Sixteen years after its PlayStation Portable debut, Capcom has announced that online services for Mega Man Powered Up (known as RockMan RockMan in Asian territories) will be shutting down on November 30th. Like LittleBigPlanet and Super Mario Maker, the shutdown will mean the loss of thousands — if not tens or hundreds of thousands — of user-created Mega Man stages. Capcom also released several official stage packs, promotional levels, and character costumes through this online functionality.
Fortunately, an enterprising fan created a small app that simulates the online menu from the game and allows users to search and download much of this content to a PC. It can then be loaded into a PSP emulator or even copied to a memory card and imported into the game on real PSP hardware. This app will also lose its functionality after the November 30th deadline but it means that most of the user-created levels will probably be archived before the shutdown. However, the app’s help screen does point out that some of Capcom’s official content is not accessible via the app and it does stand a chance of being lost or unlockable in the future.
Thanks to Wakayama_PT for submitting the news, I’ve added the date to the Watch List calendar.