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.
@Ubisoft polling gamers for next Assassin’s Creed setting: I would love it if they used multiple settings for Assassin’s Creed 3.
@Newell: Piracy is “almost always a service problem” and not price, DRM agitates: I agree with him completely, even though I think game prices are a little bit steep for me at my age.
@Christwire makes mock petition asking Pres. Obama ban Skyrim: Trolls will be trolls. This is just silly and it’s sad that it even got any attention.
@Microsoft refunds victims of Marketplace phishing scam: I’m really pleased that they seem to be taking the Valve route, to be nice to the customers instead of treating them like insignificant numbers.
@QOTW: I won’t buy holiday gifts for anyone. Period.
@”Badass”: Are you kidding me? This looks to me like a broken forum filter. And why oh why do they still use a single database for forum band AND account bans?
@Piracy is “almost always a service problem”:
Yes and no. Yes, a bad service will lead to higher piracy rate. Still, 60 USD is too high for Romania , so price-point triggered piracy still exists, at least in my country.
And Newel is not entirely honest there: when launching in Russia, besides doing it at the same time with the rest of the world, they also reduce the price of the games: around 20 USD versus 60 USD in the rest of the world.
@mock petition asking Pres. Obama ban Skyrim:
Paul, they made you read this because the petition is funny.
And the truth is that politicians don’t really give a crap.
@Holiday shopping madness:
Woohaa !! 🙂 Wait … doesn’t this qualify as an assault? Normally she should be charged …
This is pretty sick … you can get discounts at other times, no really need crowd up the shops during one day.
@Microsoft refunds victims of Marketplace phishing scam:
Microsoft went above what was required from them. I mean you cannot blame Microsoft from whatever clicks you made.
@QOTW: … yes. I guess it says a lot about myself 😛