16 years ago for my 8th birthday I got Megaman 2. I played the hell out of it. But in my times playing it one thing sticks out, the first time I ever got to the final level it was pretty late and I was tired and I could not figure out how to damage Alien Wily, but passwords won't take you further than the first Wily level. So I left the NES on all night feeling like I had gone too far to start all over. I woke up in the morning and beat the game.
Last night as I was going to bed at 3:40am I had the desire to play Megaman 2. I had it sitting on my dresser along with a stack of 10 or so other games I've been wanting to play. I popped the game in and beat Metalman's stage only to have it freeze up on me. Already tired, I can't say why I was so compelled to play it more but I used a cotton swab to clean the game, waited a minute for it to be dry and popped it back in. On this second attempt to play I decided to start with Bubbleman's stage like I almost always do.. I went to Woodman's silicon forest after that, then Flashman, Metalman and so on. I never felt in Megaman 2 I had much reason to go in boss order as the buster does quite a bit of damage to almost every boss. The exception being Crashman.
As 5:00am drew near I was nearly done with the robot master stages. Sitting at the horrible "voosh" block section of Heatman's stage I felt like just folding and going to sleep. But I kept moving forward. Wily stages make use of some of the Dr. Light inventions as a means of platforming puzzles, I had forgotten this detail. Another loop thrown in my late night play session. The mech dragon at the end of Wily stage 1 died a lot quicker than I remembered. I also forgot that Wily stage 2 and 3 were incredibly short, a running theme in the game I suppose.
Wily stage 4 will always remind me of this one day during summer break in Seattle, I was at a friends house. He had just moved to an area no longer near the Maple Leaf district that I lived in. We had gone across the street to play with some neighbor kids. They were playing Megaman 2, I either didn't own the game yet or just hadn't finished it but they were on the Wily stages. One of the kids passed the controller to me and I made it to Wily stage 4, spending a while on the moving platform sections in the 2nd half of the level we eventually gave up and went outside. But the stage forever brings back the ambience of that setting to me. The large woodgrain television, the darkened TV room in the middle of a bright summer day, even the smell. It's like NES-esthesia I guess.
After a few deaths I managed to get to the end of the purple platforms, only to realize that the boss of the stage is a puzzle of sorts. Only crash bomber will hurt the turrets and walls/barriers set up, but you barely have enough to kill the turrets alone. I died and had to continue. I thought to myself that I could just leave the game on until I woke up like I did when I was 8, but I couldn't help but reject the idea. I knew there wasn't much game left. A second try at the level and I managed to finish it. After that I quickly made my way through the robot masters alley and Wily himself, on the final stage I discovered that you could run past all the acid drops without getting hit. I never understood the Alien boss really, perhaps just a twist to throw the older gamers who were following the loose narrative?
Megaman 2 might have objectively one of the better NES endings. To me it's the best though, there is none other that compares. It's dramatic, visually interesting and I think it's pretty open for interpretation. A point of interest in the game that I could probably read a long college paper on without any sense of irony. It's the type of ending that upon viewing at 5:30am, more than 15 years after first playing the game leaves you feeling introspective and deep. A lot of of time has gone by since I started playing this game, but it's appeal to me hasn't been lost.
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