So, is it really Nintendo Hard?
Oh hell yes.
The final boss is kicking my ass now, I’ve gotten game over so many times…
Here’s the rub though. In the future Downloadable Content there will be two new difficulty settings.
Hard. And Very Hard.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT
Originally Posted by Valkyrie Esker
So, is it really Nintendo Hard?
It is Nintendo Hard overall, but it can even reach MM 1 hard at some spots (though, I haven’t been using every advantage available to me yet, so I could be off).
I got hung the most on Tornado Man’s stage, Wily #3, and I’m right now at the final Wily stage, [SPOILER]and I’m taking my time to abuse the capsule room for achievements. I’ve got about a third of them overall right now.
Also you are correct Spoony that is the boss order.[/SPOILER]
Mega First Wily Boss M. Buster (nothing fancy, you need to shoot spiked balls into the faces), Second Wily Boss L. Trident/M. Bazooka (Spash’s weapon did alright against the boss’s first and third forms while Magma’s weapon was better for the second), Third Wily boss B. Bomb all the way (stand in the middle, jump over a couple of attacks, and lay down the law), Wily’s weakness for his second form is C. Shot, his first form is suffering from Agahnim’s syndrome which means M. Buster again, and I’m still working on his final form (I don’t know what this one is yet, but I do know it isn’t H. Chaser, B. Bomb, J. Satellite, and probably C. Shot).
(Really! Don’t read the above paragraph unless you’re a Mega Wuss.)
:ah-ha!:
Originally Posted by SpoonyBard
[i]Oh hell yes.
The final boss is kicking my ass now, I’ve gotten game over so many times…
Here’s the rub though. In the future Downloadable Content there will be two new difficulty settings.
Hard. And Very Hard.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT [/i]
Man, at that difficulty, I might need to actually use E-Tanks and other Store Items. O.o
I just beat it. Hooray for me!
You’re right about the Wily boss weaknesses, Killmore, but the final boss’s weakness was kind of unexpected It’s the plug ball. So you need to get right up close to use it since it won’t hit otherwise. Man, I mean, I liked the final boss’s first forms, but the last guy? ANOTHER disappearing-reappearing flying pod? AGAIN? It’s the exact same final boss we’ve had since 4!
Ending was kinda cool though.
Beat it around 10PM.
Loved it.
Spoony covered most of what I could say about it already. I loved the Wily Stage 2 boss the most out of the gang, but the whole thing just felt…fresh, really.
Best 10$ I spent in a while.
Done at 1:12 AM. Wasn’t able to complete the Quick Draw G challenge like I had hoped, but the rest of the Quick Draws are complete including X. I also completed the No Coffee Break challenge (playthru without using E or M tanks), Trusty Sidearm (beat all Robot Masters using only the M. Buster), and ironically the Speed Metal challenge (reach a boss without stoping).
I’ve got to say I haven’t been challenged by Wily like this since 7. Now to play through it 4 more times all while completing more challenges then it’s on to Kirby SuperStar Ultra. Should be a piece of cake. :}
Also I have a feeling that the extra time trial stage that will be offered through the DLC is going to end with a fight with Bass.
I cannot download it to save my life. It keeps fucking timing out.
Has anyone tried the Time Trials yet? I managed to get myself within the top ten for Wily stages #2 and #3, but some of those other times are just insane. O.o (They’re a good half-a-minute faster than my best and I had to cut nearly every corner in the book just to get those places. >_<)
F.y.i. I’m not exactly sure where I placed in Wily #2 (it was either 4th or 6th place though that was about an hour and a half ago), but I’m sure I placed 10th in Wily #3.
Edit: Btw, remember that fake Zelda Movie awhile back? I think it’s gots some competition!
I dont think this drops on XBLA until Tuesday (as well as the new release of the Xbox Dashboard) and I’ve already got points for it.
Man this game is fucking hard. I already got the “Kill 100 enemies” achievement and I haven’t even beaten the first level. So far its taken me 15 tries to beat the splash woman stage. These achievements are not possible.
The only achievement I think I’ll never get is Mr. Perfect, because I just don’t have the reflexes necessary to beat the entire game without getting hit. Wily Stage 3 would brutalize me.
All the others though I’ll probably get in due time.
I dunno about anyone else, but I don’t think it’s quite as great as everyone else does. So, my little mini review isn’t going to say a lot of good things - plenty of other people are talking about what’s good about it, but it seems like no one will dare say anything bad about the game. So, here I go.
