Megaman Maverick Hunter X
PSP
Capcom/Capcom




It was in the springtime of the SNES that Megaman's eleventh iteration revealed a darker side to everyone's favourite homicidal robot. This was the original 'Megaman X'. With a complex, melodramatic plot and a battle-weary attitude Megaman, it seemed, had grown up. It was 1994. And now, 32 games spanning 18 platforms, a toy franchise and an animated series later, a new Megaman, the 44th (this is a conservative estimate, with many contentious tie-ins omitted) is here, and it's a remake of the... 11th Megaman.

Ah, the Golden Age of the 2D Platformers... Why would I want to get lost in a vast photo-realistic environment with a rocket launcher and a bad attitude (and a movie tie-in) when I can be mashing the FIRE button at 260 bpms and dodging 8 kinds of electric death flying out of a giant brain with robot arms and jets and tentacles and restarting the whole goddamned game when I die for the third time? The choice is clear, surely.

As I mentioned in the 'Megaman Powered Up' review a few issues ago, the original 2D platformers are, by today's standards... how do I put this...? Fucking hard. Brain-snappingly, will-crushingly, life-devouringly, thumb-ruiningly hard. And that's why you should get a copy of this game, to make you remember how good your reflexes used to be. The graphics may've been sexed up (very nicely, I might add) for the 21C aesthetic, but at heart this is an honest-to-goodness port of the original SNES 'Megaman X'.

As X (Megaman), it's your job to defeat nine renegade (or 'Maverick') robots, Blade Runner style, in any order you choose (the order, I discovered, is critical, and entirely down to the hardships of trial-and-error), and their relative home-level of extreme platform-nastiness. Through this masochistically scintillating ordeal you will collect your nine weapons (where does he keep them all?) and four physical upgrades (you bloody well better collect the upgrades) with which to tackle no less than three 'final' boss-stages. The gameplay is classic, unforgiving Platform par-excellence. Your enemies crawl, fly, jump, roll and shoot at you from every direction just about all the time; platforms hover, drift, crumble, explode, and there's instant death all over the place. In response you can run, jump, dash, cling to and leap from wall to wall, firing missiles, tornados, electricity, fireballs, 'energy-bolts', 'energy balls', 3-way 'energy-bolts', ice and boomerangs, as much as you can, wherever you can. If you run out of lives, you start the level again. Oh yes, you do.

So there's twelve stages (of death!), 15 boss-battles (including the now-he's-mad-and-he's-turned-into-a-giant-robot-death-machine multi-stage bosses), four upgrades and nine weapons to get through. In the event that you finish the game without actually eating your PSP, you are rewarded with a cool cutscene and the ability to play through the game again, this time as X's nemesis: Vile. Vile has (count 'em!) 47 different weapons, and the gameplay is much, much harder.

Then, of course, there's Hard Mode...

Ryan Davidson