Part 12: Finally, no more fucking tournaments! For this playthrough.
After....that...we're up against ColdMan for the finals.
Along with his brilliantly named Operator: Chillski. It's even better in the original Japanese: Ivan Coolinski. It's like Punch-Out all over again! He's a hideously overweight idiot with a massive coat and a hat on. Complaining that it's hot.
Fuckup Tally: 153
Taking off the gigantic coat would require the dreaded effort on Capcom's part. They'd have to make a whole new sprite! Besides, how are we supposed to know that he's Russian otherwise? They can't exactly give him a bottle of vodka, this ain't MMBN2!
Of course it's reasonable for someone from CyberRussia to feel hot in a more temperate country, but for crying out loud. Chillski's 'accent' is basically the sweatshop laborers Capcom outsourced to randomly deleting words. This sadly means that there'll be paradoxically fewer Fuckups from him because it's impossible to tell what's intended and what's the usual quality.
In Soviet Sharo, appliance turns on you. Considering this series though, that's everywhere else as well. Interpreting 'turns on' as betrayed, naturally. You can make your own joke about the other interpretation.
Chillski heads off to go adjust the thermostat or something.
Which is quite an efficient device, and ColdMan is evidently mucking with the thing in order to adjust the temperature. Whether everyone else likes it or not.
"We're useless NPCs"!
Right, the tournament organizers are complaining, because Chillski and ColdMan are dropping the temperatures down to levels where the whole Colosseum is a refrigerator. That's one way to keep the audience's drinks cool.
Fuckup Tally: 154
ColdMan is in Netopia Area with some CyberSnowmen, which are the cause of the temperature drop. MegaMan politely asks ColdMan to please stop, as the cold is bothering people.
Amazingly, ColdMan and Chillski comply with no complaints.
Chillski's decided he prefers natural cold to air conditioners on full blast, so he's headed back to Sharo until the match begins.
Bye, ColdMan. A surprisingly amicable duo, don't you agree? Yeah, as if that's where this is ending. If only anything in the series was that simple.
The temperature's crawling back up to normal, so all that's left to do is Jack-Out and head outside.
WHAT!
THE!
FUCK!
Abledeeblo...blah. Fweeee. Mah, mee mah, mo mo. What. Here's the story. The Sharo Space Center's weather control satellite has been taken over. Remember that bullshit Environmental Control System from MMBN2? Looks like they've improved upon it to the point of it basically being a global thermostat, adjustable by region, capable of creating any kind of weather anywhere on the planet.
Fuckup Tally: 155
INSTANTLY. Meteorology joins the Capcom Science pile.
Fuckup Tally: 156
And I MEAN instantly! Chillski and ColdMan just teleported to Sharo, took over the satellite, and created the blizzard in Netopia.
A blizzard in a temperate country? Just think of all the homeless NPCs, like Raoul's clan! Or the agricultural impact, crops will be wiped out and a food shortage will hit!
Or worst of all, the tournament might get cancelled!
A routine folder reorganization yields this gem.
Fuckup Tally: 157
Normally I ignore chip descriptions because they're heavily compressed by nature, but it seems as though the first two words got swapped somehow. The mind boggles, but at least MMBN4 is consistent about fucking up at every level, from the little details to the overall story.
Finally, a new country! Geeze, we've just had Netopia and Electopia so far, it's about time a new location opened up. Each country has a different means of explaining how Lan gets to the airport. In Netopia and Electopia, it's the train, while here in Sharo, Lan evidently travels by snow dog team. The funniest is NetFrica, where there's simply an Ostrich with no other commentary attached.
Must be pretty uncomfortable in that thigh-high skirt, then.
Fuckup Tally: 158
Also, the game uses celsius, so considering Lan's running around in shorts, an orange vest, and a T-shirt, you'd think that he'd be a bit chilly. Just wait a little while, this is going to get fun.
"Nah, I just figured I needed a nap here."
Anyway, here's the Space Center. Chillski sprayed sleeping gas and hijacked the weather satellite from here, the only scientist on duty is still passing out even as we speak to him.
