Jonathan Dobres

I have beaten Mega Man 9. Now what am I going to do with the rest of my life?

Saying that Mega Man 9 is difficult is like saying that the surface of the sun is hot. The game is intentionally retro, boiling Mega Man back down to its most basic components. In fact, Mega Man can only do three things in the game. They are:

1. Jump
2. Shoot
3. Die

The game is as simple as it is merciless, and the combination instantly fascinated me. I came late to the Mega Man 9 party. In truth, what really sparked my interest was this excellent essay by Bruce Morrison, in which he explains why a game so unbelievably difficult is ultimately a joy to play, if you have the right mindset. He also touches on the idea of game-based versus internal rewards. In short, players have come to expect that games will reward them for playing well, and game studios are only too happy to oblige. The Achievements systems on the XBox and Playstation make the notion explicit, and to a certain extent, ridiculous. Players are rewarded and patted on the back for making even the most rudimentary progress. Picked up the wrench in Bioshock? Have a badge. Successfully navigate the perils of the tutorial level? Here, you’ve achieved something.

Mega Man 9 does not partake of this orgy of auto-congratulation. Mega Man’s only reward—the only permanent reminder that you’ve made real progress—comes when you successfully complete an entire level and obtain a Robot Master’s power. Yes, Mega Man 9 does have Achievements, but they clearly take the term very seriously. Defeat each Robot Master in thirty seconds. Now do it in ten. Beat the entire game in under two hours. Never miss a shot. Never get hit. Would you like me to part the Red Sea while I’m at it?

Mega Man 9 feels exactly like a Buddhist enlightenment (bear with me). All is suffering. You die over, and over, and over. Amidst all the pain, you begin to accrue a deep, almost imperceptible inner knowledge. Gradually the illusions of the world around you fall away. That which once seemed impossible becomes nothing to you. You transcend. Plug Man’s infamous vanishing platforms become less an obstacle than an opportunity to demonstrate Jedi-like powers of precognition (fast-forward to about 1:00).

Enough about personal challenge, inner reward, and Buddhism. Mega Man 9 is a great game. The game’s decidedly lo-fi approach masks a surprisingly rich experience. Your options may be limited to jump, shoot, and die, but there’s a great deal of variety embedded in how you do those things. Consider the play style of one Ms. PinkKittyRose, which is very different from my own. Look at her on Wily Fortress Part 1. Unlike me, she barely touches her Robot Master powers. She’s far better than me with the default Mega Buster, and the way she plays is very different because of it. When she used Rush Coil to bypass the magma blasters (around 3:20), my jaw hit the floor. I must have died thirty times getting the jumps exactly right. Like a true Buddhist, she saw that the answer to this problem was no problem.

If you want to see true transcendence, you need look no further than the “speed runners,” brave souls whose sole purpose in life is to complete the game in the shortest possible amount of time. In their quest to beat the clock, these people (and I use the term loosely) have explored the game at the furthest boundaries of creativity and discovered subversive, unexpected treasures. To watch one of these people play the game is to witness, in one particularly specific form, the very length and breadth of human thought. For your information, Mega Man 9 can be played from start to finish in about twenty-three minutes and sixteen seconds. Got some free time? Here’s how you do it. Mesmerizing.

One particular reveiw of the game, written by Sumantra Lahiri, struck me as odd. He writes:

While Mega Man 9 has all of the elements to make a classic 8-Bit game, it some how just misses that 8-Bit perfection of Mega Man 2. For whatever reason, that intrinsic quality of a classic 8-Bit game seems to constantly elude it. In many ways, Mega Man 9 is definitely one of the better Mega Man games in its long storied run, but the truth is this; Mega Man 9 is good, not great. Though to say that Mega Man 9 did not attempt to capture that feeling of 8-Bit perfection would be false.

What does that mean? I think Lahiri’s problem is that he’s been confounded by what I call the Twelve Year Old Effect. The most awesome year of your life is the one in which you, personally, were twelve. The television shows will never be funnier, the ice cream will never be sweeter, and the video games will never be more “8-bit perfect” than they were then. It doesn’t strike me as particularly fair to dock Mega Man 9 points simply because it isn’t Mega Man 2.

Mega Man 9, like all great games, builds a complex experience out of a simple premise. Jump, shoot, die. Repeat until enlightenment is achieved.

It seems that I have a thing for random assortments of bubbles. Two wallpapers for your online boxes, made with Processing. Blue and teal versions can be downloaded by clicking the previews above. The beauty of this system is that I really spend most of my time tweaking a range of parameters. Then it’s all just a matter of pressing the “Go” button until I get one that I like.

Part One

Please take a moment to donate something to Child’s Play, my charity of choice. Buy yourself a shirt, pick out some toys for a hospital near you, or just throw a few bucks in that general direction. You’ll be performing an act of unambiguous good. How often do you get to do that?

