Mega Man for DOS is only slightly better than no Mega Man at all
My imagination is a powerful thing. For example, I can conceive of several erotic situations involving Transformers. I can pretend, against incontrovertible evidence, that I am able to function in human society. However, a standard child’s imagination is magnitudes more powerful than my own. A child can believe that a dollar store knock-off Transformer is anywhere near as sexy as the real thing. They can also convince themselves that Mega Man on DOS is equatable to the NES version.
DOS gamers often got the shaft. Although we’d get games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom before everyone else, not every IBM PC-Compatible user was armed with a 386. Developers often made their games to run on older 8-bit processors. A lot of games, even ones that were on 8-bit hardware to begin with, had to be scaled back for the sake of compatibility. This rarely ever went well.
Mega Man on DOS is a pretty poor conversion for that reason and more, and you’d have to squint really hard to convince yourself it’s anywhere near the NES classic.
I generally hold the Mega Man series to be the gold standard for 8-bit platformers. There are better games, such as Castlevania, but none were as consistent with their formula as Mega Man. Your platformer had to be at least comparable to that series to really be worthwhile.
DOS got its share of decent platformers, such as 1990’s Commander Keen and 1991’s Duke Nukem. However, that genre was hardly the platform’s best. Many developers struggled with smooth screen scrolling on DOS and dedicated microcomputers, so while adventure games and RPGs worked well, the side-scrollers were a bit less common.
With that in mind, Mega Man was developed by one guy, Stephen J. Rozner. And while Mega Man on DOS is a visibly easy
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