I upload weekly retrospectives. I sometimes get sidetracked, but my favorite thing to do is write a script that is probably longer than it needs to be about a game older than some of my viewers, and use my amateur editing skills to attempt to package it into a decipherable video for you folks. Hope you enjoy!
16:00 - This game released in JP and NA in 1992. This is still in the era where action stars like Silvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were in there prime, and movies like Rambo III were still very much in the public consciousness. Vietnam and fictional places modeled after it were pretty common at this time, you see it in a ton of games. After Desert Storm 1 & 2 and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center you see a shift in popular media where now such titles are set in desert locales. So it's pretty normal in media, I don't find it particularly distasteful. In fact it's probably because one developer though Rambo was cool and Napalm wounded interesting. I wouldn't get to twisted about it. In about 10 years you're probably going to see a bunch of fiction and video games set in Ukraine.
One comment I'd like to make about the Mega Man formula. I feel that over time there's less of a focus on weapon abilities, to the point that by you get to Mega Man Zero it's no longer a thing at all and it's replaced by this different kind of weapons you can equip in combat. For better or worse experimenting to find weaknesses seems to be less of a thing as time goes on. I think it may be a response to how players play the game because I think a lot of players do stick to the standard Mega Buster. The X series is pretty infamous for the way the weaknesses are implemented and some people love it and some people hate it.
I'm not saying it's not normal for the time, but I think it'd be like having a location based on Japan with a robot named "Atomic Man". Like the stage being based on Vietnam is cool, I get that. But the napalm man being in there is a bit much imo.
Yes, I've been realizing that actually. After Mega Man 2 the formula takes a drastic backseat, which is kind of a shame. Looking back now I appreciate MM3 a lot more, I was harsh on it because of a weaker implementation of the formula, but now I realize they didn't really go back to how it was in the first 2 games. Also once I get to the X series I think it'll be a whole restart of my mindset/approach to these games.
@@NintenDeen Well, I'll respect your opinion, but having grown up with it and having a father who fought in that war I'm just not really bothered by it. Same way I'm not bothered by Contra being named to capitalize on the Iran-Contra scandal that had just happened around the time the coin-op was released. TBH I had not really heard complaints about it until around 2014 when it became vogue to lampshade stuff like this.
@NintenDeen You may want to consider if you want to stick solely with the original series after 6 or if you want to start on X. Because while they re different and there are some idea the devs decide belong solely in each series, there's definitely ideas and influences with one brought on to the other. I think it's a lot of the same devs who did 7 that did X but I can't be sure without doing research. IIRC at this time there's more shakeups on who does what from this point on. And then after 8 and Rockman & Bass / Megaman & Forte you've got a pretty big gap until 9 & 10 and there's definitely a lot of influences in what's going on in the market happening there. You're also definitely going to start seeing more weird things pop up as the games get more advanced. FMV fixation, weird voice actors (Which was not that unusual for the industry except for a few exceptions.) I'd recommend you give yourself a reminder to look into strange regional changes whenever you get to Mega Man X5. :D
This actually got me a better understanding of this game thanks for clearing up all the confusion whenever people say this game is bad or at the very least find the story confusing I'll just point them to this video
While I do prefer the story of SA2 even with the plot holes and all, I do like the atmosphere of SA1 a lot more because it felt like you were on a genuine adventure. I know some people don't like the hub worlds but I honestly liked them and if anything, they enhanced that "adventure" feeling to me and with the exception of the Mystic Ruins which I'll admit can be a pain to navigate through, Station Square and The Egg Carrier were decent sized enough for it to not be a chore to navigate through. At least imo and I feel like if there were hub worlds in SA2, it would've enhanced that "adventure" feeling in that game. Again though, I'm aware that hub worlds aren't for everyone lol. Your commentary on Knuckles got a good chuckle from me because he was/is my favorite character in the series (barring Shadow) but even when I was a kid, I knew that Knuckles wasn't really "wise" and was always intended to be naive. It fits his character's background because he lived most of his live in seclusion away from other people soit was understandable that his character was socially awkward and too trusting. I also like how the story did give nice focus to all the characters. Well, most because er... Big. Buck the way Knuckles, Tails, Amy, and Gamma were handled with their own stories was simply a nice experience. But I especially remember Gamma's hitting me in the feels as well a kid playing the game and his ending gets me every damn time, it was beautifully done And yeah, the music was amazing. I do veer more towards SA2 as I'm a rocker at heart but I loved the variety of music genres played around with in SA1. I feel like overall SA1 was a rather nice transition to 3D. I mean personally, I find the game plays just fine and I can go back to it and not be too bothered As for your rant at the end, as a Sonic fan who didn't have as much enjoyment for the Sonic games that came out after SA2, my main issue with most of the new games post Sonic Adventure 2 was how the gameplay started to feel very awkward. I think it's fair to say that I got spoiled by SA1 and SA2 because in terms of character movement, I loved how Sonic felt in these games, I liked the "Free roam" feel while having Sonic feel controlled. In Sonic Heroes, Sonic (the speed & power characters) felt slippery as hell, Sonic 06's movement felt a little better but Sonic felt slower compared to SA1 & SA2, and then the boost games came out and they took away the 8way run physics of Sonic opting for a stiffer feeling to make the boosting work and though I didn't mind in Sonic Unleashed, I just got bored of it and missed the 8wayrun feel. And then Sonic Lost World, the stlye made me feel nausea. So yeah, I was one of those fans who wasn't wild with the experimentation but I understand why they tried, it just didn't feel like as great an experience imo.
