I've known about some Mega Man 3 improvement hacks for quite a while now, but never got around to trying any of them. To celebrate Mega Man dropping on January 7th though, I tried this on a whim to spice things up as opposed to just another replay of regular MM3. Mega Man 3's always been my personal favorite of the series. The slide does a lot to make approaching enemies more dynamic and fun and in a series full of fantastic soundtracks, 3's is among the best. On more sentimental notes it was the first game in the series I remember beating. It also introduced Proto Man, not just one of my favorite video game characters, but one of my favorite characters period (His theme is also one of my favorite pieces of music, go figure) That being said, I've never been oblivious to its myriad of flaws. Thanks to a troubled development, 3 launched with horrendous slowdown even by NES standards, broken and useless weapons, bugs, an uneven difficulty curve, and an overall lack of polish.

All of this is to say that Mega Man 3 Revamped fixes all of this and then some. All of the slowdown is gone. The Top Spin now has a hitbox that doesn't mean you'll take damage yourself using it, nor does it randomly have a chance of using up all its energy in one go (Spark Shock still seems to be a bit useless unfortunately). Hitboxes and damage values across the board have been tweaked for the better, making the Doc Robot fights in particular much more reasonable. The controls now feel more like the latter NES games, it might just be placebo but the original 3's controls always felt a bit light and prone to eating inputs to me. There's plenty of visual additions ranging from small details to new background elements to visual revamps for the Doc Robot revisits. The addition of an opening cutscene (with great spritework to boot!) helps make the whole package feel more cohesive. Assets that went unused in the original game have been restored, such as the extended versions of two music tracks. I could rattle on all the changes for hours, but the point is that anything that made 3 feel unpolished or even incomplete in comparison to say, Mega Man 4, has been fixed here.

Revamped's greatest triumph lies in its reworking of the original game's level design. Revamped is still Mega Man 3 at heart, almost all the setpieces you remember from the original are still here. However, many sections have seen tweaks to be more forgiving to the player or to make greater use of level specific gimmicks. There are also plenty of new screens that also serve to use level specific gimmicks more, as well as to introduce them in safer environments before the real test later on. Top Man's stage is a great example. Remember the spinning top platforms that only showed up at the end of the stage in the original? Here, they're on 3 different parts of the level. The first in a safe environment, the second soon after where you now need to use them to cross a spiked floor, and the third is mostly the same as the original, just with an added challenge just before the boss door. Stuff like this is all over Revamped. Sure, there are a couple parts that have been removed, like the screens with the Mets in Top Man's stage or the Hammer Joes in Hard Man's, but they're in service of what I consider to be genuinely better level design.

All of these level design improvements also apply to the Doc Robot stages, which are the most contentious part of the original Mega Man 3. The Doc Robot stages reuse assets from four of the standard Robot Master levels with revamped, much more difficult level designs. In addition, they feature two Doc Robot fights which are rematches against the Mega Man 2 bosses, now in a one-size-fits-all Doc Robot model and a new set of weaknesses to figure out. These were my least favorite part in the original, but they're much improved here. Just like before, the level designs have been tweaked to be more fair and to use stage elements in ways that surpass the original. The Doc Robot fights themselves are much more manageable largely thanks to their decreased hitboxes, as they felt nigh impossible to jump over in the original.

The Wily stages are where Revamped's level design shines the most. In vanilla MM3, the Doc Robot stages are where the difficulty peaked. In comparison, the Wily stages were a complete joke. They were way too short, and were more likely to throw energy refills and extra lives at you than any actual challenge. Here in Revamped though, they're completely in line with the Wily levels in the rest of the series. Now the Wily levels are the "final exam" that test you on all your skills and knowledge of previous enemies and stage hazards, mixing and matching them in ways that still feel fresh. Elements from the original stages are still here, like the water segments in Wily 1, but they're used in way more challenging and engaging ways than before. To anyone that might be afraid that Revamped softens Mega Man 3's difficulty, the Wily stages are here to disprove that. Ultimately, 3 is still a challenge, only now that challenge is more evenly distributed throughout the game.

I absolutely adored my time with Mega Man 3 Revamped. It took a game that I had conceded for a while wasn't the true best in the series, and put it right back in the running for that title. This is a must play for anyone that's ever tried Mega Man 3, from its diehards to those who couldn't stand it. I guarantee you'll come out of it with a renewed or newly found appreciation for it. I can't give enough props to the developer, TheSkipper1995, as well as the developer of Mega Man 3 Improvement, KujaKiller. I hadn't mentioned it until now, but Revamped is a hack of a hack, building on top of Mega Man 3 Improvement. I haven't played Improvement, but to my understanding it's the hack that focused on QoL improvements such as the opening cutscene and fixes for bugs and slowdown, while Revamped focused on the level design reworks as well as further QoL additions.

One more thing, shoutouts to Jay Eazy. If it weren't for January 7th becoming what I'm assuming will now be a Mega Man fan holiday I wouldn't have discovered this as soon as I did.

I gave this one another chance after trying it out and dropping it a few years back. I expected to just drop it again, but by playing revision K and using save states I was able to make it to the end. Revision K (and E I believe) drastically reduces the amount of damage you take from enemies. On the easiest possible dip switch settings you'll only take a single point of damage per hit, and only 3 points on the hardest, making K's hardest settings easier than the standard version's easiest. With savestates at the ready just to be safe, K on it's easiest settings is the definitive way to play this. With that in mind though, the reduced damage doesn't fix any of Haunted Castle's other flaws. You'll still be dealing with plenty of trial and error or gotcha moments that a first time player won't see coming, and hordes of enemies in the later levels that feel impossible to wipe out without taking damage (level 3's fleamen and 5's flaming skulls in particular). Hitboxes are also pretty clunky, with enemies damaging you just as they graze by (also caused in part by just how large Simon's sprite is), while attacking enemies at close range usually means they'll just hit you instead. Having only 3 continues, or more accurately, 4 lives, is unusually punishing for a Castlevania game and downright baffling as an arcade game.

