Mega Man may have made his name on the NES, but one of the rarest and most desirable products to showcase his moniker isn’t on a Nintendo system, but a Sega one.
Mega Man: The Wily Wars (AKA: Rockman Mega World in Japan) arrived in 1994 but was only released physically in Europe and Japan; in North America, it was exclusive to the Sega Channel cable service.
Today, the price of the European and Japanese editions are sky-high, but thankfully Retro-Bit has secured the rights to republish the game along with a bunch of goodies, including an interchangeable sleeve, poster and sticker collection. The game itself will come on a transparent blue cartridge, which houses a 5-volt chip, battery-backup, gold-plated contacts, and bevelled insert points.
The Wily Wars contains the first three Mega Man games released on the NES (as well as an all-new unlockable game) but features updated visuals and sound. If you purchased the Mega Drive Mini, then you’ll know it was included as part of that console’s library of games.
They’ve been printing repros of this for a while. I’ve got one. For those wondering the game kind of sucks. The unlockable game is nice since it’s unique but otherwise these are VASTLY inferior versions of the first 3 MM games. MM moves differently, he can’t shoot as fast, and some aspects of the level geometry are different enough to become extremely frustrating.
For example in MM1 Wily1 trying to climb the wall up to Yellow Devil with the magnet beam is incredibly frustrating and to make it worse they removed the respawning weapon refill at that section. It’s much easier to get the magnet beam stuck in the wall than in the NES version and without the refill you get about 3 or 4 attempts before you have to suicide. After respawning you have to then farm weapon refills to attempt again.
Likewise in MM2 the gap up to the dragon in wily 1 is equally frustrating. The spacing for item1 is extremely tight, it’s easy to slide off of them, or be just too short and not able to hit the ladder.
Basically unless for some reason you just have to have this repro in your collection skip it. It’s a frustrating inferior version of these games. Play them on NES instead.
