Finished my playthrough of 8; trying out that Famicom 7 now. Initial thoughts:
- Very cool
- Burst Man is a dick
- IntiCreates needs to hire this guy.
Now, my Moonspeak is rusty (and, er, my Windows install doesn't actually have Japanese fonts), but I'm going to assume from the English ini file that there's no gamepad support and the only buttons are A, B, and Start. I've got my gamepad working through
XPadder (HT to Spoony, with the caveat that "this thing" is not useful link text). I WOULD add that throwing in some of 7 and 8's added buttons, like
using the shoulder buttons to switch weapons without having to pull up the menu, or even being able to use one button for Mega Buster and another for special weapon, would be a great addition (assuming they're not in there; again, can't make much sense of this). (EDIT: A and S are mapped to L and R by default; AFAIK there aren't any alternate jump/fire options.)
That aside, an English translation would be swell; wonder if there's anyone out there who'd be into trying that. Not sure how easy text insertion is, but the translation itself would be pretty trivial; IIRC 7's was perfectly adequate.
Going to assume the absence of the intro and middle stage, as well as bolts, shop, and fucking Rush Search, are design decisions. Don't have a problem with most of that (though the intro stage introducing Bass was keen, and I loved the BGM medley in the Robot Museum).
Anyway. Guess those are my thoughts for now. All in all, this thing's really impressive. Also, I love the mini-flame war it's generated on the Toasty forum ("This proves you're wrong when you say Mega Man 7 sucks!" -- "No, this proves I'm RIGHT about everything that was wrong with it!" I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle -- MM7 was a game with many glaring and easily-fixable flaws. But I would also add that, as awesome as an NES version is in 2008, we would have all fucking HATED it in 1995.)