Mega Man X Legacy Collections axe Axel (and the rest of Guns N' Roses)
X gon' give it to ya
Nineties platformer icons are a recurring theme this summer. While the return of Crash Bandicoot doesn't exactly set my heart ablaze, I am entirely down with the entire 8-game Mega Man X series coming to PC, bringing us generations worth of grim anime platform robo-murder all in one place.
The two compilations now have a Steam store page and a price-tag to accompany earlier news of some interesting new playmodes, along with news that Mega Man X5's bizarre English-only Guns N' Roses references have been cut.
The Mega Man X Legacy Collections are bringing all eight of the X games to PC. While some are better than others, even the worst was still pretty good compared to most platformers of the time. Some of the later X games did have rather sketchy translations, however. One of the weirdest artifacts of this is the animal-robot bosses of Mega Man X5 getting named after members of Guns N' Roses, but only in the English release. I guess that was too silly for even Capcom, as that particular quirk is getting excised from the re-release.
While for the most part this is just an emulation/port compilation pack, there are a few new goodies coming to the game, including concept art & cutscene galleries, plus a cross-game challenge mode that pits X against two bosses simultaneously. Here's hoping they're going to be generous on the E-tanks on this, because the last one shown above - Vile Mk2 & High Max - looks like an absolutely gruelling exercise in bullet-dodging made all the worse by High Max being bulky and hard to jump over.
For those unfamiliar with the convoluted meta-series lore, the original Mega Man was set in a high-tech utopia, occasionally spoiled by supervillainous robo-crime. Mega Man X picks up the story much further down the timeline, during an era of conflict and political tension between humans and the now-widespread mechanical Reploid race. There's also the Mega Man Zero series (games very much deserving a remake/remaster) which skip even further into the bleak post-robopocalypse to come, but I digress.
Mega Man is in the air this month (smells like Blue Hawaiis and lemons). We've got the somewhat cuter Mega Man 11 confirmed coming to PC this October, and Summer Games Done Quick just got done with their Mega Man charity stream block a couple hours ago, if you want to go digging through their Twitch archives. Personally, the Mega Man game I'm most excited for (especially after watching a few live development streams) is the fan-made Mega Man X: Corrupted, but don't tell anyone I said that. Cool? Good. Glad we understand each other.
You can find the Mega Man X Legacy Collection double-pack over on Steam here. It should be out on July 24th, and will cost £28.78/€35.98/$35.98 for all 8 games, or £16/€20/$20 for either set of four.