Portable Gaming Revolution

1up.com has posted a preview of the remake of the original NES Mega Man for the PSP titled Mega Man: Powered Up.

The preview version is missing the ability to create and trade custom-designed levels, but overall they were very pleased with the results. They talk about the two different modes: Old-style and New-style.

Old-style is an attempt to reproduce the dynamics of the NES game with Powered Up’s new graphical appearance. Based on the single available stage (Cutman), the level design is taken directly from the original: Every jump, hazard and enemy is carried over. Even the music is a perfect reproduction of the NES tune that played during Cutman’s stage.

The real challenge is to be found in the New-style game, which has three difficulty levels… and the Hard game is really hard. Enemies move much more quickly and attack with greater ferocity. And Cutman has been granted a new ability in addition to his normal scissor toss; he can fling his blades in a spinning boomerang attack that’s difficult to dodge and inflicts serious damage on poor Mega Man.

Overall the game is apparently shaping up nicely. I personally love the new anime style (which seems to be the biggest criticism) and even though Mega Man 2 is my personal favorite in the series, Mega Man is not that far behind. It seems that for those old-school players like me who have fond memories of Mega Man before they trashed it, this looks to be a definite pick up.

The current release date is Mar 24, 2006