Honestly, anyone able to get back into NES Megaman games anymore?

[cabear]

I can still play 1-3 fairly easily, i might not beat them but i'll still have some fun working through it.

4-6 are meh. I can't even get into the title screens. MMX is cool but i never ventured past that.

[Thief]

I can still play 1-3 fairly easily, i might not beat them but i'll still have some fun working through it.

4-6 are meh. I can't even get into the title screens. MMX is cool but i never ventured past that.

This. I think this is the problem. Playing just the robot master levels for MM5&4 yesterday and today feels like I've just wasted my life and I want it back. Just don't like anything I see in MM4&5. Level/enemy/pacing gameplay designs just completely rub me the wrong way, the graphics art style don't compare or stand out to my memories of MM2/3, and the music does nothing to help keep me interested in repeated stage attempts.

So yeah, status so far; only beat all 8 robot masters for MM5 (the train guys was the hardest and had to use an energy tank + right weapon). And for MM4 today I just haven't been able to beat Dive Man and had enough of playing this game as I was trying Drill man as a break from Dive Man attempts. The other MM4 bosses I beat, but Ring Man and Skull Man (or Dust Man) required an energy tank + right weapon. And that weapon select. So slow and twice I picked an Energy Tank by accident today.


Anyway, I don't don't know if I want to play anymore NES Megaman. Maybe EGM and all those other gaming mags were right after all these years when they were saying; "Enough with the Mega Man games already, Capcom." That or maybe I'm slowly turning in a full blown Capcom hater... it's 7:37 already?! Man what a waste of a day...


PS - no offense to MM4&5 lovers. Maybe I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. The side to prevents me from enjoying Mega Man 4&5 today.

[Sik]

Generally MM4-6 get the shaft though, they're a lot less liked than MM1-3 in general. So it's not just you really.

[Thief]

I wonder if Inafune is responsible for the downfall of Mega Man past 3, since he took over as the main Mega Man guy at the end of MM3's troubled development time. Why he, an artist, got put in charge of Mega Man is beyond me. Seems like the same thing as IGA being putting in charge of Castlevania. We need more guys that understand game design in charge, not artists and art lovers. ... someone with good taste in music wouldn't hurt either.

[Kollision]

tsc tsc....
You disappoint me, Thief old friend.

A few weeks ago my brother and I had great fun trying to go through the first bosses of Mega Man III all over again.
I'm sure we would've kept playing through the night if it weren't for members of the family wanting to do other things in the living room.


IMO real Mega Man is 8-bit Mega Man.
<3

[Thief]

tsc tsc....
You disappoint me, Thief old friend.

A few weeks ago my brother and I had great fun trying to go through the first bosses of Mega Man III all over again.
I'm sure we would've kept playing through the night if it weren't for members of the family wanting to do other things in the living room.


IMO real Mega Man is 8-bit Mega Man.
<3

Alright, I'll try to give MM3 a revisit maybe as soon as tomorrow.

But what's your opinion on Mega Man 4-6?

[Kollision]

Alright, I'll try to give MM3 a revisit maybe as soon as tomorrow.

But what's your opinion on Mega Man 4-6?

Though not bad by the series standards at all, they didn't give me such a lasting impression as the first 3 did.

Why so, I wonder? Were we getting older by then? Was it the 16-bit era eating up our enthusiasm?
I'd have to replay parts 4-6 to find out.

[SEGA.GENESIS1989]

Though not bad by the series standards at all, they didn't give me such a lasting impression as the first 3 did.

Why so, I wonder? Were we getting older by then? Was it the 16-bit era eating up our enthusiasm?
I'd have to replay parts 4-6 to find out.

No, I don't think so. I think it's a matter of preference. Nostalgia plays a factor as to which game within a series is our favourite. Add to the fact the fact that there are a bunch of games within a series, there will be one game that will eclipse the others. Rarely if ever will every game be as good as the next. And sometimes that has to do with our own expectations of how the next game should look and play too.

[cabear]

i think 4 lacked character, 3 was already towing the line of just having generic robot masters but it pulled them off. 4 just felt, blah. i can't remember which megaman it was but i believe capcom ran a contest for the public to pitch a new robot master for part 5 or 6 and i think that's when i checked out. those sequels lacked the charm of the first 3, and this is a personal complaint, but i enjoyed the robot masters that kind of had a purpose, like wood man and heat man who probably had a legit reason for being in their areas. what the hell is pharaoh man doing? nothing, a whole lotta nothing and toad man? Ugh!!!

[Thief]

No, I don't think so. I think it's a matter of preference. Nostalgia plays a factor as to which game within a series is our favourite. Add to the fact the fact that there are a bunch of games within a series, there will be one game that will eclipse the others. Rarely if ever will every game be as good as the next. And sometimes that has to do with our own expectations of how the next game should look and play too.

There's should still be enough objective reasons, like;

- pacing (is it more run and gun or stop and gun or platforming and dead air in action).
- enemy designs and their placement within level design to work together (and by design I don't mean graphical art style)
- how much does the charge shot introduced in 4 change the formula (ie. for one they make the robot master weapons pretty useless and redundant. Like how sometimes it's better to use the charge shots in combination with regular shots one over boss weakness in the case of Dive Man)
- starting with 4 or so, the bosses start doing like a massive 25% damage to you if touched & their invulnerability frames after each shot
- starting with 4 way less bosses are weak to multiple boss weapons. And starting with 5, bosses only have one weakness. This is a change that takes away from experimenting with different boss weapons and boss orders, in turn forcing one linear progression outcome

i think 4 lacked character, 3 was already towing the line of just having generic robot masters but it pulled them off. 4 just felt, blah. i can't remember which megaman it was but i believe capcom ran a contest for the public to pitch a new robot master for part 5 or 6 and i think that's when i checked out. those sequels lacked the charm of the first 3, and this is a personal complaint, but i enjoyed the robot masters that kind of had a purpose, like wood man and heat man who probably had a legit reason for being in their areas. what the hell is pharaoh man doing? nothing, a whole lotta nothing and toad man? Ugh!!!

