Poking at New Mega Man Zero Collection Details

Just as IGN had gotten their hands on a playable copy of Mega Man Zero Collection a few days ago, so too did 1UP’s Jeremy Parish. And while IGN’s story didn’t say very much about the game beyond some basic facts, 1UP’s version has proven to be a bit more revealing.
Some items of note which 1UP points out include the game’s screen resolution, which he confirms as running at the Game Boy Advance’s 240×160 instead of the DS’s 256×192, just as some have pointed out from the game’s screenshots. They add that the black border approach was taken here, and that “it ultimately doesn’t matter that much, but as tough as these games are, every extra pixel of reaction time counts.”

Elaborated on is the game’s easy mode, which is described as an arranged mode, which as we know forces players to go through the four games sequentially. It’s noted that the mode is “super easy,” and designed to appeal to novices of the series, and is compared to the easy modes found in the ZX series:

“You start out with a massive health bar and the ability to fire off charged shots, and you don’t even have to think about strategy for at least the first few bosses: Just rush in, spam your attacks, and you’ll win before they even knock you down to half your health.”

Naturally, this may be enough to gall anyone masochistic enough to crave the spit-in-your-face sadistic difficulty some of the titles proudly boasted in the past; fortunately, for those people, the four games are available in their original form, and can be played in whatever order you please.

Another interesting point of note comes from the comments, as one 1UP user asked about the prospect of mapping functions to the DS’s face buttons. Parish responds:

You can’t directly set actions to X and Y, but you can choose to have X and Y mirror A and B. Which is kind of the same thing, just not as intuitive. The proper control scheme of Y to attack, X to jump is possible, though. However, you can’t map all four actions (attack, jump, dash, toggle weapons) to the face buttons at the same time, so two actions have to be set to L and R.

This may be disappointing, particularly to those who grew up mastering the X games on the Super NES and PlayStation consoles.

Other than those points of interest, not much else is revealed, besides further confirmation of no blood. If anything else of note comes up in the next 12 days before the game’s release, we’ll be sure to let you know here.

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