May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favor (Mega Man 6)

(Well, here we are. Mega Man 6. The last one on NES, but not the last one proper. The Mega Man series would go on, but for Nintendo Project purposes... this is the last song for our hero in blue. Fitting, then, that the focus of this entry is from well after the NES was dead. The true last days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Here are some memories of Mega Man 6 and the end of the whole mess, courtesy of a Mr. "CarpetCrawler". Fare thee well, Mega Man.)

Does anybody else miss Funcoland? Because I sure as hell do.

Hell, in that same regard, I miss GameStop. No, I know GameStop is still around, that's not what I mean. I'm not talking about this Power to the Players bullshit, or the cramped and overly-professional, fake, and completely impersonal look the store has now. But I miss the way things used to be. Wall-to-wall of older video games and also enough space to fit newer ones. I have so many memories of both Funcoland and GameStop and the retro goodies I got my hands on. The Power Glove. The Game Genie. Holy shit they made educational Mario games? No, I don't want your cleaning kit. Yes, I understand that you guys hawk them so much because you make commission on them, it doesn't not make them a ripoff.

This one Funcoland that was right next to our mall (which had a Planet Comics, Eletronics Boutique, and GameStop inside, which made no sense to me. Granted the only one that carried retro games in the mall was EB, and its “retro” was a bunch of really common Game Boy games) even had one of the coolest things ever, this really neat-o Mario statue doing his V-for-victory pose. Clearly from before Miyamoto decided that pose was too silly to have Mario keep doing.

Sadly, reality crept in and once it became clear that selling the older games was doing nothing profitable and taking away space from newer games, they changed their business model and started phasing the retro games out. All of those weekly trips to Funcoland by the mall, the GameStop nearby that really oddly designed pizza place, now they're gonna be a rarity or just a once in a blue moon kinda thing. And that's exactly what happened. The retro game collecting bubble didn't start to grow until the rise of using eBay and Amazon and other websites, so GameStop had no justifiable reason to continue selling their old stock. They had already destroyed the Mom and Pop used game shops in our area, and anything else that tried to start up in their wake died out because they just didn't have the game coverage. We even had a cool little game store that sold import games (the first shop I had ever seen that sold Japanese games. I was so tempted to buy Mario Story there before the game came out here, not knowing any better and not realizing the game wasn't going to work anyway.)

Now what does this have to do with Mega Man 6? Don't worry reader, we're almost there.

Other than hoping to find luck with thrift stores it was pretty hard to hunt for NES games for a bit for me. But then alas!! Hollywood Video, a now long-gone video/DVD rental chain that was Blockbuster's only competition, had opened up a little area next to their store for video games, and it even had old games!! Walls of neat accessories, consoles games hidden in a glass counter (a practice that I'm seeing everyone try now), it was like a nice new haven for the games I enjoyed the most. The place even had a silly name: GameCrazy.

I wish I had only happy memories of GameCrazy. I did get some good deals there, but the employees that worked there were miserable, greedy collecting misers. I am still angry that I was too young to put my foot down on the asshole that refused to sell me a "Not For Resale" copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time because they wanted it. No but like seriously, I was a coy 10, 11, 12 year old whatever my age was so I knew that that was a valuable little cartridge, but who does that to a little kid? What kind of grown-ass manchild do you have to be? I'm still salty over that. In general that was my main problem with the store, the employees either didn't know video games (later on I learned that they started putting main-room people in there to do shifts sometimes, which explains that) or were too busy being conceited gamers and it made for a miserable experience sometimes. Video game stores are always extremely intimidating. Employees are too judgemental and will lambast you for your taste in gaming, whether to your face or behind your back.

Good memories though are a-plenty. Buying Bubble Bobble!! Local Smash Bros. tournaments!! I don't know why but I even remember buying specifically The Adventures of Dino-Riki!! That game is one tough tamale. We even reserved new games from there. Dynasty Warriors games were my obsession for a brief while when I was younger (I still play 'em but holy jeez I used to play those games all day when I got home from school) and I reserved one or two from there!! And then there were the days when Mom felt like browsing the movies section, and me finally starting to introduce myself to horror movies I'd run over to the horror film rentals and read the boxes.

But my best memory is plopping down somehow only $15 to pick up today's Nintendo Project subject, Mega Man 6. And the sucker even had the instruction manual. Hell I was like 12 or 13 when I bought the game there and even then I realized they clearly weren't pricing it properly. But oh well, their loss is my gain. It won't be the first time I benefit from an improper game price in the future.

