Since Mega Man 9's bold new-old direction was first announced, one question which people have asked, half in jest, was whether or not this game would have the slowdown and flicker issues which afflicted the six NES titles.

During a recent interview with Gamasutra, Producer Hironobu Takeshita discussed many aspects of creating a new 8-bit title, and such a subject did come to the surface, with a surprising answer:

Gamasutra: 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.

So there you have it: You can deal with the flicker and slowdown... if you really want to.

You've got to hand it to these guys; they're really dedicated to the style.