The Game Anthropologist: Mega Man 9 And The Bridging of Generations
October 17, 2008 4:00 PM |
['The Game Anthropologist' is Michael Walbridge's regular GameSetWatch column looking at gaming communities and subcultures. This week, he analyzes how Mega Man 9 doesn't only represent the distant past, but how far we've come, and what's changed about all gamers.]
Okay, so I've gotten to play Mega Man 9 a bit and I think the game is a great specimen, gaming's first meta-period-piece. Some people call Upton Sinclair's The Jungle a snapshot of culture and a piece of history, but not a very literary or entertaining read. It maintains its importance as a cultural artifact, a turning point, something that matters.
Mega Man 9 doesn't particularly innovate or call itself art or revolutionary, but it is a great piece of our period, something that will help old gamers understand new and new understand old.
The game may not have consciously meant to do that, but it had to be in the developers' minds. The thing I love most is that it manages to display the developers' opinions (or at least, the opinions they're allowed to express) of video games in an open state. What I mean is that, while the message Mega Man 9 sends is not readily apparent to those not critical of games, it's not exactly invisible.
Mega Man 9's differences aren't limited to its place in time and its salute to the past. It is also a carpet ushering in the era of the new. It's similar to the first 6 editions, but should not be properly regarded as part of the old series. It's paying respects to gaming's past, while admitting that we've moved on.
The first difference is the required integration into current game systems. This includes a traditional Mega Man menu with "Go Back To Live Arcade" written on it and a save feature that doesn't feature passwords, but simply a hard drive. These are simply requirements, though; the game itself doesn't necessarily have to be different based on this. But it doesn't end there.
The level and boss designs in Mega Man 9 are very different, and so are the ways you beat them. The levels are shorter and the difficulty concentrated. In the original Mega Man games, the difficulty was smooth and buttery. Here, it's chunky and not evenly spread. In a Mega Man level, there is only one objective: get to the end. It was always hard, but here it's a different kind of hard: single, isolated points of concentrated insanely stupid challenge.
There are basically two kinds of levels:
1. Easy, then a difficult miniboss (or series of bosses) battle in the middle, then a moderately difficult section to finish. (Magma, Concrete, Jewel, Hornet. Concrete has 3 elephants instead of a singular mini-boss.)
2. Easy, then an extremely difficult section filled with difficult-timed jumps and plenty of instant-killing pits or spikes. (Tornado, Splash, Plug. Galaxy Man is this pattern, too, though his level is much easier than the other three of this type).
The bosses are different, too. Previously, the bosses would follow set patterns. Here, the bosses follow patterns, but they change depending on your position. In Mega Man 3, Snake Man ran back and forth across the screen no matter your position.
These bosses will stay on one side if that's where you are. The bosses are thus more difficult because their A.I. is improved. They go from being wind-up clocks to responsive, auto-attacking land mines. Their attacks are based on your position.
But here's the catch: they still do the same amount of damage. They have to run into you about 8 or 10 times and then you're dead. And there is no power slide, no chargeable mega buster as introduced in Mega Man 3 and Mega Man 4; nothing to help compensate for the increased dodging difficulty. I wonder if dodging some of them is almost impossible. Hornet Man is extremely difficult but possible to avoid, but I just can't dodge Magma Man at all.
Yet, Magma Man is one of the five bosses I've defeated. And I didn't beat him by using a secret weapon, a gaming feature that can only linger in the past. I beat him by using screws I'd collected over my lives to purchase energy tanks. I kept refilling my life, and then I beat him. It takes a while to earn those tanks, but I got them.
Mega Man thus goes the way of the future: it turns out you really can just muscle your way through the game as if it were another Xbox 360 game with regenerating health and save points. The achievements, awards, and time attacks are there to give you bragging rights and assure you there's still a reward. If you want to see the content, the story, the world, that option is surely open to you.
Games can be difficult; that is allowed. However, to see every part of the game's content, including the ending, is guaranteed as long as you put in the time. That's now considered a right in the games of today, a right that was never demanded in the '80s or even the '90s.
Yes, it's difficult. Sure, you have lives, sure, the save points aren't as convenient as most modern games are, and sure there are extremely difficult bosses, jumps, and landings, but really, Mega Man 9 isn't a remake of the past; it's a tongue-in-cheek admission that we've moved on while maintaining respect for the path paved before. It's "what happens if we make the past meet the new?"
The story at the beginning has a key line from Dr. Light that prefaces Mega Man's design philosophy: "Be careful, Mega Man, you haven't done this in a while." Almost none of us have, and it may be that we will never do so again.
Categories: Column: The Game Anthropologist
4 Comments
One of the things I like about MM9 is that the designers are clearly self-conscious about Megaman's design and difficulty "the way it should be"; it's actually harder than much of the classic series because the devs seem to feel like they have something to honor. There are more sadistic "gotcha" moments than I ever remember from childhood: on a couple of these I couldn't tell whether the game was being faithful to its past or parodying it at my hilarious expense.
The other thing MM9 proves is that just because a game is rigidly structured doesn't mean there isn't a lot of room for the player to experiment and be creative. The weapons are brilliantly thought out, with the speedrunners taking such ingenious advantage of them that they look like they're playing another game entirely. The "beat the game like this!" achievements-- insane tasks as they are-- also effectively offer very different experiences for the madmen who pursue them.
I definitely agree that this is a game that looks both forward and backward: it's also living proof that good design trumps tech, and it asks a great question: What the hell is a modern videogame, anyway?
Dave | October 17, 2008 5:25 PM
amen! i said the same thing on my blog. this would of been a great game back in 1998, but it doesn't hold up now.
once i beat a level, i never want to play it again because it was so frustrating! and i had to play it over and over again so much, i know every pattern so now the level is easy.
it was fun for a bit, but i hope the next remakes is based off the Megaman X series.
heavyness | October 17, 2008 5:34 PM
You don't get it.
The entire piece was a bit haphazard, but I take issue most with your assessment of the 'difficulty' of the game - which instead is one of the smartest, and most critical, elements of the design.
This approach to design is a relic of a time when true agency in games didn't mean "sandbox" but instead resided with 'control.' As the player improves his understanding of the game, his progression advances as well. This is the sort of structure that authentically rewards the player for his familiarity with the world.
People either love or lament the difficulty of this game, but ultimately it's intertwined with what a Mega Man design is truly about - pixel-perfect gameplay precision coupled with a subsequent progressional compensation for a player who understands the rules of it's world.
JHay | October 18, 2008 8:00 AM
I'm a bit unconvinced by this post. Sure, the bosses are hard at first, but eventually you get used to them. This is the same way it was with the old games - you had to learn how they behaved and then you could avoid them. The post reads mostly like you just haven't spent enough time with it yet - it took me two days to beat the game the first time, but just 40 minutes the second time.
Take magma man - he is not actually hard to avoid once you get used to him (small spoiler coming):
Just move to one side of the screen and hop under him when he changes positions. I see there are videos of this on youtube if you are looking for an example.
And what is this about the special weapons being "a gaming feature that can only linger in the past". Each boss here has a special weapon weakness that makes him or her very easy, just like the old games. Indeed, today it's even easier because if you're too lazy to figure out which weapon goes with which boss, you can just look it up online.
In short: just like every other megaman game, this one seems very hard when you've only been playing for a few days. But, also just like the old ones, if you spend a week figuring out the patterns and weaknesses, it's really not so bad.
Chris | October 20, 2008 6:50 AM