Now, before we get ahead of ourselves here, let me remind you all that I am strange with my Mega Man tastes. I cannot stand 4, it's my least favorite Mega Man and I'm happy that I finally beat it recently because it was the monkey off of back of the NES Mega Man games, the only one I had not beat. And I love, LOVE Mega Man 8. Most everyone agrees that 8 has one of the best soundtracks in the game, but to me everything about it is fantastic, from the gameplay to the mechanics, to the Robot Masters, and even the cheesy cutscenes have a place to me. Heck, 8 is better than Rockman and Forte to me. Yes I did go there.

When I purchased the game, I had already known ahead of time that 6 was considered the "weakest" of the franchise. And it's true, Mega Man was clearly running out of steam and Capcom was already planning out his cooler alternate, X. Heck, Capcom didn't even want to publish the game for North America. Nintendo of America had to do it. And looking at the plot of this game, I can understand the flak it gets. Like, are we really kidding ourselves here? Mr. X? Were they even trying anymore? At least 5 had the appeal of Proto Man going rogue, and 4 actually technically had a new villain in Dr. Cossack.

Sometimes I feel like they were trying to be ironically funny by putting no effort into making Mr. X look pretty much the exact same as Dr. Wily. But at the same time it's just... what does it accomplish? And knowing at Mega Man X was being made at the same time just adds to the overall feeling of "literally who cares, just finish the game already" from this game. And it's a shame too, because for all of its goofy cheesiness, the game's actually pretty... good?

This game was special even before it was developed. Japan had long been holding contests to let kids send in their own designs for robot masters, but this time Nintendo of America was also involved!! Nintendo Power held a contest where if you sent in your own robot master, there was a chance it would be featured in the game as well!! So which robot master came from North America? YAMATO MAN.

OK, OK, I may be full of shit.

Knight Man and Wind Man are the two that came from here. Knight Man is a pretty cool looking robot while Wind Man... well, his music is pretty cool. And he happens to be one of the easiest robot masters to beat.

Lamest looking robot master? Probably Centaur Man. Which is a shame because his game track is easily the best, and far and away one of my favorite tracks in the entire franchise. Just a super pretty chill tune that has been ripe for some AMAZING remixes, like this mix, which is just lovely.

In general this game has some strong music. Mr. X's theme is another track that stands out in particular. Sure it's kinda lazy of them to use it for all four of his stages, but I'm glad it's a legit good song. I don't mind hearing it for four straight levels to be honest. The Mega Man games are known for having good soundtracks, but this game everyone tends to sell short when it's honestly some of the best Mega Man music in the franchise. For real, give the soundtrack a shot, you won't be disappointed. It might be a little different from the other games (this feels like hard-rock-ish than the others to me) but it's still a great listen and I think the alternative style makes it a cut above some of the other Mega Man games.

If there's one thing I'm not happy with it's the loss of Rush. Rush is adorable!! How dare they get rid of him!! I like Mega Man's new power-up system (he has "Rush Adaptors" which allows him to fly for an extended period of time or give him a super-powered punch that is necessary to use if you want to find all of this game's secrets) and the Energy Balancer is INGENIUS and literally everything that Mega Man fans had wanted all-along, but it's all not the same without my adorable robotic dog. Capcom apparently understood this and brought him back for the future installments.

You also won't hear me praising this game's difficulty. Of all of the Mega Man games, this one is probably one of the easiest to gimmick. Buster-only, Power Mega Man-only, and various other gimmicks are pretty easy to do in this game. But I'm not one to think that if a game's too easy then it's clearly bad.

My cartridge of this game holds a lot of special value to me. My blossoming into a major collector of NES games is a period of my life that I kinda wish I could relive the experience of. Just the idea of looking eBay and various websites and being like, "I'm gonna have ALL of these!!" and finding the random NES game I don't have in a thrift shop or garage sale. I'm only about 60% done, but owning 493 NES cartridges is no feat to sneeze at.

Mega Man 6 is one of my first ever truly special good deals I've ever had as an NES collector. For both the cartridge and manual I paid only like, $15 for it, which was unheard of then, let alone now. It wouldn't be my last truly special deal, but it was the first one I was especially proud of. It was the first one that made me feel like a collector. Hence it holds a special value to me, as well as a special place in my heart.

Of course, the game is pretty all right, too. ;)

Dr. Cossack, Tear Down This Wall! (Mega Man 4)

(It seems that the good Dr. Sandifer's Mega Man 3 writeup was a hit. Glad that lots of you enjoyed it! Truly a high water mark for the NES, that game... and now we come to the decline. It's no secret that the latter three NES Mega Man games aren't as well-regarded. Really, with Mega Man 4 we're spoiled for choice here. A game about defeating a Russian scientist released in 1991? The same year that the Cold War ended? Or... did it happen in 1993? Today's post comes to us from a Mr. Brett Smalley. He does Let's Plays! Like I used to! Anyway, today Brett is going to take a less esoteric and more objective look at Mega Man 4 here, and give us folk who live in the colonies a look at what time, relative dimensions, and staggered release dates do to a game where a Japanese robot blows up Communism. Enjoy!)

