Azura: Powered Up!

I've been in a bit of a Mega Man mode lately...

So today I woke up at about... well, alright, it was PAST noon when I finally got out of bed.  I didn't have a lot running in my mind at the moment I woke up, so I went and reached for my DS.  Unfortunately, I had left my DS out of arms reach before going to sleep, so instead of grabbing that I found myself grasping my old PSP.

*click*

Upon opening the game-slot, I find that the last game I had played on there was Mega Man: Powered Up.  Since I've been playing a lot of Mega Man lately, I figured I'd give Powered Up another swing and blazed through Mega Man's story.  In truth, this is how Mega Man games should be made for the newer consoles.  Mega Man was not meant to be anything more than "An adorable little boy-robot in blue armor shooting at other adorable little robots in the hopes of protecting the world from a less-than-adorable evil scientist".  After beating Mega Man's story, I started touching a few of the other characters a little bit, but was quickly turned away around the time I started to play as Gutsman.

Alright, I guess I should explain a few things here for anyone who's ever played Mega Man 1 before, but not Mega Man: Powered Up.

Powered Up was Capcom's attempt at recreating the classic series of Mega Man games on the Playstation Portable.  In it, you were able to either play the classic Mega Man 1 with new graphics that made all the characters look like chibi-versions of themselves (more adorable with giant heads, like plush dolls) or you could play the new version which included two new robot masters, Timeman and Oilman.  In the newer version, if you were able to defeat a robot master without resorting to using special weapons to fight them, you would unlock the ability to use them in an alternate version of the story where, rather than having Mega Man save the day, whomever you wanted could be the hero.  This would also mean that Mega would have been kidnapped, so he would be replacing the robot that you chose.

It's a cool idea in theory, but there's a few robots that are pretty lacking when it comes to combat ability...

For starters, we have Gutsman.  Gutsman would seem to be the complete package for a warrior, but you have to remember that your default attack is the Super Arm... you remember the Super Arm, right?  The ability to pick-up and throw the giant blocks.  That... is Gutsman in a nutshell.  You're able to create a block and throw it out of nowhere, but the range that you throw it at makes it a very difficult attack to connect with, especially if your opponent is either small or not weak to it.

So what happens when you try to use Gutsman to save the world?  I couldn't tell you, I have yet to finish it because I'm too stubborn to play anything below normal mode to see.  Maybe one day I'll be able to tell you, but for now, it's a total mystery.

Another character who has a hard time playing the role of the hero is one of the newcomers, Oilman.  His default attack is... he shoots a blob of oil at the ground.  It sounds lame, but it gets better.  If you walk on it, you can ride on a surfboard made of oil which makes you zip along pretty quickly, as well as doing damage to anything you come in contact with.  So if he has an attack like this, what's the problem?  The problem is that if you're in a confined space or surrounded by a huge group of enemies, it's not easy to get a ball of oil to hit the ground.  At the same time, you can't turn around when you're riding the Oil Slider, so you have to be careful not to go riding off into the sunset... down below...

The final member of the difficult players is Bombman.  Your only attack is to throw bombs, which isn't an easy feat if your aim is bad.  Not only that, there's a limit of how many bombs can be on screen at any one time (I don't remember what that number is, but if it's similar to Mega Man's bomb limit, you can only use one bomb at a time).  He'll take some practice, but he's still a bit more practical than the others.

All the other characters have some kind of projectile attack that makes their days go by a little easier.  Each one will take a little adjusting to, but if you take the time to work at it, they're all playable... just... some more than others.

My favorite aspect of the game is when the characters will enter conversation with each other before battle.  Since the original game had Mega Man as the hero, you can see what everyone would have said to Mega Man before they entered battle.  However, there are a huge number of people to play as, ranging across the six default bosses (Fireman, Bombman, Gutsman, Cutman, Elecman and Iceman), the two newcomers (Timeman and Oilman) as well as a couple unexpected allies (Roll and Protoman also come to your aid).  This means that there are a lot of different lines of conversation, so there's a lot to explore.  The best conversations usually take place when one of the characters is weak to the other's ability.  Case-in-point, Fireman and Iceman make a great combination.

"There's something up ahead"
"FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

And if the two game-modes aren't enough for you, there's still a bunch of other things you can do besides kick robot butt.

Challenge mode allows you to rattle your brain and fingers in 100 different challenges, 10 for each of the characters (excluding Roll and Protoman) and 10 which are kind of like boss battle gauntlets or extreme challenges with limited powers.  Completing these challenges will unlock Protoman, but some are just absolutely insulting, so don't expect it to just be a quick in-and-out mission mode.

On the other side of the board is the "Create-a-Stage" feature, which should come as self explanatory.  You can either make your own stages and play through them, or you can send and download stages off of the internet to share with other people all over the world.  It's a cool feature that can keep you coming back over and over again.

Speaking of stage creations, Jaymonius saw me playing Mega Man: Powered Up earlier today and sent me a stage he made which he likes to think of as "The Kusottare World of Mega Man".  This got me thinking of an interesting idea for something I could do for the channel, but only if I could somehow learn how to record video off of my PSP.  I probably gave my idea away just by mentioning all of this, but if anybody out there is reading this and they want to see something interesting, comment me with suggestions (don't even bother messaging me with anything involving "RemoteJoy", "IR Shell" or modding of any kind.

I think I'll be playing around with this for a while, it's got me interested for the time being.  If anybody has any maps that they'd like me to try out, gimme a hollar and I'll see what I can do.