Name: Rockman X3
Platform: Sega Genesis / Mega Drive
Region: China
Media: Cartridge
Controller: Gamepad
Genre: Platformer
Gametype: Pirate
Players: 1
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The last game I want to describe in greater detail here is this little gem: Rockman X3, to westerners more commonly known as Mega Man X3.

The only official Mega Man game produced for the Genesis is Capcom's Megaman: The Wily Wars (also known as Rockman Megaworld). As some of you may know, Mega Man and its spin-offs are one of the longest video game series in existence (the "classic" line up having reached number nine recently). Rockman X is the Super Nintendo version of said series and brought it to a whopping eight games in its very own right. Why did the pirate hackers choose to port part three for the Genesis? I have no idea. What I also noticed is that unlike with other hacks, the programmers responsible for this port didn't remove the logo of the original developer  it was a bit strange to see the Capcom logo pop up at the beginning.

At the first glance, the port seems to be very accurate, capturing the Mega Man feeling pretty well. You've got your standard blaster, which, in accordance with the X series, you can charge to fire off a bigger shot. You've got the Mega Man sprite and the common enemies, and also the energy- and weapon power ups. Oddly enough, there is a strange frame around the screen during play, with a different one for each stage. It seems similar to the frames in Duke Nukem 3D or Doom 32X, so I guess they have been included to reduce the number of active sprites on screen to make the game run smoother. That, or the programmers simply thought it looked nice.

However, once you play this game for a little while, you notice several rather severe changes. First, there aren't any cut scenes. The X series told a story in which stages where intersected with some cut scenes where characters exchanged dialog and scripted events took place. Though not important to the gameplay, they were one thing that distinguished that spin-off from the classic series and added a nice touch. Considering space restrictions, leaving those out of the game is quite understandable. 

Second, another staple that distinguished the X series from the classic one (at least from the earlier games) was armor upgrades that could be found throughout the stage. Mega Man could learn new abilities, and using those abilities he could find even more power ups, motivating the player to play through the stages a second or third time in order to reach that energy tank that was unreachable at the first playthrough. In this port, you have all those armor upgrades and extra abilities straight from the beginning! Without cut scenes and the search for those little extras, the main features that distinguished the X spin-off from the original series have therefore been removed entirely. (By the way, I noticed an odd thing: There seems to be a graphical glitch in which Mega Man, who you'll generally see in his maxed-out armor right from the beginning, suddenly reverts back to his regular appearance for a few milliseconds when being hit!

Does that mean that for some reason, the programmers included all sprites and animations for Mega Man, even if some of them have become superfluous since the armor extras don't exist anymore? This just seems lazy and shoddy!)

Also, enemies don't randomly drop power ups, which makes the game pretty hard, but it isn't such a big deal since the programmers have retained all the "fixed" goodies from the original level design. However, there is one cut that really bothers me. The main distinguishing features of the entire Mega Man series were the weapons and boss system: After each level you can choose which boss to tackle next. After defeating a boss you get his weapon, which is particularly powerful against one (or two) of the other bosses. So you had a number of weapons, each with their own energy bar, that you could switch around as you liked or needed to.

Well, guess what? For some reason, this feature has been removed! The only weapon you'll have for the entire game is the standard (chargeable) blaster! You don't get any boss weapons, so the entire premise behind the selection of which boss to tackle next has become moot. Even worse, whereas in the original game the final boss only became selectable after you had completed every stage at least once, in the Genesis port you can directly jump into the boss stage! And since the boss weaknesses don't apply anymore, and you can only use your blaster, the strength of each boss has been significantly reduced, making the final battle laughably easy in the process!

So, what we have here is a Mega Man port where the programmers took a Mega Man game, kept the sprites and levels, and removed all the mechanics that made this series stand out amongst all the other platformers out there! It seems the programmers weren't quite up to the task of capturing the essence of capturing and adequately adapting the original game mechanics to the Genesis, which seems to be a lot harder to do as it is the case with a classic jump-'n-run. Considering this, however, it was a very odd choice to try and adapt Mega Man in the first place. 

http://sega-16.com/feature_page.php?id=380&title=Hacks+&+Homebrews:+Unofficial+Ports