As long as retro isn't just a bad excuse to sell your bad game to the retro loving masses, retro look is absolutely fine. It encourages people to focus more on your actual game mechanics.
This was for many a year a personal bugbear of mine. It still crops up occasionally but thankfully less often (or at least, it's on my radar less now as I've more nice things to play with :tipshatatTIGSmassive:)
The amount of games which were frankly shit with shit controls and shit graphics that would tag on "retro" as if somehow it'd make you believe that it'd unshit itself by magic. Y'know I grew up with games and even then we'd have called them crap games with crap graphics...
Annnd relax
Retro is good because it is good. Todays games are more often than not graphical wank-fests with total lackluster gameplay. Retro games had total "lackluster" graphics but really simple and good gameplay.
Well, I have a few points about this:
1) Many old games were terrible to the point of being unplayable: I used to have a lot of Atari cartridges that were very clearly hammered out over a week or two and were just so incredibly broken and awful. When people refer to how good retro games are they are generally cherry picking the classics out of mounds and mounds of games so completely worthless that they make any uninspired shooter look like solid gold for at least having characters that respond to input and don't constantly get stuck in things.
Yup, it's Golden Age Of TV Syndrome in full effect. There was as large a bag of effluence floating around in the eighties and nineties as there is now. Nostalgia is a terrible, terrible thing for some people.
Fascinating though from a psychological point of view, or at least it is to me. What happened in those intervening years to make someone idolise something and elevate it to a position whereby "it were better in my day" and lead themselves to ignore all the wonderful stuff going on in the now or at best, enjoy something but never let it attain that peak of glory that a broken and slightly rubbish game they got bought for Christmas in 1984 instead of a bike provided for them?
It's probably why I gravitated towards RR many years ago rather than the retro scene itself. I prefer to surround myself with folks who just like games no matter where on the great timeline of life they fell and have the critical faculties to be able to realise that it wasn't all fluffy bunnies and pillows.
2) In response to the assertion that they had lackluster graphics, I still remember being blown away by games featuring 256 colours. At the time, these games were really pushing the envelope. When people say these old games tried to achieve solid gameplay over graphics, it is just not true. The good ones often tried very hard to achieve both.
I still remember going to a computer club in Stockport and seeing a 16bit machine for the first time having spent many a year on my humble Speccy before it. It was running Roadrunner and I clearly remember the conversation with my friend at the time as we discussed how it looked just like a cartoon. Of course, I look at it now and it looks like an Atari ST trying to do Roadrunner but at the time... mind blowing (even if the game was a bit on the crap side).
You're right though, it's all relative to the time. Most of the games people recollect as "the good ones" didn't have crap graphics as that would have presented another obstacle in the enjoyment of them - pretty much the same as today.
However, I think the focus should be on making a well-crafted experience. Nostalgia is a good device, but if you are focusing on nostalgia all the time, you are just living in the past. This is not positive: it doesn't help you move forward as an artist and it doesn't help your medium move forward as something which is worth caring about.
This is wise talk. Running a remakes board you get an odd sort of feeling at times when folks produce a remake that, well, has all the original flaws retained. It's not even something you can pass off as a programming exercise as far as I'm concerned, producing game breakers isn't the greatest technical task - folks have been doing it for years.
More so though, it saddens me for the reasons you've pointed out here. Yet still, it seems that there's an audience for it... I know there's one game that scored pretty highly in the results we've put out so far from the competition that can probably thank its lucky stars that I wasn't a reviewer as it retains every single broken part of the original game and throws in a few new bugs for good measure.
I guess I just don't see the point of nostalgia for nostalgia sake. A poor experience is still just that.
4) As a corollary of the above, you will never improve if you only do things which are easy to do. You will only improve by pushing yourself and trying to do things which are a bit beyond your current abilities. Once again, if you don't want to improve, that is fine, but then you don't get the benefits of improvement. If you are doing pixel art because it is easy, you will probably not improve much as an artist. Personally speaking, my art is pretty bad, but it is also getting better, slowly, as I tackle projects which are more difficult or more intensive.
I, rather obviously, can't speak for anyone else nor would I want to but I choose to do "games in a retro style" as a purely stylistic choice. I like pixel art and want to make games that look how they appear in my head. Unfortunately/fortunately (delete as applicable) for the world, my head seems to want to produce stuff that is often low res and pixelly in nature.
However, I'm also fully aware that it'd be very easy to slip into a funk and get to one level and stay there - I've seen lots of people do it to the point where it's not so much "their style" as sleepwalking and that seems a waste to me.
I like to push myself a bit further with each project, be that learning new tricks or learning a bit more on the pixelling side of things. I couldn't do it if I found all of it easy though, that'd break my heart with boredom. And y'know, if old school pixels aren't appropriate for the game I want to write next, I won't use them.
But drifting away from me talking about me for a moment, I think it's a good thing to encourage people to try and push forward (which I guess is the impetus by me feeling the need to reply to this fine post of yours, sah). Be it pushing themselves with graphics, code, whatever. I'd sooner play a game that tried to be all it could be but fell over on its arse than something thats had little thought, effort or care put into it. If someone is making a retro game but still putting their all into it, I'm cool with that. If someone is making a game with the pilot from Airplane as the entire cast of characters, I'm cool with that too.
And I guess Matt falls into that latter camp. He's still a mental, but he's a mental that tries generally in a good way (as opposed to a "I'm making teh best game evar!!111lulz" way). His games aren't for me and he doesn't half talk guff, but sooner the works of MDickie than half the gaming content of the internet y'know.
Player
