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Rockman 3 - Alpha

Levels: Good

Graphics: Okay (palette change)

Music: No Change

Enemies: Good (few changes)

Bosses: Okay (few changes)

Weapons: No Change

Castle: Okay

Difficulty: MEDIUM (occasionally MEDIUM-HARD)

Comments: If you want to see how to get great mileage from relatively few tweaks to Mega Man 3, Alpha can show you how it's done. It's a fairly difficult hack that doesn't go overboard on spikes or annoying enemies, testing you instead with its tricky stage design. Be forewarned that enemies and bosses received a boost to their HP & damage, so you'll have to use everything in your arsenal or death will come quicker than you might expect. Thankfully Alpha offsets this by tossing out frequent E-tanks... which you'll wanna stock up on, as the Doc Robot stages have none (and Shadow Doc Robot's stage is a menace). Occasionally you'll run into some boring filler screens and the Wily Castle goes overboard on difficulty (Break Man is an unfair SOB), but other than that Alpha is a pretty decent "hard mode" for MM3.

I was impressed with Snake Man's stage and the vanilla enemies there. This is a thought out hack that made use of the enemies in bright ways.

Some stages have you up against vanilla enemies that probably should be defeated with the robot master's weapon, but you may not mind this.

Enemies appear in stages they originally didn't appear in and palettes are changed to very good looking colors. I don't think any vanilla enemies or bosses have modified behavior.