Passed Cut Man #7, cue the chorus of angels. Frankly, there was little sense of climax. I made a small adjustment to my pattern and cleared it immediately. The innovation was to take advantage of the screen scrolling and the effect it has on spawns. We’ll apply a bit of newspaper style here and postpone the details so we can get the juicy stuff up top.

Cut 8 was a cruise. A little cooldown as a reward for passing 7. I actually failed to make the critical jump in 8 repeatedly, but failure was non-fatal so I could just keep hammering at it. Accordingly, passed on what was technically my first try.

I’m working on Cut 9 now and it is delicious. Mega Man Powered Up is not designed as a throwback to the series in general; it is specifically an homage to Mega Man 1. The enemy types are all from 1, the stages are designed to be remixes of 1′s. One of the few design elements that’s completely new are container spawns. Little devices in the ceiling that repeatedly drop giant crates. Cut Man’s 9th challenge is the pinnacle of crate-spawning design.

You use Cut Man’s walljump to cross giant chasms by pinballing off of falling crates. I think the beauty of that may have been lost in the prose, so I will emphasize. You walljump off moving surfaces over bottomless pits. Games were made for this.

Ok, it falls a bit short of being the unparalleled joy it ought to be. The walljump is not quite as nimble as you’d really like. MMPU is really vertically constrained, so you’re never more than two jumps or so from the top of the screen. But this is the good stuff.

Back to how I passed Cut 7. Tedium follows, gird yourself.

To review, you’re on a narrow, icy platform. 8 enemies spawn in a semi-circle around and above you. They’re the infinitely respawning enemies that pour out of pipes in Mega Man 2. You used the Jewel Shield in 9 to scum them for health and weapon power drops. Slow-moving cylinders with eyes. You’ve got to survive for one minute.

The innovation I finally happened on was using the scroll of the screen to limit spawns. Picture the 8 enemies in three groups. 3 on the right, 2 on the left and 3 above. I was killing the right-hand group then moving right, into the space I just freed up, to kill the remaining five. Then move back left and repeat.

What I noticed was that I was almost always dying to the left-hand group of 2. The top 3 were more or less irrelevant. Furthermore, the platform was just wide enough that if I moved to the far right, the spawn spot of the leftmost 2 would be off the screen. And because it’s a MM game, that means those 2 would not spawn. This was no more than a short delay, of course. I had to move back left and they’d spawn then. But since those 2 were the big problems, cutting back on their spawns made things much more manageable.