Tag: mega man

I actually asked my parents for this garbage. I begged for this shit. And I got it: The worst Mega Man ever made.

As a kid, I considered myself one of the biggest Mega Man fans of all time. This was convenient for me, since I was a child during the time in which this couldn’t be verified by any means whatsoever. There were no YouTube videos of toddlers beating the entire series on Donkey Konga drums while wearing a blindfold and getting spun in a chair. It was a different time then. You used to be excited when you found out someone else liked the same video games as you. It’s not like today in which discovering a shared interest blossoms into a deep horror as the other person angrily tells you that the main character’s body is too woke now or some stupid thing that people online get mad about when they don’t have actual problems.

Anyway, I loved Mega Man with all my heart. Some of this might have been the fantastic music, amazing platforming, and incredible enemy designs. As I’ve said before, some of this might have also been that I was a little fat kid and Mega Man was a little fat guy, just bouncing along on his fat little metal legs. A lot of people talk about the importance of representation in the media, but you rarely hear about the way Mega Man inspired a generation of amorphous-looking man-children. Without his influence, who knows what I might have gone on to do? Had sex with someone who didn’t avoid eye contact? Maybe!

But Mega Man was my boy, so any time I saw some sort of new Mega Man game, I had to have it. I’d do anything I could to make sure that the game was on my parents’ radar. After that, it usually meant waiting for months until a holiday or my birthday or until my dad got so mad that he did something terrible that resulted in him buying us a toy out of guilt. That’s how we got the SimCity 2000 Urban Renewal Kit! Man, expansions used to be cool. Man, no they didn’t.

When I saw Mega Man for DOS in the store, I couldn’t stop asking for it. We’d just gotten our first computer a few months earlier and a handful of cheap shareware games to go with it. Bad card games. Worse Tetris knockoffs. A level of Wolfenstein 3D, which wasn’t bad at all, but also I didn’t respect how much I’d need to train to fight Nazis in the future. The computer was more or less a business purchase for my dad and the games were a way to show it off a little or prove that he hadn’t just bought it for himself. I do think he also bought a strip poker game on a floppy disk because I found one years later and my mom isn’t the type.

The box for Mega Man on DOS is odd in that it uses the same box art as Mega Man for Game Boy, which itself seems to have taken elements from the box art of Mega Man 3. And even though it’s simply billed as “Mega Man,” it’s not a remake of the first game in any way. In fact, it’s an entirely new game with three new robot bosses. Oh, I don’t mean three new robot bosses in addition to your favorites. I mean that there are three robot bosses period. And these aren’t Dr. Wily’s best work. These are the D-Team robots, some Roombas with legs attached.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I have to talk about the exciting first level!

You know how in Mega Man X – a real Mega Man game – you’re dropped right into that crazy futuristic highway in the middle of a robot war? It’s cool, right? There’s pounding music. Wave after wave of creative, fascinating mechanical enemies. The level shifts and changes. Forget exposition, this game teaches you what’s going on by showing it! And when you die at the hardest part of the level, you’re actually shocked to discover this is the start of the real story! Wow!

Mega Man for DOS is similar to this in that you’re dropped right into the action. Except instead of it being a cyberpunk cityscape under robotic devastation, you’re on a brick walkway with little rope guardrails. When you start, you’re at a guard booth with a gate that they raise for you and you just walk by. Because, I think the guard already knows you? Mega Man doesn’t wave a pass or anything, but they let him right in. So he must’ve been called about coming over to help. As you walk down the straight path – and I literally mean there’s nothing but flat ground and one building you walk straight through on said flat ground – robot dogs attack you. If you kill the robot dog, another will come and attack you. If you ignore it, it’ll chase you and attack you. You can’t outrun or defeat them until they stop. No matter what you do, the robot dog will hit you for significant damage. The only way to get past this is to just keep running and jumping until you read a Dr. Wily-esque gate that leads to the robot boss selection screen.

Now, if this doesn’t sound fun, I completely understand. That’s fair. However, what you need to understand is that this is really made even less fun by the fact that there’s no music whatsoever. No music. Zero songs. Not in this opening level. Not in any of the levels. This Mega Man game is dead silent outside of the jumping and shooting and dying sounds. Mega Man’s music might be one of the most universally beloved things about it, so having zero music at all is certainly a choice. I guess we’re in the year 20XX and we’re fighting to defend the town from Footloose.

