Is making games purposefully simple and arguably ugly a piece of cake? Not if you want to properly represent their forebears.
By Ray Barnholt
A few years ago, something funny happened: Game developers realized that games from the ’80s still had plenty of value in their design and presentation, and millions of present-day adults remember them so fondly. For various reasons, some of those developers began making new games that purposefully had old (some would say “bad”) graphics and artificially-limited gameplay.
The most popular example is Mega Man 9, Capcom’s deliberate regression of the classic action series into an 8-bit game, the most fondly remembered kind in the series. It’s a trend that’s positively blowing up thanks to more recent games like 3D Dot Game Heroes from Atlus tweaks the approach a little bit by turning 2D sprites into more humanoid 3D models, but packing the game with references to Zelda and related 8-bit games. Other developers seem to think that all they need is low-detail pixel graphics, though, like in Nippon Ichi’s upcoming Classic Dungeon.
But this piece isn’t about those games. Rather, this about case studies of two retro-style games for Nintendo DS that go the extra inch and set themselves up with not just ’80s graphics, but also with back-stories to add some purpose and understanding as to why they are the way they are.