Street Fighter x Mega Man

December 17, 2012 6:24 AM

Today is the 25th anniversary of the release of the original Mega Man, a series-spawning platformer-shooter starring a blue robot with a gun for a hand who traverses dangerous levels and defeats robot bosses, gaining a new weapon with each boss he defeats. In celebration, Capcom has officially released a fan game, Street Fighter x Mega Man, with the Street Fighter cast (who made their own debut twenty five years ago in August) taking the role of the bosses. Watch the trailer or download it from Capcom's website!
posted by Pope Guilty (27 comments total)

Aaaaaaand I'm old.
posted by Tenacious.Me.Tokyo at 6:58 AM on December 17, 2012 [8 favorites]

Right there with you, T.M.T. I still think of the SNES Mega Man X from 1991-92 as the "new" Mega Man, even there's been at least a dozen games since that one. (I sort of feel the same way about all Street Fighter games after SFII Champion Edition) I'll have to give this a whirl!
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:06 AM on December 17, 2012

Hooray!

*jumps, hits overhang, falls on spikes, dies*
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:14 AM on December 17, 2012 [9 favorites]

The site's being bombarded by requests. Here's the direct link [33.8MB] for the download from a US server. Here's the direct link for the EU download server

Ryu's going down.
posted by lemuring at 7:23 AM on December 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

*jumps, hits overhang, falls on spikes, dies*

*plugs in second controller, uses pencil and rubberband to press right, achieves immortality*
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:30 AM on December 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

a blue robot with a gun for a hand who traverses dangerous levels and defeats robot bosses, gaining a new weapon with each boss he defeats.

"Your designers have spent a lot of money on failed robot ideas."

"'Diamond Man'? The robot who shoots diamond missiles that explode into four diamonds?"

"That was one of the cheaper ones..."

"Rolls Royce Man? Fabergé Egg Man? Honus Wagner Card Man?!"
posted by Rhaomi at 7:31 AM on December 17, 2012 [11 favorites]

One the one hand, it's not Legends. On the other hand, my inner 11 year old is flipping out.

"Aaaaaaand I'm old."

Check some of the gaming forums that are talking about this. It's kind of hilarious to see a kid complaining he takes damage just by touching the enemy.
posted by anti social order at 7:33 AM on December 17, 2012 [2 favorites]

Welp! There goes my free time.
posted by pianoblack at 7:40 AM on December 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

"Rolls Royce Man? Fabergé Egg Man? Honus Wagner Card Man?!"

In his house, I don't care!
posted by curious nu at 7:53 AM on December 17, 2012

The US box art for Mega Man is absolutely terrible.
posted by ODiV at 8:04 AM on December 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

I hope this works under Wine!
posted by mkb at 9:12 AM on December 17, 2012

The US box art for Mega Man is absolutely terrible.

You know, I want someone to go back and make a game that plays like that box art looks. Instead of a cute little blue robot dude with a gun hand, you're a cramped-looking awkward dude with a gun and a terrible uniform, limping around a pastel horror show and shooting anyone who gets between you and the toilet you seem to need badly to use.

Really, that'd be a great project in general: take classic deceptive box art and remake the game it was the art for to better reflect that concept imagery.
posted by cortex at 9:18 AM on December 17, 2012 [4 favorites]

This is great.

Too bad Mega Man as a franchise is basically dead and Capcom only trots out its bleeding corpse to play sick mind games with its fans.
posted by HostBryan at 9:20 AM on December 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

The US box art for Mega Man is absolutely terrible.

10 year old me was not the most savvy video game consumer. Instead of reading reviews in Nintendo Power and making educated decisions about which NES cartridges to buy, I would beg a ride to Toys R Us whenever I had scrounged enough allowance together for a new game and buy whatever caught my eye. And for some reason one of those random purchases was Mega Man. Despite the world's worst box art. I have no idea what I was thinking.
posted by thecjm at 9:57 AM on December 17, 2012

The US box art for Mega Man is absolutely terrible.

I always sort of had a soft spot for it, I think because I liked the yellow and blue uniform colors better than the blue on blue of the actual video game Mega Man. Looking at it now it's absolutely terrible but back then it seemed to hold some promise. The thing is, 8-bit games had limited graphics (remember the X-Men game?) and at least for kids, the box art seemed to be there to show you how things were really supposed to be. With Mega Man it was really a far distance, of course, but you could imagine a richer futuristic world for it.
posted by graymouser at 10:22 AM on December 17, 2012

Has anybody here played this yet? I downloaded it from the direct link and it gets as far as the stage select screen, but then nothing I press has any effect.
posted by Nedroid at 10:44 AM on December 17, 2012

The US box art for Mega Man is absolutely terrible.

