Nostalgia notwithstanding, fiero is the only reason that Mega Man 9 works as a game. There are few surprises to be gleaned from interacting with the environment - Capcom intentionally employed technology and game design concepts that have existed since the late '80s. Super Mario Galaxy it ain't.
That's partly why I was immediately drawn in by the experience. In the last two decades, games have been getting easier and more forgiving in an effort to broaden their audience. Mega Man is more than simple fan service; the developers are harkening back to a simpler time, when games didn't have to be all things to all people.
But my longing for bygone days quickly gave way to shock and mild concern. When I first played Mega Man 2, I was, by my calculations, around 7 or 8 years old. I barely had the patience or dexterity to tie my own shoes, let alone spend hours jumping on spikes and falling into bottomless pits just to beat a game. Yet I probably completed Mega Man 2 a half dozen times, despite the handicap of not owning an NES.
Fiero is a powerful feeling. It's enough to make a grown adult weather the slings and arrows of outrageous minibosses for a brief sip. Yet as a fledgling gamer, I was practically swimming in the stuff. Fiero was the currency of the NES; most games had little to offer other than the satisfaction of beating them to a pulp. And just as Sesame Street taught me the alphabet and why it's nice to share, games taught me that real fun is the satisfaction of a job well done - even if that job is tedious, unfair and borderline infuriating.
Could I have inadvertently stumbled into the root cause of my videogame OCD? Had I finally discovered why I replayed games on the highest difficulty even after they'd become stale and predictable, or why I printed walkthroughs with instructions for unearthing every hidden item just so I could attain a 100 percent completion? Is this what all those hours in my friends' basements, wrangling with an NES controller while their parents begged us to go outside, added up to?
I realized at that moment that I didn't hate Galaxy Man. He had no beef with me - he was just doing his job. And watching his absurd, frisbee-shaped form slowly fade into the "game over" screen wasn't a waste of time. I was being programmed, just as he had been.He wasn't my enemy; he was just a proxy, a stand-in for my own overriding need for arbitrary achievement.
When I finally killed him, I didn't feel fulfilled or relieved. He was an innocent bystander, caught in the crossfire between morbid sentimentality and futile regret. Galaxy Man died in vain.
Magma Man, on the other hand, got what was coming to him. Bastard.
Jordan Deam believes that Dr. Wily's uncanny resemblance to Sigmund Freud is no coincidence.
