Let me set the scene for you. It’s 1991, and Nintendo is king. For some kids, at five and six years old, your parents and close family are your entire world. For others, all that mattered was a 10″ X 8″ grey box, that came across the ocean to give us the greatest entertainment money could buy. The best Nintendo characters were more than fiction to us, they were our best friends, and the worlds they lived in seemed just as real.
I remember getting my Nintendo NES system on a cold Christmas morning, in the small apartment that my family was living in at the time. Up until that moment, all of my experience with the console, and video games entirely, came from the brief moments that my older cousins would let me into their rooms. But now, I was in. Now, MY LIFE was an older cousin’s room. I was among the elite, and the sky was the limit. I can not stress enough, how much this meant to me at the time.
Every time I got a new game, time seemed to stand still. I would spend hours in class, at family gatherings, baseball games, karate class, you name it, just THINKING about the game, and the next time I could get my hands on it. Simply stated, Nintendo was THE SHIT.
The NES obviously had some great platform style games. Super Mario Bros., Duck Tales, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, Adventure Island, Castlevania, I could honestly go on and on. But the series that I fell in love with early on in my gaming career was the Mega Man franchise.
Mega Man III was one of the games I got with my NES on that fateful 1991 Christmas, and soon thereafter I got Mega Man II. Right from the first time I booted it up, I was hooked for life. Going forward there was scarcely a birthday or Christmas that would go by without me getting some kind of Mega Man game or paraphernalia. OK, let me stop here because I could go on and on, and this is just supposed to be about ranking stupid robots from a kids game that is decades old.
Lets take a look at the original 1987 classic that started it all.
Without further ado; THE ROBOT MASTERS OF MEGA MAN (1987)
My favorite thing about undertaking this review is that I get to gush early and often. Ahem. I LOVE CUT MAN. CUT MAN. CUT MAN. CUT MAN.
Cut Man represents a lot of what made me fall in love with the series as a kid. This was the first entry into the series, and we are already falling into a bottomless pit of a irreverence, which would eventually lead us to one of our main villains being a guy with scissors on his head.
Cut Man’s original “good” robot job, (The thing he was created to do in the first place, before Dr. Wiley went and switched him over to evil mode.) was apparently to cut down trees. It’s pretty obvious that his unique abilities also lent themselves to battling in the name of no-goodness, because what else would a guy with scissors for hair really do in his spare time? I have no qualms with the notion that Doctor Wily would look at this guy, and be all like “Aw hells yeah, evil robot master for sure.”
Cut Man’s stage was pretty easy, and he wasn’t so hard to beat himself, especially if you had the Super Arm. Basically, you pick up one of the two gigantic rocks that are in front of your face when you finally get to him, and launch it at him. Rinse. Repeat. It makes you wonder why he tolerated the installation of the boulders in the first place, when presumably, he was privy to the fact that they could seriously fuck him up.
Taking his low threat level into consideration, with his all around silliness and classic appeal, Cut Man gets a respectable 7 out of 10.
Bomb Man is definitely the crappiest of the three “construction” themed Robot Masters.
A lot of people choose to start with his level when playing the game, and it’s hard to argue with that choice. Yes, Cut Man is really easy and was probably my favorite starting point, but the music in Bomb Man’s stage is seriously awesome, and it has giant Death Stars on poles all over the background.
Like I said, this logic is hard to argue with.
Difficulty wise, each screen presents you with very little challenge as far as the enemies go, and the traps are pretty simple to avoid as well. All in all, dude is a chump and his main function in the game is to die. On a personal note, he also holds the special distinction of being the first Mega Man level that I was ever able to beat without losing a single life.
“…the music is seriously awesome, and there are giant Death Stars on poles all over the background”
I guess he sort of looks like an emasculated version of Guts Man, except that he, uh… you know… throws bombs. His pattern is really easy to recognize and I spent a majority of my childhood treating him like a little bitch.
Bomb Man gets a 4 out of 10 (Mostly for the awesome stage music).
In various places around the internet Guts Man is explained as such: “Guts Man is passionate and likes karaoke, but can be impatient and unreasonable at times.” I really wish I could end the review there, but I’d be doing him a grave disservice.
Guts Man is a mountain of a robot. When you battle him at the end of stage, his sprite stands about a head taller than Mega Man, and width wise he’s about double Mega Mans size.
He was apparently created for civil engineering tasks, and is really good at lifting heavy things and moving them. I just report the facts folks.
Something I always found interesting about Guts Man, is that right before he gets his rematch against you in Wily’s Castle at the end of the game, there are several “in progress” half-built Guts Men (Guts Mans?) visible in the background. Basically, Dr. Wily was attempting to mass produce an entire Guts Man army. That. Is. Awesome. Imagine an evil army of construction worker themed, civil engineering robots. This is something that could have been a reality if Mega Man didn’t go and fuck it all up.
