Wednesday, January 19, 2011

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:

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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.)

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