With a few hours of Mega Man 9 under my belt I’ve got to admit, this game is FREAKING HARD. I’ve played many games since the original Mega Man series was released on the NES and later on the SNES and nothing compares to Mega Man 9 in terms of sheer difficulty. This new franchise title looks and acts like the original with all the glitches, colors, bleeps and effects of the original games.
This game is much like chasing your kids around the yard, you forget how “old you are.” Mega Man 9 challenges reflexes, hand-eye coordination, patience and persistence. You are constantly awarded with death upon death and level restarts. Just when you think you’re getting close to a leader you’re actually just encountering a harder portion of the stage.
Between the start of a stage and the final boss you’ll encounter larger single-screen microbosses who challenge your patience and skills. As it turns out, I’ve got very little of both attributes. Upon defeating a little boss I am handed another like boss which is a little tougher. Upon defeating this slightly tougher boss (after many level restarts) I’m rewarded with yet another more difficult microboss.
Mega Man traditionally allows you to wonder all of the selectable stages out of the gate but each one gets easier as you build your characters weaponry. The trick is finding that “easy” level to get you to a boss, defeat said boss and acquire a weapon of mass awesomeness. Alas, I’ve done none of these.
You can find online video walk-throughs on the Internet which can give you tips for getting around the stages but the end result is the same: patience, persistence and accuracy. Mega Man 9 teaches you that nobody is a game master without consistent practice.
The first time through a stage is a destructive mess of failure. As you restart the stage over and over you’ll learn some of the tricks to getting you through the initial enemies without taking damage. You’ll build up your arsenal of tricks for hitting enemies before they’re on the screen and mashing the fire button to freedom… until you hit your first spike.
Spikes are the bane of the Mega Man character. Mega Man isn’t a fan of little pointy objects which result in instant death. You can hit the jump button quickly for shorter jumps and longer for bigger jumps; jumping technique is required to move you through spike infested levels.
You learn quickly to never turn your back on an enemy. Turn around, ever so slightly, and walk back on the side-scrolling screen and forward again will result in the rebirth of all enemies you’ve killed. This includes bomb wielding birds, rock tossing baddies and hells fury in the form of red and green cannons.
If you’re looking to discover all the ways you can possibly lose in a game, feel your inner child emotionally crushed under the weight of 8-bit bad asses, Mega Man 9 is the game for you. The achievements will make you laugh and the difficulty will invoke that old controller tossing nostalgia.
Mega Man 9 is a challenge. If you wish to take on this challenge and prove your 8-bit weight in the world of high resolution graphic fairy tales this may be the title for you!
Reportedly we’re going to see smaller 45 nanometer cell processors in 2009 which leads to similar cost savings as we saw in the Xbox 360 hardware. Cost savings appear on the manufacturing side, of course, along with less power consumed by the processor leading to less heat generated by the console.
I saw the Hollywood Medium episode featuring Cory Feldman with Tyler Henry discussing Corey Haim, and I anticipate his related, upcoming project…
AMD profiting off these slim and future consoles is great, despite redundancy!
I don’t see World of Warcraft coming to consoles unless Blizzard redoes coding to support more than 3 threads maximum, barely using a third, because current consoles use multi-threading via low overhead APIs to accommodate their 8 cores clocked at 1.6/1.75GHz:
http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=61949096&f=188&p=506826270
However, this might be incentive for Microsoft to push/aid Blizzard to code World of Warcraft for the Xbox Scorpio by adding more threading and DirectX 12, since DX12 has low overhead supporting more threads than previous DX APIs and Asynchronous Computing on which AMD’s GCN architecture excels while current and upcoming consoles have GCN architecture:
http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=61949096&f=188&p=507044223
Windows 10 users could, then, benefit from WoW using more multi-threaded code and DX12 which might cause millions of players to switch to Windows 10 being the only OS with DX12.
Bethesda announced that Doom will get Deathmatch and Private Match modes via its Free Update 3 later this month! We can expect Arcade mode via the campaign eventually…
I’m highly anticipating AMD’s Zen CPUS!