A few bug fixes…

• Implemented hard IE lockout. It’s really messed up in IE… I can’t believe how much different it looks there compared to all the compliant browsers. Try it in IE or set your user agent to see my shameless advertising.
• Fixed a minor bug causing the title to appear incorrectly when viewing a single post–thanks Burton!
• Fixed a huge, enormous, showstopper bug–I forgot to put in the quotes! Fear not, loyal readers, your reload-fixation has returned! I need to get my view count up somehow…

Be vewwy vewwy quiet… I’m hunting wabbits.

And it’s only a cowincidence that the wabbits is named bugs. If you happen to find bugs, pwease teww me. Quietwy.

And… let me know what you think. Personally I’m rather proud of this design, I frankly think it’s the best one I’ve come up with, and we’re on about the tenth or twelfth design revision since I started this site. I’m especially glad at how the artwork turned out; usually Photoshop fails me and I have to go looking for outside help.

And, as usual, sorry IE folken, your browser’s bass-ackwards rendering of web standards keeps you out of this page yet again. It should work in Firefox (though I’m trying to figure out a bug where the stupid float for the post category drops down to the next line… if you want to see how it’s supposed to look, check it out in Chrome or Safari. If you know what’s going on and how to fix it, please share the love).

This design makes extensive use of the Futura font. As soon as I find a suitable generally-available alternative in Windows I’ll update the font-family styles; the one Windows Vista picks actually doesn’t look too bad, but I’m not sure about XP, I haven’t tried it out in XP yet. As always, if you’re on a Mac you shouldn’t have a problem as Futura is including with Mac OS X.

In a word… this game is awesome.

First of all, it’s difficult. No, I don’t mean God-of-War-difficult-setting difficult. I mean omg-tear-your-hear-out-in-frustration-because-you’re-so-on-edge-you-jump-the-gun difficult. I’m a Mega Man buff, I’ve played all the games over and over, and I was still ready to scream after about my 8th attempt at the first stage.

A few words of wisdom for you Mega Man fans out there who are going to try this and haven’t yet:

You will find that you become averse to taking risks. That powerup on the high shelf near the spikes? You’re going to think twice (unless it’s a 1-up). This is because, unlike other Mega Man games, lives matter. When you run out and get to the continue screen, it’s not continue-from-the-last-checkpoint continue like it is in other Mega Man games. You start over at the beginning of the level. Which means you have to run that entire gauntlet one… more… time. Or two. Or five, depending on how jumpy you are at this point (see above).

There is no margin for error, at all. Thankfully, there is also no input lag to speak of; I ran into this issue playing through Mega Man 1 on the anniversary collection on my PS3. The controls are very precise, and oh boy are you going to need it. You have an margin of a couple of PIXELS in which you’re going to be in the right place to actually make that jump.

This, my friends, is why I fell in love with videogames. This game is nailbitingly difficult, and a stunning example of a classic 2D sidescroller. If you like a challenge and you want to take a trip back in time, you must get this game. If you’re a Mega Man fan with a current-generation console and you don’t already have it… well, I don’t know you.