Muri Review for PC

Any of you familiar with the musical stylings of Team Nekokan, and in particular their ode to how stupidly difficult Mega Man 1 was, understand what we mean by "muri." It's impossible. It's unfeasible. It's a *** situation to be in. Humans shouldn't be doing this. They should be out curing cancer or something. Not, y'know, using time and resources in 2013 to create the best platformer your Tandy's ever seen. Straight out of the late 80's, having swiped a cola from Commander Keen, it's Muri. In every sense of the word. Despite looking like a hot mess by today's standards, Muri actually shows a lot of polish compared to the games it's made to resemble. War has broken out, Mars has just up'n vanished, and now you're in a super-powered cyber suit in an attempt to make it back to Earth and put things right... for some value of right. Maybe you're still in the process of breaking everything. Maybe your daughter's here to put a stop to your rampage. Ever think of that? Seriously, plots never really mattered in this era anyway unless you were playing King's Quest or something, and you're patently not. What does matter is that the graphics are dated, the soundtrack doesn't exist at all, and you're left with tinny sound effects that made what Capcom and Nintendo were doing on the NES sound like Bach and Sibelius, respectively. Master race, my Crash Bomb. Awright, I've said my piece, partly because I still hurt from the wounds the super-bad PC version of Mega Man left on my developing consciousness. This is from when PC gaming was a joke, an afterthought, in the face of the emergent technologies like the Super Nintendo and the Genesis. And yet Ludosity have managed to not just do the period well, but the game itself shows polish beyond its years... which is good, because this thing is about two and a half decades beyond its years. There's a lot of attention paid to these sprites and backgrounds, even if you go the ultra-traditionalist route and play it in 16 frames per second. Some of the more active scenes, like this chaotic death from above, would've slowed any computer of the 80's to a crawl, a near standstill, but in today's atmosphere that's the last thing on your mind. All you want to know is how the hell to take shelter from the onslaught and what you'll have to kill while you're down there. To this end, you're equipped with six forms of weaponry, all but the most basic of which must be reloaded via pickups in the field. Alongside these armaments are plenty of arbitrary score pickups, ranging from 50 points for this blue thing we called a floppy disk, kids, all the way up through a thousand for a monitor displaying what we grognards refer to as a "DOS Prompt." And if you want a 100% rating on a stage, you're going to have to find every single one of 'em, which will likely involve blasting through fake walls and searching all over for hidden passages. And that's awesome. No time limit, no craptacular hurry-up mechanic; you wanna explore, you explore, dog. And then you grab your friends and go re-create what you just played with Lego because that's the natural way. And then you try to share tips on that freakin' Mega Man game and learn that - you were right - no one in the county can get past those platforms in Guts Man's stage.