Saturday Pancaking (June 21st, 2014)

I can cook breakfast too if I want. So, let's talk about this here blog. When it started about a year ago, I was posting articles every weekday. That burned me out pretty quick, so I attempted to go for a thrice-weekly update schedule. Then Nanowrimo happened and that burned me out a little, and then some shit happened in March and CAMP Nanowrimo happened and now I'm lucky to post a Nintendo Project post once a week. Long days working outside on home renovations will do that to you. Sap your attention. Keep you from wanting to play Nintendo games and write about pretend Nintendo game gods.

So, here is what we will strive to do from now on. I'm going to take a page from the book of an nice fellow named Froborr. A certain Constant Reader pointed me his way, and he wrote a lot of excellent words about Madoka Magica. Madoka Magica being one of the best goddamn Japanese cartoons I've ever seen, but I won't get into that yet for reasons. Anyway, what this guy does is simple enough. He posts twice a week about his important analysis stuff, and the rest of the days are devoted to just... whatever's on his mind. I think I'll try and do that. The current plan will be to use Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as Nintendo Project days. I will do my best to stick to that schedule and write words about Nintendo games and the pantheon I accidentally created. The rest of the days (not sure about weekends yet) will be used for whatever's on my mind. I'll do what I can to keep it on-topic and interesting. I doubt I'll need a proper Saturday Pancaking thread like Mr. Sandifer because... well, a lot of you are Constant Readers but there's little in commenting going on here. That's fine and I'm glad you're enjoying the words I put here. If I'm wrong, of course, and you'd like a weekly comment thread thing... well, prove me wrong.

I'd better get myself sorted for tabletop gaming today. Call of Cthulhu. Very exciting. Rolling with a new guy after my first PC was ripped in half by a thousand-mawed monstrosity. It's a lovely game. See you soon.

Oh yeah, and I made a new Let's Play for the first time in six months. It's Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins Kai. Hope you like it.

It All Returns To Nothing (Mach Rider, Mad Max, The Mafat Conspiracy)

There's an addendum to be made. Phil Sandifer says that M.U.L.E. isn't really about capitalism at all. If you try to out-capitalism everyone else in there without giving a fig about the economy, you will destroy it. A planet laid to waste by the dread beast GREED's insatiable hunger for money. Irresponsibility, put to point in a Nintendo game. So M.U.L.E. is probably a lot better than I gave it credit for; I'd wager that if I had a PC version of it with instructions, I would enjoy it more. That's not the point here. The point is that this new reading of M.U.L.E. sets us up perfectly for the current entry. That game has a copyright on it of 1983, and it's in 1983 when the same sort of thing happened. The Video Game Crash, when Capitalism almost killed the entire concept of video games. 1983 was also when smarter capitalists in Japan invented the Famicom, and two years later the smart capitalists who killed video games brought it over as a grey box and saved the day. One of the video games they sold with the grey box came in a black box. It was called Mach Rider, and in that game you're a biker in the year 2112. A year ravaged by evil forces. In this wasteland, all you can do is ride. Ride down the road at fast speeds and attempt to avoid being rear-ended by evil go-karters gone mad. It is a fun enough game, albeit difficult. We have often referred to the Dance Apocalyptic and the Cold War here, but this is its own thing. In the wake of the Crash, we have the state of video gaming condensed. A desolate place where crazy people try cutthroat driving tactics in order to survive. To make more money, though money has become meaningless. What is valuable in this world?

Food, water, and gas.. The black oil will flow, after we experience death by a thousand scenarios. Global thermonuclear war, a zombie plague, Captain Trips, drilling too deep into the Earth's core. Whatever it was, it caused almighty Peko the Destructor to swing her blade across the planet. Now only the madmen remain, hoarding their supplies. Some sane folk survive, of course. The biker. The road warrior. Mad Max, they call him. He drives across the dreary cracked roads, only the sounds of his engine keeping him company. The Bangles are not at #1, nor is Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel. The radio only replies with static. All we have are the sounds of the engine, and exploding dynamite thrown from rubber fortresses. We can raid a base and put some raving lunatics out of their misery. In the absence of capitalism, we have bartering. Trade your food and water for gas... or if you dare, an arena pass. Compete for glory and victory, at risk of your car being rammed off an edge and exploding in a burning heap with you inside. So that's always nice. It's not very fun, but once Trenzalore has come the fun must end. While we're here, we can see what sparked this entire tiff that blew up the powder keg. Trenzalore herself is nothing more than a Mafat Conspiracy, after all.

Ah yes. The Mafat Conspiracy. That heady incident involving a crashed satellite and threatening letters sent to the Americans and the Soviets. The only man who could handle this nonsense was... expert sniper Duke Togo. For some reason. Journey to Paris, home of the six Mona Lisas, and find that B jumps and A attacks. Backwards and odd, but Duke Togo never plays by the rules. He cannot quite stop the end of the world, because he enters buildings and finds men who throw fucking kunai at him... and he can't draw his gun fast enough to stop them. He's an expert sniper, not a quick draw whiz. Christ, Duke, get your act together. I thought you blew up robot Hitler's brain! How did you even manage that? God, no wonder Peko struck us all down. You have potential, Duke, but you need to straighten up and fly right. No wonder video games died... but the Lady Capitalism accidentally created a higher power when she brought forth the grey box.

She created magic.

I'm On My Way, I'm Making It (M.C. Kids, M.U.L.E., M.U.S.C.L.E.)

The good starship Nintendo Project has made her way to the world of M. What do we find to begin with? The foe of Communism herself, the very essence of entropy that the Dread Beast GREED pays homage to at his shrine of sawblades and slot machines. Here, then, are three worlds ruled by a new entry into our ridiculous pantheon. The Goddess Of Greed, Lady Capitalism. A billowing dress made of currency flows against the invisible winds of the cosmos as we venture into her realm. This is something that we must accept, as part of the Nintendo Project. These video games have their various merits, and the grace of Valya's breath has inspired some of their creators. At the end of the day, though, it is Lady Capitalism who keeps things alive. The games we are looking at here were made to make money for their creators and license owners. Video games are a business... as is fast food. Witness current events as we glance at M.C. Kids, a platforming game with a heaping dose of high-fructose corn syrup courtesy of McDonald's. It borrows heavily from a little video game called Super Mario World. At the end of all things, at the beginning of the downfall of this realm... it is Lady Capitalism who strikes while the iron is hot. She keeps the fire going for another three years, and staves off the dropping blade of the Destructor. Not so much to preserve cultural touchstones and create the unlimited spark of creativity for the twilight years of the NES... but to make money. This is why Mega Man 5 was on NES and not the Super Nintendo. Fiscal graphs and pie charts and investments dictated it as such. We have seen behind the curtain, and it is Lady Capitalism on a bed of money, her eyes seductive and inviting. Lay with her, and the world is yours.

Which world? Any world. Go to a new planet on behalf of your lover's interest. Earn money by mining with robotic mules, or M.U.L.E.S as they should be called. Rowdy Roddy Piper found the truth with the magic sunglasses. THIS IS YOUR GODDESS. M.U.L.E. is probably a very good game when you have friends. Indeed, it appears to have a four player mode... although the NES itself, the alchemical box, only has two controller ports. To extend this and play with two more, purchase a Nintendo Four Score. Use your Lady's currency to earn more money for her. Strip mine the planet bare, buy, sell, buy buy buy sell sell sell make money make money consume purchase consume. Having conquered planet Earth in the 1980s, and defeating the socialist scourge with her cavalier, Reagan... the good Lady Capitalism has set her sights on other worlds. The galaxy is her oyster, and for a man like me this is all just nonsense. These numbers mean nothing and I don't understand half of what I'm dicking around with. This is a relic best appreciated with time, and I have chosen the socialist approach to playing it with my half-baked emulation of the damn thing. With the power of the Internet and my own grey morals, the data files present in the fifty dollars of plastic and microchips that Lady Capitalism's agents attempted to sell now belongs to the state. Is the Goddess Valya a Communist agent? Who the hell knows?

The licensing train doesn't end here. Have a tie-in based on a line of tiny action figures. M.U.S.C.L.E. The marketing agents of the Lady say that you'll see a 19% increase in sales if you use an acronym. Those goddamn idiot kids think acronyms are cool as hell. We don't even know what M.U.S.C.L.E. fucking stands for yet! We just bought the rights to some Kenny-man manga from Japan and sold the figures here! We bought the video game rights while we were at it, too! It's wrestling! You know, like Hulk Hogan and Andre The Giant! What? What do you mean the game's shit? There's no indication of what to do? There's a super orb that the CPU opponent can get that makes them kick your ass even faster? Who gives a shit, they bought the game! So yes. M.U.S.C.L.E. is kind of trash. While we're in the world of wrestling, I just had a thought. A current wrestler on the WWE is a burly Russian brute named Rusev. His manager is a sexy Russian lady named Lana, and every time she comes out she talks shit about America and praises Vladimir Putin. It is somewhat related to what we are talking about here (capitalism/socialism and wrestling)... and it even fits the time period, too. M.U.S.C.L.E. came out in 1986, and that's what Lana and Rusev feel like. A gimmick from 1986 dredged up to try and make the WWE money.

