Category Archives: Mega Man
Video games then vs now
The best video games are coming out today.
That seems to be the attitude of the voices on the internet. No matter how much individuals attempt to wax nostalgic about the games of yesterday, they rag on history and say that the medium has reached an all-time high for some reason or another. I base this off of comments heard on The Indoor Kids podcast (even the most recent one, which I am indeed picking out because it mentions Mega Man) and 1Up’s Retronauts podcast, where Bob Mackey has literally said that old games have looked like garbage because they were 8-bits. (I’m also picking on these podcasts because they are, quite honestly, my favorite video game podcasts.) Read the rest of this entry
Why I hate online gaming…
This is the ranking screen from Mega Man 10. My score does not read 5 days, 2 hours, and 3 minutes. No, that is 5 hours, 2 minutes, and 3 seconds. That means that the top scorer completed the game in 52 seconds – an impossible feat. I wonder what people get out of cheating at games like this. Is there a sense of accomplishment I am not understanding?
For the record, I am not crying foul due to my game time. Mine is not suitable for submission. If I were to play again with the goal being reduction of overall time (and, of course, bragging rights), I would definitely stop myself and ask why I should bother. The number 7 score, by Purrfect:3, is the only one that looks realistic – and that barely broke top 10!
Co-op play
It is no secret that I have been playing video games for a good long time. My early days were filled with two-player NES action, mostly Life Force and Contra, but there were other games involved in my family’s gaming diet. What I loved about it all was that we ended up playing together, as a unit. The family sat in front of the same television interacting with each other, making suggestions and occasionally screaming, “NO! JUMP!”
Today’s games rarely offer that option. The big media systems build gaming engines around separate consoles and separate televisions, not occupying the same space. In case you lack a headset for communication, commands are programmed in that allow your character to grunt something. It promotes a certain distance between players, and even though they boast cooperative play, it’s really more like two people playing for themselves but occasionally interacting. Plus the separation of scores and additional rewards that can be earned suggests that one person’s saving the other isn’t always necessarily for the betterment of the team unit.
Kurtis Seid’s blog entry on 1up.com includes the video featured below of fan-made project Mega Man 2.5D, which originally was simply a Paper Mario-styled remake of the popular Mega Man 2. My nerd sense started tingling when the video started with the opening theme of Mega Man 3. At approximately the 1 minute mark in the video, a cooperative version of Mega Man 3 is shown, with Mega Man and Protoman having to make use of timing and jumping on each other to overcome obstacles. This is the kind of co-op I would like to see in more games.
Upsettingly, this is not a real game. There is no promise for release, and Capcom of America can legally order its stop at any time. That doesn’t take away from the fact that game designers still haven’t mastered what it is to make a good two-player game. Moving so swiftly from two-dimensions to three over a decade ago marked an abandonment of design around the necessity of multiple individuals to overcome environments. I guess one could say that I’m missing the idea of partners working together to overcome problems instead of shouting at each other, “SHOOT IT IN THE HEAD TO MAKE IT DEAD FASTER!” I want design to move back to an emphasis on being clever rather than just the rush involved with overcoming the odds.
