Mega Man 1 & Mega Man III (IBM PC)

Here's what awaits those insane enough to play these games through.
In MM1 you are treated to a very lame single page ending screen.
In MM3, if the game breaking locked hatch bug doesn't rear its ugly head, you are treated to...the exact same ending screen of the first one!
And keep in mind, both of these games lack password support, so you have to complete either game in one single sitting.
They also lack music, feature some sprites stolen from the EGA shareware game "Duke Nukem", and all of the Robot Masters are lame ass rip-offs of ones from the NES games.

Mega Man's face on the stage select screen is hilarious. Looks like refrigerator artwork.

I watched a few minutes of gameplay for each game on YouTube last night. Christ, what a lousy couple of games. A few minutes was all I could bear.

This is how PC gamers were generally treated by most publishers in those days. Good ports/equivalents of console titles were very few and far between until shareware developers started showing them how its done.

Still better than the Amiga Street Fighter games.

It's the other way around, Duke Nukem lifted from DOS Mega Man -- along with a few Amiga games. Haha, if you listen carefully in Duke Nukem 2, you can hear an item-pickup sound effect recorded from Castlevania IV. Good old Apogee.

And yeah, the ... toll booth thing in DOS Mega Man is pretty funny.

I think the most cringe worthy thing in those games, is Mega Man's swimming animation.

Well it's more colorful than the NES versions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXvQQZwKE1I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7XBR7Edk8A

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Still better than the Amiga Street Fighter games.

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Amiga ports in general sucked. Like this port of Outrun!

U.S. Gold... Why did they make nearly every port? Factor 5 got 1 port (Bonk's Adventure) and made it better than the original.
Poor Amiga...

I didn't have a NES (or any other consoles that attached to a TV) back in the early to mid '90s, so I got Mega Man 3 for the PC sometime in the early '90s. I'd played one or two of the NES games at friends' and loved them, so I wanted to get one that I could... and yeah, I was, obviously, disappointed. It wasn't much like a Mega Man game at all, and it was obviously much worse than the NES or Game Boy games. I never bought another Hi Tech Expressions game again, after that. The game's graphics aren't terrible (in EGA mode that is, of course), but the PC speaker only audio is weak (no music, pretty much), it has no saving, it has too few levels, it doesn't play like Mega Man, etc... such a disappointing game. I did play it some, and kind of liked it, but overall I was disappointed, and wished that we'd gotten something that actually played like a Mega Man game instead.

However, I went back a year or two ago and played Mega Man 3 again, and decided that it wasn't quite as bad as I'd remembered. First though, to play this game, use DOSBox, and then change CPU cycles until you get a playably low number. It'll need to be a very low number to get MM3 playable -- the game was designed for 386 CPUs, and anything above a few hundred cycles will probably be running it too fast. Experiment and find a speed you like. It would be the same with MM1.

As for the game itself, first, the game was developed by only two people, as far as I can tell -- it was a very small developer. Also, the developer actually did improve over time -- the same group, Rozner Labs, is credited in the later DOS port of Mega Man X, which was a great, nearly perfect port of that SNES classic.

Second, while it's a pretty bad Mega Man game, it's not too terrible as an late '80s/early '90s low budget PC game. That is, don't really think of it as Mega Man and you won't hate it quite as much. For an early '90s game made by a tiny team -- that is, basically shareware quality stuff, except sold at retail only and with a major license on the box -- it's not too bad really. I kind of like the open, almost mazelike at times level designs, for one. They're definitely the high point of the game. The bosses, of course, are all laughably easy once you figure them out, which is bad. They also almost all have really, really basic "go/jump back and forth and shoot" patterns, which is lame. I remember being somewhat challenged by the bosses when I was ten or twelve when I first played this game, but not anymore certainly. The game as a whole is short and not that challenging. I never finished it as a kid though... if it'd had saving I'm sure I'd have gotten through it, and I did really dislike that it didn't (I expected PC platformers to allow you to save!), but when I played it again I found that it wasn't that tough, and it is short. There are only seven levels total after all, though the last does have a boss rush in it. But hey, at least it's a lot longer than MM1 for DOS... that game has only four levels! Also, the final level was fun, and a more legitimate challenge. It had some tough jumps with instant death pits in them -- something very rare in this game, most of the "pits" in MM3 don't kill you, which was great, I thought -- and that boss rush, too.

