Mega Man 9

[Anteater]

Has anyone here played Mega Man 9? It was released about ten days ago and all I have to say is that it's one of the best games I've played in a while. Classic NES fun never gets old; this is proof. It's also one of the first truly challenging, but not unfair, games I've played in a long, long time.

[Snake]

Ha, I didn't realize they were still making them since I haven't heard anything about them in forever - until now.

Obviously I haven't played it, but I'll definately look it up. Eventhough I was never good at the megaman games (I always felt they were extremely hard for me) I enjoyed them very much.

And this thread definately needs a bump since you did indeed mention NES

I love NES.

--EDIT--
Wow! That's awesome! I'm glad Capcom chose to do it like all the others Classic stuff and it's brand new!


--Snake

[Darth Mandarb]

Unless you can shoot diagonally I'm not interested ... loved the originals back in the day, but the lack of aiming was ridiculous.

[Anteater]

You can't shoot diagonally, but it's still very intuitive. Also, a number of weapons you get make up for this.

[Darth Mandarb]

Just speaking for myself here ... I find nothing intuitive about having to jump on a box, then jump up even higher to shoot horizontally to destroy a baddie that I could easily crouch behind the box, take aim (diagonally), and destroy it that way.

This is, of course, just my opinion.  I find the lack of 'aiming' in the mega-man games to be a major design flaw.  They can put forth whatever reasoning they want (it is, after all, their game) but I see it as a flaw.

[blueskirt]

I am with Darth here. I loved the original Mega Man games on the NES, I grew up with them, played them to the death, I rented Mega Man 4 so many times, I could have bought the game 3 times with all this money I spent renting it. But the hype behind Mega Man 9 going back to its roots left me completly cold. I agree with a lot of editorialists who say it's a good thing that a game like Mega Man go back in 2D, games like that should have never left 2D platformer gameplay in the first place IMO, but is it a good idea to go back this far in time?

What is great in platformer shooter and metroidvania kind of games is freedom of movement, to not be too restricted on what you can do: being able to do long jumps, dash, double jump, climb on walls, fire in more than 2 directions, duck, etc. This is why IMO, the franchise began to kick in high gear with the early Mega Man X games, when you could finally do more than walk at crawling speed and jump more than 3 squares gaps. Mind, I haven't played MM9, but if all those screenshots that only show Mega Man jumping, walking and shooting tell me something, it's that gameplay speaking it will be as old and clunky as the original games.

I suppose Mega Man 9 is a reward to those who followed Capcom through all these years of dozens of mediocre Mega Man sequels and spin-offs, because personally, I only played Mega Man 1-7, Mega Man X and X2, and I don't see the big fuss in Mega Man 9 going back to the NES gameplay. I'd rather stick to indie platformer shooters and metroidvanias.

Also, everyone who love Mega Man 9 will be happy to know a bunch indie guys remade the awful Mega Man 7 in NES style, and are currently remaking Mega Man 8 in NES style. The final version of the game can be downloaded here:
http://www7.atwiki.jp/wakuwakusuru/pages/13.html

Reviews, videos and a list of the game controls can be found here:
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2008/06/remake_game_pick_rockman_7fc_m.html (the download link on this page leads to an older version, make sure you download the latest version from the first link I posted)

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I find nothing intuitive about having to jump on a box, then jump up even higher to shoot horizontally to destroy a baddie that I could easily crouch behind the box, take aim (diagonally), and destroy it that way.

This is just a design choice to make shooting more dangerous since many of the projectiles in megaman travel either horizontally or vertically.  By having to jump and 'time' your shots you have to exercise a bit more skill and also expose yourself to possible retaliation.  In metroid when you fired up at an angle you could easily kill those falling bird things before they could ever even react, removing some of the challenge.  Don't get me wrong, I like 8 direction aiming systems very much, but in a game like megaman where the projectiles basically travel in two directions almost always, giving you the ability to shoot at angles would make it too easy.

If you want to talk about annoying game mechanics, how about the old scroll the screen and enemies reappear thing?  Now that used to get on my nerves as a kid playing the Nintendo!

[Gilbert]

Design choice, and also personal preference for the players. It's understandable that while one game might please some group of people, some other people hate it. We don't expect all games are the same right?

IMO Metroid (I only played the original FDS version, don't know about the rest) focused more on the exploration of the world (i.e. more like a RPG/Adv. game in the sense) than on skills and actions, whereas the Rockman games focused more on hardcore skills.

I don't have problems with the horizontal-only shooting thing in Rockman. Moreover, as one crucial element of this series is to make good use of the new weapons obtained which may affect gameplay in specific locations, and having different shooting ranges/directions/behaviour, etc., I won't see the limitation in the actions a design flaw but rules of the games which provide challenges (I did feel awkward for there's not a crouch action in the games though, which made the games a bit unique among the genre). Again, as I had only played the first two games of the series I don't know about the rest. IMO the weapon system worked best in the first game only (e.g. there were obvious advantages when you use the right weapon on a certain boss), the effect of the weapons seemed to be less different in the latter games and money-hunger Capcom probably just released loads of sequels and spin-offs (as always...) which were just replica of older games and sometimes when new stuff were introduced it just made the games unnecessarily complicated. (Rockman 1 was simple and complete.)

An interesting fact was that in the Metal Slug games, you can shoot diagonally for somw weapons but not for the others (including the default pistol).