so, welcome to the club. We deal in INSTANT GRATIFICATION. You want the good stuff, up

front, where you can enjoy it before quote unquote getting an emergency phone call and

excusing yourself from the chaff. Then buddy, do I have a Mega Man game for you. All that

screwing around with levels and midbosses and whatnot? AWAY WITH IT! That noise is for

the birds! Nope, we’re going to drop you RIGHT INTO THE BOSS FIGHTS. Because that’s

where the fun is, trying to crack the rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock order to it all, without having to worry if

you burned too much weapon energy in the preceding platformer section.

So, Dr. Wily’s evil and needs to be stopped. Got it? Good. Because here’s where everything

diverges. You (and a friend if you want to play co-op) select from Mega Man, Proto Man,

and Bass, and choose which set of six bosses you wish to fight. (Pretty easy to tell this

came in the wake of Mega Man 7.) You select a stage, and BAM. Boss fight. All the concepts

from the famous franchise apply here: You slay the boss, gain his weapon, then use that

against the next. Despite some blending of games here, you should be able to logic out

which items work best against which bosses - you can guess that Heat Man and Ice Man

aren’t going to be friends, regardless of where or when - and, when in doubt, just spam

that one weapon that’s good at stunning the opponent. Finish off all six and... yep,

up to Wily’s Castle, where you fight one mid-boss (the Pumpkin if you’re on the 7

course, and the Yellow Devil on the others), before going toe-to-toe with the bad Doctor

himself... in his huge armored death machine.

As this game is built for arcade hardware - and with an entirely different manner of

gameplay - it looks and sounds wildly different from its predecessors. Sure, the graphics

are kinda ripped from Mega’s Super NES outing, but the sound is entirely different, with

a more Genesis-ish twang that really adds something to the disco-ness of Crash Man’s

theme... which plays when you’re fighting Wood Man. Despite the fact that Crash Man

is hanging out... right over there. Look, when you put seven versions of Mega Man in

a blender, not everything’s gonna come out flawlessly. The re-drawn sprites are hit-or-miss,

the translation looks rushed... but all that gets pushed to the side when you actually

play the game and feel just how fun it is. Sure, there are flaws, but this is a Mega

Man game! You just know there’s going to be a sequel, and hopefully they’ll take

care of these grievances at that time. Hopefully. And if you’ve played this on the ‘Cube,

PS2, or XBox as part of Mega Man Anniversary Collection, you know that the sequel is right

next door.