Sunday, May 1, 2016

Mega Man (NES, 1987)

It's the first of Mayyyyy! First of Mayyy! And the Mega Man starts today. I'm celebrating this month with Mega Mania, a parade of Mega Man posts both new and old.

This, right here, is the game that started it all. I was going to play this during The Three Decade Project, but it ended up being pushed aside for the first Zelda game instead. I decided to revisit this post due to the historical significance that this game has going for it. 1987 must have been a magical time for gamers, because things like this were just coming into being for the first time. Also, we were a full eight or nine years away from internet message boards ruining our enjoyment of everything.


Here's the box-art for the game. Hooooo-ly shit. It's a wonder that the game sold any copies at all. I like that it touts the state-of-the-art HD graphics at the top. I wonder if it also features Blast Processing, the mysterious secret ability of Sonic the Hedgehog carts.

While the later NES games would have eight bosses at the start, this one has a mere six. It's unique for that reason. I have always suspected that the creators wished they could go back and give this game eight bosses to be more in-line with the others. They sorta got the chance with Mega Man Powered-Up, the PSP remake of this game that adds Time Man and Oil Man to the boss lineup. More on that game...soon.

Much like Jack Bauer, I always take on Bomb Man first when I play this game. He's the easiest boss aside from Cut Man. You can take on these bosses in any order, though. That's the great thing about the Mega Man series: anyone can play it differently. You can beat any of the bosses with the standard arm cannon (aside from perhaps Fire Man, with his near-unavoidable fireballs), it's just that some are easier than others.

See that energy capsule down there? This game presents you with a lot of situations like this, where you have to decide for yourself whether or not a powerup is worth going out of your way for. It's great game design, impressive for the era.

The pre-boss hallways are sometimes vertical in this game; another thing you don't see anywhere else in the series. They also tend to be full of enemies, interestingly enough. This... is not great game design. Luckily, it'd be one of the myriad things they fixed before the next installment.

Here's Bomb Man. He jumps around and throws bombs. Indeed. I know I've brought this up before: all of these robot masters supposedly had jobs before Wily turned them to evil purposes. I'd really like to know what kind of job Bomb Man had before. Demolition, probably.

Here is THE hardest section in the entire game, the beginning of Guts Man's stage. These platforms require some pretty intense timing. This may be why a lot of people suggest starting with Cut Man and playing Guts Man's stage last. Even if you do that, it doesn't make this particular section any easier. The only thing that would do that is the Magnet Beam (more on that later), but you need Guts Man's weapon to GET the Magnet Beam. It's cruel.

Editor's Note: I'm told that the Elec Beam also works for getting the Magnet Beam...which solves this problem a bit. However, it might be good to play this area normally and get good at it, since the same platforms show up to a greater extent in Wily's Fortress.

Here's the boulder-throwing Guts Man. I vaguely remember the Mega Man cartoon that used to air when I was a kid, and Guts Man was pretty much the big bad recurring robot master for the show. I think Cuts Man was also recurring, while the rest of Wily's henchmen were a revolving door of robot masters from other games. They usually had little by way of screen time or speaking roles, with Guts Man and Cut Man getting all of the focus. It was odd. I remember getting excited when Pharoah Man (MM4) showed up, only to have him not do much of anything.

I watched a lot of that show as a kid. Best episode, and the only one I remember, was when they tied the X series in by having X travel back in time to stop Vile during the original Mega Man timeline. Yeah, it was ridiculous, but it was so cool. Oh, you want to see that? Check it out:

"FIGHTING RO-BOT! DUNDUNDUNDUNNNNN! MEGGGGA MAN!"

Ya know, this gets me thinking. I would love to see a ROM hack where you could play as X in an original series game. X would own with charged shots, dash, and wall-jumping, so it probably wouldn't be much of a challenge. But how rad would that be? Playing as Original Megaman in an X series game would be significantly less cool because it'd be such a downgrade in abilities, and he wouldn't actually be able to finish any of the games.

Guts Man is weak to Bomb Man's weapon, but actually hitting him with it is a difficult endeavor. The bombs don't explode right away when fired, giving him ample time to slowly move out of the way. I'd go so far as to say Bomb Man's weapon is pretty useless. Now, X would have this fight wrapped up in five seconds. But yeah, either way, this is one of the easier fights. His stage is a lot worse than he is.

