Mega Man Anniversary Collection (Gamecube)
Developed by: Capcom/Atomic Planet
Published by: Capcom

The Mega Man Anniversary Collection is a retro gamer’s dream come true. Who needs emulators when you can buy 10 classic games for the PS2 or Gamecube in a cool package like this? It may not be the complete Mega Man library that Japanese gamers were lucky enough to get, but when you consider that it is a cross-platform collection that includes SNES, PSX and even arcade games, it’s still a lot of value for a reasonable price ($40 Canadian).

It’s hard to believe that the first Mega Man is now 20 years old. Playing through the original game (which incidentally is not the best one) nowadays is still a fun experience and doesn’t seem as primitive or outdated as it should. It’s obvious that this is a timeless game, one that influenced many of today’s modern games. If you look beyond the low-rez graphics, you’ll see that all of these games still have substance beyond the nostalgia factor, and gameplay that is vastly superior to a lot of current generation console games.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of playing a Mega Man game, here is the basic set up: they are 2D side scrollers where you control a heroic robot, initially equipped with little more weaponry than an arm blaster. In each game there are a series of levels with different themes that you can tackle in any order. At the end of a level Mega Man must face off against an evil robot boss who has a special weapon related to that theme. When a boss is defeated, Mega Man absorbs the ability to use each weapon himself. After finishing off each of the robots Mega Man heads towards a showdown with his arch enemy Dr. Wily (or occasionally someone else).

The variety of earned weapons and their strategic use in other areas was one of the most innovative aspects of these games, and an idea that many other games quickly adopted. Each enemy or obstacle usually has a specific weakness, but there are often multiple ways to get by a particular baddie in case you don’t have this weapon. The games reward a thoughtful approach to the order of completion as a result.

Still, things have definitely changed in the world of video games. For one, the individual levels are a lot shorter than I remember them being, and they are definitely well under the epic lengths we’ve come to expect nowadays. This does make it convenient to play through the games in short installments however. There are also some things in these games that you would never see anymore, particularly some infuriatingly difficult platform jumping puzzles. The reason I no longer smash my game controllers is not because I’m more older, more peaceful and mature, it’s because they stopped making games like this!

The Mega Man Anniversary Collection contains Mega Man 1 through 6 (all originally released for the NES), Mega Man 7 (for the Super Nintendo), and Mega Man 8 (for the Playstation). As an added bonus, you can also unlock two arcade games rarely seen in the U.S., Mega Man The Power Battles and Mega Man The Power Fighters. These are basically versus fighting games where you take on many of Mega Man’s robot adversaries from past games.

The games are all emulated with precision and are true to the originals. It is important to note these are not remakes in any way, but simply direct ports to new hardware. This means, for better or for worse, you will get sprite flickering and the occasional slow down in some places (although it does seem less prevalent than it was on the original systems). The area where they’ve taken some liberties and enhanced the games slightly is with the controls. Taking advantage of the extra buttons on the PS2 and Gamecube controllers, there is now a button for multi-fire (very handy), a separate button for power sliding, and the shoulder buttons can be used to switch weapons on the fly. The controls adapt very well but on the Gamecube there have been a lot of complaints that the jump and shoot button functions feel like they’ve been mapped backwards. It does take a little getting used to, but it’s not a major problem. It might have been nice to have the option to remap them though.

The menus and interface for playing the different games are also well done. At any time you can stop and return to the main menu from within any of the games, and your progress is automatically saved whenever you complete a level so you don’t have to write down any passwords. (Remember when games actually had password systems? Crazy. I had heaps of scrap papers lying around my house with game passwords all over the place… you’ve gotta love progress.)

If the difficulty of some of the games is driving you nuts, there is also some relief available to you. First of all, you can choose a new, easier difficulty level, which seems to reduce the amount of damage you take from enemies, or you can give yourself 5 lives instead of 3. You can also turn on something called “Navi Mode”, which gives you a clear on-screen display of how many lives you have left, and provides little arrows and indicators telling you which way to go and gives hints on the submenu screen. Hey now, it’s not cheating… just getting a little helping hand where necessary!

The two arcade games are initially locked, but thankfully it doesn’t take much to unlock them. (You don’t have to beat all 8 games or anything like that.) The other extras take a bit more work. The PS2 version contains a full length animated Mega Man episode “The Beginning”, while the Cube one has the G4TechTV segment, “History of Mega Man”, which contains interviews with the creator of Mega Man. Both versions also have unlockable image galleries and remixed music tracks that can be earned along the way.

The Mega Man games helped define what video games are today, and they still hold up well many years later. If you grew up on the NES system, odds are you played one or all of these games and you’ll love revisiting them now. Mega Man has become a huge franchise and although Capcom has gone off in some weird directions, these are the core of what made the company as successful as they are. Go ahead and grab yourself a piece of gaming history — you know you can’t resist playing these classics again, and for the price you’ll pay it’s all well worth it. — Sean