#41: Mega Man Anniversary Collection

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Rating: E

Players: 1

Price Range: ~$15 USD

A compilation of Classic Mega Man games.

Okay, please let me talk about this series now, because playing video games is a hobby and I greatly enjoy these games.

Mega Man is a truly underrated series, and while it is dormant now, back then, they came out like hot cakes for better and worse. But these are what started it all.

Overall, in terms of graphics, music, and the gameplay, it is quite great. It is simple, with you just needing to run, jump, shoot, and use your slide and boss weapons to defeat the franchise's Robot Masters to stop Dr. Wily. And yet, the games are, for the most part, incredibly engaging, with the game always being challenging with mechanics and such.

And these games, especially on the NES, have aged incredibly well, and that says a lot given that the original entries of both Mario and Zelda spawned on there. Besides slowdown, you could play the game easily today as you could back then.

Although, the GameCube controls having B be the jump button and A be the shoot button is kind of ridiculous with no way to change it, but given that the game's controls, unlike the X games, are very simple and the game is slower paced, it is...fine, I guess. Turbo on X and Y are good though.

But yeah, this game has the first eight Mega Man games, each with each being able to be saved, which easily puts these versions of the games above the originals alone. Although, besides the games, there isn't any bonus content except for the reason one would play this.

Mega Man: The Power Fighters and its sequel, Japanese-only arcade games, are unlockable here in their full glory, which is quite amazing, and is definitely a reason to play this alone.

However, what's an entry about a compilation of one of my nostalgic game series without going into the games included?

Now, I haven't beaten 7 or 8, so I'll be brief on those, but I'll dive into the rest and rank the completed ones at the end.

Ready?

Right! Let's go!

Mega Man (Mega Man 1).

The first entry basically established many of the series' conventions.

A set of Robot Masters and their stages being playable in any order, the running and gunning, using boss weapons against other Robot Masters weak to them, with a set of Castle stages at the end to test your skills.

However, there are a lot, and I mean a lot of growing pains here.

For one, this game is hard, and not necessarily the fair type of hard. Enemies are hard to avoid and deal quite a bit of damage, with some being very difficult to shoot with the Mega Buster alone, and the boss design is not that very good.

Being the only game to have six Robot Masters instead of the usual eight, only Cut Man and Bomb Man are really good first picks to start the boss order, as the others either do way too much damage, have attack patterns that make no sense at all, or both.

Elec Man's AI can be exploited a little, but his attacks are basically unavoidable and do ludicrous damage, so the only real way to beat him is to use Cut Man's weapon in a war of attrition, which I've already mentioned is bad game design.

Ice Man literally slows down the game with how many projectiles he shoots on screen, turning the game into, again, a war of attrition.

Guts Man constantly stuns you, leaving almost no time to move at all, turning throwing of Bomb Man's weapon at him into, you guessed it, a war of attrition.

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