Anyone not really like all these 'retraux' games?

[CM30]

You know, the ones that are trying to look all '8 bit' or '16 bit' and treating it like an art style?

Cause personally, I've always seen as them as kind of missing the point. Companies in the old days didn't have an art style, they were trying to make the best of the technology available to them. Super Mario Bros 3, World, the Legend of Zelda games, Metroid and Super Metroid, old school Sonic the Hedgehog... they weren't trying to look 'NES' or 'SNES' or 'Genesis' styled, they were trying to look impressive for the time.

If those companies could have made Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime, The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword and others like them... they would have. And your favourite pixel art styles would never have existed.

It also kind of annoys me because in the ROM hacking, homebrew and demoscene worlds... we're trying our hardest to avert the technical limitations and styles associated with those eras. Super Mario Star Road doesn't look like a Nintendo 64 game:



Nor do most other great hacks and works like that. Seems just strange trying to go 'back in time' when many of us are deliberately trying to do the opposite on the actual hardware.

 

[warelander]

It's all just nostalgia whoring, which can work well at times, but it has reached a point where almost everyone does it.

I already wasn't a big fan of it when Mega Man 9 did it in 2008, I love the game to bits but I would have much rather seen a further enhancment of the presentation ala'
MM 7, 8 and Mega Man & Bass, in fact I was outright shocked when I saw some people get outright PISSED because Sonic 4 wasn't just sprite art like the Genesis/Megadrive games.

I don't need it personally and I don't get why some people insist on milking what's already there, rather than trying to go with the times.

 

[Glowsquid]

Indie developers mostly go with faux 8bits because that's what their extremely ressources and manpower allow. Which doesn't excuse how unappealing most fauxtraux games look, but there's a pratical reason for this beyond "nostalgia whoring".

Beside their graphical styling, I think there's a big problem with how a lot of these fauxtraux paltformers are discussed on enthusiast forum. Games like Super Meat Boy are often promoted by their developers and fans as AUTHENTIC TRUE THROWBAX TO GOOD RETRO TIEMS WHERE MANLY MEN WERE MANLY UNLIKE THE DUMB AAA SHIT YOU KIDS PLAYAN' TODAY even though these games barely ressemble what they claim to imitate, in style and mechanics. (Good) Arcade games (and the NES and occassional 16-bits release that followed on those principles) were based around a constant challenge - limite ressources, a constant difficulty curve and harsh penalty for dying. By contrast, a lot of fauxtraux games feature infinite lives, frequent checkpoints, no penalty for failure- basically, games for the Kaizo Mario generations. I'm not chiding people for enjoying that type of structure, but I find it darkly amusing to see people going "enjoy your casualz call of duty gaems WHILE I WILL PLAY MANLY PLATFORMER FOR REAL SUPER MEAT BOY" when the actual experience of playing Meat Boy and COD on its harder difficulties aren't all that different.

Steel Assault's (a recently funded action platformer modeled after late NES releases like Shatterhands rather than the "Atari 2600 look with more colours" style often asscociated with indies) kickstarter page and LearnToCounter's review of Super Meat Boy explain the issue more eloquently than I ever could:

When I laid down my original opinion, here’s what I failed to understand: Super Meat Boy was sold to the public on a premise that video games now suck. Apparently, video games are “way too easy” these days and they used to be a hell of a lot harder. (This is actually bullshit. The Cult of Nintendo Hard has long failed to understand that the most prized achievements in today’s video games often require the player to outwit and outplay a skilled player in a competitive multiplayer game. But anyway, we have a platformer to discuss.) In Super Meat Boy, you’ll die a lot, and then you’ll die some more. Surprisingly, people were okay with this. People called the game “Tough, but fair.” Right there, anybody with some common sense should have raised an eyebrow. If Super Meat Boy was actually a difficult game, nobody would have played it. So what the hell was going on here? I discovered a disconnect between the perceived difficulty level and the actual difficulty level.

The largest, most expansive levels in the Super Meat Boy universe can be completed in under a minute. Most clock in at fifteen to twenty seconds. Some can be completed in fewer than ten seconds. It’s a bite-sized difficulty level. You only have to play the game flawlessly for half-a-minute at a time. I was one of the fools who thought this constituted a high difficulty curve. Then, somebody hit me over the head with a hammer a couple of times and I finally figured it out. Super Meat Boy is built for the moron who loads up a Super Nintendo emulator, opens Super Mario World, and hits “Save State” every ten seconds. In this twisted version of the Super Nintendo platforming experience, no difficulty level exists because the player is never punished for sucking ass at video games. Instead of beginning at the start of a level or the checkpoint, the player hits a key and picks up right before the chasm that just wiped Mario from existence. Guess what? In Super Meat Boy, the player has unlimited lives. Death is punished with “restart at the beginning of that incredibly short level”. Once you complete a level or a world, you can move ahead. It doesn’t matter if you succeed on the first try or the hundredth try. The game doesn’t discriminate against the skilled player or the bad player. That’s not difficulty. Super Meat Boy advertised and continues to advertise itself as Retro Platformer: Tournament Edition. In reality, Super Meat Boy is Save State Emulator Whore: Tournament Edition. No difficulty level exists in Super Meat Boy because no meaningful punishment for failure exists.

• "Flow" is extremely important to us in designing Steel Assault. Many modern 2D platformers take the route of "bite-sized" design: hundreds of levels or checkpoints, each less than a minute long, and with infinite lives. But while "bite-sized" design is now a popular paradigm for platformers, we believe that this design choice severely limits a game's flow and tension, and (even more importantly) player immersion in a game's atmosphere and world

Fundamentally, we believe that retro styles should be an invitation for developers to push the limitations, not an excuse to fall back on them. We don't have any nostalgic pretenses or axes to grind with modern videogames, and we're not trying to sell you some tired rhetoric about "the good old days". We just want to make a kickass 2D action game.

And there's games like Mercenary Kings, which was billed as a SUPER INTENSE ARCAED RETRO RUN & GUN LIEK CONTAR AND METAL SLUT... with crafting, open-world and RPG elements! Sometimes I wonder if these developers and players have played a game older than Super Mario Galaxy.


Of course, Sturgeon's Law applies. Shovel Knight and Oniken looks damn great. Steel Assault (mentioned above) is also promising. But it applies hard.

 

[SurrealBrain]

I don't mind them...but I do agree that some take nostalgia too far, and they don't always capture what made those old ones great in the first place.

Of course, I'm starting to develop my own nostalgia goggles, for better or worse. I've been warned that it won't get better with age.