Apparently all MM2 through MM8 had that contests, but only MM6 had non-Japanese winners (Knightman and I forget who else); http://megaman.wikia.com/wiki/Boss_character_contest

[Kamahl]

I like MM2, 3 and 6, and yes I can still go back and play them.

[cabear]

Oh wow didn't know they did the contest since 2!

[Thief]

Ok, so this morning I took up Kollision's challenge and played at least the just the first 8 boss stages of Mega Man 3. And what I learned is that Mega Man 3 is better because... it's got Hard Man.


But yeah, I noticed that methodical gameplay design and pacing I love so much in classic videogames that made learning and repeating the stages much more interesting in this outing. With that "one more go" vibe. So later this evening today I decided to repeat the original 8 robot master stages of MM4 for a quick comparison to see if my interest in Mega Man is back or if MM3 just really is more interesting to me. And sadly again I felt like I wasted my time playing MM4. I also again followed that with two robot master stages from MM5 before I lost interest with this experiment.


But I still don't exactly want to continue playing MM3. I really did play enough of MM2 & 3 to last me a lifetime. But I am thinking of maybe checking out some MM6 tomorrow. That and I do have MM9 & 10 for XBLA too, and in these iterations, they ditched that charged buster shot idea I'm not too fond of (though unlockable characters do have it for a change of pace which I'm fine with, as long as the game is mostly balanced around Mega Man's no charge buster shots). MM games feel much more like run n guns without charge shots. Plus the pacing and game balance seems better without it, not to mention more reasons for robot master weapons to actually shine instead of being forgotten about - due to each time you run into an enemy meant for a charged buster shot, usually also means a good chance robot master weapons will fare worse. Which discourages you from experimenting with robot master weapons more often. At least it did me.

[Ace]

The only NES MegaMan game I played when I got into gaming in the late '90s was MegaMan 2 and I still keep going back to the game, absolutely love it. Likewise with the original, though I haven't touched MegaMan 3 to 6 all that much until I played through them in MegaMan Anniversary Collection in 2005 (truth be told, I don't game as much as I used to, so I didn't really get an opportunity to really dig deeply into those games as of late). All I can say is that MegaMan 4 made my ears hurt... I REALLY despise this game's music. Uninspired, shrill sound that makes me want to throw up. At least RockMan 4 Complete Works has that superb collection of remixed music in Navi Mode; that makes the game much more tolerable for me, but even then, the game as a whole wasn't all that memorable for me specifically because I was so put off by the music, it distracted me from the rest of the game. Bleh.
MegaMan 5 and 6, though, I remember having a good time with them. I will say, I have a lot of fun messing with the Player 2 cheats in MegaMan 3 (I believe that's leftover debug code). I'll give MegaMan 3 to 6 another go sometime, but there's no way in hell I'm playing MegaMan 4 on the NES, I'm busting out my Japanese PlayStation for this one with remixed music. At least I won't be distracted by music that makes my face hurt from cringing so much.

[Metalwario64]

In terms of NES games, I really enjoy the first 3, and I'm very nostalgic for 2, but I don't care as much for 4-6. I actually really love Mega Man V on the Game Boy, because it was an actual unique, fresh take on the 8-bit series. It's also, by great and thankful chance that it was the only one that I had on Game Boy as a kid, since it was the least common. The rest of the GB games are really pale, hollow imitations of the NES games (especially 2), but I think I've heard that 4 on Game Boy is pretty good.

I actually really like Mega Man 7, and 8 is decent, but the English dubbing is hilariously bad. Mega Man and Bass on the Super Famicom is pretty cool, but it's extremely hard. I also disagree with the sentiment that Mega Man 2 is the be-all end-all of the franchise, and that Megaman belongs only in 8-bit. I haven't played MM9 and 10, but I was immediately turned off by the huge regression of omitting the charge shot and sliding to be more like 2.

I think overall the original series started stagnating, and the 16 and 32 bit entries started freshening things up, but then the MM9 gave in to fanbase's nostalgia of 2, and regressed all of the series advancements.

Honestly, I think the first 3 X games are the pinnacle of Mega Man as a whole, X4 was okay, but the music, which I always considered and integral part of the series was severely lacking, and while I liked the animated cutscenes as a kid, to me, these days, I can see that it was the start of a bad direction the series was headed in. X5 took the story too far, and had constant interruptions, which I looked past as a kid, but makes it unplayable to me as an adult. X6 fixed that problem, and had a better soundtrack as well, but fell victim to rushed level design, which squandered much of its potential. X7... I want burned to the ground, and I never played X8, despite it being higher reviewed. Command Mission was something I thought was cool as a kid, but I recently tried replaying it, and it's an extremely awkward game, with a clunky battle system and layout, and a goofy storyline.

Maverick Hunter X on the PSP was a solid remake of the game, but I would have (and almost always will) preferred high resolution pixel art, but it's still pretty good looking at least, and with the changes made to it and the lack of any sequels make it a pretty damn solid standalone Mega Man title that doesn't have its name sullied by poor sequels.

I also greatly enjoy the Legends games, although they're too short, but I love the setting and story in those games. I would say it's a shame that 3 got canceled, but I'd like to believe that with the way Capcom was handling it, that it would have been a subpar entry anyway.