Megaman 1 - The New Lands Remastered

Hey there. Got to try this hack recently after playing through most of v1.2 and I'd say it's a general improvement from before with the robot masters definitely being made more engaging given the new varied patterns that aren't too cheap to master now. The music's mostly rehashed out of other games from what I could tell (Hard Man from MMII has a neat arrangement here) but I did like the new weapons with some having more utility than before to help with platforming and aiming! The weapon explanation text from the download was empty on my side, but basically I thought each weapon had their own distinctions and useful aspects to them. Some of the new enemies were neat too, with small but welcome changes to enemies such as Metalls and Suzys (which hop now like the Big Eye!) When they're paired up in certain stages though, such as in Zapman's stage where you fighting a Joe enemy and a yellow Telly is shooting at you from the bottom, I think that's a simple but nice variance in level design to make distinctive enemy encounters. Now my main issues with the hack's current status are the spike obstacles and a softlock in one of the last Wily stages. Spikes come in more flavors here including the moving shootable spikes and the invisible block spikes. I'm not a fan of old school Megaman spikes that instantly kill you since another patch I applied onto this hack to make spikes only deal damage wasn't working. I can understand rewind features being kept in mind for playing these older games, especially with how extreme the punishing difficulty for some of them can be, though I think even titles like these today should be playable without those kinds of emulator options. Most of the game is still playable and enjoyable, except for a softlock after beating Dynaman in the Wily stages that couldn't let me beat the rest of the game. I assume the work around to the spikes here is using Pyroman's weapon for the invulnerability, which made parts of the game better to go through (except when it's required for the first half of a Wily stage in which you need a full bar of it and just enough energy by the end to make some high jumps), but even just reducing the severity of spikes overall in this game could make the experience for new people trying Megaman ROM hacks more accessible. The reason this isn't being left as a review is due to the softlock I had at the Wily stage Dynaman fight so I wasn't able to give my full thoughts on the game in it's entirety. I fully respect the author going back to update the game in making sure it's more enjoyable then before, and even with my gripes I'm still glad to have tried it out, so I hope some of these issues get addressed so that this hack can be more universally loved for people who still play old school hacks nowadays. Thanks if you've read this far and have a nice day :)