Mega Man makes his one and only appearance on the Genesis and it's... a little flawed. For the most part this is a fairly straightforward compilation of the first three NES games, with a unique set of stages that becomes available when you clear all three games. For some reason, Capcom turned to Minakuchi Engineering to develop the game, possibly due to their experience working on most of the Game Boy MM games. While they did a fairly decent job, it seems to lack the same kind of effort they showed on the last two GB games.
Mega Man and all of the Robot Masters have had their sprites redrawn, and they look pretty nice with plenty of extra detail. However, almost all of the regular enemies simply gained more colors and still look much the same as they did in the NES games. Bizarrely, Proto Man also got this treatment and as a result, he looks comically small compared to Mega Man. The same also happens with the Sniper Joes who are also supposed to be close in size to Mega Man. Sprite issues aside, the stages and their backgrounds received a huge glowup and are far more detailed than before. The music arrangements sound fine but I'm not exactly a fan of some of the instrument patches that were used.
What really keeps me from giving this a full four stars is how the game controls and feels. Mega Man has a bit of a delay running from a standstill and this can get you into trouble in some situations if you don't take this into account. This is in stark contrast to the NES originals which had very responsive and snappy controls. The way enemies take damage also feels off as they seem to soak up more hits than normal at times.
Overall, not a bad effort at all but I feel like it just needed more time to iron out some of those various kinks. It's also a little disappointing that Capcom never bothered bringing over the other three NES games, but that's thankfully being rectified by the fanmade Sequel Wars project, which corrects some of the weird flaws and adds a ton of extra features (they recently released the MM4 port, go play it!).
Mega Man and all of the Robot Masters have had their sprites redrawn, and they look pretty nice with plenty of extra detail. However, almost all of the regular enemies simply gained more colors and still look much the same as they did in the NES games. Bizarrely, Proto Man also got this treatment and as a result, he looks comically small compared to Mega Man. The same also happens with the Sniper Joes who are also supposed to be close in size to Mega Man. Sprite issues aside, the stages and their backgrounds received a huge glowup and are far more detailed than before. The music arrangements sound fine but I'm not exactly a fan of some of the instrument patches that were used.
What really keeps me from giving this a full four stars is how the game controls and feels. Mega Man has a bit of a delay running from a standstill and this can get you into trouble in some situations if you don't take this into account. This is in stark contrast to the NES originals which had very responsive and snappy controls. The way enemies take damage also feels off as they seem to soak up more hits than normal at times.
Overall, not a bad effort at all but I feel like it just needed more time to iron out some of those various kinks. It's also a little disappointing that Capcom never bothered bringing over the other three NES games, but that's thankfully being rectified by the fanmade Sequel Wars project, which corrects some of the weird flaws and adds a ton of extra features (they recently released the MM4 port, go play it!).