Mega Man 11

I love Mega Man games. But I specifically like Classic Mega Man games. Mega Man 8 is my least favorite (although the original is pretty weak too). 9 and 10 were super retro, and I love those more than 6 and 7. But when Mega Man 11 was announced, I was skeptical. The art style is modern, and there are voice clips that can get on your nerves (like in 8). Things do look better than 8 visually, but they didn't use the perfect 3D model of Mega Man from Smash Bros, and the cell-shaded look wasn't quite what I had hoped for. There was a free demo, and it was admittedly fun. (You can slow down time!) But the music, while sort of catchy, wasn't nearly as glorious as the tunes from 3 and 4 (and some from 2). None of this was exactly a deal-breaker, but it didn't feel worth the $30 purchase price. I didn't even get the game when it was on sale for 20% off around Christmas time, partly because I didn't want to encourage the developers to make another game just like it.

But a couple of weeks ago eBay sent me a $5 coupon for no apparent reason, and I figured buying Mega Man 11 used would be a good way to spend it - basically I got the game for half price. It was definitely worthwhile. All weird things aside, the game is fun, and it does feel like a Mega Man game. Way better than 8, for sure.

From the demo, my first impression was that the game is super hard. Even for a Mega Man game. on the "Normal" difficulty (how could I play it on a lower one?) I couldn't beat the single Robot Master that was available in the demo, although it didn't let you "buy" (with in-game bolts) energy tanks and the like. The real game was also really hard, and I didn't beat anybody until I had visited most of the levels. But once I had purchased a bunch of upgrades and a few energy tanks, I started cranking through things. The clock said like 5.5 hours when I beat it. Then on Superhero mode it took me another 3 or so.

I actually do like the look, in general. The enemies managed to look classic in spite of the 3D cell shading. The robot masters look good too. And there's actually a fair amount of replayability, because the power ups you can get in the item shop are so useful that it kind of makes me wonder how well I'd do without them. Same with the slowing down time thing. In theory, it should be possible to do the game in a more classic style, once you know what to expect.


Final thing: even though I don't find my self humming any of the stage music (which is actually probably my biggest complaint), the stage select tune does get stuck in my head. So points for that.

Robot Master Maladies

[Spoiler alert for various Mega Man and Mega Man X games]

Time to write down some recurring thoughts about various Robot Master battles. Mega Man has had a lot of battles with a lot of unique strategy involved, but there are a couple of common patterns. It’s a relief to see these patterns, because once you see them there’s a good chance that you’ll win. Eventually.

Toad Man Disease

Toad Man is a good choice to go after first in Mega Man 4 because both the level and battle are very manageable without special weapons. This might not be immediately clear, since Toad Man’s weapon is the Rain Flush, which hits everything on the screen at once; you can’t dodge it. But it turns out that if you don’t worry about charging your weapon and just keep hitting him, you can prevent Toad Man from ever getting the chance to fire. If you walk in and start shooting, he’ll jump across the screen. At this point you have to slide out of the way to avoid having him land on you, but if you turn and resume shooting, his Rain Flush will be interrupted, and he’ll jump again – repeating the process. After 28 rounds of this (or actually 26 if you went in with your weapon already charged), he’ll be defeated without ever having fired a shot.

There aren’t a lot of Robot Masters that will let you cheat them out of their attacks completely like this, but there are a lot that can be defeated by the repetition of a shoot + slide + shoot pattern. Many of them require the use of a particular special weapon to do this, though.

Examples:

• Spring Man (MM7): If you get in Spring Man’s face and use the Slash Claw, he will jump over your head and repeat the process, just like Toad Man – with one important variation: at the top of his jump, he’ll spin around and extend his arm in a downward punch. If you time your slide right, this will miss you every time.
• Toxic Seahorse (MMX3): This guy’s attacks are pretty hard to avoid if you go in there ill-equipped, but if you hit him with the right weapon (which I’m thinking is Blizzard Buffalo’s, although I’m afraid I don’t remember), he’ll fight just like Spring Man, except he uses a ball of acid instead of a spring fist.

