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.

I must play everything from the absolute beginning. EVERYTHING. And I must beat it, usually fair and square. This means I beat Final Fantasy I before anything else. This means that I PLAYED FINAL FANTASY II FOR THE NES TO COMPLETION. For those of you who have played that game, I want you to think about that. Go on, think good and hard. Did you enjoy that game? No? That’s because it sucks. Just look at that horrible levelling system. I don’t even want to talk about the game any more than that, it’s like having flashbacks to being in a warzone, or kidnapped in the basement of a rapist. God.

This compulsion is worsened when games have some kind of chronology – Castlevania, for example. I have played and beaten every single Castlevania game ever released, apart from Portrait of Ruin, which came out after I’d done my little “pilgrimage” through the series, and which I’m playing right now. Every. Single. Castlevania. Game. The shitty Gameboy ones. Simon’s Quest. The N64 ones. (Which I actually love, but I know everyone else hates them for some reason.) And I didn’t even do it in release order, I did it in CHRONOLOGICAL order, beginning with Lament of Innocence for the PS2 (set in the late 11th century) and ending with Dawn of Sorrow (set in the year 2036.)

One day a few weeks ago I decided to take a look at the Monster World series. For those who don’t know (and I’d understand that fully because the series name is so generic), Monster World is actually a kind of sub-series that runs alongside (and often INSIDE) the Wonder Boy series. Go check Wikipedia for the full story behind the naming and chronology if you care, it’s too confusing and retarded to bother taking up half this post with.

Anyway, I discovered that Monster World IV (which is also Wonder Boy VI or some bullshit) now has a translation patch putting it into English. And it stars a girl with a green ponytail. This compelled me to play it in ways I can’t possibly relate in text, caused by my intense fixation on girls of that ilk, which will probably be the subject of another (very creepy) post at some point down the line. However, due to my horrible compulsion to play shit in order, I resigned myself to slugging through the Sega Master System games that make up the early series in order to get there. I decided to let myself get away with starting on Wonder Boy in Monster Land, which is Wonder Boy II, because it’s first in the Monster World series. I could just say I was “working through Monster World”, see, and not “working through Wonder Boy.”

So far, the game has been a horrible, painful, terrible experience. I am about to show you why, in order to save you from having to play this godawful nugget of feces yourself.

Looks like solid retro fun, doesn’t it? A nice sidescroller with RPG elements, not too complicated, fun to play while you chat to friends or just when you’re over saturated with complex, modern games and need a bit of a break. Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Except, guess what? It’s a port of an arcade game. That’s not so bad, though, right? Loads of great games appeared on the arcade before being ported to home consoles – the first Castlevania, for example. But look at the status bar at the top. See that hourglass?

SURELY THEY DIDN’T, RIGHT? Well, yes they did. Yes they damn well did. They left the time limit intact from the arcade version. A feature designed to make sure you weren’t being a dick and screwing around in the same few screens and not letting anyone else play the arcade machine by penalizing you for dawdling was left in for the home console release. This timer runs down constantly, and whenever it runs out completely, you lose a heart off your health. But that’s not too bad, right? I mean, it just means you can’t fuck around too much and you have to get on with the game, right?

Oh, but look at that! There’s not one, but TWO shields for sale in the shield store. A weaker one that costs less, and a stronger one that costs more. That’s pretty standard stuff for RPG-like games, and the choice here is the same as the choice in most other games following the same vein: grind for the better stuff now, or deal with the increased challenge of playing with weaker equipment until later in the game when the items which seemed so pricy back then now cost chump change.

Except, hold on a moment here. I CAN’T grind for the more expensive equipment, because holy shit, I’m on a time limit! And it’s not just shields I have to think about too, there’s armour, boots, magic, a bunch of crap like that. Even if I just bought the weakest version of everything, I still couldn’t afford equipment for my entire bo–

Wait, what? In the time I was busy typing that crap to you, I got shoved outside the store, and now it’s closed PERMANENTLY and will never re-open? Yeah, that’s right. If you take too much time browsing in a store, where the timer doesn’t even run down and where any other game in the history of mankind would have the decency to STOP THE ACTION, you get booted out of the store and it counts as “having visited it”. Most of the equipment stores shut down forever after you’ve visited them once, whether you bought anything or not, so fucking around like this will only mean the store closes, you get tossed out on the street and you can’t buy anything.