Fast forward a bit, here's the next boss. Most people fight this guy first. It's Cut Man, the most emo robot master ever. He takes a break from listening to AFI to battle our hero. He's pretty easy to beat with the arm cannon since your shots knock him backwards, but you can also use Guts Power to throw the rocks in his room at him and win in two hits. Just don't miss!

Elec Man's stage is, in my opinion, the most difficult of the six. Here's the FIRST ROOM of the stage. I emphasize first room because it's rough. If you aren't familiar with Mega Man, those enemies on the platforms move from side to side quickly... and are indestructible. Between that and the iffy jumping controls, good luck getting past this room if you had the misfortune of being a little kid and choosing this stage first.

The Magnet Beam is the utility tool of the game, and it's one of the best in the series. It lets you create your own platforms, and in a lot of ways it's better than Rush. Need Guts Power to get it, which means re-doing Elec Man's stage later if you fight Guts Man after him. Or you could defeat Elec Man and then immediately re-do the stage, since the Elec Beam works here too.

Yep, you can re-do stages in this game. Impressive for 1987, a time when most games didn't allow you to revisit a completed stage.

One of the more difficult boss hallways is this one. You're climbing upward, and these electric beams require perfect timing to get through. Really glad they did away with vertical boss hallways after this game.

Elec Man is a badass with atitude! He vaguely reminds me of Nuclear Man from Superman IV. Cut Man's weapon slices right through him in a couple of hits (literally, it obliterates him), but good luck defeating him otherwise.

Ice Man's stage is, as expected, full of ice. One of the keys to the appeal of this game: they managed to hit on a lot of the major video game elemental themes (lightning, ice, fire, earth, explosives, blades) and did it with a stage select format. What this game offers the player is variety right off the bat, and compelling variety no less. In a world of super-linear games, this was probably a breath of fresh air.

Ice Man follows a very set attack pattern, and falls easily enough to the Elec Beam (surprisingly, his weakness isn't fire). Also... wait a minute, where is Mega Man's face? MY GOD!

 Fire Man's stage is one that you -really- don't want to do first. Ice Man's weapon freezes most of the fire traps here, but it's important to save some weapon energy for the boss.

He's weak against ice, naturally...and you need it. This fight is a complete war of attrition, since his attacks are very hard to dodge. In other words, I don't think this fight would be very winnable without the weapon he's weak against, because you're both blasting away in a DPS race.

Defeat all six bosses and Dr. Wily appears. I like that this game doesn't mess around about Wily. Nearly all of the other games, at least in the NES era, present some other character as the Big Bad and then expect it to be a shock when it turns out Wily was behind them the whole time. This game just comes right out and tells you what's up.

Wily's Castle consists of four stages, and they're difficult on the level you'd expect from an NES game from 1987.

Here's the Magnet Beam in action, as I use it to create steps. It's required to get through here. This is one ability that I wish some of the later games would have brought back rather than endlessly giving us the same few Rush powers. The Magnet Beam encourages innovation on the part of the player. Plus, it's awesome to play around with.

The Rock Monster / Dark Moon / Yellow Devil is hands-down the most difficult recurring foe in the Mega Man universe. Since this game lacks energy tanks AND features one of the fastest versions of this boss, I never could win this fight straight-up as a kid. Here's the post where I finally pulled it off.

What makes this guy so difficult? You can only damage him for a second or two, once in a while. The rest of the time, he's on the offensive, breaking apart into multiple pieces and flying back and forth on the screen. If a piece of him even bumps Mega Man, you lose like a quarter of your life meter. It's brutal.

As usual, I end up doing the Elec Beam trick (rapid pausing to make the beam to do continuous damage as it passes through the enemy) to get past this guy. Yeah, it's cheap, but it's also fairly necessary. Even Nintendo Power advised that the player do this, and NP almost never advised the use of cheating-esque things in their gameplay coverage. But this fight... it's more difficult than most final bosses of the era.

The remaining three Wily stages feature a return of the six bosses from the game. You fight them in a set order as you go, and this time you have all of their weaknesses. Well, except Cut Man, since his room doesn't have any blocks. Mega Man X would borrow the idea of spreading the bosses out over the final stages, while nearly every other Mega Man game puts them all into a single "capsule room" at the end.

Another noteworthy Wily Castle boss: Mega Man clone. My...My God! I don't know which is which? Who am I playing as?

