Mega Man 9 to flicker like it's 1987

by Chris Greenhough { Aug 4th 2008 at 6:28PM }

We're beginning to suspect Capcom of tapping our phones, intercepting our emails, and reading our diaries. After learning that it would be possible to play Mega Man 9 using an NES controller (via an adaptor), we foolishly believed that the Blue Bomber's WiiWare comeback could not be any more faithful to Mega Man's 8-bit roots. We were wrong.

Capcom's Hironobu Takeshita has revealed that Mega Man 9 will even deliberately recreate bugs found in the first Mega Man titles during the late-1980s -- including the legendary flickering of sprites that plagued the games when the on-screen action became too much for the host platform to handle. You can see some of this flickering in the Mega Man 2 video above.

Though sprite flicker will be optional in Mega Man 9, it fascinates us that Capcom would go to the effort of imitating acknowledged flaws, purely for the sake of authenticity. It is madness, and we love it.

Tags: capcom, mega-man-9, platform, retro

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

King K Rule @ Aug 4th 2008 6:55PM

Ha I was over at the Ps3fanboy website and they had an article about this topic and they seemed to have completely missed the point. It's interesting to see that alot of nintendo fanboys are also old school fanboys. I personally think the flicker is a brilliant idea. Good on you Capcom

Josh @ Aug 4th 2008 8:16PM

Haha, you're right.

And this game only gets better and better.

Atlantis1982 @ Aug 4th 2008 7:01PM

Yay!!! Intentional bugs!!! :D

Mr Khan @ Aug 4th 2008 7:17PM

I seem to recall the same thing happening for StarFox 64 on VC. The game needed the slowdown to coordinate with the original score and noises

Josh @ Aug 4th 2008 8:17PM

Could you give some details on this? I heard about it before, but never knew exactly what the issues were.

CubeGuy @ Aug 5th 2008 10:23AM

My VC copy of SF64 does not have intentional slowdown. The music and sound were quite often out of sync because of it. Highly annoying.

Exia00Gundam @ Aug 4th 2008 9:01PM

that is madness. im scratchin my head on this one. im for authenticity and nostalgia, but really...

TJF588 @ Aug 4th 2008 9:09PM

*phew* It's optional. If they had made performance imperfections mandatory, I'd've said they're going too far in this, but having the option to play the thing as if it really were two decades ago (damn I feel old (born 1988)) is sheer dedication to all ages and eras of gamers.