Mega Man 9, elaborated
So here's the thing. People who write about games for a living play a lot of games, and they have an incisive eye towards game balance factors, etc. But they're not necessarily good at games. I recall a review of Splinter Cell: Double Agent that claimed the game's new mechanism of counting any disabled enemy (killed or not) against you made it "impossible to get 100% on any given stage." I laughed heartily and smugly at the screen when I read that.
Reviews touting Mega Man 9's difficulty were not exaggerated. They were not by pseudo-gamers who didn't have the patience or skill to play the game well. People like to use the term "Nintendo Hard" to hearken back to the golden age of 8-bit gaming, and how what I perceive to be poor design made them bitterly suggest that games have gotten "softer." I've always thought they were full of shit, and, contrary to the foreshadowing, I still do.
Mega Man 9 is not "Nintendo Hard." It isn't hard because the developers were too lazy to balance it. And, for that matter, it's drastically harder than previous installments of the 8-bit Mega Man series (I believe 5 was the last I played, but I played 4 extensively). Lest you think I'm falling prey to the same exaggeration I suspected, let me illustrate. The post I made this morning, saying the "rumors about difficulty are definitely true," referred to my experience on Plug Man's stage, which took me a couple of continues to make it to Plug Man himself, whom I was unable to defeat.
At lunch today, I decided to try out some other stages. Plug Man's, to my experience, was the easiest by far. I couldn't beat the mini-boss of Concrete Man's stage, made it slightly farther than halfway through Jewel Man's stage, couldn't beat the mini-boss of Magma Man's stage, and barely even got into Tornado Man's stage. I tried buying some energy tanks and going back to Plug Man, but even after getting through the stage without dying and having a pretty good attempt on Plug Man, I couldn't defeat him. If this was the only game you owned, it could very well consume you with practice alone.
And it seems like the developers want to reward that. In addition to the achievements, there are "challenges" embedded in the game itself, some of which are like lesser versions of the achievements, and some of which are so ridiculously hard that you'd kill yourself trying to do them specifically, or play your whole life before stumbling upon them. They include:
Reviews touting Mega Man 9's difficulty were not exaggerated. They were not by pseudo-gamers who didn't have the patience or skill to play the game well. People like to use the term "Nintendo Hard" to hearken back to the golden age of 8-bit gaming, and how what I perceive to be poor design made them bitterly suggest that games have gotten "softer." I've always thought they were full of shit, and, contrary to the foreshadowing, I still do.
Mega Man 9 is not "Nintendo Hard." It isn't hard because the developers were too lazy to balance it. And, for that matter, it's drastically harder than previous installments of the 8-bit Mega Man series (I believe 5 was the last I played, but I played 4 extensively). Lest you think I'm falling prey to the same exaggeration I suspected, let me illustrate. The post I made this morning, saying the "rumors about difficulty are definitely true," referred to my experience on Plug Man's stage, which took me a couple of continues to make it to Plug Man himself, whom I was unable to defeat.
At lunch today, I decided to try out some other stages. Plug Man's, to my experience, was the easiest by far. I couldn't beat the mini-boss of Concrete Man's stage, made it slightly farther than halfway through Jewel Man's stage, couldn't beat the mini-boss of Magma Man's stage, and barely even got into Tornado Man's stage. I tried buying some energy tanks and going back to Plug Man, but even after getting through the stage without dying and having a pretty good attempt on Plug Man, I couldn't defeat him. If this was the only game you owned, it could very well consume you with practice alone.
And it seems like the developers want to reward that. In addition to the achievements, there are "challenges" embedded in the game itself, some of which are like lesser versions of the achievements, and some of which are so ridiculously hard that you'd kill yourself trying to do them specifically, or play your whole life before stumbling upon them. They include:
- Defeat all bosses with only one pixel of health left
- Beat the game without taking any damage
- Beat the game while collecting fewer than 8 energy pellets
- Beat the game without missing with the Mega Buster (not sure if this is exactly how it goes, but it IS accuracy based)
- Spend 10 minutes on a single boss fight