Mega Man: Powered Up (PSP)

I never liked Mega Man. It was a platformer. It featured one-mistake deaths and bottomless pits. It was not my cup of tea.

But then, that's what I thought about Metroid, until I played Metroid Zero Mission, and discovered it was really a lot of fun. It's what I thought about Castlevania, but Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance turned out to be one of my best gaming finds of the year. So I thought maybe it was time to bury the axe with the old shiny blue robot and try out something from his more recent oeuvre.

It's worth noting that really good games for the PSP have not been as thick on the ground as I ideally would have liked, so I made a plan to remedy this by picking up Mega Man: Powered Up for my Sony handheld. It's a remake of the original, with cute super-deformed characters, and some modern gameplay concessions. It looked ideal - I could return to the roots of the series, without having to put up with 20-year-old NES game design.

Bah. Capcom obviously didn't remake Powered Up quite as much as I would have hoped. It still features one-fall deaths. And you know what? It doesn't really matter what else they've thrown in there, because none of it is going to get me past the sheer frustration of playing a difficult level almost to the end and then being booted all the way back to the start from losing my last life on a stupid jumping puzzle.

Total play time spent with Powered Up = about 15 minutes, just long enough to remember why I hate eighties platformer design. I'm done now. It can go back on the shelf, and never be played again.

No, I don't claim that this is a representative review of the game. It's just the reason that this game was a complete and dismal failure in interesting me in playing it, and you know, there's not that many games that manage that.

This review has been edited from one previously posted at The Dust Forms Words on 28/06/2006.

Score: 3 out of 20 (A terrible game with no redeeming features)
For fans of the platforming genre: 13 out of 20

Release date: March 2006
Developed by: Capcom
Published by: Capcom