Everyone hates the new Mega Man titles on the App Store

Instead of our normal App of the Week selection, we wanted to take the time to warn you that everyone hates the new Mega Man ports released this week to the App Store. Capcom has released six mobile versions of the original 8-bit Mega Man titles to iOS, and I have never seen so many review sites agree that something is so horrible. The six Mega Man games are the first games in recent memory to earn a 1-star review from Touch Arcade, and the reviewer, Shaun Musgrave, warns readers not to buy these titles, even for a laugh.

ArsTechnica says all six games run at inconsistent frame rates, which makes jumping and dealing with tricky enemies nearly impossible. The game's iconic music has also been butchered, the touchscreen controls are horrible and the auto fire option doesn't seem to work.

Google Play is filled with similar complaints about the frame rate and gameplay on all of the Android versions.

One users wrote, "I wish there were refunds on Google play Bought the game, played it for a few minutes, and then quit because of horrible frame rate issues that make the game ten times harder than it should be. My cutting edge Samsung galaxy S7 should NOT be having issues with this."

ArsTechnica does note that the Android version of Mega Man 2 has better sound reproduction than the iOS version, but that's about the only positive thing I have found written about any of these games.

The games are so bad that Frank Cifaldi of Digital Eclipse, the developers behind the Legacy Collection, felt the need to remind people that his company had nothing to do with these titles.

So why did the new Mega Man ports turn out so bad?

ArsTechnica points the finger at a company formally known as Beeline. Capcom turned its mobile operations over to the company who is known for making generic puzzle games.

An ArsTechnica reader, who claims to have worked on Mega Man 2 for iOS in 2009, also shredded some more light on the subject.

"Its not actually a port, and its not an emulator. I took the Brew/C version, and ported that code base to ObjC/C/OpenGL"

"The code base we had is not the original, the team had previously rebuilt the game from scratch, and pulled the assets from the internet (sprites.co.uk) and music from other spots. Capcom Japan told us they didn't have any original assets anymore when we asked."

"I was told to essentially write Mega Man 2 from a very poor version for old feature phones. Added back in missing bosses, missing areas, assets, enemies, etc. Try to re-create the AI as closely as possible."

You can read his entire explanation here.

If you are a masochist who likes to torture themselves with crappy games, or just don't believe review sites, Mega Man 1-6 is available on the Apple App Store for $1.99. At this time there are shockingly no user reviews in the App Store even though the games were released on Thursday. You can, however, see some user comments about Mega Man in the Touch Arcade forums.