Capcom isn’t fooling around, they know their market for Mega Man 9 on Xbox Live, WiiWare and PSN and its nostalgic gamers with a desire to be a kid again. Any retro gamer will tell you the old school experience must include some pixel flickers, slow down and 8-bit style bugs.
They have decided to include an optional feature to enable old school bugs on purpose. The limitations of early hardware like the NES caused situations where you would only see a limited number of creatures on the screen at any one time else things slowed down, flickered and got undesirable fast. What used to be undesired is now nostalgic!
“Yeah, there were some things, like you couldn’t have more than three enemies on the screen at once, so we had to make sure that that’s how it stayed in our game. In the part with the dragon with the flame, [there should be] flickering, and whatnot,” noted the game’s producer. “In the options of this game, you can adjust that, unlike the old games. We purposely put some of those old-school bugs into this game, so it does recreate that feel.” (joystiq)
Luckily these options are disabled and can be enabled to get a bit of old world feel if your little heart desires. For most of us, we should have moved on from the old times and are ready to play old school games on new school hardware to show off a bit more fluid 8-bit logic. Not so for everyone, which is why the feature was added as an optional one.
Staying true to old school computing in an emulator is extremely important when playing old ROM games because the game was coded with a certain speed and understanding of the hardware. Change the hardware without updating the game can lead to an unusable product. Mega Man 9, however, is a new game so it doesn’t have to adhere to old standards. But, it’s funny to see it try.
Hi guys, great show again. 🙂
I like the idea of turning in a CD or just even having the old DRM code to get a digital version of the game. This is what Blizzard does with their library. I was able to get digital versions of Warcraft III and StarCraft because of my old DRM codes I had been holding on to. I think more companies should do that since we did buy the game, why should we have to pay again for a digital version?
@Steambox: I thought there was only going to be one but apparently there are going to be 13 of them priced from cheap to VERY expensive. This may be a good and easy way for people to find the steambox that will be suited to their needs.
@Sony streaming old games: I agree that I want this and that they should make their entire library available. The fact that Jordan still has a functioning backwards compatible Ps3 didn’t go unnoticed. I’d love to get one myself but the issue is they stop making these consoles so it isn’t easy to get an old console to play an old game. Much easier to just get an emulator (at least for PS1 and PS2).
@QOTW: I am most looking forward to Pillars of Eternity, it promises to be a great RPG game. Among other Kickstarter games like Wasteland 2 and Shadowgate.