Dr. Wily strikes again —

What went wrong with this week’s horrendous Mega Man Mobile?

This isn't a complaint about touchscreen controls in retro games. It's much worse.

What went wrong with this week’s horrendous Mega Man Mobile?
Capcom Mobile

In the wake of the NES Classic's holiday sellout across North America, another beloved '80s gaming property, Mega Man, offered a major nostalgia trip this week. The series' first six NES games rolled out on Wednesday for both iOS and Android, with each classic game costing a mere $1.99.

Sadly, the ports are so bad that even $2 a pop is asking a lot.

Capcom Mobile itself published a series of trailers for the games after they appeared on mobile storefronts, and those trailers looked iffy, mostly thanks to choppy framerates. Sadly, those weren't due to a bad capture; that's actually how the games run. All six games currently appear to run at inconsistent frame rates, typically 30fps or less, which is brutal for a classic series that relies so heavily on precise jumps and tricky enemies.

Worse, on iOS, the games' iconic songs have been butchered by apparently broken sound emulation, with many tones sounding entirely off-key and running at the incorrect tempo. I spent $2 to confirm the poor performance in Mega Man 2, the most iconic of the games. The visual refresh was as bad for me as it appears in this direct-feed clip from Dutch gaming writer Daan Koopman. However, I was also able to confirm that the Android version has better sound reproduction, at least while running on an HTC 10.

Mega Man 2 on iOS and Android actually runs as poorly as this trailer looks.

None of these issues have anything to do with the ports' touchscreen controls, which most retro gaming fans will insist can never compare to the feel of tactile buttons. However, the port even manages to bungle this up, because the new mobile games' "auto" fire option doesn't seem to work (you'd assume it would make Mega Man automatically fire his default blaster while jumping around, yet it doesn't). I would have appreciated the devs getting this right, as it would make the emulated touchscreen buttons a little more tolerable, especially in enemy-filled levels like MM2's Air Man stage. Between that and the dodgy frame rates, the current Mega Man mobile ports are nigh unplayable.

Each Mega Man port requires over 45MB of data to emulate games that originally topped out at 256K, even though the graphics are running at their original resolution.

A Beeline to performance issues?

Most puzzling is that Capcom has actually ported a Mega Man game to mobile platforms before—specifically, Mega Man 2, in 2009. That version had so-so controls but ran far better than this week's releases. The seven-year-old port, of course, was designed for the iPhone 3G and 3GS, which have a fraction of the processing power of today's phones.

So, what gives? The issue may stem from Capcom turning its "Mobile" operation over to a company formerly known as Beeline Games. That Japanese developer's home page, which doesn't mention work on the Mega Man series, contains a scant few crapware games, including a licensed Ghostbusters puzzle game, and nothing in the way of ports from classic systems.

What's more, Beeline's site has clearly not been built out for the company's rebranding under the new Capcom Mobile name, as evidenced by a zombie "contact" page that reads, via Google Translate, "This website is closed due to website relocation. We will automatically move to the new site below." The listed URL in that case is capcommobile.com.

Capcom Mobile's Twitter account, along with Capcom's primary blog, have yet to respond to users' complaints. Since multiple trailers were uploaded with choppy frame rates, it's hard to believe that the developer is unaware of the issues. We have reached out to Capcom for comment, and we will update this report with any response.

Channel Ars Technica