For all those who cry out for more games on Nintendo hardware to be for adults or 'proper gamers', we're often quick to forget the old "Nintendo hard" phrase that spawned from titles like Mega Man being unrelentingly cheap excursions in finding out just how much you'll plug away at a game for the sake of it. Side-scrolling is the easiest genre to pack full of obstacles and other things to mess with your flow, but with Mega Man's opening levels things took a turn for the dastardly right off the bat. With enemies that move far better than you, plus a moveset that never makes you feel confident when confronting them, chances are you'll end up down any number of insta-death chasms just trying to guess where to jump before it's too late. Fans still debate which is the easiest or hardest of the lot, being that even with the upgrade to fancier visuals on the X series, the game's sharp difficulty curve always remained a mainstay.
