As you certainly don't know, as I'm doing this anonymously, my absolute favorite art form in the world is video games. My parents bribed me with an NES in exchange for stopping sucking my thumb at 6 years old. I'd played games before at friends' houses, but I'd never had a console of my own until this magnificent beast came into my life. It was one of the few examples of my parents giving me access to popular art, because I don't think they thought of video games as art.
What I love, and always will love about video games, is that they fulfill the longing in the human heart for greatness in ways no other art form does for me. We all want to be heroes, to be loved, to be important, and video games offer us a chance at that. They are much like the "choose your own adventure" books that I read as a kid. They put you in the driver seat of accomplishing greatness. They immerse you in a world in which you are the hero, and only your actions can save the day.
But, not all video games are great! Accomplishing simulated greatness, as a game designer, is TREMENDOUSLY hard. This film review by Roger Ebert gets at what it is that is required for truly great escapist art design. You, as the designer, are always tiptoeing the line between presenting what is essentially impossible (in the case of the film, having super powers, and more or less defeating an evil empire single-handed) in such an engaging way that the viewer believes not only that the impossible could actually happen, but that it could happen to them!
This is why the best heroes in fiction, the ones that hold our attention the most, are blase and unimpressive at the start. Much like us. Harry Potter is an orphan who lives in the cupboard under the stairs. Luke Skywalker is a whiny teenager. Neo has 0 personality whatsoever. Gordon Freeman is a mid-level scientist stuck in an enormous bureaucracy that he doesn't understand. Mario is...an Italian plumber? And Mega Man, the topic of this post, is a lemon shooting, low jumping, far-less-cool-looking-than-the-robot-masters, frequently dying robot that can only get strong enough to beat the game by stealing the powers of the robot masters who repeatedly trash him.
I first encountered Mega Man after renting Mega Man 3 on NES for doing well in school or something. It was gorgeous, fun, and frustratingly challenging. Especially for a boy who thought Super Mario Bros. was hard (it is, but not as hard as Mega Man!). I later got Mega Man X as my second foray into Mega Man, as a birthday present with my shiny new Super Nintendo. This was where I really dove deep into Mega Man. As Egoraptor convincingly shows, the original Mega Man was incredible, but Mega Man X improves on it in just about every way.
It puts you fully in the driver seat of a rags to riches story, and it teaches you how to be great from the first menu. Learning in video games is necessary, but learning generally takes three forms, which I have named intuition, iteration, and instruction. The best games maximize your time in intuition and iteration, and minimize your time in instruction. Why? Because instruction "breaks" the illusion that you ARE X (Mega Man's successor, introduced in Mega Man X)! X, of course, would require no instruction! Dr. Light surely taught him how to wall jump, shoot, and jump. But the player doesn't necessarily know that. Additionally, instruction is just boring! So how should the player learn, while also not breaking the illusion of greatness?
First is intuition. The process of learning by your surroundings, or by what appears to be apparent to you, is by far the most appealing way to learn in video games, because it reinforces the illusion that you ARE the hero! You aren't playing him in a game. You are him! Thus, all of the intuitive learning approaches that Egorapter highlights in the video, slide right by you. You're learning, but you think you're just playing a game! As a great hero! And you're learning how to do so without breaking the wall between reality and fantasy.
Second is iteration. All intuition games are ok, but they generally lack in one important detail. A quest that's too easy, that doesn't require any repetitions, breaks the wall too! Iteration is the process of practicing. Working through a Mega Man level, one obstacle at a time, until it becomes habitual, is just part of learning how to beat it for the first time. If the quest isn't difficult, then completing it isn't particularly heroic.
I recently purchased a copy of the Mega Man Legacy Collection (contains Mega Man 1-6) for my 3DS, and it was an incredible purchase. I had the Mega Man Anniversary Collection (contains Mega Man 1-8, as well as 2 Mega Man fighting games) for Gamecube, but the controls are reversed from their original, and I think Mega Man has translated very well into a handheld game. So I made it my goal to play through Mega Man 1-10, followed by all of the X's, and then finally finishing up the Mega Man Zero games, which I started an eternity ago.
I've beaten 1-6 now, and am working on 7 on the Anniversary Collection. I enjoyed 1-6, but made one very serious mistake, which I am rectifying on 7, and I'll circle back to 1-6 someday. I played them with save states, which I abused on 1-6. So while beating the bosses was ultimately rewarding, and I know that 1-6 are actually better games than 7, I'm actually enjoying 7 more. Why? Because I completely removed the iterative function from the game, or at least removed all the risk from iterating. Slogging through each level, dying over and over, until you finally beat the boss and get that precious password (except for Mega Man 1, where some limited use of save states to create faux passwords is a must, in my opinion), is simply a part of the Mega Man experience that you just can't miss. I'd give Mega Man 7 a 8.0/10. It treads little new ground, but it's Mega Man, and Mega Man rules!
So grab the Legacy Collection, or the Anniversary Collection, but don't use save states. They'll cheapen your excitement at going zero to hero, and Mega Man does that better than anyone else! Enjoy! The next review will be about my pick for the greatest modern imitator to Mega Man's perfect balance between iteration and intuition. Feel free to guess what's up next in the comments below if you want!
- TRO
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