Ready for some more SNES-flavored nostalgia on your iPhone or iPod Touch? Capcom has recently released Mega Man X for iOS, which should brighten the day of just about anyone who spent their formative years slaying robotic octopi.
Unlike the other versions of Mega Man that have found their way to iOS, Mega Man X ditches the classic pixelated look for smoother visuals — I think it’s a novel touch, though some gamers disagree with me.
Classic MegaMan games always required precision and some nimble fingers, and some tweaks had to be made to make it work with with a 3.7-inch touchscreen. The normal difficulty level has X constantly charging his X-Buster, while holding down the fire button turns on auto-fire mode. After a few minutes with the game, my only real concern is that the jump and fire buttons seem just far enough apart that they’re easy to miss when things start to get hairy.
If those thumbs of yours don’t move quite like they used to, there’s also an easy mode baked into the game. It may just be me, but the the thrill of clearing a particularly tough section is part of MegaMan’s appeal — considering how easy the normal mode can be, I imagine most people would skip easy mode altogether.
The end result is a version of Mega Man X that manages to strike a good-but-not-great balance between difficulty and playability. Purists may scoff at the changes, but taking a game that just begs for a controller and adapting it for a device without buttons is no small feat, and the nostalgia factor may be enough to sway gamers into forgiving its quirks and odd design choices.
Mega Man X is live in the App Store, and it can be yours for $4.99.