These wretched things are the focus of the scenario.
I'm cutting out 30 text boxes of exposition here, all of which are lovingly spent in Solid Snake Dialogue mode. Seriously, this infodump goes on for at least 5 minutes at normal reading speed, when it can be summed up as:
1: There are 4 antennas in Sharo, you need to repair them all.
2: To do this, destroy the CyberSnowmen ColdMan set up inside. Or in other words, delete viruses.
3: After that, you need a very specific fire-element chip to repair the heating systems within the antennas. If you Jack-Out before doing so, the CyberSnowmen will come back.
Let's not even address how the hell this works. And the heating systems aren't "Essentially" CyberTorches, they ARE CyberTorches.
And what's especially annoying about them is that you can't check which chip you need until AFTER you've destroyed all the CyberSnowmen, and the most populated of the antennas has 8 of the tedious little fuckers to clear up. All the battles consist of MettEX, Boomer, and other easy viruses from TownArea, so it's just a stupid waste of time.
Don't have the exact right chip? Fuck you, do it all over again.
Here's the other gimmick: Lan's body temperature. While outside in the blizzard, that counter will slowly decrement, and bad things happen if it gets too low. It instantly refills to full if you go indoors though.
And while we're in here, another of these BCC codes.
How's that satellite doing, anyhow?
Fuckup Tally: 159
Okie-dokie!
Each of the antennas is blocked by a mound of snow you need to waste time button mashing to shovel through, so you need to check one of the generic houses in order to get a shovel to do this.
More importantly, time to murder Lan for the sake of
Ahahaha! DIE! Die, Hikari, DIE!
At 34.0 degrees, Lan will be unable to send MegaMan any chips in battle. Worth noting that the counter decreases anytime Lan is outdoors, even if you're currently controlling MegaMan.
Suffer, suffer in the icy grip of death!
DIE! FREEZE! BWAHAHAHAHAAAA!
Fucking killjoy. There's no Game Over, Lan just magically teleports back to the space center, and any unlit heating systems will reset. Once you pop the required fire chip in, that antenna is fixed for good. Until then, Jacking-Out will cause all of the CyberSnowmen to return, and you'll need to repeat everything. 
Fuckup Tally: 160
Also, you don't shovel the snow. Lan sticks the shovel in and vibrates, causing the friction heat to melt through.
Some hint. It's more like a theatric little bit of prose.
At least they tell you the code. Oh, did I mention that? To get through this asinine scenario, you'll need 4 specific fire chips:
HeatShot C
FlameLine F
HeatBreath K
BlackBomb Z
Do you know where those are? No? Fuck you! There will be absolutely no indications of where you get any of these. And I'll remind you that you can only find out which chip you actually require by deleting all the CyberSnowmen first, so if you don't have it already, hey, you can go fuck yourself.
HeatShot C and FlameLine F are the easy ones, Spikey and VolGear viruses will drop those. HeatBreath K is going to drive you insane unless you compulsively explore everything the minute its opened up to you. Wuther viruses will drop HeatBreath K randomly, and they're pretty deep in the UnderNet.
Or, you can just pop over to the Netopia Area NetMerchant, who has one for sale at the low-low price of 5000z.
As for BlackBomb Z, there's only one of those available without Higsby's chip order system, and even that requires finding the original. The girl who assembled the C-Slider for us has a Purple Mystery Data next to her, BlackBomb Z is inside of it.
If you don't know where these things are, have fun scouring the ENTIRE FUCKING GAME looking for them! Screenshots don't do this part of the game justice. In the thread, everyone was complaining about ColdMan's scenario, and it wasn't bad for me because I had snagged the chips ahead of time, knowing what was in store. Neener-neener, guys. But just picture doing this when you have no clue at all where the single BlackBomb Z chip is.
Oh, and by the way, on subsequent playthroughs, the viruses change, remember? Have fun getting a HeatShot C and a FlameLine F then!
Fuckup Tally: 161
This one's a bit out of left field, let me explain. Each time you repair a heating system, it gives you an identical message. Except, 3 of them are all uppercase, one of them is capitalized normally. Which means that not only was the dialogue for each of them written individually, rather than sourced from one text sample to save programming space, they didn't even do it consistently.
