You're doing it all wrong!

If you've been following this blog with any regularity, you know that I'm gay for vidya games (in a strictly platonic sense).  And with good reason!  In addition to being the thing I spent my time doing before I learned how to jerk off, it has since become the thing I spend my time doing while I'm rehydrating after jerking off.

Yes, gaming has been very good to me.  For twenty years, it has been a source of entertainment, a creative outlet, and, as a writer, a source of inspiration.  It has also been a near-constant source of frustration.

I've already mentioned the game that turned me hardcore, as well as the game that was an obsession for about ten years of my life.  But there was another major milestone in gaming for me that came 'twixt those two: the first major letdown.  To paraphrase one of my favorite gaming vloggers, growing up there were Mario kids, Zelda kids, Sonic kids, etc.  Me?  I was a Mega Man kid.  With the release of the neo-retro Mega Man 10 upon us, now seems as fitting a time as any to take a look back on one of the downs in the roller-coaster ride of the Mega Man franchise.

I still remember popping my first Mega Man cartridge into my NES upon returning home from the local video store as a kid.  Mega Man 2.  I didn't know what to make of the stage select screen--and even less of Mega Man being hurt from jumping on enemies since, after all, Mario seemed to handle it okay--but I remember picking Heat Man's stage first, because fire was rad.  Of course, I only got to the part with the disappearing and re-appearing blocks.  Pattern recognition at five years of age?  Shit, what was I, Rain Man?

Whoa, was that a combination movie reference and robot master joke?  That's fuckin' meta.

Fuck if I know where to jump next

Alas, being at the whims of a neighborhood video store meant that many of the installments to follow were not mine to enjoy.  Especially since video games were Christmas Presents Only.  But when Mega Man 6 hit, I knew it had to be mine.  So I did what any enterprising young man would do when a new must-have title came out in his favorite franchise and the rental place didn't carry it: I begged for it.

And I didn't get it.

So instead, I earned it.  Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

Wait, how much was it, again?

Ah, that was the other wonderful thing about cartridge-based games.  See, what most people don't know about those little rectangular gems is that they weren't all created equal.  Different games had different amounts of on-board ROM, depending on the size of the game.  Bigger game = more ROM required = more expensive game.  If you were gaming like a Rockefeller, then some games even had their own built-in sound chips, which jacked the price up even higher.

Consistent price-points are a relatively new innovation in console gaming, partially due to the standardization of media.

For whatever reason, I had about $25 stashed away already.  My allowance was set at a static $2 a week.  Provided I kept the cat, India's, litter-box clean.  And clean it was kept.  Probably cleaner than it had ever been since we first got .  In fact, India owed about 8 weeks of being able to duke comfortably to Nintendo Power's 12-page spread of Mega Man 6.  That's some serious butterfly effect shit.  See what I did there?

Speaking of which, my spelling got better.  Yeah, anyone who thinks video games are bad for kids' grades has clearly never seen a kid whose video game purchasing power was riding on the success of his weekly spelling test.  But with an additional $1 riding on a perfect score on that week's spelling test, academics never seemed more important.  Hell, I owe the ability to spell "existence" to Mega Man 6.

Finally, the day came.  I had accrued the necessary $55 MSRP to purchase the blue bomber's latest installment and begged my dad to take me to the Toys 'R Us to pick it up.

And whoa nelly... what a mistake.

The rule of Mega Man games: the less of a spaz the protagonist appears to be on the cover, the shittier the game will be.

 Where to even fucking begin?

Ah, how about with the very first screen you see:

Why!?  Why do your pubes look exactly like your beard?

So, the story is that there's a robot shaft-lubing tournament that needs Mega Man's immediate attention or some shit, sponsored by Mr. X that goes horribly awry.  What?!  You mean it's not Dr. Wily?  Just like it wasn't Dr. Wily in Mega Man 4?  Get that shit out of here.  That "its not dr willy this time we promise o wait a sec sorry ya it is" shit was novel the first time, but pulling it again is just insulting our intelligence.  Insulting our intelligence?  That seems like a great segue into my next point!

wat

Jesus, what a train-wreck.  I mean, Christ just look at Mega Man's face.  He's like, get me out of this ass-fiesta.

Let's go down the list, shall we--in the suggested order of taking on the bosses, no less.

Flame Man: Yeah, an oil-themed stage complete with a turban-wearing boss master.  Nice, Capcom.  Real sweet.
Blizzard Man: It looks like you spray-painted Toad Man blue and slapped a couple skis on him and called it a day.  Yeah, we all loved fighting Toad Man so much we were just dying to have him in another game.  Hey, maybe we can fight Top Man again too?

