Where is Mega Man 11?

2008 saw the release of Mega Man 9, possibly the greatest installment in the entire classic Mega Man saga. Shortly after, Capcom followed up with Mega Man 10, which smoothed the formula even more.

Endless Attack modes in each provided an awesome new mode of platforming that has significant potential. You can already find about a dozen "endless attack" romhacks online. Proto Man and Bass provided the variety and challenge necessary for keeping the interest of the hardcore players. I still rank beating Mega Man 9 and 10 on hard with Protoman as some of my greatest gaming achievements.

Years later, however, I'm left wondering: where is Mega Man 11? Maybe the Wii is just coming to a close, or maybe Capcom is hesitant to continue the classic series without Inafune. Maybe that's it for Mega Man.

I recently purchased Mega Man X7 on a whim, but I've never really considered the MMX series all that great when compared with the classic NES and Wii 8-Bit adventures. 

I'm sure Starship Mega Man 55 or whatever else Capcom is putting out is equally good, but I just can't get motivated to play the other games in the series. The platforming always felt sloppy and the game always felt like it was marketed to younger kids or people seriously into techno and mohawks. Only with classic Mega Man does one need to be badass mother fucker to achieve victory, without the artificial dark and gritty "edge."

The edge comes from the game itself, and if you don't have serious nuts you might as well go cry at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Proto Man 2 Gameplay Video

Gameplay footage from my Proto Man 2 hack.

You can also watch this on youtube, but why?

I lost part 1 of the video, but I play through several Robot Master stages and Wily's Castle. Thanks to the new youtube features, it's 1 video and 1 hour long, which is pretty cool. I think part one only had Bubble, Metal, and Wood Man stages.

Proto Man 2

This is a Mega Man 2 romhack. I was not happy with the other Proto Man 2 romhack, although I did use it as a base. From there, everything was changed, from the graphics, to the title screen, to the palette, to the story, etc. The quality is very high, and I think fans will appriciate the little touches like the intro and an accurate palette and perfect sprites for Proto Man. Because Mega Man and Proto Man (in MM9, MM3, MM10, etc. are different shapes, romhackers of MM2 have to be a little creative with the sprites. These are the MM3 sprites which I developed for Proto Man 3, but fixed up a little bit. I used Tile Layer Pro, Nesticle, Hexposure, and Thingy to hack up this bad boy.

Mega Man 2 is much easier to hack than Mega Man 3. One only has to alter Mega Man's sprite once. However, editing the text was a major challenge, but I learned a lot about NES Text editing and I am 100% certain that I can now change any text in any NES rom. Anyway, if you don't like Mega Man 2 with a mullet, I hope you're a fan of Proto Man 2.

Features:

-Play as Proto Man in Mega Man 2
-New Title Screen
-New READY Message
-Changed palettes
-No awkward sprites/pixels!
-NEW INTRO STORY!!!

Download Proto Man 2!

Guide to NES Romhacking

Updated 4-10-2013. Well, it's pretty obvious that this guide is outdated, and was outdated from the start. If you want to do any NES romhacking, you should check out FCEUX, an excellent emulator that has all the functionality of the separate tools listed below. That said, I still made Proto Man 2, BLOCK, etc. without all the fancy new bells and whistles of FCEUX. Was I living in the past and out of touch? Seems so, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?

NES rom hacking is difficult, but not that difficult. It can be tedious, but with a little dedication and study you can break apart your childhood favorites and bend the code to your will. There are some utilities you can use to make your life easier.

First, the emulator Nesticle is essential. You can use it to look up the Hexidecimal values for palettes and graphics, which you can then change in Thingy or Hexposure. Press F4 for the palette, or F2 for the graphics tables.

For text editing, use Nesticle to see the graphics table. Find the alphabet and any other characters you are interested in editing in thingy.

