The Adventures of MicroMan

2 Micro-Aged
I had completely forgotten about MicroMan before I found this page. There are only a few of us out there that might remember it – MicroMan is a relic of the days of Windows 3.1, AOL 14.4 kbps connections, and the days when I thought that edutainment titles were fun. Out of a sort of strange curiosity, I downloaded the game to see if it was anything like I remembered. After all, it was a mere 300 kilobytes – effectively zero download time.

What I discovered when I booted it up was twofold. First, this relic still worked perfectly on Windows Vista without any compatibility settings. I considered this a brief victory – after all, so many great games I’ve played in the past just don’t like Vista, for whatever reason. As I began playing, I noticed the first thing I had forgotten about MicroMan. It’s slow. The game feels like you’re jumping about on the moon. I had previously attributed this to slow processors back in the days of my 386, but now it just feels peculiar. The controls are relatively responsive and simple – move, jump, shoot, nothing out of the ordinary for a platformer – but the crawl at which the main character moves is almost maddening. On the one hand, if you interpret it as a being running through an antiquated computer… okay, it’s still maddening.

The graphics are serviceable and clean, but aren’t anything special. Most of the animation is jerky, although better than you’d think from a game that’s smaller than most JPEG files. The minimalistic sound doesn’t get in the way, and that’s about the best thing I can say about it.

The bottom line of any game is the fun factor, and it’s here that MicroMan is a mixed bag. Back in the day, I loved it, because I really didn’t know any better. It was fun because I could actually play it without dying every four seconds, and my computer could actually run it. Now, it’s… it’s slow. It’s really, really farking slow. Unforgivably slow. I keep telling myself I’ll shut up about it, but I cannot forgive the sheer slowness. It turns what might have been a salvageable platform adventure into a slogging chore.

There are worse than MicroMan out there – far worse. Especially given its advanced age. But really, you don’t want to find them. The best thing you can do with MM is give it to your kid brother to cut his teeth on platform games, and then give him Super Mario when he’s ready for a real platformer.