Mega Man I: A Pause To Catch Our Breath

Taking Stock

Refining Definitions

    As those who have read this endeavor from the start (all three of you) will recall, my goal, or one of them, in analyzing these stages so rigorously is to break them down into their basic design elements. Now that I've got a bit of context, I think it's time to start doing that, just a bit, but first I need to get some thoughts laid out.

The 'Smallest Meaningful Unit' of Player Experience


    Those familiar with philological concepts will recognize the words 'phoneme' and 'morpheme'. For those who don't, here's the basic idea: a 'phoneme' is the smallest unit of a language's phonology, or 'palette of sounds'. The specific way in which phonemes combine varies from language to language; in English, for instance, consonants and vowels combine to form syllables, which then combine to form larger units, while in Chinese or Japanese the smallest unit is already a syllable.

These are phonemes, or something. Mouths saying
phonemes. Do you actually 'say' a phoneme? Or is 'say'
reserved for words? I mean, gurgling is a noise you make
with your mouth, but you don't say someone 'said "grblgrl"',
you know? Then again, the dentist does say 'Say "Ah!"',
so maybe you do say phonemes.
Source

    A 'morpheme', on the other hand, is the smallest meaningful unit of a language; they are the most basic elements of words that contain meaning. Some morphemes are usable words in themselves, others combine with each other to form words; to take English as an example once more, 'saw' and 'tooth' are both morphemes that can be used as words on their own, and can also be combined with each other to form 'sawtooth', a descriptive term that combines elements of both. Meanwhile, we have prefixes like 'mis' or 'un', which contain meaning ('mis' means 'wrong' or 'bad', while 'un' mean 'not'), but cannot be used on their own.

    The hell am I talking about this? Well, in my experience as a player, stage design takes on similar qualities. Player experience is, after all, the be-all-end-all of game design; when you design a game, you are designing an experience in perhaps the most pure and complete way that human art affords.

    Here's the thing, you see: players do not experience games tile-by-tile, but neither do they experience a stage in its entirety. Gameplay forms a continuum of experiences that separate in the player's mind by alterations in the demands the game is placing on him; that is why games whose challenges are intense but formally static (think of a Bullet Hell game like Reactance 2, for instance) can make time disappear, while games where the player must shift his activities frequently (like a classic RPG) tend to leave one's sense of time intact. A classic platformer like Mega Man occupies a space somewhere between these two; the demands the game places on the player all require responses using a fairly claustrophobic set of mechanical activities (run, jump, shoot), and yet the presence of a varied stage and enemies with different behaviors provides major alterations in the way those mechanical activities form responses.

    Individual actions - a single jump across a gap, one shot fired, crossing one platform - rarely register in a player's mind if there is not some outstanding quality to distinguish them, like an unusual degree of challenge or particularly severe consequences for failure (or success) - just as phonemes do not necessarily make up a word, individual player actions do not necessarily register as a player experience. What do register are the combinations of such actions that mark the completion of larger scale challenges - jumping from platform to platform while timing shots to destroy enemies that fly up through the gaps, waiting for an enemy to lift its shield to fire off a quick shot and then jump over its attack, that sort of thing.

Consequences in Stage Design

    Here's where things get a little more personal. When I attempted to make a simple platformer, I had no problems designing the engine - I gave my character the capabilities I wanted him to have and made his movement feel good to me (and I am a demanding player). My difficulties arose when I began trying to put together stages; they just felt like jumbled messes of random jumps and platforms - kind of like if a person who knew the phonemes of English but no real words started gramping notile decrosters.

These are only letters in the language of Mario. And I bet
you thought the language of Mario was mostly 'Woo-hoo!'
and 'Momma-mia!'.
Source

    There is a 'language' of stage design. This collection of meaningful design objects obviously varies from game to game, depending on the capabilities the player is given and the intended style of the game. Do you remember the article I linked to several posts ago? On game feel?

    When that article talked about creating a 'gameplay garden', it was actually discussing a method for a developer to teach himself precisely that 'language' once he has decided on gameplay mechanics - to teach himself what kinds of challenges and constructions fit naturally with the mechanics and his own design goals. I am not so experienced as all that, and so I am going backwards, taking a pre-existing game series and refining specific examples of design into related categories in order to distill definitions from them. But the necessity remains the same - whether a master or a beginner, the language must be learned. Individual elements must be built into meaningful experiences.

    It is because of this necessity of coming up with a larger 'unit' of design than the individual player action that the terms I have been creating all along have been on the level of player experience - challenges and choices - rather than the level of individual action. But, I don't think I've done it well enough. At the same time, I'm not sure I've got enough material yet to really refine my definitions effectively, so first I am going to finish up the levels of this game. Hopefully now anyone reading this will have an idea where I am coming from, though.

A Random Thought

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

    So, I just replayed the first stage of Mega Man X5 again for the first time in a long while. A long while. Just out of whimsy, a random fling.

    No, that's a lie; it was totally because of this fucking awesome remix on OCRemix's Mega Man X collaboration album, Maverick Rising. I got the nostalgias bad from it.

Source

   Anyway, Mega Man X5, like all of the games in the Mega Man X series, starts you off in an introductory stage; as in all of them from 4 and on, you can choose to play either as Mega Man X or Zero. I picked Zero, just for kicks, and started playing. 5's opening stage places you in a wrecked city, running down the street and then through a collapsing building, and then up the (strangely bulky and mechanical) scaffolding surrounding a large statue, the head of which becomes the opening boss.

Credit where credit is due: this sequence is pretty
artistically legit. Too bad the rest of the game
is plain old silly.  :P
Source

    And that is all of the game it took to remind me why I hate the Playstation Mega Man X games so, so much. I can't stand them. They make me sick, not with anger or disgust, but with sadness and regret.

