![]() ![]() RT-55J, the guardian of the armor upgrade, takes entirely too long to defeat, no matter what weapon you use. Parts of Boomer Kuwanger's stage dole out disproportionate punishments for the smallest and easiest of failures, transforming the tower from tense to tedious. The arm upgrade in Flame Mammoth's stage and the Heart Tank in Spark Mandrill's stage require a somewhat unreasonable amount of precision to reach. The second and third Sigma stage go a little overboard with extended wall-jumping segments full of too many enemies, and the enemy pairings are frequently ones you've already seen. The first Sigma stage beyond the battle with Vile is beastly, what with all the bouncing and wall-jumping and armored enemies and unarmored enemies endlessly reappearing if you start to slip. Still, some of the situations are just plain hard, especially if you don't have the dash upgrade. The upgrades you possess and the order in which you tackle the stages can completely change the difficulty and nature of the challenges, so the player has a great deal of control over how tough the game is. Enemies come in all shapes and sizes, and their attack patterns include everything from following you around, to sitting pretty and launching endless projectiles at you, to hiding in the background and ambushing you. There's a good mix of traditional action (dodging spikes on a moving elevator), variations on traditional action (hopping into an armored mech suit and punching things apart), and action that never would've worked in the Classic series (shooting up worms pouring out of the walls as you wall-kick your way above them). +1 Stages: An impressively smooth learning curve makes the game's solid challenges more manageable for gamers of all ability levels. You might find yourself accidentally jumping out of your ride armor at first, but otherwise, that handles very nicely as well. Menus and the password screen are easy to navigate, and there's the added bonus of having configurable buttons. Every bit as responsive as classic Mega Man ever was, X runs, jumps, shoots, and dashes like a champ. +2 Control: Having played Strider for the NES, I can tell you exactly how easily wall-jumping could've been a tragic nightmare in this game, yet X handles elegantly in both the new moves and the old ones. All the whirrs, clanks, bleeps, beeps, fweeps, and awoogas fit perfectly and add nicely to the atmosphere, and nothing (most notably the X-Buster charging noise) is ever obtrusive (except maybe the nonstop alarm at the end of the intro). +2 Sound Effects: A robust assortment of memorable and decidedly futuristic sounds. Relentless positivity tinged with just the right amount of tension lends a feeling of thrilling danger to the game, and the few tracks that are particularly serious or ominous have that much more of an impact by straying comfortably from the norm. Energetic and memorable music makes the stages "pop," complimenting the visuals in a big way. Enemy and location designs are diverse, interesting, and often quite cool. ![]() It's very easy to tell the difference between the new styles of power-ups, identify which blocks you can break with a kick or a headbutt, and recognize whether you're destroying, injuring, or merely insulting your foes. ![]() +2 Graphics: Sharp-looking character sprites, slick animations, richly detailed backgrounds, and nifty special effects make the game a visual treat. There's enough to get a general sense of the plot, and there's a good amount of dialogue-not to mention an action sequence or two-that firmly establishes the main characters, but I remember being very confused about the basic Reploid/Maverick terminology and where this fits in the greater Mega Man continuity when I first played the game. The premise is solid, but MMX suffers from MM3 syndrome: whole chunks of the story are absent from the game, and found only in the instruction manual. X joins Zero, the new leader of the Maverick Hunters, and sets out to quell the resistance. It isn't long before Sigma goes Maverick as well, taking most of the group with him. A group of Reploids is organized to become "Maverick Hunters," led by a Reploid named Sigma. Cain produces a number of "Reploids" based on X's design.which is all well and good until they start to go "Maverick" and turn on the humans they've been programmed to serve. This robot, called X, possesses the ability to think and reason like a human being. Light's laboratory, unearthing a capsule containing a robot unlike any the world has ever seen. +0 Story: Somewhere on the order of a century after the events of the original Mega Man, a scientist named Dr. ![]()
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