I decided to give Mega Man: The Wily Wars another chance, as I do after all have the game on the Genesis Mini. I thought I might have judged it a little too harshly at first, but then the crappiness set in. It's hard to give the game a pass when Wily Wars doesn't provide what people expect from the early Mega Man games... tight control and fast action. Mega Man feels kind of lethargic, which isn't such a problem when you're running down a long stretch of terra firma blasting enemies, but becomes a problem when you're trying to navigate through a difficult platforming section. You know, like the impossibly wide bottomless pit in Ice Man's stage, or the elevators that love to shaft you at the start of Guts Man's stage.
You need responsive control to make it through these hazards, and it feels like Mega Man has gained fifteen pounds in the migration to a 16-bit system. The fighting robot is not in peak fighting condition here, and although it's not immediately obvious, you start to realize it from the unsteady way he does things that came so naturally to him on the NES. His standard issue blaster is slower, switching from one special weapon to the next is arduous, and his accuracy has taken a hit, going from the bullseye every time to the outer rings of the target. It's like someone slapped a car boot on Robocop.
Like I said, it's tolerable during the game's easier sections, but by Wily's Castle you'll be spitting invective at your television set when Mega Man wastes most of his weapon energy on taking down a Big Eye that just won't die, or learning the lengthy pattern of the blocks shifting from one side of the screen to the other while fighting the Yellow Devil (no select button and no way to pause when a special weapon is onscreen means no easy way out of this pain in the ass!), or getting dusted by Evil Clone Mega Man because you can't quite fire as quickly or reliably as he does. And the Magnet Beam! What the hell did they do to the Magnet Beam? It's too slow to extend, meaning that by the time it's reached its full length, it's about to vanish, and you'll be lying in that bed of spikes you were trying to avoid rather than standing safely over them.
I remain of the opinion that Wily Wars is crap... the first three Mega Man games with a new coat of toxic lead paint. I'll concede that the ability to mix and match weapons and the new stages are brilliant ideas, but I would have given all that up to get a game that nails the basics. This doesn't, and in a Mega Man game, that's a death sentence.