I was shown this video by a friend the other day, and as a gigantic Mega Man fan, I loved it. It’s part of a new series by Egoraptor, who a lot of you may know from his various Awesome videos (Metal Gear Awesome, Awesome Center, Awesome Reach, etc.) centered on video games. It’s a bit of a long one, at just about 20 minutes, but every single minute is worth it. Video after the break.
Mega Man was one of the first games I ever played as a kid. Mega Man 3 was the first game I ever beat without any help from anybody. I’m a Megaman fanatic to the point where I’ve caught myself humming the stage themes from Mega Man 3 at work and realized that I’m humming them in the preferred stage order. This video really rings true with me, because I didn’t need a little guide telling me how to do things when I played these games. I just played them and figured things out on my own. Until Egoraptor pointed it out, I never realized how much the stage designs in the games were made to really teach you how the game’s mechanics worked, and that is what is so utterly genius about them. You’re being taught without realizing that you’re being taught, and this is an approach that games should take more often. It seems like the current state of video gaming leans far more towards what was being done with Roll in the video, and I personally wish developers would look back at games like the Mega Man series and realize, “Hey, our players don’t need characters screaming at them and telling them what to do. These guys have got it.”