9th time's the charm

[FlashTHD]

They'll get to that new Legends game eventually, count on it. Like Ancel with BG&E2, Inafune wants to do it bad enough.

[DackAttac]

Fuck Megaman, give me 4-player online Power Stone 3 on the 360 or PS3.

I've would love to see the latter come true, but don't necessarily need to see Megaman get the shaft. Or is that how Capcom does business?

[Blue Mage]

Fuck Megaman, give me 4-player online Power Stone 3 on the 360 or PS3.

That could work too.

Speaking of when the games peaked, I'd say it peaked at X3. Everything else was boring. X3 is also my second favorite X game. The first being well, the first one. Since X3 is too fucking easy once you get the Z-Saber.

[Shadow Hog]

To be honest, beyond the really, really hokey voice acting, I thoroughly enjoyed Mega Man X4 tons more than Mega Man X3. Maybe it was the joy of seeing such an awesome 2D game running on my Saturn, prior to which hadn't really seen too many games worth writing home about (I mean, Virtua Fighter 2 I guess, Daytona USA definitely, WipEout, NiGHTS... and not much else, since this was before my Saturn library started to grow, and grow big), but I have some damn fond memories of that game.

Same for Mega Man 8 and Legends, really.

[Shadow Hog]

...guess the 8-bit rumors were true.

Waiting for bigger scans, but they certainly nailed the look.

EDIT: And here's some actual text to read, I guess.

[Brazillian Cara]

Could this be the start of a new, ridiculously retro era/fad?
Also, Inafune just HAD to add a new fire-themed robot.

[P.P.A.]

That really does look quite 8-bit. :(
Also what, WiiWare only? Ah well, at least this'll be a great source for many jokes mocking the Wii's graphical capabilities.

[Esrever]

Styling the game after the original NES titles is too strange an idea for me not to like it. But if they're going to take this approach I think they really ought to call it something other than "Megaman 9", just because of the visual incongruity with Megaman 7 and 8.

[K2J]

Mega Man 6.5?

Honestly, I don't think this whole 8-bit thing is going to work. It's going to seem too much like a ROM hack, not an actual sequel. Brawl was able to give us nostalgia without breaking everything down into pixels - we got to see modern versions of Sonic's idle animations, for instance. Now, I understand space issues, but really - why not go all out and make a disc version? Putting it on download only makes it seem like it's not important and that only a select few will want to play it.

Then again, I could be wrong, and in two years, every game will have progressively worse graphics. I hope not.

[Zeta]

Incredibly lame. I was hoping for 8-style 2D hand-drawn graphics but I guess everyone in the industry who could do those has been downsized for years so they hired some spritehack dudes instead.

[Ngangbius]

According to some folks who've seen bigger scans that had Mega Man on a spinning platform where he goes in and out of the background while spinning around it so it's a simple NES romhack like some people are implying. Many folks in other places seem to be ecstatic about the 8-bit style and I have to admit Capcom has balls to create the new entry with this look along with including newly composed chiptunes.

To tell you the truth, I would be just as enthusiastic if Sega made a new Sonic game that looks, sounds, and plays like the Genesis/MD ones.

[Shadow Hog]

I'd be doubly enthusiastic, honestly - if only because I grew up with those titles. Mega Man didn't really become relevant to my interests until the early 2000s.

[Cuckooguy]

Color me disappointed. I probably wouldn't mind if the mechanics for the game (such as gravity, height of your jump, walk speed, etc.) were exactly the same as the NES games, but the whole 8-bit thing seems like a step backward. Supposedly Inafune claims he wants it to be better than the 2nd game, which I think is enough to turn my head so here's hoping it actually manages to surpass that (I think the 3rd is the best one, but for some reason the 3rd one is his least favorite).

For me it's been 3>2>1=4>7>8>5>6. Also, it definitely needs techno music like the first couple of games. I mean, the later games had fine music, but they weren't catchy and they didn't leave an impression on you.

Also, Splash Woman is also enough to catch my attention. A couple of years ago I probably would've been repulsed by the idea, but now I'm looking forward to see how that turns out.

[FlashTHD]

When the scans were posted at the Capcom*Unity, Corporate Officer and Vice-president of Strategic Planning & Business Development Christian Svensson stated "I will also say, NP only has part of the story. More to be learned later."

I certainly hope so! Because with Inafune talking off-putting nonsense about it ("It's all the industry's fault it has to be this way!"; "No, no new abilites but hey look! It's Rush!"; "Those t-shirts sell great so of course we're doing the graphics like that!"), they would do well to show that isn't necessarily all half-assed fanservice. I get the feeling he's still bitter about something related to how badly the PSP remakes sold.

Besides that, Inti's done a mediocre job since ZX started, so that don't lift my spirits much, but this is closer to the gameplay styles they did right (X and Zero).

[Oompa Star]

I'm sure that a Power Stone 3 announcement would've yielded more positive reactions than this.