All jokes and anecdotes aside, Guts Man is seriously awesome, and an absolute ambassador for the series. One of my favorite video game characters of all time.
I give Guts Man 8 Union Required Lunch Breaks out of 10.
Ice Man was the first of the “elemental” themed Robot Masters, and he is the worst.
I have an irrational hatred of Ice Man, and I always have. He just feels so on the nose to me. His motif is that of an Arctic Explorer, or an Eskimo, or whatever. He actually looks a lot like the main characters from the NES game Ice Climbers. (Yes, the same Ice Climbers that would show up in Super Smash Bros. many moons later.) He is weak to Elec Man’s attack, and that always made zero sense to me. I honestly don’t know where to go with this one, there just isn’t much to say about him.
Compared to the construction themed robots we have been looking at so, far he feels so obvious and contrived. Try to keep in mind that this is 1987! There were so few games of this magnitude available on home consoles, and STILL he somehow managed to feel old hat. How can you be cliche when a genre is basically in its infancy? I don’t know, I guess you should ask stupid, shitty Ice Man.
His stage was also a nightmare, because of the dreaded NES “slow-down” effect. For whatever reason, the NES would completely crap out on you when you were traveling through his level. It wasn’t the worst slow down the system would experience, but it was enough to make me hate playing it. This is especially bad in the beginning, where half of the stage is submerged in water and Pengs are dive bombing the shit out of you.
Side Note: When I was a little kid I didn’t know they were called Pengs, and I used to refer to them as suicide penguins. Yup.
I have to tip my hand early on this one and admit an intermittent bias against Ice Man. Please try not to lose sleep over it.
3 Melted Polar Ice Caps out of 10.
Let’s just get the obvious out of the way. Elec Man SERIOUSLY looks like Marvel Comic’s Electro. Sometimes when characters and ideas are ripped off I get frustrated, and then sometimes people rip off Spider-Man villains and everybody wins.
Elec Man’s stage was always really eerie to me. It’s what I used to call a “climb up” stage, because you are scaling what feels like a gigantic fortress, in order to get to the eventual battle against Electro… ::cough:: Elec Man.
Set aside for a moment, that it’s probably the most difficult of the initial six stages, because we will get to that in just a moment. It feels really industrial and barren. Hardly any of the enemies you face in this level even have faces. Most of the stages danger comes from lightning traps, which are pretty difficult to time correctly, because you go past a lot of them while on ladders. Elec Man’s boss room is the only one you enter into through the floor, adding to the fortress climbing aesthetic quite nicely.
This stage is HARD. The traps are completely unforgiving, you need to be completely precise or your ass will be getting fried a LOT. Sometimes it seems that no matter what you do you can’t avoid the projectiles coming at you from all directions. The fight against the man himself is pain in the ass too. Still to this day I can’t get down a perfect pattern for his movements. Not a fun part of the game, to say the least.
I’d say 5 out of 10.
Fire Man was always my last stop on the way to defeating Dr. Wiley. His stage was a sort of underground maze, with an intimidating river of molten lava underfoot.
Scattered around the level were these weird pillars of flame, that would shoot up. If you had Ice Man’s attack, you could freeze and use them as platforms. The stage is littered with Screw Bombs, positively oppressive platforming sections, and all kinds of traps. This shit was hell to get through.
I always loathed playing Fire Man’s stage, but unlike the previous journey through Elec Man’s world, there was some respite during the boss fight. If you battle Fire Man without any strategy, he can initially seem nearly impossible, but there is a better way. If you just wait for him to attack first, jump over the flame wave and shoot at the same time, he will get stuck in an infinite loop. Its by far the easiest boss fight in the entire game once you get this down. The timing is pretty simple, and therefor so is the battle.
Stuff like this could score you serious cred with your peers. It’s no exaggeration to say that little video game tricks like this were worth as much to us then, as listing off the number of people we’ve had sex with would be to us in our early 20’s. Kids nowadays have the internet, and I’d suspect this part of gaming culture is all but dead.
To his own credit, Fire Man kind of looks like the Noid, if the Noid had an Olympic Torch for a head instead of bunny ears. Yeah. This is thrilling journalism.
5 Obscure and Half-witted Pop Culture References out of 10.
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Gaming was not exactly in its infancy here, but we were on the crest of a brand new wave. The bit wars were about to begin, and Sega had fired the first shot. At the time I didn’t give a damn about brand loyalty, although I probably cherished my NES more than most people did their childhood pets. All I knew was that the Sega Genesis had hit stores, and it was the tits. And what a boon! It was coming packaged with a FREE GAME! How could my mother and father say no to purchasing it when were were getting SUCH A DEAL? I swore up and down that all I would need for a while would be this one game. (Of course in my head I planning and scheming on how I’d get another.) So whatever game it was going to be, I was going to be (presumably) stuck with it for a while.
The Bigger Nerd 