BREAKING NEWS: You heard it here first!

My friend in the gaming news industry (you know, GameInformer and the like) recently confirmed for me something truly epic. This combined with a confirmed article on Kotaku (since removed due to copyright claims from the Church of Scientology claims of breaking an NDA) has convinced me, crazy as it is.

Rockman EXE: Network Transmission 2 is in the works for PC.

NT2 will be a side scroller directly adapted from Mega Man 2.

"Think of it more as a remake of Mega Man 2 and less of an EXE game," a programmer on the project said. "It's completely non-canon. All the characters will be replaced with their EXE counterparts, and chips will replace Master Weapons. Also, the game won't be nearly as short as Mega Man 2, but I can't say any more on that."

Later in the interview: "The game's been a bit hard to program. Capcom of America doesn't have a lot of the original resources anymore, and since there's still a lot of rivalry between CoA and CoJ, we can't exactly ask them, so we've been having to get stuff from the community. That's not to say that the final build is going to be using MIDIs like this one, but until we can get somebody here to talk to CoJ, it's going to be hell ripping stuff from the original roms. This project's going to be using stuff from everything on a new architecture... quite honestly, I'd be surprised if it ever sees the light of day."

A little digging uncovered a beta build of the game, which I have uploaded for all to see/play here.

The game runs a bit slowly, and it's clearly not on the original engine, but it's pretty good all around. A and S control Rock, space pauses. It has joypad support, but no title screen as of yet.

Also, be warned that the ending is a tad... anticlimactic.