The games in the Mega Man series are pretty good games on their own, but they’re really about one main thing: fighting other robots and using their powers as your own. Everything else? Just gravy.
So what would we have is we stripped out the adventure mode and most of the story? We’d have Mega Man – The Power Battle.
This game is set up more like a fighting game than a straight action game. It’s you, as your Mega Man protagonist of choice, in a series of battles against the robot masters of Mega Man games past. You don’t fight all of them, just selected bosses from the first seven games, and then only eight. Win and you get the boss’s special weapon. Lose… well if you lose you have to put in another quarter and continue or walk away from the cabinet in shame.
I was only able to find this game one place: in the arcade of my local Super K-Mart, and once I did, I went there every Friday night / Saturday morning for the next several weeks… until the K-Mart shut down. I didn’t hear anything else about this game for years until the Mega Man Anniversary Collection came out. I immediately snapped it up, and now am quite pleased that I don’t have to go on any more midnight lurks to get my fix.
[...] also kind of nice how they put one of my favorite arcade games and its sequel in with the package. And I’d probably have paid the price of admission for [...]
[...] days when I went to my local arcade with the express intent of playing the sole copy of the Mega Man arcade game that I’ve ever managed to find, I’d only be greeted with a sign saying that [...]