After playing #4 I would list 1-4 in the following order of best to worst:
1. Mega Man 3
2. Mega Man 2
3. Mega Man 1
4. Mega Man 4

I have to say I am very, very disappointed with 4. Easily the worst Mega Man game I've ever played (Counting the X series also). Here's why I think that:

-The soundtrack is fairly weak.
-The weapons are crap. Seriously, the buster shot is the by far the best weapon in the game. There's really no reason to change it, ever, except for Toad Bomb and Time stopper which are overpowered and require absolutely no skill to abuse. If I had known that from the start I would have beat Toad Man first. Basically, all the weapons have a 'gimmick' where they are effective on select enemies, however there's really no need to bother since the game practically throws E-Tanks and life refills at you.
-The charge shot is way overpowered to the point where I got bored holding down the button 80% of the time whether there was a enemy coming up to use it on or not. In fact, the first 5(!) bosses I defeated were brought down using the default weapon since it happened to be the most effective. ..I don't know if this just happened to be blind bad-luck but yeah...

Hopefully Mega Man 5 doesn't suffer from these awful design choices and gameplay.


Quote Originally Posted by The Satellite View Post
As I clearly said in my post, if you don't know to get it first, you can't leave the level without game overing, or painstakingly attempting to survive the Yoku Block segment.
Why would you want to leave the level? That's half the fun of playing classic NES games--they have challenges in them that casual gamers nowadays are too stupid soft to manage. Sure it's highly annoying without the rush jet by todays standards for games, but part of the fun is being able to overcome the toughest challenges those games could dish out. I beat the block segment in MM2 when I was like 10 years-old. It never even occurred to me there was a shortcut. I just memorized the pattern, and I did it.

Anyway, I'm not trying to pick a fight with you or anything of the sort. I guess to me it just seems silly to rant that much about one of the best platformers of all time on the NES. For example, in Quick Mans stage I like the laser beam sequence. It would suck to play that level with them removed. The only issue I found with the game design was the crash-bomb boss, the rest are mainly just quirks.

I think I can answer why so many people hold MM2 as the "best MM game" for you: It has a very fast-paced flow with the best MM soundtrack and a solid selection of bosses. Also, all the robot weapons are not only useful but are bad-ass. You can practically select weapons at random an any random level and you can manage to do something clever with it (Flash thingy aside).

3 is still my favorite though.