Hello readers, I am sure that many of you get upset with my lack of updates to this blog. The truth is that I usually enjoy retro things but rarely give myself time to post about them. However, today is an exception. I am on a brief break before my final Master’s class in February and have been trying to fill it with awesome retro goodness. I dug way down into the retro barrel until I reached my NES games. The first one I picked up? Megaman 2.
Megaman 2 may be 25 years old and legally allowed to drink and smoke but it is still awesome. It was one of the defining moments in the platform genre and easily one of the first NES games after Mario Bros that I became inhumanly obsessed with. Although there is an original Megaman game, it does not have as many of the hallmarks that came with MM2. For instance, MM2 is the first MM game to feature 8 robot masters (the standard for the other games). It also was the first game to feature the ‘look’ of the main character that stayed with the series until it gave way to the Megaman X series. It also featured the use of specialized items that were not obtained from beating a robot master – the humorously vague Item-1, Item-2, and Item-3. In later installments of the game these items because more common and were eventually merged into the Megadog Rush. The original game did not have such items. It also introduced the amazing Energy tank (E Tank) that helped us all survive some of those crazy levels.
I re-played the game over the weekend and found that I still had almost a muscle memory of the levels, jumps and moves that I developed playing the game for 100s of hours as a kid. I still cringed as I ran away from the giant flying dragon that you face during the first level of Wiley’s castle, yelled loudly when I missed a jump by a half of a nanometer and hearing the famous (bloop bloop bloop) noise and rippling circles, and so on. This allowed me to come to the conclusion that even 25 years after it was made, Mega Man 2 is still awesome.
I also want to take a moment to note the awesomeness that is the latest installment of JNES, my flagship emulator. I had been using the 0.82 version for many years but due to some annoying graphical glitches in MM2, I downloaded the 1.1 version. It has a few issues ‘remembering’ some of my settings but it is much more stable than the other version. Also – Game Genie codes are hard coded into the system now. Granted, I only use those codes if I am trying to speed-run something or test a weird hypothesis but rather than digging around on the internet (GameFAQs appears to have discontinued posting Game Genie codes) for hours to find what might not even work in the game, you simply click on the Cheats tab and it will display the list of codes for the specific game you are playing and you simply check or un-check the cheat you wish to use and the gameplay is changed accordingly. How awesome is that?
It only took me about 5 hours of hard playing to get through the MM2 game in its entirety. I failed jumps frequently in the beginning but as my muscle memory warmed back up I noticed that my ability to plan my jumps and motions increased exponentially. Sure, the 8-bit sound effects are deafening even at low volume in high-def headphones and the graphics are nothing compared to even the visual effects on an older cellphone but the challenge and the joy was still there.
I have an extensive library of old school games on the NES that I now wish to play since the graphic glitches appear to have vanished in this JNES install and hope to knock out a few prior to starting my final class. I am certain that I won’t be able to get to all of them but here are a few that I plan to get through:
1. Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest
2. Wizards and Warriors 3: Kuros’ Visions of Power
3. Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link
4. Adventures of Lolo
That’s all for now but perhaps more will follow. This is the RetroGamerBoy saying “Your Princess is in another castle.”