Mega Man V Analysis

I remember when I was first able to play a Mega man game. It was way back when renting games from Blockbuster was still a good idea. The game I rented was called Mega man X2, and it was probably one of the best games I never owned. The two things I remember most about that game was its soul-crushing difficulty, and it's amazing audio.

As time passed, I moved on to bigger and better games(N64, Gamecube, Wii, etc.), but I was recently given a copy of a game suspiciously titled Rockman World 5. As it turns out, Rockman is the Japanese name for Mega man, which left me no choice but to track down my old gameboy and pop it in.

I am by no means an expert when it comes to the technicalities of game audio, but given how old the game looked, I was surprised at how well the music was done. However, one thing became immediately apparent when I started playing was that some parts of the sound track would stop playing whenever a sound effect played. For example, when an explosion would go off, the "snare" part of the music would suddenly cease, but then start back up when the effect was done playing. I didn't know it at the time, but I think this may have had something to do with a limited number of sound channels. Considering how often explosions go off in a Mega man game, the soundtrack would get really choppy at times.

The soundtracks themselves are fairly short in this game and will loop throughout an entire level. Fortunately the levels in this game are also fairly short, and the music is extremely catchy to boot. One thing I did notice however, was that Mega man himself was not given a sound effect for when he jumped. Since Mega Man is also a platformer, I think the sound designer realized that if a sound played every time the player jumped, the soundtrack would get cut off even more than it already does. The actual sounds used to make the soundtrack consisted mostly of white noise and bleeps, but were played in such a way that would leave the tune stuck in my head for the rest of the day.