"THEY'RE COMING! THE BODY SNATCHERS! THEY'RE COMING FOR YOU ALL!"

The third stage is short, with Mega Man sliding through some kind of water pipe to fight a bubble-machine boss. When I was a kid, an unofficial NES guide that I read cover-to-cover referred to these things as "Bubble Boys" and the theory was that they were prototypes of Bubble Man from the next game. Weird.

In the fourth stage, it's like they realized they had only utilized two of the stage bosses up to this point (Cut Man and Elec Man are in Wily Stage 2), so they suddenly throw the other four bosses at you in rapid succession right before the final boss. Bomb Man and Ice Man are still easy with their weaknesses, Guts Man is a bit trickier but not too bad, and then there's...

...Fire Man. Still a war of attrition, only this time you're fighting him amongst a bunch of other foes rather than as the endgame of a stage. In other words, you're doomed to walk out of this fight with very little health left. The good news is that if you die to the final boss, you restart back at that fight.

Here's the final boss: Wily's ship. It's weak against Fire Man's weapon, and falls quickly.

But wait! There's a "second form" as Wily's tinted windshield breaks off. This one is weak against Elec Beam, meaning you can one-shot him with the Elec Beam trick. Not gonna do that, though.

Both forms have a really hard time hitting you if you get up close to them (just not close enough to lightly bump into the ship and suffer massive damage).

Wily is defeated, for the first time. But most certainly not the last time. Not even close.

At the end, we get your standard NES ending screen. Good stuff. It's ironic that non-peace is required to bring about peace.

Wait, what is it going on about now? Does this mean after all other destructive forces are gone, Mega Man must lower himself into a vat of lava? And how is he ever going to end all destructive forces?

My God! The fight with Clone Mega Man was an metaphor for how an agent of destruction must eventually face themselves! ...no, no it wasn't.

That... doesn't make any sense!

Mega Man takes off his armor and streaks through the streets. Wait, what? I thought he was a robot! I guess there's a reason we never see this again...

Mega Man now leaps around in his underwear to the delight of Dr. Light and Roll. You know, let's just... let's just move on.


Other Mega Man Posts~!

And read about my rematch with the Yellow Devil / Rock Monster HERE.


7 comments:

  1. "For July 4th, I'm celebrating America... by talking about a game from Japan!"

    Mega Man is a TRUE AMERICAN!

    "1987 must have been a magical time for gamers, because things like this were just coming into being for the first time."

    It is pretty amazing that some games invented back then are still rehashed over and over and basically became their own genres.

    "Here's the box-art for the game."

    Worst box art of all time! So bad NP made fun of it later.

    "While the later NES games would have eight bosses at the start, this one has a mere six."

    They're a great lineup, though. This should have been the actual cover of the game..these guys, and Mega Man standing in the middle. I'd have been hella excited for the chance to face off with these dudes.

    "This game presents you with a lot of situations like this, where you have to decide for yourself whether or not a powerup is worth going out of your way for."

    The worst, of course, is being hurt trying to get a power-up, making the time even less worth it.
    This is the only Mega Man to have a score bar.

    "Luckily, it'd be one of the myriad things they fixed before the next installment."

    Mega Man 1 to 2 is one of the greatest improvements in gaming history.

    "all of these robot masters supposedly had jobs before Wily turned them to evil purposes."

    Scenes showing all the different bosses at work would have been a fun easter egg, though Wily himself designs the bosses later on if I remember correctly. Also, where are these stages? Are they civilian locations the bosses take over and terraform for their own purposes? That's badass you see.

    "Here is THE hardest section in the entire game, the beginning of Guts Man's stage."

    Yeah, this was fun in the sense that it was fair, but it sucked. I also remember having a lot of time with a non-fatal platform room in Ice Man's stage.

    "Guts Man was pretty much the big bad recurring robot master for the show."

    He's the one I remember, too! The Guts Man design got reused for tons of enemies and bosses later in the series, too.
    The Cut Man character design was also a classic, so I can see why they made him recurring, but better to use all the other guys at your disposal.

    "I would love to see a ROM hack where you could play as X in an original series game."

    This train of thought has me thinking, it's about time we get another upgrade the way X was over the regular series.

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    1. "In a world of super-linear games, this was probably a breath of fresh air."

      I love you looking at this from a historical perspective.

      "The Magnet Beam encourages innovation on the part of the player. Plus, it's awesome to play around with."

