eiji Inafune wanted to take Mega Man back to his old-school roots in his latest outing, and that's immediately obvious; the game looks exactly like it was transported here from the NES era. Capcom says the game was surprisingly expensive to develop despite its deliciously low-grade visuals and classic MIDI soundtrack. (The development team had to reverse engineer many of the antiquated tools required to develop the game through software, which was apparently no easy task.)

We played a couple of the levels, and it's exactly what you'd expect to see in a Mega Man 1 or 2 game. He doesn't have any kind of dash move, and it's brutally difficult. If you've gotten soft in today's age of checkpoints and quicksaves, prepare to face the game over screen repeatedly. Familiar elements like disappearing platforms and bottomless pits are back. Even old-school graphical hiccups and other glitches have been included to complete the authentic-seeming experience.

If you like old Mega Man games and you want to keep your skills sharp, look for it as a download on the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 in the next few months.