Allow me to set the scene. The year is 1993. The date is January 21^st. In the Official UK Chart Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ is seven weeks into an impressive ten week uninterrupted run at Number One. Other acts in the Top 10 this week include Take That, Faith No More, Michael Jackson and a bunch of people you’ve probably never heard of. At the UK Box Office, military courtroom drama A Few Good Men continues to reign supreme for the third consecutive week, although it is destined to be overtaken by a Laurence Fishburne thriller called Deep Cover which, again, I’m guessing few people will have heard of. In the world of sport, Manchester United are well on their way to winning the inaugural FA Premier League, while over in Formula One British motor racing legend Nigel Mansell has shockingly been dropped from Team Williams despite winning the World Championship for them the previous year. He subsequently announces his retirement from the sport and moves to the United States to compete in (and later win) the IndyCar World Series. Perhaps most important, however (because this is a video game blog after all), January 21^st 1993 marks the release of Mega Man 4 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Now before you all bring up the painfully obvious elephant in the room, allow me to do it myself. I am well aware that the game actually came out in January 1992, however, that was only in North America. I happen to live in Europe, more specifically England (as has been well documented here on the internet). During the 1990s England always received commodities from across the pond nearly a full year after they were first released in America, and video games were no exception, so while over there the NES was little more than 18 months away from being placed into deserving retirement while its more powerful offspring the Super Nintendo blew the collective minds of gamers the world over, over here in Britland the new console had been out for less than a full year and so its antiquated forebear was still selling pretty well. For the sake of adding some of my own personal experience and flair into the mix I will be concerning myself solely with the English release dates. Now that we have that pesky pachyderm dealt with and herded back into the proverbial zoo where it belongs, we can proceed.

Being the fourth instalment of the franchise (as its title implies), Mega Man 4 is not big on originality, but in fairness it doesn’t really need to be. The game’s premise is similar to the previous two: an evil scientist has unleashed 8 evil robots into the world to cause all manner of untold mayhem and we manoeuvre the plucky cybernetic hero Mega Man through several enemy-packed levels interceded with some tricky platforming elements to navigate. The only difference here is the nature of our adversary: while in the past the part of the mad scientist was played by Dr. Albert Wilberforce Wily III Esq. PhD, here the role instead is filled by a Russian newcomer to the series named Dr. Mikhail Sergeyevich Cossack (and yes, that is officially his full name, I didn’t make that up). Had this game been released five years earlier I’d have had the perfect excuse to make a Soviet Russia joke, but thankfully it wasn’t, so I won’t.

Before we can foil the Red Menace (Damn you me from the previous paragraph, what did I just say?) we should take a moment to familiarise ourselves with our octet of antagonists, for as Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach once wrote, the oldest and strongest kind of fear is that of the unknown. In no particular order then, we have Toad Man, whose only form of defence seems to be gyrating in a ridiculous fashion. Bright Man, who has the misfortune to have a light bulb stuck to the top of his head and is therefore the subjects of many jibes from his fellow Robot Masters but is nonetheless dangerous due to his ability to stop time for everyone but himself. Pharaoh Man, a construct from another age who has delusions of being a god, a fallacy we shall soon lay to rest. Ring Man, a robotic assassin who possesses speed and agility and throws his patented Ring Boomerangs with deadly accuracy. Dust Man, who looks like a humanoid vacuum cleaner but is anything but rubbish when it comes to combat. Skull Man, a cunning rogue clad only in metal and bone who hides behind the safety of a shield. Dive Man, who strongly resembles a submarine and can fire homing missiles. And last (but by no means least) Drill Man, a road-working implement given life and determined to dig you an early grave… and then put you in it. Every member of this rogue’s gallery is a worthy opponent (with the exception of Toad Man, who really isn’t) and all will require a combination of guile, bravery and tactical thinking to overcome. Upon being vanquished each of your foes will award you with a copy of their weapon for you to use. Much like before the order in which you face off with the Evil Eight is entirely up to you, but clever use of strategy in picking your order of poisons will prove fortuitous in the later battles. The locations in which you hunt down and put a stop to these miscreants are varied, ranging from a dimly lit factory to a close approximation of ancient Egypt to beneath the waves to a castle somehow suspended on the sky itself.

