Death, Jazz, and Mega Man

It's been entirely too long since I threw a rant up here. Shame on me for that. Starting off with a brief summary of events, my birthday was a little over a month ago, and quite uneventful. And then just under a week later, an even month ago as of this writing, my 19 year old cousin, who incidently was one of my best friends, died of a heart attack thanks to some serious malpractice on behalf of a few doctors. I am not mentioning this because I want people to start sending me sympathetic e-mails left and right, if only because I don't want to be reminded about it when I'm sitting down to write a Q&A column. I'm just mentioning it to A- Explain why I haven't been functioning at my best lately, and B- Let people in on this situation who otherwise wouldn't hear about it for half a year or so. Moving on now...

Remember the last few seasons of The Cosby Show when they kept reusing the odd gimmick of "Hey kids! Come downstairs and meet your grandpa, the famous jazz musician!" over and over? That actually happened to me recently. It turns out that my grandmother's cousin's husband is Doc Holiday, whose name you would recognize as an internationally famous jazz musician if not for the fact that there's very little overlap between people reading this and jazz enthusiasts. So anyway, they were in town to visit yon grandmother, and hung around for quite a while. Nice guy for what it's worth.

And then of course we have one last matter for discussion here. The recently released anthology of every Mega Man game (barring of course all the spin-off series). As a whole, they did a really nice job with this. It doesn't have any weird emulation enduced inconsistancies like most such collections. All the games look and sound just like they always have. They didn't try and redo anything either. The only additions they made were an option to up the lives per continue to 5, an easy mode (and if you actually want to use that, you have no right to be playing these games), and an optional "hint system, the one option I honestly found truly useful. When activated, pausing the game brings up a small blurb of advice on the situation at hand from one of the various lame supporting characters from the series (like Roll, or Dr. Cossack's daughter). The important thing though is that, these hints are all delivered in period, 1980s translation era mangled engrish. Real "DODONGO DISLIKES SMOKE." quality stuff which gives you know real help, but is worth a good laugh. I love it. Oh yes, and they also used those two other buttons they had sitting around for auto-fire and one button sliding, which I wouldn't bother with, except for this next point.

One of the people who ported these games is responsable for an absolutely unforgivable attrocity, at least with the GameCube version of this collection. In every Megaman game, and indeed, every platformer ever made, for very very good reasons, A (the rightmost button) is jump, B (the next button to the left) is shoot, and Start (that button right in the middle there) pauses the game and brings up a sub-menu. This is the only way anyone should ever think to set these things up, on any gaming system, with absolutely no exceptions. It's a completely universal convention, which is the only way that really works if you look at how your thumb is articulated. The person whose head I am currently condemning however somehow thought it better to make B jump, A shoot, and Z, the button on the GameCube controller placed intentionally out of the way in case a game needs a button to, say, eject you from your mech before it explodes, or something like that, brings up the weapon switching menu. Oh yes, and you can't remap these to anything sane either. There is a special place in hell for people who do this sort of thing.

It should also be noted that I made the mistake of playing these chronologically. First off, they get easier as they go, and MM1 is quite possibly the most difficult platformer ever created. It would have worked out much better to go backwards. The other problem of course is that the series gets steadily worse as it goes along... well, OK, not quite steadily. MM1 is somewhat rough around the edges. Only 6 bosses, points of the high score variety, and it's really really freaking hard. 2 improves on 1 a bit by, well not having those weird qualities. Still hard as heck though. It's also really really really Japanese. Then you have 3, where the series peaked. They threw in sliding, and it actually added challenge. They threw in Rush, and he was actually USEFUL. More importantly though, 3 is the one where after you beat all 8 bosses, you have to go back through the destroyed, spike filled ruins of half the levels, fighting 2 bosses from MM2 in each of them. I love it. Next comes 4, with it's charged shots, and really lame bosses, and lack of any really good ideas. Have to give'em credit for not releasing it for the SNES though. Then 5 just made me want to puke, 6 isn't all that bad, but they were blatantly on auto-pilot. 7 was the SNES one. Just like the rest of the games but with sloppy controls, 1/3 the screen size, and oh yeah, totally not fun... and then there's 8. The GBA port stops at 6, so it's probably a better option really.