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Friday 12 January, 2007
I played Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters on MacMAME. I only discovered MAME recently, and it's really blown me away. The Mega Man game I played is a lot of fun. The plot, like most Mega Man games, is cliched and not very important-- the good Dr. Light creates Mega Man to battle the evil robots of Dr. Wiley. That's not to say that the plot is totally irrelevant-- there are three plot lines that can be played with four main characters. Each plot line has a different objective-- find Dr. Wiley, rescue the girl or find the stolen parts which will give you special powers. The different paths all end the same; you'll get the powers, the girl will be OK, and you'll fight the same final boos regardless of the path you choose.
The gameplay is excellent. I am most familiar with the Mega Man games for the Famicom and SNES. This arcade version is primarily different in that the stages are just boss fights, where the Nintendo games were definitely level-oriented, with boss fights along the way and in the culmination of the level. That makes the Nintendo games more about memorizing the level-- knowing where to jump and where to stand your ground, etc. In this arcade game, everything is necessarily sped up; you get to the boss right away, collect new weapons after each boss, and you can switch characters any time you die. Music and sound effects are much improved in this arcade version. Another thing that was new for me was the player characters. I have played some of the Mega Man X series on SNES, but playing as other characters is fairly sparse and mostly driven by the plot. The four characters you can play as have similar powers, but have different power-ups, physics, and so on. Mega Man was the easiest for me to play, but I tried the other characters and enjoyed the contrast, though it is somewhat difficult to adapt in a game like Mega Man, where intuitive understanding of game physics is so important.
The graphics of the game are fantastic. There is an appeal that well done 2d graphics have that the most processor intensive 3d (or even cell-shaded) graphics can never have. Backgrounds are stylish, explosions and energy bolts look great, and character animations are smooth and really beautiful. Playing on an emulator can really destroy gameplay and even subtle problems with graphics can ruin the experience, but MAME seemed to run the game flawlessly. (I am especially surprised because MacMAME is designed for OS X, but not intel processors.... Therefore, when I play Mega Man on my intel-based Mac, I am literally emulating an emulator.) The one problem I had with the presentation of the game is that the level is only slightly wider than the screen, so occasionally an enemy will be standing at the opposite edge of the level from you, but is mostly or entirely not displayed. The only way to re-orient the screen is to move toward the enemy. Needless to say, this can be a frustrating problem.
Overall, Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters is a really fun game. My main problem is that it's not especially long and doesn't have a ton of replay value. On a real arcade this might be somewhat different, but with virtual quarters, beating the game straight through wasn't especially challenging, though the final boss and a couple of other enemies did give me a bit of trouble. If I had only played as Mega Man, I probably couldn't have played this game for an hour and a half. Having a number of reasonably different characters to play as does increase the value of the game a lot. I would definitely recommend this game to a friend, and I'd love to hook it up to my tv when some friends were coming over.
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