Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch Forum
Old wiki info?
msgameandcake • May. 29, 2025, 5:35 AM
May. 29, 2025, 5:35 AM
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I decided to start up a new playthrough of the story mode a bit ago, and forgot the details on how to ensure you fight Enker in Chapter 2, as well as the other Mega Man Killers. When I went to look at the wiki, I found that essentially all game guide information was gone. Mega Man Killer requirements, the Ra Moon secret hunt, the various secret weapons and giant bolts in the final chapter, in particular I recall being able to see the actual coding for each special weapon which I found really cool! I last played this game a few years ago so I vaguely recall some of the details, but at this point, I can't seem to find this information anywhere. All of the guides available are about modding or setting up multiplayer, nothing about the single player content as far as I can tell. Is there a place I can still find all, or at least most, of this information, or is it just gone at this point?
Trillster Administrator
what's a code
May. 31, 2025, 1:20 PM
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To get the important bit out of the way, for the most part, the old wiki is still accessible via Wayback Machine at the following link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220606221523/https://cutstuff.net/mm8bdm/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
As far as publicly noting some reasons for the wiki's change in direction, I feel it's important context to mention that the old one was very poorly maintained. The old wiki, especially towards the end of its lifetime, was largely maintained by folks outside of the development team, so many pages were never fully updated to match the latest major version of the game. They especially weren't updated to match all the different minor versions (such V5C -> V5D's balance and weapon redesigns). By the end of its lifetime, a large majority of the wiki wasn't up to date with V6A, the latest at the time.
The code highlighted for special weapons were the most notorious about this, with both Junk Shield's code and page description being for a far older, entirely different version of the weapon. For extra context, by the time that wiki had retired, there were two different iterations of Junk Shield that had been released, neither of which matched what the wiki detailed. With the game having a training mode built in, these pages were feeling more and more irrelevant.
While its single-player content did keep up fairly well, it still had pretty dubious content due to the aforementioned unofficial maintenance. Most all of the boss pages were an example of this with having unofficial attack names that are never mentioned elsewhere. In my opinion, it also just documented a lot of info that was generally not useful, such as internal boss HP numbers (which often had no relation to how much it actually took to defeat them), interactions with cheats, and callouts about older versions of the content, making them feel more like TCRF / TV tropes pages.
All this combined, it created a wiki that was so information dense that updating it became incredibly infeasible. To update it properly, every MM8BDM update would've entailed checking & updating 200+ pages every update, using quite old and slow wiki software. Meanwhile, despite all of the information denseness around single-player, weapons, and maps, it still wasn't at all useful for the subjects that I personally would've wanted / expected it to be useful for.
Historically, MM8BDM was a very difficult game to set up, play online with, and make mods for, but the wiki was the most out of date in those areas. The sections surrounding those areas still highlighted content from the V1-V2 era. With a lot of the play these days occurring online in modding communities, there was a very large disconnect there, which I hope that the new wiki better solves.
I didn't really mean for this to be a scathing review of the old wiki, since I've come to agree that there is some whimsy that's missing in the new one, so I can appreciate the old wiki maintainers for keeping that alive. I just think it's important to highlight just how out of date that old wiki was in relation to the game at that point in time, and just how much effort it would've been to both update it and then continue maintaining it in the state that it was in.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220606221523/https://cutstuff.net/mm8bdm/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
As far as publicly noting some reasons for the wiki's change in direction, I feel it's important context to mention that the old one was very poorly maintained. The old wiki, especially towards the end of its lifetime, was largely maintained by folks outside of the development team, so many pages were never fully updated to match the latest major version of the game. They especially weren't updated to match all the different minor versions (such V5C -> V5D's balance and weapon redesigns). By the end of its lifetime, a large majority of the wiki wasn't up to date with V6A, the latest at the time.
The code highlighted for special weapons were the most notorious about this, with both Junk Shield's code and page description being for a far older, entirely different version of the weapon. For extra context, by the time that wiki had retired, there were two different iterations of Junk Shield that had been released, neither of which matched what the wiki detailed. With the game having a training mode built in, these pages were feeling more and more irrelevant.
While its single-player content did keep up fairly well, it still had pretty dubious content due to the aforementioned unofficial maintenance. Most all of the boss pages were an example of this with having unofficial attack names that are never mentioned elsewhere. In my opinion, it also just documented a lot of info that was generally not useful, such as internal boss HP numbers (which often had no relation to how much it actually took to defeat them), interactions with cheats, and callouts about older versions of the content, making them feel more like TCRF / TV tropes pages.
All this combined, it created a wiki that was so information dense that updating it became incredibly infeasible. To update it properly, every MM8BDM update would've entailed checking & updating 200+ pages every update, using quite old and slow wiki software. Meanwhile, despite all of the information denseness around single-player, weapons, and maps, it still wasn't at all useful for the subjects that I personally would've wanted / expected it to be useful for.
Historically, MM8BDM was a very difficult game to set up, play online with, and make mods for, but the wiki was the most out of date in those areas. The sections surrounding those areas still highlighted content from the V1-V2 era. With a lot of the play these days occurring online in modding communities, there was a very large disconnect there, which I hope that the new wiki better solves.
I didn't really mean for this to be a scathing review of the old wiki, since I've come to agree that there is some whimsy that's missing in the new one, so I can appreciate the old wiki maintainers for keeping that alive. I just think it's important to highlight just how out of date that old wiki was in relation to the game at that point in time, and just how much effort it would've been to both update it and then continue maintaining it in the state that it was in.