Mega Man Nostalgia

So, today, Mega Man 9 was released. I'm coming here to the sole reason of saying: THIS GAME IS AWESOME!

Maybe it means more to people like me that actually played the first ones when they came out on the NES, but man it was a fun ride! A stroke down memory lane it was, and a good one at that. Good, but short. Four hours and thirty four minutes later and I'm done with it.

One of the aspects that I was most anxious about was how the difficulty would be, since we were promised the same challenge level as that of the older iterations. Now that I've finished it I can say:

It's normal.

Yes, you'll die the first few times you enter a stage, and yes you'll see the game over screen here and there. But, much like old games like this, it's all about memorizing patterns. You may start dying by the third screen of a stage, but 15 minutes later you'll probably breeze through it and reach the boss without taking almost any hits.

Also this time around the game is not as unforgiving as it was. You have access to a shop, where you may buy up to 9 lives, 9 E-Tanks, 9 Mystery Tanks and an Item that makes you take half the damage you'd normally receive throughout the entire stage. I know the proud ones out there will try beating it without any of this, but my point is this stuff is there for you to take, and it also happens to be very cheap. Plus you can easily find places to farm bolts and buy whatever you want even more quickly. All this does not make for a hard game.

It'll probably seem hard to so many players because the challenge this game presents is that of an age past. It was different back then. I can just imagine the number of players who'll give up after falling continuously in pits and spikes. No game nowadays will give you a difficulty that's even throughout the entire experience. We are used to a progression and Mega Man was never like this.

And I'm not trying to sound rude or anything like I was the greatest player out there. To this day I have yet to beat Mega Man 1, that thing is just impossible to me. I've tried time and again and it is simply beyond my ability as a gamer, I can't do it.

Back on Mega Man 9; the game is, of course, not perfect. There are some cheap deaths here and there which seemed, at least to me, a matter of trial and error. But that's what the extre life is there for I guess. But no matter what little frustrations you might encounter or how that damn jump just didn't turn out how you expected it to, the game is incredibly fun. I has such a feeling of nostalgia, and finishing a level just to see what kind of attacks each boss has is a reward in itself.

I think I enjoyed myself in this afternoon more than I have with most current gen titles but, again, maybe that's just me.