This cover art raised plenty of questions about the game, luckily the game delivered much more than the box could ever hope to convey.
At the time it was something of an afterthought, I had gotten the SNES that X-mas and I had some X-mas cash to throw around, but I ran into a problem, GAMES ARE FUCKING EXPENSIVE! Anything new or worthwhile was 70 bucks, and I probably didn't have more than about 30 or 40 bucks MAYBE and we were at Toys R Us (Gamestop didn't exist back then, and any gaming boutique was not likely a place my parents would ever take me). Toys R Us or KB (may it rest in peace), were my best bet for getting games back then because my parents didn't mind stopping by either one (they were conveniently located). Anyhow, so I got discouraged because my parents to my distress weren't going to give me one red cent to buy anything related to this technological monster they just gifted to me days earlier, so I had to figure out how I was going to spend this dough and get some cool shit without having to rely on mom and dad for anything more than maybe help with tax. So I picked up some action figures or something along those lines and found myself with like 10-15 bucks leftover and that's when the game isle caught my eye again. They had a few games for like 10 bucks, and one of those at the time was Mega Man X.
I was a huge fan of the series on Nintendo, but the X really threw me off, was it "ten" or "ex"? and why not just give it the next logical number in the sequence if it was related to the series in any way? Also why is he white and look kinda different? To top it all off I had no idea what was the story with this game, there were no ads for it, I hadn't seen it in any magazines at the time, I was in virgin territory, heading for uncharted seas, and at 10 bucks, I set sail without any clue just how fucking awesome it was going to be, how much time I would spend, how many years it would entertain me, and how it was the best purchase value to satisfaction ratio of any one item I have ever owned in my entire life. (To clarify, 10 bucks has turned into almost 20 years of satisfaction, I still pick it up and play through it every couple of months to this day, nothing I have ever owned has come close to that ever by a long shot).
So now that I've given the back story as to how I acquired this wealth of entertainment, let's actually talk about the fucking game. First off, cool fucking story right out of the manual (read that baby cover to cover on the drive home from the toy store that night). One Hundred or so years after the events of the regular Mega Man series, an Archeologist/Robotics buff Dr.Cain stumbles upon the buried remains of Dr Light's robot lab (Mega Man's creator). Using X (mega man), he tries to recreate Light's work in the form of Sigma, unfortunately Cain doesn't seem to have the foresight to program Sigma with Asimov's rules of robotics (Isack Asimov is a science fiction writer who's writings on robots are famous for the 3 rules of robotics, which are guidelines that would prevent robots from ever harming human beings or turning against them for any reason). Mega Man embodies this to the point where he literally destroys any robots designed or "altered" to harm human beings in any way. With Dr. Wily, the ultimate conflict for mega man is that in the end he can never actually harm Wily because he is a human and doing so would violate his most basic rules of operation, even though Wily is the source of any robots harming people to begin with. Sigma "somehow" (you figure it out later) gets infected and that fundamental programming gets corrupted, and thus Sigma goes on a crusade to destroy humanity and make way for a future where robots to carry on in their place. Mega Man X steps into action and resumes his duties as humankind's robotic defender with the help of mysterious robot newcomer Zero. Only now you have a enemy that you can fight and destroy, it just turns out that he's obnoxiously difficult to be rid of permanently (as the following 7 games in the series will make painfully clear to you).
