I Bring Nothing to the Table

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter.

Why this? I can’t resist Rockman music!

Enjoy.

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter.

Mega Man 9 is HARD.

People say, “That’s the idea. It’s supposed to be Retro like the days when games were tough.” Let me tell you a secret about the old Mega Man games: they were NOT this hard. Aside from Quick Man (the magma plumes were mad cheap), I could more or less reliably kill almost all of the Mega Man 2 bosses. At this point, I’ve still only killed Galaxy Man and Concrete Man. Funny thing about that is that both of those Robot Masters are more or less the easiest in the game. As hard as maybe this video looks, this is an easy stage.

The real point I’m trying to make here is that while MM has always been hard, it was never as insidiously hard as this game is. There are enemies who jump up specifically over gaps, as you see, enemies who pop out of nowhere to grab you and drag you into spikes, and tough enemies with hard pattern recognition required to defeat them. It’s abuse to play, but it’s so fun.

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

I’ve talked about how dedicated Capcom is to the old-school aesthetic of Mega Man 9, but just how dedicated are they? Below is the “boxart” for the DLC game:

See More Mega Man 9 Box Art at IGN.com

If you remember back to my 8-Bit All-Stars post, you might remember me talking about the Mega Man 2 boxart as being nonsensical for the anime-cutesy style of the game. This is such a return to the old school that it makes me kind of pumped for this game.

I know I said I’d have E3 updates as exciting things happened, but I’ve failed to see much that excited me in this show. That being said, I will close off with a particular trailer that does pique my interest:

If you read my 8-bit All-Stars feature you know I love me some Mega Man 2. There was just something sublimely perfect about that game with its polished level design and great boss battles.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a real sequel to a Mega Man game. The last canonical MM game was MM 8 for the PSX in 1997, with the X series taking over with about eight installments that have also stopped coming out.

Imagine the world’s surprise when Mega Man 9 all of a sudden showed up on an ESRB classification website. Could the beloved franchise be making a return in all of the splendor of the current generation’s technological advances? And then we saw the first screenshots and trailer…

Cue some controversy. I’d say that a large number of dedicated MM fanatics were happy with this new direction, but many were perplexed by Capcom’s choice to go way old school with this new installment. Personally, I’m a fan of the new direction. When you look at the disappointments that have been the more recent MM games, it seems clear that a conscious effort to get back to the roots is just what the series NEEDS. Not to mention the fact that old school, 8-bit Mega Man music is great.

It’s not exactly a straight NES-style game though, it does have some technological advances. If you look closely you’ll see that the game does have some fancy-pants effects that weren’t possible on the NES. Personally, I’ll be happy if the game manages to not drop framerate when a bunch of enemies appear onscreen.

Another neat little change in the Mega Man conventions is that MM 9 will feature the first female robot. Splash Woman is the first non Man robot in series history. Some purists are very anti-Splash Woman, but I’m pro-female evil robot rights.

If I’m not mistaken, Mega Man 9 is slated for a Fall release on WiiWare, Xbox Live, and PSN.