Chill Penguin Disease

The Mega Man X games introduce the ability to climb walls, and this give you a welcome new way to avoid enemy attacks. Staying in the upper corner of the screen by repeated jumping can hurt your thumb after a while, but it can keep you safe and give you time to charge your weapon. Chill Penguin in Mega Man X (a natural first choice since the Dash Boots are also in his level) is particularly susceptible to this. There are plenty of Mavericks with attacks that will keep you off the walls or punish you for staying there, but then again there are plenty who follow in the proud tradition of Chill Penguin.

Examples:

• Flame Mammoth (MMX): This guy’s room is really wide, and the floor is a conveyer belt, so if you get pinned against the right wall you might have trouble dropping down and firing safely. But it’s a lot easier than dodging him on the ground. And he can’t hit you up there (I don’t think – although the guy can jump).
• Wheel Gator (MMX2): This guy hides under the water a lot, and he can pop up or attack with spinning wheels from anywhere, so you’ll wear out your thumb staying on the wall. You still have to watch out for the wall-climbing wheels, but again it’s a lot safer than staying on the ground.
• Crush Crawfish (MMX3): This guy’s attacks are pretty varied, and he even has these boomerang claw things that will pull you off of the wall. But it turns out (and thanks go to my friend for realizing this) that those grabber things don’t hurt you, and if you don’t fight against them they will actually pull you out of the way of the razor claw attack that immediately follows them. Plus you can get a charged shot in, and then you can get back to the wall (or get to the opposite wall, if he charges you). So he’s not really harder than Chill Penguin as long as you know how to manipulate his attacks.
• Tunnel Rhino (MMX3): This guy charges the wall and makes you all off, but if you realize that you can dash jump off the walls (an ability available but undocumented since Mega Man X), you can get to the other side of the screen before he does this, giving you a clear shot at him plus time to climb the other wall.
• Blizzard Buffalo (MMX3): this guy fights a lot like Flame Mammoth, with the main variation being that he has a really tall laser attack, so it’s hard to know when it’s safe to drop.

Mega Man 10

Being on parental leave, I got some time to myself to play Mega Man 10. It’s pretty cool. And I ate a Mentos mint while I played it, for some nostalgic value – I first ate Mentos the Christmas I got Mega Man 3, the coolest game ever. The weapons in 10 are pretty creative. It’s not quite as cool as Mega Man 9 – it doesn’t have any really catchy songs, and some of the levels are just hard without being super cool. I actually liked the castle stages though, and the final battles were pretty reasonable. (I checked the Internet for strategies so I wouldn’t have to keep playing the re-fight-all-the-guys level over and over, but it wasn’t too complicated.)

Mega Man games are among the coolest ever, but there’s a lot of variation among them. The chart below shows just how much:

Note that I ranked 5 and 10 about the same. 10 has maybe better weapons (since 5 has a lot of forward-firing ones, and the Water Wave is pretty lame), and a better castle (not to mention a shorter one). Specifically, the boss battles are more interesting. But Mega Man 5 does have more nifty music than 10, and I like its robot masters better. So it evens out.

I also noted a couple of similarities between this game and Mega Man X, which would have been the name on this game’s title screen if they had stuck with Roman numerals. (Note that some of these also apply to Mega Man 6, which was developed concurrently with Mega Man X.)

• The Robot Master intro music (after the Stage Select screen) is the same as the music in Mega Man X (which is slightly different from the tune in Mega Man 2 and 4).
• In the intro screen, the Robot Master starts out as a silhouette before appearing fully in the center of the screen.
• When you beat a Robot Master, the “got weapon” screen demos the use of the weapon.
• The game’s plot (such as it is) involves robots being infected by a virus and turning evil.

(And speaking of plot, as insipid as it is, it’s actually less annoying than the plot in Mega Man 9. I make it a habit of ignoring Mega Man plots to the maximum extent possible.)

Explaining Extra Lives

Video games are pretty much designed for you to fail, try again, and eventually succeed. (In a sense you might say that’s one of their moral shortcomings, since you can essentially avoid consequences by repetition – which is in total contradiction to the way the real world works. But as long as you treat them as entertainment and not your actual lifestyle, I don’t have a problem with that. But I digress (already).)

