EDITORIAL
A Weekend With Mega Man
By Shaun Hatton - October 19th, 2008
I was among the skeptics when it was revealed that Mega Man 9 would be a game developed in the 8-bit style of the original series. Part of this is because the gaming industry has already seen numerous attempts to cash in on nostalgia-seeking twenty and thirty-somethings via cash grabs like oftentimes-overpriced Virtual Console releases and the resurfacing of 80s gaming icons in modern kitsch merchandising (namely T-shirts).
But the more I read and saw about Mega Man 9, the more my shell of cynicism began to crack. There’s no denying that Mega Man as a series of games played a big part in not only my early interest of gaming, but in my interest in creativity. In fact, early attempts at creative writing on my part were highly derivative of Mega Man both in terms of storytelling and of character design. I’ve re-typed a story I wrote when I was in Grade Eight and posted in on my personal blog. Anyone adventurous or masochistic enough to read through it will see that it was very highly influenced by our hero in blue.
Getting back to Mega Man 9, I still didn’t see it as a worthwhile title until I played it for myself. These days, games tend to receive more hype or praise than they’re worth, and I took that into consideration when hearing from other gamers about how great this new entry into the series was. I’ve been burned many times before when reviewers raved about games so much you’d think they were talking about the second coming of Christ. But I often don’t like games that everyone else seems to be into. For me, this even goes beyond video gaming. For the most part, I don’t listen to most popular music or enjoy blockbuster movies.
When I played Mega Man 9 for the first time, the instant familiarity of the controls combined with its simplistic yet complicated graphic and sound design fooled me into thinking I was playing an NES game. More accurately, it made me feel like a kid again. Most adventure games are at their core a struggle to get from point A to point B as efficiently and safely as possible. In recent years, forking paths such as side quests in games have made adventure titles seem less linear than they actually are. The first Mega Man was one of the first games to give the illusion of non-linear gameplay because it gave players the option of choosing which stage to play first. In the end it’s obviously a basic point A to point B game, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to adequately describe what makes Mega Man games so enjoyable for me. In a way, they can sometimes be very frustrating, which is to say not at all enjoyable. Every stage of every Mega Man title has had some sort of impassable obstacle that I couldn’t figure out or defeat the first few times encountering it. But the challenges the games present only seem impossible, and there is always a definite way to get through every stage and defeat every enemy. Mega Man as a series is one of the earliest examples of brain over brawn and firepower in a platformer. Running and gunning is something I love to do in games, but the design of Mega Man titles is such that you can only successfully run and gun through levels after defeating them and remembering all the subtleties such as how far off a platform you can stand before the game considers you to be off of it. In this manner, the series reminds me of another favourite of mine: R-Type.
There is a stack of games on my coffee table that I need to play and review, and that I want to play and review. Even though I’ve already reviewed Mega Man 9, I find myself returning to it every time I power on the Xbox 360. It’s even inspired me to start playing the other Mega Man games I own. This weekend I played Mega Man II for the original Game Boy prior to playing Mega Man, Mega Man 2, Mega Man 7, and Mega Man 8 from the Mega Man Anniversary Collection disc for Game Cube. The controls are a little messed-up in that version but I still managed to beat a few bosses in all these games.
I’m not sure when I’ll decide it’s time to move onto the next unopened game, but I definitely have a strange life when one of my biggest problems is the fact that I have a stack of games that are essentially Mega Man widows.