The gameplay is similar to the Blue Bomber’s previous outings, but there are one or two very notable additions. Chief amongst these is the new ability to charge up the Mega Buster. Yes people, it took a while but finally we can smite some of our more powerful enemies in one hit without resorting to weapons acquired from defeated bosses. The bone you just threw in our general direction is much appreciated Capcom (unless it originally emanated from Skull Man’s stage, in which case there’s a good chance it may kill us). There are also two other new items which are hidden well deep inside two of the game’s levels, or at least, they would be if this was 1993 & Sir Tim Berners Lee hadn’t gotten around to giving the internet to the world yet, but it isn’t, it’s 2014 and so just about everyone knows the location of these two tools. The Wire Adapter acts like a glorified grappling hook and can be found in Dive Man’s stage, precariously placed at the bottom of a long vertical underwater shaft littered with spikes that seems like certain doom but is actually relatively safe, while the Balloon Adapter is cunning stashed away in Pharaoh Man’s desert behind a seemingly impossible jump and creates inflatable platform that enable Mega Man to reach new heights. The collection of these items is not actually required to beat the game but will certainly make that task easier.

As the Beatles famously sung about back in 1967, we get by with a little help from our friends, and Mega Man is no exception. To this end we can call upon the help of several allies to assist in our quest. Rush the robotic dog makes a return from Mega Man 3 and can once again be used to make the tougher sections of the game a little easier to traverse as well as to reach power-ups and other items which would otherwise be inaccessible. Mega Man’s creator Dr. Light is back to impart on us more sage words of wisdom and inform us on how to operate the weapons and items we acquire throughout the journey despite it being blatantly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell. There is also a new character called Eddie. Eddie is a walking item holder/suitcase/general dogsbody who can be encountered during some stages and will dispense his wares whenever we meet up with him. And then there’s Mega Man’s sister Roll, who appears in this game for all of five seconds and is therefore not worthy of further consideration.

Returning to the action, once the eight Robot Masters have been destroyed the door to Dr. Cossack’s lair is opened. The rabid Russian’s toughest lines of defence lie in wait inside. Spiked platforms that leave you only a handful of seconds to disembark before they attempt to skewer you. A maze of ladders and spinning tops. Ice physics (ugh). The seventh circle of hell that is auto-scrolling sections in platform games. And to cap things off, three mammoth mechanical monstrosities hell-bent on finishing you. But even they cannot deny us, and before long we find ourselves face-to-cockpit with Cossack himself. He attempts to pluck us from the ground as if we were the star prize in some demented Claw Game, but we are far too agile for him. The battle is long and arduous, but finally Cossack falls. Victory is ours…

…until it is cruelly snatched away from us in the form of the mysterious Proto Man and a little Russian girl called Kalinka who totally isn’t a palette swap of Roll. They inform us that Cossack is not the real enemy, that he was merely being manipulated by another, much-more sinister individual who we know only too well: Dr. Wily. We have truly been tricked. The dastardly Wily escapes to his newly-built Skull Castle but we are in hot pursuit, determined to exact revenge for his treachery. Inside we find retreads of challenges we have already overcome once before, as well as echoes of our past. There are new dangers present too: a Giant Metool arrives to block our path but he is quickly dispatched, followed by a nondescript fire-spewing machine that receives the same treatment. The insane doctor’s final means of delaying the inevitable is to rebuild his Robot Master and send them forth to engage us in a series of rematches, but at this point our expanded arsenal of weaponry proves too much for them to handle. Presently we are transported directly to the heart of the lion’s den, where Dr Wily emerges in his latest contraption, one which matches the exterior of the domain we find ourselves trapped within. After sustaining severe damage the front of his machine falls off but he’s still standing, still trying to kill us with hot balls of plasma. Now his protection seems impregnable, capable of resisting any and all forms of assault, but look a little closer. There’s a weak spot on the front. Strike that enough times and down he goes in flames for a second time.

Yet we have underestimated the persistence of our Moriarty. He uses what remains of his infernal machine to elude our grasp one more time and make his hasty retreat. We do not have far to follow: he has fled only as far as a small room with a windy metallic passage to lead up to it. This final showdown is long overdue, but Moriarty has one final trick up his sleeve. The room is nothing but darkness. We can barely see ourselves in it, let alone the Wily Capsule, and is such it is extremely difficult to hit him. Worse still, all our previous battles have taken its toll, and supplies of weapon energy are running dangerously low. Slowly but surely he whittles down our energy, forces us to use up Energy Tank after Energy Tank until none remain. We can see him for only a second at a time, mocking us, laughing at our inadequacies. He knows that his ultimate victory is at hand, that there’s nothing we can do to stop him…

…But Wily has forgotten one important thing in his arrogance; we still have one last tool at our fingertips, the light harvested from the carcass of the false god. Pharaoh Man may have been artificial but his light is just real enough to cut through this darkness and strike down our enemy for the last time. Before long he has no direction to travel but straight down to earth. He has no course of action left but to beg for forgiveness at our feet. Wily has fallen. We have won. The end credits can roll…

And that’s Mega Man 4 is an elaborate, overly dramatic nutshell. Is it more of the same? Honestly, yes. But as the old saying goes, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Mega Man 3 remains one of my favourite video games of all time. How could I not have similar levels of affection for its successor?

