It doesn't really feel so much like Zaxxon when it's not an isometric shooter but I guess they kinda tried. My two main beefs with this game are that your shots consume too much of your fuel (you'll be hearing that low fuel warning an awful lot before approaching a base!) and your starting speed is way too slow. The latter is especially a pain if you get hit since like most shmups, you lose all your powerups upon dying and have to work your way back up. It's even worse on the later bases when there's a bunch of things trying to kill you at once and your ship is way too slow to avoid it all

Mega Man makes his one and only appearance on the Genesis and it's... a little flawed. For the most part this is a fairly straightforward compilation of the first three NES games, with a unique set of stages that becomes available when you clear all three games. For some reason, Capcom turned to Minakuchi Engineering to develop the game, possibly due to their experience working on most of the Game Boy MM games. While they did a fairly decent job, it seems to lack the same kind of effort they showed on the last two GB games.

Mega Man and all of the Robot Masters have had their sprites redrawn, and they look pretty nice with plenty of extra detail. However, almost all of the regular enemies simply gained more colors and still look much the same as they did in the NES games. Bizarrely, Proto Man also got this treatment and as a result, he looks comically small compared to Mega Man. The same also happens with the Sniper Joes who are also supposed to be close in size to Mega Man. Sprite issues aside, the stages and their backgrounds received a huge glowup and are far more detailed than before. The music arrangements sound fine but I'm not exactly a fan of some of the instrument patches that were used.

What really keeps me from giving this a full four stars is how the game controls and feels. Mega Man has a bit of a delay running from a standstill and this can get you into trouble in some situations if you don't take this into account. This is in stark contrast to the NES originals which had very responsive and snappy controls. The way enemies take damage also feels off as they seem to soak up more hits than normal at times.

Overall, not a bad effort at all but I feel like it just needed more time to iron out some of those various kinks. It's also a little disappointing that Capcom never bothered bringing over the other three NES games, but that's thankfully being rectified by the fanmade Sequel Wars project, which corrects some of the weird flaws and adds a ton of extra features (they recently released the MM4 port, go play it!).

This one is my favorite of the Game Boy Mega Man titles and probably the one I've sunk the most time into. Like the other GB games, it follows the same formula of having four Robot Masters from the NES game it's named after and four from the next game in the series, broken up by a miniboss fight in between.

It's also obvious that Capcom and Minakuchi Engineering put a lot more effort into this installment as it has an actual opening cutscene, with other little cutscenes scattered throughout the game. There's also an item shop where you can spend "P-chips" on things such as E-tanks, W-tanks (a Mega Man first!) and an Energy Balancer (also a first!). I thought this was a pretty neat addition and it's one that would appear in later classic MM games. The Mega Man Killer in this one (Ballade) is also given a lot more prominence and he even does something rather unexpected in the ending, which was a neat little twist.

The stage design is pretty good, but Crystal Man's stage in particular feels like it drags on and is the one that caused me the most grief as a kid. Napalm Man's stage can also get a bit frustrating if you're used to how his NES stage went. The other Robot Masters' stages on the other hand feel very similar to their NES counterparts.

One of the common threads with a lot of these late-period 7800 games is that they're... quirky, and this one is definitely no exception. The actual golfing is incredibly basic; you don't have a selection of clubs, no wind to worry about and things like sand traps and water hazards simply reduce the range of your swing. Instead of putting greens, the game takes you to a boss fight where you throw shurikens at a dragon until it flies away. All you need to worry about is making under par and that's about it. If you're not much into golf games like myself, this isn't that big of a deal, and honestly this was never really destined to be a serious golf game anyway.

The actual meat of the game lies in the side-scrolling portions where you go after your ball between shots, fighting other ninjas and nasties like giant frogs, gophers and sharks (if your ball lands in the drink). This part of the game plays OK, but the collision detection is a bit iffy and your attacks are very limited as you can only kick and throw shurikens (which have a very limited supply).