Of course, this means that you CAN’T EVEN JUST GO INTO THE STORE TO CHECK THE PRICES, YOU BETTER BE GODDAMN PSYCHIC AND KNOW EXACTLY HOW MUCH MONEY YOU NEED BEFORE YOU EVEN STEP FOOT IN ONE, OR YOU’RE A DUMB BASTARD AND YOU DESERVE NOT TO HAVE ANY EQUIPMENT AT ALL. Since the Master System’s actual pause button doesn’t work in the shop screens, if you’re in a store and you need to take a piss, or the doorbell goes, or the phone rings or something, you’d better be prepared to come back to a nearly-dead character, because not only will you get thrown out of the store, but the timer will keep on ticking, sapping your precious hearts while you DARE to go and attend to your real-life business.

It gets worse, though. BELIEVE ME it gets worse.

So, you’re on a time limit and you want to grind a bit to get money for items. You’d think there’d be some method of refilling the timer without sacrificing one of your hearts, wouldn’t you? Well, lucky for you, there is!

Stores like this one will sell you ale or mead to refill your timer, give you some health back, and prompt the barman to give you some vital information for finishing the chapter, such as the answer to a question asked later on, or the boss’s location or weakness. So that’s alright, isn’t it? You can just go out, kill some enemies, collect their gold, and spend some of it on refilling your timer every minute or so, kind of like a much faster version of the “fight, gain money, and use a portion of it to rest up in order to fight some more” mechanic used in so many classic RPGs.

BUT GUESS WHAT?

THAT FUCKING STORE CLOSES TOO. You only get to go in there like twice, three times tops before it’s barricaded up forever and you can never get back in. So there goes your last hope of being able to gain money sustainably for better equipment.

As a side note, the FAQ I referred to mentioned something interesting. The game has certain spots, completely unmarked, where jumping will cause a bag of 10 or so gold to materialize out of thin air. So if you’re willing to read the FAQ for every single screen of the game and jump on all of them, you might have enough gold for the best shit, but otherwise you’re just screwed. The FAQ also recommended some tourneyfag technique for “waggling” back and forth over these spots to cause a glitch where the same spot gives out gold many times in a row, but screw doing that. If you even NEED to do that, that’s bad game design, isn’t it?

Anyway, those of you who know this game will know that I’ve been talking about the second level here. Well, the first REAL level, since level 1 is so short and easy. Of course, I got further in the game than this. Let’s talk about something that happens later on.

So here I am on level god-knows-what. I can’t seem to find this level in any FAQ, probably because I took some weird route that went over the clouds to some southern island. As you can see, I have more hearts, my equipment is better, blah blah. So I’m going through this level merrily…

… when I come to this. An enemy in an unhittable position that swoops down and hit me as I jump on small platforms over lava.

Sure enough, just like every old game designed to frustrate you, you also jump back a million miles whenever you get hit. Fortunately, I didn’t land on the lava. Even if I did, though, it wouldn’t be that much of a problem, because all the lava does is make you lose one heart and give you that just-hit period of invulnerability. In fact, I passed this section by deliberately getting hurt and using that period to just walk over the lava to the other side.

So, here I am at the boss door to this round. I’ve been knocking on it, but it just won’t let me in. This is fairly normal because in Wonder Boy in Monster Land, you need to collect the key from somewhere in the level in order to get through the boss door. That’s pretty standard stuff, and a lot of great games past and present have used the same mechanic. One of the previous levels in this game sent you past the locked door once in order to swim under the small island you were just on, collect the key in the water, and circle back to the door to unlock it.

Unfortunately, the right hand side of this screen is a dead end, and there are no pits in the floor or stairs to climb that could take me to other location. This level DID consist of a lot of areas, though, so I probably missed the key in one of those, yeah? I should go back and get it.

BUT WHAT’S THIS? I can’t go left back out of this cave and into the previous area. In fact, I can’t go ANYWHERE. There are no hidden doors or routes that I can find, and I’ve jumped in every spot to try and find some of those retarded hidden things. No, I’m just STUCK here with a steadily decreasing timer and a bunch of respawning enemies that take like 5 hits to kill, hovering directly over lava. And because this game doesn’t save data to an internal battery or use a password system or anything remotely logical, my only choice is to RESET THE ENTIRE GAME AND TRY AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING.

