It's only when you throw out both arms to punch/throw that your movement gets really limited, and you leave yourself more open. So staggering punches (punch, wait a second, then throw the other punch) seems to work better than going all out, particularly if you're equipping arms that move more slowly.

Also, you can expand the size of your grab if you angle the joycons outward. The grab moves slower, but makes it more likely to land on the opponent. I don't fully understand the mechanics of it, but I'm sure there's a guide somewhere that explains it.

I also think the parry is helpful to use too (when you successfully block a punch, if you immediately dodge, you can throw a faster punch, while also causing the opponent's throwing arm to recover slower, for a practically guaranteed hit -- it also works against certain supers if you time it right). Just don't block for too long, esp. if you're close to the opponent, or you leave yourself open for a grab.

Anyways, those are just my thoughts, I haven't tested all of that to confirm, it's just my off-the-cuff impressions from having played a lot recently and really starting to enjoy the game.

Interesting. How would you recommend I start? Should I just avoid jumping and dodging for now and see how I fare? I mean, there's an abundance of Kid Cobras with dual Slapamanders and Slamamanders right now, and they're near impossible to avoid, but think I can make do with everything else. Or should I keep trying in Grand Prix? I went in at Level 4 using Spring Man to see how Grand Prix is like but Max Brass has become a brick wall. (And yes, I'm using the thumbs-up scheme. I have bad wrists though, so I'm doing mostly arm and elbow movements.)

I really liked the Testpunch, enough to pick up the game at launch, but at this point it feels like I wasted sixty bucks. I didn't buy the game to get pummeled.

Zin5ki wrote:

Simple though the concept is, it is still too eerie for my sensitivities. Hollow arms must be simply harrowing. Do those affected by this condition still possess fine motor skills in their hands? Do the inner sides of their coils have nerve receptors? Indeed, what of their bones?

The official artwork shows that their arms, when coiled all the way back, take on the shape and function of normal arms. There is one such illustration of Ribbon Girl signing her autograph on Biff's shirt, for instance, so indeed, they still have fine motor skills.

The official ARMS Twitter also states that when they're not wearing those masks, their arms are functionally just normal arms too, though I don't know if they become biologically normal or are just incapable of extending.

That was apparently a poor translation. From what I understand, what actually happens is that when people wake up with the extendable arms (or in some rare cases, people are born with the ability, such as Kid Cobra), they're uncontrollable. They're to contact the ARMS League and get a mask, which allows them to control their arms (both in their extendable forms and the normal arm forms you already mentioned). But without the masks they're probably in a bad situation.

Conceivably, one could train themselves enough to have control without the masks, it would just take a lot of effort and skill someone just waking up with them wouldn't have. Though the masks were only invented 120 years prior to the point the game takes place in, so obviously people have managed before, since the ARMS ability has been around since ancient times in that world.

So does that mean that people like Spring Man and Twintelle wear their masks 24/7?