And so I return to my efforts to try and stop my capture device from gathering dust. That’s what happens when you move from a video blog to a more conventional textual blog thing. Anyway, I don’t want to stall this playthrough too long because February’s just around the corner; it’s going to be a very busy time for me as a gamer because Catherine will be released at the start of the month and I’ll be distracted with that until a few weeks later when the PlayStation Vita gets released… which will only distract me even more. Of course, it will also give me a lot to talk about on this site, which is why I’m worried about ongoing things like this being left in the dark. Anyway, it seems that I still can’t really get the measure of the general difficulty of this game when compared to the NES game. Metal Man’s stage was much more difficult than I thought it would be (especially the boss), Wood Man’s stage was also much harder than I remembered (especially the boss), but Bubble Man’s stage and Flash Man’s stage? They were pretty much how I expected them to be based on my experiences with the original. So where does Air Man’s stage fit in? It’s a stage that gave me a hell of a lot of trouble on the NES, because the jumps to the red face platforms have to be very precise or else the rising spike things will knock you back and to your doom. I probably worry about those jumps even more than I worry about the boss, but I manage to negotiate the first few fairly quickly, and without any reloads.

You might notice that I walk into the spikes of the red face platforms quite a bit, but this is an intentional tactic that I always use in the NES game. If you try to jump from a red face platform whilst the birds are flying out of the sides, then there’s a high probability that you’ll hit a bird, be knocked backwards and fall off the level and die. However, if you touch a spike, you can use the invincibility period to safely jump onto the next platform without worrying about the birds. It may not be a good tactic for people trying to do a playthrough without being hit once, but it works for this particular run. When you get to the red enemies hurling lightning bolts, you have to be careful about how you deal with them; if you try and angle the Metal Blade upwards to hit them early, you could slide off your axis and run forward off the platform, so it’s often safer to fire whilst still or performing standing jumps. And not perform random suicide leaps such as the one at 1:18. Oops.

Once off the clouds there are more birds dropping eggs. Just like in Wood Man’s stage, you can let the eggs burst open and destroy clusters of birds with the Metal Blade to get lots of pickups, although I don’t find the weapon energy I’m looking for. The blue wibbly things in the next section also spawn infinitely – as with the similar enemies in Flash Man’s stage, we can also use these to stock up on items. Rather than bore everyone by waiting for weapon energy to appear, I move on to more red face platforms (AIR TIKKIS – thank you http://megaman.wikia.com) and use invincibility to get past them as before. Shortly after this you face a new enemy; the blue fat dude will blow you back and so you have to move forward to counter this, but you must also be careful once you’ve destroyed him; if you’re holding forward too much you could accidentally run off the platform. Moving on to destroy more mini birds nets us a load of weapon energy and an extra life, and eventually the boss looms near. (Note: the recording went a bit jerky for a second here – apologies.) Air Man’s weakness is the leaf shield, although it’s very difficult to get close to Air Man and get the leaf shield to connect without being blown away. When you’re able to do this, however, he goes down fairly quickly and we’ve got a nice new weapon to use to take down Crash Man. That said, Heat Man is also an option at this stage too. Decisions.