Mega Man's 15th

In the year 2002 Mega Man would be approaching his 15th anniversary. To celebrate, Capcom would begin working giving the US it's own celebration of Mega Man in the Anniversary collection which would come out two years later. In the mean time we had quite a few things to hold us over.

This would be the year Mega Man Zero would finally launch, and arguably the best Battle Network, Battle Network 3 would also hit stores. I'll be reviewing those games separately, but here's a list of games that came out that deserve mention.






Mega Man and Bass (GBA)
Although it's a port, it's worth mentioning because this was the first time this game was released in the United States. The music isn't as good, and it does have some annoying vertical scrolling since the game wasn't re-sized to GBA's aspect ratio, making an already really fucking game even harder. Still this is your only legal method of obtaining this game in the states without importing the original. It also has a translation change concerning Quint, but I've already beat that into the ground.

Rockman 123 (PC)
This is a simple port of the original NES games, although I believe it actually uses the Complete Works versions. I normally wouldn't mention a port, but this is a Taiwanese only game, and the title often confuses people. It's not worth your time to track this down unless you want to own every version of every game.

Kobun Flies Xmas
There were also a couple of Cell Phone games released in Japan. This one is essentially Kobun Flies? with graphics in a Christmas theme... Wow? Really Capcom? Really?

15 Panel
As if that wasn't bad enough, they also released one of those annoying sliding panel picture games with a few Legends characters plastered on them. The artwork barely even looks like Legends, talk about your waste of money.

Rockman.exe Plug-in PET Game
And speaking of money, you'll need a lot of it if you want to import this LCD game. Shaped just like the PETs from Battle Network and coming with some battle chips, this thing costs $130 bucks to import. Jesus. It's cool looking to be sure, but what a fuck ton waste of cash if you ask me. Later the US would get a few versions of their own with the popularity of Mega Man NT Warriors. A side note, I got a few Battle Chips for this thing when my sister went over to Japan, so that's kinda cool.

2002 was a good year for Mega Man, right before a really bad one in 2003 where X nearly died, the cell phone games got out of hand, and Battle Network was shilled out like you wouldn't believe. Hell, a lot of people even consider Mega Man Zero 2 to be the worst out of the Zero series, although it really is the high light of that year. We've covered 15 years of Mega Man so far, only seven more to go! Coming up next, Battle Network 3, Blue/White.