Having gone through… so much of Nitrome’s back catalogue over… oh wow it’s been a year at this point? time fucking flies, man. But anyway what strikes me is how little I stuck with a bunch of these games — and, in particular how little I played of their… pre-2008 output. In hindsight, it makes sense: my ability to access the internet pre-the-age-of-ten was limited to whenever I’d completed my work early in the computer lab, or whenever we went through the back fence to my aunt’s place every Friday afternoon. Oftentimes I’d go full weeks in between playing games — not to mention how different computers would mean different save files, resetting my progress to the beginning each time — and oftentimes those gaps often meant I had some new toy that took precedence over the Nitrome game I’d already gone through: a new Poptropica island, maybe, or some new website like Crazymonkey.com or the Bubblegum Arcade. My impression is, a lot of times, I’d pick something up, give it my best shot, then never play it again, save for a couple I’d return to, a couple (like Frost Bite or Hot Air 2 or Off The Rails) that stuck around my memory. But even then, there was nothing here I was super gung-ho about beating, nothing here I’d super try to revisit.

Until this one: Dirk Valentine. I can’t begin to tell you just why this game was what kid me latched onto, why this one was what truly began the process of making him a Nitromehead — iirc my family didn’t get access to home internet until, like, January 2009 at the earliest — but god it got its claws in me. It was my first exposure to steampunk, and with no Horrible Histories to tell me otherwise, this was just what I assumed the Victorian era was like. It was my first exposure to the Wilhelm Scream, and even back then eight-year-old-me knew that was the funniest shit ever — he’d shoot enemies that weren’t even in his way just so he had a chance to hear that soundbyte again. He loved the core gameplay conceit: how the chaingun you wield is both your main way of fighting enemies and your main method of getting through the level. He loved bouncing shots off the walls, he loved making those weird webs of ricocheted chains that he could jump up and climb. He loved all the mechanics the game kept introducing, all the enemies, all the ways they impacted the chaingun. It gave me the brainworms, long, long before that word even entered my vernacular… yet I was never able to beat it. I made it far, near the end, but there was always one level I couldn’t beat. I was eight, I was nine, I was ten, and I’d keep coming back, keep thinking maybe this would be the moment I was good enough of a gamer to get through my plateau, but it never came to be. I’d reach whatever level it was that walled me (I can’t quite remember but it was probably Control Room 1) and I wouldn’t be able to beat the game before computer time was over, before next week gave me something else to fixate on. It was… certainly important in the context of my history with flash games, yet I never actually beat it. I never actually saved Queen Victoria from the evil Baron Battenburg.

At least, not until today.

…Playing the game again, in 2024, with whatever wisdom the past sixteen years have or haven't given me, what I’ve realized is that this is a fairly major step forward, at least in the context of Nitrome’s progression as a studio. This is their first game to have a proper story — or at least, more of a story than a ‘congratulations, you beat the game!’ screen and maybe a quick intro cutscene — your mission control’s consistent chiming in doing a lot to lend a sense of context and gravitas to your actions, even if, perhaps, his dialogue could’ve used some commas. I like, too, that the background changes as you go outside the fortress to inside then back to outside again: it’s baby steps compared to some of Nitrome’s later stuff (simply adding a filter to the outside background and then taking it out again), but it helps lend a sense of overall progression as you fight through the titular Fortress of Steam. Beyond that, a lot of what kid me found fun about it still applies today: how cool it is that your gun makes this both a shooter and a platformer, all the cool things the game explores with that mechanic, and how… frenetic the game grows to be, especially near the end (kid me’s dreams to beat this would’ve been absolutely doomed, lmao). I’m still fond of all the sounds you make as you do things: the screams the enemies make when they die, the extremely bitcrushed voicelines as you get a game over or pick up a healing item, they all lend so much character. I think perhaps the boss battles felt rather basic (and a bit of a crapshoot as to whether you get hit upon entering the arena or not), and in general it’s… easier to softlock yourself in a bunch of levels than I feel it maybe should be, but as a whole this was a blast. Perhaps it’s not fully polished to the point where I could call it one of the best Nitrome games nowadays — moving the mouse to move the camera was… rather rough, the recording quality of the music wasn’t that great and there were a non-zero amount of points where shooting the chaingun didn’t feel like it maybe should — but if any game has done enough to earn the right of pet favourite, it’s this one. God knows how much past me loved this. And I reckon he would've been happy to know that I eventually got good enough to finally clear this, even if it, uh, took a good bit longer than he presumed it would.

I'll be playing the entire collection at some point, and I'm usually the type to play by release order barring a few special series. Can't be understated how awful and cryptic some of the puzzles are, even when they built in a help button to one of the buttons on the controller at all times. Sometimes it's just "check literally every checkable thing you can, no hints on what it is without a guide" like finding the WWW Metro, how are you supposed to know that it's behind the school statue of all things? There's a real tendency for the game to have you go do something, then go "I need to go see dad!" and then you go to see dad and then you go exactly back to where you just were. Dentown might be the worst designed area of its type I've ever seen, to the point where my mental map failed me after 10 minutes of looking around for one objective and I looked at a map of it, and it was entirely different looking of an area than I thought it was supposed to be! It's entirely pointless backtracking because it's also entirely real world navigation, there's not even any netbattles to do. The netbattles are basically what all 4 of this 4/10's points come from. I think they're really fun but the devs clearly didn't consider what some of the enemy combinations would be like to fight while in the same fight as each other. It's real satisfying when you pull a bunch of chips at once that work together and you can pulverize your enemies. You restore HP after battle, so as long as you don't die, you won't get a game over usually. I focused on building my chip deck around the A, C, and F codes and found most of the story bosses fair and balanced. The final boss feels like a damage race at a certain point but because of how upgraded your buster is there, it makes it fine if you can tank some hits. Some of the bosses, namely Shark Man and Number Man, are godawful and I wonder how they even got put to code, and ironically, both of those are the complete opposite end of difficulty. Number Man is so easy that you just... pick the small number and shoot it, and Shark Man is RNG if your chips you picked are good enough to hit Shark Man past his 2 fake fins that block all damage and attack at a near undodgeable speed. Maybe they just expected me to constantly spam the chip that makes you invincible for a few seconds there? The plot is pretty much nothing, it's basically cartoon villain wants to destroy the world, the only wrench thrown in is right at the end with Mega Man being Lan's deceased brother, digitized. I've always heard this series had a rocky start and that 2 and 3 are actually some of the better in the series, so I'm looking forward to continuing the games even if my enjoyment of this one wasn't that great. I doubt I'll go back and fight Bass in this one, since it requires every single chip other than the one you get from him, and I doubt any generous donors online want to give me their full collections so I can fight him. Cause I'm not grinding for that. Maybe in future games I'll enjoy things far more and feel much more like going for a completion.