This is going to be another Mega Man post. Which makes me get that queasy feeling of needing to justify myself. Like when someone walks in on you pantsless.

I don’t really consider myself a Mega Man guy. That is probably disingenuous given that I’m playing two MM games right now and a third was my favorite game last year. The only game of the lot that I think is really exceptional is MM9. That includes the X series, which is mostly forgettable. But being recent 2d shooty/jumpy games with tight controls puts them in an uncrowded category.

Perhaps it helps my case that I’m abandoning MM10. In our last episode, I had died on Chill Man. Cleared him, cleared Nitro after an easy and mostly uninteresting stage, then tried Commando. That stage punched home the lesson that was more subtly taught in the prior stages: this game is deliberately unfun. Commando Man’s stage has a periodic dust storm effect that could only have been intended to make sure that we are not enjoying ourselves. Wind effects are a staple of the series, but this is a combination wind effect and whiteout. You can’t see the platforms while it’s blowing. Which might be kind of cool for the speedrunner, who will need to progress blind. But the safe tactic is obviously just to stop. To sum up: multiple times throughout the stage, you’re encouraged to stand still and do nothing for while.

The theme from my last post was basically that I wanted better weapons so I could cruise through Chill Man’s stage faster. Going smoothly and quickly through hard stages is what makes MM fun. That’s what each stage should aspire to. MM10 is instead full of stuff to sabotage that. It’s choppy and it drags. Screw it. I’d rather go back and play more of MM9.

I also dusted off Mega Man Powered Up recently. I lost my save at some point, so I’m doing all that jazz: unlocking each dude and playing through all the challenges. The core New Style game is middling. The challenges are the real meat here. There are 10 per character, 100 in total (Mega + 8 Robot Masters + a boss survival set). They’re Break-the-Targets-ish mini stages which are built around the special abilities of each character. They ramp up quickly to being all kinds of hard. Dozens and dozens of restarts hard. Hard enough that the lack of an instant restart annoys after a while. I’ve learned to hate the little intro animation you have to do on every single restart.

Little progress to report. Got through six or seven of Mega Man’s challenges and five of Cut Man’s.