CanadaHere's some data on level growth and what it actually does, as well as how difficulty affects the game. This data is currently incomplete since it's rather tedious to test every boss over and over.
Summary:
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Difficulty does not change weapon damage and does not interact with the character properties in any way.
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Difficulty does not appear to change drops or the number of points gained from collectables.
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The starting health range between Kids-VH is only due to a difference in starting rank. Modifying game memory to start with a different rank results in greater initial health. Gaining rank is enough to close the difference in health between difficulties.
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Bosses have different health values between difficulties.
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Bosses have several "stacks" of health with 64 health each. On Kids diff., most bosses have 4 stacks. On VH, most have 8 (but I have not yet confirmed this about all bosses.)
Marco: Handgun: 1 Machine Gun: 2 Shotgun: 16 Rocket Launcher 12 (4 x 3 hits) Grenades: 24 (8 x 3 hits)
Fio: Handgun: 1 Machine Gun: 2 Shotgun: 32 (16 x 2 hits) Rocket Launcher: 12 (4 x 3 hits) Grenades: 24 (8 x 3 hits)
- There can only be 12 machine gun shots on screen at once
- There does not appear to be a difference between damage values in each mode.
Hi all,
I just have a quick suggestion for those of us who run the game. There is a long, unskippable cutscene at the start of the game, which makes resetting tedious and could turn off new players from wanting to pick up this game. Super Mario Sunshine has a similar issue! However, unlike Super Mario Sunshine, our unskippable intro cinematic is not preceded by gameplay!
Proposal: When Larryboy spawns in the tutorial room, the game is automatically saved, so creating a newgame file to start runs from is trivial. Just load up the game, watch the cutscene, and then save+quit after the tutorial loads.
Starting from the newgame save is easy: Load up the save and when the tutorial loads, immediately pause. Then you can take out the memory card, and resume the game with time starting on "resume". Alternatively, start time when the save game loads and remove the memory card during a long voice line from Alfred. I'm not sure if the tutorial has autosaves along the way that would complicate this.
Anyhow, food for thought. Let me know what the rest of you think.
