Mega Man

"Mega Man, what a very rubbish name, still, he IS a robot..."

Yes, Mega Man is a bit of a crappy name. Oh well, this game isn't very MEGA exactly, its just pretty good. There are many brilliant games on the NES, and this is one of them. Mega Man is about a robot. A blue robot whose arm can suddenly turn into a gun which can blast the living hell out of other robots. In fact, I only ever saw 1 human in the game. Mega Man is pretty simple, you have 10 levels, you go around them, and kill lots of annoying robots, then defeat the end of level boss. It sounds pretty simple, and IS simple. But what makes Mega Man different then all those other boring NES games?

Mega Man is a platformer. You go from left to the right, or even up sometimes. You don't have to jump onto robots head though, instead, you shoot them with your gun, and many other guns you can later collect. There are a lot of enemies, and some appear more then others, and some are very annoying to kill or to avoid. For example, there are these annoying green or something enemies that have a big smile on them. They get evil soon enough. They will start bouncing around at incredible speed, and trust me, this isn't very nice. The good thing is, you get health. A nice little bar going downwards is at the top left of the screen, its actually a pretty cool health bar. It contains many little blocks, or at least, rectangles which represent your health. Occasionally, you will find that you go through most of the game without many blocks. This is mainly because the enemies are hard to kill even when shooting from a distance. They will still be able to get at you some way or another. Different enemies will take different amounts of damage before they blow up. Of course, different weapons will make short of them. Guns are good in this game, I was getting a bit sick of jumping on top of enemies heads.

There is also the platforming part. You will find very many gaps to jump across, enemies to jump over, or platforms to jump across. There are usually some puzzles with platforming. Some are very simple, just a bunch of platforms to jump across, to the slightly harder. You enter a new room, and find a big gap, you can't get across. Underneath is some water, and a nasty enemy that shoots towards you when you touch the same floor its on, and they hurt. So how do we get across? Well, eventually, some invisible blocks will appear. You need to learn the pattern first. Soon another appears, then another appears, and the first one disappears, then the second one will disappear when the next block comes and so on and so forth. Some are very tricky, and are pretty good, it adds more then just blasting things. Also, you can get some other pretty tricky ones. For example, I saw this long piece of metal like thing. I first jumped on not knowing that it was some sort of cable for a platform to go along, so I died. Waiting this time, a small little platform will appear, and you have to jump on. You will find more platforms to jump on, blocks to jump over, and there are times when the little platform will swing underneath you, making you jump to avoid falling down. There are quite a lot of fun platforming parts in Mega Man, but some can get pretty tricky.

Then both are combined. Your climbing up a ladder. This is kind of platforming. Then some enemies start to appear from the top of the screen. When they are level with you, they zap you, and you fall off the ladder. You have to be quick with this, blasting them before they get you! Many appear at the same time, and this happens a lot. Another example, doesn't really involve action, but is similar to the above. This time, instead of flying robots coming to zap you, you get little bursts of electric fly out of the wall, past a ladder. Time it right, and you can get past without being electrocuted, and falling off the ladder. This is kind of bad though, because some parts get very similar, just with different things happening.

Something different about Mega Man is you get a choice. You can choose which levels you do, and when. At least, the first 6 anyways. You have 6 levels, all very different, mainly the environment, and what they contain. Each will feature a different boss at the end. The bosses are pretty easy, but the first one is usually the hardest because you only have your normal weapon to defeat them. Another cool health bar appears for their health, and the battle begins. Once you defeat them, you get their weapon. So when you beat the electric boss, you can fire electric. Pressing the start button, you can choose which weapon you use. This means you can beat other enemies and bosses faster, if you use their weakness. This makes it kind of easier once you have their weakness though, although you will never have the weakness for all the bosses, you just have to beat them without! There is also an extra weapon to find, the Magnet Gun. This can lead to a very annoying bug/glitch or maybe even intended thing. If you don't have a certain weapon from a boss, the pick up a block and toss it one, you cannot get a weapon which isn't hidden really, its just behind some blocks, and you can only pick them up with that weapon. OK, so you can go back to levels, but some people may just miss this weapon, it might not be important. So, once you defeat all 6 bosses, and move onto the big fry, on the very first level, you get stuck. Why? You need the magnet gun. This took me ages to figure out, I was pretty pissed off, and you have to complete the whole game in one. No passwords or save or anything. I had to kill myself until I had no lives, go back to the level select, and get the weapon, which was annoying.

So you have the freedom of doing these 6 levels. What about after that? Well, you go onto like I said above, the big fry, Dr. Wily. No, don't laugh. He is the only human I saw in this game, a crazy Dr. who wants to take over the world. Well, I assume that anyways. Moving onto him, you must complete 4 levels in a row, each one containing the bosses you just beat, until you finally get to the last one, Dr Wily himself. The annoying thing is, you will most probably have little health or ammo for your weapons (your default has unlimited ammo though) which makes it harder, as resources are scarce through out the levels. You mainly get them from enemies, completely randomly though. Fortunately, there is a very nice trick to hit the enemy multiple times, and you can even defeat the last boss in one attack, if you get it right! So Mega Man is hard sometimes, but not as hard as capcoms arcade games (like the ones from arcade classics). Overall, its not a tricky game to complete, and its not very long, but then again, you do have to complete it in one go. A couple of hours will do it, although you may have to get better and better at the game before you can do it.

Overall, Mega Man is a great platformer. Combining different combat, and some great platforming puzzles, which may be used over and over again sometimes, this game is very enjoyable and managed to spawn another 5 games on the NES. Mega Man is an above average shooter and a change from Mario on the NES, because, I don't see many robots in Mario, if at all. The NES has many classic games, and this is one of them.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/28/06