I’d been meaning to record the second half of Mega Man 6, but kept putting it off due to getting busy with other projects. I sat down one night and played and recorded the fortress stages, then later messed around with some filtering settings in FCEUX and realized just how much I could enhance the visual quality of an NES title. Filters are something that isn’t new in the emulation world, nor is super-scaling a game’s graphics to much higher resolutions, but I didn’t know that this was an option in this emulator. Well, I can say that after tooling around with it, I realized that at 3X High-Quality as a rendering option, the game looks fantastic. It’s very bright, colorful, and crisp, and rather than losing quality due to artificial blurring, the game really pops and stands out!

I also had to spend a little time messing with the options related to how rendering is done and V-Sync itself, and once I got that straightened out (which took longer than you might guess), I got a super smooth experience that looks great!

The fortress stages of Mega Man 6 are much easier than I recall. Maybe I’ve just gotten better at the official games because of how many super-difficult fan games I’ve played in recent years, but I really just blew through these with minimal challenge and no real save-state abusing at all. I also found that they load you up with 1-Ups and E-Tanks throughout, which seems odd – Dr. Wily isn’t even all that hard, and I didn’t really need to use any E-Tanks in the final battle, period.

I like that the game ends with Dr. Wily being arrested and thrown in jail – it’s a great way to wrap-up the NES saga and make it feel complete, yet you can tell by the “To Be Continued” note at the end of the credits that Capcom was already thinking about the SNES sequel that would be coming in 1995.

Well, one day we’ll get to Mega Man 7, but for now, I hope you enjoy this high-quality video of this late-NES classic!

As always, enjoy, and don’t forget to subscribe!