Frankly, the only place we can go from here is the end of the world.

Wistful Thoughts At One-Eighth Earth's Gravity (Loopz, Low G Man, Lunar Pool)

Loopz is an NES game that I went into completely blind. This turned out to be a mistake. These games were not created to be played blindly. You were meant to open a cardboard box and remove a pristine cartridge from inside. Maybe it came with one of those dark game sleeves, with Nintendo emblazoned on it in red. I never used those things. Maybe I should have. It would help the contacts not collect dust. Not that I'd know that then. More importantly, the game would have come with a manual. Something to tell you how to play. Notably, on the Japanese side of things, Shinya Arino of Game Center CX always goes into his challenges blind. If things should stump him, only then does he resort to the manual. Maybe Japanese sentiment rewards beating a game without looking at the controls or secrets in the manual as some sort of cool thing. I mention all of this because I have absolutely nothing to say about Loopz on NES. It is a game whose point completely baffles me. From what I can gather, you hit buttons and make shapes that resemble tetrominoes, of all things. A puzzle game with tetrominoes. It'll never work. You do this by hitting the button on a grid of green and make the grid red. The shapes get weird, and you can't make a shape if there's any red over it. It's hard to explain, and the point of the game is lost on me. I could educate myself, but it's not intuitive at all. Bleh.

Rather amazingly for me, "not intuitive at all" is a well description for Taxan's Low G Man. I should properly talk about gravity again, since we have a game where the protagonist is literally named Low G Man. He also, to quote some angry Nintendo reviewer from somewhere, "jumps like he's on the goddamned moon". I wasted the Talking Heads song quote on Mega Man 5. Shit. Well, like I said. Not intuitive at all. You shoot bullets at robots with the B button but it only freezes them. Great. A game where you can only freeze your enemies? Soon the screen was crawling with them, but then I realized. You freeze the enemies, and then you can do a jumping attack. Thrusting down with some sort of spear. Gravity! After that, Low G Man became... pretty fun! There's a certain satisfying charm to spear attacking dudes from below. This is not an unsung classic of the NES. Nor is it the dreck and detritus of the system. Low G Man is what you mostly got with the NES. A servicable action game for a small child to play in their free time. Something to rent from the video store, to spend a casual weekend on, when not playing outside or watching cartoons. I'd dare to call it quintessential NES. It's not your big name game, but I imagine there being some sort of nostalgia for it from people. It's that kind of game. There are a few games that I hold in that regard myself. Castlevania II, for instance. Or WURM. There's an entry to look forward to.

Hell, here's one more I remember: Lunar Pool. Of course, I didn't remember it as Lunar Pool. Turns out I remembered it as Lunar Ball, from a 31-in-1 pirate cart. You want to talk about nostalgia, well here's this thing. It even had games that never got official English releases on NES. Like Popeye, or Circus Charlie. Lunar Pool is... well, pool. With a background that suggests it's played on the moon. I'm not sure if low gravity is in effect here, but oh well. Everything I just said about nostalgia is true for Lunar Pool. Playing it now, it's just pool. Nothing to get excited for, and hardly the best thing on NES... but then I think of being 7 years old again, in that same place where I played Dr. Mario and the other three Super Mario games, fiddling with 31 in 1 and making my way through all these games. The wonders of Popeye and Circus Charlie and god knows who else... as well as Lunar Ball, with its very nice music. I was fascinated. Here I am, over 20 years later and playing a dim reconstruction... and writing about it for the people of the future. Despite all that, I'm still maybe only a mile or two from where it all went down. I actually saw 31 in 1 again recently, at a comic book store. I lacked the funds to get it, but for just a moment we crossed paths again. How lovely a relic she was. How lovely a letter L was. We cross out of this galaxy, having begun... Jesus, in February? With that horribly morose post about how my friends "saved" me? God in heaven.

Well, on to M. We may have prematurely dealt with its biggest hitters... but there's another one I'm looking forward to. A Dark Queen that must be praised, a mythic force among herself.

All praise be to the Huntress, Champion of Peko The Destructor.

