Emulator Hour: Mega Man 3 (NES/3DS)

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I am finishing up today's post from the Aéroport de Bürbànk and sitting less than a foot away from a bin de trash.  But onto more important matters.

I recall first playing Mega Man 3 (III) way back in or around 1991 or '92 (seeing as how I was rarely one to play the newest video games, let alone games in the Mega Man series of which I was never able to beat until June of last year).

But I did it, I beat Mega Man 3 and I think I've come to, at least for now, a bit of realization that I like this game as a whole more than the frequently touted Mega Man 2 as the best in the series {{Citation Needed}}.  Thinking about the first three games in the series up to the year of our lord, Nineteen Hundred and Ninety, I found that I enjoyed the level design of Mega Man 3 the most whereas I like the music from Mega Man 2 just a smidgen more than MM3.  Plus there's the additions of the newly created slide ability and the robot pet dog Rush with his various, if somewhat limited use abilities (Marine Rush!?).

First off, everything that I loved about MM2 was refined for this installment.  The level design gave me enough of an idea to the robot boss type and I didn't notice too much of the level art being reused for subsequent levels.  But it's the level design is what makes me enjoy this game just a little bit more than MM2.  After defeating the first eight bosses, you have to go through four of the levels again, but they are in a ravaged state.  chunks of the world are now missing, as if the absence of the boss or the havoc brought on by Mega Man has left portions of the world/level in a state of disrepair.  In Gemini Man's stage part two, there are Jamacys that fall through cracks and holes in the blocks that create the borders to the stage.  In every stage that you run into Proto Man, his escape routes are still there.  Then when you get to the boss area, you now have to fight one of the bosses from Mega Man 2, which is a nice throwback until you realize that your weapons are all different than the ones used in that game so your weapon choices have to be decided upon rather quickly (or you can use the aforementioned chart like I did).

Similar to how I played Mega Man 2, I used a chart to figure out which bosses I should play and it what order.  And how I defended my decision as I previously did, I don't find this to be cheating.  I find it no different than talking to Dr. Potts or Delaños about the order they used and which weapon they found to be more effective against which boss.  Again, I still had to go through the level and defeat the bosses on my own in the end, I just did it with an additional bit of information.

But here is the order that I took the bosses in:

1) Snake Man

2) Gemini Man

3) Magnet Man

4) Top Man

5) Shadow Man

6) Hard Man

7) Needle Man

8) Spark Man

I decided to start with Snake Man, because that's what I remember from playing 23 years ago.  Also, Snake Man's theme is pretty damn catchy and there isn't much more to get me interested and stay playing a game that hearing awesome music while being destroyed by a giant undulating robotic snake hellbent on destroying a modified service and homemaking robot.  

Now, I know that based on the aforementioned chart, that this list doesn't take into account "the best" way to go through the game and choosing the bosses based on their weaknesses.  Sometimes, as in the case with taking on Magnet Man before Shadow Man, that I needed to take a break from constantly dying in Shadow Man's stage and I found I was able to get through Magnet Man's stage and take him out.

Going back to the music, I find it interesting that Capcom brought on newcomers to the Mega Man franchise, introducing Yasuaki Fujita (credited as "Bun Bun" during the credits) who wrote all but two of the songs (Gemini Man and Needle Man) and Harumi Fujita. What I find interesting though, is that the music from this game blends fairly seamlessly with that from Mega Man 2, while still sounding different enough to not be repetitive as to be disinteresting to long time players of the series.

In the end, Mega Man 3 took me 6h21m to complete with an average play time of 25 minutes.  In MM3, I found that the regular stages were a lot more difficult than MM2, but that the Dr. Wily stages were a lot easier to traverse.

I guess I should in closing say that if you haven't played any of the games in the Mega Man series, that Mega Man 3 wouldn't be a bad place to start as it is a great continuation of a great series that, so far anyway, is a bit easier than the previous two games but is still a challenging experience that should not be missed out on if you are at all into older NES games from a great era of gaming.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
If It Ain't Broke. . .

Emulator Hour: Mega Man 2 (NES/3DS)

First off, is it Mega Man 2 or Mega Man II?

The box art, regardless of region has the game titled as being "2."

If you can't tell what the game is based on the box art, you can consider yourself  medically normal.

But, when you start the game, the game is titled as "II," with the exception of Rockman and then the title screen has the number 2.  

Does he really need a helmet?

Wikipedia has the NES Mega Man 2 with the number and the Gameboy release (different story) of Mega Man II.  So, for all intensive purposes the NES Mega Man will be referred to as "2."

Now that that's out of the way, let's get down to business.