Then, created a romname.tbl file that simply has the hex value, followed by the in-game value. For example, here is the Mega Man 2 Text HEX Value table:

C0=
C1=A
C2=B
C3=C
C4=D
C5=E
C6=F
C7=G
C8=H
C9=I
CA=J
CB=K
CC=L
CD=M
CE=N
CF=O
D0=P
D1=Q
D2=R
D3=S
D4=T
D5=U
D6=V
D7=W
D8=X
D9=Y
DA=Z
DB=r
DC=.
DD=,
DE='
DF=!

Sweet. Now, I've saved this file as protoman2.tbl, and put it in a C:\DOS\Thingy directory. I mount my C:\DOS folder in dosbox and run thingy. Now I can edit the text, and search for strings. Keep a backup of your file with HEX editing...there is no save function, all changed are just applied instantly.

You can download Thingy here.

And Hexposure, another Hex Editor. Hexposure was useful when I messed up some text by making the strings too long. I could look at the code for an old version of the file and use them to replace the hex values in the current file. It was a tedious process, but it worked!

But, you might just want to edit the graphics to a game, nothing major. Well, changing even 1 detailed sprite can be a tedious task, but Tile Layer Pro is the best editor around.

If you want to change the palette, however, that will take more work. Unless your game has an editor which can accomplish palette changing (Like MegaManFLE, for example) you need to run the ROM is Nesticle and hit F4 to see the palettes. Mega Man's palette might be 0F 0F 21 11 for example (Transparent, Black, Light and Dark Blue). Downloaded NES Palette Editor, and be sure to grab the 2007 release.

You'll probably need to download DOSBox, a DOS emulator to run all of these programs correctly. They have a main page you can check out.

Generally you should check romhacking.net and zophar.net for any special utilties for the games your working on. DOSBox is a DOS emulator which can easily run DOS programs in Windows XP, Vista, 7, etc. I think it works for MACs and 'Nix users, but maybe not. You'll want to put any program you wish to use in DOSBox in its own c:\dos\ directory. Then, run DOSBox. In the console, type

mount c: c:\dos

and this will create a virtual drive C:, in the emulator, which contains everything in C:\DOS\ Now you can just navigate around like you would 20 years ago. Type C: to get to your drive, the cd hexposure (just as an example). If I have a C:\DOS\Hexposure folder on my computer, in DOSBox I'll see the files under C:\Hexposure.

Finally, check out this much more in-depth tutorial that provided me with tons of useful information over the past years. Click here for NES Player's Beginner's Guide to Romhacking.

Mega Man 2 Helmetless Rom

Who needs a goddamn helmet to fuck Wily's shit up? Mega Man's hair is longer than his 9/10 sprites, because I thought it looked cooler. This is a great improvement over the previous version. Certain awkward frames of animation have been corrected, and Mega Man flows very smoothly. I also edited the title screen to say Mega Man II: Helmetless, and the dates to 2010-2011. Download the Mega Man 2 Helmetless Rom. I used Tile Layer Pro, a great utility for NES graphics hacking.

This project started a few year ago when I hacked Mega Man 2 so that I could play as Helmetless Mega Man. I intended to hex edit the rom to make Mega Man take double damage, but decided that was unnecessary. I posted some preliminary videos on youtube, to mixed responses. I'll admit that the sprite looked awkward back then, and was even glitched on one frame of animation, but now this mod works 100% perfectly.

Enjoy! I'll do some more videos of the new version...

Why Gamers Love Mega Man 2

In preparation of Mega Man 9, I've been replaying the classic Mega Man series. Let's take a look at a true classic, despite this site's premise of reviewing "lesser-known," "obscure," or "forgotten" gems. If you aren't familiar with Mega Man, well, you should go buy the Mega Man Anniversary collection for PS2, GameCube, or XBox, and learn about the Blue Bomber the hard way.



Ask any Mega Man fan which is their favorite, and 4/5 times he or she will answer Mega Man 2. Hell, ask Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune and he'll reveal its his personal favorite.

