Another game I was able to play through Gamefly was the Mega Man Anniversary Collection. I loved to play the Mega Man games when I was a little kid – I can remember the many hours I had in front of my NES and beat Mega Man 2. Now I had the chance to this again, but to be able to play all of the games this time, instead of waiting for them each one at a time.

I had a good experience with this game, and all the frustration it provided me. I really hadn’t realized how hard the original Mega Man games were until I got to play this game (this PS2 disc is actually an emulator for Mega Man 1-8, and 2 bonus games) – I just remember playing Mega Man 2 with the Game Genie. Each of these games is based around a simple story: the evil Dr. Wily is threatening to destroy the world with his robots, and it is up to Mega Man to stop him (with slight variations on the length of the story, depending on the game).

The games featured simple controls – spam the attack button to shoot up to 3 “bullets” at a time on the screen, and jump onto platforms in the levels and avoid falling down the holes. Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, the design of many of levels will cause much frustration, as things will jump out of the holes to attack you as you are jumping, knocking you down into the hole EVERY TIME. These games also feature a nifty feature – beat the bosses and you can have their weapons. This is nice, until you start to get to the end of the game, where all of the bosses require precise timing and weapon control to beat them – in other words, if you use a weapon to attack a boss and die – you won’t have a chance to beat him, unless you restart the game from the off position. This little fact made me pack up the game, because I just didn’t have the timing to kill off the last bosses in some of the games.

Overall this game was quite fun, as I never got a chance to play all of these games, and I am glad I got the chance to now. I would recommend this to someone who would want to play these games, and is willing to put up the frustration that will ensue. Also, this game lets you have more lives and saves your energy tanks as you play (and while the power is still on), so you can use those to your advantage. I’ll leave you with some footage from one of my favorite parts. Enjoy!