199. Mega Man (Rozner Labs, MS-DOS, 1990)

I had no idea there was an MS-DOS port of Mega Man, but thanks to The Internet Archive's massive library of free DOS games, I went from learning about DOS Mega Man to playing DOS Mega Man in about 3 minutes. When I gazed upon the words "DOS Mega Man" my immediate thought was "oh no, I have to see it" and it was just about as bad as you would expect.

The starting level has Mega Man passing through a guard station and entering a park that is filled with robot dogs. These enemies are extremely tedious to defeat, as they try to get as close to you as possible, causing near-continuous damage (and when you have taken damage, you can't fire for a bit). They can also jump faster than you so they can't be totally outrun, though if you time your jump just right, you can evade them. They will only jump at you if they are a certain distance away, so you can actually just get an enemy behind you, and they will follow you all the way through the (completely flat) stage as long as you don't get too far away. For posterity's sake, I also found out that you can just hold right and you will get through the first level alive.

Everything about the game is sluggish. The inputs are all delayed by about a quarter of a second, the animations are terrible and slow, and the game itself runs at about 5 frames per second. One of the worst parts about the original Mega Man games is the knockback that you get from getting damaged, and here what was an inconvenience becomes a 3-second long agonizing ordeal. Mega Man only supports 4 colors at a time, so if you don't like cyan and magenta, this is not the game for you. It's bonkers to me that Doom was released on MS-DOS just 3 years later with all of its speed and colors.

After you beat the opening level, you are treated to a boss select screen with only 3 robot masters (half of the original Mega Man's 6). They are all newly designed, though their designs are pretty pedestrian compared to the "real" robot masters. Once I finally made it to a robot master (Voltman), he only had a single attack, and more importantly, no invincibility frames, meaning that I could take out about half his health bar by standing next to him and mashing fire while he was vulnerable.

There are flashes of good Mega Man in here but they are few and far between. Enemy design is not terrible, though enemy variety is very low, and there are certain areas where you need a certain boss power to reach a tantalizing item, but they almost feel like references more than features. The disappearing block puzzles from Mega Man 2 also make an appearance, though thankfully they have been made much less challenging, because that would have been awful given the performance of this port.

1/5, a paltry facsimile of Mega Man that was at least interesting to check out