Mega Man and Me
Somewhere near February 12, 1995, I logged onto the Sega Channel with the sole purpose of figuring out what this "Mega Man: The Wily Wars" deal was. GamePro had mentioned it in their News section, and I remembered my friend Tom saying something about it years earlier. Mega Man looked rather interesting, considering I was a die-hard Sonic-type sidescrolling fan.
I found it under the "Exclusives" section (The Sega Channel was very, very different and very hard to use back then) and loaded it. The introduction baffled me, as it had a little blue dude and this guy that looked like Santa Claus in a lab coat chewing gum.
Apparently, the dialog got cut in the Sega Channel version.
After the "chewing gum" and Explanation Board sections got done, the screen went black and little eyes popped up everywhere. They soon turned into different types of robots, all piled together with the Santa Claus dude stuck in the middle. Another fellow, not so jolly looking, sat at the top of the pile, next to an awesome-looking robot.
I chose Mega Man out of the three games, since I was never one to rush things and always wanted to hear the message games were trying to convey.
A sappy title screen followed. There was a picture of Mega Man, and the title, but nothing else. No introduction, no nothing. I was beginning to wonder how interesting this game really was.
After pressing the start button, a weird screen appeared. It showed six robot faces, arranged in a hexagonal shape. I waited for something to happen, but cheap music just played on and on.
This was a new idea for me. Never in my life had I been prompted to pick where I would start in a video game, much less give me little to no information about where I was going.
As a kind of compromise with my narrow-minded self, I chose Cut Man, since he was the guy the cursor was already on. I had no earthly idea it mattered where I started.
Mega Man was too small for me. The levels were intriguing, but the bosses were too hard. I remember sitting in my room one Saturday morning for four straight hours trying to beat Cut Man. I needed to jump higher, and move faster, but Mega Man wasn't giving it to me. I gave up after a few frustrating rounds with Guts Man's level.
A month later, in the middle of March, I tried again. I was desperate to find something to do after Sonic & Knuckles had failed me for the last time.
I was much sharper, no pun intended, after playing Sonic & Knuckles and Tiny Toons--Treasure Island back to back and realizing not all sidescrollers behaved the same.
I had asked Tom about it again, and he went into a huge lecture about Wood Man and his lack of difficulty. So, this time, I chose Mega Man 2 instead and tried Wood Man.
His level was a serious pain. It was lucky for me Sonic had bottomless pits, or I would have never understood how to get past the monkey things.
After about forty tries and "I can do it!" reassurances, I finally defeated Wood Man. Little did I know Tom had never played the game on Difficult Mode, the only setting for the Wily Wars remake of Mega Man 2.
I was completely fascinated by the concept of retrieving Wood Man's weapon. I played and played with it until the energy was used up ten times, and then some. It no longer seemed boring to kill endless hordes of enemies.
The next boss I chose was Metal Man. I couldn't beat him, much less get to him, but Mega Man was lodged into the Protoman History of Video Games. And the rest, or so they say, is history.
It went on for two weeks. After giving up on Mega Man 2, I went to Mega Man 3. I remember still believing the first boss the cursor showed up on was the first to beat, so I worked nonstop for an entire day on Spark Man. I went over my plan time after time: I would first beat Spark Man, then find out which boss his weapon worked best on.
Unfortunately, it was rather late at night by the time I got rid of Spark Man. I found out the hard way that the save feature didn't work on the Sega Channel. So, for the first of many times over the next month, I left the system on all night.
I woke up early the next morning, a Sunday, and proceeded immediately to Snake Man's level. I had quite a problem getting to him, because of the "up in the clouds" portion of his level. After about ten tries and the frustration of the Spark Shock not even grazing Snake Man, I discovered a way to cheat him out of my life bar. When he approached me, I simply jumped and held toward the left wall, and he missed me by about two pixels. His shots were easy to claim, and so I beat him by pure luck.
In a feat that I still remember to this day, I beat Gemini Man on the second try without even knowing the Snake Seeker worked on him. (I picked him out of order because Tom said he was easy.)
In-between leaving the game on all night and terrific strides of luck, I beat Mega Man 3 in around two weeks. Since I had had luck on Mega Man 2 before, I decided to try it again instead of Mega Man 1.
I did rather well actually, much better than I had on Mega Man 3. I managed to get to the first station of Wily's Skull Castle in less than three days...but I couldn't beat it.
My problem was the famous "climb down the ladder" platform trick shortly before the Dragon boss. I located a fellow Mega Man lover at school, Adam Ruellas (whom I called "A-Dame Insane" after Sadame Hussein), and asked him about it. After he showed me that he knew a great deal more about the series than me, he gave himself up to several months of questions about the other Mega Man games, especially the X series, before school was out that summer and he finally got away.
Meanwhile, I had beaten Mega Man 2 and was very close to beating Mega Man 1. The only problem was, it was nearing the end of March. I was beginning to worry that Sega was going to take Mega Man off their prized Sega Channel in favor of something stupid beyond comprehension.
