Retro fans rejoice! The classic Mega Man series that started back during the NES era returns for yet another outing in all its 2D pixellated glory. After a long break since the previous entry in the series, Mega Man is finally back, as well as the anger, stress and that loveable charm that makes us continuously want more.

When starting up the game after you make space in your 'mini-fridge', you'll be welcomed with the old retro music, lack of colours and glorious pixel art as you're introduced to the story and what that crazy Dr. Wily is getting up to after all these years. If you were patient and watched the intro, you'll know what's going on and jump into the game. Those of you who are impatient and just skipped the intro and jumped into the game, shame on you. In a nutshell, Dr. Wily convinces folk his evil reign of terror and destructive shenanigans is over, but robots are running around in a rampage - those made by Dr. Light himself. Dr Wily, now having turned over a new-leaf boldly tells everyone that he's making robots to counter these attacks but, coincidentally, doesn't have enough money to finish them. He then pleads to the community to donate money to his Swiss bank account. How people can trust him after what he's done and freely give him money is beyond even us. Now with the story settled, let us move on to the menus.

Once you enter the title screen, you'll have a few different options to look at for a brief second while you rush to start the game. The menu also has the challenge list of achievements you can attempt, and if you so dare choose, to complete. Then you have the rankings option, including a time attack ranking and an all-clear ranking which allows you to connect to the Wi-Fi Connection to see how fast people have completed the game and bosses. And then there's the option menu and downloadable content menu which will allow you to get Protoman, have new difficulty modes (for the outrageously hard core) and new special stages that'll be available from the 10th of October. With this settled, lets get into the game!

2008 the year Retro became new again.

Just like the previous Mega Man games, once you reach the stage select screen, you have 9 square boxes and a shop down at the bottom of the screen, Mega Man in the center with the 8 bosses and their own uniquely themed twisted stages surrounding him with his black eyes slowly looking at the stage that is currently selected. Once you pick your stage of demise, this is where the fun and anger begins. Any player who has played a Mega Man game previously will instantly feel like they're playing a previous game with Mega Man 9 being so similar to its 8-bit NES predecessors in terms of graphics, game play and music. Once you're in the stage, just like the NES controls, you move with the D-Pad, jump with the 2 button and fire with the 1 button (you can switch the functions of the 1 and 2 button around in the options menu). And in the time its taken you to read the last sentence up to this point, chances are you've died already. No joke. You'll even see that familiar health and energy gauge up at the top left of the screen. After you save up the screws you find through the levels on platforms or when you kill enemies, they can be used in the shop to help out your travels. You can buy extra lives, energy tanks, a mystery tank and a few others such as the essential energy balancer that fills up the energy level of the weapon with the lowest energy, even when you're using a different weapon.

Those of you that have looked into Mega Man 9 will know that Capcom deliberately made this little beauty into a game that separates the men from the boys. During your time with the game, it's safe to say you will die several times during each level unless you've watched folk do all the levels so many times on Youtube you already know the stage off by heart. As you trek your way through the challenges each stage presents and have a burst of joy as you pass the checkpoint roughly in the middle and end of each stage, you'll eventually encounter the boss of the stage. Thankfully, the bosses aren't as hard as their stage counterparts, but they will put up a challenge, unless you defeated a boss previously and gained their weapon that the current boss you're challenging is weak against. Then you have a slight chance of getting the challenge of completing a boss in under 10 seconds if you keep shooting away like a horde of zombies are limping towards you. With the pesky boss defeated, you gain their ability and move on to the next stage in a typical Mega Man manner.

Get ready to have your platform and dodging skills pushed to the limits.

One of the great things about Mega Man 9, is the levels themselves. When playing through them for the first time, it can take several tries to complete it, but once you know the layout and the spawns of enemies and objects, you'll be able to jump through the game easily and complete it under an hour, which isn't a bad thing. Because of its retro feel, you'll go back to it again and again for the enjoyment as well as the bonus of the challenges which can take sometime to get. The challenges vary from being easy, like killing 100 enemies which you can do in a single level, to a cruel obscenely twisted task such as getting the game completed without getting hit. The game itself separates the casual audience, who will struggle though the game, to the hardcore who will complete the game; the challenges separates the hardcore from the immensely hardcore if they can get all or nearly all the challenges. Though to completely master the game and try a run through for the speed challenges, you'll need to master all the weapons and know the layout of the levels better than your own face. When you stop playing Mega Man 9 and after a while, decide to play it again, that difficulty will show itself once more as well as the steep learning curve, albeit it won't be as steep as the first play through.

To improve your gaming abilities with Mega Man, as said previously, you have to learn from your mistakes and get used to all the tricky and complex parts of the level. For instance, Jewel Man will have spawning green bricks in the second half of his stage and you will have to learn where the blocks spawn since they will easily trick you, and more than once. Another example is Concrete Man's fake blocks, if you don't notice one and you're unlucky, you'll fall into a spike, killing you as soon as you touch it.

Along with the enjoyment you get from going through the levels and that strong sense of accomplishment once you complete a stage, if you choose to keep replaying the game, you'll have fun running through the levels getting to know everything and trying to get a new speed record to upload to the leader boards through Wi-Fi Connection and you'll only want to do this again if you download the extra content such as Protoman and the extra difficulties. Heck, when playing this, you'll even enjoy the look of the 8-bit graphics and the NES soundtrack playing some catchy tunes and Capcom have done that well to make Mega Man like the NES games, at times you'll forget it's even a WiiWare game. Everything has been created to make the game like the original, the sound effects of shooting your Mega Buster, jumping, the enemies getting killed. Instead of a game pushing the system and going all out, this time you can play a game that has intentional limitations and tries to feel old. Who says HD and super realistic graphics are the way forward? Old school fans, Mega Man fans, NES owners, newcomers, they should definitely give a title like this a download.

I hope that blue armor doesn't rust in the rain.

As "NES-like" as the game may seem, there are those extras mentioned through the review. The time trials will provide many hours of playtime, the downloadable content will give you the urge to go through the game again as well as a few extra areas, the challenges is something in itself and will give you more bragging rights than only using the Wii Wheel online with Mario Kart. Capcom have done a truly great job with Mega Man 9, a game that fans have yearned for and will no doubt be extremely satisfied with. It may fall short in terms of length and graphics compared to other titles, but that's exactly what Mega Man fans wanted and it's in no way a bad thing. You could only complain that the difficulty is the only downfall with the game, but myself as well as many others out there will only love that.

If you download this for the Wii, the real reason why it's better for the Wii isn't because it's more natural or the d-pad is better, it's actually because when you die and get severely annoyed with it, instead of kicking or punching a pillow, you can simply hold the Wii Remote as if it was a knife and start pretending to stab the screen to get rid of your inner rage. That's why some sites gave Mega Man 9 on WiiWare a slightly better score then it's 360/PS3 counter parts. But shh, it's our secret.