It would have been easy enough for Digital Eclipse to just mail it in with Mega Man Legacy Collection. After all, at fifteen bucks, this is by far the cheapest it’s ever been possible to acquire the six original Mega Man games, and as an added bonus, no reversed control schemes, either! Sure, you’re missing 7 and 8 (yes, there was an 8… remember?), but when it comes to the actual classics, this is where it’s at.
Fortunately, the good folks at Digital Eclipse apparently hold the same kind of respect for the series as your or I. So not only did we receive remarkably faithful emulation of the originals—all handled beautifully in HD with optional filters (cathode ray/interlacing included)—but we also received a trove of bonus content. This includes, to briefly summarize, a massive list of timed challenges (serviced by leaderboards, of course, with replays for the top 100 performances), a huge list of enemies and characters with descriptions, artwork, and—naturally—a sound test/soundtrack option. You can even choose to instantly practice a battle against any of the robot leaders, which is awfully nice considering how challenging some of them actually are.
In fact, that’s always the most jarring part of the return-to-Mega-Man experience. The first 15 to 30 minutes are generally spent getting your ass handed to you in every scientific way, but usually because of disappearing blocks. Mega Man 1 in particular is positively brutal in that I-swear-I’m-okay-I-just-need-to-spend-a-few-minutes-whipping-my-head-onto-the-coffee-table kind of way. One particular co-editor described it as “the Dark Souls of the 80s”.
But once it all starts coming back to you, you really begin to appreciate what’s here again. If it’s been a while since you’ve experienced these gems, it’s a lot of fun to pick your favorite and make a run through it. If, like a lot of people, you never had the chance to experience the later games (4, 5, and 6), now’s a wonderful time to give one of them a shot and see precisely why 4 just might actually be the best of the series. But regardless of your reasons or opinions on the hierarchy of the installments, Legacy Collection is just plain hard to pass up for a measly 15 bucks.
Putting aside the emulated classics (which, as expertly as Legacy Collection accomplishes the task, is something that’s been available for a while now after all), the Challenge Mode is something Mega maniacs are really likely to mega-appreciate. Some of the challenges are pretty straightforward, such as battles with particularly memorable bosses. But most of the others are essentially crazy mish-mashes of specific segments of the games, and a large number of them span multiple Mega Man titles, to boot. So it’s quite a lot of fun, really, to pick up the controller and experience a rapid-fire succession of different snippets of Mega Man history. Other times, modifications to the challenge are present—such as the series of No Items challenges, which are evil. Of course, your completion time is ranked on the leaderboards, and you can view replays of the best times. It’s a pretty sweet addition that carries some serious added value.
Overall, there’s an awful lot to like here, especially at the price point. Supposedly a retail version will be coming next year, but you can’t beat the price of this digital edition. Mega-tastic, Captain N!
