5. Now you have to clear three huge elephant robot things, coupled with a deadly rolling ball they like to play with. You have to jump over the ball, not get sucked into the elephant's trunk, shoot it a little bit, and get back over the ball as it rolls back, making for some hectic bunny hopping. The first one is easy, with a small ladder that helps you shoot it. The second one bounces its ball, making it slightly more difficult to jump over. The third one is freaking impossible, because there are gaps in the ground that will insta-kill you if you get hurt at all. If you die, go back to the start of the level.
That's how far I could get in this tiny little sixty megabyte demo. So, um, it's hard. Maybe if I had played more Mega Man as a kid, I'd know what I'm doing wrong, but I don't. The game can be really infuriating. The sad thing is, this incredible difficulty feels enticing somehow when I'm not playing it. Speaking as a person who doesn't particularly like coffee, it's a lot like black coffee. It tastes bitter and awful, but there's something about it that just makes you miss it constantly. Maybe it's just the caffeine, but soda doesn't scratch that itch. I want that bitterness again, even though I'll hate it when I'm actually drinking it.
Anyway, the rest of the game is appropriately stylized to appear "classic". The 8-bit menu music is shrill and stops abruptly when you choose a menu item or do anything else. The menu itself would be blank and uninteresting even for an NES game. They made sure that this felt like almost an exaggerated old Mega Man game. Most everything about it is frustrating and theoretically badly done, but the game entices me even now. After you run out of lives in the demo, a "Buy the full version!" screen pops up that seems almost insulting, and yet when I'm away from the game, I feel like I very well might buy the full version. I'm stuck in an abusive relationship with this game already.
Article comments