(To preface this argument, before anyone gets on me about my perceptions of the difficulty, know that I played the entire thing with the Pea Shooter, only using Weapon Energy at the mandatory parts of Wily’s Castle)
Sure, it’s not BAD, but neither was like, Mega Man 4. This is NOT up to snuff with the first three Mega Man games at all. My least favorite thing about it is the ‘difficulty’ - more than half the obstacles in the game are things like chasms or spikes and stuff where you have to jump or move at the last possible moment to make it across. There’s also a lot of “You can’t even kneejerk react to this obstacle that will send you hurdling off a cliff” bullshit, like in Tornado Man’s level.
That kind of shit was okay for Dr. Wily levels, but normal levels? That’s shitty. The Dr. Wily levels are even worse - with puzzles that require you to do a little trial and error - except, if you guess the wrong solution, there’s a 101% chance you’re going to lose a life for it. There were hardly ANY situations like this in the original Mega Man games, but this game is chock full of them. The only level that made me feel the really intense thrill that I used to get playing Mega Man was Galaxy Man’s level. Now THAT is what I was expecting from MM9.
Strangely enough, what isn’t hard is the bosses. Most bosses are incredibly easy, unless you do something that gives them a huge advantage, like letting Tornado Man occupy the center of the screen, or try to fit yourself in between the pink projectiles of the last boss, when you can simply cause them to fall and walk to the outside of them. Otherwise, the bosses are kind of lame.
I guess it is my fault for buying into the hype, but it sounds like everyone agrees with the hype but myself. It’s true that old-school games were harder than games nowadays, but this isn’t a fun challenge, like the old MM games; this is a lot of “You’re GOING to die if you don’t have this memorized” crap. Contra 4 pulled the same “Oh, since we’re going retro, we need to put in superfluously annoying obstacles” nonsense.
I feel like I’m looking at a piece of Art Noveau for video games. The funny thing is, most new art is reviled in its time, but people come to look back on them and realize their worth as art. With video games, I feel that it’s the opposite; I think that people will eventually look back at Contra 4 or Mega Man 9 and say, “They’re okay.”
Even though I think Zero Punctuation’s XBLA Retro video games review kind of imploded on itself for reviewing Castle Crashers, which made an argument for the OPPOSITE of what he was trying to say, I do agree with the thrust of his argument: There isn’t anything inherently sacred about old-school gameplay. Now that we have the foresight and technology to make better games, we need to do that instead of trying to intentionally plant us in the late 80’s/early 90’s.
Now, does that mean I think the 8-bit graphics idea was bad? Hell no. The aesthetic compliments the simple gameplay of Mega Man, and more detailed animations always made the Mega Man games play a bit clunkier, in my opinion.
The real problem is our perception of what makes a game old-school. For one, to be simply antiquated for its own sake is stupid. Why take out charge shots and sliding, but leave Rush, Fliptop, Beat, and AUTO? WTFmate? I personally think that Charge Shots were unnecessary in MMClassic games, but even Charge Shots would have been more fun than buying E tanks and shit. And sliding would have been really useful in MM9! Before I played it, I didn’t care that there was no sliding; now I do.
And for two? Games back then were hard, but they were not hard for the same reason that Mega Man 9 is hard. Mega Man 1-3 were challenging in a fun way, because they tested your reaction time, and pattern recognition. Mega Man 9 is hard because it tests your ability to jump at the very edge of a platform across a bunch of lava and have enough altitude to grab the ladder. Mega Man 9 is hard because if you just jump across the platform without sitting and waiting, you’re gonna hit a stupid-ass umbrella robot hiding in the clouds and fall off the cliff for sure. Mega Man 9 is hard because if you make a wrong guess on how to get past the lava beam rooms in Wily Level 1, you will die FOR_SURE, much unlike the part that they directly ripped that off from in MM2, where if you messed up with Item 1, you’d fall to the previous screen. Big whoop.
In conclusion, developers need to get their heads out of their asses about retro games. If you’re gonna make a challenging game, make the challenge play off of what’s fun about the games. Dying repeatedly as a result of trial and error, or a lack of technical mastery, is not fun. The end.
