Monday, October 8, 2012

"Retro City Rampage" Looks Pretty Sweet

I admit, upfront, that I am a "mark" for so-called "retro-style" games. Yes, it's comfort in the familiar - this is gaming as I knew it when I loved it best and so forth - but it's also just a stylistic thing: I'm a fan of "handicapped art - i.e. art made under some kind of imposed technical restrictions - and as such I'm fascinated to see the way talented digital artists use the restricted medium of pixels to create visuals or the limited sound-range of "chiptunes" to create musical compositions.

But I'm also willing to admit that the "retro" aesthetic has also become an easy way for lackluster games to pitch themselves as a quick nostalgia fix or, more commonly, a medium awash in overly reference-heavy games that "work" as nostalgia-fixes but don't hold up as games in their own right. "Retro City Rampage," on the other hand, looks to be doing the genre right - mixing up the usual set of go-to visual cues with a solid gameplay hook (pre-III "Grand Theft Auto" with a gonzo aesthetic and an NES gloss) that looks like a lot of real fun even for folks who don't immediately get a laugh out of a Bionic Commando gag:


5 comments:

Zac said...

Just sitting here, PSN Store open, waiting for it to drop. Probably won't be up until tomorrow afternoon though, should just go to sleep and grab it tomorrow.

Firehazard51 said...

Wow, a lot of retro reference in that game I caught. And I'm sure I missed about half of them. I grew up in the age of Atari and NES yet didn't have that privileged of a childhood to experience all the great games back in the day. If this plays on the Vita then I'm going to have to pick this game up when I get my Vita.

Anonymous said...

I didn't know what I was expecting but I want it

ScrewAttackSamus said...

one of the composers to this game also worked on Double Dragon Neon.

Anyway, what's kind of amusing about this game is that it started life as an NES homebrew game (seriously, the guy making it made his own NES dev kit for it).

And yes, I too am getting sick of games awash in retro aesthetic where it's their only defining feature. At times they come off as the videogame equivalent of Oscar bait

Sabre said...

I've had my eye on this a while. There is a wii and PC version, so I wonder what the controls will be like for those.

One other thing about pixel art. Another reason it's used alot is because it's, for lack of a better word, easier. When a man is 16 dots, it can be drawn in just a few minutes, whereas it might take days to concept, model, texture, ect. for a 3D character. You also don't have to be as concerned with things like anatomy because of the low resolution.

When things get higher res, it can become harder than 3D, but stuff like this and McPixel, that's part of the reason.