I lucked out. Sega kept it for another month, but not because of their nonexistent player support. I beat Mega Man 1 in about six hours from start to finish April 1. Boy, that sure was a fun day. The dog didn't understand when I lept up in the air and screamed, "YES!!!" after beating the Mega Man clone.
It is interesting to find that I was a die-hard Sega lover and "Nintendo" was a bad word in our household at the time. I was shocked to find the games Tom was talking about to exist in more primitive form on the original Nintendo system. For a few days, I wavered between Sonic and Mega Man, then decided to accept Nintendo as neutral and Sega as the deliverer of the best games.
Somehow, I doubted Mega Man: The Wily Wars would remain on for May. I was right. Luck was with me though, and May was none other than my birthday month. My parents, however, didn't quite find the idea of buying a system which I had hated with a passion for two straight years.
I never knew about Wily Towers (it didn't exist in the American Sega Channel game) when May 1 arrived, and I woke up at 6 in the morning to make sure I was right. I was, and Mega Man didn't live in my house for another month. It was a very, very gloomy day.
Then I remembered Tom and his endless hints that didn't work. He had the games at his house, surely...??
Our attention was averted from Alien Versus Predator to sit in Tom's younger brother Jonathan's room and play a six-year-old game on a ten-year-old system. I recognized the music, the characters, and the enemies, but I couldn't understand why the old NES couldn't handle the cheap graphics and little sprites barely enhanced for the Genesis.
And on I trudged through the annoying and boring month. It took my parents two weeks for the news their son wanted a Nintendo system to sink in. It seemed I wouldn't get the system and the six games for my birthday when my uncle Joel, a policeman and protector of pawn shops called in saying he could get me one at a great price. The problem was, the games weren't there.
Mom and Dad refused to take me to pawn shops. So, after a week of deliberation and annoying arguments with my parents, I discovered an ad for FuncoLand in my latest and last GamePro. I was planning on subscribing to GameFan, hearing from Tom that it was far better than any other magazine.
Mom reluctantly took me to the "Funco Superstore" in the same shopping center as Toys'R'Us. I found it wasn't quite a "Superstore."
It consisted of one wall of videogame boxes, mostly NES games, and a kiosk about cleaning instruments. The freezes and crashes coming from Tom's old system were finally explained.
In a tremendous stroke of luck, probably the greatest in my life, I scored all but Mega Man 6 in the same store. Yes, even the original--they even had a box on display! I frowned at the cover art, and didn't understand it until years later, reading the PostMeister section of my first GameFan Magazine.
I took the games and my cleaning kit over to Tom's house, and we discovered Four and Five were just as fun as One, Two, and Three--you just had to understand what they were trying to say. I never believed Protoman was evil as soon as I saw Mega Man 4's ending...yes, we beat them all before I ever got the system for myself on May 20. We rented Mega Man 6 as well, but couldn't beat it in time.
It was very sad. My parents were supposed to arrive to pick me up at 5:00, but they were two minutes late. Two minutes makes a great deal of difference when you're at the final boss and need just one more try to defeat it. We had just realized Rush Power actually did work on the Wily Capsule's cockpit when the doorbell rang. I had to wait four more months to see the ending. (Adam had given me the Nintendo Power with Mega Man 6 in it--for the first time, I didn't have to figure out what order the bosses went in!)
Meanwhile, I was watching the Mega Man Cartoon every chance I got--which was almost all the time. Every Friday at 2:30 on Houston 39, not yet WB 39. It corrupted my life almost as bad as the other people's that are reading this, and the emotional crisis that occurred when I ran into Mandi's page in the summer of 1996 just about did me in.
But before that happened, I went on a renting spree. Mega Man X was hot!
This occurred in the summer. I can remember renting Mega Man X and Mega Man X2 several days before my annual trip to Phoenix, Arizona. The challenge imposed on me by the games was quite a bit more than what I had faced in Mega Man 1-6. I actually made it to Sigma in Mega Man X and touched on Wire Sponge's level in Mega Man X2 before I returned the games and left for Phoenix.
It was 11 at night, and my parents were forcing me to go to bed before my plane trip the next day--or else I would have tried again and again all night 'till I beat it on tape. While I was in Phoenix, I watched the Mega Man X Demo Tape V 0.5 over and over again. On the tape, I couldn't beat the first station of Sigma's castle boss. (You know, the Spider.)
As soon as I got back, I rented them again. I had very little money, and it remained that way for almost a year. I figured out later that I rented X and X2 enough times to buy the games and the system twice. That's a lot of gaming hours!
I beat both games two days before my 1995 trip to Phoenix--with some guy named Travis who claimed he was the Mega Man X2 champ, beating the Sigma Virus of X2 with only three Subtanks. I made the Mega Man X and Mega Man X2 Demo Tapes V 3.0 (2.0 was the fall of 1994), and then returned the games for over a year. But first, though, I beat the Sigma Virus on the Demo Tape with only one and a half Subtanks.
Mega Man X was my obsession that summer. I watched the tapes over and over again, but I knew I didn't have enough money to buy them until Christmas. But my feelings toward the series quieted considerably when I ran into an obscure 32X game known simply as "Chaotix."