All of these marks against the game are a shame, because I can see the workings of a good arcade style Castlevania here. There are a few moments where it clicks and it's satisfying to wail on enemies, and the handful of platforming segments are fine enough. Bosses are alright, although they might be a bit too easy as most fold pretty quickly (minus the rock monster on level 4, who might just be the worst boss in the entire series). Hitboxes aside, Simon controls more or less how he does in CV1 here, minus the controls for getting on and off the stairs being much more finicky than they usually are. The soundtrack is easily the best thing about this game, and while most of it has been remixed in later games, the original compositions are still well worth a listen. Each level has enough setpieces to make each one memorable. Some would become series staples like the crumbling bridge while others would be forgotten, like the weird alternate dimension harpy fight. I'm a bit mixed on the game visually. There isn't anything wrong with the sprite work and animations minus a few oddities, but something about them feels off, like I'm playing a store brand Castlevania instead of the real thing.

With a few more months of development time, Haunted Castle could have been something great. Unfortunately we're left with a very messy Castlevania game with level designs that lack almost everything that makes the series' gameplay satisfying. I can only really recommend this to big fans of the series that are morbidly curious, and even then playing on anything other than the easiest revisions on their easiest settings is probably going to be a miserable experience.

The car chase segment is really impressive, barely looked like a game at times (though ironically the frame drops broke that immersion a bit). It didn't wow me too much in terms of "this is what games could be like in the future" because of how much it didn't look like a game at all, on top of it just being a tech demo with very limited gameplay. As a visual showcase though, it's pretty neat. I think reading up on how everything in the demo works will give me a better picture of how all of the tech could be implemented into a full game some day.

Only started playing this one once I heard that it was shutting down. It's what it says on the tin, playing Pac-Man on mazes constructed from Google Maps. It sounds like a bit of a mess, but it ended up being a lot of fun. There's some novelty in being able to play Pac-Man near famous monuments or even just by your home. The novelty of generating your own stages wore off after a bit (especially since the game couldn't always generate them depending on the area you chose), but it was also interesting to play levels that others had uploaded.

The real hook of the game, however, was the tour mode. The tour mode had stages handpicked(?) by the developers (from what I can tell they rotated like the tours in Mario Kart Tour), where you also have side objectives which you needed to complete to unlock more levels (eat X ghosts per stage, get X points, etc.). These objectives got a bit annoying on the more difficult levels, but nothing that ever felt unachievable, especially with power ups. Some of those "more difficult" stages also highlighted some of the game's control flaws. Some spots just aren't conducive for Pac-Man mazes, and I'd often be frantically swiping to go the right way to no avail. There were also some spots that definitely looked like you could make a turn, but either couldn't or would just get stuck on the maze geometry. Ghost spawn placements also tended to mean ghosts dominating a portion of the map by default, since there were never going to be any perfectly symmetrical maps. However these issues only truly frustrated me when I was shooting for some of the more difficult challenges later on, and most of the time I was having fun. There's definitely a novelty to playing a bunch of massive and wildly different, if unbalanced, types of mazes. I also really liked the unlockable pixel/voxel replicas of monuments and foods from around the world with fun facts attached. I love these kinds of collectibles and they gave me an extra incentive to keep coming back to the tour stages, and even select user submitted ones as well. There was also some sort of competition mode where you'd compete for the top score on a few stages, and earn badges and currency to buy hats that gave you extra perks. I only played one of these (seems that they updated on a monthly basis), so I can't really say much more other than it was neat.

As a final note, I'm surprised how lenient this game was in terms of monetization, or lack thereof. From what I can tell, this never had microtransactions at all. It only showed you ads after every level or two, and had the usual "watch this ad for an extra life after a game over/get an extra reward" mobile game trappings. There were two currencies, one you earned by watching ads or playing the game and was used for extra power ups. The other was the aforementioned currency that you could only earn through competition mode and could use for upgrades. Between the non-existent buzz for the game and the lack of any monetization besides ads, I can see how this died in little over a year. That being said, I hope this concept can be brought back some day, with a bit more polish on the controls, either as a new mobile game or a side mode in a full console/PC release. This is too good of a concept to let die unceremoniously in a mobile game that practically nobody played.


(No idea how this review turned into an essay, guess I wanted to go in depth with something that's at risk of being semi-lost media. Didn't even have an IGDB listing til I added one about a month ago.)

This game is just a massive bundle of joy. You can feel the devs' passion for this medium in every inch of it. It's a bite-sized collectathon with smooth controls and occasional vehicle sections to spice things up. All of the DualSense's features are put to good use here. Sections that use the adaptive triggers, motion controls, or touchpad control like a dream and don't feel gimmicky or obtrusive at all. The haptic feedback in particular feels like magic the first time you get your hands on it. The game is bursting with charm (Astro waving to you in his idle animation will never not warm my heart) and callbacks to other games or PlayStation hardware. It's an ad, sure, but it's done with enough reverence to not come off that way while playing. The soundtrack is a treat as well, with plenty of catchy tunes and others that make me feel all fuzzy inside. Astro's Playroom is one of those games that reminds me just how much I love gaming. If you have a PS5, make a beeline for this one.