They Sleep In My Mind (Little Samson, Lode Runner, The Lone Ranger)

Huh? What were we talking about again? Feels like I've been asleep for three months or something. We passed out on the couch watching some movie about kung fu brothers, or some such bullshit. Then the weird dreams. Childhood and faith in friends overflowing. A bunch of sonnets about a little blue guy. Still, I'm up now. Let me rub the gunk out of my eyes and tell you about... Little Samson? Now there's one that was forgotten. You can easily go over what "everyone knows" about Little Samson. Really, the point is that not many people know about Little Samson. It's a Taito game that came out in 1992, well after the Super Nintendo. The NES was already dying, and the populace at large didn't give a fig about it. Little Samson, then, became an alchemic object defined by its scarcity. I know that it is one of the rarest Nintendo carts. In fact, experiment time. I'm going to look it up on Ebay. Right now. Four hundred dollars at least. Jesus. Rarer and more desired than even Earthbound. An object defined by its forgotten nature. It was good enough to want, but nobody in 1992 wanted it. By the time the ROM pirates sailed the seven seas of the Internet and discovered the treasures within, it was too late. It was a rarity. Something to be hoarded in a dragon's den. That's half of the story when it comes to Little Samson. Let me tell you who it reminds me of; another forgotten face. A man who called himself L0rdVega. With an 0. He was a Let's Player, a somewhat famous one back in the heady days of 2008 or so. He briefly had a thing going with one of my other LP friends, and then they broke up and he fell out of the world. Where did he go? We don't know. We may think of him at times like this, but for the most part he sleeps in the back of the mind. Forgotten. Just like Little Samson, he slumbers deep within the mind's eye. Now and again, he will escape... but escape is difficult. You can ask Lode Runner about that.

Oh, this is an old one. The title screen says 1983. 1984. Some guy is locked away in a dark place and needs to get all the gold, and avoid the other guys running around trying to blink him out of reality. Are we inside the dragon's den now? Is the gold part of his hoard? Run, Lode Runner. Scoop up the copies of Little Samson. There's a complete in box Earthbound there as well, still in the shrink wrap! My god, if you make it far enough you might even find Stadium Events! The pinnacle of rarity! Dare we wish for Nintendo World Championship? These names hold a certain power, and the electronic worlds they create are altered by them. Most of these rarities are moreso regrets. The world had its chance at cheap Earthbound, when the clearance sales happened. Few of you cared. A vision comes to me now. A nice young man looking at Mega Man 6 on the cheap, and taking advantage of the deal. Not to hold it on a shelf, but to enjoy it. Is Lode Runner held on shelves? Probably, but not as an object of scarcity. I can get a complete copy for less than 25 dollars if I so chose. It is a game. A game with puzzles to solve that is fun, maybe.

Now the world of collecting has collapsed into anarchy. Like the Old West, a world of bandits charging ludicrous prices for pieces of rare plastic with microchips inside. We need a hero. A Lone Ranger. This one is a rarity. Not just in collectible terms, where it will run one 30 dollars for just the plastic... but in terms of gameplay. It reminds me of Zelda 2 and its endless adventure, except top-down. And in the Wild West. With shops and punching and shooting and my god this is brilliant and I want more of it. Oddly enough, I don't even remember it for that. No, I remember it for one last forgotten relic of the past. Nintendo Power. We've talked about it before. Or someone else did. We must really sit down and discuss it proper, but Nintendo Power itself is a forgotten relic now. They do not make them any more. The Lone Ranger is where Howard Phillips bowed out. After helping a spiky-headed punk repel a bandit attack, he gave away his bow tie and rode off into the sunset. Like L0rdVega would 20 years later. I don't know where either of them went, but I like to think that they had adventures too numerous to name.

And that's how I choose to remember it.

Mega Man Unlimited

So, we just spent quite a lot of time talking about Mega Man out of sequence. I'm not quite done talking about Mega Man, but in the context of the NES I am. Incidentally, I really need to come up with a name for these non-Nintendo Project posts. I know Phil has "Pop Between Realities" on TARDIS Eruditorum, but I need to think up a good Nintendo-related one. Expansion pak? Disk system? Controller 2? Help me out here, if you're reading and clever.

We'll be back tomorrow with regular programming. I believe Little Samson is the next game after Little Nemo and the power of dreaming. To finish off the whole Mega Man thing, I'm going to link a review that I wrote recently; a review of a Mega Man fan game called Mega Man Unlimited. See, Mega Man didn't really "die" with the NES. The classic series eked out two or three more games before going quiet in the '00s. Then they came out with two new games that were styled after the old NES games, and they were bloody brilliant. Then things went quiet again, and that's what we're looking at now. Look, I go into it a bit more in the review proper.

