Game:

Mega Man (1987)

Duration: 12:03

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2

Okay, so you may have noticed the somewhat drastic increase in video running time compared to the previous two stages... and... well, I expected this to happen sooner or later.

In case the absolute onslaught of regular enemies, high retention of hit points but slow refill rate, crazy platforming set pieces, and huge amounts of life energy being traded against one another in boss fights weren't already an indication... Mega Man will die. A lot. And if a Mega Man does NOT die as often as he should, he still owes his miraculous longevity to those Mega Men who fell before him. Mega Man has its much-deserved "Nintendo Hard" legacy to maintain, after all!

As Mega Man does the whole "teaching without teaching" thing... it by nature does relatively little direct teaching. The most effective means of "teaching" in this fashion is to maim or destroy you in the hopes you learn from your mistakes in an iterative fashion, which... may not actually sit all too well with most modern game design paradigms, but a large number of their great-great-great-grandparadigms were still yet to be written at the time! Heck, the fact that some of these are still in use today means that Mega Man hit very high marks right from the start. Very... death-prone and player-testing high marks.

It is my goal, as ever, to demonstrate even the meta Mega Man madness methods of meticulously mandating multiple megamassacres... but I'm still conflicted and quite at odds with how best to present that as completely and succinctly, because I want to convey the full experience (vicarious though it may be), but I don't want it to drag on excessively and thus discouraging people from absorbing its "message" just as the game difficulty and emphasis on repetition has scared away countless of potential players over the years.

Don't get me wrong, it's definitely not for everyone...but there's plenty that everyone can stand to learn from its example, good and bad.

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Ice Man Stage

The first thing I have to say is... some enemies in this game, like the "Bunbi Heli" (a.k.a. "Blader") helicopter enemy from the previous two stages or the "Crazy Razy" enemies immediately encountered here... the flight paths are quite quick and can be rather nontrivial to counteract. Fortunately, they only need one attack to dispatch, although things get worse before they better if you shoot a Razy's legs out from under him rather than his head.

Also of note and relative series infamy is the "Gabyoall" (a.k.a "Spine") enemy, a short ground-based obstacle that moves faster if Mega Man is aligned horizontally with it while Mega Buster shots fly over it from even footing. Even if you DO hit it with the buster thanks to uneven terrain, you'll only freeze it in place. You CAN destroy it with certain Robot Master weapons, and I DO have one of those in my possession (the Rolling Cutter)... but obviously I will forgo its use.

ANOTHER infamous series set piece appearing here is a series of appearing and disappearing platforms... well, these are hardly the most notable case of their usage, but they can be quite frustrating for fairly obvious reasons. Incidentally, the second such segment is weird in that you can abuse the fact that the patrolling Gabyoall can leave the visible part of the screen and permanently unspawn itself as a result if you linger against the wall at the far end of the pool.

Up next is the one part of the stage I personally take issue with... the large aerial segment populated by an enemy known as a "Foot Holder"... which, by itself isn't that conceptually problematic of an enemy, although it DOES present a fairly consistent threat as you attempt to cross the gap. No, my problem is with the erratic and clearly unscripted behavior, which due to irregularities in their flight paths, can make a situation unwinnable for an indefinite period of time while you can do nothing but wait and see if maybe they resume an arrangement that Mega Man can actually use to cross. The best policy in general is to try to cross as quickly as you can (personal safety permitting) so as to avoid giving them enough leeway to drift too far out of alignment, but even this won't necessarily help. (They also have some pretty bizarre hit detection problems wherein you can be hurt on contact with their platforms and fall through to your death, which is a pretty big no-no in my book.)

The room between the boss shutters is apparently irregular as to whether or not the onslaught of enemies is be continuous, which can be a problem if you want to shore up some energy reserves for what's to come.

Anyway, on to Ice Man himself... the little guy packs quite a wallop with his Ice Slasher. The pattern is entirely consistent (although it's not entirely trivial, and it speeds up as he gets lower on health), but you can only make a very small number of mistakes before dying... yikes!

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