MM9 not really a NES game, but sure feels like it

LanceHeart

August 4, 2008

Gamasutra has posted a pretty interesting interview with Mega Man 9 producer Hironobu Takeshita. Among other pieces of info discussed in the article, we have this:
GS: You talked about how people were trying to graphically exceed the capabilities of the Famicom, but what about the temptation to exceed some other capabilities, such as flicker, slowdown, sprite limits, and stuff like that? Was it really hard to get people to stay within the confines of what they could have done, if this had come out after Mega Man 6 in 1993?

HT: 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.

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.

It’s also mentioned how the game isn’t really programmed with true NES programming, and wouldn’t really fit on a NES cartridge. I imagined that was likely the case from the start, as digging up obsolete technology to make this game probably would have made the development even more difficult.

I am rather curious about these options, though. It’s very rare for any Mega Man game to have an options screen. I wonder what other options there’ll be.

News Credit: Capcom-Unity