The Blue Bomber is back for the 9th time, and this is possibly his best game yet.
The gameplay is classic Megaman action. You jump over pits, dodge enemies, shoot with your Mega Buster, and try to beat the boss to steal his (or her) weapon. If you die, you start at the beginning of the stage or the checkpoint, and if you run out of lives, it's either back to the stage select screen or another retry from the beginning of that stage. Once you beat all 8 stages, you face (spoiler alert!) Dr. Wily, avoiding his deathtraps and battling through a massive fortress that is divided up into several stages. It's more fun than it sounds, thanks to the brilliant and well-designed stages. And once you're done with this game, you'll spend hours on Time Attack, improving you're skills every run until you finally make the leaderboards and brag to your friends only to have someone bump you off the leaderboards the very next day. It's the thing that challenges you to improve you're skills, and the Challenges mode will make sure serious players play this and beat this game time after time to try to complete all the challenges.
The story is that robots have gone renegade again, but this time, it appears to be Dr. Light's doing, not Dr Wily's. Megaman sets off to stop the robots and clear Dr. Light's name. It doesn't get in the way of the main game at all.
The music is just pure retro awesomeness. The Megaman series has some very catchy and good music, and Megaman 9 is no exception. I don't care if I get beat up by Halo fanboys at school for humming the Concreate Man theme, because it's very catchy and sounds very good, just like most of the other music in this game.
The graphics are 8-bit, and it actually gives it the charm the newer Megaman games didn't have. It really reminds me of the NES, and I'm glad Capcom did this, because I would have gladly chose this style over next-gen graphics.
Now, this game is not for everyone. If you play this, prepare yourself, because it can get frustrating (stupid death spikes!). This is the most punishing game I've played in a while. But the name of the game is to try and try again until you learn what to do and get that great feeling of satisfaction once you've finally beaten that tough stage or boss.
THE VERDICT!
Pros:
Classic, and very fun, gameplay (+6.0)
Awesome music (+1.5)
Classic NES-style graphics (+0.5)
Suprisingly a lot of replay value (+1.0)
Great value for ten bucks (+1.0)
Cons:
Can get frustrating (-1.0)
Megaman 9 is a great retro-style platformer for just ten bucks. You'll find a lot to like about this game if you can get over the only flaw of this game: that it can get frustrating.
Final Score:
9.0 (Superb)