      I agree, but I hadn't realized it until you put it that way.

      "Even Nintendo Power advised that the player do this, and NP almost never advised the use of cheating-esque things in their gameplay coverage."

      Rock Monster! I HATED him and and never got past this. It is funny that NP had such an ethical position on cheating (never talked about Game Genie for example) and that they abandoned it for this boss.
      MM1 veterans who saw this guy appear again in MM3 must have totally lost their minds at first.

      " Another noteworthy Wily Castle boss: Mega Man clone. My...My God! I don't know which is which? Who am I playing as?"

      Also, such a rad background! Man! So good!
      This is pretty creepy, actually. I wonder what X would have to say if he had to fight another X.

      "The good news is that if you die to the final boss, you restart back at that fight."

      ...whew. Because there's no way you could have one them all after going through this guy first...they even acknowledged he's the hardest by putting him last.
      He lives up to his rad design.

      "FIGHT, MEGA MAN! FOR EVERLASTING PEACE!"

      W..wow. That's one of the most terrifyingly overpatriotic endings to a game I've seen.

      "Mega Man takes off his armor and streaks through the streets."

      Wh..whoooa! This is SO 1987! It could be a Rocky III montage!
      Great job on this my friend!
      Your score: 45,200

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    2. http://lvls.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/fami-rm.jpg Here's your proper boxart JM. It even has a little BOMB BOMB BOMB

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  2. Man, this entry takes me back. This was one of the first 2 NES games I owned; the other being Section Z (I had to use the slow motion feature on that thing to beat it back in the day, not to mention an attempt to map the paths you could take...remember when we had to make our own maps?).

    I got the Mega Man Collection for the Xbox several years ago, and remember having to take on the Rock Monster without the pause trick. Took at least a dozen tries to finally pull it off.

    I still have the cart. I am not sure if I should try to get a collector's price for it or just keep it.

    A couple of interesting things that you didn't mention:

    The spiky disc things at the start of Elec Man's stage are only invulnerable to the Arm Cannon. The only other weapon that doesn't work is Ice Man's without wasting extra shots freezing and unfreezing them first (which the Arm Cannon will do anyway). If you can time it right, it's a good use of Bomb Man's weapon (since it's pretty much useless outside of fighting Guts Man, and even then...).

    Also, Elec Man's weapon can destroy blocks that Guts Man's weapon uses. A common stage order for me was Cut Man, Bomb Man, Elec Man, Elec Man again to get the Magnet Beam (then suicide), Ice Man, Fire Man, Guts Man. The Magnet Beam made the last two stages so much easier.

    I've been reading the archives and enjoying them. Keep up the good work.

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    1. Thanks for the comment. I also played the Anniversary Collection, and the Rock Monster fight with no pause trick was brutal. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, overall. I'd say the harshest thing in the original series for me was probably Wily Stage 1 in Mega Man 8. The Rock Monster in MM1 might take second, though there are a bunch of sections in MM9 that are REALLY tough. Jewel Man's entire stage comes to mind.

      I didn't know those Elec Man fun facts. The Magnet Beam is probably my favorite toy in the whole series so I try to get it quick, but Elec Man himself is really tough without his weakness.

      I sold my Mega Man carts (even the Anniversary Collection) long ago, given the ease of emulating them or loading them up on the Wii nowadays. Got a pretty good amount of cash for the lot of them.

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  3. Those aren't HD graphics, those are HR graphics!

    I always use the Elec Beam to get the Magnet Beam, because F doing the rest of the game without it. It's not just Guts Man, Ice Man's stage is rough near the end without it too.

    Pharoah Man didn't do much of anything?! On the contrary, he's responsible for the greatest moment in the show! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7dSJN5LgsE

    There's a song that covers the first screen of Elec Man's stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFtkDEAhWC8&feature=player_detailpage#t=70 It's never a problem for me since I always come here with Cut Man's power and it can take out those enemies.

    Elec Man's firepower is insane. You have to put him down fast or he'll take you out in seconds.

    Fight, Mega Man! For everlasting peace!

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  4. FOR EVERLASTING PEACE. I played this game for the first time like 5 years ago and man getting past the yellow devil was a pain. Otherwise I grew up with the snes X games but somehow I like the classics series better nowadays. Finished them all plus a really awesome hack called Rockman no Constancy hard mode. It's harder than most Ghost N Goblins games but it's very satisfying to play.

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