Kick-ass collection. Christmas for every Mega Man-fan.
User Rating: 9.7 | Mega Man Anniversary Collection GC
I used to own the first four Mega Man-games for NES, and it truly is one of my absolute favourite game series of all time. By the time the fourth part was released for the NES, the formula was getting a bit tired and washed-out, and I found Mega Man X for SNES a very big disappointment since it was way too short and too easy. The first three games for the NES are brilliant and outclass any Super Mario Bros-game as the three best platform action games ever created. The premise for Mega Man is very easy to understand and somewhat easy to learn. You should be ashamed of yourself if you don't know it already, but I'll go through it anyway. It's an action platformer where you shoot robots and then the "robot master"-boss at the end of the level. The twist is first and foremost that you can choose for yourself in what order you want to play the stages. Today this sounds extremely banal and unexciting, but I can remember when first playing Mega Man 1, how cool it felt and what a new dimension it added to the genre, when compared to SMB1 for example. Also, you achieve the robot masters' weapons when you defeat them. Using these weapons you have to figure out by trial and error, or by logic, which weapons work best for each boss. There's an unmistakable charm about the Mega Man-games that is hard to explain, but it lies in the graphics and the way Mega Man himself is such a quiet, cool and sturdy character. No matter what the evil Dr. Wily throws at him, Mega Man is the one who comes out the winner in the end (although he can be a bit of an irritating wuss sometimes, since he never has the guts to shoot Dr. Wily in the head and end his evil deeds once and for all). Games four, five, six, seven and eight aren't that fantastic, but the collection is worth buying for the first three classic games. The sounds are all there, the graphics are by today's standards not modern, but they are functional and have aged extremely well considering how long it has been since the games were released. I think it's for the better that they've not been upgraded like the graphics in Super Mario All-stars for example. The only downside of this otherwise perfect collection, and the reason why I don't give it ten out of ten, is a strange one that I can't figure out what the hell the company behind this compilation were thinking. As a sacred sanctimony that has been consistent from the very beginning, you jumped with A and shot with the B-button in the Mega Man-games. In MMAC, they've pulled a switcheroo and you now jump with B and shoot with A. It's unnecessary and hard to get used to and puts the gameplay down a notch. The button configuration has not been tampered with in the PS2-version so I'd recommend buying that version instead if you have a PS2. The documentary you can unlock in the GC-version is good, but the controls are far more important than some silly extra feature. 
