Because I even find writing about this election increasingly grating, here's some mind-cleansing.
I downloaded Mega Man 9 a few days ago. So far, I'm through the first three robot masters. The main question I'm left with is what the hell happened to all my old gaming skills?
I'm not particularly nostalgic for the days of yore when I could dedicate four hours a day to a new game; I've since replaced that with the ability to worry about how I'm going to pay bills and obsessively checking Facebook. But I still remember when I could jump from platform to platform without falling in a bottomless pit for no reason.
Mega Man games are, in a way, my weakness - the classic series (Mega Man X is to Mega Man as Cosby was to The Cosby Show) is one of the most straightforwardly pure versions of entertainment I can imagine; like little puzzles that fall into place after a few tries, the old sense memory comes back and I immediately remember that Heat Man falls to Bubble Lead like whoa. But a new challenge in the old wrapper is messing with my head, and everything feels a little bit less forgiving, a little bit less innocently fun. It's the same issue I had after I took a film class - it took me months of watching movies without seeing the artifice behind the production of the onscreen image; I still can't watch a horror film without missing half the movie trying to figure out how they accomplished a given effect.
On the plus side, MM9 has the first-ever female boss, Splash Woman. It's a step for superpowered female robots everywhere.
I leave you with this, because it's been stuck in my head every day for the past #*($@ week. Enjoy!