Mega Man 2, released in 1988 in Japan and 1989 in North America by Capcom is a fun game, but god damn is it pretty difficult.  I feel like I can say "pretty" as opposed to "fucking" seeing as how I just beat it a few hours ago for the first time since I started playing it nearly 24 years ago.  To all the possible haters, it was on normal difficulty, it was the port to the Nintendo eShop and not on the NES from an original cartridge.

The story is pretty simple in that Mega Man, created by Dr. Light "was built to be a domestic robot, but in order to put a stop to Dr. Wily's evil plans [world domination], he was reborn as Mega Man, a battle robot. "  What more do you need to know?

While going through the game, there were definitely areas and specific screens that I remembered very well.  As I did when I originally played the game back in the early 90's, I started off with beating Metal Man (and by "beat" I mean that it took me a number of tries to not only get through the level but beat Metal Man.

Admittingly, I looked up the suggested order to go up against the bosses.  I personally don't see this as cheating since one still has to have some skill in order to get through the level and the game is designed so that a boss is weak against a particular weapon.  Also, I knew this information when I was younger but had since forgotten it.  To note, here's the order I used:

1) Metal Man

2) Wood Man

3) Air Man

4) Crash Man

5) Flash Man

6) Quick Man

7) Bubble Man

8) Heat Man

In this order, each weapon from the boss is strong against the boss below it.  Yes, the Heat Cannon (named Atomic Fire) is strong against Wood Man and the Quick Man Boomerangs are pseudo-strong against Metal Man and the standard arm cannon works well enough on both Flash Man and Crash Man, but you've got to pick an order, and this was the one that I settled down on.  An actual list can be found here and actually lists what weapons the bosses are weak against, but keep in mind that you can still go through the levels and beat the bosses in any order you want, something that I still see as ingenious about the game.

One thing that I noticed while playing, was that Mega Man 2 is apparently very guilty of the annoying respawning of enemies that Dr. Potts talked about regarding TMNT.  I don't know how many times I would get knocked back by an enemy, run towards the shielded green cannon guy, only to have the same enemy respawn and now be faced with two green shielded cannon guys.  Another hazard that I fell victim to (pun not intended) was switching out my gun while on a ladder.  The danger of doing this, is that Mega Man falls/ teleports back onto the screen and when this happens when you're on a ladder, you are no longer holding onto the ladder, and fall through it to the screen below.

Now, the 3DS (and maybe the DSi as well, but I never had that system so I can't comment on it) does this thing when you close down a downloaded NES/Gameboy game.  It puts the game in stasis, as in, I could be playing Mega Man 2, pause the game then exit to the main 3DS screen while closing down the Mega Man 2 game.  When I return, I can pick up right where I left off.  For Mega Man 2, this allowed me to never need to copy down passwords.  I could play the game and reach the "Game Over" screen and simply select "Continue" or "Stage Select" and I never had to worry about copying the password and subsequently losing said password.  Once I reached Dr. Wily's compound, I realized that losing the passwords was probably the main reason why I was never able to complete the game.

And then there was this series of jumps that I could rarely manage to time correctly.

And the very few times I did manage to make those jumps, I wasn't able to deal with the Mecha Dragon.  Yes, that silvery dragon on the front of the German and UK covers, you do have to fight although it only took me about 4-5 times to figure out how to not die during the battle.

By the end of the game, I felt like I'd become pretty good at killing the boss robots, having to defeat them one-by-one from a central hub-teleportation point before fighting Dr. Wily and while it is a little tempting to go through the game on the "Difficult" difficulty setting, I'm sure I would have a hard enough time making it through the levels with enough life just to get to the bosses.

Oh yes, the music.  Holy damn the music.  First off, if 8-bit era, NES style music is not your thing, tough luck not liking this music; except my Father.  The music was primarily composed by Takeshi Tateishi along with Manami Matsumae and Yoshihiro Sakaguchi.  I find the music to be every bit as awesome when I first heard it as when I hear it any other time.  The music from Mega Man 2 seems to be a staple among video game music cover bands (The Advantage, NESkimos, Minibosses).  So yes, the music holds up.

Now when I was playing Mega Man 2, I never seemed to hunker down and just play the hell out of the game.  I would pick it up, play for maybe 15 - 20 minutes then put it down after getting frustrated and needed to walk away.  My stats for the game had me playing 15 different times with an average of 17 minutes of game time each time I would play.  In the end, it took me 4 hours 25 minutes.  A very respectable time I would say having spent $4.99, so roughly $1.10/hr, although I know that I will be wanting to go through the game again, not because Mega Man 2 has some of my favorite songs from the series, but because now I know I can beat the game.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Charging Up The Digital Hill