WHO THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA? This game is complete and utter tripe. I’ve suffered through some terrible shit for my play-every-series-in-order fixation, but this really does take the cake. Thankfully it’s mercifully short, so I don’t have to deal with it for like 30 hours of my life like I did with Final Fantasy II, but it’s like every little aspect of this game was made specifically to irritate the player. Some games do that well, like the classic Megaman games. Hell, there was an indie game created in recent years – I Wanna Be The Guy – which was designed as a homage to the intense difficulty and unfair bullshit that those games pulled, and it’s actually pretty fun to play.

But Wonder Boy in Monster Land is not fun in any of those ways. In fact, it’s just not fun at all. Its nostalgic retro charm is completely negated by its utter unplayability, piss-poor design and terrible execution. It’s not even “so terrible it’s fun to play” like Bible Adventures or Superman 64. It just sucks, I’m sorry I’ve wasted my time playing it, and I’m even MORE sorry that I’m going to force myself to finish this fucking thing in order to work up to Monster World’s better installments.

“Games! Articles! Design theory! Keep it in mind!”

You see, when I was younger, I was pretty much an endless engine of enthusiasm, willful to spend hours, even days, on the most depressing and soul crushing things. I’d spend hours on sprite comics, fanart, and very very bad homemade games (The most noteworthy, aside from the one that is soon to be mentioned below, is an RPG based around an Anime forum I went to. Ugh.) Nowadays, I lack the motivation to even finish a game (I honestly think the last game I ended was Jump! Ultimate Stars, about 2 years ago), but back then, I had all of the zeal and zest you would expect from a giant nerd with new technology at his fingertips.

What I want you to know is this: I don’t write for this blog for money. I write so I can try to reclaim some of that lost enthusiasm. So while I dick around on the internet, I keep everything in mind. “How would I draw that?”, “Would this make a good game”, and most importantly: “Can I write about this in 400 words or less?”. 400 words, if you didn’t know, was the word limit for each Blag! aritcle. A limit that is utterly murdered by our tl;dr squads.

This brings me to the subject of this article.

While dicking around on TVtropes.org, I happened upon the article “So Bad It’s Horrible – Video Games” I scrolled down until I found a little gem of a mod named Nazi Auferstehung: A DukenDoom Adventure. Knowing I was in for a laugh, I clicked a link that led to it’s Doomworld: Worst Wad of the year “award” recipient page. It was there that I saw something that made my cheecks turn red.

“The wad was over 165 megs when unzipped, containing multiple copies of the Doom 2 IWAD, spread out over some 20-odd wad files.  There is a staggering number of MP3 files that never end up playing as music in the game, and maps 30-32 are just texture-replaced copies of the original maps.”

Now why would this shame lil ol’ ℳℴℯ me? Because that was a huge part of the huge problem that was the huge shit I created a few years ago. That shit didn’t have an official name. So we’ll just call it Rape of a Genre 2006 for now.

It was such a good idea at the time...

I’m not sure where I first heard of MUGEN. My earliest memories are of youtube videos and some guy calling it the hidden salvation of the fighting genre. That guy is an asshole, but not nearly as much of an asshole as I am. After having my curiosity piqued, I downloaded a torrent that called itself “THE BIGGEST AND BESTEST MUGEN TORRENT OF ALL TIME (400+ CHARACTERS AND MORE STAGES THAN BROADWAY DUDE)”. You see a lot of these on every torrent site. Mine was one of them, albeit way bigger than those other pansy ass MUGEN torrents. You see, RG2K6 had 827. This one had about 160 (God, if you can’t be honest on the internet, where can you be honest?). It was also badly organized, and I had to literaly hack the game just to play as most of the characters.

Eventually, I became adicted to messing with the engine. All that hacking had really hit the core of my enthusiasm (Now if only I used that enthusiasm for something useful; I could be a Doctor, or a Comp Sci major!). You have to give MUGEN credit; for all of the abominations it spawned, it’s a pretty natch engine. Somebody could actual make a good fighting game with it. Not that they have, or for that matter, ever will…

I became addicted to hoarding all of the best and rarest characters I could find. I spent nights hunting down old warehouses and torrenting newer sets. Within a few weeks, I had one of the best collections around. I was a veteran and expert on any and all MUGEN affairs. Imagine my surprise when I saw a well and heated flame-fest on /v/ about MUGEN.