yeah, megaman 4 is very good, but i like more 2 because of 1: nostalgia obviously, 2: without it we would never get the others, 3: it has the best soundtrack of them all, besides all that megaman 4 was my second megaman game and i like it a lot, with the first instance of the mega buster and the first 2 castles game (something that later games will do a lot XD
MM2 music is my favorite thing about it, but I LOVE Dive Man's music the most haha. Also yeah you make a good point that without MM2 we wouldn't have gotten others.
I'd be interesting to know what the rentals for Mega Man 4 were in addition to sales. At the time I remember playing the game as a rental and never buying it. While game rentals are, and were at the time of these games, illegal in Japan, around the time of this game the video game market in the USA was in it's heyday and you can bet that pretty much all the fans of the Mega Man games at this point were at the very least renting the Mega Man 4 games like I did, if not outright buying them. With these games retailing with MSRP of $49.99 each a $2-5 rental for a weekend was a big deal. While I was trying to get the price right in the previous paragraph I was digging through old game mags, electronics boutique ads, and toys r us ads to try to get the sale price at the time right (More on that later) and it was then that something jumped out on me as to why Mega Man 4's sales might not be so great compared to Mega Man 3. Mega Man 4 released in the USA in January 1992. That means it just missed the Christmas 1991 holiday season here. Mega Man 5 released in the USA and Japan on December 1992 of the same year. Next Mega Man X came out in the USA January 1994. Then Mega Man 6 came out March 1994. (The delay of 6 to NA ended up flip flopping the release order between the last two, as in Japan 6 preceded X.) Since both of those missed the 1993 holiday season in the US you'd see the two of them next to each other on store shelves. Incidentally for the other US release dates: Mega Man December 1987. Mega Man 2 June 1989. November 1990 It seems like Mega Man 4 probably came out at the worst possible time for big sales. When I was researching I was seeing full page ads for Mega Man 3 in Gamepro up until the release of Mega Man 4 which were almost identical and proclaimed it was "Like nothing before" (LOL. Also those Mega Man 3 full page ads from December 1991 were for a year old game, how wild is that?) When Mega Man 2 and 3 came out they, as you said, got huge coverage in Nintendo Power. By the time 4 came the top billing in magazine in magazines was quickly dominated by the Genesis and SNES. Mega Man 3 also came out right in time for the holiday season which Mega Man 4 missed and then it ended up getting sandwiched next to Mega Man 5 later that year, and it also had to compete with adoption of new gaming systems to contend with. It definitely shows why #2 and to a lesser extend #3 loom so big in the memory or people in the US as the releases had a lot more time to breathe and solidify themselves. It also meant they could be picked up used and had more time to reach more players. Also as for that promised aside about prices, the reason was digging through game magazines to get the prices right is, because unlike today the prices of retro games back then would fluctuate a lot as sellers were trying to move stock. Also all game carts aren't created equal and some become more expensive due licenses, more ROM chips on the board, or extra expansion chips. The NES had quite a few different chips, the most common being the various memory mappers that ended up in almost every cart but the first ones meaning that not only were devs learning the hardware better as time went on, they were getting minor upgrades in hardware through the cart which is something that doesn't happen these days. When researching, I didn't see huge difference in game prices for NES carts but when you look through SNES/Genesis you start to see huge differences in cart MSRP prices with them ranging from $50 to $100 depending on the game.
PS: Sorry, I do tend to write entire essays in these comment sections... And I do agree with you that 4 is definitely an improvement over 3. I think when people say which one is "the best" It's usually not solely on quality. They are often speaking to the impact it had or how revolutionary it was at the time. For example you see Street Fighter 2: The World Warriors or Turbo really listed as the best at the time even though objectively there's a lot more improvements in Super Street Fighter 2.