I agree, my biggest problem with games these days isn’t how hard they are, it’s how they try to make them hard. I remember playing Assassins Creed and thinking that the crazy people who fling their arms at you and expose you was a clever idea until I got to the final missions and it seems like literally these are the only people on the street. Mega Man 9 does much the same thing, shifting the focus from twitch gaming and quick reflexes to mastering what almost seems as the only possible way to do it without dying. This isn’t fun, as I stated in my earlier post I played the Splash Woman stage for an hour and a half before I even saw the boss.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the game is a blast to play. I just wish that it actually was more like the older games because really, it isn’t. Although there is some flashes of brilliance in the level design; I’m particularly impressed with the rotating platforms in the Tornado Man stage. That being said I hate that jump you mentioned from the Magma Man stage and I only just this minute reached the umbrellas in the Tornado Man stage.
How the fuck did you guys beat this game so fast? It’s whippin my ass.
Yeah, definitely a lot of these stages have an ‘all or nothing’ to them. Tornado Man’s stage is the best example: If you took any sort of damage in Tornado Man’s stage, it was probably because of a cliff or a spike. …Or, you got hit by something that sent you off a cliff. It’s just a highly fatal obstacle course - that’s not fun!
Don’t get me wrong, I think the game is a blast to play. I just wish that it actually was more like the older games because really, it isn’t. Although there is some flashes of brilliance in the level design; I’m particularly impressed with the rotating platforms in the Tornado Man stage. That being said I hate that jump you mentioned from the Magma Man stage and I only just this minute reached the umbrellas in the Tornado Man stage.
Yeah, 8-bit graphics /= oldschool. If you’re having trouble, though, I think the easiest stage to beat is probably Galaxy Man’s, and probably the most fun, too.
How the fuck did you guys beat this game so fast? It’s whippin my ass.
Most of the people playing probably have a Nintendo Wii. As for me…I’ve played waaaaaay too much fucking Mega Man in my life. 
If you don’t like the game as much as us, SG, that’s cool. Though I wouldn’t mind a clarification on a few things. I’m not attacking you for criticizing it, there’s just a couple of things I don’t get.
Such as? The only thing I can think of, really, in Tornado Man’s level are the Umbrellas that fly in from behind the clouds. But they have an easy solution: Jewel Satellite. If you decided to go through it with just the M-Buster, fair enough, but the special weapons are there to be used.
Again, such as? Seriously, I can’t think of what you’re talking about. The only ‘gotcha’ trap in the Wily Stages that I didn’t see coming was in Stage 3 when navigating the anti-gravity room with the spikes, at the very end if you fire too fast and go too far to the left, one of those propeller-head grappler guys will grab you and haul your ass into spikey doom. That pissed me off once, but that was it.
Ummmmmm… deep breath
Mega Man 1
Missing the Magnet Beam and Entering Wily’s Castle
Jumping down the wrong side of of the wall later in Wily Stage 2
Mega Man 2
The entire Wilydragon battle (keeping footing on three small platforms and flickering NES graphics? Fun)
Spike-lined fall in Wily Stage 3
THE FUCKING TURRET ROOM (used one or two Crash Bombs earlier? OOPS!)
Alien Dr. Wily (No Bubble Lead for some reason? Tsk)
Mega Man 3
Spark Man Revisited: 'nother spike-lined fall, better memorize it!
Needle Man Revisited: Ran out of Rush Jet somehow? Doh!
Gamma: Don’t have weapon energy, or recharged the wrong ones at the start of the stage? Too bad, so sad.
pant There’s probably more, but I think that’s enough. Thing is, there were PLENTY of cases in the earlier games where we NEEDED trial and error, and died a lot, to figure out how to progress. We just look back at these games now and don’t see it because we already know the answers. We’re also smarter now than we were when we were kids so we think about these puzzles with our mighty adult brains and think that they really weren’t that tough. But no, we didn’t know the answers then, unless you had good gaming buddies that finished it already, or had a Nintendo Power subscription, since there wasn’t any internetz to bail us out in 1989. We died a lot back then, we tried lots of things back then, and it wasn’t much different. To say the early Mega Man games didn’t have moments like that is just wrong.
I disagree again here, because it’s the same for the early games. None of the Robot Masters are all too difficult once you get their pattern down. Even less so if you use special weapons. I dunno, say what you will about the difficulty of the MM9 RMs, at least you couldn’t kill some of them in 2-4 hits like some of the RMs in MM2 with the right weapons.
(stealth edit) Oh yeah, last boss. Just Black Hole Bomb the pink projectiles. Special Weapons, there to be used.
As I said above, all the early Mega Man games DID have moments like this were you’re scrap if you don’t got it memorized. We just don’t see it now because we’ve had 20 years to play them.
Well we totally agree here, at least.
Then download Protoman.
Okay okay, even I gotta admit that charging to unlock something that really should’ve been unlockable via challenges in the first place is the sourest point of this game. I’ma still pay for him since it’s only 200 Wii points, but still.
