LVL Headed

I lived in the age of the original Megaman games, and I also own the Megaman Anniversary Collection.  In playing through the Megaman franchise, you see a little love lost for the game and level design.  All the NES titles are good to excellent, but as the series moved on to other consoles, it seemed to loose something.  To see what I mean, pull up YouTube and watch a playthrough of Frostman’s stage:

There doesn’t seem to be any of that “spark” that you find in the earlier titles.  The stage doesn’t throw any tricks at you, it just seems to be a straight line through a bunch of enemies with some rocket-snowboarding tossed in as a minigame.

I like to think that this is what Capcom realized when they set upon the creation of Megaman 9.  The graphics are retro, for sure, but so is the spirit.  Megaman 9 brings back the wonderful level design of the earlier games with some of the lessons of today to make what may be the best in the series.

What makes a good Megaman game is the level design.  In the older games, the levels were tests of your memory, reflexes, and (basic) intellegence.  Megaman wasn’t about tossing different enemies on the stage, it was about adding enemies as an extension of the stage.  It isn’t about destroying tons of enemies, it’s about finding your way to the boss with as much health, lives, and weapon energy as possible.

Level design in Megaman 9 seems to have had as much thought put into it as it was in Valve’s Portal.  Level obstacles are introduced gently: in Galaxy Man’s stage, you walk into an empty room with two portals.  Hopping into one flings you out of the other one (so I guess the game has a little more in common with Portal than I originally stated).  Then, the challenge is ramped up: after this room, the player finds spots in which they must hop in and out of portals over a bottomless pit.  This is repeated in every level, players encounter a safe example of what’s to come to learn what to do when the real challenge comes up.

You might argue with me on this point that there are plently of levels in which something will come flying out of a bottomless pit without warning, causing you to fall in yourself.  To that I say… well, yeah… but even these instant-kill situations pop up at the beginning of each level before the player has gotten too far.  If the player dies towards the end of the level by this means, it’s not because it hasn’t happened before.

Megaman does have a reputation as a game in which you have to die multiple times to know what to do.  I’d say that for Megaman 9 this isn’t quite true, though you’ll die a few times for sure.

Well, I still have plenty of game to finish, but it seems like the guys at Capcom have put some real love into this.

The other day, just sitting around at work like I normally do (I’m employed now, didn’t you know?), I had a sudden vision of something so obvious that I couldn’t believe Nintendo hadn’t cashed in on it yet (like they have everything else).  It had come to me as my coworkers were discussing whether they should stick it out with World of Warcraft or hop the fence to Warhammer Online, where the grass is greener.  I have personally had a fairly dissapointing history with MMORPGs.  Warcraft had interested me just enough during it’s free trial period that I thought I could spend a few bucks a month just to keep at it, but then I learned that I had to buy the $50 game disc as well… even though I already had the entire game loaded on my hard disc and already had my credit card out for the monthly fee.  A little bit of money a month would have pulled me in, but that fifty dollar deposit was a big brick wall.

Anyways, back to the post as I originally had intended it.  Nintendo.  They’ve played around with the quasi-social gaming experience, bringing us casual games like Wii Sports and interesting experiments like Animal Crossing, but they haven’t really dove into the lucrative world of reaching into gamers’ pockets every month via a subscription model.  But it somewhat makes sense, as Nintendo doesn’t do a lot of “War,” and that seems to be a necessity for modern MMOs.

But wait!  There’s one property that would make perfect sense in a massive online environment!  One that Nintendo is already squeezing the life out of, and has enough popularity that it would immediately grab a demographic here-to untapped in the world of MMORPGs.  One with dueling and fights with wild beasts, and even ranking system.

My god… Pokemon would make a perfect MMO.

Think about it.  An entire world of free-roaming Pokemon to catch, train, battle, and trade.  A server-wide ranking system of wins and losses, creating a giant never-ending tournament.  Raids on dungeons not to collect epic loot, but rather epic Pokemon.  The RPG elements are there, they’d just have to be tweaked a bit.  And obviously there are a few off bits, but the game fits well in the mold.

Just like in the old Gameboy game, a player would start by picking out his or her first Pokemon.  This decision would choose their hometown, much like choosing your race sets your starting point in World of Warcraft.  Players could style their characters however they liked, not worrying about having to wear rediculous-looking armor later.  There’d be no armor, no weapons.  All of these things would be built into the Pokemon themselves.

Ah, and the classes!  No more rogues or paladins, just different types of Pokemon.  Not only that, but players could switch out their Pokemon at will, meaning one player can hold a multitude of classes all at once, able to use just a fraction of their abilities at a time by carefully tossing a Pokemon to the battlefield.

A game like this couldn’t have a weapon or armor marketplace, but players could teach their Pokemon different skills.  Though the amount of skills available would be great, each Pokemon would only be able to remember about four, meaning players would have to be very careful of how they trained their Pokemon.

Well, this is just what popped in my head at the office.  I haven’t played Pokemon since Blue and Red, but I’ve always appreciated the catchy idea behind it.  I just thought it was interesting enough to share (and also I haven’t posted in a while, so I needed to put up some content).

I’ve got some special stuff coming up soon, so just hold on.  Just take this post as a “I’m not dead” notice.

-SKT