Part Two

I am fourteen years old. I’ve been fourteen for less than a month, and I’ve spent a decent bit of the past three weeks being vaguely worried about what’s happening now. What’s happening now is that I’m in the pre-op ward of Overlook Hospital with an IV in my arm, waiting to be rolled into surgery. The surgeon assures me that this is a minor procedure, more like a booster shot than anything else. It will be quick, and I’ll be able to go home later today. He tells me that recovery will be rapid and I should be able to walk back into my junior high within a couple of weeks. This is the same man who performed my other leg surgeries eight years ago. As doctors go, he is a genius and a saint, and I trust him implicitly.

“Are you sure I can’t interest you in a general anesthetic? We have several interesting flavors,” he says.

“No, I really think I’ll be okay on just the local.” The local anesthetic will numb my legs but leave me awake during surgery, accomplishing three things. One, it’s manly. Two, I’m genuinely curious about how an operating room and my favorite surgeon work. Three, waking up from my first major surgery was the single most excruciating moment of my entire life. A person’s life is filled with a million little pains, but believe me, nothing has ever come close to matching that first moment of consciousness, in which I was blind from shock and on fire from the waist down. More than anything, I want to avoid replicating that memory today.

Eventually my number comes up and I’m brought into the operating room. The surgeon asks me if I’d like to listen to anything in particular on the radio. I give him my stock answer, “Anything but country.”

And then suddenly I’m in the recovery ward. No hallucinatory dream sequence, no fade to black, just a sharp cut from that room to this one. I’m surprised and angry to have missed an event that I was so intent on observing, and the anesthetic, whatever it is, has my brain all out of whack, and I’m crying a little, trying to explain that I’m not really upset about anything, and not even that uncomfortable.

Then comes the at-home recovery, in which I relearn how to walk. Again. I gradually progress from complete immobility to slowly dragging myself around on my grandmother’s walker. This period is a highlight reel of vulnerability and embarrassing moments, but suffice to say that things eventually hit a plateau. It has been four weeks, significantly longer than what the surgeon had promised. We schedule a check-up with him.

“Take a few steps for me, Jon.”

I’m in a large room that the surgeon uses for check-ups and evaluations. I take a few tentative steps.

“Alright, now pretend that there are really big rocks here, and take some big steps.”

I do so.

A slight smile catches on his mouth. “Alright,” he says, grabbing my hand, “now let’s run.”

Before I can really think about it, he’s pulling me across his office, and to my surprise, I’m keeping up.

I walked into school two weeks later.

Part Three

I learned after the fact that the expected recovery time for my surgery is not two weeks. The recovery time is better than what would have been possible even ten years prior, but still significantly longer than what my surgeon claimed. He low-balled the recovery time because he knew that if he’d said, “The standard recovery time is eight weeks,” then I’d definitely be recuperating for eight weeks. On the other hand, if I expect to be back to normal in two weeks, my recovery just might go faster.

Health is a state of mind. True, no amount of positive thinking will cure hepatitis, but a person’s state of mind, one’s attitude toward his illness or injury, makes a real difference in the quality and final outcome of healing. By buying video games for sick kids, you’re not just purchasing fun little distractions. You’re brightening the atmosphere of an unpleasant place, and giving young minds something new, fun, and exciting to think about. In a very real sense, you are helping them heal. So, again, Child’s Play.

I’m in a doctoral program. It’s a highly specialized road to travel, and there’s no single thing that brought me here. But I can point out one specific person who is most responsible for sending me down this path. Every year for the past five years, I have returned to his class to give a lecture on the basics of perception. It’s a fun, slapdash sort of talk where I get to cherry pick all the most interesting research from cognitive science and make a case before my audience. Kind of like Malcolm Gladwell.

The first time I put the talk together I wondered how I’d fill an hour and twenty minutes. Now I have the opposite problem. Should I maybe split this into two separate lectures? Unfortunately I’ll never have a chance to find out, as the professor in question will likely be retiring at the end of the year.

About halfway through this year’s lecture I digressed to tell an old joke. It begins, “What’s the difference between plagiarism and research?”

“Lipstick,” interjected the professor.

I’m really going to miss him.

(And if you really want to know the difference between plagiarism and research, it’s this: in plagiarism you steal from one person, whereas in research you steal from a lot of people.)

Like I said, I’ve been in the throes of a renewed X-Men addiction for several weeks now. Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men is (or I suppose, was) so entertaining that I had to have more. I figured that my safest bet would be to try Ultimate X-Men, a series that restarted the X-Men story from scratch in 2001. The upshot about action-oriented comics like Ultimate X-Men is that if you really care, you can catch up on 94 issues in, say, three weeks. The down side is that they’re not written by Joss Whedon. That’s not really a fair criticism, but it’s still true.