    Please keep in mind, this is not part of my hard-core analysis schtick. This is my opinion, yadda-yadda. Lots of people like those games; hell, I used to love the ever-loving excrement out of them. But it is my considered opinion that they are, taken as a whole, one of the more spectacular failures of a previously top-quality series in gaming history.

    And now that I am older and wiser and have given much thought to game mechanics and design, I think I understand what went wrong. Who killed Mega Man X? The answer is this guy, right here:

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

    Oh God, here it comes.

    Before anyone rises to Zero's defense, let me explain. I love the character as much as anyone else; hell, he's practically bad-ass incarnate. He steals all the good scenes and there's not a single one of us X players who didn't want to be Zero, dashing in with our long, blonde hair flowing behind us and green lightsaber Beam-Sabre dealing swift death to our enemies.

    But he didn't work. He just didn't work. Not as a character, it's true; the heavy drama weighed too hard on a series that was too cartoonish to support it, and the cutscenes got in the way of our bloody platforming ("I don't care if Zero is dying for the third time now, I just want to play my game!"). But the real problems lay in what Zero did to the series' gameplay. Let's take a quick glance, and only a quick glance, since this is just a little side-trip:

    First, let's take a look at some stage layouts real quick. Here's Storm Eagle's stage from Mega Man X, the premier (and also best) game in the series:

Source

    Notice the large blocks of terrain (the opening area on the left is four screens tall and wide, I think). The stage is about freedom of movement; wide open areas to dodge enemy fire and retaliate, nooks and crannies to explore, and a whole lot of sky to keep things in perspective.

    Now, here's something from Mega Man X5, The Skiver's stage (the sky-based Maverick, and therefore analogous to Storm Eagle):

Source

    That's the bloody sky stage. THE SKY STAGE. It's a series of one-screen-wide gray corridors broken up by exactly two areas of free-scrolling; and of those, one of them is an elevator that you can only leave if you have X's Falcon Armor and has only one 'hidden' area, and the other is the boss chamber.

    Not convinced? Let's look at another comparison. Here's Sting Chameleon's stage, also from X:

    This one's a lot more strictly horizontal and constrained, but look at all the different kinds of terrain! We move from a light jungle area to a cave (including optional branching paths both up and down, the upper of which contains a mini-boss that yields both an Armor piece and a change to the stage dynamics, and the latter of which changes if the player has beaten Launch Octopus already), to more jungle, to a small mountain that must be scaled, to a thicker jungle, to a swamp, to a clearing. This stage is alive with dynamic changes.

    Now here's another stage from X5, Dark Dizzy's:

    It somehow manages to be both busy and monotone at the same time, and it's flat. Flat and unchanging; for your reference, the constellations in the top map turn into enemy ambushes (which quickly become tiresome and annoying), while the terrain becomes very boring in the second part, with constant predictable traps doing little more than slowing the player down, and only one optional path with a puzzle to get an Armor Piece near the end.

    The problems aren't just limited to stage design, either. For the Playstation iterations, the Dash move's speed was cut almost in half; running is also slower. Jumping feels less precise, perhaps due to the loss of clear tile-based layouts and the constant use of 2.5D perspective. Enemy behaviors feel more sedate, and placement seems less creative.

    Some of this was due to laziness and loss of talent on the developers' part, no doubt; CAPCOM had plenty of big-money, big-plan projects for the Sony Playstation, and it's likely that those sucked top-level talent away from the Mega Man X projects. I don't know for sure, though.. Some of it was certainly due to a loss of clear direction in the series; the writing alone is enough to show me that. But it wasn't all that. Some of it was a deliberate adaptation, and I'll tell you what it was a deliberate adaptation to:

That purple fabulousness right there.
Source.

    Yes, it was Zero's iconic Beam Saber that ruined the level design of Mega Man X, pretty much for good. Here's the thing. Before Zero was a fully playable character (he was playable in 3, but only as an assist and he played almost identically to Mega Man X), the Mega Man games had been designed around ranged combat. Quick, precise movements, out-ranging enemies, and moving into horizontal alignment were the key skills, and stages were designed to permit these things as much as possible. But Zero couldn't work that way; with his short reach, he had to be able to get right up into an enemy's face. From the beginning, this meant they had to slow the dash; otherwise it would be too easy to miscalculate and bump into an enemy. They had to make stage designs more claustrophobic, or Zero would have a hard time getting to them in time. So, enemies were placed almost entirely directly in the player's path and their behaviors were altered so that Zero could safely approach right up to them - which, of course, meant that their behaviors were considerably less dangerous than in previous games.

    Zero's mechanics were more suitable to a beat-em-up game than a classic platformer of the style the Mega Man games had always been; and, in a way, the developers were smart to make changes to allow for this. But in doing so, they lost a lot of what made the series great to begin with - expansive, varied environments, creative enemy arrangements with wild behaviors, the supreme freedom of movement and the joy that came with learning to control it, all of these were pretty much gone from 4 onward. It was a great loss for the platformer genre, and to this day no series that I know of has really stepped up to replace it. Perhaps now that Metroidvanias are the standard format and the days of carefully crafted, refined obstacle-course stages are gone, none ever will.

    But I sure hope not.

   ....

    This fucking remix. I tell you what, man. It's the bee's knees.

Mega Man I: Cut Man's Stage Analysis

Cut Man's Stage: Analysis

Stage Divisions

    As you can see, for this stage I tweaked the arrangement from my previous breakdown. I included the first screen of each gauntlet in the section to which it is a lead-up, despite the lack of a clear division via scrolling. This will help clean up my difficulty curve and hazard population analyses.

