Mega Man has the appearance of a well made game from the title and opening sequence, but when you finally get to the gameplay you're left with a stale game that just seems to frustrate you.
The side scrolling action is poorly designed with jumping not able to be preformed at the same time as moving without some difficulty. The majority of the levels involve weaving your way through guns that shoot far too frequently and there are many times where it's near impossible not to be shot when bullets are comming at you from above and the side at the same time. The boss battles leave much to be desired. One of the X bots is killed by a defensive gun's bullets and the second one can be shot safely from underneath through the water that's used as a platform. Magman only needs to be shot through the feet with a stream of bullets then taken out from behind. For some odd reason his head throws stars which can't hurt another object. Later you ride a raft down a lava flow which means you dodge rocks(bullets again) for a period of time. After that you fight a volcano which you can saftly attack from the side defeating all of its shooting elements and leaving you to clear the rest of the breakable boss looking for it's "weak spot". Fire man, the final boss give you a challange that makes it more like a game, but the odd thing is that whilst in the previous side-scrolling levels you had an infinite amount of ammo, in these fights you do not have that luxery which means the meagre amount of ammo you collected throughout the game depletes quickly.
A good idea that could have been executed a little better, Mega Man can be fun if you can get past the annoying first few levels and over the fact that the bosses are push overs.
Great game, but a little short. It also is not true to its Mega Man roots.
Neatly programmed and well-planned, "Mega Man" is one of the best ZZT video game adaptations. The graphics are quite good, the action is tense, and the Mega Man feel is maintained pretty well. The limitations of ZZT-OOP make the action feel choppy, as is to be expected in a ZZT platform game, but the design manages to keep this from becoming too severe an issue.
The only real problems are an anticlimax boss battle and a few less-than-stellar boards. Overall, "Mega Man" is a fun, polished little game.
