Sure, your future has just disappeared in a puff of smoke and you've just realized that you're going to have to work until you're 90 in order to pay off your part of the part of $700 billion or so that the gov'mint might or might not vomit on Wall Street (not to mention all the war ca$h!). You turn to the Wall Street Journal, your only source of help and information in these troubled times. And what do you find? Mega Man. A pink Mega Man. Big as life and bright as a poodle, rocking a charged-up blast from his Buster cannon. And you know what? You smile. Your day is suddenly that much better. You reconsider hurling yourself through the window of your office building while clutching your lasted 401(k) statement. Instead, you plunk down what may possibly be your last remaining ten dollars on Mega Man 9, comforted by the fact that you'll never actually finish the game, thereby receiving a near-infinite return on your amusement investment.

Mega Man 9: stronger than the American economy and twice as likely to give you a heart attack.

A grainy, bigfoot-in-the-forest quality mobile pic of Miniboss guitarist Aaron Burke just popped up in my email. Aaron had previous hit me up for some MM9 shirt luv, promising that the entire troop of Minibosses would rock said gear at their next engagement. They've got a Really Big Show coming up on Saturday, so if'n you live in the Tempe, AZ hood, head over to the Clubhouse. The MBs are playing during KOLcon. If you don't know what KOL is, you've never experienced the joy of taking on a horde of Goblin Barbeque chefs with your Disco Bandit. Meat!

Okay, okay, we'll fess up: over the years and over the (literally) hundreds of Mega Man titles, some of our robotic archfiends have been slightly less clever than others. Cutman? Hell yeah, he's got big-ass flying scissors on his head! Gutsman? Sure, he's huge and yellow. Wire Cucumber? Umm... perhaps a few more hours on the whiteboard would have have brought about better results. IGN digs through 20 years of Mega Madness to point out some of our mechnical foe-paws.

I like the Nyko folks and their products. At home, I use their awesome Wii recharging base, as well as their lightgun body (which is far superior to the Nintendo Zapper IMHO). On Thursday, Nyko threw a media bash, showing off some of their new gear running upcoming games, and Capcom's Tim Ng trekked into San Francisco to show off Mega Man 9. CrunchGear had the chance to play MM9 with Nyko's new Wii controller and liked both game and gear. Check out their thoughts here.

Mandalorian32 revisits the toys that spawned from the US Mega Man animated series that ran in the early 90s.All in all, the toys really weren't that bad in terms of quality, except for the questionable change that came from making Mega Man look like a weirdly buff teenager. I personally dug the Cutman and Gutsman figures. As proof of their hardiness, my Gutsman is still rattling around in my kids' toy box. He's a little battered and scraped, but still eminently play-with-able.

Fun fact: I was involved in script approvals for the Mega Man, Street Fighter and Darkstalkers cartoons that we licensed back in ye olden days.

Funner Fact: the simplistic theme song ("Super fighting robots! Mega Man!" repeatedly over and over) was picked because the Power Rangers had broken big about the same time the Mega Man cartoon launched and the producers wanted to feed off the success of that show -- including the brain-dead "Go go, Power Rangers!" theme -- as much as possible. To this day, old school Capcomers will still occasionally burst out into the Mega Man theme when talking about the games.