The more I try to figure out what the deal is with the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, the more confused and angry I become. Seriously, it’s been virtually impossible to get a straight answer regarding anything, especially the GameCube version.
First off, I’ve learned that the remixed music for parts 4-6 is indeed from the Japanese PSone re-releases. So what about the remixes for parts 1-3? Apparently, they’re from Mega Man: the Wily Wars, which was the first three Mega Mans redone (a la Super Mario All Stars) for the Genesis! Very interesting…. I actually had Wily Wars (came with my Nomad) and felt that it did an admirable job of updating the classic tunes, though most people will probably strongly disagree. Then again, many seem to hate Genesis music for no good reason. I still prefer the vast majority of Genesis soundtracks to those on the Super Nintendo, simply because composers had to be more creative when dealing with the technically “inferior” hardware. But I digress…
But now I hear that the music for parts 1-3 is not from WIly Wars, but simply lifted from the Power Battle/Fighters games, the arcade Mega Man titles that are also in the collection. Plus some are even saying that the PSone versions of Mega Man 1-3 did indeed have remixed music, which if true, is pretty fucking infuriating since I paid $50+ for each, only to sell them off for peanuts on eBay since it seemed like there were no enhanced music.
Next, a Mega Man fan site asked the folks behind the collection, Atomic Planet, numerous questions regarding the GameCube version, and their answers were totally ridiculous. Apparently there wasn’t have enough room to fit all the remixed music since they barely had space to include all the games as there were. Yup, 1.35 gigs (the size of a GameCube disc) isn’t enough room to fit 2 old arcade games, an old PSone game, an old SNES game, and six really old NES games.
Instead of emulating the original NES games, Atomic Planet decided to emulate the PSone versions. So Mega Man 1, which was about 150k on the NES, became 273mb since that’s how big the PSone image size is. That’s almost the size of Mega Man 8, which came out originally for the PSone and Saturn, and which had far more levels, character animation, voice acting, full motion video, and a ton of extras! The PSone re-releases’ audio as the main reason for the large file sizes since all the music was redbook.
For those who don’t know what that means, basically a video game can utilize either of two methods to produce sound and music, and one is via the system’s sound chip. This means everything must be programmed to make the chip perfrom, but since it’s all one’s and zero’s, it takes up very little space. Redbook audio on the other hand uses sampled sound and the sound chip is not as involved, it’s simply playing back pre-recorded information. This is far easier than taking the time to actually do any programming, but as most people know, samples take up a large chunk of memory.
Anyways, the reason for such a move was so all the special features that were specially made for the PSone iterations, such as the assistance, or Navi, modes, could be included. But even so, how hard would it have been to convert all the redbook audio to mp3s? There would have been virtually no loss in quality, at least to a noticeable degree (we are talking about NES chip tunes here afterall). Hell, they could have just used the original sound files which anyone can easily find on the web and which is playable on any PC or Mac via WinAmp or other means. But that would require just a tiny bit of little effort or talent, which Atomic Planet has neither of (which is further reinforced if you take a look at their past work).
Then I hear that there’s black bars on the side of the image. This sounds just like the Japanese Saturn version of Mega Man X3, which also had bars to the left and the right of the image as well. Didn’t make sense, nor look good, back then, and I don’t expect it to seem any better,
Plus there’s the issue of extra content. It’s been known all along that the GameCube version gets a special retrospective and behind the scenes documentary, featuring an interview with Mega Man’s creator, Kenji Inafune, and the PlayStation version gets an episode of the ultra lame American Mega Man cartoon from years ago. Which system do you think got the better deal? Hence why hearing all the problems associated with the CG was so painful. But get this… the documentary is simply an episode from of Icons from G4, the video game channel! Icons is their show that highlights a prominent game character or creator, and is one of the better offerings from the network that aims to inform and entertain fan of video games, but simply reinforces negative stereotypes and makes me embarrassed to admit to being a gamer. And even still, the show is notorious for having glaring inaccuracies.
Someone actually ripped the video and put it online, which I just got the chance to see, and it was no different from any other episode. Granted, it was great to see Inafune being interviewed, but the rest of the show was simply a fluff piece, with nothing truly groundbreaking revealed. Hell, they didn’t even mention Mega Man Soccer or Mega Man Battle & Chase! But the piece did do a good job of getting across the importance of Mega Man to Capcom, which makes the Anniversary Collection’s piss poor outing even more mind boggling.
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Also, I saw The Frames last night with a small bunch of friends and they were incredible. I really wanted to see Spider Man 2 afterwards, but the majority overruled, so we ended up eating at an extremely shitty Mexican restaurant (not so much the food, but the service). Thank God I had hot dogs at the seaport before the show began.
