Street Fighter X Mega Man now available for free

Capcom has released its latest crossover—Street Fighter X Mega Man—for free on the Capcom Unity Mega Man page. The game is released in celebration of both franchises, namely Street Fighter and Mega Man.

Instead of being a fighting game, Street Fighter X Mega Man is a traditional Mega Man game where the iconic Street Fighter characters like Ryu, Chun Li, Dhalsim and Blanka are bosses.

Ready to make Mega Man stretch like Dhalsim?

The game also features an 8-bit soundtrack from Luke "A_Rival" Esquivel, who has blended tunes from Street Fighter and Mega Man to make a new soundtrack. Examples of the sounds include Flash Man's music mixed with Ryu and Snake Man's music mixed with Dhalsim.

If you choose, you can also join the community for the game on Capcom's forums. There you can discuss things like strategy and what order to tackle bosses in. One of the most notable things about the release is that it lacks any DRM. You don't even have to log in to any account. The game is yours for just a couple of clicks.

The last fighting game made by Capcom was Street Fighter X Tekken. As the name suggests, the game mashed characters from both franchises in a Street Fighter-esque 2D fighting game. All the characters from Tekken—while retaining their movesets—had undergone massive retooling in order to let them fight against the likes of Ryu and his fireballs. While the game was commercially successful, Capcom drew a lot of flak from fans over the inclusion of on-disc DLC.

The game had included many of the characters that were planned as DLC on the disk of the game, and this had irked players a great deal as the characters were already made playable and should’ve been included in the game from release without the payment barrier.

Capcom had defended this action with the statement in April, "At Capcom, we value our customers and make every effort to resolve customer complaints. SFxT has an enormous amount of content, fully developed and available for play and enjoyment immediately on-disc. Given the 38 characters available for full play, as well as multiple play modes, SFxT provides great value for all players from day one.”

"While Capcom is sorry that some of its fans are not happy about the chosen method of delivery for the DLC, we believe that this method will provide more flexible and efficient gameplay throughout the game's lifecycle. There is effectively no distinction between the DLC being 'locked' behind the disc and available for unlocking at a later date, or being available through a full download at a later date, other than delivery mechanism."

Capcom had also recently revealed details about an upcoming patch for Street Fighter X Tekken. The patch, which will be out in January 2013, will be making large changes to the balance of the game along with some key tweaks to the gameplay.

The main goal of the update is to make matches quick. Street Fighter X Tekken has faced issues with matches being too long and winners being decided because of a time out. With this patch, it will be possible to start fighting as soon as the word 'fight' disappears at the start of the round. Throws have also been made faster and Boost Combo close-ups have been eliminated. This is good news as the close-ups were one of the reasons that matches were too long. The game would prevent any other action during the close-up while the round timer still kept ticking.