Introduction
MMI MMII
A giant step up from the rather badly made Mega Man II and still far better than the often pretty rough Dr. Wily's Revenge, Mega Man III is the first Game Boy Mega Man I would call a very good game. It is well-polished, looks and sounds great for the system, and shows incredibly well how skilled the designers really are at making levels. As in their first outing (the aforementioned Dr. Wily's Revenge), they often use this skill to make the stages pretty damn challenging, but here more than ever fully in the realms of the reasonable.
Still, I consider this overall the hardest 8-bit Mega Man. It will test your platforming skills to the limit. Hence the thread title. As I really like playing it, however, and have done so quite a lot, more than any other handheld title, I'll do my best to not look bad at it. As an added challenge, I'm even going to tackle stages only with the last special weapon gotten, though I am going to go all-out for the final one.
Also, I will colour everything by adjusting the emulator's palettes, for hopefully your viewing pleasure. It's not easy to recreate the NES stages with just four colours, I hope it turns out okay.
Without further ado, I'll let the videos speak for themselves (that's a lie, I actually talk a lot in them).
Videos
Music
Minakuchi did a bang-up job in porting the originals, and their original compositions are fantastic, too. As always, big thanks to Bean for uploading the tracks!
- Snake Man
Shadow Man
Gemini Man
Spark Man
Wily Base Entrance
Dust Man
Skull Man
Dive Man
Drill Man
Mega Man Hunter #02 - Punk
Wily Marine Fortress
Title Screen
Stage Select & Start
Boss Battle 1
Boss Battle 2
Got Weapon (!)
Credits - Justice March
Extra links and other stuff
Frame-by-frame analysis of why Up&Downs are just plain evil in Dust Man's stage.
Trizophenie, as in the MMII thread, tries to effort-kill some of the robot masters - this time, with rather mixed results, as MMIII is just so much better.
He also streamed a full playthrough of the game with me co-commentating. You can find it on YouTube here.
Pizzatime provided a remix of this game's title theme!
I wanted to preserve this rather enthusiastic post in its entirety:
Skunkrocker posted:
Alright, hands down the best mother fucking character in all of Mega Man, behold the awesomeness that is PUNK! So fucking awesome. And of course, double checkout his badass theme 'Get the Punk Out' which you can hear the best updated in Mega Man 10 or given the VRC6 treatment here in this Youtube video by Danooct. Punk is both mine and Keiji Inafune's (co-creator and illustrator of the Mega Man games) favorite character, hence why he is the only Mega Man Killer to get a NetNavi counterpart. He is also usually my skin in Megaman 8 Bit Deathmatch on the few occasions I decide to boot it up. He's the reason I have been so excited about this LP! Forget the rest, Punk is too cool for school.* He's even more awesome in Mega Man 10 than he is here, with some updated attacks and Screw Crusher being better than ever! However, he is the BEST in Rockman 4 Minus Infinity, which you can see in LP format here by Dectilon and Phiggle, as one of the bosses guarding the Cossack Shield Generators, and he's awesome there too. Sadly, outside of some mangas, it seems Punk hasn't gotten the recognition I truly feel he has deserved. Sure he's gotten a bit more attention than any of the other Mega Man Killers, but I'd love to see his character expanded a lot more than just "he's evil, he has spikes, and he will fuck you up."
* Literally, he hates the PTA, as evidenced in his CD Data from Megaman and Bass\Rockman and Forte.
And finally, as with the first GB game, FreezingInferno shows off here how the Mega Man 10 extra stage interprets the final level of this game.