MegaMan Powered Up

[Protoman]

I recently got a PSP and of course I had to get the two Megaman games on it, this and MegaMan Maverick Hunter X. I've only played Powered Up so far.

First I was pleasantly surprised, by the graphics, good gameplay and being able to choose difficulty before every stage.

Then, I got to Elecman's stage, and Elecman is the first hard robot master, as you remember from the NES version. But here I noticed the games fatal flaw (for me anyway): the robot master weapons are useless! As far as I can tell, a mega buster shot takes 1 damage, and ANY robot master weapon takes 2. So that does away with the megaman tradition of a robot master being weak to a specific weapon. I spammed the rolling cutter on Elecman and he didn't die in two hits like he used to. Fine to change it to making max 4 damage like Megaman 4-6 did but not 2, that sucks. Plus, max weapon energy is not enough to kill any robot master, they always run out before they die. Thanks to this I had to play in easy mode for the Elecman, Iceman and Fireman, even though this made the stages insultingly easy. The easy mode goes the Megaman 10 route of adding helpful
extra platforms.

Dissappointed.

On the other hand, the "old style" is pretty cool, it's MegaMan 1 like on NES, recreated in the Powered up graphics. It's played in 4:3, more zoomed out and with NES music. Unfortunately Megamans little "yeah!" sound clips are still there. Other small changes like the flying bomb-like enemies in bombmans stage fly straight instead of in waves and you still can't fire through walls. Oh and no difficulty select in this mode.

The robot master weapon issue turned this game from a B+ to a C instantly for me.

[UglyJoe]

Some FAQs would suggest that the robot masters still have weaknesses, but they're different than the original game.

[P]

Yes in "new style" mode the weaknesses are different and don't have as much of an effect as they used to. On the other hand they don't take as much damage on you either. This means that it doesn't matter as much in what order you take them in.

I heard this from MMHP.net.

[Zycrow]

Many years ago I had a PSP and Maverick Hunter X was one of the two games I had. (The other was Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles.)
Playing through that one made me realize how little the original MMX needed an update. The vocal samples were annoying and the anime cutscenes just seemed gratuitous. I guess I really am old school!

What really bugged me, though, was Vile mode. Vile has long been one of my favorite characters in the X series and I was excited to play as him. But what killed it for me was that when playing as Vile, every stage gets Vile's theme, which gets repetitive very quickly. And Vile's vocal samples were much worse and extremely repetitive. For some people this might be fine, but I'm a bit of game sound junkie, so it was game-breaking for me.

That said, maybe you'll have a better experience than I did.

[FamicomRetroGamer]

Yeah the Mega Man games for PSP are really cool but a shame that no third party company has yet decided to release a PSP-UMD console for home use and yet, we're seeing an HD NES going on pre-order for $500.

Such a shame I'd really love a PSP-UMD console.

[L___E___T]

I thought PS3 could play PSP games?

[FamicomRetroGamer]

I thought PS3 could play PSP games?

If it's hacked then it seems to be able to, but otherwise it can't.