Remember the Days

With the release of Mega Man 9 upon us and Jeremy Parish's excellent piece about how everything wrong is right again, I changed my ways of thinking. Metal Gear Solid 4 was forgotten, Soul Calibur IV tossed aside, even Final Fantasy IV DS was put on hold for a week. I regressed from 4's to 3's instead. Digging out my old NES system, I plugged in a controller, hooked up the AV cables and AC adapter, and began the only Mega Man game I've ever played. (Editor's note: this has since changed.)

When I was about five or six, my dad took me to a pawn shop so I could pick out a game from behind the counter. Of course, while Super Mario Brothers 3 looked awfully tempting, I had played the heck out of it already and wanted something new -- which is why Mega Man 3, with its bright purple cover and a white guy who looked like Gary Coleman in a blue spandex suit shooting a nasty-looking robot, looked so appealing. I'm glad, all these years later, that made this choice...if only for the white Gary Coleman. Maybe the resemblance is just me.

So, yes: Mega Man 3 is the only game in the series I've played (excluding a brief stint with Mega Man X on a friend's SNES emulator). Magazine publications, gaming websites, and internet forums all tell me that the second is the best, like a gift granted to the masses from heaven above, but I've played the third for so long, it's hard to believe otherwise. And frankly, I don't really care to argue about the best -- I just want to shoot up some robot masters. Especially Shadow Man. What a bastard!

Shadow Man and I have a long, sad, frustrating history together; it's a history fraught random jumping and constant sliding and throwing ninja stars that are almost seemingly impossible to avoid. I'd try shooting Hard Man's Flying Punch Thing, but that was impossibly slow and completely bounces off Shadow Man when it makes contact. And...that's about it, though: my only tactic was to either shoot him with the Mega Buster or attack him with a useless robot power-up (because Hard Man was the only boss I could beat at the time without dying). Years later after I bought the game, however, I discovered that you can beat this Shadow Man sonuvabitch with the worst power-up in the game: Top-Spin.

What kind of crazy game design is this anyway? It's like finally realizing that final boss Ganon in Twilight Princess bizarrely has a soft spot for the fishing rod. Huh.

With Mega Man 9 now released unto the masses, the third game feels like old news -- well, that might be because it is -- but that doesn't mean it's any less proficient at what it does well than it did twenty years ago. Most power-ups still pack a punch, your robot dog is just as useful (somewhat), and the additional slide feels like it was implemented perfectly into stages that required, uh, sliding. It's just that...Mega Man 9, a game I'm becoming more and more attached to, was made with hindsight and experience, clearly and precisely combining everything that made the series good into one package. While still one of my favorite NES games, Mega Man 3 was made hot off the tails of a supposed masterpiece, and had a difficult time attempting to surpass near-perfection.

What I'm trying to say is that despite having an 8-bit sheen, the early Mega Man games hold up incredibly well -- and like I said, I think I'd rather be playing this series than Metal Gear Solid 4 or Soul Calibur 4. Why? Well, instead of preaching to its audience about PMC's and the horrors of pantless monkeys who smoke and drink, or shoving players' eyeballs into a pair of virtual heaving bosoms, this series was made with fun in mind, to give anyone who played it a challenging yet enjoyable experience from their first battle with Snake Man to the final showdown with Dr. Wily.

Fun is key here: forget cinematic experiences and screw involving storylines.

They're not exactly fun.

But Mega Man is. And that's what's most important.