Mega Man Week – 09/14 – 09/21

The original Mega Man series is one of my favorites on the Nintendo. The graphics are excellent, the music is timeless, the controls are tight, and the gameplay – oh, the gameplay. You’ll be hard pressed to find Nintendo games more frustrating – and rewarding – than the first six Mega Man games. Indeed very few games provide such a delicate balance between difficulty and learning curve than the Mega Man series.

Starting a Mega Man game is always overwhelming. Look at all those bosses you have yet to defeat! Listen to that music, urging you to pick one and do it now, you little wuss! Once you’ve defeated a couple bosses and acquired the rhythm that all Mega Man games carry with them, you relax. Mega Man urges you to run with him, and instead of cowering in fear, you agree. Once you’ve defeated Wily, you feel like you’ve experienced a back-breaking adventure, and yet, at least in my case, I’m always ready for more: more deaths, more controller throwing, and ultimately, more humility. The Mega Man games are always there, ready to break us out of the challenge-less stupor that this current generation of gaming has wrought. For that, I am thankful.

To show my thanks, for the next week I’m breaking my trend of paragraph-reviews and going all-out. I’m playing every Mega Man game for the NES in full. Every boss, stage, power-up, music track, and other miscellaneous information found within the game will be acknowledged. In other words, each Mega Man review will be an exhaustively researched, finely crafted labor of love, or your E-cans back. Who knows how long these reviews will be. But if you don’t like Mega Man, I dare say you should stay away.

I’m not doing this because any of my readers expect me to. I’m doing this because I truly love Mega Man. If this proves to be a popular feature, who knows, I may go back and re-do some of the more “classic” game reviews. For now, I hope you enjoy what is to come, and God willing, I’ll see you on the other side…