I enjoy reading the essays lol. These long comments make my videos worth it because I get to read more perspectives about those that grew up with the games
beaten this game twice, US "Difficult" because i would not take capcom's lies about this being difficult, and JP. if you beat this game on "Normal" which is actually the added EASY mode...that's cool. never forget that gaming is supposed to be fun first (and frustrating second). Difficult mode evens the playing field a little bit once you get metal blade. one of the RetroAchievements is to get to the end of Quick Man's stage without Time Stopper, and another is getting to the end of Heat Man's stage without Item-2...AND I HAVE BOTH buebeam trap is ass. even the most hardened rockman 2 diehards won't defend this. fuck "annoying to new players" i've beaten this game on hard mode twice and i would happily skip this if i could.
MegaMan 2 on Gameboy isn't difficult in the game itself.... If you play on the original Gameboy Gen 1 hardware you have difficulty with the poor screen clarity and ghosting from the LCD slow drain time... That may be where people have difficult experiences.
I randomly learned that mega man 2 was more successful due to it getting an entire nintendo power issue, while 1 never got one. Had nothing really to do with box art or difficulty.
Since you do seem like you're a Mega Man fan, I have something nifty to share with you, Deen: If you have Super Mario Maker 2 for the Switch, I remade (as close to block-by-block as I could) all the Mega Man 2 stages and turned them into a Maker World. If you were interested in trying it (or any of my other stages), my SMM2 ID is 6YT-3CQ-15G
What Games to Play? Basic: Mega Man 1-6 and Mega Man X1-X3 Advanced: Mega Man 1-11 and Mega Man & Bass and Mega Man X1-X8 Simple as that. No reason to delve any deeper.
It's interesting how different the perception was back in the day VS now with people uploading speedruns etc and talking about how easy it is. Back then, I knew only one guy who had gotten past all robot masters let alone beat the game. We basically only played to see how far we could get but knew we'd eventually get our asses kicked. We absolutely loved to try though and didn't even see anything as bs tbh. I played another game with my neighbour; he told me he had played that one for months but had still not beaten the first level. It sounded odd but I couldn't figure it out either. We still thought it was a pretty cool game from what we could tell. 😂 Another example is how nobody I knew had been able to beat Mario 3. That one took years of on and off play to finish. Made it all the more epic though. Now with games like MM2 you look it up and see people glitching and sliding through walls, teleporting all over the place and beat the game in minutes. Crazy times. 😂
Megaman 2 All Bosses Boss 1 AirMan Boss 2 WoodMan Boss 3 CrashMan Boss 4 MetalMan Boss 5 Quint Boss 6 FlashMan Boss 7 HeatMan Boss 8 BubbleMan Boss 9 QuickMan Boss 10 Mecha Dragon Boss 11 Block Devil Boss 12 Guts Tank Boss 13 Boobeam Trap Boss 14 Dr. Wily Final Boss - Alien + Ending & Credits
Great video. One thing I'd point out, for the DOS game is it's not actually a ROM image you're playing there. It's actually the game executable for the game program and all it's supporting files. We call them ROMs for consoles because the file is an image of the Read Only Memory on the cartridge. But with a computer program like Mega Man 1 for IBM Compatible Computers that was distributed on a floppy disk there's no real need to make an image of the disk when you can use the disk operating system you were using to just copy the file for storage.
4:49 - Yup, that's four color CGA graphics. It sucked. CGA, MCGA, EGA, VGA, and Super VGA were the common graphics formats you might see on an x86 machine back then. By the time this game came out you generally would expect a machine to have EGA or VGA graphics, but there were plenty of older machines still out there.
2:02 - Yes that's a thing. A lot of old computers did not take any steps to limit how quickly the game runs at. with DOSBOX and other emulators you do this buy setting an emulated clock speed the emulation should run at. Back in the day we would use Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programs designed to slow down the computer for some of older games on newer machines. One common thing when some newer processors were coming out were "Turbo" buttons on PC which would slow the clock speed of the machine down to run code designed for earlier, slower machines. If all this sounds weird, just remember every console emulator you are using is also doing the same thing, it just has a singular processor it's trying to emulate to match the original machine. When you get into computers that had different parts available for them there's a lot more options and you have to make decisions about what type of machine you want the emulator to be behave like. If this sounds crazy, just remember how primitive these machines were compared to what you have today. You had to be a lot more efficient with your code than you would be these days.
@@NintenDeen Yeah, it was a VERY limited slice of time that this was a thing in the grand scheme of thing. Just like having to fight to get all 640K of conventional memory free for an EXE was a struggle before protected mode made that not a thing.