Plant Man: "Hey I have an idea for a robot master!" "What's that?" "How about Skull Man again, but this time let's make him an even uglier sack of shit!" "Genius!  Let's take lunch... say, what're you eating today?" "Dicks.  You?" "Same."

Tomahawk Man: Thank you, Capcom, for somehow topping your previous atrocity against the Native Americans.

What, was naming your robot master Red Man too subtle?

Yamato Man: He shoots his spearhead at you and then has to go and get it.  Thank you, Capcom, for finally combining adrenaline-pumping BC-era weapon technology with the excitement of picking things up off the ground!

Knight Man: Okay, I'm not going to lie, Knight Man is pretty cool.  Good job with this one, Capcom.  Except wait, Capcom didn't even fucking design him.  Knight man was drawn and designed by a fucking Canadian who won a Nintendo Power contest.  Holy shit, fucking Canada can make better robot masters than the company who invented the series?

Centaur Man: Ugh...

This is your fault, Capcom.

Wind Man: I liked him better the first time, when he was called Air Man.  Although I can't hate on Capcom too much for this one, since it was also designed by a "winner" of the Nintendo Power contest.

What of the gameplay, though?  Shitty robot masters can be forgiven if the challenge is solid.  

Did you see that prissy little jetpack Little Red Robo Hood is sporting in the cover?  Remember Rush, Mega Man's robo-dog friend from Mega Man 3 onward?  That's him.  Yeah, Mega Man disassembled his canine friends and wore him like a muffler.  Any of you fur-is-murder pantywaists have your priorities in the wrong fucking place.  This thing massacred any semblance of challenge this $55 disappointment simulator had left.  You get that thing like three stages in.  And suddenly, Mega Man's gimpy arms-out dork-hop puts the entire cast of NBA Jam to shame.

What's worse, the level design seems to be an afterthought.  Remember those really tense moments in previous Mega Man games that were made all the more memorable thanks to ingenious enemy placement and painstaking attention to detail?  The grueling endurance runs through Snake Man's stage, the environmental slogs through the unrelenting quicksand pits of Pharaoh Man's stage, fighting the torrential rain in Toad Man's stage, the breathless leaps of faith in the intermittent spells of pitch-blackness in Bright Man's stage?  Hell, you could teach an entire course on level design with nothing more than Mega Man 2.

In Mega Man 6, level design is that thing you fly over in your jetpack.

Sure, you could just not use the jetpack and experience all the levels have to offer: very, very little.  The environments are stale, the enemies are the same shit you've seen in every other installment, and the only semblance of creativity comes in the form of four of the bosses having "true" or "fake" versions in their stages.  Beat the "true" one and you get one of four necessary parts to get this piece of heavy-duty ordinance:

 Seriously, fuck you, Capcom

I'm not kidding.

That's your reward.  That smirking cuntgobbler is your bonus for backtracking through the shitshow of level design Capcom decided to gurgle into the toilet bowl that was the Mega Man 6 cartridge.

Ladies and gentlemen, I beat this game in less than two days.  I played it for a couple of hours the night I got it and finished it the next morning before breakfast.  I would have felt less violated if my parents had taken my $55 to the bank, converted it to quarters, and taken turns shoving rolls of them up my rectum in front of my Sunday school class.

Months of scrimping and saving, working my ass to the bone to get those 20 words memorized, assailing my sinuses with the putridity of evergreen scent and cat shit, listening to the ice cream truck driving by, its siren song taunting me with promises of frosty delights unfulfilled.  For what?  A night and a morning with a phoned-in cakewalk of a game.

You know what this thing was?  A formality.  A final Mega Man installment on a dying console to cash in on the last of the NEStards who hadn't cried enough to get a shiny new SNES.  It was a slap in the face of everyone who expected even a shred of the quality of Mega Man X--a game released on the SNES two months earlier--to be preserved in our aging console.

I fucking learned spelling for this game.  This game made me study spelling.  Spelling.  You know what's awesome to learn about when you're nine years old?  Dinosaurs.  Volcanoes.  Fighter Jets.  And I sat in the corner grinding away to learn how to spell "excessive."  I'll tell you what's excessive: the amount of shit Capcom put a nine-year-old through to buy their half-assed excuse for a Mega Man game.  I wish I could unlearn all of that spelling shit straight out of existance.

Ah, that's better.