25 Cent Time Machine Review: Mega Man II

Photo taken from ProtoDudesRockmanCorner



Mega Man II, released in 1987, was a great game. It really took the NES to its full potential in terms of graphics and sound, and was loads of fun to play as well. It follows the story of Mega Man, a robot created by Dr. Thomas Light, as he tries to save the planet once again from Doctor Wily. The thing about Doctor Wily is that he's a stubborn villain, simply refusing to learn his lesson after one defeat or even two. I guess he figured more Robot Masters would be the solution this time. Anyone who's played the first Mega Man will know that the first one had six Robot Masters.

I could go on forever about the gameplay, but I feel that people stop reading reviews if they're too long-winded. I'll give a brief synopsis of each level.

The first Master I beat was Wood Man. Wood Man's stage was pretty straightforward, with very few u-turns and no spikes for miles around. Most of the enemies went down in a couple of hits, and there are these roadrunner enemies that jump over you if you stand still. Wood Man himself went down fairly quickly with just the peashooter(I call it that because it's weak and its symbol is the letter P). The weapon I got from him, the Leaf Shield, stagnated in my pause screen until I got up the guts to challenge Air Man.

Next up was Flash Man. I don't really remember much about Flash Man, only that he went down pretty quickly as well. The stage is also fairly simple, even though it looks like a maze at first. The trick is to stick to the upper paths, along which you'll find a fair number of extra lives and an E Tank. E Tanks are useful because they completely fill your life meter when you use them. Flash Man's weapon, the Time Stopper, makes Quick Man's stage a LOT easier to beat, which I translate to "Possible."

After Flash Man I went after Metal Man. Metal Man's stage has a lot of gears in the background and a number of enemies that look like drills. These little buggers have a habit of boxing you in, and they take multiple hits to kill. I ended up resorting to the Time Stopper to get past them. After that, there are lots of conveyor belts and pits. Metal Man himself also went down with the peashooter. His weapon, the Metal Blade, is quite possibly the most useful weapon in the game.

Next we have Air Man. Now, unless I'm mistaken, there's an entire song out there dedicated to how hard Air Man is to kill. Now, for me, it wasn't Air Man himself that made him hard to beat. It was the stage. The entire stage consists of platforms floating above instant death pits(every single one of which I fell into and lost all my E Tanks). And to make matters worse, some of the platforms have horns that hurt you and, more often than not, knock you into the pits. This stage is like Mario meets Castlevania. So after falling more times than a suicidal Humpty Dumpty, I finally made it to Air Man himself, and the Leaf Shield made his fight almost insultingly easy. The one shot of the Leaf Shield I was able to hit Air Man with took out half his health, and I finished him off with the peashooter.

After obtaining the Air Cannon, I moved on to Crash Man's stage, which is actually quite reminiscent of Donkey Kong. Maybe it's all the ladders and barrel shaped enemies. Oh, and there are moving platforms, too, like in 75m of Donkey Kong. Also, the objective is the same: get to the top. Most of Crash Man's stage is platform puzzles. Crash Man himself went down in less than 5 seconds because of the Air Cannon. His weapon, the Crash Bomb, can blow up some types of walls.

Now we get to the stage I hated with a passion, Quick Man's stage. Quick Man is widely acknowledged as the hardest of the 8 Robot Masters to beat. In my case, his stage killed me a lot. Most of the time I spent on his stage was either trying to get past the lasers or grinding for extra lives. I'd heard that the Time Stopper actually kills Quick Man if it's at full energy, but I didn't get to test that because I used it up getting past the lasers. Luckily, the Crash Bomb is another weakness of his.

Onward to Heat Man's stage. By the time I got around to him, I had the Tools No. 2, which meant that I could bypass the hardest part of the level. Most of his stage is reminiscent of Mario because it focuses heavily on platforming and resembles Bowser's castle. The barrel enemies from Crash Man's stage also make an appearance here, and the weapon I relied heavily on there was the Metal Blade, which I also spammed Heat Man to death with.

Now with the Atomic Fire(which sounds nice, but that I haven't really found a use for), I moved on to Bubble Man's stage. Now, this is a nice stage. It's got waterfalls everywhere and most of the stage is actually underwater. Mega Man can jump higher underwater for some reason, but if you don't control your jumps, you'll jump up into spikes. After making it past the water, there's some platforming up until you fight the boss. Bubble Man was weak to the Quick Boomerang, which actually isn't as useful as it sounds.