The idea of extra lives can create a continuity problem in a game’s story. There are a few ways of explaining what happens when your character loses a life and starts a new one:

1. The straightforward way: Your character actually experiences everything you do. When the character is defeated, he or she is somehow transported back to some checkpoint to try again. The enemies and obstacles behave in essentially the same way each time the character attempts the level (or battle or whatever). The repetitive nature of enemy behavior can cause concerns with plausibility, as can the notion that your character is somehow transported backward.
2. The “ideal path” way: Only successful attempts “count” in the context of the game. In other words, if you take five tries to complete a level, only the last one “really happened.” If you explain the game in this way, your character essentially completes each goal on his or her first try; the other time in game play represents an inaccurate attempt to explain what really happened. Again, this may raise plausibility issues. Worse, though, is the continuity problem that arises if the game allows you to save accomplishments you made before losing. In this case, you can’t disregard the character’s loss of a “life” while still explaining how the character acquired the saved item.

Ultimately it doesn’t really matter, because the real story of the game is about the decisions and progress that you as the player make. (That is, the straightforward explanation is generally acceptable regardless of its weaknesses.) But some games really do offer a reasonable explanation for how extra lives work. At least if you interpret them correctly (meaning if you interpret them as I do). Others aren’t so easy to explain. Here are a few examples:

Mega Man

In Mega Man games, when you run out of energy, Mega Man appears to explode – but really it’s just expanding circles flying outward from his last location. I believe this is actually an emergency teleportation. We know Mega Man can teleport, since this is how he enters each level. I think that he can set a limited number of teleportation beacons. He sets one at the beginning of each level, and an additional one near the middle of most levels, and yet another before most boss battles. When his energy is about to run out, he automatically teleports away to refill, then teleports back to the last beacon. If he has only energy for one more teleportation and his energy runs low, he teleports back to his base instead of the last beacon. (This allows him to refill his health and weapon energy, but any temporary beacons he has set are lost.) That’s what happens when you get a Game Over. (This explanation may also explain why you have to re-fight the Robot Masters in each game near the end – they may also do an emergency teleportation when their energy runs low.)

Metroid

Metroid games have specific save points. If you lose, you lose everything since that save point. I think it’s reasonable to say that everything between a save point and a game over never really happened, and Samus is successful on her first try. (Of course, I mean your real first try. If you replay the game, knowing the most efficient path in advance, the story element makes less sense.)

Zelda

Zelda games are harder to explain. You can save wherever you want, and if you quit you’ll start at some checkpoint – the beginning of the current level or some central Overworld location. The same happens if you get a Game Over. It’s not clear how Link gets back to the continue point, but warping is a common practice in Zelda games as well. I guess you could say that Link “Saves and Quits” right before losing his last heart, and only the “falling on his face” scene is not part of what actually happens.

Splash Woman Controversy

[Spoiler alert for Mega Man 9]

When I was looking up something about Mega Man 9 (which is, incidentally, awesome), I saw a comment someone had posted that complained about how Splash Woman (the first female Robot Master) was the weakest boss in the game. This is in reference to the fact that she takes only 14 hits from the arm cannon to defeat, compared to 28 hits for all the other Robot Masters. While I admit this does seem to feed a bad stereotype, I’d like to say a few words in the game’s defense. First of all, while Splash Woman may have the lowest defense of her peers, she is by no means the easiest boss. You can beat Galaxy man with the normal weapon without getting hit, if you’re patient. But even with the right weapon on Splash Woman, her “fish summoning” attack is very hard to dodge, and the fish can even block your shots. The second thing to keep in mind is that, as a 14-hit boss, Splash Woman is in very good company. Magnet Man is my favorite Robot master – he kind of looks like Optimus Prime, he has a neat weapon, and he has two actual hands, firing Magnet Missiles out of wrist launchers – and he and Top Man only take 14 hits. The Mega Man 1 bosses take even fewer. So while I don’t see any good reason why Splash Woman takes fewer hits than her contemporary Robot Masters, the fact that she does need not be a cause for complaint against the game.