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Having a Shovel Knight game on the NES is a great idea, and if you're going to do it, this is the base game to use; great choice there. That does make it a bit puzzling that some of the other design choices are all over the place. The Shovel Knight soundtrack is here, and it sounds great; if there is any difference in audio quality, I'd have to hear them side by side to notice it. Where the songs are placed are a bit strange, though; for example, the fire stage is the castle entrance music from Shovel Knight, so I'd thought that maybe Mole Knight's music didn't sound right, and that's why it was chosen, but there it was in the Secret Cliff stage. I know you're not going to get a one-to-one with the music, unless you alter the tilesets for every stage, and I'm not even sure how well that'd work, but I do feel that more thematically appropriate choices could have been made. The other thing that struck me as odd is the enemy choice; aside from the bosses, few if any enemies are from Shovel Knight. I saw familiar creatures from Little Samson, some from Little Nemo, and even Elmer Fudd. It's still a great game, does what it advertises, and sports an impressive music conversion, but I think that it could be even better.

This is an interesting hack; a graphics and music replacement of an existing NES game that brings Shovel Knight back to the NES. Whomp'em was a good choice for this. The gameplay naturally lends itself way to be a Shovel Knight analogue. There are a few oddities that are carryovers from the original, like the shovel poking instead of slashing, and the welcome ability to do an up-slash, but by the end of the first stage, you'll be in the flow and won't notice them.

One criticism people have of Whomp'em is that the music is a bit touch-and-go. This hack features Jake Kaufman's Shovel Knight music, and it's a welcome change. The music is just so good! It's a little odd to have the world map music on the opening stage, and the campfire music on the world map, but the music fits the scene. It's more my mental associations with the music that don't match.

The hack is not perfect. There are some graphical oddities as the hack tries to fit a too-big sprite into a too-small space. Things like half of Shovel Knight's fist being cut off when he runs, or the shovel not having its full outline when blocking. There is some room for improvement here, but nothing that would make me say "you shouldn't play this."

Thanks for this patch!