I am currently overwhelmed by the number of new games out that I am playing/want to play so of course I have been doing the most reasonable thing possible to handle that situation and playing through old Mega Man games on the Mega Man Legacy collection, which I bought almost a decade ago but never got around to playing.

I've actually been having a good time with it, since Mega Man is one of those series where I've always enjoyed the games and been curious about them (since they are so important in games history) but also found them extremely frustrating, ever since I was a kid (Mega Man X is maybe my favorite SNES game, which I owned as a cart, though I never actually finished it) The Legacy Collection allows me to cheat with save states and rewinds and I've been doing that without a lot of guilt. I may some day go back and play them legitimately but for now I've been enjoying seeing all the stages and playing the parts I like legit while cheating through the parts I find frustrating or annoying.

In my Googling for boss order guides and at least one part in Mega Man 3 where I was legitimately stuck because the game doesn't tell you that you start with Rush, who is on the second page of your powers (remember manuals?) I found an achievement guide that tells you to get the achievements for beating the games by just using a password for the final stage and then playing through them. Basically skipping the games to get the achievements. I am kind of baffled by people who do this because while I like achievements and trophies it's only because they act as a sort of diary of my gaming, so I can look back and see when I finished a certain game or how long it took me. Paying for a game only to skip playing it seems...strange (though of course if you just like the final level of a game and want to play it again skipping to that makes total sense.)

But then again I was sort of skipping a large part of the experience of the Mega Man games by cheating through difficult sections. I was having fun and getting to see all the bosses and weapons but I wasn't playing Mega Man as intended. Of course back in the day people used Game Shark to turn on various cheats and play games in ways they weren't intended so this is not a new phenomenon. It's just one I find kind of interesting. Some people wouldn't see the point in my playing Mega Man the way I was since the challenge is basically removed.

It just got me thinking about how we engage with games and their meta systems and how that has changed so much as gaming and consoles have gotten more complex and capable. It's interesting to me that very few modern NES-style games incorporate a rewind function (Though the new Garbage Pail Kids NES game does in its modern platform versions) even though they're ubiquitous in re-releases. How long after a game is out does it get old enough to deserve a rewind? Should modern retro games incorporate them in their first release, given that almost every re-release does?

I don't know. I do know that I enjoy Mega Man with rewind but find it too frustrating without, and that I still don't see the point of skipping forward for achievements but I guess everyone should just play the games they want in the ways that they want to.