Our journey has come to an end. There are still two titles to cover. Alas, I cannot be your conductor for the last two legs of this odyssey. I must hand that mantle over to two others. Who these individuals are, I cannot say. All I can do is to wish them good luck…

…They’re going to need it…

The Execution Of All Things (Mega Man 3)

(Wow. What a hell of a post we've got here. Today's guest post is by none other than Phil Sandifer himself, the very creator of the Nintendo Project that we've dug out of the dust and restarted thanks to... who knows? Boredom? Valya's grace? Some other purpose? Either way, this is a treat. If you have somehow made it to this blog without knowing who Phil Sandifer is, well... you can check his old Nintendo Project posts on the sidebar there. Or his current blog posts about Doctor Who and The Last War In Albion. Hell, speaking of Albion, he's got a Kickstarter going for that. Check it out. It's a hell of a thing... but for now, let's let the man himself talk about one of my top three Mega Man games; Mega Man 3.) 

FreezingInferno’s idiosyncratic decision to try to bring me out of semi-retirement would have been doomed to failure had he not gone straight for the magic words: Mega Man. Indeed, I’m not sure there’s a more fitting entry for me to make my cameo appearance on than Mega Man 3, notable as the first NES game to rely upon nostalgia.

It is worth offering a capsule history of the Mega Man series up until this point, just to provide some fleeting historical context. In 1987, Capcom released Mega Man. It flopped. But improbably, the team that designed it was sufficiently dedicated to the task that they opted to work on a sequel, often on their own time. This game, Mega Man 2, was released in the US in 1989. Unlike Mega Man, it was a massive hit.

You can tell it was a massive hit because it was on the cover of the seventh issue of Nintendo Power, a magazine that, in this era, was essentially the sole arbiter of, if not taste, at least what Nintendo culture was going to be. The seventh issue boasts of a sixteen page feature on the game, featuring detailed maps with Nintendo Power’s typically useless hints (my personal choice is the helpful note that you should avoid hitting the horns on the giant faces in Air Man’s stage, if only because it means I know those monsters are called Air Tikis). But the point stands - Mega Man 2 was a big, iconic game that mattered.

And so it was no surprise that Capcom rushed a sequel out in 1990. This time Nintendo Power gave it twenty pages, providing walkthroughs not only of the eight Robot Masters but the four Doc Robot stages and a solid bevy of hints on what to do in Wily’s Castle. This is, of course, slightly perverse, in that the extended coverage ended up spoiling one of the game’s most notable moments.

See, after beating the eight Robot Masters in Mega Man 3, the player is forced to replay four of their stages. The stages exist this time in a ruined form - platforms have been blasted out of existence, it’s pitch black where it used to be day, and in every case the place has largely gone to the dogs, which is to say, become a lot harder. But what’s really notable are the bosses - eight identical junkheap looking robots (two for each level) who, when you encounter them, are inhabited by the spectral presences of the Robot Masters from Mega Man 2.

It is perhaps excessively self-evident to point out that Mega Man 3 is not the first sequel on the NES - indeed, Super Mario Bros and Castlevania both beat it to the threequel, and a bevy of other games reached prequel before it. But none of these games with the arguable exception of Castlevania (which reused some stage design) traded on nostalgia in quite this way. When Nintendo themselves made a sequel, at least in the US, the tendency was towards radical reinvention of game design. The Adventure of Link and Super Mario Bros 2 are shocking in their lack of resemblance to the originals, and much as Super Mario Bros 3 returns to normal form, it also cares more about its innovations than about recreating the feel of the first game. And, of course, plenty of sequels copy the best bits of the original and try to recreate them in a slightly different form.

But Mega Man 3 is different - the game builds steadily to the big reveal of the previous game’s robot masters, treating the recreation of the past as a big reward earned by playing through the present. It’s fundamentally backwards looking in a way that the NES had never quite been. And, of course, it’s one of the classic moments of the era. Anyone who liked the Mega Man series remembers when the Mega Man 2 robots drop in.

