Mega Man (PC) Playthrough
556A playthrough of Hi Tech Expressions' 1990 action game for Dos PCs, Mega Man.
After having played so many Mega Man games for the channel, I decided that it was finally time to tackle this especially notorious slice of the franchise's history. You can find its sequel here: https://youtu.be/ZP8M4xM3DmI
This is the 38th Mega Man game I've played, no joke. (You can find them all in my Mega Man playlist https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gSj_kh1fHv_byjbzySGOUL9OBLnrQcP)
Mega Man's first PC game was a well-kept secret for a long time, and it probably still would be had it not become the subject of endless internet ridicule. And yes, this was an official product. It's not something that Capcom is likely to acknowledge nowadays, but Steve Rozner, the game's programmer, was hired by Capcom USA with the thought that he'd be part of a new internal development studio. That plan never came to fruition, but when he left Capcom, he was given permission to finish and release the Mega Man game that he had been working on on his own.
The result was clearly not going to be something that could compete with the NES games in terms of quality, but this version of Mega Man isn't quite as bad as you might've heard elsewhere.
The EGA color palette isn't as large or as versatile as the NES's, but Mega Man makes fair use of what's available, and the screen scrolling is impressively smooth for a PC game of this vintage, especially considering that it only required a 4mhz 8088 with 512K of memory! There is no music, though, and the sound effects are all played through the internal PC speaker.
The game itself feels like a bizarre Mega Man game from an alternate dimension. The core elements of the NES games are here, but they're pretty warped.
There are three main robot masters - Dyna Man, Sonic Man, and Volt Man - and you can play their stages in any order. Each one is weak to another robot's weapon, so the order you choose is just as important here as it was in the NES game.
The stages are pretty straightforward, but they're loaded with weird contraptions (why the grabby zappy robot arms?) and enemies that come at you from angles that make them impossible to hit. They're not too hard to avoid once you know where they'll show up, but they will swarm and do their utmost to knock you off of the platforms in some of the trickier platforming sections. And what's up with that intro level? Why does the robot dog chase you through a security hut?
The game left me irked at a few points, but I found myself enjoying it for the most part. It has a strange bootleg charm to it (how can you not love how derpy Mega Man is here?), and it's fairly easy to blow through after a couple of tries, so there's no major time commitment required to see the ending.
If you want to try the game for yourself, I have one big suggestion to help smooth over the bumps: map the controls to a gamepad! The keyboard layout is ridiculous - the arrow keys move Mega Man, the J key jumps, and the space bar shoots - and as you might imagine, that's an extremely irritating way to try to play a platformer.
I still find it funny that Hi Tech Expressions somehow managed to worm their way into Mega Man history.
Almost as funny as that ending screen.
"DR. WILEY HAS SURRENDERED.
MEGAMAN HAS SAVED THE
PLANET FROM DESTRUCTION,
BUT WILL IT LAST!!"
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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