Capcom's 8-game Mega Man X Legacy Collection is out now
A never-ending hail of deadly lemons
For the first time, Capcom's entire Mega Man X series of platform shooters is available on PC. 'X' may live in a slightly darker world than his smaller, cuter predecessor Mega Man, but these are still games about a heroic blue robot running around, collecting new weaponry and equipment and shooting stuff with energy bolts that look like lemons. General save-the-world stuff, time and time again. Eight times, in fact. The Mega Man X Legacy Collection (broken up into two releases featuring X1-X4, and X5-X8) is out now, having launched on Tuesday.
Looking at initial reviews, it seems that the Mega Man X Collections are mostly solid, but do fall short on a few odd points. Some of the earlier SNES-era games suffer from authentic slowdown. While technically accurate, this chuggy performance wasn't present in the last big Mega Man X bundle released, way back on the Gamecube/PS2. There are some new options such as multiple graphics filter modes, although anyone who cares will just stick to unfiltered, chunky pixels.
The latter half of the bundle seems to be free of slowdown, but isn't without flaw. There's mention that control rebinding is very limited if you're playing on keyboard, although more options are available if you have a gamepad, which you probably should if you're playing Mega Man games. While the collection does allow you to play the Japanese version of these games, there's no option to play the English version with Japanese audio. Given how notoriously awful the voice-acting was in some of these games, that's a shame.
Still, it's not all bad news. There's some nice new features to this compilation, such as a special arena mode where you fight two bosses (taken from a large, combined pool spanning multiple games) simultaneously with a limited arsensal. There's a Museum Mode too, where you can browse soundtracks, trailers, and official promo art. Also, until Capcom finally go and remaster and re-release the Mega Man Zero series, X4 is the best one you can buy today and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
The two halves of the Mega Man X Legacy Collection are available on Steam here and here for £15.99/20/$20 each, or you can get a small discount by buying them together here.