"Prometheus, Prometheus! To write your post, you need to press the keys on the keyboard!! That's that board in front of you with keys on it!!"
Watch this. Now. It's a hilarious deconstruction of what makes MegaMan (specifically MegaMan X) so great and what is very wrong with modern gaming, something that has bothered me a lot recently but I've been unable to figure out why.
Stan, that video is truly fantastic. I watched it a few weeks ago, and it's still great now.
It really does run down what was right then and what's wrong now, and it's quite scary to look at how, over time, so many people have lost their ability to work on their craft. And making a good game IS a craft. Cutting chunks out, or worse, having them on the disc and keeping them locked, and expecting people to pay extra for it, is not.
Many people don't realise it, but a game made with care shows - it's the difference between Batman: Arkham Asylum (which I've been told by those it appeals to is quite good), and
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7tIBIny4L6E?feature=oembed
The Mega Man series, for the most part, tends to blend those (where they're present) into the games pretty well. There's nothing excessive (obviously, they're usually text!), they're always skippable in some way, and they're usually part of the fun anyway. It's a rich universe they've got there, after all.
The exception is the MegaMan Legends series (excluding The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, which is a brilliant arcade-style game), which is seriously an acquired taste, and which is too full of cutscene fluff (and, in the second game, forced tutorials here and there) for my liking. It's a shame, as the game parts are mostly quite good. It looked like Legends 3 was going to fix those problems, too (and this is why we keep campaigning for it)...
