Mega Man Anniversary Collection for GameCube

The inevitable has happened-- gaming's most exploited franchise now has its own compilation. Altogether, Mega Man Anniversary Collection includes the eight numbered titles in the original Mega Man series, along with two obscure arcade efforts. Though this production could have used a little more care, it's serviceable in the least, and is essential for any devotee.

Mega Man's been around, for better or worse, as frequently as anyone-- we all know his schtick by now. He scampers from left to right. He blasts, he destroys. He fights a robot boss at the end of his levels. If you pay enough attention, he blinks on occasion. But most of all, he tries his darndest not to fall into pits, bottomless or spiked. Oh, the "Blue Bomber" always hated his spikes.

But despite his consistent, workman-like adequacy, Mega Man, from the beginning, has relied on a particular gimmick to earn his... bolts, as it were. That, of course, is his ability to jerk abilities from fallen bosses and plagiarize them to his non-existent heart's content. Though these weapons were never particularly convenient, nor even practical to use, players could always count on each to make one of the game's boss battles unnecessarily predictable.

That's Mega Man for you. Over the course of ten years and eight games, we saw the introduction of minor tweaks-- the ability to slide, the use of charged shots, the inclusion of diverging level paths and the like, but at its core, Mega Man 8 is essentially the same type of game as the original. Truly, younger players will have much difficulty differentiating between any of the initial six games, all from the NES. Mega Man 7 and 8 offer some epidermal revisions, but even they basically espouse the same principles of design as their predecessors.

Regardless, If you're itching to play a good 2D platformer, you can't go wrong with a Mega Man game. While truly thoughtful design has long passed this series by, it's worth commenting that the relative level of quality has stayed consistent. Though most purists will contend Mega Man 2 to be the series' pinnacle, players who weren't "there" in Mega Man's 8-bit heyday will have trouble discerning any of these games as being considerably better than any of its cousins. Therefore, if, in this day of lavish, overwrought 3D circus shows, you like your action 2D, side scrolling, and devoid of story, Anniversary Collection may be just what you're looking for.

So the games themselves are here... but how faithful are they to the originals? First, a warning-- and this applies to every game on this disc. For some undoubtedly absurd reason, the game's developer, Atomic Planet, not only declined to allow a customizable control setup, but they actually, inexplicably switched the functions of the A and B buttons. In EVERY Mega Man game EVER, the A button was always "jump," and the B button "shoot." Here, those functions are transposed, and it will take hours of gameplay for Mega Man veterans, who have A-jump/B-shoot hardwired in their brains, to accustom themselves fully. The only sane reason I can think of for this change is that the big green A button of the GameCube controller seems to lend itself well to repetitive jamming, but that's still no excuse not to at least include the ability to customize your control setup. Casual, inexperienced players will not have a problem with any of this, but those who have a history with this series will often find themselves aggravatingly hitting the wrong button at the wrong time.

Controls aside, the six NES Mega Man games, with the exception of a few expurgated copyright notices, are nearly perfect emulations. But that's where the lovefest ends. Mega Man 7, which was originally a Super Nintendo game, is intact, but suffers from inexplicable slowdown during its more graphically intense moments. Mega Man 8, originally released simultaneously for Playstation and Sega Saturn, has similar problems, along with some choppy sound during boss sequences. While these inadequacies hardly ruin either game, they're equally inexcusable considering the relative power of the GameCube platform.

The two included arcade games are another, more sadistic story. Neither of these games had previously been released in North America, and it's easy to see why. Both feature the same willowy premise-- dispose of the side-scrolling levels and have Mega Man fight only the boss battles themselves. Each game is thus a long, tiresome string of boss encounters which play similarly to their counterparts from the "regular" Mega Man games. Make no mistake... this isn't "Street Fighter" meets "Mega Man" as much as it is "Mega Man Lite."

To make things worse, it's obvious that the arcade games were of low priority to the producers, as they suffer from positively crippling amounts of slowdown. Both of these games ran originally on Capcom's ancient 16-bit CPS1 arcade hardware, yet the GameCube seems to encounter slowdown every time more than 5 sprites are onscreen at once. And that's just the 1 player game. If you're brave enough to sample the 2-player simultaneous mode, be prepared potentially to go backwards in time. Honestly, I haven't seen this much slowdown in an arcade-to-home conversion since Konami's infamous port of Gradius III to Super Nintendo.

Beyond the games, there are the usual throw-in compilation "extras". Random bits of concept art, a few remixed music tracks, and some developer interviews are included-- nothing too involving. There is something called "Navi Mode" which, when you turn it on, gives you access to a map screen and a constant stream of (useless and poorly-translated) tips as you play through each of the NES games. Also, as you would expect, you can now save your progress within each game onto your memory card instead of frequenting Mega Man's traditionally-convoluted password system.

If I haven't made it clear enough thusfar, just about all aspects of this collection point to the developer putting in just enough effort to get things done. It's quite evident throughout that Atomic Planet, a studio external to Capcom, clearly doesn't have the love for the series that perhaps the original Mega Man team, or even any random internal Capcom studio, would have offered. That being said, Mega Man Anniversary Collection, solely based on its wealth of fundamentally-sound gameplay, is worth the purchase, both for the Mega Man fan and the old-school gamer alike.