This lack of music is fascinating to me. I used to hold a Talkboy up to the screen to record songs from the games. If I tried that now with Mega Man for DOS, I’d likely get silence or some slight static where you could almost detect a ghost begging to be heard and have their murder solved. There’s just nothing there. I tried putting on some Mega Man music from Spotify while playing, and it’s one of the few things that made this game more fun other than turning it off.

But then we get to the robot bosses screen. Just so you know: Still no music. You’re not getting any of that here ever. Your choices are Dyna Man, Sonic Man, and Volt Man. All of which are designed to look nothing like a Mega Man robot boss. They could’ve gone a bit cheap and did some knockoffs by adjusting a pixel here or there. Nope! Pure free hand digital drawing. Dyna Man looks like a mad scientist who did too many sit ups and he’s one of the highlights.

Even as I type this, the difference between boss’ levels are melting together in my mind. One is a sewer landscape that’s just a series of walkways and pits. One is an electric power plant landscape that’s just a series of walkways and pits. Another is a warehouse that’s just a series of walkways and pits. I know “walkways and pits” could describe a lot of platformers, but I genuinely mean that your first level in Super Mario Maker probably had more nuance than anything here. If you gave me a sheet of graph paper and told me I had 15 minutes to design three Mega Man levels, this is probably the level of quality I’d produce. They dedicated the same amount of effort to the enemies. For example, the manual tells you to watch out for: BIRD (not pictured).

The old Mega Man games were the pinnacle of platforming precision. Carefully placed jumps. Deaths were common, but rarely unfair. Great. Forget that. Mega Man can neither jump that high nor shoot that low. Which is great, because every single obstacle is slightly too high to reach and every enemy will fly just below your shot range. Killing anything – even itty bitty shitty insect robots – feels more like a game of chance than anything else. I’m serious when I say that this game can only be completed by bum rushing through levels, hoping that you don’t lose all your lives before reaching an equally awful boss fight. Besides choosing between EGA and VGA graphics, there is no point in which this game becomes fun.

Oh, and there are those fucking annoying little blocks that appear and disappear. I’m glad of the things they could get right about Mega Man, it was the worst part of any level. There may be no music, the level design may be terrible, but at least we can try to time jumping between disappearing ledges. Phew! Thank you, Dr. Light, for keeping us going until we had the chance to fall into a river of flames again and again and again and again. In fact, I’d say the greatest challenge in this game is just getting to the robot bosses themselves. God knows you probably won’t defeat them unless you actually try and – if the developers didn’t with this game, why should you?

And I do mean that they didn’t “try.” After doing some research (i.e., Googling), I discovered that this game steals some of its graphics from Duke Nukem. Not the 3D one with the boobs and stuff. The 2D one that came in CD-ROM value packs.

You don’t remember those games because they’re not really worth remembering. They’re not terrible by the standards of the day, which means they’re nightmarish by the standards of now. For a while, Duke Nukem was the best the PC had to offer on sidescrollers, which is probably why developers mostly focused on obtuse, un-fun role playing games instead.

To be fair, I can kind of see why the developer, Stephen Rozner, stole some assets. Also, yes, Stephen Rozner is just one guy. This was a game made by a single person. That tracks. And I don’t want to shit on someone who made a bad game 35 years ago. Because, look, far be it from me to criticize someone else’s work. I’ve definitely put my name on projects that were great and I’ve definitely put my name on projects that paid me money. It’s also a bit of a relief: Knowing this wasn’t made by a well-funded team feels like less of a waste. And, if I’m being upfront, I’d feel pretty proud of myself if I made this in 1990, especially considering I was six. And at six years old, I’d probably feel less morally against stealing art.

The good news is you can play Mega Man for DOS right now! For free! The bad news is that, by playing the game, you’re using up some of the few, brief minutes you’ve got left on this planet. There is no music. Almost no enemies. Stolen artwork. Bosses that don’t make sense. And gameplay in which Mega Man can neither reach high or low enough to accomplish things. Mega Man may be a robot, but this is the first game to show us what would have happened if Dr. Light had a box of bricks fall on his head while designing a new creation. If I have anything positive to say, it’s that now – and when I was a kid – Mega Man for DOS made me respect how hard it must’ve been to create a fun game in the series. I can’t wait to play it again in another 35 years when I’m in my 70s.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Josh S, who was responsible for the music, but nobody told him.