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We'd love to live inside our computers. Rubbing pixel to pixel with our nudey image library of Catalina while feeling the gentle tickle of the contents of our My Music folder tingling along our bodies would be pretty neat.

Or maybe we're just drunk. Either way, Mega Man's GameCube debut serves as a dire warning that life on the inside of a hard drive might not be the paradise we'd expected.

Old Boots 'N' Nails
Mixing the traditional platform game content of the classic Mega Man games with the strategic item collection and usage of the recent GBA games is at least a brilliant idea. You have to explore the Net and collect and use different chips that have an awesome array of different effects.

Some serve as long-range attacks, others arc to reach enemies beneath you, or serve as shields against attack. You can only carry five chips at one time, and of the huge total available, you can only access those five from a folder of 20. The chips are then selected at random at the start of each stage and at specific points during a level.

It might be 2D and fairly plain looking, but the action is addictive and the chip management is a cool RPG twist. The one real problem is that the game's difficulty level is pitched way too high. We're talking Everest here. The visuals might look a bit Fisher-Price but the game plays more like Smith & Wesson.

Hardcore players will lap up the challenge but those less willing to persevere will want to move on to something more accessible while they lick their wounds.