ExecutiveMan

Overview

Firing a buster shot mid-leap across a pit is the move the whole game is built around — you sprint, you jump, and you loose a volley of pellets at whatever corporate-themed robot is waiting on the next ledge. ExecutiveMan is a near-faithful JavaScript recreation of Capcom's NES Mega Man, written by Cameron Henlin and first released in 2014 under a BSD license on GitHub. It runs on CreateJS (EaselJS for rendering, with SoundJS and PreloadJS alongside it), ships a Closure-compiled build, and loads its stages from editable Tiled level files. The engine aims for what its own README calls "nearly 100% correct NES MegaMan gameplay" — side-scrolling multi-screen stages, a bouncing buster projectile, touch and gamepad support, and one-on-one boss confrontations against a roster of workplace-themed 'Man' characters such as WasteMan, AccountingMan, and VisionaryMan. It is aimed squarely at players who want that 8-bit Mega Man feel — momentum-heavy jumps, knockback on contact damage, and a chiptune soundtrack — without installing anything, and the project is explicitly hackable: levels are plain JSON, so a campaign can be edited or extended once you grasp the format.

How to Play

Move with the Left and Right arrow keys, press Space to jump (a second tap chains into a double-jump), and tap C to fire your buster. P pauses the action. Pick a stage from the title screen — or jump straight to one with the ?level=N query in the URL — then traverse the themed screens, destroy or dodge the enemies, and defeat the stage's boss to clear the level. Touch devices get on-screen left, right, jump, and shoot buttons, and Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer pick up attached joysticks and gamepads automatically. Every key is remappable from the Options screen, and your bindings and save data persist to localStorage between sessions.

Tips & Strategy

Lead your jumps with buster fire. Because the projectile travels slower than you sprint, a shot released at the apex of a hop catches an enemy the instant you land, which is the cleanest way to clear a ledge without eating contact damage and knockback. Treat the double-jump as a correction tool rather than a default — most gaps clear on a single hop, so save the second tap for an unexpected projectile or a mid-air dodge you didn't see coming. The README itself calls out the one mechanic that did not make the cut: there are no ladders, because they would need up and down inputs that break touch play, so don't waste a hop searching for one. Boss rooms are one-on-one pattern fights, not damage races — read the tell, land two or three shots, then reposition, since contact knockback will shove you out of a combo if you greed for a fourth. Save progress is localStorage-based, so clearing the most complete stages (WasteMan, AccountingMan, VisionaryMan) first leaves you free to practice the rougher, half-finished levels without losing your foothold.