Wily's fortress consists of four stages and the final boss, who I regrettably couldn't get to before I had to write this. The first four stages are essentially puzzles that make use of the 3 platform tools that you get throughout the game. The first boss of Wily's Fortress is a robotic dragon that can kill you just by touching you. It chases you into a dead end, where there are three tiny platforms that you can stand on. Shoot it in the head repeatedly with the peashooter(nothing else works) to kill it. The second boss is the Gutstank, which I killed with the Quick Boomerang. The third boss is a little room where parts of the walls fly off and try to kill you. The Metal Blade worked best here because you can shoot it directly above you. The fourth boss are the Wall Lasers, which I got stuck on. Its only weakness is the Crash Bomb, but it killed me off before I culd get to all its modules. I'll just have to let the final boss remain a mystery. Sorry.

That wasn't long-winded at all, was it? Anyway, this game was well worth the five dollars I paid for it. It would be worth the fifty dollars Konami is charging for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

This game, along with the first game and the next three Mega Man games, is available on the Wii Virtual Console, but I'll probably get the Megaman Anniversary Collection, which has the first eight Mega Man games.

Stay tuned for next time, when we will be visiting 1998 and reviewing Bomberman Hero, a great game from my own childhood.

25 Cent Time Machine Review: Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong is a game from 1981 we ALL know. The premise is simple: Jump-Man(later known as Mario) is a worker at a local zoo. One day, an enormous gorilla breaks out of the zoo, kidnaps Jump-Man's girlfriend, and climbs to the top of a construction site.
The gameplay consists of four levels that are named based on how high up you are. Each level contains different hazards, such as barrels, pitfalls, fireballs, and springs that try to fall on you. Here's a picture of the first stage of the four:



This level is easy enough. However, that blue barrel falls directly into the fire and creates a fireball. Now, the fireball is there to make sure that you don't dawdle too long on any one girder. It can climb up ladders, so don't think you're safe just because you're a girder above it.

After beating the four levels, you start over at the first, but with a few changes. On your second run, the brown barrels can sometimes fall directly down to the next girder without having to roll all the way down. This alone killed me more times than you'd think.

One hazard is that they went for the realistic interpretation of humans in that they're slightly more vulnerable to falling than Humpty Dumpty filled with nitroglycerine. Seriously, if Jump-Man falls even a little bit, he dies.

The graphics and sound seem laughable today, but back in the 80s, this was state of the art. The music gets repetitive, though.

Donkey Kong was one of the few arcade games that translates well to a home game controller. Most arcade games that don't translate well use some sort of dial or trackball for controls, but the arcade Donkey Kong used a joystick and a button, and actually plays better on a D-pad than a joystick in my opinion.

If you asked me to give the game a rating, I'd ask you to consider the silliness of what you just said, but if pressed, I would have to give it a 9 out of 10. It's not my favorite game, but it's definitely famous and thoroughly deserving of that fame.

In some ways, I consider old games like Donkey Kong superior to most modern games because they were made so that you would have lots of fun playing them for hours on end, and, in an arcade, dump about $20 worth of quarters into them, and still come back the next day to play some more. The things I value in a game mainly have to do with how much fun the game is, and whether I got my money's worth out of it(also known as replay value).

You can get the NES Donkey Kong for about $5.00 U.S. on the Wii Shop Channel. If you can't do that, I'd suggest investing in an NES and buying the game on Amazon. It's probably less expensive and quicker to get a Wii and buy the game over the Shop Channel though.

Our next quarter will take us to 1987, where we will review my absolute favorite NES game of all time, Mega Man II.

25 Cent Time Machine Reviews

Hello. 25 Cent Time Machine here. I created this blog to bring to the attention of the new generation of gamers the charm of those older games that made games like Halo and CoD possible by bringing the concept of home video games into the public eye. Now, let me make one thing clear: I am 17 years old. Most of the games I review will date from before I was born. This will hopefully add some credibility with the new generation because I won't seem as much like an old man telling a story that begins with "when I was your age." I play these games for one reason: having fun. Today's gamers, with their focus on pretty packaging like smooth graphics and story, seem to have lost sight of the true purpose of video games: having fun. The graphics of Tetris may be, so to speak, blocky, but no-one can deny the millions of quarters people dumped into Tetris back in the 80s. 25 Cent Time Machine was created to explore just what made people spend all those quarters on those games. I will by no means limit myslf to older games. There are some newer games I'd like to review because they fell down into the dark depths of obscurity. So, let's pop in a quarter and begin our journey, shall we?