CrunchGear takes the words floating around in my head and puts them down on paper. Brilliant stuff:
It’s not that it’s just easier to make a good game of the NES type ’ god knows there were plenty of terrible ones back in the day. I think that developers are losing track of what makes a game good, instead focusing on realistic physics, or meaningless new features, or of course the ever-escalating graphical arms race. But when a team gets really knocked down to the basics, which is to say two dimensions and a bunch of sprites and tiles, they remember why it is they make games in the first place. Fun.
I say, bring ”˜em on. Excitebike World Rally is out there, and of course New Super Mario Bros Wii is around as well ’ unabashed, straightforward fun. When did we start losing track of that?
How ironic is it that a game like Dark Void Zero, created as an 8-bit “throwback” game meant to promote the “next-gen” Dark Void title on Xbox 360/PS3 (on the DSIWare service, no less!!!), is actually leaps and bounds better than the game it’s meant to advertise? Same with Mega Man 9, Bionic Commando Rearmed, and countless others. All were arguably side projects meant to market their bigger, badder, louder cousins. A bit sad, indeed.