In my last post, I talked about how I have a horrible compulsion to play long video game series spanning multiple console generations in strict chronological order. Before I begin this post, however, I should really explain why this is necessary for big-name series such as Mega Man.

To put it simply, I never had a NES. A lot of gamers my age who started when I did (late 80s/early 90s) had the NES as the staple of their early gaming years, particularly in America where it sold so phenomenally. Consequentially, a lot of underage gamers who like acting like Internet Tough Guys on forums rag on people who haven’t played certain NES franchises because “everyone had a NES.”

What they don’t seem to take into account is that we had console wars back then, too – and I was young and dumb enough to believe they meant anything. After my initial years with a green-screen PC that could only display ascii and a ZX Spectrum 81, I got a Mega Drive (that’s Genesis to our colonial friends) for my birthday and became a loyal Sega hound-dog. I hated anything Nintendo and wouldn’t even stand for watching the Super Mario Brothers Super Show on TV. They were the devil, they were to be detested and shunned. Everyone knew Sonic was better anyway, right? … right??

It gets even worse because, as a Brit, I didn’t get to play a lot of the games that American Genesis gamers considered staples. The problem of delayed (and more frequently, nonexistent) PAL releases of popular games was much worse then than it is now, and even when some of the “classic” games DID make their way to the UK, they were often in such limited runs or so poorly publicized that a lot of kids simply never played them. Remember, these were innocent days before the internet.

I did eventually acquire a NES and SNES in my late teens when they started showing up in my local stores extremely cheap, but by that point it made more sense to just emulate most of the time unless it was a game I really loved that merited going out of my way to play it authentically. (Like the original Metal Gear, which I own a boxed copy of.)

So, I suppose all of that was just a REALLY long-winded way of saying “I never played Mega Man.” The fact that every Tom, Dick and Harry on the internet won’t shut up about it for two seconds made me buy Mega Man 1 and 2 on the Wii Virtual Console a few months ago, which I now regret immensely because not only is the Wii DEAD TO ME (I HAVE NO SON), but I realize that I was a gigantic faggot and effectively paying money to a company I don’t like anymore for ROMs. (To clarify that last statement, I got over the console war bullshit by the N64 and enjoyed both that and the Gamecube thoroughly, bought a Wii on launch day and tried so hard to love it, but when it turned out to have no outstanding games, then spent a bunch of time pandering to people who were nostalgic for franchises I never grew up with, then went all NINTENDO GENERATIONS on us, I decided the company had turned sour.)

The first time I played Mega Man 1, I was pretty wowed. It had been a long time since I’d played a game which would just openly wave its dick in your face at every opportunity. Let’s take a look at two highly infamous areas in the game:

Just look at this. These platforms give you barely any room to jump from one to another, thanks to the low ceilings that extend the entire length of the platform, and to top it off, they’re patrolled by small robots which will hurt you and knock you off if you touch them. They also speed up dramatically if you’re on their platform, and they’re largely invincible. This is the FIRST SCREEN of Elecman’s level. And you know what? I’m sorry, but I think that’s awesome. Seriously, completely awesome. I mean, honestly, what’s the worst that happens if you fail? You fall down, lose a bit of health. Do it enough times and you’ll go back to the beginning of the level, which is… oh wait… here. It’s stressful, but not TOO stressful. You gotta work hard to get past it, especially the first time, but it’s rewarding when you do, and it lets you know right away that this game isn’t fucking around. You’re not here to jump through a set of easy hoops.

Let’s talk about that, actually. What is “playing a video game”, really? Is it just defined as interacting with an electronic product that requires you to perform a series of tasks? Sure, why not, that’s as good a definition as any. But what if those tasks are easy, or samey? Let’s take a look at a game that’s guilty of that.

Breath of Fire 1. I took a screenshot from the first battle in the game because this game sucks too much for me to suffer through it again. Yes, I beat it, and it was horrible the whole way through. It’s ludicrously easy, completely unremarkable in every respect, entirely too long and generally unimaginative, with no variety and only very basic gameplay options. I fucking hate this game.