So please. Read all about Mega Man Unlimited over on Sliders 'n Socks. Hope you enjoy it. See you tomorrow.

May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favor (Mega Man 6)

(Well, here we are. Mega Man 6. The last one on NES, but not the last one proper. The Mega Man series would go on, but for Nintendo Project purposes... this is the last song for our hero in blue. Fitting, then, that the focus of this entry is from well after the NES was dead. The true last days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Here are some memories of Mega Man 6 and the end of the whole mess, courtesy of a Mr. "CarpetCrawler". Fare thee well, Mega Man.)

Does anybody else miss Funcoland? Because I sure as hell do.

Hell, in that same regard, I miss GameStop. No, I know GameStop is still around, that's not what I mean. I'm not talking about this Power to the Players bullshit, or the cramped and overly-professional, fake, and completely impersonal look the store has now. But I miss the way things used to be. Wall-to-wall of older video games and also enough space to fit newer ones. I have so many memories of both Funcoland and GameStop and the retro goodies I got my hands on. The Power Glove. The Game Genie. Holy shit they made educational Mario games? No, I don't want your cleaning kit. Yes, I understand that you guys hawk them so much because you make commission on them, it doesn't not make them a ripoff.

This one Funcoland that was right next to our mall (which had a Planet Comics, Eletronics Boutique, and GameStop inside, which made no sense to me. Granted the only one that carried retro games in the mall was EB, and its “retro” was a bunch of really common Game Boy games) even had one of the coolest things ever, this really neat-o Mario statue doing his V-for-victory pose. Clearly from before Miyamoto decided that pose was too silly to have Mario keep doing.

Sadly, reality crept in and once it became clear that selling the older games was doing nothing profitable and taking away space from newer games, they changed their business model and started phasing the retro games out. All of those weekly trips to Funcoland by the mall, the GameStop nearby that really oddly designed pizza place, now they're gonna be a rarity or just a once in a blue moon kinda thing. And that's exactly what happened. The retro game collecting bubble didn't start to grow until the rise of using eBay and Amazon and other websites, so GameStop had no justifiable reason to continue selling their old stock. They had already destroyed the Mom and Pop used game shops in our area, and anything else that tried to start up in their wake died out because they just didn't have the game coverage. We even had a cool little game store that sold import games (the first shop I had ever seen that sold Japanese games. I was so tempted to buy Mario Story there before the game came out here, not knowing any better and not realizing the game wasn't going to work anyway.)

Now what does this have to do with Mega Man 6? Don't worry reader, we're almost there.

Other than hoping to find luck with thrift stores it was pretty hard to hunt for NES games for a bit for me. But then alas!! Hollywood Video, a now long-gone video/DVD rental chain that was Blockbuster's only competition, had opened up a little area next to their store for video games, and it even had old games!! Walls of neat accessories, consoles games hidden in a glass counter (a practice that I'm seeing everyone try now), it was like a nice new haven for the games I enjoyed the most. The place even had a silly name: GameCrazy.

I wish I had only happy memories of GameCrazy. I did get some good deals there, but the employees that worked there were miserable, greedy collecting misers. I am still angry that I was too young to put my foot down on the asshole that refused to sell me a "Not For Resale" copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time because they wanted it. No but like seriously, I was a coy 10, 11, 12 year old whatever my age was so I knew that that was a valuable little cartridge, but who does that to a little kid? What kind of grown-ass manchild do you have to be? I'm still salty over that. In general that was my main problem with the store, the employees either didn't know video games (later on I learned that they started putting main-room people in there to do shifts sometimes, which explains that) or were too busy being conceited gamers and it made for a miserable experience sometimes. Video game stores are always extremely intimidating. Employees are too judgemental and will lambast you for your taste in gaming, whether to your face or behind your back.

Good memories though are a-plenty. Buying Bubble Bobble!! Local Smash Bros. tournaments!! I don't know why but I even remember buying specifically The Adventures of Dino-Riki!! That game is one tough tamale. We even reserved new games from there. Dynasty Warriors games were my obsession for a brief while when I was younger (I still play 'em but holy jeez I used to play those games all day when I got home from school) and I reserved one or two from there!! And then there were the days when Mom felt like browsing the movies section, and me finally starting to introduce myself to horror movies I'd run over to the horror film rentals and read the boxes.

