Good news for fans of the Blue Bomber old and new because a group of dedicated users managed to archive everything from the 2006 PlayStation Portable release of Mega Man Powered Up before its servers shut down last November. Capcom announced the shutdown with less than two months before the deadline leaving fans with little time to sort through the tens of thousands of user-created Mega Man levels from the past sixteen years. Through official means users could download and keep playing levels after November 30th but it would be impossible to save them all to a single PSP.
Even a year before the announcement Mega Man fan and coder Miles made a PC app to browse and download the game’s many user-created levels, enabling the contents of Capcom’s servers to be more easily perused, and more importantly, archived. In January Miles and a small team released the fruits of their efforts on Archive.org in a collection of 83,129 user-created levels in a whopping 10 gigabyte download.
It isn’t quite for the faint of heart and you’ll need some patience to get things set up but there is an included database file that lets you search and browse levels by region and rating. As they put it “one could very easily make and host a user-friendly website [with this archive] to search and download historical Mega Man Powered Up Levels”, though the team admits they have no plans to do this themselves.
Thanks to Sard who originally mentioned Miles’ project and Sardaukar who linked us to the Rockman Corner post about the Archive’s release.