Today's choice for Virtually Overlooked seems fairly obvious. Now that Capcom has made WiiWare worth talking about, the gaping absence of any sort of Mega Man game on the Virtual Console is even more noticeable. Europe already has Mega Man and Mega Man 2, and they'll be released in Japan starting this month. It's safe to say that we'll have our chance to be gouged on those two games soon enough.No telling when or if they'll ever get around to the other "Mega Man 9."
Mega Man & Bass, as it was called in its American Game Boy Advance version, or Rockman & Forte as it was known in Japan, is an extremely odd game in theory. After Capcom released Mega Man 8 on the Saturn and PlayStation, they decided to put a new Mega Man game on the Super Famicom. It even stars a new character introduced in Mega Man 8, meaning that Mega Man shares the spotlight with some new guy who nobody cares about.
In storyline terms, Bass is Dr. Wily's version of Mega Man, a versatile super robot. He even has his own robot dog, Treble. He's an arrogant jerk who is obsessed with being the strongest robot ever and defeating Mega Man. In gameplay terms, he's like Mega Man, except he can't shoot while running, and he can shoot in multiple directions. In that there's a second playable character, Mega Man & Bass is a step up from Mega Man 8. Weirdly, Capcom decided to use the musical character naming convention found in the Japanese games for Bass and his dog Treble, after years of changing the names ("Rockman" becomes "Mega Man," "Blues" becomes "Proto Man," etc.) Even more weirdly, they changed the names anyway, from one musical pair ("Gospel" and "Forte") to another ("Bass" and "Treble.")The second playable character came from 8, and, surprisingly, so did two of the eight Robot Masters. Tengu Man and Astro Man from the 32-bit game are, for some reason, recruited by Mega Man & Bass antagonist King to join his stable of six new Robot Masters. For all the jokes about Robot Master ideas being recycled from game to game, it's kind of nice to see some just plain copy-pasted. The "new" robots include Pirate Man, Burner Man, Magic Man, Dynamo Man, Cold Man, and ... Ground Man.
Ground Man.
It may not have the iconic designs of the (more) classic games, but Mega Man & Bass is a real Mega Man game with new levels and new bosses. The addition of Bass and the 100 hidden in-game CDs, which provide biographical data about almost every character in the series, add tons of replayability. Not that we've ever had a problem finding a reason to replay a Mega Man game.