But my best memory is plopping down somehow only $15 to pick up today's Nintendo Project subject, Mega Man 6. And the sucker even had the instruction manual. Hell I was like 12 or 13 when I bought the game there and even then I realized they clearly weren't pricing it properly. But oh well, their loss is my gain. It won't be the first time I benefit from an improper game price in the future.

Now, before we get ahead of ourselves here, let me remind you all that I am strange with my Mega Man tastes. I cannot stand 4, it's my least favorite Mega Man and I'm happy that I finally beat it recently because it was the monkey off of back of the NES Mega Man games, the only one I had not beat. And I love, LOVE Mega Man 8. Most everyone agrees that 8 has one of the best soundtracks in the game, but to me everything about it is fantastic, from the gameplay to the mechanics, to the Robot Masters, and even the cheesy cutscenes have a place to me. Heck, 8 is better than Rockman and Forte to me. Yes I did go there.

When I purchased the game, I had already known ahead of time that 6 was considered the "weakest" of the franchise. And it's true, Mega Man was clearly running out of steam and Capcom was already planning out his cooler alternate, X. Heck, Capcom didn't even want to publish the game for North America. Nintendo of America had to do it. And looking at the plot of this game, I can understand the flak it gets. Like, are we really kidding ourselves here? Mr. X? Were they even trying anymore? At least 5 had the appeal of Proto Man going rogue, and 4 actually technically had a new villain in Dr. Cossack.

Sometimes I feel like they were trying to be ironically funny by putting no effort into making Mr. X look pretty much the exact same as Dr. Wily. But at the same time it's just... what does it accomplish? And knowing at Mega Man X was being made at the same time just adds to the overall feeling of "literally who cares, just finish the game already" from this game. And it's a shame too, because for all of its goofy cheesiness, the game's actually pretty... good?

This game was special even before it was developed. Japan had long been holding contests to let kids send in their own designs for robot masters, but this time Nintendo of America was also involved!! Nintendo Power held a contest where if you sent in your own robot master, there was a chance it would be featured in the game as well!! So which robot master came from North America? YAMATO MAN.

OK, OK, I may be full of shit.

Knight Man and Wind Man are the two that came from here. Knight Man is a pretty cool looking robot while Wind Man... well, his music is pretty cool. And he happens to be one of the easiest robot masters to beat.

Lamest looking robot master? Probably Centaur Man. Which is a shame because his game track is easily the best, and far and away one of my favorite tracks in the entire franchise. Just a super pretty chill tune that has been ripe for some AMAZING remixes, like this mix, which is just lovely.

In general this game has some strong music. Mr. X's theme is another track that stands out in particular. Sure it's kinda lazy of them to use it for all four of his stages, but I'm glad it's a legit good song. I don't mind hearing it for four straight levels to be honest. The Mega Man games are known for having good soundtracks, but this game everyone tends to sell short when it's honestly some of the best Mega Man music in the franchise. For real, give the soundtrack a shot, you won't be disappointed. It might be a little different from the other games (this feels like hard-rock-ish than the others to me) but it's still a great listen and I think the alternative style makes it a cut above some of the other Mega Man games.

If there's one thing I'm not happy with it's the loss of Rush. Rush is adorable!! How dare they get rid of him!! I like Mega Man's new power-up system (he has "Rush Adaptors" which allows him to fly for an extended period of time or give him a super-powered punch that is necessary to use if you want to find all of this game's secrets) and the Energy Balancer is INGENIUS and literally everything that Mega Man fans had wanted all-along, but it's all not the same without my adorable robotic dog. Capcom apparently understood this and brought him back for the future installments.

You also won't hear me praising this game's difficulty. Of all of the Mega Man games, this one is probably one of the easiest to gimmick. Buster-only, Power Mega Man-only, and various other gimmicks are pretty easy to do in this game. But I'm not one to think that if a game's too easy then it's clearly bad.

My cartridge of this game holds a lot of special value to me. My blossoming into a major collector of NES games is a period of my life that I kinda wish I could relive the experience of. Just the idea of looking eBay and various websites and being like, "I'm gonna have ALL of these!!" and finding the random NES game I don't have in a thrift shop or garage sale. I'm only about 60% done, but owning 493 NES cartridges is no feat to sneeze at.

Mega Man 6 is one of my first ever truly special good deals I've ever had as an NES collector. For both the cartridge and manual I paid only like, $15 for it, which was unheard of then, let alone now. It wouldn't be my last truly special deal, but it was the first one I was especially proud of. It was the first one that made me feel like a collector. Hence it holds a special value to me, as well as a special place in my heart.

Of course, the game is pretty all right, too. ;)