And yet in so many ways it also spells the beginning of the end. Certainly for the Mega Man series, which would never be this good again. It’s telling that Mega Man 3 has the first outright moment of inexcusably bad design in the series - a lengthy section requiring the Rush Jet that, should the player fail at, they’ll be unable to reattempt without a game over because the recharge items left scattered around will all be used up and the Jet won’t have enough power to get across the level. It’s also telling that this is the last time that the Robot Masters can actually be usefully approached in multiple orders - come Mega Man 4 the stage select will become a trick to slow the game down while you figure out the one usable path. (Notably, there isn’t even a true circuit of the Robot Masters in this game, but two: Top Man - Shadow Man - Spark Man - Magnet Man - Hard Man forms one self-contained loop, while Snake Man - Needle Man - Gemini Man forms another.)

But the real end is visible, as ever, in Nintendo Power, which, alongside the twenty pages of Mega Man coverage includes a full page tease of the Super Nintendo, recently announced in Japan. The Super Nintendo would steadily grow to be a larger and larger part of the magazine until, eight issues after the Mega Man 3 cover story, Super Mario World finally got its cover story and we entered a period in which the entire NES became an object of nostalgia.

And so Mega Man 3 ends up being a strange game - the beginning of the end, and yet a desirable sort of end - one that suggests that, in its own way, we wanted the NES era to fade into lost memory even as it was happening.

Air Man Isn't Even All That Hard (Mega Man 2)

(Hello again! Today we are talking about Mega Man 2, a game whose gravity is massive. Quite possibly the most revered action platformer on NES, and even if you don't agree with that you have to admit that it's way up on the list. It's far too much for even my esoteric madness to handle, so I'm proud to introduce the first guest post of The Nintendo Project, Resumed! My pal and intrepid game designer, John Thyer, is here to tell you why Mega Man 2 is brilliant. Most of you already "know" that, but much like Phil Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum, we are here to ignore what we "know" in favor of talking about when a revolution has taken place. I'll defer to John now, but not before popping you a link to the games he's made. They're pretty neat. And now, friends and constant readers... Mega Man 2.)

So. Let’s talk about title screens.

NES games, by and large, did not have great title screens. For a long time they all followed the “text on a black background with no music” template set up by the earliest games on the console, like Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong. Even once they moved beyond that template, very few did anything interesting. Most of the exceptions were from Nintendo games -- Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3 -- but even these didn’t do anything more than set the mood. Very few added to the story of their game in a truly meaningful way.

Mega Man 2 is the exception. It stands toe-to-toe with the the best title screens of the 16-bit era, when heavy-hitters like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, and Earthbound entered the scene.

You can give it a watch over here. Let’s look at a few interesting details:

1) The first detail that sticks out is the music: the song playing is the same as the ending music to Mega Man 1. This is a cute touch, and it’s a clever way to provide a bit of connective tissue between the two stories.

2) Later Mega Man games would come to use expository intro text as a crutch, but 2’s manages to summarize the entire setup of the game in only three sentences. Not only that, but it’s the only expository text in the entire game!

3) The pan up the side of the building it still damn cool.

4) Listen to how the music develops during the pan upwards. The transition to the big, heroic Mega Man theme at the top is seamless.

5) When the player presses the start button, Mega Man puts on his helmet and teleports away, signalling the start the game. (This will be important later.)

That’s a staggering amount of clever ideas to fit into such a small amount of time. Keep in mind that Mega Man 1 doesn’t have any sort of intro, and neither does 3 for that matter. The intros from 4 onward are all overlong and boring, and I’m pretty sure most players skip past them on replays. Speaking to my own experience, I let 2’s play out every single time.

So, that’s the first forty-five seconds. What about the rest of the game?

Well, one of the most striking things about playing Mega Man 2 in 2014 is how messy it is. It has dozens of little design problems and unfair moments of a sort that aren’t really present in the later Mega Man games. 

The most egregious offender is the Boobeam Trap in the fourth level of Wily’s Fortress (or as its more commonly known, that goddamned Crash Bomb boss). It’s easily the most poorly thought out enemy in any of the NES games; failing the puzzle means choosing between farming energy for ten minutes or killing yourself over and over until you run out of lives. Getting stuck in that situation completely sucks the momentum out of the game, and many players give up rather than deal with it any longer.

Other quibbles! Wily’s forms have only one attack each. Mega Man’s controls are still just loose enough to occasionally throw you off of a key jump. Air Man has attacks that are actually impossible to dodge. There’s only one boss theme in the whole game. And then there’s the debatable matter of the disappearing and reappearing blocks in Heat Man’s stage and the lasers in Quick Man’s level -- whether or not those parts are fun, they’re almost definitely at least a little unfair.

