With a vintage vehicle slated to roll off the line in two short weeks, Mega Man hype has hit a fever pitch. At least it has with me. Whether you celebrate with me or not, I’m starting early by revisiting the Blue Bomber’s other classic series, gathered (in large part) in Megaman X Collection. In reimagining their strongest-selling action series for the Super Nintendo in 1993, Capcom wound up creating an entirely more vicious, theatrical, and sophisticated animal. Unfortunately, it sort of broke loose and went on a rampage of mediocrity after X4–but, having come out before the PS2’s X7 and 8, the Collection only goes up to X6 anyway. That’s a lot of guaranteed good… seriously.The games paint a picture of humanity’s greatest hour, as a robotic race of ‘Reploids’ emerges to be tasked with all the hard menial labour we so want to escape, and with generally helping people. Early on, the series echoes Asimov’s short stories and foreshadows the dangers of mass production and free will among robots, which leads to an epidemic of virus-infected, ‘Maverick’ reploids. Later, I feel the creators lost sight of the most novel aspects of their creation and, most famously, just killed Zero off in every game to be brought back later. TOO much drama.The games are old, the graphics 16- to 32-bit 2-D. But like all Capcom efforts, they were well-executed at the time and remain the best-in-class today. They threw in the Rockman X3 CD audio and anime cutscenes for this release, and of course the later Playstation releases offer more where that came from. It’s all, uh, mega-rockin’. Plus there’s that crappy racing game that had previously only appeared in Japan and Europe to add some value to this package–but really, that’s what first, second, and third are for.

Posted on August 28th, 2008 by katie