Difficulty Chart

    What to say about this? If Cut Man's stage feels somewhat dull and listless, I suspect this is at least part of why. The stage has no very high or low points; it maintains a more or less static (and not very high) level of challenge throughout, so any character it has must come from something else - a special enemy or hazard, a unique bit of platforming, something.

    Unfortunately, there is no 'something' that does that, as we are about to see:

Hazard Population

    This is informative, but not in quite the way it appears at first. First, note the similarity to Guts Man's stage's hazard chart. As in that, the player mostly encounters different hazards sequentially, with little or no integration, and there are not many hazards. However, there are some key differences that need to be taken into account:

1. In Guts Man's stage, the Sections were far shorter, and the hazards in each had virtually no development within their Section as well as no integration into later ones; here, on the other hand, Sections 2 and 4 provide a process (however flawed) of escalation and development, making the stage feel less about tricks. Additionally, similarities in the way different hazards are presented (again, Sections 2 and 4 are both vertical OROC series') make it feel more integrated than it really is. In this way, Cut Man's stage is an improvement over Guts Man's.
2. On the other hand, because the length of Cut Man's stage (which is closer to, or even greater than, that of Bomb Man's stage) is much larger than Guts Man's stage, and yet contains barely any more hazard types, it feels very monotonous and repetitive. In this way, Cut Man's stage falls short of Bomb Man's.

Post-Mortem Analysis

    Cut Man's stage overreached itself, and I suspect it had more to do with the limitations (of time and system resources) the developers faced than inexperience on their part. It shows signs of smart design, with clear attempts to introduce and escalate challenges focused around enemies and terrain; unfortunately, the inability to: 1) do this effectively with all of them and 2) integrate them to create something even more challenging prevented them from realizing their full goals. Octopus Batteries were a poor choice for enemy design (actually, many of the enemies in this game were such, and I will discuss this issue somewhat later), and while Section 4, for instance, might have been better if, say, the developers had started blending Beaks and Octopus Batteries, it is likely that they were constrained by the NES hardware, which could only handle so many sprites at a time. Even the third screen in Section 4 displays lag with only five Octopus Batteries.

    Where I am not as inclined to forgive the developers is in the waste of the stage's unique hazard: the Super Cutters. Since they appear only in this stage and could have provided the developers with myriad options to create distinctive and fun Forced Pace and High Pressure Challenges, I cannot fathom why they instead chose to focus on a series of fairly dull OROCs with enemies the player would get to encounter under more interesting circumstances in plenty of other areas in the game.

Mega Man I: Cut Man's Stage Breakdown

Intro: A Stage That Doesn't Quite Feel Right

It's certainly big enough to work; one of the longer in the game. The colors
are a bit sickly, though.

    Cut Man's Stage just doesn't add up, and it's a little hard to put one's finger on just exactly why. Hopefully my analysis will clear things up once we've broken the stage down, but I can point out a few things right off the bat:

• Out of all the stages in this game, Cut Man's has the blandest, ugliest graphics; Bomb Man's stage had no logic, but at least the colors popped and the vertical-horizontal design gave it visual interest. Here we have nothing but sickly turquoise sky, green brickwork, and dull gray interior wall. It appears to be a large building of some sort, perhaps in disrepair, but the lack of coherent structure and dull, unpleasant colors detract a great deal from the stage's aesthetic appeal.
• Cut Man's stage is, like Bomb Man's, divided into alternate vertical and horizontal sections; however, this time, it is the horizontal sections that provide fleeting breaks between sections of vertical OROCs; the emphasis on vertical movement slows the pace of the stage, and since it's already long the ultimate feel of the stage is slow and tedious, especially since the stage offers no novel hazards to spice things up.
• Copy-pasting makes another appearance here, and this time it isn't even much of a mix-up, the way it was in Bomb Man's stage; rather, it is dull and repetitive. That combined with the poor design of many of the vertical areas, which are by their very nature repetitive, gives the stage a...repetitive feel. That is repetitive. And repeats itself.

    Those are some issues that are obvious right off the bat. Let's take a deeper look, though.

Cut Man's Stage: Breakdown

Part 1: A Slow Start

Map

Description

    Do you remember how I pointed out, several posts ago, that all of the mechanics of Mega Man were designed to give the player the feeling of unhindered movement? Well, this stage gets off to a bad start by opening with a section designed to defeat those mechanics, and worse, uselessly. And it does it twice. With copy-pasted screens. The choices do get somewhat better from there, at least for a while, though.

Breakdown

1. These two identical screens force a player who either has not beaten Guts Man or wants to preserve the Super Arm ammo to first backtrack and then navigate around the loose blocks via the ladders, all while two flocks of Bladers pester him. Bladers are especially annoying on broken terrain. It's a poor tutorial element to place at the beginning of the stage, but I will give the design here two points:
• The ladders here provide the player with a low-pressure opportunity to get used to the movement and physics on them before moving on to stiffer challenges involving them later.
• The loose blocks, though in my opinion poorly placed, do provide players with a hint that the Super Arm might be a good weapon to have here, as it so happens that Cut Man is weak against it. This kind of hinting is only made possible by the stage-contextual nature of the Super Arm weapon, of course, and Cut Man's stage is not the only one to have blocks in it, but they are more plentiful here than in any other; most areas have at least one laying about.
2. This pit hazard does not provide a serious threat even with the Beak located just past it. I am not entirely sure why it was included at all, since pit hazards will not play a significant role in this stage. These exact two screens will reappear in the next horizontal section, however, with the only change being the exchange of Beaks for Octopus Batteries. Speaking of the Beaks, the two that are located here are pretty clearly placed for tutorial purposes. The first one is placed in such a way that a cautiously proceeding player is able to fire at it just as it opens, showing him the enemy's weakness, while the second is placed in a more threatening position to make him notice the four bullet trajectories. Observe:
   
   

   

   Cool mint lines indicate trajectories that are not a threat to a player
   who is being careful and taking out Beaks when possible. Spicy
   chili lines indicate trajectories that the player must cross before he
   can destroy the associated Beak, assuming he does not have
   the Elec Beam.


I have roughly marked the trajectories of the four shots fired by each Beak on this screen. Bearing in mind that shots are fired sequentially starting at the top, you can see that a player approaching with any sense of caution is going to have a chance to see the two mildly threatening shots fired by the rightmost Beak at the ladder he will have to climb to progress. At this time he can choose (Equivalent Path Choice) to go the long way around to get a clearer shot at the Beak (and avoid the annoying jump into the one-tile opening to reach the ladder) or else go straight up the ladder and either time his movement to avoid the shots or pause briefly to fire at it from the ladder. In either case, the layout of the stage ensures that even a first-time player will have plenty of time to observe and deal with the Beak enemy's behavior before moving on to the gauntlet coming up in the next section.

Video Demonstration

Part 2: The Gauntlet In This Section

Map

Description

    Here we come to the meat of Cut Man's stage: the first of two three-screen gauntlets. This one features the Beaks we dealt with just a moment ago, in three different configurations. The vertical movement here works, mostly, because it relies on ladders broken by horizontal movement, and thus fits in with the natural flow of Mega Man gameplay; the repetition is not so good, however. Still, even working with the limited elements present, there are signs of smart design and I plan to illustrate them as clearly as I can.

Breakdown

1. The screens in this section are a rough process of escalation; taking the end of the previous section as the first 'screen' in this series (which it is, more or less), then this is the second, and the escalation begins right away. First, there are three Beaks here instead of two, and second, for the first time the player is forced to cross the line of fire from some of them (with restricted ladder movement, no less) before gaining the opportunity to retaliate, requiring the player to observe timing.
   
   
   
   
   As you can see, the two beaks at the top fire their last bullets along the same trajectory, directly across the ladder the player must climb in order to reach a level where he can face them. That level itself is also peppered by trajectories, but the initial shots of each Beak, fired harmlessly into the air, should give him ample time to eliminate the Beaks safely before much danger.
2. The next screen is more of the same, but with the stakes slightly higher.
   
   
   
   
   As you can see, the Beaks here have been placed in more threatening positions, with one firing directly at the player almost immediately, and two more covering an area the player must negotiate in order to approach safely from the right; if he chooses to take the initial ladder, he can avoid one of them but must negotiate the topmost Beak's lowest shot still. More importantly, the player must deal with shots going in both directions now, which can be disorienting for a novice player.
3. Finally,
   
   
   
   
   Here we see the culmination of the mini-progression of Beak gauntlets. There is a gap the player must cross in order to proceed; only one pathway is feasible, and it takes the player directly through the line of fire of a mid-range shot from the middle Beak, requiring careful timing in order to avoid taking damage. In addition, the player is immediately threatened by a Beak at his level upon entering the screen, and must react by shooting it or reaching the top of the ladder and jumping over the second shot in order to avoid damage. I don't want to give the impression that this screen is hard, exactly, but it is at least harder than the previous ones.

Overall Analysis

    Plenty of smart design choices in this section. The difficulty of each screen advances smoothly and never in an unfair way; the relationship between the Beaks' behavior (firing sequentially from the top down) and the player's progress through the stage (moving from the bottom to the top of each screen) is exploited to ensure he always has time to react. The relationship between enemy behaviors and terrain plays a key role in keeping up challenge and engagement with limited elements, it would seem. Perhaps that is why the newer Castlevania games, with their enormous and mostly barren maps, require such large bestiaries in order to keep up player interest?

    It's just a shame the rest of the level doesn't hold up to this precedent...

Video Demonstration

Part 3: A Brief Interlude

Map

Description

    As I explained in the introduction, Cut Man's stage flips the formula of Bomb Man's; the horizontal sections make for brief interludes between the meatier vertical ones, rather than vice-versa. Here we see the first such area - a mere three screens, the third of which really counts as the first screen of the next vertical section if we were to be nit-picky. I would never be nit-picky. Never.

Breakdown

1. Here we find the sole unique hazard of Cut Man's stage: a Super Cutter launcher. It consists of a big gray blocky structure (entirely in the background), the black opening of which dispenses cutters in an arc aimed directly at Mega Man. A fairly basic hazard, but one with which much could be done. Nothing is done with it here - the cutters start flying once the player starts right from the ladder and stop after he jumps onto the ledge to the right - but of course the player needs a chance to learn its behavior.
2. Again we see this structure; this time instead of Bladers a trio of Flea bots jump at the player, often catching him unawares even if he is expecting them. Not a major threat, but at least it's something different from earlier. Still, since Fleas aren't used for anything later in the stage it feels like a bit of a non-sequitur.
3. As I said, this is really the screen where the next vertical section begins; I include it here because a first-time player will not perceive it so due to the scrolling mechanics of Mega Man I. The layout is, again, identical to the corresponding area in the first section, but this time the flavor of the day is Octopus Batteries, enemies which fly either vertically or horizontally between walls. They are configured so:
   
   

   

   The lines obviously mark the paths the Octopus Batteries move
   across. Back and forth, up and down.

   
   Now, as before, there are elements of smart design. The first Octopus Battery the player must negotiate is trapped in a narrow area directly in his path, presenting no active threat but forcing a response; this is as effective a tutorial as any normal player needs. The developers then move right into more advanced placement; the player must deal with at least one of the second Batteries in a...somewhat more threatening situation...? I just...I don't...
   
