Capcom started the new year with a blast from the past: they released the six original Mega Man games from NES on iOS and Android for $1.99 each. Press releases highlighted the effort made by the developers in adapting the controls and gameplay to smartphones, but user reviews during the first week reveal the sad truth: All six games suffer terrible frame rate issues that make the titles barely playable at all.
The news come as a bit of a surprise, given that Capcom actually praised the fact that these Mega Man ports had been put through a review of their performance and were optimized for the new hardware. We don’t know what resources they spent on the development, but the final product makes clear that they were not enough.
The official press release states that “Each game has been optimized for the mobile devices with adjustments to game speed.” However, the reality is that the games run at such an abnormal speed that it makes them very hard to control, something specially troubling in games where timing is essential in order to advance through enemies and platforms.
The technical issues have such a great effect that even a high-speed mode and the possibility to remap touch controls are not enough to make a difference. We can even see that this version of Mega Man doesn’t run as smooth as it should in the promotional trailers:
Mobile users were quick to state their complains via user reviews on Google Play and Android. One of them states: “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.”
And others also brought attention to the fact that the power of their own device didn’t seem to make a difference in the performance: “I’m running Android 6.0.1 with 6GB RAM and the minimum requirements state Android 4.0 1GB RAM.”
It has only been a few days since the release of the six games, but we can only hope that Capcom will be quick to release a patch for them that will make justice for such classic pieces of gaming.