Unfair or not, Quick Man’s level is still one of my favorites. The stage is a careful, rehearsed race against instant-death lasers that demands absolute perfection on behalf of the player. What I love is how this contrasts with the messy, chaotic boss fight against Quick Man, which isn’t so much about memorization as it is about reflex and instinct. Interestingly, in both cases the player has an “out”: Flash Stopper can make either the stage or the boss trivial. But it can’t be used on both, so the player has to decide which one is more threatening.

This is an example of how the robot master stages take a simple idea (in Quick Man’s case, speed) and prod at it from a number of different angles. It also showcases how the levels play off each other in neat ways, like how Flash Stopper totally changes the dynamic of the level. Some of the levels are more traditional and straightforward, while others focus on neat gimmicks. Some are brilliant and incisive like Metal Man and Wood Man, and some are only successful in spite of themselves, like Flash Man’s poorly conceived maze and Crash Man’s slightly-obnoxious vertical climb.

The levels manage to accomplish two totally disparate goals. 1) They each have their own unique and memorable identity. Later Mega Man games often had stages that just sort of blended together, and as a result the games were way less interesting. 2) They come together to create a singular emotional journey. While it’s impressive that each stage succeeds on its own merits, what’s more impressive is that they form a own cohesive narrative arc.

Let me explain. Every stage ends the same way: Mega Man triumphs over the robot master and collects a powerful new weapon, and occasionally a special item from Doctor Light.This ritual is repeated eight different times, and each time it’s clear that Mega Man is growing stronger and stronger, until finally he has defeated all eight of Wily’s Robot Masters.

There’s this idea in game design that the most important thing a game can do is make the player feel powerful. This is where the whole methodology of power-ups and experience points comes from. Start the player off with a fairly weak ability set, and then as the game progresses reward them with stronger and stronger abilities. This creates the sense that the player character is going on an actual journey, with actual trials and growth.

This is a nice concept, but it’s really only half of the equation. The player can’t just keep gaining new abilities. They also must have those abilities tested.

The Robot Master stages are ultimately about empowering Mega Man; Wily’s Fortress is about testing him. It’s a final exam on all of the abilities the player has learned throughout the game. Sometimes its obvious, like walls and pits that require understanding Dr. Light’s Items. Other times its more subtle, like the false floors in Wily 3 that can be identified with knowledge of one of Bubble Lead’s more obscure characteristics. It can even be cruel, like the Boobeam Trap demanding perfect weapon energy management while pummeling your energy meter with nigh-undodgeable attacks.

The Wily Levels are also the first stages that force the use of Dr. Light’s Items. It raises the stakes in a meaningful way; instead of playing through obstacle courses clearly designed with eventual victory in mind, parts of these levels can only be circumvented if the player uses an outside force. This contrast with the Robot Master stages creates the sense that in order to progress, the player has to break the game.

The boss fights also raise the stakes in a dramatic way. While all of the previous bosses are humanoid, roughly Mega Man’s size, and take place on solid ground, the first boss of the fortress is a gigantic fire-breathing robot dragon that’s fought on several precariously placed blocks, and they progress in increasingly strange directions from there. It’s also important to note the excision of the transition screen between the stage and the boss fight, so not only is the first appearance of the dragon also an effective jump-scare, it also further differentiates the Wily levels from the preceding Robot Master stages.

Most important of all is the music. Wily 1 is probably the most famous Mega Man song ever, and for good reason. It’s the most musically elaborate piece in the whole game. Listen to the way it establishes the core melody and then holds onto it for most of the song, often playing it in the background with one square channel while the other bounces around doing something else entirely. It’s a masterful little diddy, and there’s a reason it still gets a lot of attention.

Try contrasting that with the second tune. There’s a reason it doesn’t get nearly the same amount of love: it’s just plain unpleasant. It’s repetitive, dreary, and unbearably suspenseful. Try listening all the way through and feel the way it builds and builds and builds before finally slipping back to the starting key. It’s the chiptune equivalent of the heartbeat in Space Invaders, a song purely designed to compliment the game and raise the intensity of the experience. So while it isn’t the sort of melody you’d listen to in your car, it might be the single most effective song in the whole series.

The two songs together give the Wily Levels a subtle aesthetic arc. The player starts out empowered and ready to take on Wily, then descends deeper and deeper into the center of the fortress. It’s a little similar to the descent-into-Hell vibe established in the early Metroid games, but the linear structure actually makes it more focused and dramatic.