Anyway, while sliding is nifty, it would’ve made a few parts of the game too easy. If they didn’t design the challenges around having the slide, then can it be called bad design to leave it out? Eh, this one’s up in the air.
Yeah because Mega Man 2 never had anything like that, like in Quick Man’s stage or anything.
Alright, the leap of faith at the start of Magma Man’s stage could’ve used one more block’s worth of running-space before jumping.
But the umbrellas, sorry, I just didn’t find em hard. Even without thinking to use Jewel Satellite the first run. I just took my time.
I had lots of fun playing Mega Man 9. Now, did I buy into the hype? I dunno. But I just know I enjoyed it. I know a lot of people enjoyed it. If you didn’t, that’s cool. No game will have everyone like it, and a lot of people that dislike some games might have perfectly legit reasons for it, but it doesn’t necessarily discredit the fun of the game for others. I don’t think developers need to get their heads out of their asses at all, I’d like to see more stuff like this. Sure, a few points of MM9 could’ve used a bit more polish, but it was certainly a better retro-attempt than, say, New Super Mario Bros. I still enjoy that game to a point, but the levels were too dull in parts and the game was far too easy.
So, have gamers gotten so pacified in recent years by easier and easier games, that they see Mega Man 9 as an unreasonable and poorly-designed challenge? Or are the fans of MM9 just glossing over its faults for the sake of reliving their cherished memories? Again, hell if I know. Us gamers are frequently an unreasonable and illogical bunch.
I’ll get back to you in a year on whether or not I still enjoy replaying MM9 as much as I do MM2.
I mean, I’ve played all the games as well, but still - this is unbelievably difficult.
And Spoony, I was referring to the Xbox Achievments, some of which are to clear the game in 60 minute or less, clearing the game without using any energy or mystery tanks, clearing the game without dying, clearing the game without continuing, beat the game without killing anyone but the bosses, and clearing the game five times in one day. Theres more but they are relatively easier.
Perhaps what I like the least is that the game seems to be more about jumping around than shooting things. I just seem to remember more bad guys in these games.
Yeah, the Wii has the same achievements.
I know, shocker eh?
The Wii has achievements? None of those are challenges I believe, so are you sure?
SG pretty much stated my thoughts on it. This is not “Megaman Difficulty” Megaman Difficulty got me to at least see any one of the robot masters. I even beat half of them in the first one, which people say is/was the hardest. I can’t even reach the halfway point. The difficulty, like he said was in the level design (not meaning all the pits, and spikes, and shit fucking knocking you into them), and trial and error and memorization, not the aforementioned pits and spikes and shit knocking you into them, and the sheer amount of enemies on the screen at one time. WTF is up with those fucking things that grab you and pull you into a spiked wall?
It seems like they forsook the level design, and made the difficulty a gimmick.
Special weapons. There to be used, sure. But what if you played Tornado Man’s level first, like me? Clearly, they didn’t make it so that you HAD to beat a certain boss first…right? So, sure. Using Jewel Satellite is an obvious choice, but it’s my personal opinion that you shouldn’t feel like a total GIMP going through the original 8 levels without special weapons.
Other than that, there are more than a few situations where if you jump across a pit or a bunch of spikes, something that you didn’t see previously will knock you back into the pit/spikes.
Again, such as? Seriously, I can’t think of what you’re talking about. The only ‘gotcha’ trap in the Wily Stages that I didn’t see coming was in Stage 3 when navigating the anti-gravity room with the spikes, at the very end if you fire too fast and go too far to the left, one of those propeller-head grappler guys will grab you and haul your ass into spikey doom. That pissed me off once, but that was it.
I already referenced two of them indirectly: Wily stage 1, the parts where the lava beams are going horizontal. Sure, it’s easy to think Rush Jet is the solution to the first one, but it looks like there could be quite a few solutions to the second one. Even then, the first one requires a lot of precision in making the Rush Jet land in the right place. I know I died a few times trying to get that right, and I died god knows HOW many times trying to figure out the solution to the screen with THREE of them.
Ummmmmm… deep breath
Mega Man 1
Missing the Magnet Beam and Entering Wily’s Castle
Jumping down the wrong side of of the wall later in Wily Stage 2
Mega Man 2
The entire Wilydragon battle (keeping footing on three small platforms and flickering NES graphics? Fun)
Spike-lined fall in Wily Stage 3
THE FUCKING TURRET ROOM (used one or two Crash Bombs earlier? OOPS!)