But you see, you can pick up Breath of Fire 1 at any time, and you’re GUARANTEED to make progress in it. If you sit down, boot up the game, and play for half an hour, at the end of that half an hour you will be further than you were when you began. Guaranteed. All you’re doing for the whole game is jumping through hoops – kill this, go here, save her, kill that – and none of it is even remotely challenging. All that’s required to beat the game is to sit down in front of it for the right number of hours and make the obvious choices at every menu. To me, that isn’t gaming.

Let’s go back to Mega Man 1 and compare.

Oh shit, remember this one? To clarify, you’re on a moving platform that follows a rail. A rail which, quite obviously, you can’t stand on. The rails below you have dead spots which cause the platform to tip down when it passes over them – you can see it happening to the middle platform in the screenshot. If you fall down, you’re fucked, it’s over, goodbye. Again, this is near the start of the stage, so it makes you swear and build up a sweat, but it’s not too bad if you fail. It’s fun to try and get past it, it keeps the game solid without being bullshit (more on that later) and overall it makes for a fun game, I’d say.

Think back to Breath of Fire 1, and how you could just sit down in front of it and be guaranteed to make progress. I’ve spent hours, sessions upon sessions on a single Mega Man level before and ended up no further than I was when I started. It’s been frustrating, yes, but it’s been GREAT, because when I actually beat one, get that precious password and finish writing it down, I know I’ve actually overcome something. I was presented with a challenge, and I have risen to that challenge. Kind of like — GASP — A GAME.

Now, I know I’ve only talked about the early levels, but that’s fine. They illustrate perfectly what I’m on about. Let’s talk about Mega Man 2 now.

One thing that I really love about Mega Man 2 is that it isn’t lazy, and it isn’t constrained. It doesn’t say “Right, here’s your engine, here’s how the game works, here’s what you’re going to be playing for the whole game” and just leave it there. Each level is different from the next – hijacking clouds from enemies and riding them over endless abyss in Air Man’s stage, making split-second dodges when floors come slamming across the screen at light speed in Quick Man’s stage, running away and dodging on tiny platforms while being chased by a giant dragon in Wily’s Castle. In recent years, video games have tried, too hard in my opinion, to take their tips from movies. Thematic and gameplay constraints are too tight. There’s too MUCH consistency. I’ll give you a good example.

Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. “You colossal faggot, you actually played Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories?” Well yes, yes I did. And I beat it. And it sucked. It sucked so much that I refused to go download a ROM of it to take screenshots, because I coudln’t beat the thought of playing through even five minutes of it to get a shot of a battle or a map or something.

Anyway, there’s a reason I brought up Chain of Memories, and that is because it’s the best example of a game utterly constrained by its modus operandi that I could think of. They sat down, said “Right, this game is divided into two segments: One in which Sora runs around a very samey map based on each of the Kingdom Hearts 1 worlds getting into fights and unlocking doors, and one in which Sora engages in real-time RPG battles using cards as attacks.” And that was it. Nothing exciting or different happened in any way, for the entire game. The whole game was the exact same thing, copied and pasted over and over again. Even at points in the game when it would have been entirely appropriate to have a section that played differently, or let you control a different character, the game neglected to do this, because it didn’t fit its tight-knit little perception of how things “should” be done. Yes, there was an extra mode where you played as Riku with a pre-defined deck (and I beat that too, the lack of bullshit card collecting mechanics actually made it better than the main game) but that in itself was constrained by its own system just as much as Sora’s mode was.

Hell, they were reluctant even to make changes for aesthetic reasons, such as giving you originally designed areas that weren’t the KH1 ones. The trip to Twilight Town in the late game proved a pleasant surprise. What’s this? A location that we’ve never seen before? It’s mysterious and new, looks pretty, and hey, it seems like it might actually give us a change from this monotonous bullshit, and a chance to learn more about the truth behind the overall story. DID IT DO EITHER? FAT FUCKING CHANCE. It was just the same shit as the other levels with different sprites and backgrounds. And not even THAT different, holy shit, hold on here, REIN IN THOSE FUCKING HORSES BUDDY. Don’t want to get TOO exciting.

