Bugbear of mine: Games made to look "retro"

[Baseley09]

I just caught a glimpse of an indie game on Steam titled 'Breath of Death VII', which looks utter chud.

I can't buy into this, the notion of making games look old is void if the art direction is bad and in turn the product looks like rubbish. Do you know how many old games there are out there that you havn't played, its absurd, i suggest people play those before getting tucked into modern fake releases.

For instance, I noticed a game today called 'Psycho Dream' for Super Famicom (Dream Probe in USA) by Riot/Telenet...it looks like a lost Valis game, considering I thought I was pretty upto scratch on such games I was pleasantly surprised. With older titles lost in the mire, I see no place for games made to look old.....who's with me?

I'm going to get burrnnnned I can feel

[toythatkills]

I'm going to get burrnnnned I can feel

Yep, sorry! Breath of Death is awesome, as is Cthulhu Saves the World which comes with it. It's all about what people expect, really. It's a five or so hour retro style RPG, and giving it modern graphics would feel "wrong" to me. It brings back nice memories and plays on that in its dialogue and humour.

I love retro graphics done well. There's a lot of beauty in how people can get so much out of so much less. Like, making a person look like a person in modern graphics is easy. Making them look like a person when you've only got 6x12 pixels or something is an art.

[Rep]

Breath of Death looks awesome, what exactly do you want for ?1.79?

[toythatkills]

Breath of Death looks awesome, what exactly do you want for ?1.79?

90p actually, you get two full RPGs for your ?1.79!

[BigDeadFreak]

I've got to agree with Basely here. It seems like a lot of developers think that 'old' and 'crap' are interchangeable terms and make their games look like the worst examples of 8/16bit titles. I can't think of a decent recent release that goes for this look and pulls it off.

[Guts]

I would love to play (good) new games that look like, say, Chrono Trigger, FFVI or Suikoden I/II perhaps. For example, I find the 3D graphics on the DS generally dissappointing and would much rather have games that use pixelated sprites and hand-drawn backgrounds instead.

[Baseley09]

It's not a question of money, you can pick up many great games by proven developers for a pound. I haven't played the Brain if Death game to comment on the gameplay, but imo it looks bad.....if I wanted to play something in that genre i'd try say Y's II, a game that world outstrip this indie release in production values.

@Guts, this is true, Snes quality is still an excellent standard for sure, i'd rather have good 2D than bad 3D.....DS has 3D of pure puke.

[toythatkills]

It's not a question of money, you can pick up many great games by proven developers for a pound. I haven't played the Brain if Death game to comment on the gameplay, but imo it looks bad.....if I wanted to play something in that genre i'd try say Y's II, a game that world outstrip this indie release in production values.

Well it would, but any game made by a studio is going to have better production values than a game made by two guys doing everything themselves. I just think it's fair enough, they wanted to make an authentic feeling 8/16-bit RPG because they grew up on them and were probably coming up with ideas for these games all through their childhoods. Now they can make them, they're making them as they imagined them back then, as the games they were playing when they fell in love with the genre.

They're tributes, hence the look of them. I recommend playing them.

[Decider-VT]

TBH I picked up both of these because they were cheap and it looked like they had a good sense of humour. I didn't even notice the retro-styled graphics, really.

I've got to agree with Basely here. It seems like a lot of developers think that 'old' and 'crap' are interchangeable terms and make their games look like the worst examples of 8/16bit titles. I can't think of a decent recent release that goes for this look and pulls it off.

Half Minute Hero (PSP)
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman
Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles
Gemini Rue
Pier Solar
Arkedo Jump
Arkedo Pixel
Tobe's Vertical Adventure
Desktop Dungeons
Dungeons of Dredmor
Geometry Wars 1/2
Bit.Trip series
Canabalt
Mega Man 9/10
Cave Story

All of the above pull off a retro-influenced pixel art style superbly. (I'm also inclined to mention Radiant Historia on account of the SNES/Saturn comparisons in reviews but I haven't played it yet.) You also have to bear in mind that some of these one or two man teams may produce games but that doesn't mean that they're particularly good artists, so abstract pixel art is a good way of using a sort-of impressionistic visual shorthand (or homage, depending on the game) to clearly represent the in-game world and characters.

Edit: Not sure if Minecraft counts either but it does use a deliberately retro style too.
Edit 2: Don't know how I forgot about Cave Story but... I did.

[Tig]

I've heard those Zeboyd games actually have great gameplay... very nicely thought-out mechanics with some original gameplay ideas.


In this case, it's the story of one bloke who wanted to make a love-letter to his favourite games, while also contributing some fresh gameplay ideas to the genre. For a tiny indie developer, that seems like an ambitious-enough goal. Asking for beautiful graphics on top is a bit much!

The developer almost certainly couldn't afford a more expensive style.



But on the other hand.... I agree that the Super Meat Boy-style "modern retro" look will probably go out of fashion soon. The iOS/XBLA/PSN/Steam/Browser indie developers are putting that style all over the place. It's bound to get overused.

[Flabio]

I can't think of a decent recent release that goes for this look and pulls it off.

Scott Pilgrim.

[Dogg Thang]

Scott Pilgrim is a perfect example. Absolutely beautifully done and the retro style added so much to the game and worked really well with the source material.

[abigsmurf]

There's a core problem with 'retro styled' games.

Developers now have to try to get things to look 'bad', developers back then were trying really hard to make their games look good. These two approaches don't meet in the middle.

The approach shouldn't be to make sure it's retro by consiously choosing to make it retro at every stage. The approach should be to enforce the restrictions the developers of the era you're trying to emulate had, and then to try to make it look as good as possible under those restrictions.

[Dogg Thang]

Retro does not equal bad. Scott Pilgrim's makers were not trying to get things to look bad - they made it look fantastic, and clearly put in a lot of work to get that.

I would have thought very few designers approaching something in a retro style actually aim for their work to look bad.

[Skull Commander]

I thought the complete opposite about the Scott Pilgrim game. I would have preferred if they had made it look more modern as the faux NES look does nothing for me .

It's the graphics equivalent of Oasis, wanting to be the Beatles and failing miserably.