Shovel Knight looks great because a rather insane amount of thought went into getting the graphics to their final iteration. games that have “New” slapped on the front of their titles suffer from the same affliction. I would also argue that all the Mario Bros. The special edition versions of The Secret of Monkey Islandand Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge look much like the stuff of bland, browser-based flash games, with far less character than the detailed pixel art of the original versions. There are plenty of examples where the updating of graphics hasn’t served as compelling evidence that pixels should be left in the past. Or what about the surreal, dramatic presentation of huge boss battles against black backdrops? Much has already been written about the odd, simple Dadaist presentation of the original Super Mario Bros., with its funky little creatures and mushrooms on minimalist backgrounds. Some of our most respected media (see: the original Star Wars trilogy) has come out of working with limited resources, and many 8-bit games still look great, because the artists were clearly pushing the system, doing as much as they could with what little they had. Pixel are is a perfectly valid style that has the potential to be truly lovely. Lately, my initial reaction to pixels has been that they’re a gimmicky trend that allows for lazier, cheaper graphical design. Should we abandon pixel art altogether? Well, no. They strove for an experience that would both recall and build upon 2D action-platforming, which would engage older gamers without pandering to them and, additionally, wouldn’t alienate modern audiences. This brilliant balance of retro and modern is the result of extensive, painstaking work from Yacht Club Games, who approached the game’s development with a desire to showcase their reverence to 8 and 16-bit gaming, but with the added goal of not outright aping it. If Shovel Knight had actually been a Nintendo game, it would’ve blown the rest of the system’s library out of the water. Aside from the obvious hardware deficiencies, the design is light-years beyond what gaming was capable of in the 80s and 90s. It looks and sounds a lot like Nintendo, but this game would never have actually been possible on a system of yore. The interesting thing is that Shovel Knight honors and pays homage to Nintendo-era gaming, but still feels like the product of smart, contemporary development. So what a wonderful surprise it was to start up Shovel Knight on my 3DS and find it to be easily the best game I played in 2014, not to mention, one of the best modern 2D action-platformers out there. In other words, I gave Yacht Club Games money to make Shovel Knight based on false memories, or at least, false emotions implanted in me by childhood peers and the internet. Sure, I got to play some NES at friends’ houses back in the day (Ninja Gaiden, mostly), but my concept of the salad days of Nintendo and Sega is informed primarily by hearsay (both then and now) from more fortunate gamers. So powerful was the pull of nostalgia that I dropped money on the idea of what I thought retro gaming was supposed to be. Some of the design was bound to come out wonky.īut my funding of this pixel-knight-bouncing-about-on-a-shovel nonsense is a uniquely absurd situation. These were games made during a period when whole genres were still being invented, games that were defining what the artform actually could be. While there was a lot of good in those old titles, there was a whole lot of nonsense and garbage paired with it-unavoidably so, really. There’s definite foolishness to funding reheated versions of gaming artifacts. And what about that time literally all the money in the world was donated to the creator of Mega Man to make not only a spiritual video game successor, but an animated series on top of that? Independent developer Zeboyd Games has basically made a career out of Dragon Warrior clones. Revolution Software managed to get enough old-timers to empty out their pockets in support of a new Broken Sword point-and-click adventure. Many indie games these days, Kickstarted and otherwise, depend and thrive on this sort of thing, producing facsimiles of titles from bygone gaming generations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |