Mega Man, The Power Battle (Arcade)

The Power Battle, the first Mega Man game designed for the arcades. Months after Mega Man 7, Capcom decided to take the main draw of Mega Man games, the boss fights, and throw it in to the arcades.

Capcom is no stranger to fighting games or arcade games, so this seems like a natural spin off for the series. Its not anything ground breaking, but what do you want for an arcade game? It's nothing that's supposed to eat up more than 15 minutes of your time. The big draw here is that we can play as Mega Man, Proto Man or Bass, and another player can join us in two player co-operative combat. There's some interesting tie-ins to the X series as well.

Story
Dr. Wily has some robot masters attack various areas. Each character you choose from has different motivations for taking them down and stopping Wily. For Mega Man, well, it's his job. After he beats Dr. Wily, he asks Dr. Light what they should do to end the violence. Dr. Light says that A.I. programing will have to improve so that Robots will be able to make the decisions to stop the violence (X tie in).

For Proto Man, he seems to be doing it because it's the right thing to do. He fades back into mystery after the game ends.

For Bass... well he's just a dick. Bass is specifically made and programmed to defeat Mega Man. It is the only thing he cares about. He sees Wily as wasting his time and resources, working on any other robots besides him. So he destroys them. Dr. Wily gets pissed and tells Bass that the next robot he is working on will blow both Mega Man and Bass away! (Who could that be!?)

Aesthetics
The sprites are all made and based off of Mega Man 7. Many of the robots from previous games have had graphical upgrades to them to fit this new standard, and most of them look good. Some of them appear a bit fatter for some reason, even Bass, who had a perfectly good sprite set in Mega Man 7, so what the hell happened there? The Yellow Devil however, is awesome in this game.

The backgrounds are interesting, but a lot of them get reused with slight tweaks. Arcade machines at the time were more capable than this, but I think they're trying to tie in Mega Man 7 closer to this, so I understand not taking it to the next level so to say.

Sound
The game has mostly remixes of all the old stages into more SNES styled sounds effects. They're pretty good and the game also has a voice over announcing wins and the start of the battle, I think it's supposed to be Mega Man's voice. It's really kiddie sounding, pretty much the exact opposite of other arcade fighting announcers.

Design
At the start of the game, you and possibly a friend, choose your character, Mega Man, Proto Man or Bass. Each character plays pretty similar, having the variable weapons system. The main difference is how they slide. Mega Man has his traditional slide, Proto Man Dashes, and Bass kinda jets across the screen. It's all mostly aesthetic and it won't affect your game too much.

Then you choose which series of games you want the bosses to come from. Mega Man 1-2, Mega Man 3-6 or Mega Man 7. This is a bit like a difficulty select, as the later Mega Man games bosses seem to have more health.

After this the stages appear, and a roulette goes around waiting for the player to press a button to select the stage. From there you fight a boss, beat them, take their weapon. They don't have an invincibility time like the main games, but they do have more health then they normally would have. Bosses do have weaknesses, but they aren't as dramatically damaging as the normal games. After clearing the bosses, you face either the Yellow Devil or VAN Pookin (the pumpkin mini boss from Mega Man 7). Then you fight Wily in three forms and the game ends. Enter your score, see the high score list. Game over.

The whole process takes about 15 minutes, and beating the game isn't particularly challenging. I take about three credits on average. It's enjoyable, just not deep.

Playability
If you can play any Mega Man game, you can play this one no problem.

Extras

• No boss order here. Even if you have the bosses weakness, it won't make the fight much faster. Besides this, it's easy to not get the level you want anyway.
• There is evidence that the Yellow Devil's stage was going to have Ladders in it. Exactly what for, well that's not clear.

Not a ground breaking game, but alright. I've never seen this game in arcades, but it is an unlockable game in the Anniversary Collection along with it's sequel. This is probably where you'll experience this game, and that beats paying hundreds of dollars for an arcade version of it.

Playthroughs
Speed Run by Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols