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.
@Gamergate: Oh what a cluster-duck. Companies need to stay out of politics and people need to keep their personal lives out of the media and business world. Why are these people failing to learn these lessons? Not to mention the whole mob mentality of jumping on a bandwagon that they have no business getting involved in the first place. No wonder I’m an escapist. I had thought that the name Gamergate was a company until I read this story and not a continuation of the Watergate “meme”. I agree with Paul you shouldn’t add –gate to the end of every scandal. It makes it hard to differentiate from real things that have gate in it’s name like Brandenburg Gate or Golden Gate.
@Capcon: I know they are in the business to make money but I’ve always hated this mentality. The idea that if it doesn’t make 2 million it isn’t worth bothering with his a terrible thing, there have been games that did better over their life time then when they initially launched. Some games take time to build up their popularity and this need for them to be block buster sellers doesn’t guarantee quality. There are many AAA games that have sold millions and I have NO intention of ever buying or playing. This is the mentality that killed the original Sierra games and with them coming back I don’t want to go through all that again.
@Mario Clones: There was a similar joke in Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry, where if your character died and you restarted they showed a cut scene of a new Larry being made and put back in place. So that’s an interesting game concept to imagine your characters going through.
@QotW: My favorite Saturday morning cartoon would have to be the Dungeons and Dragons. I loved Superfriends and Amazing Spider-man (who was teamed up with Iceman and Firesta). I had to use a site (http://www.inthe80s.com/saturdays.shtml and http://www.inthe90s.com/saturdays.shtml) to remember what cartoons were on Saturday morning as opposed to Weekday afternoon or morning. So I can’t seem to find when I watched Silverhawks, Thundercats or GI Joe, which I thought were in the morning. There are just so many to list but those that are very memoriable were Gummi Bears, Garfield, Kissyfur, and Smurfs. I have to agree with Jonah I do remember watching Smurfs mostly to get to whatever was after it and I didn’t stick to just one channel. It was a very warm and fuzzy nostalgic memory of a tradition that it is a shame has seemed to come to an end. I was like Jonah as well as after watching the cartoons I would be ready to go out and play.
The third Question of the week is that I play the Nintendo 3DS, I love all the RPG games and the old nostalgic games that I can play on it. I’m very into the Professor Layton games so that’s another one for Pawel.
GamersGate is the online store.
@EAs eternal struggle against its own credibility
When Battlefield 4 came out I was lucky enough to be at university and did not buy it at launch. I pre-ordered Battlefield 3 and spent the first day trying to get into a game, so I am glad I missed their second fiasco. DICE needs to stop rushing their games out the door. Especially considering that the Battlefield series have a terrible single player component which cannot compensate for lack of multiplayer (unlike Call of Duty).
@Thr Cute Terrors of Nintendo
According to the original Mario manual, Bowser turned all citizens of mushroom Kingdom into blocks. Basically, Mario rescues the princess as an accomplished mass murderer. In fact, Nintendo is full of creepy things which would make the Western audience cringe in fear. Dead Pokemon, Silent Hill-like Zelda dungeons and getting Zelda’s “Ultimate Reward” right in the dungeon she was kept in. Their early games are as good for kids as GTA.
@QOTW
The 3DS is still my favourite. I don’t play small iPhone games. I have KOTOR on the iPhone but it gets continuously interrupted by various notifications and calls, which makes me loose my progress.