Game:

Mega Man (1987)

Duration: 3:20

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38

Guess what? I'm cheating today! ...well, sorta. I need ONE extra day before I can do what I *really* wanted to do next. This seems like a decent enough excuse anyway, because it serves multiple purposes beyond the most immediately convenient one.

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Consider this my "full disclosure" that all the original Mega Man classic series games that I've got are in this form, meaning that they're not exactly 100% authentic to the originals, but they are in all the ways that REALLY count.

Unless you're an extreme purist, which I'll acknowledge is a thing that I can respect... but I can also respect having ten games (eight main series and two... ... ...others... that I probably never would've played otherwise) on one disc for a console that's not going to self-destruct or corrode or get infested with dust any decade soon. I respect it even more when I got the whole thing for about $8. Even getting them digitally à la carte can't compete with that... although I would at least hope that doing so would get you slightly more authenticity for your trouble.

So, just off the top of my head, here are the obvious changes that might interfere with the experience:
-The title screens have been... ahem... "updated" to include a copyright of 2004 as one of the years of publication in addition to the year of origin
-"Capcom U.S.A." seems to have been regularly removed from the game and replaced with simply "Capcom" where appropriate
-Small sound differences, but this varies from case to case as to for the better or worse
-An overlay pause menu that lets you exit the game and check the current password

-System menu level changes:
--"Navi" mode, wherein there's an "updated" HUD overlay and Roll will "Mega Man, Mega Man!" in some advice if you pause the game at certain points.
--A system-level difficulty change for the first seven games
--A system-level choice of starting with 3 lives or 5 per continue

Oh, and specifically to the GameCube version, for whatever reason, the controls of A for jump and B for shoot are reversed... I'm sure this is less damaging on the other consoles where the face buttons are of a more standard distribution, size, and positioning... but it's a HUGE oversight to say the least.

There's probably some more specific stuff that would best be served on a case-by-case situation that can't be quite as generally-described and oversimplified as the sound changes.

Personally, I find the "difficulty" toggle to be just a bit weirdly obscured by a... neat menu interface idea, but not really the most convenient one for efficient navigation as you might've surmised on your own. (But it has cool music!)

The most egregious change in my mind is the not-even-close-to-self-explanatory "Navi" mode, because the new style overlay clashes quite jarringly with the original aesthetic... although the convenience of X-series style shoulder button weapon cycling is a "nice" but imprecise means of avoiding the need to open the menu in low-stress situations, so it could've easily been done without as well.

The real annoyance to me is that Mega Man is one of those pioneering platform series that does the whole "teach by not teaching" thing with the indirect and subtle approach of showing you what you need to do without having to tell you explicitly. Now, I will admit that some of the hints ARE slightly more interesting suggestions than I'd have expected... BUT... well, they're the kinds of situations that tell you to use a certain weapon, which you may not even necessarily HAVE, making them fundamentally flawed AND spoilers if you didn't know what kind of weapons you'd see already, AND it totally flies against the whole point to Mega Manning in general... you know, getting new weapons to play with and learn their properties...

So yeah, no offense to Atomic Planet, but there seems to be a fundamental disconnect in understanding of exactly what Mega Man is. That said, since I can still play the games in their fairly-close-to-original states regardless, I'll forgive these admittedly minor transgressions, but as someone who makes it a point to adopt an identity specifically referring to "games"... well, game design is allowed to be one of my bigger hot-button issues.

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Anyway, this video is a huge tease, but you can imagine something of what I've got in store for the immediate future. It also lets me use the unique new content, like uncanny valley Gutsman and bizarre astronaut monkey finding a Mega Buster grapple gun clips and the root menu in SOME way. The Secrets menu would upset the Mega Man 2 and 3 title themes remix, though, so I will get to those some other time. SUSPENSE!

Also, now that I've gotten all the cards laid out on the table, nobody will cry foul that I'm allegedly passing off any Anniversary Collection versions as their original counterparts... well, no, they'll probably do that anyway, but at least I have the "fine print" in place... at the very start.

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