Mega Man 4 (NES)

Some considered Mega Man 4 to be the beginning of the end of the love affair gamers had with the series.  Honestly, I didn’t find that happened until several years later with the countless Battle Network games that changed the formula altogether.

1992 - NES (Capcom)

It came out a couple months after the Super NES was released, but the Nintendo Power Pak Watch previews had me quite excited.  Why not?  Mega Man 3 was (as far as I’m concerned) the best game in the series, and the sky was the limit for 4.  They were adding a few things, such as a Mega Blaster you could charge and unleash for maximum damage, and Fliptop, a tin-can robot who would help you out on certain levels with random items.

I wanted there to be a “Super Mega Man” pretty badly, but I supposed it would show up eventually.  Mega Man 4 would just have to suffice for a while.

I remember renting the game and having that boss selection music stuck in my head, and humming it while at my seat in the school cafeteria.

Mega Man 4 was indeed a fantastic game, but that initial wow factor that had come with 3 was almost non-existant.  It was more of the same with a few additions, but even as a young kid I couldn’t help but just lose interest and explore other games, especially considering the fact that the Super NES had been out for a little while.  16 bit graphics were just too pretty to look at to be ignored.

It was worth a few rentals, but it has yet to make it into my NES collection; aside from being a part of the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, which I own for GameCube.

Speaking of which, I don’t usually go on a tangent from game to game in a single post, but it’s Mega-related to what I’m talking about.

2004 - GameCube, Playstation 2, Xbox (Capcom)

When Anniversary Collection was announced, the only logical choice for me was to buy the game for the Nintendo GameCube.  Yeah, the PlayStation 2 controller would have been decent to play with, but I really couldn’t see myself playing a Mega Man NES game on anything but a Nintendo console.  Every other option seemed like blasphemy!

Somehow, the controls have been seriously messed with.  B is jump, and A is shoot.  Considering the positioning of the buttons on the GameCube’s controller, how could this be messed up so badly?  You can’t even change the button configuration, which is really unfortunate.

Oh, but I found a way around that.

Thumb on B, side of my index on Y.

Pressing Y performs a rapid triple-shot, which works better than even pressing B on an NES controller super-fast.  You’d think the messed-up position my hand is in would make it cramp up after a while, but it really doesn’t.

Game on!

 

This was the first Mega Man title to have a proper introduction to the game’s storyline.  I mean, yeah, Mega Man 2‘s was classic, and the music just made it so great perfect.  It wasn’t an actual cutscene with detailed images, however, so that made this one start off a bit better than the first two.

Playing through this one again made me regret not having the chance to play it that much as a kid.  Like I said earlier, these games may have all followed the same formula, but they’re still a hoot today.

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