Screenshots from VG Museum

Year released: ? (Super Nintendo)

Number of Players: 1

Mega Man is awakened 30 years in the future, where he meets a world in havoc caused by robots that think for themselves.

Graphics: Colorful, detailed sprites and somewhat realistic locations. Nothing really stunning.

Play control: B to jump, Y to shoot (hold to charge up a shot). If you jump up against a wall, you can slide down it, and jump off of it again to climb the wall. When you get hit, you slide backwards for an instant, like in all Mega Man games. As you play, you find different armor upgrades as you play that change certain rules of play control.

Sound: Normal early SNES instruments. Sound effects are standard, music has the almost-energetic music akin to the NES Mega Men.

Challenge: Get through any given sidescrolling stage by shooting enemies with your infinite standard ammo or special limited ammo (which you get from beating bosses and resemble each the power of the boss you got it from). The challenge is based more on shooting down enemies and thus clearing your path than on the platforming (jumping and such), especially with the helpful wall climbing ability. However, platforming is not completely tossed out the window.
As with any Mega Man game, the player has to learn the tactics of a boss (one boss at the end of every stage) before one can take it down, and even then the battle is rough.
Challenge is significantly reduced by the fact that one can save after the first eight bosses. That's right, no more huge sessions where you have to blast through the final five or so stages at once.

Gameplay: I really enjoy keeping an eye out for the bad guys and having to mold how I play around their tactics. Really, some of the miniscule bad guys (ones that take a few shots to destroy and litter the stage) take some tactics. Shoot one or two times, keep your eyes open for torpedoes, jump over the torpedoes, get back to shooting (while keeping your surroundings in mind--that's where platforming comes in). The gameplay dedicates itself to this kind of thought, but it does not grow overwhelming--the only truly demanding enemies are the bosses, which should be demanding.

Bottom line: Despite all of its ins and outs, Mega Man X is a simplistic game that's easy to get into, probably because of its focus on shooting.

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