"Yeah, I Just Beat Mega Man!"

Like the title says, today I'm going to be talking about Mega Man.  Capcom's 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System release.  Nearly everything about the "history" of the game you can find over on Wikipedia so I'm not even going to attempt to talk about it on that front.  Like the majority of our posts here, I will talk about my experiences with this little bit from a 26 year old video game.  And now,

There's a song by Totally Radd!! called "Victory Pose."  I read it somewhere that the group (person?) said that it was a song that captured the feeling of legitimately beating the first Mega Man, dropping the controller and standing up with your arms raised to the sound of imagined applause.  I must have read that somewhere on Amazon.com, which is where I first heard a snip-it of the song, so here it is in full:

So yes, I did in fact just beat Mega Man on a port that I purchased from Nintendo's eShop and played on my 3DS.  Some may scoff at not having beaten the game on the original console, but let me reassure any and all nay-sayers, that the game is in fact a "direct" port.  All known glitches and ticks with the original cartridge will play havoc with you on the 3DS port as well.  I should probably also elaborate when I say "3DS port" in that it's not a 3D rendering of the original Mega Man and it's not part of Nintendo's 3D Classics line that includes Excitebike, Kid Icarus and Kirby's Dreamland among others.  It's just an eShop game that I played (and BEAT!) on my 3DS.

And now that that's out of the way, let me just say, that this game is pretty goddamn difficult.  I wrote a post last year that included Mega Man as a game that I would probably never complete due to losing those countless slips of paper containing hastily scribbled down passwords.  It almost makes me want to purchase Ninja Gaiden from the eShop and give that game another go.

But back to Mega Man.  Guts Man stage was a pain in the ass.  Those moving/flipping platforms, y'all know what I'm talkin' about.  The disappearing platforms in Ice Man stage.  Pretty much every stage in Dr. Wily's villainous compound.  The game was just brutal.  I don't know how long I spent just in Dr. Wily's Devilish Compound of Villainy, but I spent a total of seven hours, three minutes on this game.  Compare it to someone who knows what they're doing and the game can be completed in just under half-an-hour.  It really took one of my coworkers saying that he would ask me everyday [starting last Friday (6/14/13)] if I'd beaten Mega Man yet to get me off my lazy ass.  Last night, I hunkered down and completed it.  

Like I previously stated, the four stages in Dr. Wily's Hellhole of Excruciating Evil are what helped to rack in the extra hours of gameplay.  Yes, I will admit that I watched a couple of youtube videos for ideas/hints/tactics on how to get through areas and defeat bosses, but I feel that that's only the lowest form of "cheating," if you were the type of person that would consider that to be cheating.  Even with online guidance, I would still have to play the game myself without any kind of modification, say, a Game Genie.  Jumps still have to be timed right, blasts of evil energy still have to be dodged and special weapons that have to be conserved, like a squirrel burying a precious bone.  

And you know what?  I did it.  I beat Mega Man.  Without Game Genie. A game designed by a then young gaming company who had only developed about eight titles for the NES.  That game was hard.  That game had some great music in it.  That game was fun.  And now, onto Mega Man 3.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Wind Guide You