Chill Penguin's stage is the right icon on the top of the stage select screen. It's an ice and snow stage, but it's not slippery, so it's not too much of a pain in the butt. You'll immediately meet a weak new enemy.
Ray Bit
Pfft. Weak. They hop around and shoot you and do the minimum amount of damage before exploding when you hit them with two regular shots. Hardly even worth mentioning. This next guy is a bit more complicated.
Axe Max
So manly. These guys hide behind robotic trees, hitting them with axes and sending the robotic logs flying towards you. The logs can be destroyed with a few shots but they regrow and will absorb shots meant for Max so fire quickly. Max himself has 8 HP.
You'll move to the right for a while and fight more bees and rabbits until eventually entering a cave area. This area is pretty similar to the outdoors except it has a new enemy.
Batton Bone
Another weakling. It goes down in one shot, has no projectiles, and the only noteworthy thing about it is that it can fly.
Keep going to encounter more Batton Bones and some Spikeys. Take care when you reach an area where you'll have to zig zag upwards. This is perhaps the only area in the game where Spikeys can be a bit dangerous. Once you reach the top, you'll find the thing we came here first for.
Leg Parts
You might have noticed that you haven't been able to dash until now. Here, in plain sight, is a capsule containing a holographic message from your creator, Dr. Light. Hop inside to get the important Leg Parts upgrade, which will finally allow you to dash. This is so important that subsequent
Mega Man X games give it to you right from the start. You can double tap the d-pad left or right to dash, or just press A (or a shoulder button if you took my advice and remapped it). You'll be able to jump much farther if you jump during a dash. You can also shoot while dashing, and the dash jump even technically works while clinging to walls if you press the dash and jump buttons at the same time! Super secret bonus tip: Regular X Buster shots do double damage if fired during a dash! This is easy to miss, but can come in handy.
Put your sexy new legs to use and continue on. But, uh, be careful, because there are Jammingers waiting for you, as though they just know you'll be dashing around with abandon. There's also this weirdo:
Flammingle
These are too tall to jump over, so you'll have to destroy them if you don't want to take damage. They can throw the buzz saw on the top of their head, which itself can be destroyed with a few shots.
Keep going and you'll find some Ride Armor of your own!
Hop in! The Ride Armor can dash and jump, just like X. It can't shoot, but it has a whopper of a punch, which you can use to destroy some of the things around there. If you want to get out of the Ride Armor, hold up on the dpad and jump. There are a couple of new enemies in this area.
Tombot
Another weak enemy that goes down with one hit from any weapon. It can drop weak bombs and fly around but it's not much of a threat.
Armor Soldier
These guys are a bit more dangerous. Sometimes they start off outside of their Ride Armor, which means you can finish them off quickly. Otherwise, they'll hop inside and take significantly more damage. They're easy to defeat if you're in your own Ride Armor but they can be trickier if you're not.
You'll eventually reach a wall you can't pass unless you exit your Ride Armor and go on foot. Shortly after here, you may or may not want to take a quick detour.
Heart Tank
You'll soon reach a spot where you'll climb up a bit and be able to backtrack onto the "roof" of the area you rode the Armor through. Up here you'll find two domes that you would be able to destroy if you had your Ride Armor, but you don't. Instead, you'll have to come back here later with Flame Mammoth's weapon to destroy the one on the left to collect the Heart Tank inside. (Don't worry, I'll remind you.) Be careful of the Tombots that come out of the domes. Heart Tanks slightly increase X's maximum health, so be sure to collect as many as you can. There's one in each Marverick stage.
Snow Shooter
You'll probably see this guy's snowball before you see the enemy himself. He will either throw snowballs directly at you, or roll them on the ground so that they'll gradually collect snow and grow bigger until they hit you or a wall. You can always jump over them but it might be a bit tricky to do on a slope, where these guys tend to hang out.
Continue left and you'll reach your first Maverick boss battle.
Chill Penguin
Chill Penguin is not too difficult to beat with just your X Buster, which is good, because if you're following this guide exactly, that's all you have. As with all Mavericks, there are two ways to beat him.
The Hard Way
You're probably going to have to do this the old fashioned way. That's ok, he's not that tough. Chill Penguin has several attacks. If he stands still and shoots ice at you, alternating between chunks that sail through the air and chunks that slide along the ground, just jump on to a wall and stay there until he's done. The same strategy applies when he throws himself forward and slides along the ground on his belly. (He's bullet proof when he does this.) Charge your weapon while you're on the wall and attack when you have an opening. When he uses his ice breath, stand back. It has a limited range but will freeze you in place if it hits. The ice breath will cause ice statues to appear, which will absorb your shots until they're destroyed, but they won't do that until they're fully formed, so feel free to blast him while he's breathing. They'll absorb his own ice chunk shots as well. The statues will be destroyed if you shoot them enough, if he slides into them, or if he jumps to the handle hanging from the ceiling and hangs off of it, causing the wind to blow. If this happens, again, stick to the wall, since the only dangerous thing about the wind attack is that you might get hit by the moving statues. You can also climb up and fire at him while he's hanging if you want. Chill Penguin's attacks are easy to avoid.
The Easy Way
If you have the Fire Wave weapon from Flame Mammoth's stage, you'll be able to melt right through his's ice statues and do a nice bit of damage to him, complete with a satisfying Street Fighter/Final Fight-esque flaming body animation. Burn, Chilly Willy, burn! You can interrupt all of his attacks except for his body slide, so if you shoot him with the Fire Wave and he doesn't flinch, jump over him, because that's what's coming out.
Either way, you'll earn a new weapon for beating him.
Shotgun Ice
Shotgun Ice is a single ice shot that travels in a straight line until it hits something, at which point it breaks into several pieces and bounces back at multiple angles. It's honestly not that useful, especially since you can only fire one at a time. If you have the arm upgrade, you can charge the weapon to create a horizontally moving ice platform that you can ride along the ground. Not a great weapon, but at least, from now on, you'll always have a weapon that will totally obliterate one specific boss.
What's Next?
There's no backtracking to be done yet since there's nowhere to backtrack to. Clearing Chill Penguin's stage will cause Flame Mammoth's stage to freeze over, making some otherwise-unreachable areas accessible and generally making the stage easier. If you feel like you're taking a lot of damage, it might be worth your time to go to Sting Chameleon's stage and get the Armor upgrade. You don't have to actually beat a stage to keep its upgrade. If you die enough and get a game over, you can return to the character select screen and keep anything you've collected. (It's not pretty, but it works.) The down side of the order in which we're fighting the Marvericks is that we'll be going to Flame Mammoth's stage last, which means we'll be collecting the arm upgrade last. If you want to just go get it now, feel free to check his section of the guide, but keep in mind that you'll need to get the helmet upgrade from Storm Eagle's stage first.
Alternatively, just follow along and head to Spark Mandrill's stage next.
NEXT: Spark Mandrill
