Capcom, I don't really know how to say this. It's a little awkward, but damn it, it's the truth. We've known each other a long time, and you've always been a good friend to me, but this year, things have gotten more serious. With Street Fighter IV, HD Remix, Commando 3, 1942: Joint Strike and two versions of Bionic Commando, it's like you've gone out of your way lately to show me what I mean to you, and now that you've announced Mega Man 9, it's time for me to return the favor. Capcom, I. . . I love you.
Jesus, I don't know what came over me there. But with Mega Man 9 just unveiled in all its eight-bit glory, my old-school-gaming glands are all swollen and red, and I think it's squeezing out the blood flow to my brain. The early Mega Man games are masterpieces of their era, and they feature some of the most unforgettable stages on the NES — a series of giant constructions that, high-tech though they may be, maintain a playground-like innocence. World-building obsessives that we are, we couldn't let this glorious day go by without commemorating the ten greatest classic Mega Man levels of all time. — Peter Smith
Elec Man
Keiji Inafune's first attempt at Mega Man was promising but ultimately half-baked. The play was there but the world itself was still confused, its six core stages shuffling back and forth between "gamey" abstraction and eerie pastoral. Elec Man's tower was one of the series' first real successes, an ascent that felt like a true structure and not a background for a sprite to jump about, a dangerous place pulsing with energy that could obliterate our diminutive hero using the very power that fueled his mechanical innards. — John Constantine
Top Man
The whole premise of Mega Man was that each of the Robot Masters you were fighting had been conceived for an industrial purpose and therefore ruled over an area appropriate to his capabilities. (Guts Man is a construction robot, right, so he's in this construction zone... or something.) This whole idea kind of fell apart as the robots got weirder. By all rights, Top Man should probably have been in a giant robot toy store or something, and God knows that's how the series' increasingly corny later installments would've played it. Luckily, Inafune and co. were still capable of a curveball or two when Mega Man III came out, which must be why Top Man's stage isn't a toy store at all, but some kind of bizarre jungle/greenhouse/space station. With giant robot cats. Most fans would agree it's better that way. — PS
Gemini Man
As important as the future metropolises of classic Mega Man are the natural landscapes. Gemini Man's stage shows a world where even the harshest environments have been hollowed out, bent to the will of humanity, and overrun with intelligent machines that can work and survive where our fragile bodies can't last. Enemy placement is logical, functional in this arctic wasteland; drones spill fire digging into the frozen surface, giant penguins produce an adapted work force, robotic-tadpole pods shifting to maintain delicate structural integrity deep in the ice. The whole place is cold and sharp, beautiful and forbidden. I'd never survive there, but Mega Man can. — JC
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