Alien Dr. Wily (No Bubble Lead for some reason? Tsk)
Mega Man 3
Spark Man Revisited: 'nother spike-lined fall, better memorize it!
Needle Man Revisited: Ran out of Rush Jet somehow? Doh!
Gamma: Don’t have weapon energy, or recharged the wrong ones at the start of the stage? Too bad, so sad.
pant There’s probably more, but I think that’s enough. Thing is, there were PLENTY of cases in the earlier games where we NEEDED trial and error, and died a lot, to figure out how to progress. We just look back at these games now and don’t see it because we already know the answers. We’re also smarter now than we were when we were kids so we think about these puzzles with our mighty adult brains and think that they really weren’t that tough. But no, we didn’t know the answers then, unless you had good gaming buddies that finished it already, or had a Nintendo Power subscription, since there wasn’t any internetz to bail us out in 1989. We died a lot back then, we tried lots of things back then, and it wasn’t much different. To say the early Mega Man games didn’t have moments like that is just wrong.
- A lot of those, I completely disagree with.
-
The Magnet Beam thing sucks, to be sure; however, that’s not a ‘trial and error’ thing, that’s a ‘You don’t even HAVE what you need to beat the stage’. It’s absolutely shitty, but non-applicable to what I’m talking about. As for the other MM1 thing you mentioned, I have no idea what you’re talking about
-
Almost none of those things are hard in MM2. The dragon is shitty the very first time, when you don’t know that you need to be at the far end of the screen. However, after knowing that, you’d have to TRY to die there. The spike fall is scary, not hard; if you stay in the center of the fall - the logical thing to do - it should be easy to react to the changes in the wall. The turret gun boss is pretty crappy, I’ll admit it; however, in its defense, you are clearly expected to beat that boss over the span of several lives. What makes it crappy in the end is that you can get there with only one life remaining. Getting to the last boss with no Bubble Lead is lame, however, it’s nothing like the examples I’ve shown, where you have to go all the way back to the beginning of a level that’s very perilous to begin with. The last stage of MM2 is like 10 seconds long, and you can avoid all damage by simply not stopping.
-
For MM3, refer to what I said previously about the spike pit and last boss conundrums. As for Needle Man part 2…well, for one, you indicate yourself by saying ‘somehow’ that the possibility of running out of Rush Jet before that particular part (or even using it) is absurd. Besides that, it’s non-applicable to my argument, where you have to memorize or be ultra-technically proficient in order to succeed.
Phew, and now for
- You mentioned nine things in the first three games. Even disregarding the fact that I’ve pointed some out as non-applicable or nearly as severe as the examples I’ve discussed, it’s pretty sad that I can think of like six undeniably shitty instances of memorize/technical mastery to get through.
And finally,
- A big part of your argument here is that we don’t remember this being a problem because we have all of this shit memorized. However, the ‘hardest’ game of the first three - MM1 - I’ve only played through twice. Definitely do_NOT have that game memorized. And, at least for MM3, I doubt there’s anything in your list or that you forgot that could be too hard, considering I beat the game by myself when I was freakin’ seven. I could NOT have beat MM9 at age 7; my beating MM9 in a timely manner - with the pea shooter, no less - comes from being quite the veteran.
I disagree again here, because it’s the same for the early games. None of the Robot Masters are all too difficult once you get their pattern down. Even less so if you use special weapons. I dunno, say what you will about the difficulty of the MM9 RMs, at least you couldn’t kill some of them in 2-4 hits like some of the RMs in MM2 with the right weapons.
That may be true, but I also don’t use special weapons. Perhaps, due to this, there will be some things that we’ll have to agree to disagree on. However, I can say this: There is NO boss in MM9 that comes close to Quick Man, Crash Man, Hard Man, or Shadow Man. Not_even_close.
(stealth edit) Oh yeah, last boss. Just Black Hole Bomb the pink projectiles. Special Weapons, there to be used.
Good to know. The last boss was a breeze after I figured out not to run in between them.
As I said above, all the early Mega Man games DID have moments like this were you’re scrap if you don’t got it memorized. We just don’t see it now because we’ve had 20 years to play them.
Though there are some parts that certainly required memorization (The Quick Man beams come to mind), they seem far and few between compared to the sheer amount of these instances present in MM9. Also, I refer you to the above - I don’t even have MM1 memorized, and MM3 couldn’t have been TOO hard in the way of level design if I beat it with no help at such an early age.
Then download Protoman.
