Addison's Mega Man Page
featuring the Rockman & Forte CD Gallery / Commentary
It wasn't easy beating Rockman & Forte, also known as Mega Man 9, but I think just about anybody reasonably skilled at Mega Man could have plowed through it, given time. A far more interesting, and less-often-accomplished challenge, was going back through the game, playing alternately as Rockman and his incompetent, uncoordinated rival Forte, and trying to locate the one hundred lost CD-ROMs strewn around in some of the most obnoxious places on the planet. Still, even this task wasn't all that astounding - many players have accomplished it before me, as evidenced by the number of FAQs available on the subject (I admit, I broke down on the very last few CDs and got some help). But nobody, to my knowledge, has taken the time to not only gather every CD together on a webpage, but also to spice them up with rambling, unlikely humor!
| Yes, it's true. I've given in to the temptation of every aspiring video game humorist and made a Mega Man page. The legendary Seanbaby got his start round these parts, it's said, and everybody knows that ToastyFrog was following in those footsteps before he decided to refocus his efforts elsewhere. And there are others. But something compelled me to make a CD gallery on the web, and somehow I couldn't allow myself to just make a big, linked list of all 100 images with some incomprehensible Japanese text, like Dr. Light has (see right). No, my gallery would have a big, linked list of all 100 images with some incomprehensible English text. Witness the fruits of my labor by clicking on the links to the left. | |
But first, for those of you not familiar with Rockman & Forte, or Mega Man in general, let me pause and try to get everything up to speed. Mega Man (known as Rockman in Japan) is a series of games, dating back to the deadly 80's, in which you usually control a cheerful little blue robot who attempts to foil the plots of the incompetent Dr. Wily. Wily typically tries to take over the world by unleashing an octet of diabolical themed robots (the first batch included, for example, Fire Man, Ice Man, and Bomb Man) and, I guess, telling them to train in seclusion for a while until they're ready to really spread out and conquer. Mega Man always catches wind of Wily's plans early on, and is able to sneak into the evil robot masters' bases while they're sleeping, wipe them out, and steal their themed weapons for use against the other villains.
This formula remained more or less unchanged for many years. Just about every game, Mega Man gets some slightly useful new feature, like being able to slide around or charge his weapon, but generally, nothing changed in the main Mega Man series (ignoring the "Mega Man X" line, which is outside the scope of this site). Until...
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The Japanese above reads "Rockman & Forte," and it's the title of this game, in which (get this) you can play either Rockman or Forte! Forte is Rockman's purportedly evil (I have yet to see him doing something villainous, like fighting the good guys) rival, and a lot of the fun (read: agony) of playing this game is discovering how Forte is different from Rockman (read: discovering how Forte sucks).
Yeah, I'm not much of a Forte fan. Okay, so his double-jump is very handy, and he looks effing godly when he fuses with his robot dog to become some sort of killer angel thing - it definitely kicks the pants off of Mega Man's ability to call up his dog and yell "Dig, Rush! Dig!" in hopes that the damned mongrel will scrounge up something useful, instead of a Coke can, which is what usually happens (more on this later). But Forte's other big pseudo-advantage, a rapid-fire gun, is irrelevant because, in this game, when something gets hit, it can't be hurt again for another second or so. In other words, being able to shoot rapidly is only useful if you want to keep up an assault on some target while you move around. Of course, Forte can't fire while moving. So...Christ Almighty, I don't know what the deal is with this guy.
So Forte sucks. But this game really doesn't. As a basic Mega Man run-around-shoot-and-jump game, it's flawless. I keep waiting for this series to have a Super Metroid or Castlevania: Nocturne in the Moonlight moment, and develop itself out into a full-fledged exploration RPG or something. For now, I'm content to limit my exploration to these horrible quests for ill-placed CD-ROMs. Some of them are in plain sight. A lot of them, I had to have my dog burrow around for ("Dig, Rush! Dig!"). A very few required Forte's bitch-ass fusion maneuver. And a few are exercises in video game psychosis - I think my favorite is the one that's buried under a patch of ground that's being eaten away by robotic fish even as you approach, so you have to jump into exactly the right place, coax Rush into beginning his retrieval mission, and somehow keep the worms from tearing his dumb dog ass to pieces while he's screwing around.
But I did it, and it was worth it. Each CD grants a newly-drawn portrait of one of the robots or characters from Mega Man past and present, and some of the portraits are really cool. That's the reason I even bothered to make this page, and now I want to share it all with you. Here, then, are all one hundred Rockman & Forte CDs.
065 - 068: Obscure GameBoy Characters
069 - 078: Mega Man V (GameBoy)