11/14/2022 0 Comments Retro game challenge ds undub patchHad that been released fifteen years ago, it would’ve been Game of the Year material. One of the best examples is Ninja Haggleman 3 in the first title, essentially a mixture of Ninja Gaiden and Metroid. Even more interesting are the games that combine two or more mechanics from disparate classics – it’s fun to not only recognize the sources, but see how they work in tandem. It’s true that some are simply clones of existing titles, the kind that probably would’ve been scoffed as ripoffs had they been released years ago, but the genres they tackle are so sparsely populated nowadays that it’s more a cause for celebration than criticism. As a result, they tend to avoid the pitfalls of so many old games, except for the ones they explicitly mean to replicate. There’s more to the games than mere nostalgia though – each of the games in Retro Game Challenge benefits from over twenty years of hindsight, as well as technological improvements. The atmosphere is explicitly meant to remind games of the lazy summers they spent in front the TV, playing games all day with their friends, flipping through gaming magazines and trading secrets. The graphics, the sounds, and the controls are all styled like they were back in the day. Both titles, released for the DS, are collections of retro-style games – none of them actually existed back in the 80s or 90s, but they’re all designed to make it seem like they did. The concept of Retro Game Challenge ( Game Center CX), published by Namco Bandai in Japan and XSeed in North America, and developed by indieszero, follows in a slightly similar school of thought. To whit: many joked (or perhaps were serious) that the killer app for the Xbox 360 back in 2005 wasn’t Perfect Dark Zero or Kameo, like Microsoft would’ve had you believe, but was actually the $5 downloadable title Geometry Wars, whose roots lie heavily in the 1982 arcade shooter Robotron 2084. As such, we’re seeing developers go back and mine old properties for old ideas. The passage of time has made the greater populace aware that, you know, just because a game is newer doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better. Still, there’s more to the phenomenon that just republishing old games. It’s about that long that kids have grown up, have some sense of disposable income, and want to recapture the spirit of youth, either for their own fulfillment, or for the joys of a new generation. The NES was released in 1985, hit its stride around 1988, and twenty years later, we have Nintendo and everyone else finally redistributing their old games legally through digital distribution. How long does it take, roughly, for media to go from “outdated” to “nostalgic”? If the video game market is to be believed, we’d probably have to say about somewhere between fifteen and twenty years.
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