Topic: Mega Man 11

Sincere question here: Do you know what "pick up and play" means?

Pick up and play literally just means they require no time to understand how to play them and/or have the gameplay start ASAP. An NES game where you jump, shoot and run right is very much easy to understand and those games starts as soon as you pick a stage. It's called that because you can just pick up the controller...and play it. And in fact those old Megaman games have less mechanics to understand and honestly fit better into that criteria.

@Agriculture You obviously don't know the meaning of pick up and play. The original games were very much that. Really the only strategy was what order to take on the bosses and even then you don't have to do that.

Nobody can start up an early Mega Man game and just finish a level. It involves tons and tons of trial and error. Just because all you do is shoot and jump doesn't mean the game is "pick up and play".

This is 100% false. The better Mega Man games have surprisingly little trial and error in them. They pre-empt all of what you need to do so you are ready for it. Sure the secret areas in games form the X series for example take a while to find but you can really pick up an early Mega Man game and just play it.

Mega Man 1 was just really hard and the controls were not that good. Not really trial and error, we knew what to do, jsut doing it was really difficuly. Mega Man 2 toned down the difficulty and also not that trial and error. The only trial and error parts are one of the Wily stages with the invisible floors and the wall canon boss that can screw you if you don't come in with enough of the right weapon ammo.

Mega Man 11 on the other hand is 100% trial and error. here's why:

1. The knockback from the enemies is so large that every hit in the stage proper is an instant death.
2. The enemies are placed in such a way that you either avoid then entirely or take a hit and fall into a pit or spikes because the being hit animation and knockback is so long. There's nothing you can do about it apart from not getting hit. Very different to other Mega Man games where you can take multiple hits from enemies and often you die from running out of life.
3. There's no warning to let you know there's a screen scroll segment in a level in Mega Man 11. These segments are just pattern memorisation. You learn it through multiple deaths as if you're too slow you are pushed into a spike or a pit and die.
4. Much of the game is designed around the slow down ability. Such that the ability feels like a necessity, not a powerup. This mostly applies to the sub bosses and bosses.

There's more wrong with Mega Man 11 but that's outside the scope of this direct reply to you.

Mega Man 2 as an example, though Mega Man X follows this too, introduces you to the main challenge in a level early on, in an easier way so you know what to expect and then later on in the level ramps it up so you have to get good to beat the level. Most of the challenge in these classic Mega Man games is not trial and error. It's practice makes perfect. You know what to do, just need to practice so you get good enough to actually do it.

Pick up and play also doesn't automatically mean "are able to be good enough to get far in it".

And tbh, even as a dumb 5 year old that could only beat the easiest of games, I beat half of the Robot Master levels in Megaman 3, without knowing weapon weaknesses were even a thing. (I'm not even sure I used those weapons back in the day!)

Just found out about the recent free DLC update to the mega man zero collection that let's you play alternate remixed music tracks in stages! Then i heard that they did the same thing for mega man 11 a while back. Why am i just now hearing about this? 😳 Time for another replay!

@Slowdive would you say it’s better than the original Mega Man games or the X/Zero games?

@Zeldafan79, wow, I didn't know about the Mega Man 11 alternate music either. That kinda makes me want to pick up the game again - I really disliked the original soundtrack. Probably the thing that bummed me out most about it as a Mega Man game, to be honest, although I don't especially love the aesthetic, either.

These tracks aren't exactly classic MM tunes either, but I kinda dig the instrument choices from what little I now have heard of it! Kinda cool.

@Slowdive This entire list makes NO sense.

Seriously — putting the entire Legacy/X collections in this list alongside each game in the series literally makes no sense. (The entire X Collection gets #3 and MMX gets #1? WTF?)

Regardless of that, #17 for MM11 is pretty generous, IMO. Putting it above Mega Man 10 I disagree with. Putting Mega Man 1 SO FAR DOWN on the list is a crime and the person putting this together clearly doesn’t understand what they’re doing.

I expected Mega Man 2 to be top of the classic series here, so at least that predictability factor has been met. (Should have been MM9 on the top though - criminally underrated here too.)

@Slowdive BTW - is it a reference to the band? Good ***** if so.