Dying is Easy.
Kids these days don’t know what a hard video game is. That’s a pure, unchallenged fact. When the Game Genie came out, the challenge in video games went into a downward spiral that it never recovered from. People say Zelda: Twilight Princess is hard. People say GTA4 is hard, and people say a slew of other games are “hard.” These people have never played a real game. They have no inkling of how unrelentingly evil video games were, games like Megaman.
Kids these days don’t know what a hard video game is. That’s a pure, unchallenged fact. When the Game Genie came out, the challenge in video games went into a downward spiral that it never recovered from. People say Zelda: Twilight Princess is hard. People say GTA4 is hard, and people say a slew of other games are “hard.” These people have never played a real game. They have no inkling of how unrelentingly evil video games were, games like Megaman.
On September 21st, Megaman 9 hit the Wiiware shop channel and millions of hearts went all a flutter. Capcom went out and created a game that was outright fan service, and I’m sure everyone is completely content with that. Dare I say “excited?" If you let the intro cut scene play out, you’ll notice one thing from the get go: Chun Li is the news reporter on the TV Megaman and Dr. Light are watching. Talk about having a mini geek-gasm.
But it only gets better from there, and by “better” I could, at times, mean worse. It all depends on your level of how much self abuse you enjoy. The main menu is pixilated to all hell (as is the entire game), but has a 2008 copyright in the corner, only adding to the humor of the entire idea of what this game is. Sprite flickers are prominent, as well as dead pixels, but if that isn’t your thing you can go into the Options menu and turn it off. I don’t know why you would, but you can, if you hate history and the foundation of our culture. A cultural foundation stabilized with sprite flickering. Turning the classic style off is one step away from wanting to put the Berlin Wall back up.
The new bosses are...unique. Concrete Man? Hmm.
Getting back into things, the game is fucking hard. I spent a few hours muscling through the first few levels, fighting the urge to punch myself in the jaw whenever I died. I died a lot. Everyone will die a lot. There’s no fighting that fact, and if you’ve played a Megaman game before, you know full well that you’re going to die. A lot.
That’s one of the great things about this game though, it goes back to the roots of the franchise, and brings it back from the dead. I love Megaman, but I couldn’t tell you a god damned thing about the Battle Network game series, but does that make me a terrible person? No, because I love the basics of Megaman games, and what made them great. Sure, I hate dying (I die a lot), but the challenge of older video games is the trial and error of it all. Trial, error and repetition were the building blocks of video games stretching from the arcade to the Atari, then the NES and so on. There was a huge sense of accomplishment when you actually beat a level, or even a game back then because of the sheer difficulty of it. Nowadays, video games have to reward you for doing extra shit in a video game, like Microsoft’s Achievement points. On a sidenote, aside from the feeling of accomplishment you’ll get after beating an even robot, Megaman 9 also offers Achievements, just to push you that extra mile, and bring you back for more.
Megaman 9 is a great game, though the kitsch factor might be lost on the newer generation of gamers, or those easily discouraged. It’s a terribly hard game, and you will die, but it’s worth every minute of punishment for the feeling you get when you actually get through it. If you’re easily discouraged, remember this: the game will offer Continues, that girl who wouldn’t have sex with you after all your advances does not.