[G.Silver]

If they do something like Cave Story where it's a powerful 2D game that just happens to be wrapped in pixely graphics, I'm all for it. I'd like it even better if they went crazy with it like Space Invaders Extreme. But it really does look just like the 8-bit games, and just looking at the screens as-is it looks a lot more like MM4 or 5 and less like 2 or 3. I really think part of what makes the later NES games unappealing was pushing the graphics further, but with low color count and no parallax effects it just ends up looking poor and cluttered a lot of the time.

That quote from Svenson makes me suspect my earlier suspicion (did I bother to mention it?) that they might do a cool new Megaman game with slick new graphics and then have a separate mode where the game is exactly the same but all the graphics are 8-bit and crappy looking.

[Zeta]

That quote from Svenson makes me suspect my earlier suspicion (did I bother to mention it?) that they might do a cool new Megaman game with slick new graphics and then have a separate mode where the game is exactly the same but all the graphics are 8-bit and crappy looking.

I'd be all for that, because frankly even back in the 1980s I thought that NES Megamans looked like shit even compared to contemporary platformer games at the time like Mario Bros 3. A lot of other games managed to look great in 8-bits because they adapted the inspirational art style so well and captured the feel of it. Not so much Mega Man, who always looked so lively and round in the Japanese art but managed to always look like a bald Smurf when you were actually playing the game.

The article also provides some insights from franchise mastermind Keiji Inafune of Capcom, who these days is perhaps better known for such fare as Onimusha, Dead Rising, and Lost Planet. According to Inafune, the simple fun of a classic Mega Man game "doesn't fit into the grandiose and expansive world that the consumer gaming industry has become, and so you have to make games that match the current expectations."

. . . the current expectations are for rehashes of old games with even worse graphics? Have we really hit that point?

In addition, the popularity of retro graphics on things like t-shirts and other paraphernalia "made it seem like the right time" to bring out an oldschool game. Plus, they wanted to show what the upper-limits of 8-bit graphics could do.

"Thank god for Hot Topic making it easy for us to sell shit of any kind to nostalgic 20-somethings!"

[Ngangbius]

Um wow, this is the first message board I regularly visit when the majority opinion so far is negative. Even in the usually pessimistic neoGAF forums the majority is going crazy(in a positive way) over the style choice in this entry.

[Team Mecha]

Yeah seriously, I for 1 love the fact that it's in 8-bits & can't wait for this game to come out.

[Zeta]

It's not that I think it will be a bad game. I think it looks like it'd be a decent game by the standards of 1989. But seeing as how that's almost 20 years ago . . .

I'd have the same reaction to say, Nintendo stopping the production of Mario games for 10 years and announcing a brand new Mario game in 2018 and playing it up as the successor to Mario Galaxy only to find out it's nothing more than the original Super Mario Bros for the NES with hacked levels.

Or imagine if Diamond and Pearl were the last Pokemon games produced for 10 years and then GameFreak finally announces new ones and then reveals that it's the original Red and Green, no new features, original GameBoy graphics, the features from Generation II-IV purposefully left out, and the only difference is that the 8 Gym Leaders have been replaced with new ones.

Which is pretty much what's going on here.

[Ngangbius]

And you know that this game will have no new features, or even effects that couldn't be done with the NES how?

[Zeta]

And you know that this game will have no new features, or even effects that couldn't be done with the NES how?

The article stresses that Mega Man won't have any new moves and will play just like on the NES. The most we could hope for is RUSH having new gimmicks, but I wouldn't be shocked if he just had the same three transformations as he did in Mega Man 3.

[Shadow Hog]

Although there are still the rumors that Proto Man will be playable - and he could have some interesting moves to differentiate himself from Mega Man's gameplay. Maybe he'll dash and wall-jump! (Maybe not!)

Oh, and I was pumped to begin with; I was a bit surprised at the hate, too, but given that pretty much every topic on every game ever on this board is a hatefest, I didn't see any reason to complain. :P

[Zeta]

I just think that the first six Megaman titles were just mediocre cash cow clones (or http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... PackSequel "Mission Pack Sequels", if you will), even by the standards of the time, and think that the series didn't really hit it's stride till 7 and 8. Even back on the NES there were people complaining about how similar Mega Man 1-6 were to eachother, so doing this just really proves that they just don't know how to develop the series further and it probably is time to bury the damn franchise once and for all.

[Oompa Star]

I just think that the first six Megaman titles were just mediocre cash cow clones (or http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... PackSequel "Mission Pack Sequels", if you will), even by the standards of the time, and think that the series didn't really hit it's stride till 7 and 8. Even back on the NES there were people complaining about how similar Mega Man 1-6 were to eachother, so doing this just really proves that they just don't know how to develop the series further and it probably is time to bury the damn franchise once and for all.

Agreed, the horse died 2 decades ago, no need to keep beating it.