Yes, everything I’ve just said about that horrid, horrid game could be attributed to laziness on the part of the developers. And given who the developers are, I don’t think that’s too unreasonable a conclusion. But it’s also a product of self-imposed constraint, the kind that Mega Man 2 was too early, innocent and imaginative to fall victim to.

Let’s briefly talk about a game that came DURING this trend and still managed to say “Fuck it” to the whole thing.

That game is Jak 3, from the excellent Jak and Daxter series for the PS2. Now, a lot of people give this series shit, and in my opinion they do so for extremely superficial reasons. The first installment was a charming 3D “collect shit” platformer in the rough vein of a much improved Super Mario 64, with real design work having gone into it and awesome environments. Then in the second game, they moved all the characters into the world’s distant, grim future, made the previously silent protagonist an angsty, tortured badass with a goatee, gave him guns and borrowed city-wandering mechanics from the GTA series. In other words, they pulled a Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, only with more being chased by cops. A lot of people criticised this change in tone and gameplay style because it wasn’t what they were expecting and they considered it in some way “defiling” the original game.

I say fuck all that. Jak 2 was awesome, and Jak 3 was even more awesome. They were polished, fun to play, and CHALLENGING. Yes, you had a reasonable chance of making progress whenever you booted it up, but by god you had to THINK and TRY and TAKE CHANCES. That’s what made it fun.

Anyway, I brought up Jak 3 because it changes gameplay style and content whenever it fucking feels like it. Never is the game guilty of not delivering. I remember a point where, after driving your awesome Mad Max-style car through the desert to this one mountain and proceeding on foot to the summit, Jak was captured or incapacitated or something and you had to play as his little furry friend Daxter in order to pull whatever lever needed pulling to release the FUCKING HANG GLIDER. (At least, that’s how I remember it. The exact order of events may have been somewhat different. ) Then, the game entered this hang gliding segment with controls and mechanics that had never been seen before in the GAME let alone the series, and would never be seen again after that one part. It was immensely awesome. I love how they didn’t just get to that part and think “Oh shit that’ll mean programming a whole bunch of crap just for this one part right here, let’s just do it in a cutscene”, or, even WORSE, think “That doesn’t fit with what kind of game this is! This breaks our MO! This means that players might get frustrated with having to adapt to a different style of play than the one they “paid” for, let’s just cop out and make it a cinematic!”

Jak3 is fucking awesome. I might even make a post in the future about how awesome it is. But this post was SUPPOSED to be about Mega Man. Let’s get back to that by talking about Mega Man 3.

This game is gloriously, wonderfully challenging. The previous Mega Man games had me making angry faces at the screen but loving every second of it. This one, however, is just a total bitch, and it KNOWS you love it. For a start, instead of the usual circle of robot master weapons and weaknesses, where each robot master is vulnerable to another’s special weapon in a big loop, Mega Man 3 has TWO circles that have nothing to do with each other. That means that you need to find not one, but two precious points of penetration into the circle, where you have to kill a robot master with just your shitty default mega buster or a weapon it’s not vulnerable to.

Snake Man is one of the more common “points of penetration” into his circle because he’s comparatively easy. However, that doesn’t mean he’s not still a total and utter dick. His pattern seems to have been designed with the exclusive purpose of making it awkward to dodge, even though it’s simple, repetitive, and his offensive capabilities aren’t that spectacular.

But the real challenge comes after you beat all of those robot masters. SURPRISE! You have to beat ALL the robot masters from MEGA MAN FUCKING 2, only this time you don’t have the weapons they’re weak against (and there’s no way you can get them in this game), they occupy remixed (read: harder) versions of the Mega Man 3 boss’s stages, AND there’s two per stage!

Look at this crazy shit right here. Allow me to explain exactly what is happening in this screenshot.

First off, those platforms above me there? Those open up in the middle and let you fall through when you jump on them, giving you a very short window of time in which to jump off. Second, see that thing at the top of the screen that looks like a weird, inverted lightbulb? As long as that thing’s on screen, anything that isn’t a sprite (such as Mega Man, the enemies and those disappearing platforms) is made invisible and replaced by a shot of outer space. This means that you can’t see where the pits or walls are. Thirdly, that enemy right in front of me that’s about to kick my ass can jump up and down ledges and a ton of them come from the right to kill you. Also, they explode when they die, and the explosion can hurt you and knock you back. Oh SHIT.