Chaotix blew everything I had seen in Mega Man X and X2 away. It still remains my second-favorite videogame of all time to this day. You will find out what my first is before the end of this little jibe.
Hmmmm...now that I think about it, I can't remember what I got for Christmas of 1995. I know it wasn't a SNES or a 32X. I do know I got a Saturn for my birthday of 1996.
In January of 1996, I was introduced to the Internet. It meant nothing at first, but then, slowly, I began to realize the kind of power it held. I never even thought to look for Mega Man pages, though.
Then, on a little-remembered but very important sleepover in March, Tom and I rediscovered and began to become very excited about Mega Man. We had read an old preview of Mega Man 7 in a GameFan, and it looked very nice, at least from the preview shots. He couldn't find the magazine that reviewed the game.
We then, later in the night, drew back up an idea called simply "Protoman" from about a month before. It featured Protoman instead of Mega Man fighting evil, and had several recognizable bosses such as "Shark Man" and "Dynamite Man." Little did I know that those simple ideas would turn into two book series and a phenomenal (at least from my point of view) book which actually played the bosses' sound track music as you read about how Protoman combatted them.
A short time later, I rented Mega Man 7 and bought Mega Man 6 from the Top Ten NES section at Toys'R'Us. 6 was the only NES game I bought directly, and so the only NES game I have an instruction manual for; with the possible exception of Mega Man 2's. It can hardly be called an intact manual, though, as it stinks horribly of tobacco and the poor ink and paper used to make it have just about degraded out of existence.
Mega Man 7 hooked me instantly. I could not believe the craftsmanship of the game, and how it seemed to flow--unlike any other game I had ever played before. This made it my favorite videogame of all time. What's my third favorite, you ask? Alien Versus Predator, of course.
And now, comes the rather strange and sad part of my story. Sometime towards the end of May (the start of Summer Break), I tried searching the Internet one more time for Mega Man. I spelled it, and had been spelling it "Megaman," and so Mandi's page didn't come up first. Digipen also happened to be down the first time I tried it, so my first impression of Mega Man on the Net was the MegaManiacs Home Page.
Slashman had good ideas...actually revolutionary ideas, considering the time period, but it didn't fit together very well. Many of his pages had been lost due to "lack of resources." Funny I should see the MegaManiacs Home Page in the middle of problems as it would continue to be to this day.
Anyways, I found Mandi's page the second time I searched somewhere in the 20's, and was amazed at what I saw. Here was a page that flowed, and actually looked nice...Mom happened to walk in just as the page finished loading, and asked something like "Who drew that picture?" I answered, "I dunno, I guess the person the runs this page." She said, "Huh. Looks like the real thing!"
"The real thing" can be very elusive when you consider the kind of torture the Mega Man series has gone through over the years. Mandi's opinion and my opinion were rather different, but not after I read her FanFic.
That convinced me of what the series was really trying to convey (and changed my spelling to "Mega Man"!), but I still wasn't willing to accept "Break Man" as a name for my new hero.
I took her stories with me to Phoenix that summer, and read...let's see...probably all but the last two of them. I would stay up until two in the morning reading, and I still didn't get done with all of them. Still, my main interest that summer was not Mega Man. That would all change when I got back.
I checked out her Ultimate Guide, and found a few things I didn't know about Mega Man 7. Actually, quite a few things. I rented the game again, and became obsessed all over again.
Mega Man 7, my friends on the Yazone Cyberlounge, and the people on the Mega Man Mailing List inspired me to write a little Webpage. Known as "Protoman's Secret Hideout," it failed quickly because I didn't know enough about HTML. Hold in mind that everything I knew came from the assimilation of other pages. If I saw something I wanted to do, I looked at the source code and changed it to fit my page. The Hideout was shipped to several people that wanted to look at it, but the background wasn't included, so the people were reading yellow text on a yellow background with yellow links and bright green viewed links.
This occurred in late July. Then, Dad informed me that he had initialized the space on IWL, and I had free access to it. In short, "Yippee."
I worked around the clock (literally!) for a week and a half to form what would become the basis for the page you see today. Someday, I'm going to put important landmarks in the Page's history back up in a real Museum section, for everyone to see. But until then...
On August 1, Dad showed me how to use FTP, and I uploaded the page. I told the people on the Mailing List about it, and some of them came. However, I forgot to change the background (Oily)'s URL from the localdisk to IWL, so the people were once again looking at lots and lots of yellow, only this time in their browser instead of their mail program.
On August 2, the Protoman Homepage debuted for real, with Oily as its background and the famous "Hi and Welcome!" at the top of the Main Page.
Last Christmas, I got a SNES and Mega Man 7 and X2 with it. I still need to get X and X3, and probably will in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, I just obtained Mega Man 8 and have played it through twice. I am very pleased, as quite a few (but perhaps not enough) of Mega Man 7's features crossed over. Mega Man 7 is still my favorite videogame of all time, and the original Mega Man series is still my favorite video game series of all time. Funny, isn't it, how I did all this in about three years, while seemingly everyone else did it in ten?
...and the adventure continues...see the Records!