Here is a 1-Life & no-damage replay of the NeoGeo classic, Magician Lord. I have always liked the look of Magician Lord after seeing in it the old Neo-Geo feature in the legendary UK magazine C&VG. The graphics looked so good for the time and still hold up today. Aside from the amazing music this game isn’t the best, but I still love it, mainly nostalgia I guess. My biggest gripe with the game is the awful jumping physics, it feels so odd and inconsistent. First off, the jump is fully controllable in the air but with no inertia, which always feels odd in games to me. And secondly is the weird acceleration you get when you transition from a small jump into a big jump, it almost feels like someone is swiping on a touch screen. Also the jumping while firing is weirdly restricted. For example, when jumping horizontally you can fire the instant you leave the ground, but jumping straight up with no left of right direction restricts your firing until you’re at least a character height from a jump, it’s all very odd and very inconsistent.
After a little experimentation I came to the conclusion that the Magician is the strongest character in the game by far. He has the advantage of attacking from a distance which most of the transitional forms can’t, and he also has the fastest firing-rate. The transitional characters just seem kinda pointless and restricted aside from using the dragon on the final boss.
Note: There is questionable collision detection @2:00 that looks like I am using invincibility, try it for yourselves. I’m not sure it your ducking animation has a really high hitbox or if the projectile has a tiny hitbox. It doesn’t make much sense because everything else in the game has a huge hitbox...
*Played via MAME on a Sega New Astro City cab using CRT_Emudrivers. No cheats, save-states or auto-fire were used. Gameplay was captured from .inp playback file and synced with joystick-cam.
https://youtu.be/tVjtbJOtsQs
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