Gaming off the Beaten Path

Last week, I took a high level look at Mega Man X: Command Mission, an RPG featuring side scrolling stalwart Mega Man.  Now its time to take a closer look. I guess we can get started with the first thing anyone would notice: the graphics.  They are pretty good, everything is bright and bold and all the characters look great.  The attacks look cool, the enemies are well done and the backgrounds are serviceable.  I found a lot of the areas to kind of look dull and sterile.  There isn’t much to look at, but it kind of fits the setting of the MMX universe.  My eye was usually drawn to the enemies, many of whom appear in 3D for the first time.  That might not matter to non fans, but as a Mega Man aficionado I thought it was cool. The music and sound effects are also great, but the cutscenes....whooooo boy.  It brings us to one of the biggest flaws in the game.  Anyone that has played any of the PS1/Saturn MMX games (X4, X...

Mega Man X: Command Mission - Part 1 I’ve finished yet another RPG, so its time to take a break from the kid’s stuff and review a game from yet another franchise I am intimately familiar with. I am just going to come out and say it: Mega Man is the reason I play video games.  Mega Man 3 is was the single game that made me beg my parents for an NES back in the 90s.  To this day, its still one of my favorite gaming franchises and one of the few I pay attention to in the modern generation.  For a brief period, Mega Man games were the only non-RPGs I actively played. That phase didn’t last all that long, but RPGs did become the genre I primarily focused on.  I was back to playing a bigger variety by 2004, but when I heard they were making a Mega Man RPG, I was pumped.  It wasn’t often I got excited by new games at that point, but this certainly made me take notice. I had also learned to temper my expectations for games, so while I...