Mega Man

High Scores: Storm Eagle

The track, “[Desert] Storm [Bald] Eagle,” sounds almost comically American to me, as if the Japanese composer, Makoto Tomozawa, were parodying the music at an early ’90s American airshow. It sounds like Guns ’n’ Roses sounded in 1993, after grunge and hip-hop had absorbed heavy metal’s countercultural cachet.

High Scores: Dr. Wily Stage 1

Mega Man 2 is a sonnet. Its fourteen stages are fourteen lines, nicely organized into an initial group of eight (its octave) and a final group of six (its sestet). The first stage of Dr. Wily’s Castle is the game’s volta.

Mega Man

I learned his patterns, parried his bombs,
got all up in his face, all up in his guts.
If I kept him running, he could never fire.

Mega Man 2

Everything will try to kill you, incessantly. Don’t be scared.

I’m not scared.

I don’t even know what scared means.