   ...
   
   Forget it. I'll deal with that issue in the next section. Here's a video or something, I don't know.

Video Demonstration

Part 4: A Rustier Gauntlet

Map

Description

    On the surface this section looks exceedingly similar to Section 2, but it isn't. Once again, the player is scaling what seems to be an industrial building, though this time the presence of two walls indicates an interior, despite the gaps in the background, and once again the hazard takes the form of a gauntlet consisting of a single type of enemy in what were apparently intended to be increasingly dangerous configurations. My use of softeners in that last sentence will become clear in a moment.

    Before moving on, I would like to say that, despite the highly critical tone I am about to take, I approve of what the designers were going for here. Taking the same basic structure and repeating it with variation is not a bad way to sustain interest; one could say that that sort of repetition forms the basis of most structured art forms. This is a good design choice that we will see in later games. It falls flat here not because of what it is at core, but because of smaller shortcomings, which I will try to indicate.

Breakdown

1. Okay, just look at it:
   
   
   
   
   
   Do you see what the problem is yet? No?
2. Let's look at the next room, then:
   
   
   
   
   
   Well? Anything?
3. How about here:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Do you get it yet?

Overall Analysis

     The lines of movement really should make the issue with this section clear, but I'll spell it out anyway: Octopus Batteries are not threatening. They don't do anything interesting; they just move back and forth along a single line, either vertical or horizontal. They don't fire anything, and they don't change their movement in any way. Because of this, there is literally no reason why a player who is patient enough to wait for each one that blocks his path to come in range and kill it should ever take damage. They provide no challenge in the sense of difficulty; they merely punish a player who does not feel like standing still to wait for them to move. Novice players often do not realize this and take damage, but the moment a player grasps the nature of these challenges they immediately become trivial and annoying, nothing but a time-waster to draw out the level.

    You can see in the three areas that the designers were going for something along the lines of an escalation, with more lines of movement crossing the player's path and more claustrophobic formations, but they just didn't have the tools to do it; the behavior of the Octopus Battery doesn't allow for challenging level design on its own. It isn't a good enemy design for this game; Mega Man's freedom of movement and attack abilities are too strong for it. And the developers realized it, too, because no enemy like the Octopus Battery ever appeared in the series again. Ever. At least, not on the NES, and I can't off the top of my head think of an enemy like it in any of the later games either.

    I'm going to delve into some enemy design stuff later on in this blog when I've got a bit more context and have solidified my thoughts a bit more clearly, so I'll get back to this issue later; there's quite a bit to say on it. For now, suffice it to stress that this section of Cut Man's stage fails solely because the enemy design was not suitable to the overall game design choices, and therefore the developers' intention was foiled from the beginning. It was a lesson the they learned well, I think, because later games in the series showed some of the most brilliant enemy design in any NES platformer series.

Video Demonstration

    I would like to take this opportunity to debut a new feature of my stage breakdowns: not having a video demonstration for every part of everys tage! There is literally nothing in any of my video footage of this section worth showing; the info is all in the analysis already. If you really want to see it, I'm sure there's plenty of footage online.

Part 5: The Apex, Zenith, Summit, and Highest Point

Map

Description

    I...God, it's hard to write coherently about this stage. What do I say? In a later game, this area would have marked a striking change in the stage and likely would have been a memorable moment; it's the highest point of the map and marks a sharp transition in the design philosophy of the stage, from a series of progress-blocking gauntlets to a rather quick drop-down, and then to the end. But, instead, it's another mere interlude. It's not that it's actively bad, not like some of the things in Guts Man's stage, and nowhere near as bad as some of the things we'll see next in Elec Man's stage, but...it just feels like wasted space.

Breakdown

1. This bit right here kind of sums up what's wrong with this stage, doesn't it? This is the second and last appearance of Super Cutters in the Mega Man series, and it's identical to the first. It's nice to see something different, but nothing is being done with it; there are no extra hazards added to make it more challenging, and since the 'solution' to the Super Cutter dispenser is 'run straight forward without stopping', which is what any player is ordinarily motivated to do, it falls rather flat. This obstacle had potential to play a role in integrated Threat Management Challenges or High Pressure Challenges, but neither of those appears in this stage.
2. Some Bladers attack the player here; but since this terrain actually makes them less of a threat than the ones at the start of the stage, once more it falls rather flat. In a minor act of mercy, the developers left an easily accessible Big Life Energy for players who didn't fare well in the earlier sections. Once that's been collected (it hardly seems worth calling it an Optional Path Incentive, though I suppose it is), the player can choose either to take the ladder or jump straight down. Most likely take the ladder by instinct, out of a sense of caution, which as we will see in the next section is a good idea.

Part 6: Downhill From Here

Map

Description

    This area is the reverse of previous sections, in more ways than one. The screen layout is reversed from the first Beak gauntlet - the building is now on the right (I suppose the player is now descending the other side of the building or buildings he has been climbing all this time) and movement is, of course, downward. Downward movement changes things in Mega Man; falling is easy and quick, and many stages in the game take advantage of this to force new challenges on the player.

    That's why it's a bit strange that, contrary to expectations, this area is actually another series of OROCs, albeit somewhat simpler than before. Let's take a closer look.

