My AES copy came today. Plugged in headphones to the unit and like everyone else music is 90% left side while other sounds are more evenly balanced.
Graphically, had a couple glitches where the game stuttered for half a second and then some of the sprites (character, dog tags, grenades, ammo) seemed a little screwed up—didn’t make things unplayable. I also kept running into bad contact errors in the Nest so maybe my cart slot just needs to be cleaned. I have another AES I’ll try playing some more on.
As for Neo Geo enhancements to the graphics, I saw the scaling pill on Game Over people have mentioned, and there are some alien crab and bat things that scale in from above the screen. Pretty infrequent though.
Otherwise, control is great and the game is as good as it was before. I like being able to save and resume from certain stages rather than starting from the beginning each time, which I don’t think was possible on Genesis. That and credit feed in MVS mode.
It’s too bad Bitmap Bureau didn’t send out some test copies or make it possible to update these carts like NG Dev does because imo this was only a few fixes away from being a top NG game and the best home brew/indie NG game. The packaging, instructions, label, bonus crap that came with the collectors edition are all on point.
Even with the issues, I’m probably going to play a lot of this…but it would be better if they could be fixed.
Some pictures of the AES cart and packaging: