State of The Mega Man Network – January 2025

It’s been an entire month — more, actually — since I last updated this site. And even then, that was only with a new episode of “Legends of the Halcyon Era”, which is not something I like to think of as a foundation for this site, but rather something to help further enhance what I bring to the table.

As we stand on the precipice of the year that will be 2025 and look back on the year that was… I feel like I didn’t bring much to the table. Not as much as I would have liked. And I’ll get into that.

At the end of 2023, what was the incoming year-to-be held a lot of promise. For one thing, I was eager to follow up on my Mega Man X anniversary-timed announcement of “Beyond 21XX.” But aside from a sliver of the setting being featured in the “Legends of the Halcyon Era” stories over the coming year, I completely failed to capitalize on that. I hope I’ll be able to remedy this soon.

Speaking of “Legends of the Halcyon Era,” it had a bit of a rocky year as well.

Updates were spotty throughout, even with a deliberate plan to cut updates down to once per month. January featured a “story thus far” recap post, and I just completely missed May entirely. June only had an update by way of “Legends of the Sword“, a short one-shot stock story I had on hand that I’d written as a gift for my recurring character and cover artist for the series, Victor Campan, featuring his characters.

And due in part to budgetary issues (more on that soon), I was not able to get the last episode of the year out before the ball dropped on the end of 2024. It’s still in-progress, and I’m working to make it extra-special.

I wound up writing fewer — hell, did I write any? — of my regular essay-type articles this year. (Answer: Yes, there were two of them.) That doesn’t mean that things were slow for new content around here, however, at least in the early goings.

Following last year’s tremendous breakthroughs in video game preservation by RockmanCosmo and his associates, particularly of mobile Rockman games from Japan, other types of preservation within the community emerged. One would be the ongoing efforts to translate, document, and preserve the myriad entries from the “Mega Man Legends 3 Project” Devroom entries by rabidrodent and LaytonPuzzle27.

Another came from me personally, as I kicked off the TMMN Archive, an ongoing effort to preserve the press releases and marketing of Mega Man and Mega Man-related titles from the late ’90s through today. I have most releases on-hand, with the earliest being the inaugural Mega Man 8 press release, but if you know of any others that precede that, feel free to drop me a line at the.mega.man.network (at) gmail.com! You will be credited (unless, of course, you don’t want to be)!

To my regret, I only got one review out this past year, and that was for the exceptional Berserk Boy. I hoped to get more done, as I have a backlog of games (and other things) to cover, so hopefully 2025 will smile more favorably on me for that.

On the video side of things, we continued TMMN-TV’s Twitch streams of “Nadia & David’s Mega Man Mayhem” by wrapping up Mega Man 6 and the NES era of titles, and wrapping up with a color mod of Mega Man IV for the Game Boy. There would probably have been more, but I wound up screwing everything up for our October Halloween Castlevania marathon by not noticing the capture device’s input and outputs had been reversed, and we spent November making up for that.

Incidentally, we’ve be kicked off 2025 with the Game Boy Color-ized “Mega Man World V DX” on the stream. It’s already up over on the YouTube channel, TheMegaManNetwork, sound issues and all (that we’ll hopefully be able to fix by the time we continue it), but I’ll be making a dedicated post for it here soon as well. It was a fun time with a classic game that I’m not as familiar with.

That’s not the only video I’ve had a hand in creating, however. I’ve been gradually self-teaching myself the art of editing, which you can see a bit of in the videos I’ve helped Random O’ Panda make (one of which I still haven’t made a post for yet — ack). Unfortunately, that’s come to a bit of a stall for reasons I’ll get into momentarily…

So, this all begs the question: “Why have things been so erratic around here? Especially towards the end of the year?”

Well, as I mentioned back in October, I’ve been picking up some extra work from UDON Entertainment. Specifically, I helped research art for the upcoming Mega Man Legacies Official Complete Works, which will be published sometime this year. That wound up taking a lot more time than I expected, but hey, I tried to be as thorough as I could. On top of that, there was copy editing for the Mega Man X DiVE Official Complete Works book, also due in 2025. And finally… well, I can’t talk about that yet. You’ll see, hopefully soon enough.

Legacies occupied a good chunk of the first part of the year. The second… sigh. Hm. Hoo-boy…

In the aforementioned October update, I told about some stuff that was going on, a lot of bad and heavy things in a relatively short period of time. Tango’s passing hit hard, and probably affected me the most negatively.

And it wasn’t just Tango. It feels like so many friends and people I know online have lost cats this year, and some dogs and other pets, too. But a lot of cats. 2024 really had it in for cats.

After that, so much has gone on. We’re usually doing alright for ourselves, but a lot of freelance work dried up, leaving us in the lurch for a while. On top of that, there was difficulty with getting paid for work that was done, thanks to some archaic systems the American companies used, paired with Canada Post going on strike, meaning the check they’d normally send wasn’t going to get to us any time soon. We still haven’t even exchanged Christmas gifts yet, on account of not being able to get stuff in time.

I’ve had to put my video editing on hold because it looks like my PC might be experiencing hard drive failure, and I’m worried about running anything more taxing than Firefox on it and running out the clock. That also meant not getting to help out with the 5 Islands translation patch as I’d wanted to, or playing DiVE Offline lately, either. Getting a new one is a priority, but slow going.

I also had a nice little bit of stress/anxiety pulling myself together to do what I needed to for Nintendo Force and another project, which I can’t talk about yet, but hopefully that will come out before too long. Suffice to say it’s very, very big for me, personally. Thanks to some help from my wife, I was able to pull through it, though, but not without its own challenges.

For one thing, while in that final stretch, I found out a longtime friend of mine had passed away recently. Matthew Green of Press The Buttons and the corresponding Power Button podcast (of which it was always my pleasure to appear on and talk about Mega Man, and other things) lost his 14-month battle with cancer at the end of November. I found out second-hand a little over a month later.

His last post on Bluesky just weeks prior stated “I finished my radiation regime today! Still two more weeks of pain and side effects to come though. It lingers”, so the news really blindsided me. I’ve only recently started to be more active on Bluesky, though not through my own personal account, and so didn’t get to interact with him much prior to his passing. Suffice to say, I have regrets.

I hope to do something, say something more about him in the future. But for now, rest in peace, my friend. You’ve earned it. And my condolences to your wife and cats.

Did I mention the insomnia yet? Yeah. I think I’d been dealing with that increasingly since Tango passed, as I basically destroyed my sleep schedule in order to keep an eye on him. Now, you would think that maybe not being able to sleep when you try, you’d be able to do more work, but for something like writing… it kind of affects you mentally.

There might have been some holiday depression in there, too. I’m not even sure. Who can even tell when there’s all that other stuff going on, right?

Is all that a lot? I feel like it’s substantial.

Am I looking for sympathy out of all of this? No, not really. Some understanding from anyone who might feel let down by performance this year might be nice, but honestly? I feel like I’ve managed to push through, and here with the sun rising on 2025, I feel like I’ve come out the other side.

I’ve gotten my insomnia under control, more or less. I’m going to sleep earlier and waking up before noon now, at least. I’ve gotten those tasks done. I’ve grieved. I’m less stressed out now.

More work has been coming in, so things are kind of evening out, though if you’d like to give us a helping hand, links are on the right. Keeping this place going isn’t super cheap, so any help is appreciated, and one of my goals for this year is to not only try to get back to a semblance of normalcy around here, but also give more incentive for supporting on Patreon (I’ve said it before, but running this place ain’t cheap, and I don’t want to have to bring back ads unless I have to).

That includes some content appearing there first. Not things like TMMN Archive or Legends of the Halcyon Era, but essays, reviews, maybe if I can get any of that podcast or video content I’ve been trying to off the ground? Stuff like that will appear there a week early for supporters to enjoy. I’ll try to find other stuff to make it worthwhile, too.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I mostly wanted to write this to clear the air, set some goals for myself in the coming year, and get things off my chest.