All of this is leading up to the immaculate climax. After the mandatory rematch against the robot masters, Mega Man comes face to face with Dr. Wily himself. The battle is nearly identical to the final battle of the first game (except with strangely less interesting attack patterns), so veteran players will expect this to be the final battle of the game. Not only that, but the map of Wily’s Fortress clearly marks this as the last stage. When Wily escapes after the defeat of his machine and the floor falls out from under Mega Man, it’s a genuinely well-executed twist.

The final stage begins with a lengthy falling sequence, and unlike in previous levels, there aren’t any spikes or other obstacles to distract the player. There’s no music whatsoever; the only sound comes from the deadly acid globules dripping from the ceiling (a set-piece borrowed in Daisuke Amaya’s Cave Story). The acid isn’t difficult to dodge, so the stage isn’t much of a challenge to move through. It’s purely in place to build suspense.

Then comes the final boss. Dr. Wily’s saucer descends, and he leaps out and starts hovering in the air (this is significant because Dr. Wily has never done battle directly with Mega Man before), and then reveals his true form: an alien! It comes out of absolutely nowhere, and it’s exactly the sort of insipid “twist” many game designers of the era would pull out of their butts for a last boss.

But then Mega Man defeats Alien Wily (with Bubble Lead of all things, leading to a tradition of last bosses best defeated with the most inconvenient weapon possible), the screen flashes, and the truth is revealed. It was all a trick, a hologram projector put into place by Dr. Wily as a last resort. If this isn’t immediately clear, the screen lingers on the projector as it moves around in the same figure-8 pattern as the boss. Dr. Wily is in the corner, desperately fiddling with the controls even though it’s clear the jig is up. Finally he gives in, falls to the ground, and begs for mercy.

If it isn’t the cleverest bit of visual storytelling I’ve ever seen in an 8-bit video game, it’s only because of the next segment. After defeating Dr. Wily, the screen shifts to an image of Mega Man as he walks in front of a black background. On the side is an image of a valley and a little town. The seasons pass, as indicated by the differing color schemes and precipitation. Finally, Mega Man stops and looks towards the town. The black background disappears and the whole village is visible. Mega Man is gone, his helmet lying on the ground in his place, pulled off and tossed to the ground as he runs towards his home.

Beautiful. There’s a couple of metaphors here, and the passing of the seasons is the most obvious. The ending shows that a lot of time has passed, and Mega Man has undergone a long journey. He’s fought through all of Wily’s forces, and all that time he’s been away from his home. John Teti notes that it’s intriguing that Mega Man walks, whereas in the rest of the game he teleports away after finishing a level. Combined with the melancholy music, the slow walk home shows that Mega Man isn’t just the player’s nameless avatar of destruction. It characterizes him in a really genuine way.

The second is a little more complex. Way back at the start of the game, we see Mega Man standing on top of a building, his hair loose and blowing in the wind. The second we press start, his helmet materializes, and Mega Man teleports off to battle. Only at the very end of the game, after we defeat Dr. Wily and lose control of Mega Man, does he finally take off the helmet.

Do you get it? We are the helmet! We take control of Mega Man when he goes into battle, but the ending lets us know that there’s a being that exists outside of stage select screens and energy meters. We don’t see this side of Mega Man, but it’s there, just outside the screen. In a small way, the ending takes this little blue Astro Boy-knockoff and turns him into a rounded character.

Mega Man 2 is not profound, not in the literary sense. The only NES game I can think of that can make that claim is the original Mother (though I’m happy to hear about any I might have missed). But that doesn’t change the fact that this this sixty-second ending is a lovely, layered scene, and the game would be unquestionably poorer for its absence.

It’s followed by credits, overlaid by a perfect reprise of the title music. Combined with the completed metaphor of the helmet, the music brings Mega Man 2 full circle. Thank you for playing. Presented by Capcom.

Mega Man 2 is a special game for a whole lot of people, and that’s because it goes out of its way to do more than put a bunch of robots on the screen for you to blow up. It is, bar-none, the most exciting, dramatic, and just plain fun story on the NES. It has tension, pacing, twists, silence, and symbols. It has an exciting climax and a meaningful resolution. And while later Mega Man games are vastly more refined mechanical experiences, none of them nail these concepts nearly as well.

Mega Man 2 knows that in order to create a game that really lasts in people’s hearts, you can’t just duct-tape a bunch of levels together and be done with it. You have to pay attention to all of the little details, like the mood created by the music in a specific area or the pacing before a climactic battle. You need to have a beginning that prepares the player to undergo a journey, and an ending that brings emotional closure. You have to tell a story.

It’s an exceptional video game. It was exceptional when it came out in 1988, and it’s exceptional now, twenty-six years later. It will likely be exceptional for many years to come.

And that’s because it pays attention to things like title screens.