It had the usual. “[X] is shit!” followed by “Stupid [opinionownedbytheposter]fag” seen frequently on /v/. This was the perfect opportunity for me to post a screenshot of all the characters I had amassed in my time. For what does a Tripfag value more than attention? Did I not say that I write these articles to regain my lost enthusiasm and get tons of attention? No? Well, I really really do.

…

Do you like me yet?

…

No? Jerks.

They asked if I could upload it all, and I gleefuly accepted. I always told myself that I was going to upload this set one day, but I also said that I would cleen all the shit out first. Did I clean out the Hugh Jass mess? Of course not! I was in a hurry! /v/ demanded it be delivered as soon as possible! I had 4 gigs to archive and torrent! The funniest thing is, this is probably the turning point of my youthful enthusiasm. This may be the exact moment in which I became the lazy, unimaginative bastard that I am now.

But enough nostalgia. Time for the good part. What was the shit, you ask? Well, I for one am proud to say that RG2K6 was the very first video game of the genre to contain 26 Gokus. That’s right. 26 horrid, bland, generic, pallette swaps of Goku. What else? about 400 megs worth of music, most of which went unused. What else? About half of the songs linked to places on my hard drive that weren’t in the MUGEN directory, so a shitload of the stages have no music. What else? The torrent says “200+” stages. It’s really “500+”. There was a problem with my version of MUGEN. When a Stage’s config file labeled a directory with “\” and not “/”, it wouldn’t load, so I simply cut the entire stage pack form my collection’s configuration file. You better believe I kept the stage files and their music, though. What else? How about junk characters and spare Screenpacks, with no explanations of why I put them where I did? How about a charatcer that just plain crashed the game? (I forget which one. Probably one of the 15 Gotenks). How about a configuration built specifically for that machine? One that only 5% of PCs can run properly? How about taking characters from games with different rules and metagames and just sticking them all together? And how did I advertise this? Just like all of the other MUGEN collection did. ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! I even added in extra screenshots. Screenshots that showed the “Yaranaika?” guy molesting Cable from MvC2.

Take that, you God Tier Liefeld abomination! With games like this, how can PC gaming EVER be dead?

I know what you’re thinking. “Jesus, was anything RIGHT with this crap?”. Why yes, yes there was.

Someone was nice enough to upload a video of RG2K6 in action…

You see that? Kanye West! At least it wasn’t Linkin Park! My custom select screen was about the only worthwhile thing in this whole mess.

I remember waking up the next morning, and seeing the thread on /t/ about the abomination I had just released onto the world. Oh boy, those comments were amazing.

* This is great, thanks for making this – it has a lot of characters I can’t find anywhere else or are no longer hosted.. I just hope it’s seeded until I can finish downloading it.

* keeps crashing when i start it

* please someone tell me how to completely install it, can someone tell me how i get started, PLEASE Email me, i need help!!

* gg pwnt

* I have the same problem it crashes to desktop when its loading chars.. :’(

* Meh, how can i play this game without crushing?

My concern quickly turned to indifference, as I soon completely forgotten about the demon I had created. Well, until I started showing it off on /co/, which led to me uploading it again, this time to ThePirateBay, where it can be found to this day. Please note in the link below that I was just as enthusiastic when I put it there, and even tried to help some people with their problems (albeit half-assedly).

The magnitude of sorrow I’d caused hadn’t hit me until a friend of mine was describing a horrible MUGEN pack his friend downloaded. The way he described it, I just knew it was mine. That’s when it hit me. I was one of the biggest unintentional trolls in history. I made Neville Chamberlain my bitch, while making Freud and Jung my Gods. It’s also when a disturbing theory popped into my head. What if my creative rut was simply God’s way of preventing me from ever creating again? What if the things I was capable of creating would one day put humanity in danger by the magnitude of it’s shittyness?

Well, let’s hope this article will suffice as my martyrdom. I’m an idiot, and I’m sorry.

You can still get RG2K6 if you want. It’s on ThePirateBay. Let me just ask you this: Why in the hell would you do this to yourself? You have so much to live for.

Rape of a Genre 2006: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3765211/MUGEN_(800__Characters__400__Stages)

p.s. After this, every time someone mentions this game to me, I will respond with LOL I TROLL U. I will never again willfully admit to making this.

p.p.s. Venom is from Spider-Man.