Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Mega Man Legacy Collection Preview for Xbox One

Mega Man Legacy Collection Preview for Xbox One

The Ultimate Collection

To be honest, I didn’t expect much when I saw the Mega Man Legacy Collection at E3 2015. It’s another compilation game, which means we have already played all these games before and we aren’t going to see a whole lot of new content come our way. Not to mention, the Mega Man series is old. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t played at least Mega Man 2 by now , and while it’s cool that Mega Man 1-6 will be offered all in one bundle, it’s not exactly anything new or revolutionary. Sure, Capcom advertised this entire collection as being 1080p in 60FPS, but the whole game is played in eight bits, so I figured I wouldn’t even be able to tell.

Well, I was wrong. Let me tell you that even an eight-bit game in 1080p looks gorgeous. The sprites pop off the screen, bright and colorful. The game moves smoothly, without motion blur or flicker. Because of this, you feel like you can move Mega Man with precision. Heck I would go as far to say that Mega Man looks better than he did in Mega Man 9 or 10 . There is a real cartoon style painted look to the sprites in Legacy Collection , and it really helps the game out.

If you are more of a purist, however, you can choose to switch the game to monitor or TV mode. Monitor mode adds scanlines to the game and fades the color a bit. It effectively replicates a high end TV or low end digital monitor from back in the day. TV mode, on the other hand, adds motion blur, fades the color even more, and even adds glitches like slowdown and motion flicker. This is meant to simulate playing Mega Man on an old and perhaps fading CRT TV. These filters were nice and all, but in the end the modern day graphics were still the way to go for me. Nostalgia isn’t powerful enough to warrant me purposefully making my game hard to see.

Mega Man Legacy Collection Screenshot

The two big extra pieces of content are the gallery and challenge mode. The gallery is basically what you’d think it is, a collection of Mega Man art and music for the first six games. The art is an interesting walk through Mega Man history, but there are some strange discrepancies. Crash Man, for example, is called Clash Man. I don’t know if this is an incorrect translation from the original game or an incorrect translation now, but tiny things like that are annoying for a compilation to not at least give a reason for.

That being said, how could I possibly argue with a mode that allows me to listen to all my favorite Mega Man tunes whenever I want? Mega Man has some of the best classic chiptune music of all time, and purchasing the Legacy Collecton is essentially purchasing the Mega Man soundtrack, and you can’t go wrong with that.

Mega Man Legacy Collection Screenshot

Challenge mode is a lot more like a fighting game’s challenge mode than a traditional platformer challenge mode. It basically takes small snippets of Mega Man stages and asks you to complete them. Usually these are the hardest parts of the hardest stages. Can anyone say, “disappearing block puzzles?” Yeah. Expect them, lots of spikes, and difficult enemy encounters. A Capcom rep also said that they are considering putting in things like hard mode bosses, where boss rooms have spikes and you have less life, or perfect run challenges, where you have to take no damage over the course of a stage. They may even include speedrun challenges for the speedrunning community.

Mega Man Legacy Collection Screenshot

Playing Mega Man Legacy Collection really swayed my opinion of it. I thought it was just going to be another compilation, and it is, but there’s more value in this compilation than meets the eye. For a budget price, I’d say this collection is totally worth it, especially if you haven’t played all the classic NES Mega Man games.

To top