Breakdown

1. Here the player, if he has taken the ladder or manages to land on the platform it rests on after dropping, is presented once more with the choice between a quick, risky drop or a slower, safer ladder. Flying Shells once more make a late-stage appearance here, incentivizing the latter (the ladder, ha ha). This time they pose no serious threat. I am a little puzzled about the purpose of the right-most two-tile platform in this design; it might be there to balance the visuals, I suppose. I see no gameplay purpose for it. The Flying Shells appear just above those two platforms, providing a descending player with an opportunity to take out one, securing a break in their spawning to safely go down the ladder if he chooses to do so.
2. And here we see why the cautious path is better. The spikes above are placed so as to neatly trap and kill a hasty player trying to save time by dropping down the right. This is another example of malicious design, which I define as purposefully enticing and then punishing certain behaviors on the part of players ("Here, have a short-cut! Uh-oh, gotcha!"). I have mixed feelings about it; in small measures it can add a dose of healthy fear to the experience of playing ("You'd better take my game seriously and be careful."), and it can even be humorous - the famously difficult indie platformer I Wanna Be The Guy is based largely on this principle, and Dark Souls takes some of its appeal from it as well. On the other hand, large amounts of it can discourage or frustrate many players, especially when they are not properly warned beforehand. Of course, Mega Man is an old-school series, and malicious design was  quite common; likely anybody picking this game up expected to die plenty of questionable deaths. But the Mega Man series was also one of the earlier game franchises to eschew this style of design, and it will appear far less often in later games, and I think this choice made up part of its lasting success.

Part 7: The Marathon's End

Map

Description

    No, I'm not doing another description and I'm not doing a breakdown or video demo either. This is identical to the end of Guts Man's stage, down to the last detail: a drop-down and a Forced Encounter with a lone Big Eye, then the door. I will say only one thing: I think I can understand how a semi-climactic encounter with a larger baddie might be an attractive way to end a stage. But the developers soon abandoned this technique, and instead placed their mini-bosses in the middle of stages. Why? Because putting something right before the Robot Master detracts from the drama of the final run-up. Some stages in later games will still place a large hopping enemy directly in front of the door (perhaps out of nostalgia), but none of those enemies will be as hard to kill or as dangerous as the Big Eye.

    Nor will they look as much like an old-fashioned telephone riding The Noid's crusher pogo-stick. >:[

Mega Man I: Guts Man Breakdown and Analysis

Guts Man's Stage: Breakdown

Part 1: Regression

Map

Description

    Visually Guts Man's stage is an improvement over Bomb Man's; the orange foreground and blue background contrast nicely and there is a clear logic to the graphics: we are at some kind of mountain work-site, probably a mine or quarry, as indicated by the zoned-off entrances into the mountain in the background and the railway-like bridge in the latter part of this area.

    In Bomb Man's stage we saw a fairly lengthy stage that made up for its relative lack of unique or interesting elements with solid design and pacing. Guts Man's stage is almost precisely the opposite, and the problems begin very early on, as we will see.

Breakdown

1. Once more we see here a very simple tutorial section, where the player is forced to prove his knowledge of the game's basic mechanics in order to proceed. Mets (Hard Hats) dot the stairway-like structure, marking their first appearance in the Mega Man universe, and almost their only appearance in this game.
2. And here the problems begin. Those who have watched Egoraptor's Sequelitis episode on the Mega Man series will recognize these platforms. I am puzzled that Egoraptor used these as an example of how good the Mega Man games are at teaching, however, because there are far better examples to be found, even in the first game. As he pointed out, the player does get to see the relationship between the moving platforms and the background before moving to the second one. While this is true, and the idea of using a background element to inform the player's understanding of the behavior of a hazard was an innovative trick the series would go on to use many more times, the section still creates some major problems. Consider:
• The platform timing is maintained regardless of player progress through the stage, meaning that a player might encounter the track before encountering the platform. Because the track is solid in appearance, it would be easy to mistake it for a platform itself, leading to a death by confusion, which is frustrating.
• The player's first encounter with the obstacle is over an instant-death pit trap, forcing the player to learn its properties during a High Pressure Challenge, something a game should never do, as we saw in Section 9 of Bomb Man's stage.
• Though the general relationship between the platforms and the track are fairly obvious from the start, the precise relationship may not be - specifically, that the track interacts with the circular protrusion on the left end of the platform, and not the center of it.
3. Here the player encounters three Bladers in a flat area before crossing a series of platforms; this section poses no major challenges and serves as something of a breather before the next section.
4. Just before and on this rail section the player must get through a series of Forced Encounter Challenges against Picket Men. The last one, in which the Picket Man is placed on the two-tile platform just before the spikes, is the hardest.

EDIT: I have been remiss. I was so caught up in criticizing the moving platforms that I forgot to point out that they do, in fact, represent a new kind of challenge: the Cue Response Challenge, in which the player must respond to visual or auditory cues in order to succeed. In this case, the cues are present in the background track object, and are telegraphed by the layout of the tracks. We will see more of these in later games, and in fact they form a large part of the challenge in many of the later Robot Master encounters.

Video Demonstration

I chose to forego the commentary in previous

videos; the action here basically speaks for itself.

Part 2: A Drop

Map

Description

    This short vertical section has the player moving downward, and provides a rudimentary Path Choice; in this case, because of the speed with which the player falls, the inability to move back up, and the presence of hazards in the form of spikes that are difficult or impossible to avoid depending on the player's choice, it is an undesirable Blind Path Choice. The player is merely tricked if he happens to fall onto spikes the first time, and memorization is required to pass the challenge. This kind of design was fairly common in games at the time of Mega Man's release, but it would not be used in later games in the series; Blind Path Choices will reappear from time to time, but only in the context of optional rewards, and never punishments.

