I know we already wrote a full review of Mega Man 9 but as it turns out we left out a very important piece of information.  The game is soul-crushingly hard.  I mean really, really difficult.  So much so that many times I found myself ready to chuck the controller as hard as I could into our tile floor.  Certain doom for the sixaxis.  Alas, I kept my head about me and only occasionally whipped the controller into a couch cushion out of frustration.  While Julie was taken aback by my sudden violent streak (I’m usually quite docile), the controller was unharmed.

Mega Man 9’s end game plays out much like Mega Man 2’s: you fight through three levels of garbage before you reach Dr. Wily’s skull-castle building and run through a short level before ending up in the room with 8 doors.  Sound familiar?  Behind each door is one of the bosses from each of the eight levels in the game and you must beat them all successively to reveal the ninth door, behind which rests the evil Dr. Wily.

After taking about three hours to play through the three levels, getting to know their “eccentricities”, and beating the eight bosses in the eight rooms, my thumbs were getting a little sore (I press the buttons way too hard in the ill-held belief that it makes Mega Man jump farther).  After restarting the eight boss stage a few times and constantly getting destroyed by Wily, I decided to give it a rest for the night and come back the next day refreshed and ready to kick Wily’s ass.  Wrong.

The save point I had made in the room with the eight doors didn’t start me back at the beginning of that level when I loaded, it sent me all the way back to the beginning of the chain of levels that leads up to Wily’s skull-castle.  WTF?  Dejected, I gave up and decided that I may not have the spirit to ever pick up the game again and take another run at Wily.

It leads me to this question: Is the game too punishing?  Even if you make it to Dr. Wily and run out of lives, you have to restart the eight room stage and fight all eight bosses over again before being able to go back to Wily.  That part I can almost understand.  Forcing the player to go through an extra couple hours of game before that if they shut it down for the night however seems like a terrible punitive measure.

I guess the game more closely resembles how games were back in the 8-bit era: more challenging and fewer checkpoints.  Maybe I’m just getting old and I’m not as good at video games as I used to be.  Then again, it could be that I have realized that I’m getting older and I don’t have hours of my life to just throw away redoing levels I have already completed.  Okay, I’m starting to sound like an old man rambling.  Ah, the ignorance of youth…

I know I made a big deal before about the benefits of capturing that old 8-bit experience.  From the graphics to the sound to the level design, Mega Man lives up to that standard.  But save points?  C’mon.  There have to be some benefits to having lived past Y2K.  I get why you can’t save at any point you want, as saving after every successful screen would be kind of cheap.  However, saving at the end of a level shouldn’t be out of the question.  Wily’s “level” is really four or five levels, and making you redo them just because you were tired and had to go to bed seems like punishment for no reason.  They should at least let you continue from the same spot as when you Game Over.   Although, keep in mind this is the same game that gives you a trophy for beating it five times in the same day.