Mega Man Retrospective - Part 1

A Look Into Start of The Blue Bomber
On
June 23, 2014
Hey guys, it's me Klaymen after a long hiatus after my Twisted Metal Retrospective. This time, I wanna take a look at one of the major video game icons of my childhood: Mega Man.



This guy to be exact.Now onto my experience. I first played this on the Mega Man Anniversary Collection back in 2004. (My first Mega Man game was Mega Man X on the SNES as my cousins had it). I decided to play the games in order. Like I did when I played the games, I'll be starting of with his first adventure on the NES.


They just didn't care, didn't they?

Ah, this game back on the NES. I remember playing this for the first time and wanting to tear my hair out. But why is it so hard you may ask? I'll get to that later.

The story is that Dr. Wily, an assistant or Dr. Light, decided to take over the world using Light's industrial robots due to jealousy of his colleague. A robot named Rock, having a sense of justice, decided to volunteer to be converted into a fighting robot to save the world from the menace of Dr. Wily. From that moment on, Rock became known as Mega Man and will stop at nothing to defeat Wily.

I want to talk about what made this so revolutionary. Look at this screenshot right here:



You could pick your own stage and choose how to play the game. Nowadays, this doesn't seem like much but at the time, it was revolutionary. Not many games had that feature except for maybe Metroid or Legend of Zelda (I never grew up in the 80s so please forgive me). Also, this could happen:


Yes, I know this is a screenshot from Mega Man 2.

When you beat any of the Robot Masters, you would gain their own weapon and you could use it. This provided a Rock-Paper-Scissors element of gameplay as each of the Robot Masters are weak to one of the weapons (for example, Ice Man is weak to Elec Man's weapon). The weapons could also have certain effects as Ice Man's weapon would freeze enemies or Guts Man's weapon would allow you to pick up certain items.


The Incredible Hulk ain't got nothing on me!

Now onto what makes this game famous: the infamous difficulty. To be fair, I've played harder games than this...


C'mon, you know this is the hardest NES game

... but doesn't mean this game is a cakewalk. This is definitely one of the hardest Mega Man games (behind Mega Man 9, I'll cover that later). But why is it so infamously hard. I'll show 3 screenshots to demonstrate:
Exhibit A:

Watch out for that first step, Mega Man. It's a doozy.

Guts Man's stage. Whenever I hear Guts Man's theme at all, the lifts from the first part of the stage immediately appear in my mind. I really hated this part as a kid. Just one wrong step or horrible timing will bring you towards your demise. On the bright side, once you get past this part, your home free. This stage however is the reason why I usually start of with Guts Man, to get this part out of the way.

Exhibit B:

HE'S UNSTOPPABLE!

The Big Eye. Hands down one of the most annoying enemies in a Mega Man game. The main problem is how much it takes to destroy one. It takes so much fire power with any weapon to destroy him. When you do destroy him, you've probably emptied out your own inventory. The worst part is that when you get to Dr. Wily's fortress, you have to fight 2-3 of them at the beginning. And if that part of Wily Stage 1 wasn't bad enough, this is:

Exhibit C:

Am I the only one around here that can beat him without using the pause glitch?

C'mon, you knew this guy was going to pop up here. The Yellow Devil, probably the most infamous Mega Man boss ever for his attack pattern. There's absolutely no way to dodge him at all, and you'll probably die a good amount of times when fighting him. And yes, I'm aware of the famous "Pause glitch" where you push select to pause the game and use Elec Beam. The reason why I don't however, is I can beat him without being cheap (That and the Anniversary Collection removed the glitch as far as to my knowledge). Here's a video demonstrating this monstrosity:



If you can brave through the difficulty of the game, here's your final challenge:



Dr Wily himself. In this thing:


Just what the hell is that supposed to be exactly?

The Wily Machine No. 1. This boss was easy if you used Rolling Cutter and Fire Storm (that's what I used to beat him. If there's another way, feel free to let me know in the comments below). If you beat him, here's your reward:



The ending, naturally.

Join me next time and I'll talk about the sequel.
7
More Articles From Klaymen
An unhandled error has occurred. Reload Dismiss