So, Mega Man–also known as the blue bomber–has made a return to his roots with Mega Man 9, available for Wiiware, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.

Capcom has said publicly, in interviews and on its blog, that the game is a throwback to the games of yesteryear. It keeps the gameplay fron 20 years ago intact, and I’m really amazed just how much it feels like it could’ve been an NES game, except for fade-ins and fade-outs that seem a little too smooth.

But really, the game delivers. Graphics that are pixelated with few minimal frames of animation, music that is catchy and uses limited hardware to produce it, and the “challenge.”  I say challenge, because the game is hard, but it’s hard because of the many cheap deaths you may come across in your venture.

This game does put to rest a question I’ve had for years: Are games nowadays too easy, or am I just getting better?  Well, I browsed a few message boards and read page after page of comments from people complaining about how hard the game was. I feel that the difficulty is about up there with the old MMs when I would first play them.

Several of the comments were about an elephant you fight in Concrete Man’s stage of people unable to beat it. I didn’t find this to be a challenge.  Got past them in my first life (after encountering the first elephant with so little life that one hit killed me).  Then someone asked about the octopi in Splash Woman’s stage. Ugh.

Now, those are some incredibly easy enemies to defeat.  I mean, if you can’t kill those, you probably shouldn’t be playing video games.  Or perhaps at least give it more than 30 seconds before you run to a message board asking for help.

The game is wonderful and feels like something straight out of 1990. Definitely a bargain for the $10 price tag it carries. When we can have content this good come out on download services, it makes me wonder why the big three allow some shitty content to come out. Yaris and Undertow on Xbox Live Arcade quickly spring to mind.