Okay okay, even I gotta admit that charging to unlock something that really should’ve been unlockable via challenges in the first place is the sourest point of this game. I’ma still pay for him since it’s only 200 Wii points, but still.
Anyway, while sliding is nifty, it would’ve made a few parts of the game too easy. If they didn’t design the challenges around having the slide, then can it be called bad design to leave it out? Eh, this one’s up in the air.
To add onto what you’ve already said about how lame it is to have to download a character that can slide,
-
I don’t know if he’s available yet for Wii, but he ain’t ready for XBLA, we haven’t even had the game for 24 hours yet.
-
I can’t particularly think of any spot that would have been made too easy by sliding. I can think of a few parts that would be easier, for sure; but that’s the case with any added feature that gives a character an added ability. It certainly would have made the game MORE FUN, and I don’t know how I feel about having to pay extra money on top of the game fee, to have an addition that would enhance the fun of the game that should ALREADY BE THERE, and was taken out as a very arbitrary aesthetic choice to make the game feel more antiquated. …Even though they put in fliptop. …and beat. …and auto.
Yeah because Mega Man 2 never had anything like that, like in Quick Man’s stage or anything.
Alright, the leap of faith at the start of Magma Man’s stage could’ve used one more block’s worth of running-space before jumping.
But the umbrellas, sorry, I just didn’t find em hard. Even without thinking to use Jewel Satellite the first run. I just took my time.
Yeah, Quick Man’s beams are kind of lame. But hey, Time Stopper will do the trick. Special weapons are meant to be used, right? Lol, I kid
Still, I reiterate that you shouldn’t even HAVE to do things like that in the original eight levels to get by.
I had lots of fun playing Mega Man 9. Now, did I buy into the hype? I dunno. But I just know I enjoyed it. I know a lot of people enjoyed it. If you didn’t, that’s cool. No game will have everyone like it, and a lot of people that dislike some games might have perfectly legit reasons for it, but it doesn’t necessarily discredit the fun of the game for others. I don’t think developers need to get their heads out of their asses at all, I’d like to see more stuff like this. Sure, a few points of MM9 could’ve used a bit more polish, but it was certainly a better retro-attempt than, say, New Super Mario Bros. I still enjoy that game to a point, but the levels were too dull in parts and the game was far too easy.
So, have gamers gotten so pacified in recent years by easier and easier games, that they see Mega Man 9 as an unreasonable and poorly-designed challenge? Or are the fans of MM9 just glossing over its faults for the sake of reliving their cherished memories? Again, hell if I know. Us gamers are frequently an unreasonable and illogical bunch.
I’ll get back to you in a year on whether or not I still enjoy replaying MM9 as much as I do MM2.
First and foremost, I’m not trying to accredit or discredit someone’s opinion on a game. I was offering my opinion, as an experienced - even fanatical - Mega Man player who has criticisms to level on the game, where I feel no one else that plays Mega Man games as much as me would do so.
I think New Super Mario Bros was an excellent return to form, actually. Now that you mention it, I think that is one of the best retro experiences I can think of. I’d love to see more things like this, for sure - a classic Mega Man game that didn’t feel phoned in like 5-8 + MM&Bass? That will reel me in every time. However, I feel like their focus was just in the wrong place. A game should never be hard for hard’s sake. A game should challenge you in a way that its genre’s strengths are applicable to. And, for Mega Man platformers, that definitely isn’t technical mastery and memorization.
I should also mention that this doesn’t even make a game truly hard; in the case of Tornado Man’s stage, to keep with our most popular example, once you learn all the stupid tricks, you’re bound to never get hit. That level, to me, is an extreme example of what the entire game is like. There’s a bunch of very obnoxious hurdles; but, once you learn the song and dance of each one, the game becomes sort of pathetic. I never found this to be the case, not in any of the first three games, or even the fourth game.
EDIT: Just to show that I’m really not blowing smoke about what I just said, I did a second runthrough of the game. Pea Shooter Only. 1:05:08. ‘No Coffee Break’, ‘Almost Invincible’. I died like eleven times, though I died twice to Plug Man, and I died a few times going through the main levels due to random lapses of “I wonder if I can do THIS without dying…oh, nope.” I also died twice going through Wily Stage 2 due to really shitty jumps. The point is, I almost got the under an hour challenge playing sloppy as hell with the damn Pea Shooter, and I DID beat the game with no continues, E or M Tanks. So yeah. Once you learn where the dumb stuff is…I dunno. That’s a good time for an awful, unrehearsed run.