How Mega Man 11 never got its backside in gear
Mega Man 11 (2018)
Mega Man 11 (2018)
I don’t know much about cars, but never mind taking advice from the petrolheads and gearheads because I’ve got the only bit of car advice you need - make your next car purchase an automatic.
You’ll probably want to make it an electric or hybrid motor too, and do your bit for the environment. If you can’t do that, then at least acquire a car that doesn’t completely cackle at the polar ice caps, like some vaudeville villain tying the dainty demure dame to the train tracks. If your car doesn’t run on tofu then somewhere, somehow, there’ll be a Green Party policy there to thwart you. I’m all for environmental concern, but I’d rather the holes go in the ozone layer than in my pocket, know what I mean?
You’ll be warned off buying an automatic by others for a few, easily dismissed reasons. Firstly, they usually cost you a bit more money if they go wrong. Well, there’s no “if” about cars going wrong. But anyway, automatic cars might be rarer here in Europe, but that’s quickly changing, and sales of automatics are far outpacing the manuals.
But that’s the trouble, really: the heartbreak caused by your car’s sad little engine light coming on is never far away. And by God, the inconvenience it causes. When you’ve got a stricken vehicle, whether manual or automatic, you just want the bloody thing fixed as soon as possible.
Therefore, provided your local mechanic isn’t too much of a villain (whether that’s a vaudeville villain, or just a plain old daylight robber) and the cost of repair isn’t more than the car itself, then you don’t really care what the bill says. You just want the bloody thing back on all four wheels again. So, let’s not worry ourselves about the costs.
The most laughable thing the doubters really hit you with is that, with an automatic, you will miss out on those pleasures of driving. What pleasures is that then? Changing gears?! That sort of stuff might sound nice if you were taking a Sunday drive in a beautiful 1960s Ferrari, with fashionable driving gloves on and no other people around you. Or if you were thrashing a race car around Spa or Silverstone.
But for your stop-start commute, or your daily trip to the shops, you’ve got to be kidding yourself if you think you actually enjoy the left-boot, left-hand workout of a manual car. Actually, that’s right-boot, right-hand workout to just about everyone in the world outside of Ireland, the UK, Australia and Japan - lefties lose again.
The benefits of an automatic might sound rather minor when written down, but not having to faff about with the gear-stick constantly as you slowly move through traffic is a godsend. Not to mention that you’ll never suffer that panic of stalling at the lights and having an obnoxious honker behind you, winding you up, leading you to panic as if the car will explode and you’ll fail all your exams if you don’t get that bloody engine started.
Still, manual gear changes are here to stay for a while yet. And in the long awaited, er, eleventh installment to the classic Mega Man series, gear changing has become a necessary step. That’s the gimmick this week you see: the little blue boy called Mega Man has now been given the ability to switch his internal cogs to either a Power Gear or a Speed Gear.
Well, that’s not as many gears as my old Volkswagen Polo, that’s for sure. But he’ll need these two gears as he makes his way through eight more humdrum platforming levels, with a final fortress waiting at the end of them. The Power Gear boosts the horsepower of his arm cannon, while the Speed Gear slows time down - just what you need for weaving in-and-out of other vehicles and machinery.
I won’t deny that the graphics are nice, but... I don’t know, when you bring a game series like this to the PS4, Switch and Xbox One, as a fully fledged retail game, it needs a bit more under the bonnet than this. That’s a bit unfair from me of course, because I’ve criticised Mega Man 9 and 10 for being too retro. But this is a Capcom developed game, in a much-beloved franchise, in 2018. There are standards.
The jury’s out on the music as well; some interesting techno-funk is present but there’s not much that will linger in the memory, sadly. And even with four difficulty settings, I find this one bloody hard, although I’ve never swallowed my pride and chosen Casual Mode - I’m a Mega Man legend, after all. Well, I’m lethal with the rewind button to reverse myself out of bad collisions, anyway.
I just wish more health powerups would appear during the level - Mega Man 11 would remind of the old NES days when there’d be too many graphics on the screen, the flickering would give you and Mega Man seizures, during which you could say goodbye to that health powerup.
Also, when you do die, and you will die many, many times, then what’s greatly annoying is that the checkpoints set you way, way back. I also feel it very important to mention that you can’t jump “through” the doors in this game, which is one of the finest Mega Man traditions. If I was submitting suggestions for the next patch or update, that one would be top of the list.
They’ve tried to do voice acting again as well, but this time they really went for it, no risible stuff here like they had in Mega Man 8. And again I’m being hypocritical, because although I castigated 8’s voice acting for making Mega Man into a girl, and I probably did the same thing to Mega Man X4. But Mega actually sounds a bit too old here. He’s meant to be a young boy, right? In my mind he is anyway. More Ash Ketchum than Sailor Moon, or Goku.
So that’s next-gen Mega Man, and we’re still waiting for Mega Man 12. 11 was a nice little experiment I guess, and on the whole, probably a good break away from the retro Mega Man stuff which was already threatening to get repetitive. But with average music, Robot Masters who don’t inspire, the usual short length, and a gear-change powerup gimmick that gets tiresome and isn’t really Mega Man, I’d say avoid this one like a manual car. At least this is a highly unusual Mega Man game in that it won’t cost you very much to own.
19 December 2025