Mega Man Anniversary Collection Review

If you’re from the Nintendo generation, you probably remember the Mega Man games. Capcom was releasing a lot of those games on the NES and they were all huge hits, spawning a new serie on the SNES and, later, on the Playstation. If you’ve started gaming on the N64 or on the GameCube though, you might have no idea what game I am talking about, but we’re going to change that. If you call yourself a true gamer, you have to get this collection. It features 8 of the best platform games ever made as well as 2 never released games here in America! Still not convinced? Keep on reading.

First of all, developer Atomic Planet had to port all of the games for the GameCube so you get more features than what you had in the original versions. You can still use the basic controls and the password screen, but they’ve added 2 new buttons as well as a save feature that saves how many bosses you’ve killed, so no need to write down all of those passwords again. The 2 new buttons are autofire and slide. Even though the button to slide is included in both Mega Man 7 and 8 since the SNES and PS controllers had more than 2 buttons, the NES controller only had 2, so it is a nice thing they’ve added it as it is much more simple to slide pressing 1 button than having to press down+jump. Secondly, there’s the autofire button. I’d say that using it is kind of like cheating, because in the old days we had to press the fire button extremely fast sometimes in order to destroy some ennemies, but with the autofire, you can just hold it down and it fires extremely fast and makes everything seem easy. They’ve also added R and L buttons on older games so you can switch abilities on the fly rather than having to open up the menu. Something that older gamers migh not like about the new controllers though is that they have inversed the fire and jump buttons and it doesn’t seem natural when you first pick up the controller. It only took me a few minutes to get used to it, and those playing for the first time won’t notice it, but some people were getting frustrated because of this. I don’t really see why as it’s really easy to get used to the new controls.

Then there’s the fact that they’ve added an easy difficulty setting as well as the possibility to start with more lives, and it removes all the fun in the games. Sure, it’s optionnal, and it can be helpful if you can’t get past a certain boss, but it kind of removes the challenge in the games. We had lots of fun restarting the same bosses over and over and trying to learn their patterns to defeat them, or remembering what was their weakness. With the easy difficulty, it seems like there isn’t any challenge anymore, so you’ll be blasting through the games in no time, which isn’t exactly something everyone wants. But since it’s only optional, there’s no reason in complaining here. You also get maps in some of the games and even though they’re not really useful, they’ve at least taken the time to do it. Something else I really liked about the presentation of the game is the fact that instead of having standard menus, you have to walk MegaMan around and enter doors for the different options or games and I thought that was pretty original and that more developers should take the time to do it. It even has one of the best Mega Man songs remixed playing in the background!

Now, doing a review of 10 games would be quite a task, so I’ll just give you a good idea of what the games are if you’ve never heard of Mega Man before. The story is quite simple: we are in the future and there’s the evil doctor Willy who has made some evil robots and wants to do evil things, so the good Doctor Light creates Mega Man in order to stop him. Nothing too complicated here, it’s your standard good and against evil thing, but it’s still good to know that there is some backstory to it, even though doctor Willy comes back in every game. So the goal of the game is to go into each stage and beat the end-stage boss, which is some kind of super robot, just like Mega Man. Those bosses also all have a certain ability, and by defeating them you gain that ability and you can then use it. So if you are fighting a robot that uses fire and you have the water ability, you’ll be able to deafeat it a lot more easily than with just your standard blaster.

On the way you’ll also get energy tanks that you can use to refill your energy bar when it is nearly depleted. Off course, your new abilities can’t be used indefinitely, so you’ll also have to refill those with some energy balls that you find when killing ennemies. But Mega Man also has other abilities he can use! He has his own dog, called Rush, and he can do various things. He can be used as a spring to help you get to higher areas that were unreachable before, as a jet to blast through the air, or as a submarine to go underwater. Rush is more used in certain games than in others, but when you defeat all bosses and then have to beat the doctor Willy stages, you get to use it a lot more as those stages seem to have more platforming elements that require Rush to complete them.