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Street Fighter X Megaman

I’m trying to download this fan-made (and Capcom-hosted and sponsored!) free Megaman game for PC right now, but its servers are positively logjammed at the moment. If you can manage, the download’s available here. And if I ever get it, I’m considering broadcasting it on twitch.tv while I play it, just for fun.

The game is described as a love letter to Street Fighter and Megaman fans for the 25th anniversary of both franchises — and from what I’ve seen so far via these videos, it almost certainly is. Seow Zong Hui, the game’s creator, obviously had a lot of love for both to have done what he’s done. That Capcom’s throwing their weight behind this is simply fantastic, and I honestly wish more companies would legitimize fan-made derivative works like this because that might have repercussions on copyright law that would alleviate some of the fear within fandom of being cracked down on by the “intellectual property” owners.

Street Fighter X Megaman

Four Megaman games played with one controller

This is either a work of art or a work of madness. Apparently, via heavy use of speedrun tools that allow a person to frame-by-frame step through an emulated version of a console game, someone’s built a speedrun that uses one controller input on Megaman 3, 4, 5 and 6 simultaneously.

Advice: play this on Fullscreen, with the volume down. Chiptune music is grating enough to some folks that having four simultaneous tracks playing might just be too much to handle.

Tool-assisted speedruns are fascinating in that they often do some things that a human player could never pull off. This is probably only possible via manipulation of the synchronization in subtle ways — passing input to one game while another is in a screen transition or on the “weapon get” screen, or having one game walk into a wall while another is proceeding through the level, for instance.

This run found its genesis in someone joking that Capcom had basically produced the same game for every Megaman sequel. While they are certainly formulaic, the challenges all build off one another, and the Megaman games are traditionally grossly unforgiving which makes the speedrun all the more impressive.

Four Megaman games played with one controller

Megaman, Liefeld Style

I’m sure you’re wondering where I’ve been this weekend. I built myself a new media server using Serviio so I won’t get caught flat-footed on another NASA live-stream, so I can stream it to my PS3 in the future. My wife and I went to see Brave and Avengers at a real honest-to-goodness drive-in (yes, we still have those here!) on Saturday night. And I’ve also been tinkering with a whole-site backup of Freethought Blogs, trying to run it off my netbook just to see what happens (and to give myself a playground in case I decide to go all mad scientist). Plus, I’ve been on overnights for work for two straight weeks, and look to have two more before getting back to some semblance of normalcy Wednesday or so. Sorry I’ve been absent.

Jeffrey “Chamba” Cruz is a comic artist whose work is heavy on Capcom representation. One of those representations apparently includes a piece he drew for a Megaman tribute
Continue reading “Megaman, Liefeld Style”

Megaman, Liefeld Style