Whedon is always careful to write the characters appropriately. In every line of dialog, in every interaction, the personalities behind the superpowers bleed through. Emma Frost never lets her guard down, always throwing up a wall of arrogance and superiority, especially when she’s around Kitty Pride. Beast might threaten to eat you, but he’ll do it with a dash of intellectual shame. Since Astonishing X-Men represented my first foray into mainstream comics in a long time, I’d forgotten how rare that kind of subtlety is.

So, the writing in Ultimate X-Men isn’t as good. It would be fair to call some of it bad. The comic also “youngs up” the X-Men, putting them in their mid to late teens. This is an unnecessary contrivance that I found annoying even when I was a teenager myself. Aside from claiming that the X-Men are now teenagers, you’d be hard-pressed to find any real evidence of it. They attend school in name only and grapple with the same Earth-shatteringly dangerous missions and personal problems that their adult counterparts do. The only character who legitimately feels like a teenager is Iceman. I’m willing to admit that it works for him.

Ultimate X-Men isn’t perfect, but it’s an entertaining read, and every so often there’s a twist or a new interpretation of an old story that makes you glad to be reading comics. Rewriting Colossus as gay, for example. He’s the hulking fellow made of nearly indestructible organic steel pictured at left, for those who don’t follow these kinds of things. Prior to this, the only gay mutant of any real importance was Northstar, who debuted in 1979, didn’t get a back story until 1983, and didn’t come out until 1992. Northstar was always vaguely effeminate and had elfin, pointed ears, at least until recently. The original plan was to have his character die of AIDS shortly after coming out (hooray?), but this was ultimately scrapped. Instead, it was implied that Northstar was dying in our world because he was actually a creature from another world, literally a homesick fairy.

Contrast this with Colossus, whose power is that he has incredible physical strength. He’s the kind of person who can crack continents when angry, and in general he is unambiguously awesome. He has a long history in the X-Men Universe and nothing about him reads as stereotypically gay. Ultimate X-Men’s treatment of his sexuality is daring in conception, but it errs on the side of extreme subtlety in execution. By and large it is a non-issue, which says something about today’s social climate. When Northstar came out in 1992, he promptly adopted a young girl who had contracted HIV in the womb, only to have her succumb to the disease shortly thereafter. In 1992 this was the socially conscious thing to do, though it seems a bit much now. Ultimate X-Men takes the quiet road with Colossus, hinting at his sexuality for a long time before outting him, then hooking him up in a healthy relationship with (of course) Northstar. He also deals with homophobia from a close friend: Nightcrawler, of all people.

If anything, Colossus’s sexuality is a little too subtle. Romance boils hot and strong among the X-Men, and the Ultimate version is no exception. Jean Grey and Cyclops, Jean Grey and Wolverine, Beast and Storm, Storm and Wolverine, Rogue and Iceman, Iceman and Kitty Pryde, Rogue and Gambit, then Iceman and Rogue again, Dazzler and Angel, Dazzler and Nightcrawler (kind of). Even the stately Professor Xavier is a player, leaving a trail of relationships with Moira MacTaggart, Mystique, and Emma Frost in his wake. He even confessed to having feelings for (take a guess!) Jean Grey. Amidst all this craziness, Colossus merely came close to admitting he had feelings for Wolverine, before eventually holding hands with Northstar.

Ultimate X-Men has been fun, but the most recent issues—which focus on a drug called Banshee—have been monumentally stupid, specifically for what’s being done to Colossus. Banshee vastly enhances a mutant’s powers, and we learn about it when a seriously doped up version of Alpha Flight swoops in from Canada to abduct Northstar. Desperate to get Northstar back, Colossus accidentally reveals to Jean that he’s been using Banshee for years. Without it, he doesn’t have super strength, and can barely lift his steel arms once he transforms.¹ Never mind that the existence of Banshee has never been mentioned or even implied prior to this story. The writers can’t seem to decide if it’s Mutant Growth Hormone, Mutant Heroin, or some strange combination of the two. Moreover, it is wildly unlikely that Colossus could have been adequately juiced up for every fight, which often take the X-Men by surprise. How, exactly, did he keep this a secret from not one, but two of the world’s most powerful psychics? Why in God’s name would you take one of the coolest, most straightforward mutants and turn him into a roid-powered steel paperweight? Colossus has never been much of a talker and a lot of his character comes from his physicality, which the Banshee revelation thoroughly ruins.

Not all is lost, however. The identity of Colossus’s dealer is completely obscured, but the writers still went through the trouble of putting him on-page while Colossus pays for more Banshee. Throughout the transaction, no hint is given as to who the dealer is (he’s never on camera), and he vanishes without a trace the instant he has his money. Why bother writing the scene at all? Couldn’t Colossus just have shown up with more Banshee, the deal implied to have happened earlier? This is Extremely Suspicious. Combine this with the recent revelation that Wolverine has screened positive for Banshee, having used it at some point in his unremembered past, and it appears that Things May Not Be What They Seem. I hold out hope that Banshee turns out to be a placebo, or a psychic hallucination, or something, anything other than what it appears to be right now.