Recent reviews by Bob Billans

Mega Man 7: In light of the Mega Man X series coming out around the time of this game's release, Mega Man 7 is a slightly darker take on the classic series with more emphasis on story. The gameplay is still the same run & gun fun you've come to love but with more focus on exploration. Mega Man 7 took much inspiration from Mega Man X by hiding powerups throughout the levels that can passively boost Mega Man's power. This can range from automatically giving weapon energy to the weapon that needs it most, a device to exit a stage on demand, or even a new armor with a jetpack and a rocket fist! As far as downsides, the art style could be a downside to some, sacrificing visibility in favor of detailed spritework. As well, the game has a huge difficulty spike at the final boss. There is also a change that was carried over from the Game Boy Mega Man games in which you can only fight the eight robot masters in waves of four instead of choosing any of them from the start.

Mega Man 8: Considered the black sheep of the series (Next to Mega Man & Bass), Mega Man 8 was made in the very experimental Playstation 1 era of gaming. In this time period, developers could afford to put pretty much anything they wanted into a game without having to worry about space with disks. This led to many developers adding full FMV cutscenes and voice acting into their games without any knowledge about how to do so effectively. This led to memorable moments in gaming history like "You were almost a Jill Sandwich" from Resident Evil and "What is a man?" from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Mega Man 8 is one of the most notorious examples of voice acting from this era, with Mega Man sounding more feminine than his own sister. That being said, the cutscenes are still enjoyable from an ironic standpoint and hold a certain charm to them. As fro the gameplay, it's still exactly the same as before, but the problems with Mega Man 7's artstyle have been resolved with pretty scenery and plenty of visibility. The game itself is still just as fun as any other game in the series, although there is an abundance of autoscrolling stages with WIly 1 in particular being a frustrating roadblock for new players.

Mega Man 9 and 10: I lumped these together as they both have mostly the same pros and cons to them. They were created around the time developers began taking interest in creating retro-styled games. Mega Man 9 and 10 near-perfectly re-create the feelings and nuances of the original six Mega Man games. If you've played any of those six games, you know what to expect from Mega Man 9 and 10. As far as level design goes, Inti Creates knocked it out of the park. Each level feels fine-tuned to perfection for maximum fun while still being nail-bitingly difficult. However, both games start to slip a little around the Wily Castle segments where they take an intense spike in difficulty to the point you are forced to make near pixel-perfect jumps. Mega Man 9 and 10 bring new content to the table in the form of having multiple playable characters. In Mega Man 9, you can play as Proto Man who can charge his shots and slide like Mega Man could in later games in the series. However, as a by-product of this choice, Mega Man's movement has been neutered back to what it was back in Mega Man 1 and 2. Thankfully, levels are designed with this in mind, so you don't really notice it much. Mega Man 10 re-introduces Bass as a playable character with the ability to dash, aim his rapid-fire buster, and even fly! Mega Man 9 and 10 also bring in a selection of difficulty options with Mega Man 9 having hard, very hard, and die-in-one-hit mode. Mega Man 10 takes it down a notch and introduces a beginner-friendly easy mode witch blocks much of the pitfalls and adds full health recovery items everywhere. This alone makes Mega Man 10 the perfect entry point for anyone hoping to jump into the series.

Original Content: Aside from the usual concept art and sound test, Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 brings back the challenge mode from the first Legacy Collection that allows you to speedrun small parts of levels in succession to try and get a good time. However, this mode is not without it's flaws. Unlike in Legacy Collection 1, which had you speedrun 15-second segments of various levels, Legacy Collection 2's challenges are mostly just boss fights and entire halves of stages. As well, some of the challenges are downright unreasonable, such as beating Mega Man 7's final boss with no healing. Legacy Collection 2 also adds in an "extra armor mode" that doubles the player's defense in all four games making them much more accessible to newcomers. A questionable change that was made, however, is that the "save states" no longer behave as expected and only respawn you at the last checkpoint with your health, weapons, and healing items exactly as they were when you saved as opposed to placing you back exactly where you saved.

Overall, if you enjoyed the original Legacy Collection, this is more of the same and is just as fun as ever. If you are looking for a good place to start with the franchise, I highly recommend Mega Man 10's easy mode and the extra armor mode.

The game is already an amazing homage to competitive Smash Bros, but with the inclusion of the Workshop, this game becomes much more than the sum of it's parts. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys platform fighters even a little.