Srs BzNz
So I fire this game up, and they don't fuck around, the music is intense and awesome, the graphics are top notch, the level of detail in the sprites and background is amazing, the controls are rock solid, they even added a wall jump feature which gives it a much greater level of control over the character than in the original series on the NES. So I get through the intro level, and right away the first boss you fight is an un-winnable battle with this badass motherfucker who goes by the name of Vile. He messes your shit up, laughs in your face, completely dominates you, and reminds you that you're yesterday's trash compared to him, and at this point I have absolutely nothing to go by to believe otherwise, so now what?! Enter fucking Zero, you hear this distant sound of a charging weapon followed by the blast that comes from off screen and blasts the arm off of the huge Mech-like thing that Vile just effortlessly pulverized you with, and here comes Zero, about a head taller than Mega Man but clearly a force to be reckoned with. As he goes to charge his second shot, Vile gets the fuck out of there, hops into his enormous flying ship he came in on, and bounces before he can take another hit from that crazy firepower that Zero is packing. With the enemy turned tail, you get the pep talk from Zero about how Vile is literally a war machine and in time you might become powerful enough to effectively fight him, however, Zero has your back (which at this point is very reassuring), and in the mean time you have a war to fight and you can't let this minor set back stop you if you're going to defeat Sigma.
An approximate breakdown of events described above via pictures I found on the internet.
At this point I'm so pumped I can't even wait to get the ball rolling and smash through this game. I'm already convinced this is the best damn game in the series and I can't believe it was as cheap as it was. Anyway, there was so much awesome shit in this game it completely blew my mind, they took a great concept with Mega Man, and made it so much better. All kinds of secrets (and super secrets, hadouken anyone?), hidden health add ons, energy tanks, and hidden armor upgrades courtesy of Dr. Light! I was blown away by this game and every time I played it I discovered a new trick or a fun thing I hadn't realized before, or a different trick to beating a boss. Over the years I got good enough to beat bosses with or without special weapons and in any particular order that suited my mood at the time (eight stages, each with a unique boss at the end, typically there was a logical order to follow so that when you got new weapons from downed bosses, you'd use those weapons to exploit the weakness of another boss and defeat him much easier than using your standard weapon). It's a fun game to figure out, one that is challenging after playing it many times over again, but still offers enough variation that the replay value is (at least for me) exceptionally high, especially for a game of that genre. I think anyone who has any love for older games of that era would be doing themselves a great disservice by not giving this game a serious chance. Anyone who owns this game probably has a special place in their heart for it, and anyone who doesn't clearly doesn't know what they're missing out on.
So how does this game hold up after all these years, well I sat down for about half an hour and had to stop myself from playing through the entire game. This game somehow has infinite potential to entertain me like no other thing on this planet. I love every minute of the game from the intro to the very end of the credits after beating it. I like playing it alone, I like playing it with other people, I love trading notes and stories with other people who have played it and share a similar love for the game, and I love playing with an audience because I enjoy showing off how years of playing this game has paid off. I don't know if I've played this game more than any other in terms of raw hours put into the game, but as for games I've played from start to finish (that could be played from start to finish), I've definitely played through this game more times than any other by far.
This game is probably the most under rated game of all time. Never saw an advertisement, there was no hype for the game, not even any love from Capcom in the form of "hey if you like this popular game, then try this other game we made so we can stay mega rich and keep pumping out games", and yet they must have produced a ton of copies because I don't think anybody would have trouble finding a copy to this day for a reasonable price. What kills me is the underground success of this game would cause Capcom to over-hype the following two sequels on the SNES and never distribute enough copies to meet the demand for them, and thus I never owned X2 or X3 until many years after their original release, and years after SNES games phased out of mainstream retail sales (ie, I had to drop a small fortune on ebay to obtain them *grumbles*).
The hover bike was one of the worst features of this game, and it made the cover...
They learned from the hover bike mistake, got Zero on the cover to get you pumped, this would probably be the only game in the series that could almost potentially reach the greatness of the original, too bad they didn't produce enough to meet the massive demand for this game.
Ok, so there you have it, the saga of Jaymbz and the video game phenomenon known as Mega Man X. I would love to hear any feedback from anybody who has played or owned this game because as much as I've played this game, everybody has a unique perspective or thing to try that I haven't considered before, and it's just another testament to the game's genius (well it's creators genius anyway). Alright, getting on towards really late so I'm going to wrap this up by saying that I'll be a bit more adamant about getting this out at my original pace rather than lollygagger's pace I took to write this one.
"Bodies are for hookers and fat people."
-Bender
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