To make it even worse, in these remixed levels with the Mega Man 2 robot masters, if you die fighting a boss, you go ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE STAGE. (Or, if you die fighting the second boss in the stage, all the way back to just after the room you fought the first one in.) You’d better get serious if you don’t want your ass handed to you.

I absolutely love all of this in ways I can’t possibly describe. It’s hard. Very hard. At times it feels unreasonable, like it’s throwing stuff at you just to piss you off, but it’s great. The game is basically saying “Think you can take me on, you pussy? COME ON, TRY YOUR HARDEST, BITCH BOY”, so when you beat it, it’s great. It’s like punching someone particularly smug in the face, only to have them smile, reveal that they were just acting all along, shake your hand and congratulate you on being so awesome. That’s the feeling that I love. That’s the feeling that so many great games give you, and that so many unchallenging or samey games like Breath of Fire or Chain of Memories fail entirely to deliver.

I’ll say one last thing about classic Mega Man before I finish. And that is, I’d like to talk about the controls. They’re fluid, perfect, and you always know exactly how to do what you want to do. They’re responsive and fair. What you mean to do is always exactly what Mega Man does on-screen, and if he fucks up it’s because YOU fucked up. Let’s contrast that to a game which caused me an awful lot of anger, despite not actually being that bad at all.

Ah, Sonic Adventure 2. Not, in my opinion, as good as Sonic Adventure 1, but good nonetheless. Arguably (and I’d argue so myself) the last of the decent 3D Sonic games…. of which there are only two anyway.

So what’s my problem with Sonic Adventure 2? It’s the fucking horrible controls, at least on the Gamecube version. Yes, yes, I’ve never played the Dreamcast one, I never had a Dreamcast. Whatever. It’s fine. I’m not bashing the game or saying it’s bad, I’m just relating a bad experience I had with the controls on the Gamecube version as an example.

Basically, when playing as Sonic or Shadow, this irritating thing happens where, for no readily available reason, pressing the jump button does not in fact cause you to jump straight up or in the direction you indicated but instead to jump sideways as fast as possible in a random direction. I have absolutely no idea why this happens. Perhaps it’s a glitch, perhaps there’s a bona fide reason for it, but I couldn’t work it out even after reading the manual, FAQs, and asking people on the internet, which makes it a shitty control mechanic.

Now, there’s a level at the end of the game which takes place in space, where the gravity is constantly shifting depending on what surface you’re standing on The platforms and rails are tiny, lead in weird directions, and are almost always directly above a long fall into the dark, cold abyss of space. This is actually REALLY AWESOME, and it makes for a really fun level, except WHOOPS! You told Sonic to make a short, careful hop to the right to get on that rail, and instead he decided it’d be better to SUDDENLY LEAP AT FULL FUCKING SPEED TO THE LEFT, HURLING HIMSELF WITH RECKLESS ABANDON OFF THE EDGE OF THE PLATFORM AND INTO DEEP SPACE WHERE HE WILL SUFFER A LINGERING DEATH FROM COLD AND ASPHYXIATION. TOO BAD, FAGGOT, BETTER HOPE THE CONTROLS DON’T CRAP OUT NEXT TIME.

It’s stupid, it feels unfair, and it IS unfair. When you fuck up in that level, it’s not your fault, it’s because they were too lazy/incompetent/pressed for time to make controls that respond properly. YOU didn’t fuck up, the game did, and yet you get punished for it.

In Mega Man 3, by comparison… well, you’re dying a lot. But that’s because YOU’RE fucking up. If you lose, it’s YOUR fault, too bad. Suck less.

It’s harsh, but fair. It’s challenging, rewarding, and well designed. Despite being extremely formulaic, it’s never afraid to break away from your expectations and surprise you. And that’s why so far, I think the classic Mega Man series is awesome.