As for the graphics, they're not exactly Mega Man, but for a shareware-caliber early '90s game they're okay. You can clearly tell that they're Western and not Japanese, but like with the level designs, if you set your expectations appropriately they're tolerable. Some of the enemies are interesting and different looking, and I like the variety of environments -- an oil platform, sewers, etc. It was kind of cool to actually have to explore and find your way around in a MM game, and I like that once you kill the enemies they don't come back...

For the audio, the sound effects are fine, and it has no music. It's too bad it doesn't have Soundblaster audio, by the time this game came out most all retail PC games had it. It's several years out of date, pretty much, either that or it should ahve been shareware (shareware games with Adlib/Soundblaster support did first appear in 1990, but it didn't become standard for some time, unlike retail titles; similarly, EGA-only graphics held on much longer in shareware too.). In being PC Speaker only for its audio and in not having any music, the game makes me think of shareware stuff -- Mega Man 3 was a 1992 release, after all. Sure, SB/Adlib wasn't in everything yet, but a lot of games did, and you'd think Mega Man would for sure. Oh well.

Of course, I didn't own a sound card in 1992, and in fact wouldn't until early 1995, so when I first played the game I didn't care that there wasn't SB support; I didn't have one. And that was a computer we'd just gotten new in the beginning of 1992, so they weren't wrong in imagining that plenty of people that year didn't have sound cards yet. On the other hand both the game, and that computer of ours, did have VGA graphics support.

Oh, and yeah, I like that Mega Man can swim. In most of the games he just sinks to the bottom, but in this one he can swim! Sure, the water stages are kind of frustrating, with how when you get hit in the water you go floating all over the place, but even so, it is kind of amusing to see Mega Man swimming, and it did make for some more interesting, if frustrating, level designs. It's also amusing how some of the boss names were later used in some of the Mega Man games made by Capcom itself. I've always wondered if those were by accident, or intentional references. Probably the former, but you never know... :)

Basically, Mega Man 3 is an okay B or C-grade DOS shareware game, somehow given retail release and a major license.

(Oh, in that video of it a few posts above, I think the person has the speed a bit too high -- it's running a bit too fast, I think.)

I remember buying both of these games years, and years ago on some random saturday with my dad. I have no idea the details, but we would usually spend just about every saturday together doing some random stuff, like going to funcoland, going and buying PC games from Sam's club, going to this local PC group called HAL-PC, etc. My dad was just as big of a geek as I was, and he'd often take me to random places based off of store closing stuff he'd heard about.

Anyways, one random saturday - I have no idea how old I was, but this was well after the time when Floppy disks were no longer the standard - he took me to this warehouse filled with PC software that was going out of business. total liquidation. We spent a good hour in there looking over every title they had, which admittedly was slim pickings. I picked up these two games, along with some weird FPS dracula game. When I got home, neither megaman title worked - all the disks were corrupted. So I never played these particular games. I still have, however, the boxes and non-functioning disks. I guess I should be greatful that they never worked, because, as a consolation for some non-functioning games, my dad picked me up the PC version of Megaman X, along with the 6-button controller it was bundled with, instead. And that was an awesome port.

I miss doing random things like that with my dad. We live in the same city and even work at the same office, and I see him every day at work, but it's not quite the same as spending endless summer days with my pops, without a care in the world, just geeking out with him.

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Originally Posted by evilevoix

I just beat Mega Man 3 on my Nintendo last night, what an epic game.

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Congratulations, evilevoix.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

U.S. Gold... Why did they make nearly every port? Factor 5 got 1 port (Bonk's Adventure) and made it better than the original.
Poor Amiga...

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Bingo! It's not that Amiga couldn't handle such ports, or that Amiga ports always suck per-say, it's that US Gold sucks and they, for whatever reason, got the rights to port several awesome games.

US Gold is the kiss of death. It's up there with LJN. You see the US Gold logo on a game, you can almost guarantee it blows.

EDIT: Also, don't forget that Factor 5 handled the ports of Turrican from the C64 to the Amiga. Some consider the Amiga versions the best versions of the game, but even if you don't, you have to agree that they're stellar ports.

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Originally Posted by TheSonicRetard

Also, don't forget that Factor 5 handled the ports of Turrican from the C64 to the Amiga. Some consider the Amiga versions the best versions of the game, but even if you don't, you have to agree that they're stellar ports.

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The Amiga versions are better (because of the music). However the final boss in Turrican 2 for the C64 is better than the Amiga, because you can't use the wheel mode against him, on the amiga version he becomes too easy.
I was talking more about ports of arcade/console games, not from the predecessor system :p.