Maybe you already said something about it but megaman 2 for the gameboy had a rush development and it was made by other company, it had a glitch in the programing that made the music unhearable, it was just a programming error, just that, and good video keep on n.n
I completely agree with that. I also wonder if they're comparing it with the later NES games and that's why they find it hard... Because it's way easier than MM1 NES.
Dr. Wily's Revenge was my first Mega Man game, and until I learned about the whole series, I thought it was _the_ first game, since the title screen only said "Mega Man" and the subtitle was too small to read on the Game Pak label.
That's actually hilarious lol. And really lends to why it was probably a mistake that they didn't give them original names. Either that or it was intentional because they wanted people to actually think it was the main start of the series.
If you go for Battle Network eventually, for the sake of everything good, please play the Nintendo DS port "Mega Man Battle Network: Operate Shooting Star". The original game is really rough and the Chip codes have no synergy as they hadn't figured out what they wanted the battle system to be like until the second game. "OSS" rebalances the Chip pool so your deck can have synergy, adds the Escape button from the sequels, and rebalanced two dungeons to make them less obnoxious to play through. This version has an English patch. And on Wily Wars' case, to be fair, it's because that game has a time travel overarching plot about making sure the events of history "go as they should" and then you unlock Wily Tower which is a completely original thing, so it's not like Mario All Stars exactly.
3 has always been my favorite of the original six. Don't get me wrong, I love 2 and think it's a masterpiece and it's what everyone thinks of when they imagine Mega Man on the NES, but 3 was the first entry that I physically owned (had rented 1 and 2). I think the music slaps, but I've ALWAYS despised the boss order. It's the only entry in the series without a complete circle of weaknesses. My usual order is Magnet>Hard>Top>Shadow>Spark>Snake>Gemini>Needle. The real issue in there is Snake Man. I love snakes, so the level and boss are great, but as his main weakness is Needle, and Gemini's is Snake, it breaks the cycle. So, there is a 5 boss loop and a 3 boss loop instead of an 8 boss loop. You can sort of make it one loop by using secondary weaknesses (Shadow on Snake being the best option), but it's not the same. I always appreciate seeing people play through these games for the first time. Hearing how much they all hate the Doc Robot stages always makes me laugh. lol. I think that 3 did a great job with boss weaknesses. In 2, you could 3, 2, or even sometimes 1 shot a boss with its weakness. Metal Blade was ridiculously OP as well. I've done runs where I only use secondary weaknesses in 2, but even those are sometimes pretty strong. I'm gonna go watch your videos on 1 and 2 now! Great job!
I thought i was the only one who realized Mega Man 1 & 3 are both better than Mega Man 2. Also, am i the only one who thought the Doc robots parts were, actually fairly managable and not too hard? I see a lot of people dogging on it, but, idk, i like them. I'd much rather have it over Mega Man 2's brutal Wily stages.
I thought a few of the doc robot fights were really difficult, mainly the Air Man Doc Robot. But the stages themselves were fine enough imo. If I didn't have to keep repeating the stages because of a single fight I wouldn't mind it as much. But yeah still better than MM2.
@@NintenDeen I guess so, yeah the doc robots them-selves are hard... But i didn't find them to be that tough? Also... There are checkpoints any ways, one after you beat the first Doc. Robot (which i usually manage to beat after like, the first attempt), but i get it, it might be a difficulty spike for many.
Hey! Mega Man 1-3 speedrunner here, Watching your reviews of the series is super refreshing! The fact that you like the Needle Cannon is so funny to me because speedrunners only use it against Doc Woodman and in the Doc Gemini stage. Your MM2 review was really interesting because I never even noticed that most people only play on Normal Mode in spite of saying you need to play on Hard Mode. Keep it up! Looking forward to more of your MM reviews!
Oh awesome, thanks for the encouragement haha. I haven't even remotely tapped into the speed running community yet 😅. Out of curiosity, what would be the weapon of choice for each game? I'm assuming it changes throughout the stages to some extent but there's gotta be one to fall back on?
@@NintenDeen Yeah man! I've been really enjoying the videos! Yes, it does vary from level to level, but in MM1 usually the Magnet Beam is the go to for speedruns because you can do some crazy skips with it. As far as actual weapon weapons though, I believe we use Fire the most. MM2 is obviously the Metal Blade. You yourself pointed out that it is very powerful and great against almost half the bosses. In MM3, I don't really know that any one weapon is used more than the rest... Maybe Shadow Blade since you use it for both Magnet and Spark man's fights and can use it in Gemini's stage and battle? As far as falling back on weapons, it somewhat depends on the runner. For me, in MM1 if I need a weapon to get me back on track I usually go Elec, MM2 would be Metal Blade, and for me Shadow Blade is always my go-to in MM3.
