Mega Man

As a young lad, one of my favorite Super Nintendo games was Mega Man X. Unfortunately, I had never ended up playing the second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth installments. (Are there more than six?) A couple of Christmases ago, one thing I asked for was the Mega Man X Collection, a compilation of games one through six. I was happy to open it on Christmas morning. Another gift I received, perhaps due to some confusion or basic "if he liked that, he'll like this" logic, was Mega Man Anniversary Collection, a compilation of Mega Man one through eight. (For those of you not in the know, Mega Man X is a separate character and series than Mega Man.) Sweet. I'd never played any of the original eight games either. It was a very good Christmas gift. Flash forward a year and a half, to this past summer, as I set out on my quest to beat every backlogged game I owned, and you may understand my immediate hatred for my owning two gigantic compilations filled with games that were, to say the least, extremely similar to one another. I had dabbled around a bit on each game, but not until tonight did I make any real progress on either of them. But now, you can scratch Mega Man, the long-running series' very first game, from my list. This was a quintessential NES game; game cartridges really couldn't hold that much data back then, so programmers prolonged games by making them challenging. This is what makes these games so good for speed runs; do everything right, and entire NES games will rarely take you more than thirty minutes or so to beat. But for casual gamers like myself, certain rooms and boss fights can take half an hour to beat all on their own. I was feeling rather patient tonight as I played through Mega Man, a fact which can be attested to by all three of my apartmentmates. They watched as I tried over and over to perfectly time countless jumps to clear simple gaps or position myself perfectly so as to avoid instant kills. The game was really rather simple. It was composed of six levels (and short ones once you get the timing and shooting down pat) followed by a four-stage final level. Ten levels, really, in all. No boss was very challenging, save for one ridiculously difficult one that nearly made me quit the game. Said boss was capable of firing 19 projectiles at you in a row for every one shot you can get off on him. Patience was really the only "strategy" to use, aside from quick thinking and impeccable timing. Once that guy was dead though, the rest of the game was more or less a breeze. I'd say it took me two and a half hours to beat, all things considered. I'm sure I won't enjoy the long road of Mega Man games ahead of me for the most part, but this one was an enjoyable experience. It was quick, fun, and had an unquestionably classic feel to it. A good use of a Tuesday night.