Mega Man

"Press Start"

Years ago, Capcom created a legend by offering the video gaming world the little Blue Bomber. Giving you control of a small cyborg with a heart of gold and will that just won’t stop, Mega Man has been featured in games that have spanned over fifteen years and several different console and handheld systems! In the beginning, you were charged with taking on the forces of Dr. Wily and his band of evil robots and attempt to stop them from taking over the world! What Mega Man did, was to create a legend that hasn’t really changed much from the theme and the plot of the original, but rather add in different characters through a side scrolling setting that will challenge your skills as a platform gamer. With different weapons and several challenging levels, you’ll find that the action genre really doesn’t get much better than this and probably has gone downhill from this game ever since. A true NES gaming hit, the amount of action and game play that you find here is enough to keep you riveted, even though the game is dated and aged in today’s market.

The game play that you find here in Mega Man is strictly run and gun action with robots and special weapons being your goal. Through successful defeats of the enemies ahead of you, you’ll find that destroying the boss characters will result in you acquiring their special characteristics that will help you in later stages! The difficulty of the game comes while trying to traverse the different stages, all of which will challenge your skills through several instances of jumping and eliminating anything that is in your way. Most gamers who started out with this game, will find that the true challenge is just making it through the game without getting yourself killed, and without enough practice, you’ll find that this is damn near impossible the closer you get to the end. In your travels, you’ll face off against enemies that will leave you with small power pellets to keep your health up to maximum. If you fall too far down, you end up exploding and in certain cases, if you fall at any point and there is nothing below you, you’ll be destroyed! This amps up the challenge to the fullest, in which you’ll have to use a little bit of strategy and timing in order to get through the various points of the game. When it comes to the amount of jumping, action and general strategy, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Controlling the Blue Bomber takes some practice though. You’ll have to learn how to work with the slow and sometimes unresponsive NES controller, in which jumping doesn’t always seem to go the way that you want it do, even with a full button press! This is an important problem, in which most of the game requires you to have precision jumping in order to get through the various stages. If you’re heavy into NES gaming, then you should have no problem figuring out how to get around this problem, but if you’ve never played the old Mega Man games, then you’ll find that the game takes on a certain amount of difficulty that takes patience and practice to get through. The selection of weapons is easily done through a menu system and using them doesn’t take much effort other than selecting them and then using them accordingly. If you’re expecting anything intricate, then you can stop worrying, because anyone of any skill can pick the game up and play it without having to worry about excessive amounts of advanced control.

Visually, the game isn’t all that impressive, although by early standards, the amount of detail and otherwise was rather nice to see. The characters that you go up against all have their own personality and otherwise, with color schemes and even designs being well thought out and original. The stages themselves have nothing more that flat colors and small bits of details thrown in as an afterthought, but the speed of the action that you take on is something that should be noted! The later stages of the game have some pretty impressive designs, but you’ll find that more often than not, the amount of action on screen causes image break up and severe slowdown. NES gamers who have played various games on this system will find this to be a common problem and not think anything of it, while gamers of today will see it as a huge problem.

The music isn’t exactly first rate, and you’ll find that in most cases, it repeats itself with a slightly different beat each and every time. The stages themselves all have this sense of urgency and action, but the NES MIDI is only good to the point of being able to listen to it for an hour or so before you go nuts and mute the sound! The audio effects are also your standard fare of bleeps and bloops that really don’t do much for the overall game, but it does tend to blend together in all of the stages, which makes it average all the way around. When you look back on this game, you’ll find that this is where most of what the Mega Man games offered for future versions and there really isn’t much of a change from the original.

Overall, Mega Man is the start of a legend that does fairly well. Even though it isn’t the most impressive action game that I’ve ever played, there is a sense of nostalgia everytime I pick it up and play it! With the lack of control in certain parts of the game, most gamers will probably find that the amount of practice you need to get through the stages is staggering. However, you will find that good action gaming starts here, and without ramping up the difficulty too much, anyone of any skill can play. NES Collectors would do well to find this and keep it as the start of an amazing series on the NES, and die hard action gamers will find this to be one of the best action series in the Nintendo library.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/13/01, Updated 12/13/01