It’d be easy to go off on a rant about Capcom and Legends 3 and how much they have it out
for Mega Man and his fans... but that’s not what the season’s about.
A fan-made production, which could’ve been shut down with a C&D letter, was adopted and
provided for free on this, the 25th anniversary of the US release of Mega Man.
And it’s full of Street Fighter, because why the hell not.
Look, after the last few years, the inclusion of Fat Mega Man in that Street Fighter X Tekken
nonsense, the abandonment of... no, not gonna say it again, gonna move past that... just
watch some footage.
It’ll do better to explain this madness than I can in my present state.
There.
Feeling better.
As the legend goes, some huge Street Fighter fan from Singapore started putting this thing
together, then showed Capcom a single stage of the concept at the big EVO fighting throw-down.
They loved it.
And so do I. He’s captured the crucial aspects of a good Mega Man game: solid platforming
physics, exciting gameplay, and inspired level design.
And it just so happens that each stage is capped off with a famous Street Fighter figure.
It’s a worthy successor to a lineage that sampled the fruits of 16- and 32-bit technology,
found them lacking, and went back to being 8-bit 18 and 20 years after that stopped being
a thing.
If you’re expecting an experience as primal as Mega Man 9 or 10, though, you should know
that the inspiration for this game lies a bit later in the series.
There are charged shots.
The slide returns.
Some stages feature multiple paths.
The first throwbacks barely ventured past the innovations of Mega Man 2, but Street
Fighter X Mega Man draws its concepts from at least Mega Man 4 and probably closer to
5 or 6.
As this game is only available on the PC, your choices are to deal with the WASD keys
for control or find some manner of gamepad lying about, and I strongly suggest the latter.
This monstrosity channels the most brutal spite of the series’ history, and then adds
its own flourishes just for good measure.
Like this little sequence here, where you have to suspend a slide on a falling platform
to hit a gap in the spikes, or this Rush Jet side-scrolling shooter segment in Rose’s
stage.
Aside from the classic Mets and whatnot, most of the foes in this game are brand-new, but
look so faithful to the classic Mega Man style you’ll swear you’ve seen them somewhere
before.
It’s like these debacles never happened, and we got our legitimate Mega Man 11... just
full of World Warriors, for whatever reason.
In grand Mega Man tradition, the physics are drum-tight, the soundtrack is incredible (even
if it’s just 2A03 remakes of classic Street Fighter themes with the occasional homage
to Snake Man), and the game itself pays meticulous attention to detail.
Hurricane kicks travel over projectiles.
Lightning kicks slow your fall.
All these little details might not matter, but to the fans, they’re a sign that someone’s
still paying attention.
The passion is still out there, and there’s a clear demand for something a little more
reasonable than that horrible-looking iPhone... thing.
Perhaps it just took destroying Capcom’s servers on a certain someone’s 25th birthday
to get that fact through their heads.