Breakdown

1. The player will likely instinctively attempt to land on one of the platforms here. It is probably that the developers understood this through playtesting and intended it to make the choice more intentional on the player's part; nevertheless the placement of the 'wrong choice' in the slot nearest to the area where the player enters from the room above is notable.
2. It is very difficult to collect the Big Life Energy on the top right without using the Magnet Beam from Elec Man's stage; when falling at terminal velocity, the player's movement is too fast to enter the small area successfully. The same goes for the 1-up in the third screen. A player who falls in from the path on the left and attempts to collect the Small Life Energies on the platform to the left of the spikes is likely to be knocked into them by the Bladers that soon appear from that side of the screen; another mean trick on the developers' part which is likely to frustrate less experienced players.
3. The spikes on the bottom here cannot be successfully avoided if the player has fallen from the beginning while hugging the right wall. Even with the warning time the screen-by-screen scrolling provides, the player will be falling too quickly to get out of the way.

Video Demonstration

Part 3: One More Encounter

Map

Description

    The last area of Guts Man's stage is a short run over broken terrain with a single Forced Encounter Challenge against a Big Eye, a large hopping enemy resembling the Flea which causes 10(!) points of damage if it hits the player, making it a very poor Loss-Option Choice unless the player has avoided taking damage throughout the stage so far, especially since the player's higher ground gives him an advantage in the fight.

Breakdown

    No breakdown needed. That's literally it. I don't know if the developers were out of ideas or if the limited space on the Mega Man cartridge prevented them from doing anything else with the stage, but one way or another the end is quite sudden and jarring; it feels like the stage is cut off half-way through.

Video Demonstration

Note on Bosses

    From now on, I am going to leave the bosses out of the stage descriptions and analyses. Though the boss encounters are a major feature - arguably the key feature - of the Mega Man formula, I think a better way of dealing with them will be to do a post covering all six of them at once, with descriptions and comparisons of behavior and difficulty, than to do them at the end of stage descriptions where they don't really fit in well with the prior material.

Guts Man's Stage: Analysis

Stage Divisions

This time I didn't use my numbered breakdown divisions; the vertical section, 5, is really just one section
despite involving two screen transitions. We'll be seeing more such sections as this blog goes on.

Challenge Diagram

    Right away we see a major problem: the challenge levels are all over the place. Gone is the gradual ramp-up in challenge, paced by areas of slightly lower challenge that made Bomb Man's stage feel so smooth and well-rounded; Guts Man's stage moves from the base tutorial straight into a very difficult challenge, then proceeds to zig-zag between decreasing challenges spaced with essentially dead space before cutting off in a jarring fashion before the player has even had a chance to understand the stage's features. The sole feature for which the stage is remembered is also the feature for which it is largely hated: the moving platforms placed directly at the beginning. But it gets worse.

Hazard Population

    The hazard population is also in stark contrast to Bomb Man's stage; whereas (with a couple of exceptions) in that stage the player encountered threats in a process of introduction and integration, here they are mostly just placed one after another, with each challenge appearing once and then disappearing. The moving platforms we will see exactly once more before the end of the game, in the very last stage; Metalls and Picket Men will never appear again. Nothing is explored, nothing is integrated, nothing is really learned or gained.

    This is why Guts Man's stage comes off as a series of disconnected, one-off tricks. It is not the worst stage in the game (I think there are two worse, personally, and I'll point them out as we reach them), but it's pretty bad, and I doubt the series would have lasted as long as it did if the developers had not evidently learned from their failures and successes. Stages as badly designed as this will become much rarer as we progress through the Mega Man series.

    Incidentally, I realize now that the two features I chose to chart, and therefore to quantify, have very easy names: Pacing and Integration. Pacing is self-explanatory; it refers to the player's sense of progression, and since challenge plays a large role in that it becomes very clear in the Challenge Progression diagram. Integration refers to the level to which challenges are repeated, enhanced, and mixed with each other in order to give the player a sense that he is not just moving through a series of obstacles but actually learning and applying skills, and therefore gaining and exercising mastery over the game. Both Pacing and Integration are easily quantifiable measures of how 'good' a stage design is, and therefore will prove very useful tools in my quest. I will be adding both to my design lexicon. Of course, they are not the only measures, and not all of the elements that make a design good or bad are quantifiable; things like aesthetics and compatibility with the game's core mechanics also come into play and are not as easy to give a simple number.

Thanks for reading,

The Undesigner

PS: You didn't think we actually captured all that footage without a few deaths, did you? Here are some instructive examples of this stage's meanness. Enjoy.

Mega Man I: Analysis Intro, Bomb Man Analysis

Introduction to My Analytic

The Non-Linear Factor

    A key feature of the Mega Man series, and one that it is not easy for me to handle neatly in a serial blog, is the non-linear flow of the first part of each game. The player has the option to attempt any of the eight (or, in the first game, six) Robot Master stages in any order, and to facilitate this each one is designed to be possible without any power-ups or special weapons. However, some stages seem clearly designed to be either significantly easier or significantly harder than the norm.

    The 'Rock-Paper-Scissors' style of boss weakness that the series featured from the start also works with this design choice, allowing a player who has completed one stage a clear 'next' choice, if he knows which boss is weak against the weapon he now possesses. These weaknesses are not always obvious, often requiring a first-time player to experiment, but since they do nothing to punish beating a stage 'out of order', that does little to break the flow of the game.

    Because I have to review the stages of each game in some order, it will not really be possible for me to rate the stages of a game by difficulty clearly until I have done them all. Mind you, I know for my own purposes from years of playing the games how they stack up, but I can't really demonstrate it. Nevertheless, the flow of a given stage often gives a hint of whether that stage was designed to be a 'break-in' stage or one the player is intended to tackle later, and it is those hints that I will use in my analysis.

