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Rockman 3: Extra

Levels: Excellent

Graphics: Okay (palette change)

Music: No Change

Enemies: Eh (more health to minibosses)

Bosses: Good (weakness & room changes)

Weapons: No Change

Castle: Good

Difficulty: EASY-MEDIUM (Wily 2 is MEDIUM-HARD)

Comments: Don't sleep on this poorly-named hack—Extra is brilliant when it comes to vanilla level design. Stages are clever and dangerous, with their gimmicks shuffled around to shake things up. Better yet is that the pit-to-enemy ratio is perfect, testing you without going overboard in either direction. Boss rooms have been slightly altered (where applicable), giving foes like Spark Man and Magnet Man a new flow. Sadly by the time you break into the Wily Castle, you've seen the best the hack has to offer as the Wily bosses and final three levels are basically unchanged. Despite that, Extra is certainly on the better end of Mega Man 3 hacks I've completed. It's a great starting point for someone that's beaten Mega Man 3 and yearns for a harder (and smarter!) experience.

This is an interesting hack for the way that it mixes things up. I've played Mega Man 3 about a hundred times by now, and when I go after the Doc Robots, they're always in the same 4 stages. This hack puts them in the other 4 stages, which is neat by itself. Well, except for Hard Man; for some reason, Gemini Man is still Gemini Man. Anyway, the level design is pretty good; it's very challenging, but it's the good kind of challenging that can be played without using states for the most part. There are new palettes on everything, including weapons and for the most part, they're pretty; my personal favorites are Needle Man's stage, which looks almost like it could be a round in Game B of Hogan's Alley, and Snake Man's stage, which is entirely blue. The robot masters are the same, but their weaknesses have changed, and often to weapons that work a lot better on them than the originals; the final boss has a pretty clever solution, too. I also think that this hack fixes that dumb glitch that causes Top Spin's ammunition to be drained too quickly. This is definitely worth checking out, not just because it's good, but also because it's pretty creative.

One of the best level hack I ever played.

The level design is very polish, all stages, bosses and weapons have new colours and new weakness chains .

The enemy distribution is great as well. They place enemies that don´t appear in that stage (which is a good touch) and in fewer numbers, give opportunity to use another enemy.

About the level design, I only had 2 issues on it. One of it is Shadow´s stage, with a magnet enemy section where you have to ride on him dodging lots of magnets and parachute guys. The problem here is that the section is quite long, so it can take a while to get through, but even so isn´t that bad.

The other one is in Wily 2, which can be hard to get through without E-tanks, but beyond that, the levels are very well done.

I had a good fun with this hack, and I believe you guys will have too.