Wicked Mega Yo
Mega Man 9 is out. Get it. Seriously, get it. It’s ten bucks, and it’ll kick your ass like it’s 1989. It looks, sounds, and plays like any NES Mega Man title, but it’s loaded with modern features like save games, downloadable content, achievements, online leaderboards, and competent translation. This time around it looks like Dr. Wily is (wait for it) attacking the world with evil robots again, only this time he’s sort of hilariously also running a protection racket. If you send him money, he’ll make sure no evil robots blow you up. So it’s up to you, as the good robot, to blow him up.
That’s really about all the plot I need. The gameplay is delightfully retro, and hard as balls, and the presentation really takes me back (there’s even an option to enable sprite flicker — score!). Some of the achievements are completely insane (beat the game without getting hit?), the extra play modes are a nice bonus, and one of the evil Mans is actually an evil Woman this time around. Is that the first time that’s happened? I have all eight Mega Man games, so I should probably know that.
I believe so. I didn’t get into the series all that much, so I couldn’t say for certain. I have MMAC and MMXC, but MMAC put a serious barrier to my entry in the way: they swapped the functions of A and B. I used to have MM3, and my brain knows that in order to shoot, I press the button closest to the end of my right thumb, but if I want to jump, I press the button closer to the knuckle. And then MMAC makes like Gravity Man and turns everything upside down. So that I’m heading for the insta-kill spikes.
I’m rambling, but the upshot is that I could be very mistaken, but I think all the robots outside of Roll in the main series were called either “(Something) Man” or “(Something)man”.
Comment by Nyperold | 25 September 2008
Bit far off on that one — a whole lot of robots had names that didn’t end in “man.” Rush, Beat, and Eddie are immediately obvious, but if you want to stick to just vaguely-humanoid robots, there are Bass and Duo. And Auto, who sure is in Mega Man 9 even though I sure don’t remember him ever being in a Mega Man game before. I might be getting senile.
Meanwhile, yeah, the Anniversary Collection’s ill-considered button-swap is one of the all-time great design fuckups. At least they mended their ways for the X Collection. Shame the X series wasn’t as good as the original series, though.
Comment by Darien | 25 September 2008
Ah, forgot about those guys. I was thinking mainly of the Robot Masters.
Auto… I think I saw him in the beginning of MM8, driving the truck…? Was that him? He drives Mega Man and Roll up to the point where the road gets unstable, hands Mega Man the wrong helmet, then gives him the right one.
Comment by Nyperold | 29 September 2008