Difficulty is Subjective...Mostly

    For me, there are only two difficult parts of Mega Man I: the two boss rushes in the second and last Wily stages. I know at least one person by acquaintance for whom both of those are (or were, anyway) quite easy. For most people, the game is fairly hard almost from start to finish. It all depends on the player's general platformer skill and familiarity with the game. Therefore, take my difficulty ratings, such as they are, as opinions, colored by my own aptitudes and experiences.

    Even so, there are still objective measures to be found. The amount of stage in a given moment that is 'covered' by a hazard or enemy, the ratio of safe footing to unsafe, the 'power' of the hazards in terms of health-cost (from zero to instant-death), and the speed at which the player is forced to complete it; all of these are at least to some extent quantifiable, and therefore provide an objective underpinning to that opinion.

    Taking both the objective and subjective elements of difficulty into account, I am going to use a simple 1-5 scale to indicate the difficulty of each section in a stage, as follows:

1. Dreadfully easy, requiring nothing other than a basic understanding of the game's controls and features. Anyone capable of playing can do this without effort; this level is usually relegated to 'breathing space' between stronger challenges, or else tutorial elements at the beginning of Robot Master stages.
2. Requires competence in the game's basic actions, but little more. After a few tries, even a beginner can do it without much effort, and an experienced player will barely notice it.
3. Attention and focus will be required of the player; an experienced player will not have much trouble if he is not being careless, but a beginner may have significant problems at first.
4. A significant challenge, enough to catch even an expert player from time to time, and a major hurdle for beginners; this is the level of challenge that usually forms the 'climax' of a normal stage in most games.
5. The hardest the game gets; these are the moments that experts remember as 'that hard part' and frequently fail even after many replays.

    The use of a numerical scale broken up by section will allow me to make visual representations of a level's changing difficulty, something I intend to do.

Hazard Population and Distribution

    Another easy choice for visual representation is the distribution of hazard and enemy types in a stage; since this often ties into the effectiveness of the challenge and tutorial elements in a stage, a simple chart showing their rough placement from section to section will give a quick overview of the elegance of a stage's construction, especially when cross-referenced against the difficulty chart. I hope.

Bomb Man's Stage: Analysis

Stage Division

    For purposes of simplicity, I will be using the stage divisions I made earlier, subdividing by the numbered lists; this will effectively eliminate a few of the flat, uneventful moments in the stage, but shouldn't hurt my analysis too much. Just so you don't have to scroll up to remember what those divisions were, here's a visual representation of it:

Arranged into block formation for efficiency; image references individual sections but
not necessarily their arrangement.

    Note that in some sections there is 'blank space' in the form of flat terrain with no notable features. In 5 this serves the gameplay purpose of allowing the Sniper Joe to exhibit its tailing behavior, but in the others it serves as breathing space to lend a sense of pacing to the action of the stage. I could probably subdivide these 'negative spaces' into their own sections, but I think it makes more sense from the standpoint of challenge analysis to leave them integrated, since they do not affect the challenge of the level one way or another, but merely pace it.

Challenge Diagram

   Bomb Man's stage isn't that hard, overall. The double-peak in the second half of the stage is where the climax of the action occurs, first on the Threat Management Challenge and then on the High Pressure Challenge. If anyone is wondering why I did not make the latter a '4', the answer is that some of the difficulty of that challenge is fake, due to the sudden appearance of a previously unencountered enemy in very unfavorable circumstances, and that challenge is negated once a player is experienced enough that the psychological element of surprise disappears.

    Readers familiar with the general shape of plot tension arcs will recognize this as resembling one. I suspect that this is, first of all, one of the reasons that Bomb Man's stage feel so smooth and well-paced, and also why it makes such a good starting stage. While it doesn't stand out as one of the better stages in the entire series, by the standards of this game it's one of the best. It's not without flaw, however.

Hazard Population

    Some of those flaws can be seen in this chart. While for the most part the various enemies and hazards are introduced in forgiving circumstances early on and then re-introduced later in more threatening situations, flying shells stand out as appearing only late in the stage, and during the single most difficult section. This is a major design misstep, uncharacteristic of the series as a whole but still not absent. I think it would have been preferable to have substituted more Killer Bullets; by the time the player reaches the difficult Section 9, he has already had plenty of time to become acquainted with their behavior, and their sine-wave movement would have provided as much real challenge as the Flying Shells' eight-way shot.

    Of course, Killer Bullets themselves are introduced during the second-most difficult section, though the result is not as egregious, especially because there does not seem to be a better place to have introduced them. If I were tasked with re-tooling the stage, I think I would eliminate the Screw Bombers from Section 3, which are never used again in the stage and therefore do little to further its development, and introduce Killer Bullets there instead, and replace the Flying Shells with Killer Bullets in Section 9 as well.

    Another flaw, though I suppose it must ultimately be forgiven, is that the stage simply does not have much unique character. It is the only one of the six Robot Master stages to feature Sniper Joes, but otherwise it has little to characterize it. Most of the game's basic hazards are present but not utilized in very creative ways, the scenery is slightly bland and difficult to interpret from the standpoint of game logic, and the most memorable section of the stage is memorable mostly for the frustration it causes players on the first encounter. As a tutorial stage it does a fairly good job of familiarizing the player with the game's basic elements, but otherwise it has little to set it apart.

    Still, this was the first game in the series, and many of the distinct features of Mega Man are present only in concept or rudimentary form; the stage does what it seems to have been intended to do without any fatal flaws, and its structural features will be seen more than any others in later stages in the series, as we will see, so I am going to have to give this one a favorable judgment. It was a strong start to a strong game. Next time, we review a stage that does not get off so well: Guts Man's.

Thanks for reading,

The Undesigner