This week I thought I’d give you all a wonderful review of Orion: Dino Beatdown, but due to some technical difficulties the game is right before its launch the game is pretty much unplayable. So what do we waste out time on while we are waiting to waste our time? Our favorite classic games of course!
Everyone has that one game that they beat thousands of times. That game that they played till the cartridge wouldn’t work even if we blew on it. For some that’s Ninja Gaiden or Super Mario Bros. For me it’s Mega Man X. I can’t even begin to count the hours I spent as a kid sitting on the floor only a few inches away from the TV playing this game. There was just so much that this game did right it’s hard to pin it all down.
For starters there is the story. As a young pup I didn’t know the convoluted past of X or how he was related to the original Mega Man. To me it was like seeing an older and much cooler version of myself. The best way I can relate it is to think about the edgy cool teenager that becomes every young boy’s role model. At the same time though we see that X himself has a role model in Zero, and if our hero looked up to someone then that made him all the more awesome to us. This combined with the themes of growing in power and self sacrifice really pushed Mega Man X to become the still child friendly but darker game that it was.
Then we combine this with the gameplay. Mega Manx did it right, it took what we already knew from the original Mega Man series and enhanced it tenfold. You want to run and jump, cool. Now how about we teach to you dash and climb up walls. These small additions to the already familiar gameplay put Mega Man X into the perfection. It’s not often I say a game has absolutely perfect control but Mega Man X was the best there was. Even the later game in the series never felt as fine tuned as what X did (though I have to say that the Zero games came very close).
Graphically the game really set itself apart from its predecessor. No longer was it a simple 8-bit world with overly colorful characters and backgrounds. Mega Man X traded these out for the 16-bit, more realistic graphics and toned down colors. It wasn’t that the game didn’t look lively but instead it just didn’t feel like a trip through candyland (Mega Man 7&8 may have came out after X but are a perfect example of how the original series was sometimes a little too happy looking). The graphics are a little rough around the edges by today’s standards but aren’t bad by any means.
Bring all of this together with an awesome Rock & Roll soundtrack, more down to Earth sound effects and an overall tone of importance and we see that Mega Man X was a perfect game for its time and still holds muster today, and for only $8 on the Virtual Console it’s an easy buy for any gamers library of the greatest in classic games.
Mega Man X blast its way to 5 GiN Gems out of 5!