The icing on the cake is that having dialogue chunks that source back to one string is the reason for all the under-eight-characters weirdass compressed names. Like ProtM or Ingrdnt. It's the little things that get me.
By the way, be sure to check all of the Antenna computers, they have some surprisingly great stuff. One of them even has an HPMemory. What's even better about this BugBomb is that its G coded, so it fits into the BVG tricoded folder setup I have going.
Monotony later, the instant the last of the Anetnnas are repaired, the blizzard subsides.
Fuckup Tally: 162
The instant. Extreme weather patterns form instantly, and by golly, they vanish instantly as well!
Fuckup Tally: 163
This is my favorite part. The blizzard in Netopia will take a while to dissipate, however. Not because of the whole "It's another country a hemisphere away and weather takes time to travel". It'll take a while because the fucking wireless signal will take time to travel.We've come full circle. So ass-backwards that we're moving forward. Capcom Science! Where weather travels faster than satellite signals!
ColdMan and Chillski call up, pissed off that we've averted a sequel to The Day After Tomorrow.
That's all for the scenario. It really goes by quickly when you've prepared in advance like me. Which I did specifically because of all the moaning in the thread about how horrible this scenario was.
Jesus, when the blizzard parallax foreground effect is removed, I just noticed how horribly sprited these houses are. Those are SNES graphical levels, they look like they came out of Earthbound or something!
And boy is that advisory heeded. While the blizzard effect is up, all NPCs in Netopia are removed rather than given unique dialogue. That'd take effort.
The normal pre-battle music starts now. Oh, ha ha, Capcom, such meta humor you've got going.
You could easily fit 8 of Lan in this guy, seriously.
ColdMan is a massive asshole, not only being one of those stays-in-the-back Navis, but also an obstacle spammer who takes great joy in screwing with our side of the field. The worst is his icy fog attack the name of which I forget, which stays ont he field and tracks you down. You hav to destroy it, or else it's time for some unavoidable damage!
The worst part is that JunkSoul's charge shot is POLTERGEIST. Remember that chip? It flings all obstacles at the enemy for 100 damage a pop. Watch how ColdMan behaves, and picture how hilariously different this battle would have been.
After the battle, Chillski says that NetBattles are just a game. Which is what multiple NPCs throughout the story have done, including Lan himself.
Lan, naturally, goes apeshit ballistic.
Fuckup Tally: 164
I think it was Tensuke/TopMan's update where Lan himself said something like "I guess NetBattles are more than just a game for the young!"
"Which is why I put my brother in mortal danger every round!" I should note that the game specifically uses the term Deleted for enemy Navis after the tournament matches. I can't believe I've forgotten to mention it up to now.
Fuckup Tally: 165
I'm not calling it a Fuckup because of Lan risking MegaMan like that. I'm calling it a Fuckup because the N1 had special measures in place to protect Navis from having to worry about deletion. Good old continuity.
Fuckup Tally: 166
And by the way, the "Deleted" enemy Navis are just fine speaking to us after the match as part of the banter, without anything like a backup or other explanation invoked whatsoever.
Which would do absolutely nothing. Lan, this man's hat probably weighs more than you do. It's kind of weird that no attention whatsoever is given to the sheer bulk Chillski has, he's the largest human in the series.
And one scrawny official is all it takes to subdue him and drag his ass off to jail for hijacking the weather satellite.
At least karma arrives to mete out a fitting punishment. Who wants to bet he'll leave his coat on the whole time? That'll be an enhanced interrogation method, alright.
Fuckup Tally: 167
YOU'RE WINNER!
Now that we're champions of the world, we get a helicopter ride! What, no trophy? Yeah, that's ending cutscene only.
Now, only NOW, do we actually get to start addressing the Asteroid. 3 tournaments after the introduction of it, for a total of 9 asinine, completely irrelevant scenarious that have nothing to do with a giant Asteroid.
It only gets worse, trust me. Off to NAXA!