Remember back when Mega Man GB Anniversary (AKA Mega Man Mania) got cancelled? It was real sad, because we missed out on the chance of seeing Mega Man World 5 getting a colorization beyond what Super Game Boy did…

But now, thanks to the efforts of dedicated fans, we got it! And not just that, it got its slowdown greatly reduced (if not outright removed), custom weapon icons, some backgrounds got a nice touch up, and even attack animations saw an improvement, and the action feels fast. NES Fast, almost.

It’s not all perfect, however, there’s a few things that gets a bit in the way:

• The momentum hits a bit hard. In the original version, you still had more ease of control over it due to the game’s slowed down pace, but with this hack you may have a little bit of trouble adjusting to precise drops of two block wide between spikes. Thanks heaven that drop is very early in the stage it happens, but still made me physically hiccup a bit.

• When unpausing you may see a slightly glitched background for a frame or two, it’s a little jarring when it happens at first, otherwise you get adjusted to it.

• Getting the Turbo Arm upgrade (get 4 game overs) twice makes the Rock’n Claw upgrade less reliable than it originally was, and sometimes causes items pulled with the Magic Hand upgrade to fly over Mega Man if he’s falling when the hand is coming back with the item.

Those issues aside, didn’t see anything worth documenting as an issue or bug.

If there’s anything I’d like to see done is the ability to switch weapons on the fly with Select, and a quicker pause/unpause transition if possible.

Played on VisualBoyAdvance 1.8.0b Version 3 (last official nightly build of VBA ever released)