Fun Fact: When Capcom released Mega Man 9 and 10, deliberate retro throwbacks to the early NES Mega Man games, they commissioned similarly horrible/awesome box art. Like, you see a robot dragon shooting bullets from its gun nipples and stuff.
posted by cyberscythe at 11:02 AM on December 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

It is unfortunate there appears to be no way to save, because I finished four levels before I realized I had things to do today.

E-Tanks can only be collected once, it seems. Even if you fail the level and return later they don't seem to return. (Also, sometimes tanks get put in weird places, like partly embedded in the ground. I suspect this is a bug.)

With any Mega Man game, the decision of which levels to do first are important ones. The first level I finished was Blanka, the second Chun Li, then Ryu (he seems to be weak to Blank's weapon, although it's hard to use against him), then whoever the cyborg guy is. (My experience with Street Fighter is almost entirely restricted to II, I don't know any of the other weirdos' names.)

Chun Li's stage is probably easiest though, and your gun will probably suffice for beating her. A lot of the danger in the level comes from endless numbers of vehicles running through, but each dies in one hit so you can quite quickly build your health back up if you need it, and once in a while you'll get an extra life from them too.

Dhalsim's level is interesting, in that you can freely travel around. It's broken up into single-screen areas. It would have been interesting if there was more than way to go through it, but there's really only one route.

There's a pit in Ryu's stage you can jump over. (If you run partly off a block before jumping, Mega Man can leap up to four block widths.) On the other side is an E-Tank.

C. Viper has an extremely annoying stage with turrets, Sniper Joes, and a really annoying place near the end with a lot of one-hit kills that will remind a lot of Mega Man veterans of Quick Man. It's not set up very well; you have to inflict enough damage on the skull-bot things to destroy the force fields before the advancing wall of laser death catches up to you. Charged shots help a lot.

That's my biggest problem with this, in fact, that it uses Mega Man's later arsenal of moves including the charged Mega Buster and slide move, which kind of damages the purity of the game. Still, it's not bad I think.
posted by JHarris at 11:07 AM on December 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

Currently watching ManVSGame play through it. Looks very well done. I wish you could buy the soundtrack somewhere.
posted by sparkletone at 12:29 PM on December 17, 2012

I wish you could buy the soundtrack somewhere.

The soundtrack will be available as a free sanctioned download starting 12/18. Sampler and link to the download site here*.

Full disclosure: self-link
posted by Servo5678 at 12:49 PM on December 17, 2012

The US box art for Mega Man is absolutely terrible.

Bad Box Art Mega Man is also a playable character in Tekken x Street Fighter.
posted by Amanojaku at 1:03 PM on December 17, 2012

The soundtrack will be available as a free sanctioned download starting 12/18.

Yay! I'd tried to google around for it but couldn't find anything. Thanks for the head's up!
posted by sparkletone at 1:08 PM on December 17, 2012

My favorite unofficial Mega Man-related thing.
posted by owtytrof at 1:54 PM on December 17, 2012 [2 favorites]

You know, I want someone to go back and make a game that plays like that box art looks. Instead of a cute little blue robot dude with a gun hand, you're a cramped-looking awkward dude with a gun and a terrible uniform, limping around a pastel horror show and shooting anyone who gets between you and the toilet you seem to need badly to use.

The recent Street Fighter x Tekken has that horrible-looking Mega Man from the front cover of the US Mega Man art. It's a glorious troll.


That's my biggest problem with this, in fact, that it uses Mega Man's later arsenal of moves including the charged Mega Buster and slide move, which kind of damages the purity of the game. Still, it's not bad I think.

The Mega Man games I played to completion as a kid were 2 and 3. (I beat 1, but not until 2005 or so on the emulator that my old HP PDA ran.) I'm okay with sliding, but the charge-up thing never felt right to me, especially since when playing later games I feel like I'm expected to be charging up whenever I'm not shooting.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:22 PM on December 17, 2012

The thing about sliding I disapprove of is that the game is designed so that it is the "right answer" to avoiding some attacks in the boss fights. Instead of avoiding them using the basic actions of the game, you have a special move to get you out of trouble that you have to be cognizant of.
posted by JHarris at 1:08 PM on December 18, 2012

Yeah, but jumping or running are the right answer to other things. It's just one more ability to keep track of and use, really.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:27 PM on December 19, 2012

It is. But it's a twitch game. Every ability you're expected to use makes it harder. In a fast action game, the more verbs you have to consider, the slower your reactions.
posted by JHarris at 11:14 PM on December 19, 2012