The reason, like Mega Man's weapon, is multifoliate. I would, however, like to look a a few very specific reasons why Mega Man 2 simply rocks. I could list them... but Mega Man 2 has so many redeeming qualities and so few shortcomings I'd sound like a crazy.



Instead, I'll skip out on the usual review, and relate some of my experiences playing the game. Most recently, I was playing the game an hour ago preparing to write this review. It's extremely difficult to get inspired to write after playing such a great game, which may sound contradictory. It's almost disheartening to experience a piece of art as good as Mega Man 2.

I brought my copy of Mega Man Anniversary Collection over to a friend's house. He seemed decently excited so we started to play. He asked which one I recommended, and, to be fair, I said that most people consider Mega Man 2 to be the best of the best, but others prefer Mega Man 3 and it's really good too. He decided to start with 3, and we fought through Magnet Man's stage and I breezed through Snake Man's stage and died using only the Mega Buster.



Which is an interesting side note: a fun Mega Man challenge is to beat each robot master with only the arm cannon. Some are more difficult than others, obviously. I'm currently working on this particular challenge and actually managed to beat Quick Man on my 3rd try. Usually I have trouble most bosses, but to beat one of the hardest was pretty fucking sweet.



And eventually we tired of Mega Man 3, and he wanted to check out Mega Man 2. We started playing, and he got through Metal Man's stage and I beat Metal Man (I can regularly beat this guy without getting hit. It doesn't take a kid long to realize that the Metal Blade is fucking awesome and beating Metal Man, if one has to beat a robot master without exploiting a weapon, while, perhaps not the easiest, is surely the most useful. Armed with the Metal Blade, you'll buzzsaw a path straight to the center of Skull Castle). And after playing a few more levels, I inputted the code (which I have memorized) starting at Dr. Wily's castle with 4 E tanks. I didn't beat the game, because I was frustrated at the bomb-wall boss... that one boss that is completely impossible unless you do it exactly right. I didn't even die, I just ran out of bombs. Protip: if you rapidly pause and un-pause the game at this boss, you will change to and from a beam of light, and become invulnerable to their attacks while in the shape-changing animation frames. This glitch can also be used to slow your fall in the underwater corridor of spikes.

Then a few days after that, two friends and I were playing Mega Man Anniversary Collection (and drinking). I was attempting Heat Man's stage without Item-2. It wasn't working out very well. Care to guess? That's right: the magnetic blocks. BVOOOM. BVOOOM. BVOOOM. GRAH! DEATH! I gave up and beat Air Man to get Item-2 and surfed my way over the pit. I cleared the remaining levels (and of course I had to use the Flash Weapon to get through Quickman's devious beams. I tried and tried without using the Flash, and finally gave up. Frustrated, I looked up the pattern on the internet today, memorized it, and beat the beams without it!) and showed my friend (who had never seen Dr. Wily's Castle) my favorite stage in the game. The music, obviously, which has been remixed more than any other song on the internet, and, secondly, the Dragon!



I remember the first time I got to the Dragon. I had rented the game, and was probably 6-8 years old. I would write down every password in marker on a giant poster board. I had different variations too. No surprise, really, before the internet and FAQs most people took notes or wrote down passwords when playing games. Video Game hobbies really do require a significant amount of paperwork.



But the Dragon! Jumping on the blocks, in time to the music, even though we only jump for 10 seconds before the music stops, and the boss music starts, and everything stops as his life gauge appears, where death and awesome are opposite and very near, and certain destruction flies forward, and we face those incredible mechanical odds, there are moments of pure reckless abandon as we heroically jump towards an almost certain death, and then emerge victorious with cool non-emotion on our 8-Bit sprite's face while we watch our enemy explode and fade into nothing. It's code cycle in the NES's cpu complete... The castle successfully stormed.

That's why so many gamers love Mega Man 2.