I opted out of Vis and Weatherby's race because I hadn't played this once before and I was feeling lazy. I did get around to it shortly after though and I do think their frustration is pretty warranted.

This game is purely built around inconvenience. From the massive mazelike levels, to the weird inconsistent physics, to the awful special stages, to the joke characters. If you look at the tech demo that was made before this (titled Sonic Crackers for some reason) you can see there wasn't even much refining done to the core mechanics. It's all just so awkward and frustrating. Not really worth a go, but it's admittedly pretty funny to watch a friend suffer through it.

At least the bad ending is kinda amusing in how blunt and outlandish it is. If you don't get through those shitty special stages Metal Sonic WILL proceed to destroy the city and Kill Thousands

During a time where the general consensus was that the Mega Man series desperately needed to be souped up a bit, Capcom answered those prayers with Mega Man X, far exceeding many's expectations in the process. I've been a classic Mega Man person since I was a kid, but X1 kicks major ass. It stands where it does today for damn good reasons, and is possibly the magnum opus of the sidescroller brand of the franchise.

Recently I had complained about Mega Man 7's urging to revisit levels to dig up hidden items and upgrades just to make your life easier, a trait typically found and fondly remembered in the X series. What's the difference here? Well, it's less tedious, there's more incentive to do it, more room to explore, and generally it feels much more rewarding. The movement (which is absolutely wonderful, just as good as everyone says) really helps with this. You can use your wall jumps, speed boosts, and various tricks combining the two of them to discover areas you wouldn't see normally, often containing health and armor upgrades that are much worth the effort. It's not quite like going out of bounds, but for me it's a similar feeling that brings childlike glee and wonder.

You can also exit previously entered stages much more conveniently, not having to get a special item for that or anything. This is great because some stages are altered a bit depending on the order you do them in, for example if you do Chill Penguin first then Flame Mammoth's stage will be frozen over, allowing you to reach the latter's health upgrade. You can also come back to Chill Penguin's stage with Flame Mammoth's weapon to destroy a structure containing the health upgrade in the former's stage as well. There's a lot of stuff like this, and for my money it's far more enjoyable here than their attempt to integrate this into 7 with Rush Search or whatever it was.

Sometimes, however, I feel like the enemy placement is a bit poor and some stages go on surprisingly longer than others, both of these most notable in the first stage of Sigma's hideout. There's a big scene where both a major protagonist and antagonist meet their demise, but then the level continues for about just as long as it took to reach that section and caps off with an annoying spider boss battle. It makes that whole moment feel a lot more anticlimactic than what was probably intended. As far as the enemy placement goes, there's not much to really elaborate on there. Go to the vertical corridor in the aforementioned Sigma stage and you should see what I mean, but there are many more minor cases throughout the game. This could just be a skill issue on my part, however.

Anyway, yeah! It's really good! X1 is essentially singlehandedly responsible for saving the franchise, and many people remember it fondly to this day both due to this and due to just being really goddamn fun. Sadly, it seemed like they didn't really know where to go with the sequels to this game, and at the end of the day most people know the X series for being notoriously inconsistent in quality overall. I'll be replaying X2 and X3 soon to refresh my thoughts on them, but I remember them being really damn underwhelming compared to this one.